Monday, March 31, 2014

Virginia Woolf / A Knife

Émile Savitry
Anouk Aimée and her cat Tulip Flower, 1947
[via Le Journal De La Photographie]

Anouk Aimée and her cat Tulip Flower, 1947
Photo by Emile Savitry

A KNIFE

by Virginia Woolf

"For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy…"

— Virginia Woolf, Orlando

The 100 best novels / No 28 / New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

The 100 best novels: No 28 – New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

George Gissing's portrayal of the hard facts of a literary life remains as relevant today as it was in the late 19th century

Robert McCrum
Mon 31 Mar 2014

New Grub Street is the first novel in this series explicitly to address, in a realistic narrative, the contemporary working conditions of a new class, the professional author. George Gissing, born the son of a chemist in 1857, was breaking important new ground, as well as responding to significant cultural change in the literary generation after Dickens (David Copperfield) and Thackeray (Pendennis).

By contrast, the eponymous hero of David Copperfield (No 15 in this series) is a writer, of course, but Dickens's focus is chiefly on Copperfield's childhood, not his career as a novelist. He never delves as painfully as Gissing does into the threadbare texture of Victorian literary life.

Part of this is due to the social and cultural upheavals inspired by Forster's Education Act of 1870. Gissing's career as a man of letters was the product of this. For the rest of the century, the lives of writers and readers would undergo a profound transformation which would comprehensively reshape the British literary landscape. Henceforth, high and low literary culture would increasingly diverge. This is one of the main themes in John Carey's important critical study The Intellectuals and the Masses. It is also the animating idea of New Grub Street.

Gissing was hardly alone in finding the role and conduct of the modern writer an urgent topic in late Victorian literary London. A year before New Grub Street, Henry James also published a novel, The Tragic Muse, about "the conflict between art and 'the world'", though James focused on painting and the stage more than literature. In 2014, in the midst of another paradigm shift, Gissing's subject remains as topical as ever, and addresses timeless themes in the everyday life of the full-time, professional writer.

In New Grub Street, the narrative is set in the literary world with which Gissing himself was intimately familiar; the title refers to the London street that, in the age of Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne (No 6 in this series), was synonymous with hack writing. By the 1890s, Grub Street no longer existed, though hack writing, of course, never goes away, with timeless imperatives. As one character puts it: "Our Grub Street of today is supplied with telegraphic communications, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy."

The novel's protagonists are a contrasted pair of writers: thoughtful Edwin Reardon, a shy "literary" novelist with few commercial prospects; and Jasper Milvain, a hard-driving young journalist who treats his writing as the means to an end in a ruthless literary marketplace. "I speak," he says, "only of good, marketable stuff for the world's vulgar." Reardon will die, unfulfilled, in poverty; Milvain will flourish in literary London ("I write for the upper-middle-class of intellect, the people who like to feel that what they are reading has some special cleverness"), navigate a complicated love life, and eventually marry Reardon's widow, Amy.

New Grub Street is Victorian in its realist depiction of a society in transition, but modern in the way it harks forward to the imminent new century with its portrait of the artist as an existential character making his solitary way in the world. The hero of Jude the Obscure, the next novel in this series, Jude Fawley, a working-class boy who dreams of becoming an Oxford scholar, is Reardon's West Country equivalent.

A note on the text

New Grub Street, a regular "three-decker" novel, was first published in three volumes by Smith, Elder & Co in 1891. There was no serialisation. Gissing already had a modest reputation as a novelist of working-class conflict from books such as Workers in the Dawn, Demos, Thyrzaand The Nether World, but had not achieved much financial security. In the 1890s, he began to write about middle-class life, with books such as The Emancipated, Born in Exile, The Odd Women and The Paying Guest.

In 1890, having completed, and sold the copyright for, The Emancipated, Gissing began work on a succession of new novels, none of which prospered in his mind. In April 1890, we find him beginning work on a new manuscript entitled "A Man of Letters", but then becoming distracted by other projects. Finally, in October 1890, he records "a fresh beginning" on a novel now entitled New Grub Street, which was swiftly completed in December. The proofs arrived from the publisher in February, and Gissing's masterpiece appeared on 7 April 1891.

Later, for George Orwell, he was "perhaps the best novelist England has produced". Orwell argued that Gissing's "real masterpieces" were The Odd Women, Demos and New Grub Street. For Orwell, the central theme of these books is simple: "not enough money". Orwell's interest, as an indigent literary man, is understandable. From a longer perspective, it is New Grub Street that establishes Gissing as a writer of importance alongside George Meredith (not included in this series) and Thomas Hardy.

Other essential Gissing titles

Demos (1886); The Odd Women (1893); The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft(1903).

THE GUARDIAN

THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH

000 The 100 best novels: an introduction by Robert McCrum

001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)

003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)

005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)

006 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)

010 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)

011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)

012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)

015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

017 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

018 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)

020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

022 The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)

026 The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

027 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

028 New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)

034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)

035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)

037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)

038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)

039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

055 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)

070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)

072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)

078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

079 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)

080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)

082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)

084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)

086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

087 Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)

088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)

089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)

091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)

Pending Vegan By Jonathan Lethem

Illustration by Patrik Svensson

Fiction

Pending Vegan

By Jonathan Lethem

March 31, 2014

Paul Espeseth, who was no longer taking the antidepressant Celexa, braced himself for a cataclysm at SeaWorld. He wondered only what form cataclysm would take. Espeseth had tried to veto this trip, making his case to his wife with a paraphrase of a cable-television exposé of the ocean theme park, one that neither he nor his wife had seen. Instead, his wife had performed judo on his argument, saying, “The girls should see these things they love before they vanish from the earth entirely.”

Zhang Jingna / Women

WOMEN I

by Zhang Jingna

WOMEN II
by Zhang Jingna

Irina Shayk

WOMEN WE LOVE

Esquire cover girl Irina Shayk made a name for herself as a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, and has been the face of Intimissimi, Lacoste and Victoria’s Secret.

She even met current partner Christiano Ronaldo after they worked on an Armani Exchange campaign. Now, Esquire is proud to present nineteen things you (probably) didn’t know about Irina Shayk.

Charlotte Gainsbourg / Lars von Trier isn't a misogynist

Nymphomaniac stars: 'Lars isn't a misogynist, he loves women'

Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stacy Martin and Stellan Skarsgård reveal what it was like to work with Lars von Trier on his explicit new film, and why it is unfair to describe it as arthouse exploitation.

Xan Brooks
The Guardian, Thursday 6 February 2014

Charlotte Gainsbourg, Lars von Trier, Stellan Skarsgård and Stacy Martin

Left-right: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Lars von Trier, Stellan Skarsgård and Stacy Martin. Photograph: Christian Liliendahl/AFP/Getty Images

Lars von Trier's new film rolls into Copenhagen just ahead of hurricane Bodil, one startling storm preceding another. The blizzard hits, the planes are grounded and the wind is so strong it knocks the Christmas shoppers flying. To misquote Louis XV: après Lars, le déluge.

Stacy Martin

Nymphomaniac

Kwak Ji Young

by Zhang Jingna in “Flowers in December”

for Fashion Gone Rogue

Photographer Zhang Jingna

Model Kwak Ji Young

Stylist Phuong My

Hair by Junya Nakashima

Makeup by Viktorija Bowers

Chekhov / Anyuta

Anyuta

By Anton Chekhov

BIOGRAPHY

Translated by Constance Garnett

ANTÓN CHÉJOV / ANIUTA

IN the cheapest room of a big block of furnished apartments Stepan Klotchkov, a medical student in his third year, was walking to and fro, zealously conning his anatomy. His mouth was dry and his forehead perspiring from the unceasing effort to learn it by heart.

In the window, covered by patterns of frost, sat on a stool the girl who shared his room — Anyuta, a thin little brunette of five-and-twenty, very pale with mild grey eyes. Sitting with bent back she was busy embroidering with red thread the collar of a man’s shirt. She was working against time... The clock in the passage struck two drowsily, yet the little room had not been put to rights for the morning. Crumpled bed-clothes, pillows thrown about, books, clothes, a big filthy slop-pail filled with soap-suds in which cigarette ends were swimming, and the litter on the floor — all seemed as though purposely jumbled together in one confusion...

“The right lung consists of three parts...” Klotchkov repeated. “Boundaries! Upper part on anterior wall of thorax reaches the fourth or fifth rib, on the lateral surface, the fourth rib... behind to the spina scapulæ...”

THE NINNY
by Anton Chekhov

BIOGRAPHY

ANTÓN CHÉJOV / POQUITA COSA
ANTON TCHEKHOV / PAMONHA

Just a few days ago I invited Yulia Vasilyevna, the governess of my children, to come to mystudy. I wanted to settle my account with her.

“ Sit down, Yulia Vasilyevna,” I said to her. “ Let’s get our accounts settled. I’m sure youneed some money, but you keep standing on ceremony and never ask for it. Let me see. We agreed to give you thirty rubles a month, didn’t we?”؟

“Forty”.

“No, thirty. I made a note of it. I always pay the governess thirty. Now, let me see. You have been with us for two months?”

“Two months and five days”.

“Two months exactly. I made a note of it. So you have sixty rubles coming to you. Subtract nine Sundays. You know you don’t tutor Kolya on Sundays, you just go out for a walk. And then the three holidays”...

Yulia Vasilyevna blushed and picked at the trimmings of her dress, but said not a word.

“Three holidays. So we take off twelve rubles. Kolya was sick for four days – those days you didn’t look after him. You looked after Vanya, only Vanya.

Then there were the three days you had toothache, when my wife gave you permission to stay away from the children after dinner. Twelve and seven makes nineteen. Subtract... That leaves... hm... forty-one rubles. Correct?”

Yulia Vasilyevna’s left eye reddened and filled with tears. Her chin trembled. She began to cough nervously, blew her nose, and said nothing.

“Then around New Year’s Day you broke a cup and a saucer. Subtract two rubles. The cup cost more than that – it was an heirloom, but we won’t bother about that. We’re the ones who pay. Another matter. Due to your carelessness Kolya climbed a tree and tore his coat. Subtract ten. Also, due to your carelessness, the chambermaid ran off with Vanya’s boots. You ought to have kept your eyes open. You get a good salary. So we dock off five more... On the tenth of January you took ten rubles from me”.

“I didn’t,” Yulia Vasilyevna whispered.

“But I made a note of it”.

“Well, yes – perhaps”...

“From forty-one we take twenty-seven. That leaves fourteen”.
Her eyes filled with tears, and her thin, pretty little nose was shining with perspiration. Poor little child!

“I only took money once,” she said in a trembling voice. “I took three rubles from your wife... never anything more”.

“Did you now? You see, I never made a note of it. Take three from fourteen. That leaves eleven. Here’s your money, my dear. Three, three, three... one and one. Take it, my dear”.

I gave her the eleven rubles. With trembling fingers she took them and slipped them into her pocket.

“Merci,” she whispered.

I jumped up, and began pacing up and down the room. I was in a furious temper.

“Why did you say ‘merci?” I asked.

“For the money”.

“Don’t you realize I’ve been cheating you? I steal your money, and all you can say is‘merci”!’

“In my other places they gave me nothing”.

“ They gave you nothing! Well, no wonder! I was playing a trick on you – a dirty trick... I’ll give you your eighty rubles, they are all here in an envelope made out for you. Is it possible for anyone to be such a nitwit? Why didn’t you protest? Why did you keep your mouth shut? It is possible that there is anyone in this world who is so spineless? Why are you such a ninny”?

She gave me a bitter little smile. On her face I read the words: “Yes, it is possible”.

I apologized for having played this cruel trick on her, and to her great surprise gave her the eighty rubles. And then she said “merci” again several times, always timidly, and went out. I gazed after her, thinking how very easy it is in this world to be strong.

1883.