“General
statement of the narrator’s antinomian philosophy. And his corresponding
discomforts. Reference to a trip with a friend to whom these ‘epistles’ are
addressed. Concern with death (as the narrator meets a man ‘while travelling
[sic] south alone’). Foreshadowing: thoughts on destitution. Attack upon friend
to whom he is writing, and in whom he sees the lucky antithesis of himself.
Close: statement of antinomian ars
poetica” (p. 3).
A.
The narrator plays with perspective by incongruity, posing such
opposites as “When finding that people held the same views as I, I persuaded
myself that I held them differently” (p. 3).
B.
He then poses that the world is overwhelmingly sorry, but that we grow
used to it, especially if we accept that the world is sorry.
C.
Thus, the narrator declares, “one cannot distinguish between friends
and acquaintances,” and finds he prefers talking with strangers, although he is
still suspicious of them.
D.
Waking up in the middle of the night, panicking about something that
has not yet happened, the narrator remembers a trip in the spring with his
friend.
1.
But, again, he thinks in terms of opposites, an ironic philosophy: “We
know there has been a major ill in every stage of the world’s history, since we
know that in no age were all men [sic] sovereigns—but one must sing, though it
be but to praise God for his [sic] boils” (p. 6).
E.
The narrator discusses meeting an anxious man “while travelling south
alone” (p. 6) that was going to see a dying woman.
1.
He goes to the back of the train with the man, who tells the narrator
that he is religious and praying that he at least would see her before “the
animal heat had left the body” (p. 7).
2.
The narrator does not really understand how just seeing the woman right
after she has died would answer the man’s prayer.
3.
The man confides to the narrator that his greatest fear is destitution
“of finances, destitution of mind, destitution of love” (p. 8) (a foreshadowing
of what will eventually happen to the narrator himself).
4.
It seems to the narrator this man is “well versed in this gloomy lore”
(p. 8), and the narrator predicts the man’s demise because of this.
5.
The narrator expresses that this man’s sad ideology is not the answer:
“We must learn to what extent our thoughts are consistent with our lives, and
to what extent compensatory; to what extent ideals are a guide to behaviour,
and to what extent they are behaviour itself” (p. 9).
F.
The narrator now turns his ire against his friend.
1.
He accuses the friend of doing good deeds only so that good deeds will
be done to him. Calling him a hypocrite, the narrator expresses his utter scorn
for his friend.
2.
He admits that if they were talking to a third person (whom the narrator
also holds in contempt), that person would think the friend to be nice, and the
narrator loathsome—but, the narrator says, “since even humility too
consistently maintained becomes a boast, how could I expect otherwise than that
my accusations against you should redound upon their author?” (p. 11).
3.
He calls their rivalry “ars
poetica” (p. 11).
4.
The narrator has been waiting to say this for a long time.
II.
Chapter two: “If life moves with sufficient slowness”
“Opening
complaints on life and its injustices. Narrator’s envy of his friend. He
recounts an incident at a farmhouse, where his friend had become intimate with
a girl. Peroration of complaints” (p. 13).
A.
Again talking in opposites, the narrator cites examples of injustices,
such a man who was “secretly committing crimes against the state,” but got away
with it because he was a magistrate (pp. 13-14).
B.
The narrator then questions philosophies that celebrate the virtues of
people suffering and bearing injustices, pointing out that although they are
celebrated, it is people who commit injustices that actually benefit.
1.
“Why! When a great philosopher goes mad, pedants of the opposing
schools promptly seize upon his [sic] misfortune as a proof of their
doctrines—and the people will be convinced, for the world is made logical
easily when we link an outstanding trait of a man’s [sic] character with an
outstanding trait of his [sic] career” (p. 16).
C.
Turning back to (against) his friend, the narrator asserts that he
should keep track of injustices. He admits that once he tried awkwardly to live
up to his friend’s greatness.
1.
Here, the narrator first implies that a third person, a lover, has
played a role in ending the friendship.
2.
The narrator also scoffs at the friend for not “self-questioning” nor
being slowed by that “self-questioning” (p. 17).
3.
The narrator asserts that “were I to leave some heritage of good
counsel for the young, my code would advise the striving after such privileges
[that is, those of the friend] as are not obtained through deliberation or
discipline, but could only be bestowed by hazard” (p. 17).
a.
That is, some are born with great attributes (the friend); some have to
work for them (the narrator).
b.
The narrator also feels that the friend is only where he is because of
the narrator’s efforts.
D.
The narrator recalls a time he and his friend were at a farmhouse. The
friend insisted they stop there, and while the narrator made friends with a dog
and waited up half the night for the friend, the friend had a tryst, and then
made both of them leave in the middle of the night.
1.
As they left, the friend compared the woman with which he had the
affair to Florence, the lover of the narrator. The narrator became jealous.
2.
Lamenting again about how unjust the world is, the author remembers
calling Florence, trying to convey his sorrow to her, while also trying to hide
his sorrow from the rest of the world.
III.
Chapter three: “This day I spent with Florence”
“He
recalls his trip through the woods with Florence, and their sitting on a rock
together. Describes a play in which Florence and his friend were acting. (He
notes with resentment how they flattered themselves by living a fiction, in
carrying over their parts from the play into real life.) His envy of Florence
and of the friend (Anthony) leads to compensatory boasts of his own, as he
tells of his mastery over one Genevieve.”
A.
As the narrator remembers coming to the rock with Florence, he also
realizes that he no longer sees the seasons as a promise, and has become a
pessimist: “And if I now refuse to consider the problematical, it is because
the certainty of grimness is preferable to the possibility of disappointment”
(p. 24).
B.
He also reveals that this outing with Florence took place prior to the farmhouse
events in the previous chapter.
1.
During the outing, Anthony, the friend, was at the theater rehearsing.
C.
The play that Anthony was in turned out to be the turning point for the
love triangle between he, the narrator, and Florence.
1.
Anthony, according to the narrator, had taken on the persona of his
role Alcaeus.
2.
In this same play, Florence is playing Mary, the Mother of God, who in
the play has become intrigued by Alcaeus (the narrator thus sees himself as
Joseph).
3.
At the party following the premiere, the narrator observes not only
Anthony acting like Alcaeus, but Florence acting like Mary.
a.
In short, the narrator comes to realize that he is losing Florence to
Anthony.
D.
The narrator flashes back to the outing with Florence; they lay down in
the woods and talk, observing the season and the woods.
1.
Remembering that day, the narrator tries to figure out what went wrong.
2.
He realizes that he “must acquire much more to retain even that which I
already had, as one who would strive for millions to avoid starvation” (p. 29).
E.
The narrator then recalls that as time passed, he met a man who also
did not like Anthony, but this man also did not like anything, including
Florence, and so he and the narrator “parted company for ever” (p. 30).
F.
The narrator then asserts that while Anthony had taken Florence from
him, he had met and used a woman named Genevieve.
1.
He justifies this by saying that Genevieve needed to be treated
cruelly; her life was too perfect.
IV.
Chapter four: “My vengeance lay in complaint”
“Memory
of preadolescent delight. Then: the furies of adolescence. His later attempt at
cynical ‘calm.’ Further account of his resentment at the way Anthony and
Florence have build themselves a gratifying myth. How his attack was
invalidated in the eyes of others by Anthony’s statement that he (Anthony) had
the money to carry out the plans for the colony. Closing grimnesses” (p. 33).
A.
“It is no dismal trick of the memory that there seem to have been
gentler days in childhood” (p. 33).
B.
The narrator recalls his childhood pets: a parrot, rabbits, a terrier
that hated the rabbits (and convinced the narrator to hate rabbits too), and
pigeons.
C.
The narrator then remembers as he got older, and more educated, he
became more miserable.
1.
He specifically blames art and “letters.”
2.
“I openly identified myself with literature, and thus identified
disgrace with literature. I doubtless brought disrepute upon the guild for
deformations which were my own, but which, since I laid such bold-faced claim
to art, have discredited in simpler minds this calling whose self-appointed
representative I was” (p. 35).
3.
Although the narrator admits that he now is “careful to acknowledge as
personal stigmata those vices which earlier I should have attributed to my
medium,” he still claims that “many of life’s questions have found unseemly
answers through being of such importance that they were prematurely asked,
which art, by the greater clarity it brings to any subject, may seem to magnify
the indecencies which it is enlightening” (p. 35).
4.
Thus the narrator became a very negative person: “But that man [sic] is
destitute who, to prove himself well favoured, must glorify his possession of
those things which all men have unthinkingly” (p. 36). He also is awed by those
who do not notice their good fortune.
D.
The narrator then recalls that on the night of the premiere of the
play, he began to complain about the injustice in his life, especially the more
Anthony talked about working “‘towards a better life’” (p. 37).
1.
The narrator directly challenged Anthony.
2.
Anthony responded by telling the narrator he has the money to back up
what he says.
3.
The narrator realized that Florence was impressed by Anthony, and he
was humiliated.
4.
From that point forward, the narrator realized that people, including
Florence, are attracted to Anthony, and repelled by the narrator.
5.
Florence also tells Anthony that she is going with him.
6.
The narrator thus wishes he had not done what he did, because it had
now changed things forever.
V.
Chapter five: “Unintended colleague”
“He
tells of another man who, jealous like himself, killed himself. The incident
happened while all were celebrating the success of the play. He considers this
man’s suicide as a portent of vicarious release. (“He died for me.”) How, on
the hunch that things would turn out well, the narrator decided to squander
what few funds were still left. But in the end he must steal from Florence. In
his state of gnarledness, he recites a catalogue of other gnarled people he has
known” (p. 42).
A.
Although he does not really remember the name and face, the narrator
recalls the man who killed himself the night of the premiere.
B.
Before doing so, the man told the narrator about his lover leaving him
for another.
1.
The man had metaphorically discussed with his lover her straying thoughts
(as a little dog exploring the territory).
2.
He tried to “grovel” before her, “‘for in thus grovelling [sic] I could
better imagine her as pure’” (p. 43).
3.
The narrator replied that this is inappropriate (both in terms of
relationships—the man’s and his own—and life in general) and, “‘they cannot
lead to anything much more instructive than suicide or murder’” (p. 43).
4.
The man indirectly admitted he was going to kill himself, which the
narrator “took no interest in preventing, despite my sympathy with his disclosures”
(p. 43).
5.
The man recounted in detail the decline of his relationship.
6.
When the man finally did kill himself, the narrator saw this as hope
for himself, saying for days afterward, “‘He died for me.’” (p. 47).
C.
The narrator admits that his reaction to Anthony’s plans “towards a
better life” was to squander some securities an uncle had left to him.
1.
He had done so thinking it would secure his future (that is, he was
trying to compete with Anthony), but in the end, he had to steal from Florence,
an act he repeatedly denied to her.
2.
The other man’s suicide also inclined him toward this action, as he
thought things would now be better for him.
3.
“I understand all this in retrospect, for the knowledge of living is
not something to be learned in advance of the calls made upon it; it
accumulates with age, matures as its utility diminishes, and under favourable
[sic] circumstances dies at ninety” (p. 49).
D.
The narrator then explains that observation of other people is to “best
counteract the memory of past unhappinesses by adopting an aloof attitude
towards them,” and through them, toward himself (p. 50).
1.
In other words, the narrator distanced himself emotionally from others.
E.
The narrator ends this chapter by listing off other people who, try as
they might, stayed inadequate, like him.
VI.
Chapter six: “The twitter of many related bird-notes”
“Tells
of how, by giving Anthony and Florence keys to his apartment (without telling
either that he had given a key to the other), he set the scene for their union.
His jealousy at the success of his own plan. His gloom as an ‘outsider’ when he
followed Anthony and Florence to the hotel on the island. The ‘insight’ of
money versus the insight of poverty. His ‘N’importe où, hours du monde’ escape.
The dog barking behind the mist, and related enigmatic portents” (p. 54).
A.
The narrator asserts that we are always harder on ourselves for
mistakes, and our mistakes stay with us long after the mistake was made.
B.
The narrator had given Florence keys to his apartment, and two hours
later gave keys to Anthony.
1.
He thought Anthony would surprise Florence, who would think he was a
drunk intruder.
a. But he also knows that he was yielding to the inevitable; and was facilitating their union.
2.
Weeks later, he goes to a hotel on an island where she is at and begs
for her to come back to him, but he fails.
a.
He describes that she is sympathetic, but in the end his lack of
self-confidence and his other negative qualities seal his fate.
C.
As the days pass, he “spies” upon Anthony and Florence by watching
their nonverbal language toward each other, and the way they talk to each
other.
1.
He also sees that Anthony does indeed have the money to back up his
promises, while the narrator himself is running out of money.
2.
He speculates on how money does buy happiness, and people should
realize that.
3.
As far as the narrator is concerned, Anthony won Florence over with his
money—his “future plans” had always been about courting Florence.
a.
He also thinks that Anthony courted Florence simply because he is
manipulative, simply because he could.
D.
The narrator decides to leave the city, hoping that he had “done much
to sharpen [Florence’s] interests,” and that she would miss him.
1.
He goes on a spending spree, and then buys a ticket to an unknown town
and leaves.
2.
Upon arriving, he notices his new surroundings: “chilly morning air,”
“the twitter of many unrelated bird-notes, with the rustle of water somewhere
behind the mist—and a dog was barking, imposing fresh sharp sounds upon his own
blunt echoes” (p. 60).
PART TWO
I.
Chapter one: “I am to Genevieve permanently grateful”
“He
is grimly ‘at home,’ after having established himself in a rural setting.
Reminiscence of Florence. Compensatory ‘use’ of Genevieve. Peroration: his ill-natured
philosophy of calm” (p. 63).
A.
Two years have passed since the narrator left for the country.
1.
He finds the residents there to be back-stabbers, conformists and
hypocrites.
2.
He has managed to get along with them by keeping his self-doubts and
his work to himself.
3.
He has sat at home dwelling on his misery, wondering if Anthony and
Florence even noticed he left.
a.
He also has fantasized about their breakup: “Testing the evidence that
your affection for Florence was abating, I have imagined the growing tentatives
[sic] of separation; I have pictured your love, like the heart torn from a
turtle, beating after death” (p. 65).
B.
He compares his sorrow to “a fresh-cut stump, a massive wound, bleeding
its sap into the sunlight” (p. 65).
1.
Though trying to stay healthy, he has become increasingly dull,
murmuring Florence’s name in the hopes that she thinks of him too.
C.
Thus, he continues his affair with Genevieve, with whom he has moments
of fleeting happiness.
1.
However, he tells her he is already married, and later that he is not,
but, “I had asked another woman of the village to marry me” (p. 67), the news
of which she takes “without protest” (p. 67).
2.
The narrator wonders if he could have used and been grateful for
Genevieve at the same time.
3.
She offers to take his pain away, to stay with him, but upon his
continued refusal, eventually separates from him.
D.
The narrator wonders if living in excess, and making mistakes, is the
best way to live: “And I should hesitate to compromise a moral by drawing it
from my defective living, except by our faults or exists in spite of them” (pp.
68-69).
E.
He spends much time dwelling on himself, “submitting to a self-enquiry
maintained without assent, dwelling continually upon my own attributes” (p.
69).
F.
He goes for a walk in the late summer in “his” fields, and we learn
that he has indeed married.
1.
The narrator ends this chapter by thinking about what is worst: death,
the end of the earth, or attempts and immortality (such as “volumes” and
“symphonies”) that have no meaning (p. 70).
II.
Chapter two: “How different, Anthony, are the nights now”
“Continuing
the era of ‘composure’ (composure with reservations!). He contrasts with his
present anchorage the earlier period of grotesquely intense suffering (as on
the night when he gave Florence and Anthony the keys). We gather that he has
married, and is propertied. In keeping with his new ‘composure,’ he propounds
an ars poetica. And he tells of
meeting a scholar who represents an aspect of his own weaknesses.”
A.
The narrator recalls the night he got Florence and Anthony together.
1.
He had gone back to the apartment to beg Florence to come back to him,
but when he got there, he laid down next to a “packet of refuse” for a while
before finally leaving without confronting the lovers (p. 73).
B.
Now, in his sadness, he walks, studies, and sleeps, and makes note of
his “investments, be they in lands, cattle, or family” (p. 73).
C.
Unlike a happy frog, the narrator surmises, people are aware of their
misfortunes, and must “scheme for his composure” (p. 74).
1.
The narrator is grateful that he was a pessimistic youth, or he might
have killed himself rather than “dealt” with his pain.
D.
We learn that the narrator writes every night to Anthony, without ever
intending for Anthony to read what he has written.
1.
He does not need anyone to read his writing, because “even a philosophy
of despair may, in its couching, become an ornament to living” (pp. 74-75).
2.
Saying, “I would have you join me in lauding the pressure of speech,”
he discusses Voltaire, who he sees as a dimwit that then makes a witty remark.
This was Voltaire’s undoing (p. 75).
E.
Asserting that his talent is diction, the narrator discusses his
disdain for people who are not well spoken, and who do not appreciate art.
1.
He admits if art is bad he “quarrels” with it, and also “noted how
thinkers, in the codifying of their passions, find names which the thoughtless
can appropriate to flatter their own preferences” (p. 77).
a.
“However we choose to classify mankind [sic], people must fall into at
least two opposing groups, and for one of them the world’s best doctrines must
be subversive. So we must hold that wisdom itself remains a jungle, and that
the most astute advice can fall upon the wrong ears” (p. 77).
2.
The narrator also observes that artists are art’s worst foes. They like
to point out their own faults in others, and when their art fails, they like to
blame society rather than themselves.
F.
The narrator would rather solicit scholars, who are “equally
incompetent at life and among the archives” (p. 78).
1.
He met a comic looking scholar who stated that as a child he (the
scholar) was very smart, uninterested in his peers, and had wonderful parents.
His parents were a disservice to him, however, because they did not prepare him
for the injustice in the world.
2.
As a result, he struggled with “‘a world tragically different’” (p.
79).
3.
The scholar then describes a relationship and breakup that mirrors the
one the narrator had with Florence.
4.
At first optimistic that the day will come when people are not divided,
the scholar then laments that people will always be divided, and “‘we cannot
have the softness of great insight, the pardon before offence—or that we can
have such only in glimpses’” (p. 82).
5.
“‘As a test of happiness . . . imagine what manner of life one would
impose upon himself [sic] were he [sic] expiating some great wrong or striving
to obtain forgetfulness. Picture existence as it would be under such a
theoretical burden, and you will picture the daily habits of us all” (pp.
82-83).
6.
The narrator and the man no longer speak, as they have said everything
they have to say to each other.
III. Chapter three: “My exile had unmade
itself”
“His
sudden alleviation. He recites details of his attempts at settling. How he even
wrote a trivial play for a local school. How his activity with plays led him to
make arrangements for a troupe of barnstormers. Among them is Florence. Their
incidents together. His elation and boastfulness (he is now no longer one with
the oppressed)” (p. 84).
A.
Something has now changed for the narrator; he is no longer unhappy,
and in fact would like to leave his new life (including his wife and two
children) behind.
1.
He is aware that his wife is aware of his unrest.
2.
He recounts that he came here, had an affair with Genevieve, married,
had children, and became a citizen in this town.
3.
At one point, he wrote a play for a neighboring town’s school, which
cast a quiet local man as the hero.
a.
The town liked the play so well that he was offered an “office” at the
schools and “thereupon, by resignment too deep for irony, my participating in
the cultural improvement of my neighbours [sic]” (p. 86).
B.
All these seemingly unimportant things, and the narrator’s active
adjustment to his new life, have led to this moment of happiness: Florence has
come to the town.
1.
He and Florence stand upon a hill looking down at his property, and
they reminisce about old times.
a.
They remember Hubert, a rich friend who was anxious, contradictory, but
confident and happy on the sea.
2.
The narrator realizes the importance of living for today, resolving to
never again be jealous.
3.
He realizes he is at last content.
C. We learn that he had found Florence after (unknowingly) inviting her acting troupe to his town.
D. He had found the area in which they are
now standing dismal before, but Florence brightened it, and they begin to
discuss how the feel about each other.
IV. Chapter four: “Let this be a song”
“Paean to the excitements of love, due to Florence’s reappearance. He thinks of various people whom, for one reason or another, he could include among his band” (p. 93).
A. The narrator now reverses many of his laments expressed in past chapters.
B. The narrator realizes that his leaving was good for him, and that he has become a “sovereign” in his new territory, and has actually enjoyed his time in the small town.
C. Still addressing Anthony, he admits that it is odd that he is so happy, but also asserts that Florence’s return to him is a new beginning, and that he is not picking up the pieces Anthony left behind.
1. He is even okay with Florence’s little lies that she always preferred the narrator best.
2. “In love, Anthony, I believe we were like elephants” (p. 95).
3. Yet, the narrator is cautious about his newfound love, and he “shall return to her, with doubled attentiveness, and in apprehension, lest she has been equally subversive” (p. 97).
D. Florence, the narrator asserts, has not lost any of her beauty and wonderfulness, but he will not go into detail because Anthony would only “misread the privilege of your priority with her” (p. 97).
1. We learn that Florence is, for an unknown reason, traveling with a troupe “she loves with amusement and belittlement” (p. 97).
2. She makes no apology for this action, and he also considers himself among a “motley army” (p. 98).
a. He then lists off some of his colorful neighbors who also have had their share of injustices and troubles.
b. “But all, all are like the receivers of a legacy, who would keep their good fortune to themselves while sharing with others their delight in it. It were better that they were destroyed at the peak of their intensity . . . like the man struck down by an unanticipated bullet as he was smiling to himself, so that he passed without graduation from delight to nothingness, and was dead before the signs of pleasure died on his lips” (pp. 101-102).
V. Chapter five: “Despite them all, in their very faces”
“How chemicals bring solace. But love is superior to chemicals. ‘Good things have been brought to me on a platter.’ Plans for the future. Enjoyment of nature. Amused recollections of the past. He caps his delight by a tirade against any that would belittle it” (p. 103).
A. The narrator explains that people use drugs “for happiness, phantasy [sic], intensity, and sleep” (p. 103), and he has also used morphine, cocaine, “hemp,” and “the coal tar drugs” (p. 104). However, being with Florence is like, if not better than, all of these drugs.
B. The narrator and Florence go on walks and take in nature.
1. “We watched swans on still water, with Florence noting how the birds are weight and colour [sic], but their reflections colour [sic] only (and in the sheer extravagance of our mood, we held that since the bird and its reflection could not be divorced, the reflection and not the bird is causally prior)” (p. 105).
2. The narrator reminds himself that he needs to remember these happy days in the future.
3. He also asserts that life can change for the better if something unexpected happens.
C. He wonders if he wished Florence back.
D. He remembers before when he would seek out other women, but none quite made him happy, and he would drift back into misery.
E. He marvels at Florence’s deep thoughts about nature, thoughts that he associates more with himself than with her.
F. He is not sure why she is so happy (although he admits he is too), or why she wants to be with her acting troupe, which he considers beneath her.
1. Although unable to pry from her much about her breakup with Anthony, the narrator has found out that she is married, but goes with this acting troupe to get away from her husband.
2. After prodding her, the narrator does get Florence to admit that Anthony manipulated her, first by carrying his role as Alcaeus into real life (as she did Mary), and then by coming up with the “colony,” that is, his plans for the future.
G. Meanwhile, he tells Florence about his life since leaving she and Anthony, including his encounter with an evangelist.
H.