The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

'As things are, we are the enemies of the world, and foreigners to this earth. Our grasp of it is a process of estrangement. Through estrangement itself I earn my living from day to day. I say, this is animate, but that is inanimate. I am Salt Inspector, that is rock salt. I go further than this, much further, and say this is waking, that is a dream, this belongs to the body, that to the spirit, this belongs to space and distance, that to time and duration. But space spills over into time, as the body into the soul, so that the one cannot be measured without the other. I want to exert myself to find a different kind of measurement.

'I love Sophie more because she is ill. Illness, helplessness, is in itself a claim on love. We could not feel love for God Himself if he did not need our help. -- But those who are well, and have to stand by and do nothing, also need help, perhaps even more than the sick.'

Approaching the end of the year I decided to return to a book I very much love: Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. The first of her books I read and also the best, and what seems to me one of few very perfect novels, The Blue Flower seems to shine on every page. It's funny, sad, touching, clever. Reading it put me in the spirit of Fritz's mother, seeing her old home for the first time in years, the feeling of "coming home after having done one's best."

The question posed by The Blue Flower--or, perhaps, the earthly and practical question posed by it, because there are a number of philosophical and aesthetic questions--is, why does the brilliant philosopher-poet Fritz von Hardenberg, later known as Novalis, choose Sophie von Kuhn, a largely unremarkable young girl, to be his betrothed? Fritz calls her his "Philosophy," but she is largely unphilosophical, disinterested in writing, amused primarily by trinkets and dogs, touched but sort of befuddled by Fritz's interest. And yet, Fritz is not the only member of the family who ends up being captured by Sophie's charms: first his brother Erasmus, who had been against the match, and then his severe, businesslike father, follow Fritz. "It is quite unsuitable," Fritz's precocious six-year old brother the Bernhard repots: "It is our business to see the beauty of that."

In a way, Sophie is like philosophy: she is the generator of questions, rather than the solution to them; Fritz's undying ardor for her is the given that generates wonder. "A story that begins with finding," Fritz says, "must end with searching." That, perhaps, describes philosophy and Sophie both--and poetry, too, and all kinds of human endeavors that Sophie comes to stand in for. Perhaps what impresses me most about Fitzgerald's warmth and humanity is that the legitimacy of Fritz's love for Sophie is never in question; it's not played for irony or laughs. It's puzzling, sure, but Fitzgerald also suggests that there is something eminently reasonable in it, that there is a quality in Sophie that is worth admiration but eludes our narrow definitions of intelligence, of talent, of human worth. "I don't want to become," Sophie says to Fritz when they first meet, suggesting that a purity and immutability that eludes, but foreshadowing, too, Sophie's sudden and debilitating consumption.

Reading The Blue Flower for the second time, I was struck by just how immense and how vivid the cast of characters is. Sophie and Fritz are the stars, of course, but Fitzgerald manages to people the novel with a dozen memorable figures: the Bernhard, wise beyond his years, stands out, but also Sophie's pragmatic sister known as "the Mandelsloh," Sophie's jovial stepfather Herr Rockenthien, Fritz's sister Sidonie, his lovesick friend Karoline, Sophie's mischievous brother George, several other siblings, and even the insular and pretentious "Jena crowd" that includes well-known philosophers like Schiller and Schlegel. The Blue Flower transports you into the world of late 18th century Prussia, not because it's meticulously researched (although Fitzgerald is clearly knowledgeable), but because the world seems so recognizably human. 

Someone who knows more about Romanticism and German philosophy could probably tell you a lot about the subtext of The Blue Flower. I don't feel like I have anything particularly smart of knowledgeable to say about it. As heady as it may seem, The Blue Flower hits me in the purest pleasure zones of the brain, the places that light up after a really good story, well-told.

The Monk by Matthew Lewis

'Return to your home?' repeated the Monk, with bitter and contemptuous mockery; Then suddenly his eyes flaming with passion, 'What?  That you may denounce me to the world?  That you may proclaim me an Hypocrite, a Ravisher, a Betrayer, a Monster of cruelty, lust, and ingratitude?  No, no, no!  I know well the whole weight of my offences; Well, that your complaints would be too just, and my crimes too notorious!  You shall not from hence to tell Madrid that I am a Villain; that my conscience is loaded with sins, which make me despair of Heaven's pardon.  Wretched Girl, you must stay here with me!  Here amidst these lonely Tombs, these images of Death, these rotting loathsome corrupted bodies!  Here shall you stay, and witness my sufferings; witness, what it is to die in the horrors of despondency, and breathe the last grown in blasphemy and curses!

Ambrosio, the title character of Matthew Lewis' The Monk, is the most renowned man in Madrid, a man so virtuous that he never ventures out of the walls of his monastery, except once a week to deliver a sermon to the people of the city.  He's so virtuous that someone jokes that he "knows not the difference between man and woman"--but this naivete becomes the breeding ground for his corruption.  Ambrosio, seduced by a devoted female follower who gains access to the monastery by pretending to be a monk, slowly but surely gives himself over to his insatiable lust, which leads him to kidnap, rape, and murder.

The Monk caused quite a scandal.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge lamented that a member of Parliament could write such a book.  It shocked Ann Radcliffe, because its method is so different from hers--instead of teasing us with the spectral suggestion of horrible events, Lewis makes us face the gruesome head-on.  This works because Lewis has a sense of humor, and even when writing about the most shocking material, he seems to understand that its fundamental ridiculousness.  I said in my review of Radcliffe's The Italian that I don't think her work holds up in the 20th century because the bar of what shocks us is so much higher, but The Monk remains engaging because, while it doesn't really shock either, it remains a terrific black comedy:

As She uttered these last words, She lifted her arm, and made a motion as if to stab herself.  The Friar's eyes followed with dread the course of the dagger.  She had torn open her habit, and her bosom was half exposed.  The weapon's point rested upon her left breast: And Oh! that was such a breast!  The Moon-beams darting full upon it, enabled the Monk to observe its dazzling whiteness.  His eye dwelt with insatiable avidity upon the beauteous Orb.

In fact, what makes this passage and others like it so great is the way that it treats this material with so little seriousness: I can understand why the Coleridges and Radcliffes of the world found such a dark mixture of violence and sexuality disturbing, but the winking pretentiousness of the phrase "beauteous Orb" seems like it ought to deflate such revulsion. 

(One exception to this--and here I'll issue a SPOILER ALERT--is the episode late in the novel when a pregnant woman named Agnes, separated from her lover and forced into the nunnery, is locked in the dungeon by the evil Prioress where she gives birth.  Without food, the child dies and Agnes begins to waste away, but she is unable to part from the body of the child, so she holds on to it until it becomes a "mass of putridity."  That I found legitimately shocking.)

Lewis uses the story of Ambrosio as a back-drop for a collection of Gothic tales he's collected from other sources: There's the kindly homeowner who murders the travelers who pass the night in his house, and the ghost of the Bleeding Nun, who appears at the stroke of one every five years.  There are incantations of Lucifer, who appears as an attractive young man.  (Lewis himself was more or less openly homosexual.)  Each of these stories is really fantastic (and if I hadn't just written a fifteen-page paper on the novel, I'd have a lot more to say about them).  You get the sense that, even though the Gothic tradition he was working in wasn't something as codified or established as we think of it today, Lewis was really interested in pushing the boundaries of the expectations of the genre, and his frenetic, voracious use of these tales is surprisingly seamless.

Ultimately, Lewis was taken to court, and forced to republish The Monk without murder, rape, descriptions of nudity or accounts of witchcraft.  (All that was left, I imagine, was the introductory poem.)  Someone accused me the other day of liking "stuffy" novels--which, in some cases, is a fair dig.  But The Monk is pretty much "Exhibit A" why equating "old" with "stuffy" is idiotic: How many novels from the twentieth century are as bold, irreverent, or cathartic?

Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

But, born a woman--and born to suffer, in endeavouring to repress my own emotions, I feel more acutely the various ills my sex are fated to bear--I feel that the evils they are subject to endure, degrade them so far below their oppressors, as almost to justify their tyranny; leading a the same time superficial reasoners to term that weakness the cause, which is only the consequence of short-sighted despotism.

Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin really did belong together.  Her Wrongs of Woman is cut from the same cloth as Godwin's Caleb Williams.  Both focus on members of unrepresented groups--for him, a servant, for her a woman.  Both of them depict their protagonists as being unfairly imprisoned, both to expose the injustice of the English legal system, and to serve as a symbol for social repression ("Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?").  Both pepper their accounts with stories culled from real life accounts of injustice so that we might see that they are more than novels--they are what really happens on a daily basis.

Both are boring as hell.  Wollstonecraft is a better nuts-and-bolt writer than her husband, but her heroine, Maria, has a shadow of Caleb Williams' already paper-thin personality.  Perhaps some of that isn't her fault;  she died before Wrongs of Woman could be finished and so it remains fragmentary.  But I often get the impression that she felt that giving her heroine any kind of weakness or flaw that might make her seem realistic would only play into the hands of her detractors as exemplary of women overall.

Maria is generous, intelligent, and compassionate, but when the story opens, she finds herself committed involuntarily to a mental institution at the behest of her cruel husband, George.  She finds a sympathetic soul in the equally unjustly imprisoned Henry Darnford, to whom she spills out her sad, sad tale: George only married her for access to her uncle's wealth, and when she spoke out against him, he used his superior legal and social clout to have her committed, separating her from her newborn child.

In the late 18th Century, this might have been a moving piece of literature.  Scenes like the one in which a judge, though faced with the cruelty of Maria's husband, admonishes her impertinence in speaking out against him, might have inspired rage.  Or the one where Maria's husband, mired in financial difficulties by his own licentiousness, tries to pimp her out to a friend for cash.  But Wollstonecraft doesn't need to persuade me, and though we have our own breeds of sexism to combat in the 21st Century, The Wrongs of Woman seems like an answer to an already resolved question.  It's so much of its time that it doesn't seem interesting except as a historical artifact.  Maybe that's a good thing.

A Spectacle of Corruption by David Liss

Events of the past few days had happened so quickly and so strangely, I felt I understood almost nothing, but I now knew two things with absolute certainty. I knew that someone desperately wanted to see me convicted and sentenced to hang, to which end the law had been cruelly abused.

And, just as surely, someone wanted me free.



A Spectacle of Corruption is the story of Benjamin Weaver, a jewish thieftaker, and his struggle for justice after being convicted of a crime he did not commit. Set in 18th century London, amidst a backdrop of heated Parliamentary elections, Spectacle provides a glimpse into the seedy world of British politics in the colonial age.

The story opens with Weaver's murder trial, overseen by a judge who seems intent on a conviction, no matter how feeble the prosecution's arguments. After being convicted and sentenced to death, Weaver escapes his incarceration thanks to the efforts of a mysterious young woman who slips him a lockpick and file before he is escorted from the courtroom. In an effort to clear his name, Weaver creates a new identity so that he may freely roam the streets of London gathering information. As Matthew Evans, a gentile tobacco farmer returned to Britain from Jamaica, Weaver is able to penetrate the high-class, political circles that seem to want him dead. The story takes a number of twists and turns, eventually unveiling plots involving far more than the life of Benjamin Weaver... Plots that could dismantle the entire British Government.

I've never really been one for mystery stories, but I suppose I enjoyed A Spectacle of Corruption. Benjamin Weaver is a wildly likeable character. His narration and dialogue remind me of a less pretentious version of Frasier. Not simply a man of eloquence, Weaver is a former boxer unafraid to use pugilistic persuasion on those unmoved by his verbal arguments. I suppose you could imagine Weaver as a hybrid of Oscar Wilde and Jack Bauer. Aside from Weaver's character, this story didn't strike me as anything remarkable. I enjoyed it a bit, but I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone (unless I know they adore foppish historical fiction). The story's mystery fell flat on its face. With clues pointing Weaver to dead end after dead end eventually leading to a climax that hardly felt satisfying. And the most interesting aspect of the story, Weaver's inadvertent involvement in a Jacobite uprising, seemed underutilized.

I will say, that while the book didn't blow me away, I really respect the amount of research and work Liss must have put into making this book. From what I've read, Spectacle is a very accurate portrayal of 18th century British politics and a number of characters in the story are actual historical figures. Jonathan Wild, for example, is one of Weaver's rivals as a thieftaker and was, in fact, considered the most famous P.I./criminals of his time. Also, Liss's use of racism was delicately done. I think its easy for writers to go overboard when trying to make a character seem racist or ignorant. Its a more complex task to accurately portray how racist, ignorant people actually act. The anti-semitism in Spectacle, I thought, was very well done. The snooty, high-class, talking wigs that Weaver encounters do not keep their disdain for the Jewish community under wraps, but nor do they spend entire dinner parties spouting anti-semitic remarks. Liss was able to convey the anti-semitism of 18th century London as a pervasive undertone, instead hitting the reader over the head with it every other page.

So I suppose long story short, A Spectacle of Corruption is an excellently written (but somewhat boring) story about a very likeable character. Spectacle is the sequel to A Conspiracy of Paper, also starring Benjamin Weaver, so perhaps that story finds Weaver in more arresting circumstances.

Highlights: The use of the word "bubbies" instead of breasts, Weaver is pretty B.A.
Lowlights: All of the useless red-herrings and dead ends that add nothing to the mystery's solution.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

The Bridge of San Luis Rey tells the story of a bridge that collapses in the early 18th century between the cities of Lima and Cuzco in Peru. A Franciscan monk named Brother Juniper witness the incident and decides that this tragedy provides him a perfect test case to prove that we live by God's plan, and that there are no true accidents. Accordingly, he investigates the lives of the five people who perished on the bridge, and goes so far as creating a chart of their goodness and usefulness to compare to those who survived.

That, however, is only the frame story--the bulk of San Luis Rey is three tales which describe the five victims of the bridge collapse: The Marquesa de Montemayor, Esteban, and Uncle Pio (also perishing are the Marquesa's orphan ward Nina and Uncle Pio's student-to-be Jaime). The three stories are finely intertwined, and share many other characters in common, principally a character named the Perichole, a reknowned (and historical) Peruvian actress. The Marquesa is a widely belittled public figure whom the Perichole ridicules during a performance (but, we learn later, the Marquesa's letters to her daughter in Spain become treasured as a literary achievement after her death). Esteban is the bereaved twin brother of Manuel, a poor orphan copies letters for and is in love with the Perichole (before he dies of gangrene). Uncle Pio is the Perichole's benefactor, to whom she entrusts her son Jaime as a student. There are other recurring characters, like the Abbess and orphanage director Maria del Madre Pilar, and the Spanish Viceroy Don Andres de Ribera, but the Perichole is the closest thing that San Luis Rey has to a main character.

Ultimately, Brother Juniper is unable to come to a conclusion regarding the plan that sent these five to the great beyond, and the book he writes is condemned as heretical. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, too, seems to lack a certain answer regarding why they had to die this way, but there is no doubting that there is an interesting pattern at work in the interwoven threads of the story. When the Perichole and the Marquesa's daugter, Dona Clara, come to serve in the Abbess Maria del Madre Pilar's abbey, there is the suggestion not that their dedication to God in the face of suffering is the result which justifies the tragedy, but that at least there is some faint echo of purpose and design.

I liked this book, though at a tiny 110 pp. it seemed a little inconsequential--which is quite the opposite of what it intends, I think. That however, is probably just my hang-up. It did win the Pulitzer prize in 1928.