On this page we will put some texts concerning CM, with the exception of those introducing editions still on the market, such as Valentine Cunningham's Preface to the Capuchin Classics edition of The Voyage, and Carole Bourne-Taylor's introduction to the Oberon edition of the theatre criticism (see the News page).
HANDS ACROSS THE CHANNEL: TWO AUTHORS IN THE DARK DAYS
Roger Kuin
François Mauriac
(My thanks to Jad Hatem for alerting me to Morgan's letter concerning Le Cahier Noir)
It is well known that Charles Morgan loved France. He himself explained that it was as a young Naval officer interned in the Netherlands during World War One that he had made the acquaintance of an old lady, Madame Hélène Elout van Soeterwoude, who was Dutch but – like many Dutch aristocrats at the time – knew France well and was steeped in French culture: as he wrote later, “she had waltzed to Chopin’s music with ‘Monsieur Chopin at the piano.’” She taught young Morgan to look to France for all that was clear, rational and beautiful in European civilisation. And by the mid-1930s, as dramatic critic of The Times and a successful novelist, he had not only won a French-based literary prize, the Femina-Vie Heureuse Award, for Portrait in a Mirror, but his next novel, The Fountain, in its brilliant French translation by Germaine Delamain, had become such a favourite in France that on May 8, 1936, at a luncheon in the French Embassy in London the ambassador, Charles Corbin, had decorated him with the insignia of a chevalier in the French Legion of Honour.
A couple of years later he made the acquaintance of an important French writer, François Mauriac (1885-1970). Mauriac, born to a patrician family in the Bordeaux region, was a devout Catholic who had come to loathe his own class, the grande bourgeoisie, for its hypocrisy and who had, especially through the Spanish Civil War, come to sympathise with the Catholics of the left. He had written two novels that had become famous, Thérèse Desqueyroux and Le Nœud de vipères (Nest of Vipers) and had in 1933 been elected to the French Academy. By 1938 he had written his first play, Asmodée, about a hypocritical clerical tutor who sows havoc in a bourgeois family. It had been translated by Sir Basil Bartlett and was put on at the experimental Gate Theatre in London on February 23, 1939. Morgan, reviewing it for The Times, wrote that “M. Mauriac’s art . . . is intellectual, accurate, and precise, exempt from all woolliness of mind, but its observation is, nevertheless, visionary, discovering always the cause beneath the effect, the innermost spring of emotion under the recorded fact. The result is a completely new experience of the theatre, held firmly within traditional form.” A real success, it was retitled The Intruder and moved to Wyndham’s Theatre in May.
Mauriac had flown over from Paris to be present at the Gate opening, and had lunch with Morgan on February 28th. He seems to have flown back right away; for at the meal in honour of the Comédie française put on by the Anglo-French Luncheon Club on March 2, which Morgan attended, there is no mention of him. Morgan himself crossed to France on March 12 to go and stay with his friends Jacques and Germaine Delamain near Jarnac, and to work on his new novel The Voyage. On this trip to France he was fascinated, on entering Chartres Cathedral, to find the stained-glass windows removed in the anticipation of war, their absence creating a whole new sensation of vaulting lines.
On September 3, France and Britain declared war on Germany following the latter’s invasion of Poland. Morgan at this time had gone to work for the Naval Intelligence Division at the Admiralty, while Mauriac was living on his family’s property at Malagar in the Gironde and finishing a novel, La Pharisienne. This he was permitted by the new German overseeing authorities to publish in 1941. They initially limited the edition to 5,000 copies; Grasset, the publishers, persuaded them to allow 25,000, which quickly sold out. Mauriac had at first hoped to stay out of the hostilities, but gradually found himself drawn into the underworld of the Resistance – as a writer, not a terrorist. By early 1943 he was a member of the editorial board of a new, clandestine publishing house called the Editions de Minuit, created by Jean Bruller and Pierre de Lescure. The first title Minuit published was a novella by Bruller, under the pen name of “Vercors” (a region of France). This text, Le silence de la mer, showed the reaction of a French family to a German officer billeted in their house. The German is a decent man who loves France, and hopes for a good relationship with his involuntary hosts; the family, unpersuaded, react by never addressing a single word to him.
This tiny book (the Minuit books were beautifully printed by a trade printer of cards, in a format of 4 ½” x 6 ½”) was a huge success; and by some means a few copies found their way to England, where Charles Morgan was given one in July by Theodora (“Thola”) Dalembert, a Polish-born film producer working in England, and was sufficiently impressed to devote to it one of his weekly “Menander’s Mirror” columns for The Times, under the title “A Good German” (reprinted in Reflections in a Mirror). Minuit went on to publish three more titles, each under the pen-name of a region (e.g. Angleterre by “Argonne”); and in August 1943 they printed their fifth title, called Le Cahier noir (the Black Notebook) by “Forez”. This 49-page pamphlet was a passionate attack, not only on the German occupation but also on the French – the educated French: politicians, bourgeoisie and intellectuals – who collaborated with it. It minces no words, denouncing the omnipresent “Machiavelli” of craven cowardice, fear, and cynicism; and it ends with a passionate call to tear the oppressors’ hands from our throats, so that we may become once again a free people, and thence a righteous people.
Once again, a few copies found their way to England, where one was presented to Charles Morgan, perhaps once more by Thola Dalembert. Did he already know at this time that “Forez” was François Mauriac? He may well have done, as whoever smuggled the book to England was probably aware of it.
Reading the pamphlet, Morgan was thrilled by its passionate integrity and its call to resistance; but he was also disturbed by some of its utterances. “Seule la classe ouvrière dans sa masse aura été fidèle à la France profanée,” wrote Forez: only the working-class, as a mass, showed itself faithful to a desecrated France. And later on he attacks Ernest Renan the 19th-century intellectual, citing an 1870 conversation recorded in the diary of the Goncourt brothers, in which Renan supposedly said, pointing out the Sunday crowds in the Tuilerie gardens, that their moral flabbiness would save us from the passionate patriots and their patrie [Renan shown as much impressed with the intelligence and efficiency of the Germans].
Morgan was deeply upset by such pronouncements, the more as I think he knew they came from Mauriac, whom he admired. Still, he was impressed enough by the text as a whole to have it translated into English and republished from London in a bilingual edition distributed by Hachette in 1944. And to this edition he added a “Letter to the Author”, which we reprint here:
Cher Maître,
Your book has been distributed in France by an underground organisation which, in the days to come will be regarded as a wonder in the history of publishing. It has been brought across the Channel and, as I write this, an English translation of it – not my translation – is being prepared. Together they will appear in London, and yet such is the power of darkness which the enemy exercises in the world that even here your name must not yet appear upon your own book. That is my only excuse for intervening. I have to assure English readers that, if the Germans had not made it a crime to be an artist of integrity, there would have stood upon your title page the name of a loyal Frenchman, among the most distinguished in the contemporary literature of your country.
Your book is short and speaks for itself. It would be presumptuous in me to comment upon it. No Englishman, and perhaps no Frenchman out of France, is competent to discuss its opinions. It contains hard sayings. For example: “Seule la classe ouvrière dans sa masse aura été fidèle à la France profanée” and you speak fiercely of Renan. I mention these passages only because they are evidence of what we English who love and venerate France, have continually to remember: that it has become almost impossible for us to have an intuitive apprehension of her, a sense of what she is; we can at best hope for no more than that we may learn anew her thousand aspects, believing that in the end she will reveal herself to us again in a singleness that permits no adjective but “French”. I think of Renan as a Frenchman and a writer of good prose. These qualities, and that he is dead, transcend in my mind every consideration of him as a member of a race or party. What he may have said to Goncourt seventy-four years ago has for you a relevance altogether different from the relevance it has for me, and it is certain that we do not begin to understand a foreign people until we know, not only the facts concerning them, but the relevance of these facts in their minds. Therefore, I hope that my own countrymen, while first reading your book, will suspend, as far as possible, all agreement or disagreement with it, and even all decisive mental comment upon it, and then will read it again as news of a world unknown to them and almost unimaginable by them. As I began, I remembered your face and your voice. I supposed that I should find myself – I will not say upon familiar ground, but in a recognisable planet of spiritual experience. Now I know that in my study of France I must go to school again and at the bottom of the humblest class.
As I sit there, your pupil, learning again how to spell the words “la France”, I hear again a phrase which I can understand. “De nouveau la France a son mot à dire. Son mot: Liberté”, and I listen for what seems to me the inevitable and necessary precursor of it: “De nouveau la Liberté a son mot à dire. Son mot: France.” And as I repeat my lesson, turning again to the magnificent passage which begins: “De sorte que bien loin qu’ils aient le droit de fuir . . .” and which bids men seek God among all who suffer persecution, “Christian or pagan, communist or Jew”, I take heart, I begin to understand that, though the form of the lesson be changed, it is still the same lesson, now re-enforced by her suffering and division, which France has to teach me, herself and all civilisation: that men are to be valued for what they are by virtue of the spirit in them, and not for the group or class, or race or sect to which they belong. Every nation, even France, from time to time has been guilty of perverting the truth. Never has the perversion of it been carried so far as it has been by the Nazis. Your book teaches the truth again in its uncompromising attack upon them as well as in its positive exposition of the truth itself. It teaches it above all by the witness it bears to the endurance of your own spirit. That is why we English, to whom, in face of the Germans, class is almost meaningless, and in whose eyes a retrospective bitterness between parties would appear as a folly of irrelevance, must read what you have written without being turned aside by this phrase or that: must read your whole book receptively for its candour as well as for its passion, as a document without which the new France cannot be understood. We may take it as a first short text-book for the lesson we have to learn.
Its first words: “En août 1943, dans cette aube . . .” were written nine months ago. If you will look at the date under my signature you will understand with how profound a sense of being at one with you I write today, and you will know that it is no formal courtesy which impels me to say to you, a great Frenchman and artist, that
I have the honour to be,
dear Master,
Your friend and fellow-servant,
(Signed) Charles Morgan
London, 15th May, 1944.
How should we read this letter? The French sociologist Paul Yonnet, in a 2015 article in Commentaire, suggested that Morgan (with whose criticism of Mauriac, as he sees it, he fully agrees) was writing strong criticism under the guise of une humilité feinte (a feigned humility). Those of us who know Morgan and his mentalité may not agree with this: one mode which is totally alien to him was irony. I certainly believe that he is here being perfectly sincere. His love for France was passionate and entire; his admiration for Mauriac sincere and wholehearted; but by 1943 he has been effectively cut off from his beloved France and his French friends for four years, and he is beginning to realise the degree to which what they are living through, and the way it has affected them, is not only even more difficult that the war in Britain, but different. Different because they are an occupied country, in daily contact with the oppressor and faced with daily challenges to their courage and integrity. Different because, divided by the Machiavellian ruses of the Nazis, their social antagonisms cannot be forgotten in a joint effort as, to a large (and by Morgan perhaps exaggerated) extent, they have been in Britain. And different because those who resist cannot but see a large number of their own compatriots with hatred and contempt.
The bilingual edition of The Black Notebook also contained an eloquent essay on “The Christian Spirit in the Culture of modern France” by the actor and writer Robert Speaight, a friend of Morgan’s, a Francophile intellectual and Catholic convert who had written a biography of Hilaire Belloc, and who may have been the translator of the volume.
This edition in turn found its way back into France, where Mauriac read it and was immediately dumbstruck by Morgan’s letter. Knowing this, we might wonder how he would react: would he execrate this Englishman with his feigned humility, who did not and, being English, could not understand the reaction of a furious and humiliated Frenchman? Such might well have been his reaction. However, it was not so. By the autumn of 1944 Paris was being liberated, and Mauriac’s own feelings had somewhat muted and moderated. Yes, he was stung by one or two of Morgan’s remarks; but he was stung, not to anger but to repentance. So he wrote an eloquent and generous reply, which we also reprint here:
If only I had received your message at the time it was written, while France was still enslaved! Today it tells me nothing that I did not already know, concerning the faithful affection for us that you kept alive in the darkest hours. But then it would have delivered us from a torment that I scarcely dare confess to you. Although I never doubted the Allied victory, from time to time I did believe in my country’s dishonour. I feared that Vichy had disfigured France in the eyes of the world. Doubtless this must be an almost unimaginable feeling for an Englishman: nevertheless it is a shame that we have known. The Resistance did not reassure us: it was undergound, invisible, its extent escaped us. The heroism of our African soldiers only partly, in my eyes, compensated for the horrible things happening in the mother country. If at that moment I had read your letter, if I had known that the author of The Fountain did not doubt us, and that for him France still remained France, with what wonder I should have been filled!
As you can see, my dear and illustrious friend, it is I who have everything to learn from you, where my country is concerned; it is I who need to go back to school, to ask the friend who loves us for the reasons that he loves us still. It is no pleasure of vanity that I seek, but at times doubt haunts me still and I need to be reassured. It is so new for us, this place that France has regained among you, these military triumphs, this leader who has given us back our honour – for General de Gaulle is, for the French, first and foremost the man who has given them back their honour.
If I dare confess to you that there were times when I, her ungrateful son, doubted France, it is because the Black Notebook would be inexplicable without that lack of faith, without that need I had to regain some courage. This little work was originally called Letter to one in despair, so that he may hope. The one in despair, to whom I was trying to give back some confidence, was myself. The passages that struck you and, I fear, shocked you, are there for the same reason. Mind you, today I should no longer write that ‘only the working-class, in the mass, has been faithful to a desecrated France’. How unjust that was to the vast multitude of young men of the middle class who sacrificed themselves and are doing so to this day! And in any case, where, in France, does the middle class end? It is fed by the workers, the peasants, because in our country “everything starts with the plough”. That all too undifferentiated blame, aimed at the middle class, was inspired by the stifled fury that the Vichy crowd kept smouldering in me. In fact, the Resistance was made up of countless elements that in the end swelled the tidal wave which swept away the enemy and the enemy’s lackeys.
Similarly, today I judge Renan as you judge him also. I no longer think of blaming him for the words with which the Black Notebook reproaches him. He represents one moment and one thought in the discourse that France unendingly addresses to the world: and as such he remains dear to us. The French have learnt this at least: not to enlist their great men, no longer to bring them into their present quarrels. Voltaire, recently, was celebrated by a France unanimous. Not so long ago, that would have seemed unbelievable. Today, the sum of our glories is barely enough to deserve the friendship for us that you have preserved.
So it was you, my dear Charles Morgan, who managed to step back far enough clearly to observe my country. You were able to combine all its oppositions into that unique harmony that enchants you. I, on the other hand, was blinded by the hand over my eyes, stifled by the gag on my mouth. The collaborationist press maintained in me an irritation, a rage that hardly encouraged a balanced judgement. And what is more, at each contretemps in our daily life we had to be on our guard against Vichy, against the Germans, against their deceitful propaganda.
Henceforth is it to that harmony of France, to that balance of its contrary forces that I aspire, like yourself. I believe I may already have said that to you, on the day when, newly returned to liberated Paris, I had the surprise and the joy of seeing you walk into my long-abandoned office. While you were talking to me, I remembered that day in 1938 when, as I arrived in London for the performance of Asmodée, a friend on the station platform gave me the Times: there, on the front page, was Charles Morgan welcoming me. I know full well that in my humble person it was France you were honouring. At least you had the opportunity to address her directly yourself, in that poetic matinée of October 27th 1944, at the Comédie Française, when you had the happiness to read in person, before General de Gaulle, your admirable Ode. By way of my voice, may France here express her affectionate gratitude, and salute you as her dearest and most admired English friend.
13 December 1944.
There was a double aftermath to the story. The first part is referred to by Mauriac in his letter. On 27 October 1944, after five years of silence, the fabled Comédie française theatre was reopened. For this occasion Edouard Bourdet, the Administrateur, had been told to organise a Gala performance of Poets of the Resistance; and General de Gaulle had asked François Mauriac to arrange the programme. Texts by French writers, and some by Allied authors, would be read by actors of the Comédie. There were passages by Paul Eluard, Jules Supervielle, Louis Aragon, Edith Thomas, Gabriel Audisio, Jacqueline Farge, Jean Noir, Jean Tardieu, Pierre Emmanuel, Pierre Seghers, Paul Claudel, Valentin Guillois, Lise Deharme, Loys Masson, and Angelos Sikelianos; and also one text by John Steinbeck (an extract from The Moon is Down) and one by Walt Whitman (“Vigil Strange I kept on the Field One Night”).
All these texts were read by actors of the Comédie française; and then, at the end, one foreigner appeared on stage: Charles Morgan, who read his “Ode to France”. In the audience was the great French poet Paul Valéry, who later wrote: “I shall always remember that night, at the Comédie Française, when we saw appear, before the audience assembled there for the poetic celebration of the country’s liberation, alone, grave, living the moment with all his heart, Charles Morgan. He read to us, slowly, with that solemn intonation we French have difficulty giving to reading, the great poem he had composed in honour of our country. Many did not understand, but all were captivated.” Morgan himself wrote of that moment: “It was very exciting – the most exciting day of my life. I care desperately for French honour. The programme consisted of poems of the Resistance – Claudel, Eluard, Vercors, etc. The National Guard in helmets and plumes. De Gaulle in the stage box . . . My ode came last . . . When I bowed to the audience I suddenly heard a noise like the wings of angels and then I saw that the whole audience of the Comédie française had risen . . . An Englishman can’t ask much more of life.”
And finally, in November 1948, Morgan received what to him was the crowning “French honour”. On the 8th of that month, in the Bibliothèque nationale, he was inducted to the Académie de Sciences Morales et Politiques, section Associés Etrangers, fauteuil 7, succeeding Nicholas Murray Butler (the former President of Columbia & Nobel Peace Prize winner); and on the 12th, he was promoted from Chevalier to Officier of the Légion d’Honneur.
As for Mauriac, when Minuit published a new edition of Le Cahier noir in 1947, he insisted that both Morgan’s letter and his reply be included, following the original text.
As we end this brief study of his interaction with Mauriac, we might perhaps ask what prompted the Frenchman to write the passages that bothered Morgan, and why Morgan was disturbed by them. The passage on the working-class was, I believe, written by Mauriac under two impulses: first, his own growing sympathy for the political courage of the Left during his journalistic coverage of the Spanish Civil War; and, more immediately, by his new association with the Communist sympathisers in the Resistance, who increasingly dominated the Editions de Minuit under the influence of Louis Aragon and his wife Elsa Triolet. Moreover, it was increased by his disgust with many menbers of his own social class who had avoided the Resistance and more or less compromised with the Occupation.
Morgan’s reaction was, I think, partly fuelled by his strong social and political conservatism (Raymond Postgate wrote to Alfred Knopf, “He is the highest of High Tories”), and partly because of his experience of the many young men of the middle and upper class who had immediately and selflessly gone to war and often died: one example was John Dundas (1915-1940), a young friend of Morgan’s and Margaret Rawlings’, who was an RAF ace with a DFC and bar and twelve kills before he went missing during the Battle of Britain.
In any case, the exchange concerning the Cahier noir forms a fascinating element in the relations between France and Britain in those dark days, as exemplified by two major writers, each profoundly typical of his country.
It is well known that Charles Morgan loved France. He himself explained that it was as a young Naval officer interned in the Netherlands during World War One that he had made the acquaintance of an old lady, Madame Hélène Elout van Soeterwoude, who was Dutch but – like many Dutch aristocrats at the time – knew France well and was steeped in French culture: as he wrote later, “she had waltzed to Chopin’s music with ‘Monsieur Chopin at the piano.’” She taught young Morgan to look to France for all that was clear, rational and beautiful in European civilisation. And by the mid-1930s, as dramatic critic of The Times and a successful novelist, he had not only won a French-based literary prize, the Femina-Vie Heureuse Award, for Portrait in a Mirror, but his next novel, The Fountain, in its brilliant French translation by Germaine Delamain, had become such a favourite in France that on May 8, 1936, at a luncheon in the French Embassy in London the ambassador, Charles Corbin, had decorated him with the insignia of a chevalier in the French Legion of Honour.
A couple of years later he made the acquaintance of an important French writer, François Mauriac (1885-1970). Mauriac, born to a patrician family in the Bordeaux region, was a devout Catholic who had come to loathe his own class, the grande bourgeoisie, for its hypocrisy and who had, especially through the Spanish Civil War, come to sympathise with the Catholics of the left. He had written two novels that had become famous, Thérèse Desqueyroux and Le Nœud de vipères (Nest of Vipers) and had in 1933 been elected to the French Academy. By 1938 he had written his first play, Asmodée, about a hypocritical clerical tutor who sows havoc in a bourgeois family. It had been translated by Sir Basil Bartlett and was put on at the experimental Gate Theatre in London on February 23, 1939. Morgan, reviewing it for The Times, wrote that “M. Mauriac’s art . . . is intellectual, accurate, and precise, exempt from all woolliness of mind, but its observation is, nevertheless, visionary, discovering always the cause beneath the effect, the innermost spring of emotion under the recorded fact. The result is a completely new experience of the theatre, held firmly within traditional form.” A real success, it was retitled The Intruder and moved to Wyndham’s Theatre in May.
Mauriac had flown over from Paris to be present at the Gate opening, and had lunch with Morgan on February 28th. He seems to have flown back right away; for at the meal in honour of the Comédie française put on by the Anglo-French Luncheon Club on March 2, which Morgan attended, there is no mention of him. Morgan himself crossed to France on March 12 to go and stay with his friends Jacques and Germaine Delamain near Jarnac, and to work on his new novel The Voyage. On this trip to France he was fascinated, on entering Chartres Cathedral, to find the stained-glass windows removed in the anticipation of war, their absence creating a whole new sensation of vaulting lines.
On September 3, France and Britain declared war on Germany following the latter’s invasion of Poland. Morgan at this time had gone to work for the Naval Intelligence Division at the Admiralty, while Mauriac was living on his family’s property at Malagar in the Gironde and finishing a novel, La Pharisienne. This he was permitted by the new German overseeing authorities to publish in 1941. They initially limited the edition to 5,000 copies; Grasset, the publishers, persuaded them to allow 25,000, which quickly sold out. Mauriac had at first hoped to stay out of the hostilities, but gradually found himself drawn into the underworld of the Resistance – as a writer, not a terrorist. By early 1943 he was a member of the editorial board of a new, clandestine publishing house called the Editions de Minuit, created by Jean Bruller and Pierre de Lescure. The first title Minuit published was a novella by Bruller, under the pen name of “Vercors” (a region of France). This text, Le silence de la mer, showed the reaction of a French family to a German officer billeted in their house. The German is a decent man who loves France, and hopes for a good relationship with his involuntary hosts; the family, unpersuaded, react by never addressing a single word to him.
This tiny book (the Minuit books were beautifully printed by a trade printer of cards, in a format of 4 ½” x 6 ½”) was a huge success; and by some means a few copies found their way to England, where Charles Morgan was given one in July by Theodora (“Thola”) Dalembert, a Polish-born film producer working in England, and was sufficiently impressed to devote to it one of his weekly “Menander’s Mirror” columns for The Times, under the title “A Good German” (reprinted in Reflections in a Mirror). Minuit went on to publish three more titles, each under the pen-name of a region (e.g. Angleterre by “Argonne”); and in August 1943 they printed their fifth title, called Le Cahier noir (the Black Notebook) by “Forez”. This 49-page pamphlet was a passionate attack, not only on the German occupation but also on the French – the educated French: politicians, bourgeoisie and intellectuals – who collaborated with it. It minces no words, denouncing the omnipresent “Machiavelli” of craven cowardice, fear, and cynicism; and it ends with a passionate call to tear the oppressors’ hands from our throats, so that we may become once again a free people, and thence a righteous people.
Once again, a few copies found their way to England, where one was presented to Charles Morgan, perhaps once more by Thola Dalembert. Did he already know at this time that “Forez” was François Mauriac? He may well have done, as whoever smuggled the book to England was probably aware of it.
Reading the pamphlet, Morgan was thrilled by its passionate integrity and its call to resistance; but he was also disturbed by some of its utterances. “Seule la classe ouvrière dans sa masse aura été fidèle à la France profanée,” wrote Forez: only the working-class, as a mass, showed itself faithful to a desecrated France. And later on he attacks Ernest Renan the 19th-century intellectual, citing an 1870 conversation recorded in the diary of the Goncourt brothers, in which Renan supposedly said, pointing out the Sunday crowds in the Tuilerie gardens, that their moral flabbiness would save us from the passionate patriots and their patrie [Renan shown as much impressed with the intelligence and efficiency of the Germans].
Morgan was deeply upset by such pronouncements, the more as I think he knew they came from Mauriac, whom he admired. Still, he was impressed enough by the text as a whole to have it translated into English and republished from London in a bilingual edition distributed by Hachette in 1944. And to this edition he added a “Letter to the Author”, which we reprint here:
Cher Maître,
Your book has been distributed in France by an underground organisation which, in the days to come will be regarded as a wonder in the history of publishing. It has been brought across the Channel and, as I write this, an English translation of it – not my translation – is being prepared. Together they will appear in London, and yet such is the power of darkness which the enemy exercises in the world that even here your name must not yet appear upon your own book. That is my only excuse for intervening. I have to assure English readers that, if the Germans had not made it a crime to be an artist of integrity, there would have stood upon your title page the name of a loyal Frenchman, among the most distinguished in the contemporary literature of your country.
Your book is short and speaks for itself. It would be presumptuous in me to comment upon it. No Englishman, and perhaps no Frenchman out of France, is competent to discuss its opinions. It contains hard sayings. For example: “Seule la classe ouvrière dans sa masse aura été fidèle à la France profanée” and you speak fiercely of Renan. I mention these passages only because they are evidence of what we English who love and venerate France, have continually to remember: that it has become almost impossible for us to have an intuitive apprehension of her, a sense of what she is; we can at best hope for no more than that we may learn anew her thousand aspects, believing that in the end she will reveal herself to us again in a singleness that permits no adjective but “French”. I think of Renan as a Frenchman and a writer of good prose. These qualities, and that he is dead, transcend in my mind every consideration of him as a member of a race or party. What he may have said to Goncourt seventy-four years ago has for you a relevance altogether different from the relevance it has for me, and it is certain that we do not begin to understand a foreign people until we know, not only the facts concerning them, but the relevance of these facts in their minds. Therefore, I hope that my own countrymen, while first reading your book, will suspend, as far as possible, all agreement or disagreement with it, and even all decisive mental comment upon it, and then will read it again as news of a world unknown to them and almost unimaginable by them. As I began, I remembered your face and your voice. I supposed that I should find myself – I will not say upon familiar ground, but in a recognisable planet of spiritual experience. Now I know that in my study of France I must go to school again and at the bottom of the humblest class.
As I sit there, your pupil, learning again how to spell the words “la France”, I hear again a phrase which I can understand. “De nouveau la France a son mot à dire. Son mot: Liberté”, and I listen for what seems to me the inevitable and necessary precursor of it: “De nouveau la Liberté a son mot à dire. Son mot: France.” And as I repeat my lesson, turning again to the magnificent passage which begins: “De sorte que bien loin qu’ils aient le droit de fuir . . .” and which bids men seek God among all who suffer persecution, “Christian or pagan, communist or Jew”, I take heart, I begin to understand that, though the form of the lesson be changed, it is still the same lesson, now re-enforced by her suffering and division, which France has to teach me, herself and all civilisation: that men are to be valued for what they are by virtue of the spirit in them, and not for the group or class, or race or sect to which they belong. Every nation, even France, from time to time has been guilty of perverting the truth. Never has the perversion of it been carried so far as it has been by the Nazis. Your book teaches the truth again in its uncompromising attack upon them as well as in its positive exposition of the truth itself. It teaches it above all by the witness it bears to the endurance of your own spirit. That is why we English, to whom, in face of the Germans, class is almost meaningless, and in whose eyes a retrospective bitterness between parties would appear as a folly of irrelevance, must read what you have written without being turned aside by this phrase or that: must read your whole book receptively for its candour as well as for its passion, as a document without which the new France cannot be understood. We may take it as a first short text-book for the lesson we have to learn.
Its first words: “En août 1943, dans cette aube . . .” were written nine months ago. If you will look at the date under my signature you will understand with how profound a sense of being at one with you I write today, and you will know that it is no formal courtesy which impels me to say to you, a great Frenchman and artist, that
I have the honour to be,
dear Master,
Your friend and fellow-servant,
(Signed) Charles Morgan
London, 15th May, 1944.
How should we read this letter? The French sociologist Paul Yonnet, in a 2015 article in Commentaire, suggested that Morgan (with whose criticism of Mauriac, as he sees it, he fully agrees) was writing strong criticism under the guise of une humilité feinte (a feigned humility). Those of us who know Morgan and his mentalité may not agree with this: one mode which is totally alien to him was irony. I certainly believe that he is here being perfectly sincere. His love for France was passionate and entire; his admiration for Mauriac sincere and wholehearted; but by 1943 he has been effectively cut off from his beloved France and his French friends for four years, and he is beginning to realise the degree to which what they are living through, and the way it has affected them, is not only even more difficult that the war in Britain, but different. Different because they are an occupied country, in daily contact with the oppressor and faced with daily challenges to their courage and integrity. Different because, divided by the Machiavellian ruses of the Nazis, their social antagonisms cannot be forgotten in a joint effort as, to a large (and by Morgan perhaps exaggerated) extent, they have been in Britain. And different because those who resist cannot but see a large number of their own compatriots with hatred and contempt.
The bilingual edition of The Black Notebook also contained an eloquent essay on “The Christian Spirit in the Culture of modern France” by the actor and writer Robert Speaight, a friend of Morgan’s, a Francophile intellectual and Catholic convert who had written a biography of Hilaire Belloc, and who may have been the translator of the volume.
This edition in turn found its way back into France, where Mauriac read it and was immediately dumbstruck by Morgan’s letter. Knowing this, we might wonder how he would react: would he execrate this Englishman with his feigned humility, who did not and, being English, could not understand the reaction of a furious and humiliated Frenchman? Such might well have been his reaction. However, it was not so. By the autumn of 1944 Paris was being liberated, and Mauriac’s own feelings had somewhat muted and moderated. Yes, he was stung by one or two of Morgan’s remarks; but he was stung, not to anger but to repentance. So he wrote an eloquent and generous reply, which we also reprint here:
If only I had received your message at the time it was written, while France was still enslaved! Today it tells me nothing that I did not already know, concerning the faithful affection for us that you kept alive in the darkest hours. But then it would have delivered us from a torment that I scarcely dare confess to you. Although I never doubted the Allied victory, from time to time I did believe in my country’s dishonour. I feared that Vichy had disfigured France in the eyes of the world. Doubtless this must be an almost unimaginable feeling for an Englishman: nevertheless it is a shame that we have known. The Resistance did not reassure us: it was undergound, invisible, its extent escaped us. The heroism of our African soldiers only partly, in my eyes, compensated for the horrible things happening in the mother country. If at that moment I had read your letter, if I had known that the author of The Fountain did not doubt us, and that for him France still remained France, with what wonder I should have been filled!
As you can see, my dear and illustrious friend, it is I who have everything to learn from you, where my country is concerned; it is I who need to go back to school, to ask the friend who loves us for the reasons that he loves us still. It is no pleasure of vanity that I seek, but at times doubt haunts me still and I need to be reassured. It is so new for us, this place that France has regained among you, these military triumphs, this leader who has given us back our honour – for General de Gaulle is, for the French, first and foremost the man who has given them back their honour.
If I dare confess to you that there were times when I, her ungrateful son, doubted France, it is because the Black Notebook would be inexplicable without that lack of faith, without that need I had to regain some courage. This little work was originally called Letter to one in despair, so that he may hope. The one in despair, to whom I was trying to give back some confidence, was myself. The passages that struck you and, I fear, shocked you, are there for the same reason. Mind you, today I should no longer write that ‘only the working-class, in the mass, has been faithful to a desecrated France’. How unjust that was to the vast multitude of young men of the middle class who sacrificed themselves and are doing so to this day! And in any case, where, in France, does the middle class end? It is fed by the workers, the peasants, because in our country “everything starts with the plough”. That all too undifferentiated blame, aimed at the middle class, was inspired by the stifled fury that the Vichy crowd kept smouldering in me. In fact, the Resistance was made up of countless elements that in the end swelled the tidal wave which swept away the enemy and the enemy’s lackeys.
Similarly, today I judge Renan as you judge him also. I no longer think of blaming him for the words with which the Black Notebook reproaches him. He represents one moment and one thought in the discourse that France unendingly addresses to the world: and as such he remains dear to us. The French have learnt this at least: not to enlist their great men, no longer to bring them into their present quarrels. Voltaire, recently, was celebrated by a France unanimous. Not so long ago, that would have seemed unbelievable. Today, the sum of our glories is barely enough to deserve the friendship for us that you have preserved.
So it was you, my dear Charles Morgan, who managed to step back far enough clearly to observe my country. You were able to combine all its oppositions into that unique harmony that enchants you. I, on the other hand, was blinded by the hand over my eyes, stifled by the gag on my mouth. The collaborationist press maintained in me an irritation, a rage that hardly encouraged a balanced judgement. And what is more, at each contretemps in our daily life we had to be on our guard against Vichy, against the Germans, against their deceitful propaganda.
Henceforth is it to that harmony of France, to that balance of its contrary forces that I aspire, like yourself. I believe I may already have said that to you, on the day when, newly returned to liberated Paris, I had the surprise and the joy of seeing you walk into my long-abandoned office. While you were talking to me, I remembered that day in 1938 when, as I arrived in London for the performance of Asmodée, a friend on the station platform gave me the Times: there, on the front page, was Charles Morgan welcoming me. I know full well that in my humble person it was France you were honouring. At least you had the opportunity to address her directly yourself, in that poetic matinée of October 27th 1944, at the Comédie Française, when you had the happiness to read in person, before General de Gaulle, your admirable Ode. By way of my voice, may France here express her affectionate gratitude, and salute you as her dearest and most admired English friend.
13 December 1944.
There was a double aftermath to the story. The first part is referred to by Mauriac in his letter. On 27 October 1944, after five years of silence, the fabled Comédie française theatre was reopened. For this occasion Edouard Bourdet, the Administrateur, had been told to organise a Gala performance of Poets of the Resistance; and General de Gaulle had asked François Mauriac to arrange the programme. Texts by French writers, and some by Allied authors, would be read by actors of the Comédie. There were passages by Paul Eluard, Jules Supervielle, Louis Aragon, Edith Thomas, Gabriel Audisio, Jacqueline Farge, Jean Noir, Jean Tardieu, Pierre Emmanuel, Pierre Seghers, Paul Claudel, Valentin Guillois, Lise Deharme, Loys Masson, and Angelos Sikelianos; and also one text by John Steinbeck (an extract from The Moon is Down) and one by Walt Whitman (“Vigil Strange I kept on the Field One Night”).
All these texts were read by actors of the Comédie française; and then, at the end, one foreigner appeared on stage: Charles Morgan, who read his “Ode to France”. In the audience was the great French poet Paul Valéry, who later wrote: “I shall always remember that night, at the Comédie Française, when we saw appear, before the audience assembled there for the poetic celebration of the country’s liberation, alone, grave, living the moment with all his heart, Charles Morgan. He read to us, slowly, with that solemn intonation we French have difficulty giving to reading, the great poem he had composed in honour of our country. Many did not understand, but all were captivated.” Morgan himself wrote of that moment: “It was very exciting – the most exciting day of my life. I care desperately for French honour. The programme consisted of poems of the Resistance – Claudel, Eluard, Vercors, etc. The National Guard in helmets and plumes. De Gaulle in the stage box . . . My ode came last . . . When I bowed to the audience I suddenly heard a noise like the wings of angels and then I saw that the whole audience of the Comédie française had risen . . . An Englishman can’t ask much more of life.”
And finally, in November 1948, Morgan received what to him was the crowning “French honour”. On the 8th of that month, in the Bibliothèque nationale, he was inducted to the Académie de Sciences Morales et Politiques, section Associés Etrangers, fauteuil 7, succeeding Nicholas Murray Butler (the former President of Columbia & Nobel Peace Prize winner); and on the 12th, he was promoted from Chevalier to Officier of the Légion d’Honneur.
As for Mauriac, when Minuit published a new edition of Le Cahier noir in 1947, he insisted that both Morgan’s letter and his reply be included, following the original text.
As we end this brief study of his interaction with Mauriac, we might perhaps ask what prompted the Frenchman to write the passages that bothered Morgan, and why Morgan was disturbed by them. The passage on the working-class was, I believe, written by Mauriac under two impulses: first, his own growing sympathy for the political courage of the Left during his journalistic coverage of the Spanish Civil War; and, more immediately, by his new association with the Communist sympathisers in the Resistance, who increasingly dominated the Editions de Minuit under the influence of Louis Aragon and his wife Elsa Triolet. Moreover, it was increased by his disgust with many menbers of his own social class who had avoided the Resistance and more or less compromised with the Occupation.
Morgan’s reaction was, I think, partly fuelled by his strong social and political conservatism (Raymond Postgate wrote to Alfred Knopf, “He is the highest of High Tories”), and partly because of his experience of the many young men of the middle and upper class who had immediately and selflessly gone to war and often died: one example was John Dundas (1915-1940), a young friend of Morgan’s and Margaret Rawlings’, who was an RAF ace with a DFC and bar and twelve kills before he went missing during the Battle of Britain.
In any case, the exchange concerning the Cahier noir forms a fascinating element in the relations between France and Britain in those dark days, as exemplified by two major writers, each profoundly typical of his country.
A QUESTION OF TRUST: CM AND HIS AMERICAN PUBLISHERS (1932) Roger Kuin
The following article is the result of an attempt to clear up a mystery by means of a few documents that came into my possession: the abrupt change from Alfred Knopf to Macmillans between The Fountain and Sparkenbroke.
KNOPF NEW YORK
MORGAN SECRETLY SOLD ALL FUTURE WORK TO MACMILLAN NO INFORMATION WARNING GIVEN ME UNTIL ALL OVER BREACH BY HIM PINKER EVERY HONOURABLE UNDERSTANDING stop OFFERED LARGE TERMS BY LATHOM [sic] IMMEDIATE CONTRACT stop AGREED NOT EVEN ALLOWING US COUNTER OFFER stop ASTOUNDED AM HOLDING M POMPOUS LETTER ADDRESSED TO ALFRED stop
Thus reads a telegram sent to the offices of Alfred A. Knopf Inc. in New York City on February 9th, 1932 by Raymond Postgate, Knopf’s representative in London. Postgate’s outrage is clear even in the brutishly abbreviated style of telegraphic communication: so excited was he that he even misplaced the “stop” after “contract” which should have followed “agreed”. The events behind this emotional moment in publishing history shed an interesting light on the careers of a novelist, an agent, and a publisher, as well as illuminating an aspect of the Great Depression as it affected the mechanics of English literature.
The novelist was Charles Morgan (1894-1958), who had begun adult life in the Royal Navy, first as a cadet, then as a midshipman in the Far East; in 1914 he had been part of the Naval Battalions that attempted unsuccessfully to defend Antwerp, and had spent the rest of World War I interned in the neutral Netherlands where, as a guest in a baronial castle, he had written his first novel, The Gunroom. During his repatriation to England, his ship was torpedoed and the novel’s MS was lost; he rewrote it, and it was published in 1919 by A&C Black, the publishers of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The book, in part an exposé of brutal hazing in the Navy, met with a curious fate: within a short time of its appearance, all remaining copies vanished from the bookshops.(1) Nobody in authority ever admitted to any action or pressure, and the details have never been explained.
Morgan by now knew he was a writer and produced a second novel, My Name is Legion. This curious book, a study of evil and spiritual power, was created in a period of extreme emotional stress (Morgan’s first great love, Mary Mond, daughter of the financier Alfred Mond, later Lord Melchett, had been forced by her mother to break her engagement and was sent to India), and Morgan himself later wrote that ‘the man who finished [it] was not the same as the man who began it.’ My Name is Legion was accepted for publication by C.E. Evans, chairman of Heinemann’s, and appeared in 1925.
In the meantime, Morgan had obtained an agent. In 1924 he had registered with the agency of James Pinker and Sons(2) , then being managed by James Pinker’s son Ralph, who had taken over the business two years before, at the age of 22, with his 31-ear-old brother Eric upon the death of their father. The two brothers continued in partnership until 1930, when Eric moved to New York and set up an American agency there, while maintaining links to Ralph’s London office.(3)
By this time it was clear that beyond the English market there were readers to be found across the Atlantic. Margaret Storm Jameson (the novelist Storm Jameson), then a reader for Alfred A. Knopf in New York, had read My Name is Legion and been fascinated by its writing and what she called “the whiff of sulphur”.(4) She enthusiastically recommended it to Knopf, and Morgan sent him a presentation copy of the Heinemann edition; in August of 1924 Pinker set up the contract for an American edition, and Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. secured the American copyright in March 1925.
Charles Morgan immediately began work on a third novel, initially called First Love (among the novelists he most admired was Turgenev). He offered the MS to Evans who, after some consideration, refused it. My Name is Legion had had only moderate sales, and Morgan was not yet considered as a seriously profitable author. Evans later publicly regretted his error. Meanwhile Lucy, Lady Clifford (the novelist Mrs W.K. Clifford) had seen the manuscript, had loved the story and had taken it to Daniel Macmillan. Macmillan saw the potential at once, and published the novel, which in the meantime had twice changed title: after First Love it had become The Edge of Life and finally appeared as Portrait in a Mirror (Macmillan, 1929). The American publication was once again offered to Alfred Knopf, who accepted it but then, when he heard that Heinemann’s had refused it, asked Morgan to withdraw the offer. Morgan, via Pinker, declined to do so and Knopf went ahead with publication; in America the novel retained its original title of First Love.
As early as January 29th, 1929 an ecstatic Charles Morgan wrote to Mrs Blanche Knopf (her husband’s partner and confidante) ‘The miracle appears to have happened. Portrait in a Mirror . . . has struck oil over here. All the critics have gone ‘all out’. The book was published last Friday. It was given that morning the greater part of a column and the head of the column by all the principal papers . . . The consequence is that the book is the talk of London: at any rate for the moment. I have no official figures, but I gather that all the principal bookshops exhausted their supplies and were re-ordering.’ (5)
The story of a very young painter’s love for a slightly older society woman also won the Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize, an award created by the French house of Hachette (publishers of the magazines Femina and La Vie Heureuse) in 1904 for French novels and in 1919 offered to some allied countries and taken up by Britain. The prize was 1000 francs (£8 or $40) and was intended to ‘reward a strong and original piece of work, excellent in matter and in style, promising for the future, and calculated to reveal to French readers the true spirit and character of England’. The aim was to encourage writers who were felt to be insufficiently known or appreciated.(6)
American sales were more moderate. On May 20th, Knopf wrote, ‘I have unfortunately no exciting news for you. Portrait in a Mirror has reached just about 4600 copies so far, which I suppose isn’t hopelessly bad—it gives us, at least, a substantial foundation on which to publish with a great deal of hope and effort your next book when it comes along. I am glad to know that you are working on it.’(7)
The ‘next book’ in question was a long novel set in the Netherlands during World War I and incorporating much of the setting Morgan had himself experienced during his internment there. Lewis Alison, and English officer who had been a publisher in civilian life, finds himself on parole in a picturesque castle owned by an aristocratic Dutch family. With much forced ‘time out’ on his hands and a library at his disposal, he is able to pursue his cherished dream of writing a history of the contemplative life. However, he falls in love with a young Englishwoman, part of the family, who is married to a German officer away at the front. His love is returned, but the German then comes back, severely wounded. To their own surprise, he and Lewis find much in common; on his deathbed, Von Narwitz effectively bequeaths his wife to Alison. Fully aware of the difficulties that face them after the war, Lewis and Julie know that, like Adam and Eve, they must leave their parenthetical paradise and go to live in the real world.
Morgan finished it in 1931 and called it The Fountain after some lines from Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’ Ode: ‘from outward forms to win/the passion and the life, whose fountains are within’. For its British publication, early in 1932, he was happy to stick with Macmillan’s, who had shown confidence in My Name is Legion and carried Portrait to such a resounding success. He himself had not expected much: ‘I chose in The Fountain what I thought was inevitably an unpopular subject – philosophy, contemplation and what-not.’(8) Considerably to his surprise and pleasure, the book ‘took off’ even more than its predecessor: by March 9th, Macmillan was advertising that they had sold 24,000 copies, and by May 5th Morgan wrote to Roger Barrett that they had sold 33,000 copies and were still selling five hundred per week. Moreover, it too won a prize: the coveted Hawthornden Prize, instituted in 1919 by Alice Warrender and awarded to authors under the age of 41 for the quality of their ‘imaginative literature’. Macmillan also published an Empire edition, for sale in all countries of the Empire but not in Britain or America. Such editions, usually somewhat cheaper in paper and finish but identical in content and typography, were common at the time. (9)
Now, however, we must go back to the autumn of 1931, when on November 23rd Morgan had dinner with Raymond Postgate (1896-1971). This young man from a distinguished intellectual family, a former pacifist and Communist now setting up as a far-left author and biographer, was also the European representative of Alfred A. Knopf Inc. In spite of the fact that he referred to Morgan as ‘the highest of high Tories’, the two seem to have got on well with each other; and on the night of this particular dinner Postgate pointed out to Morgan (as Knopf had told him to do in a message from New York) that his American contract with Knopf’s was running out and that they should talk about renewing it. Morgan, who was also dramatic critic for The Times and wrote columns for American newspapers including the New York Times, said – and confirmed in a brief letter to Postgate on November 25th – that he was at this time too busy with proofs and such to give much thought to contracts, and that they should talk to Pinker about it. Postgate reported this to Knopf, saying that personally he did not believe it: Morgan, he thought, wanted to see how well The Fountain would sell in Britain in order to get better terms for America.(10) Meanwhile, Postgate had received a note from Ralph Pinker, saying that Mr Morgan had shown him Postgate’s note about renewal; ‘The matter of a new contract has not slipped my memory and is still under consideration. I think it would be more satisfactory, and save some trouble, if you did not write to my clients with regard to new contracts without letting me know.’(11)
Alfred Knopf had been reading The Fountain, and on October 6 had written to Charles ‘I finished THE FOUNTAIN last week and I congratulate you on a book that is both beautiful and profound. How well it will sell in these troubled times no one can tell in advance but you may be sure that it will have back of it our undivided and altogether sincere enthusiasm. It is not, of course, what the average patron of the circulating library looks for in a novel, but for myself I can pay it no higher compliment than to say that I think it not unworthy of being mentioned in the same breath with Thomas Mann’s THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, which I regard as probably the greatest work of creative literature (not the greatest novel, you notice) of our generation.’(12) Not having received material for his catalogue in time, he (as he wrote to Morgan) ‘took my life in my hands and printed just what I thought about the book’ which was fulsome and, as Postgate noted, has ‘done you proud from the point of view of sales possibilities.’(13)
By the end of the year, with preparations for The Fountain’s American appearance well in hand, Knopf began to worry about the renewing of his contract with Morgan. On December 23rd he dictated the following memo to Postgate:
THE FOUNTAIN completed our present contract with Charles Morgan. What move, if any, do you think we ought to make now? Pinker, while friendly isn’t the most satisfactory agent in the world to deal with and I sort of hesitate to approach him. Perhaps you would prefer to discuss the matter tentatively with Morgan who writes in a friendly way that he is seeing more of you and seems to like you. Or perhaps you think the whole matter should be left alone until I get there. [AAK was planning a European trip in February.] My only fear is that Pinker will be getting offers from other publishers and might not be above selling Morgan down the river although I doubt that Morgan is the kind of author who will simply be after a big advance—we will pay him a straight fifteen per cent—and who would fail to appreciate the extraordinary personal interest that we have taken in his work here from the beginning.’(14)
Postgate replied to this that he did not expect any problems and that they might as well settle the whole matter with Pinker (‘who is more a fool than a crook’) when Knopf came over.
And now came the bombshell. In the Knopf Correspondence files in Texas we find the following ALS from Morgan to Postgate:
Dear Postgate,
With very real regret, I have had to write the enclosed letter to Mr. Knopf.
I had meant to send it to him in America and a copy to you, but I know [sic]
understand that he will have left New York before it can reach him. May I
therefore entrust it to you, to be delivered or sent to him at the earliest
possible moment?
Yours very sincerely,
Charles Morgan (15)
Unfortunately, the crucial letter he here refers to is missing, and has not been unearthed anywhere. However, we can infer its contents from Postgate’s reply, as well as from his furious telegram to the New York office, quoted at the beginning of this article. Upon receipt of Morgan’s note he at once replied:
Dear Morgan,
I have your letter announcing that you have signed a contract with Macmillans without allowing Mr. Knopf the opportunity of making a counter offer. I am of course astounded.
I will hand Mr. Knopf our letter, which I observe contains no reference to your signed letter to me of November 25th, nor to my reply of the next day.
Possibly if you look up these letters, you will agree that a stronger word than ‘astounded’ might be used.
Yours sincerely,
(signed)(16)
And to Morgan’s agent he wrote:
Dear Mr Pinker,
I have a letter from Charles Morgan which indicates that you and he have
probably sold the rights in his future work to another firm, without giving
Mr Knopf the opportunity to make a counter offer, despite your letter
to me of November 25th.
If this is correct will you please tell me what explanation I am to offer
to Mr. Knopf?
Yours sincerely,
(signed)
From this point on, we have no word from Charles Morgan himself on the subject: the correspondence continues between Postgate and Pinker. The latter replied, saying that Morgan’s letter to Mr Knopf fully explained the circumstances of their accepting the Macmillans offer ‘without further reference to Mr Knopf’. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he continues, ‘the offer was of such dimensions that I will go so far as to say it did not allow of refusal.’ And in a postscript he says, ‘If you would like to come and have a talk on the matter, by all means do so.’ Postgate replies that Morgan’s letter is far from explaining the circumstances; and if the offer was so generous, why not have informed Mr Knopf or himself before concluding? He is going to meet Knopf in Germany and really wants a full explanation. Pinker replies that the explanation has already been given; Postgate’s last word is that he notes ‘that you refuse to give Me Knopf any further explanation, and I shall inform him accordingly’. Pinker finally writes ‘for the record’ that he will be delighted to explain the matter personally to Mr Knopf upon his arrival, and that he looks forward eagerly to meeting him.(17)
As far as extant correspondence is concerned, this is the end of the topic. But Alfred Knopf himself refers to it at some length in his memoirs, and what he says sheds some light on his own personality and on what such an event meant to the publisher involved.
"Looking back over the books we published in 1932 . . .the great event of the year for us was Charles Morgan’s The Fountain. This was selected by the Book of the Month Club, a much more important piece of luck then than now, and almost immediately took wings as a big best seller. Indeed before the year was out I think we had disposed of approximately 105,000 copies in addition to those sent out by the BOMC. The Fountain was the last novel by Morgan on which our contract gave us an option, but long before we published it he assured Raymond Postgate our English representative that he would not move to another publisher without first giving me a chance to discuss the matter with him. I don’t know when I was moved to quite such heady anger as when I learned that he had signed a contract with the Macmillan Company without telling us anything about it. It wasn’t so much the loss of future profits that concerned me as the feeling of shock at being betrayed by a man whom I considered my friend and above all, one incapable of breaking his word. Our relations, very friendly for years, seemed to justify my sense of outrage. But ultimately we met in my office with no hard feelings.
In our Autumn catalog I ran a page headed
“Moriturus te saluto”
which read as follows:
“For, so far as the author of The Fountain goes, I am about to die. Nay, I died in January when giving me no inkling of what he was about he signed a contract with another publisher for his future work. I mention this now because many people, knowing the facts, have wondered at the advertising campaign—expensive and enthusiastic—with which I have backed The Fountain, which is in its hundredth thousand in America as this goes to press. True, I thus benefit the amiable competitor who is to follow me as Mr. Morgan’s publisher, but even more, I think, I benefit the art of letters and the profession of bookselling and serve the American book-reading public which for more than fifteen years has backed so generously—most of the time—my sincerest enthusiasms. The argument of the man vs. the artist will go on, I guess, forever. My duty has been to Charles Morgan the artist.” (18)
As Alfred Knopf says, ultimately there were no hard feelings: by July 14th Morgan wrote to him “. . .will you allow me to say how grateful I am for the skill and courage with which you have published the book and how extremely generous I feel your support of it has been?”(19)
Faced with this extraordinary action and controversy, the first thing we need to know is more about the role of Macmillans and the offer they made to Charles Morgan. On February 22nd 1932 he wrote to Mrs Robert Menell, “ I have a big American contract for three novels.”(20) In March, to Rupert Hart-Davis, “I am now certain of a minimum of £3,000 for any novel I write.”(21) And to Margaret Storm Jameson on April 5th, “I am dead certain now – for three books at any rate – of £30 a thousand [words] of any fiction I write which is much more than journalism will yield.”(22) To put these sums in perspective, a novel of 300,000 words (roughly the length of The Fountain) would net him £9,000, which in 2021 equates to £432,000 or nearly $600,000 US.
How did this offer come about? Fortunately we also have the memoirs of Harold Latham [the “Lathom” of Postgate’s telegram], chief editor at Macmillans New York, which contain a brief chapter on Charles Morgan. In it, he insists that he always scrupulously avoided making approaches to any writers published by others.
“Imagine my surprise, then, when I was asked by the agent who represented Morgan [i.e. Ralph Pinker] whether I would be interested in taking him on. I expressed some surprise and explained my position about “stealing” authors. I was then told that, whether I took him on or not, Morgan was going to make a change in his U.S. publishers, that in no event would he be staying with the company that had brought out The Fountain, that I need therefore have no hesitancy in considering him.
Under these circumstances there was no reason why I should not negotiate for Morgan’s next work, Sparkenbroke, and in due course a contract for this work, with options on future writings, was concluded.
I have never been sure of the reason for Morgan’s desire to change publishers. I think most probably it had to do with his thought that there would be advantages in being published in England and in the United States by the same Company. In England he was published by Macmillan. It may also have been agent-inspired. I have known of many cases in which agents have held out prospects for better terms, larger advances, if a change were made. Knowing Morgan as I now know him, I am inclined to doubt that theory.”(23)
This sheds a completely different light on the affair. Charles Morgan, romantic idealist as he was in his writings, was careful and precise almost to the point of mania about two things: his prose and his finances – evidently because knew that only this could set him free to write as he pleased. He trusted Pinker though not blindly, and if it was Pinker who initially approached Latham we can be sure that he did not do so without Morgan’s knowledge and approval. On the other hand, Ralph Pinker was perfectly capable of exaggerating if he believed it would benefit his client (and thus, his agency); and it is more than likely that the idea of Morgan’s intention to change US publishers in any case was a little Pinkerian icing on the cake.
The Pinker Collection of papers and correspondence now in the New York Public Library provides a certain amount of background useful to our comprehension. As early as June 4th 1928, concerning Evans’ of Heinemanns refusal of First Love, Morgan writes to Pinker that
‘there are, indeed, few [publishers in America] that I should wish to have it – only Macmillan, Cape, Constable and Chatto, I think’(24). And while Alfred Knopf wrote to and about Morgan in terms almost of close friendship, and in return always received friendly and grateful replies form the author, Morgan clearly never quite got over his disappointment at Knopf’s reaction to Heinemanns’ refusal of First Love. ‘My misgivings about Knopf’ he wrote to F.C. Wicken, Pinker’s associate, on April 3rd 1929, ‘arise entirely from his having asked me to withdraw First Love when, having accepted it himself, he heard that Heinemann had refused it.’(25) If Knopf goes all out for First Love, he will stick with him; if not, he will break with him. Big advances interest him only as a sign of his publisher’s willingness to risk all for his book. ‘What I wasn’t is confidence and solidity – a feeling that my publisher will do his utmost for my book because it is my book. And even if he didn’t think it would sell, no publisher who thought of me in that way would have tried to back out of First Love.’
Such an exchange shows clearly the insecurity of a novelist facing the publication of his third novel, after the mysterious disappearance of most copies of the first and only moderate American sales of the (admittedly very odd) second. It was only the great British success of Portrait in a Mirror -- including the Hawthornden Prize – achieved by Macmillan, that gave him the confidence to write and promote The Fountain. For all his expressed admiration and tones of friendship Knopf, Morgan felt, had not actually achieved all that much for him.
And an even more useful statement comes later in the same letter to Pinker of July 26th 1928. He asks Pinker to see if Macmillan would be willing even now to acquire My Name is Legion, since ‘my whole object in life is to have all my books in the hands of one publisher. If one publisher sticks to me, no bribes will get me away from him. I am sure that, in business dealings, long association is everything; disloyalty and impatience are the unforgivable sins. An old-fashioned view; pray God the Macmillans have it; if they don’t, no one does.’(26)
And finally, the relations between Charles Morgan and Alfred Knopf were most illuminatingly analysed by Margaret Storm Jameson, who had been a reader for Knopf and the first to put the two in touch with each other.
‘I forced him on the Knopfs, who did not keep him very long—incompatibility of species rather than any failure of Alfred Knop’s foresight.
“Alfred doesn’t believe in the book [Portrait in a Mirror],” Charles wrote to me in 1929, “though Macmillan’s acceptance shook his unbelief a little; and even if I sent him all the reviews, he still wouldn’t believe; only thousands of copies will convince him, I am afraid, and I don’t hope for much in that line . . .”
This did Alfred Knopf an injustice. It was Charles himself in whom he could not believe—as if he were a hippogriff, or as if he were seeing him in a glass which reflected only Charles’s more arrogant traits, his aloofness, his Platonic idealism, his distaste for anything that offended his style as a human being. The two men never met, however often they may have sat at the same table.’(27)
At this point, we have perhaps reached an explanation for Morgan’s directing Pinker to approach Harold Latham. To Charles, the ideal of all his books in the hands of one publisher, on both sides of the Atlantic, had still not been reached; and from an early date he had been attracted to Macmillan as to no other house, while in Knopf he never managed to have total confidence.
One final aspect that should not be ignored in this affair is the Great Depression. Beginning with the Wall Street crash of October 1929, this had brought the American economy to its knees, and put the British economy into a steep decline, by 1931. Publishing, however, was affected less than any other industry: indeed, the period 1920-1940 is still known in the trade as the Golden Age.(28) This was perhaps less understood in Britain: just before The Fountain appeared in the US on June 1st 1932 Morgan wrote to Roger Barrett, ‘America is in a really desperate plight and I don’t think the angels in heaven could sell a book there’(29). In British publishing, earnings were low: as D.J. Thomas writes in The Prose Factory, ‘a novel by a relative unknown which achieved a sale of 5,000 copies might have cost its backer £500 to publish and promote. The publisher’s return would be just over £1,000. With a standard author’s royalty of 15 per cent. of published price, the writer would receive something over £850 and the gross profit to the publisher weighed in at £250. On the other hand, the publisher’s profit, Jerrold (30) calculated, was no more than £20.’(31) In Britain, the typical advance for a first novel in the 1920s and 1930s ranged from £50 to £100. Graham Greene, whose first novel, The Man Within, had sold surprisingly well, had received from Heinemann an offer (like Macmillan’s to Morgan) for three years for three more books; but the offer was only £600 per year. Many novelists, from Hugh Walpole to Evelyn Waugh, supplemented their income by journalism. Charles Morgan had been employed by The Times as assistant dramatic (theatre) critic since 1921; five years later, when A.B. Walkley, the chief critic, died, Morgan took his place and remained in that post until the beginning of World War II.(32) He also sent a monthly article on the London theatre scene to the New York Times, and wrote occasional pieces here and there.
In view of this, the success of The Fountain and later Sparkenbroke was perhaps less surprising in America than it was in Britain, and Alfred Knopf was able to be less anxious than his English author.
If we attempt now finally to analyse and understand the whole affair, we see a novelist not yet a bestseller and still insecure; an American publisher with a certain liking for, but au fond little understanding of, both the man and his work, not yet quite ready (as, ironically, he was shortly afterwards for The Fountain) to commit himself completely to maximum effort; an agent all too ready to go out on a limb for his author and for himself (nine years later, the Pinker agency went bankrupt and Ralph was arrested for pocketing his clients’ royalties)(33); and a second publishing house that earned the reward of its solid backing, which continued throughout Morgan’s career and bore ancillary fruit in his history of the firm, The House of Macmillan (1943).
POSTSCRIPT
Charles Morgan went on (in his association with Macmillan) to publish two more long novels: Sparkenbroke (1936 - about the love between an aristocratic poet and the wife of a country doctor), which brought together his three great preoccupations, Art, Love, and Death; and The Voyage (1940), set in 1880s France, about a vine-grower and a cabaret singer), which won him a third award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He then turned to shorter novels and plays: of the latter, The Flashing Stream (1938) was a considerable success. It was followed by The River Line (1952) and The Burning Glass (1953). Of his shorter novels, the most successful were The Judge’s Story (1947) and A Breeze of Morning (1951). A great Francophile and much loved across the Channel, Morgan was elected to the Institut de France, the only English author beside Rudyard Kipling ever to be so honoured. He died at the age of 64, in 1958.
NOTES
[1] CLM, letter to Louis Bonnerot, 1 March 1932; in Eiluned Lewis, Selected Letters of Charles Morgan (London: Macmillan, 1967), 95.
[2] James Brand Pinker (1863-1922) had created the foremost literary agency in Britain, representing Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Stephen Crane and James Joyce.
[3] It was Eric, for example, who collected Morgan’s American royalties from Knopf’s and passed them on to Ralph in England.
[4] Margaret Storm Jameson, Journey from the North vol. 1(London: Collins/Harvill, 1969), 170.
[5] Letter in Morgan Correspondence.
[6] The English prize winners were suggested by an English committee, the records and papers of which (1919-1940) are in the Cambridge University Library.
[7] Letter in the Knopf Archive, Harry Ransom Center,, Box 722.5.
[8] Letter to Roger Barrett, 1 April 1932; in Morgan Correspondence.
[9] See Nicola Wilson, “British publishers and colonial editions”, in her The Book World: Selling and Distributing British Literature 1900-1940, ed. Nicola Wilson (The Hague: Brill, 2016).
[10] In-house memo of January 4th, 1932. In Knopf archive, Harry Ransom Center, Box 722.5.
[11] November 25th, 1931. In Knopf archive. This note of fairlly mild reproof clearly annoyed Postgate greatly: on several occasions afterward he refers to it as ‘an infuriated letter’.
[12] This laudatory letter was of course flattering (not just the greatest novel but work of imaginative literature, all genres included), but Morgan would have noticed that it still hedged its bets.
[13] Letter of November 25th 1931, in Knopf archive, Box 722.5.
[14] Memo, December 23rd, 1931, in Knopf archive, Box 722.5.
[15] ALS, February 5th, 1932, in Knopf archive, Box 722.5.
[16] This and the following letter are dated February 8th, and are in the Knopf archive, Box 722.5, as are the letters mentioned in the next paragraph.
[17] Letter of February 16th 1932, in Knopf archive.
[18] Excerpt from TS memoir, Knopf archive, Box 610.4.
[19] ALS July 14th 1932, in Knopf archive, Box 501.7.
[20] In Eiluned Lewis, Selected Letters, 94
[21] In Morgan Correspondence.
[22] in Eluned Lewis, Selected Letters, 97.
[23] Harold Latham, My Life in Publishing (London: Chatto andWindus, 1965), 157-8.
[24] Pinker Collection, NYPL, Charles Morgan Box, letter foldder 4.
[25] Pinker Collection, letter folder 5.
[26] Pinker Collection, letter folder 4.
[27] Margaret Storm Jameson, Journey from the North, vol.1, 171-172.
[28] Cf John Tebbel, Between Covers: the Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), section IV, pp. 201-334.
[29] Letter in Morgan Correspondence.
[30] The reference is to Douglas Jerrold, Georgian Adventure (London: the ‘Right’ Book Club, 1937).
[31] Taylor, p.
[32] A selection of his theatre reviews was edited by Roger Morgan, with an introduction by Carole Bourne-Taylor, and published as Dramatic Critic: Selected Reviews (1922-1939) by Charles Morgan (London: Oberon Books, 2013).
[33] Stape, J. H. ""The Pinker of Agents": A Family History of James Brand Pinker." The Conradian 34, no. 1 (2009): 136.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The manuscript material for this article comes from three principal sources: 1) the Alfred A. Knopf Inc. papers in the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, where Ms Emma Hetrick and Ms Elizabeth Garver have been most helpful; 2) Charles Morgan’s own correspondence transcripts made by his son the late Roger Morgan, former Librarian of the House of Lords, and made available to me by him and by his daughter Lucie Morgan Bert; these files now reside in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, where they have not yet been processed; 3) the James B. Pinker and Son Collection of papers in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, where I have received help from Ms Emma Davidson. I am grateful to Ms Tina Simpson who has undertaken the New York Public Library research for me.
Printed sources:
Margaret Storm Jameson, Journey from the North vol. 1 (London: Collins/Harvill, 1969).
Douglas Jerrold, Georgian Adventure (London: The ‘Right’ Book Club, 1937).
Latham, Harold S., My Life in Publishing (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1965).
Eiluned Lewis, ed., Selected Letters of Charles Morgan (London: Macmillan, 1967).
D.J. Taylor, The Prose Factory: Literary Life in Britain Since 1918 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015).
John Tebbel, Between Covers: the Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
(1)
KNOPF NEW YORK
MORGAN SECRETLY SOLD ALL FUTURE WORK TO MACMILLAN NO INFORMATION WARNING GIVEN ME UNTIL ALL OVER BREACH BY HIM PINKER EVERY HONOURABLE UNDERSTANDING stop OFFERED LARGE TERMS BY LATHOM [sic] IMMEDIATE CONTRACT stop AGREED NOT EVEN ALLOWING US COUNTER OFFER stop ASTOUNDED AM HOLDING M POMPOUS LETTER ADDRESSED TO ALFRED stop
Thus reads a telegram sent to the offices of Alfred A. Knopf Inc. in New York City on February 9th, 1932 by Raymond Postgate, Knopf’s representative in London. Postgate’s outrage is clear even in the brutishly abbreviated style of telegraphic communication: so excited was he that he even misplaced the “stop” after “contract” which should have followed “agreed”. The events behind this emotional moment in publishing history shed an interesting light on the careers of a novelist, an agent, and a publisher, as well as illuminating an aspect of the Great Depression as it affected the mechanics of English literature.
The novelist was Charles Morgan (1894-1958), who had begun adult life in the Royal Navy, first as a cadet, then as a midshipman in the Far East; in 1914 he had been part of the Naval Battalions that attempted unsuccessfully to defend Antwerp, and had spent the rest of World War I interned in the neutral Netherlands where, as a guest in a baronial castle, he had written his first novel, The Gunroom. During his repatriation to England, his ship was torpedoed and the novel’s MS was lost; he rewrote it, and it was published in 1919 by A&C Black, the publishers of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The book, in part an exposé of brutal hazing in the Navy, met with a curious fate: within a short time of its appearance, all remaining copies vanished from the bookshops.(1) Nobody in authority ever admitted to any action or pressure, and the details have never been explained.
Morgan by now knew he was a writer and produced a second novel, My Name is Legion. This curious book, a study of evil and spiritual power, was created in a period of extreme emotional stress (Morgan’s first great love, Mary Mond, daughter of the financier Alfred Mond, later Lord Melchett, had been forced by her mother to break her engagement and was sent to India), and Morgan himself later wrote that ‘the man who finished [it] was not the same as the man who began it.’ My Name is Legion was accepted for publication by C.E. Evans, chairman of Heinemann’s, and appeared in 1925.
In the meantime, Morgan had obtained an agent. In 1924 he had registered with the agency of James Pinker and Sons(2) , then being managed by James Pinker’s son Ralph, who had taken over the business two years before, at the age of 22, with his 31-ear-old brother Eric upon the death of their father. The two brothers continued in partnership until 1930, when Eric moved to New York and set up an American agency there, while maintaining links to Ralph’s London office.(3)
By this time it was clear that beyond the English market there were readers to be found across the Atlantic. Margaret Storm Jameson (the novelist Storm Jameson), then a reader for Alfred A. Knopf in New York, had read My Name is Legion and been fascinated by its writing and what she called “the whiff of sulphur”.(4) She enthusiastically recommended it to Knopf, and Morgan sent him a presentation copy of the Heinemann edition; in August of 1924 Pinker set up the contract for an American edition, and Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. secured the American copyright in March 1925.
Charles Morgan immediately began work on a third novel, initially called First Love (among the novelists he most admired was Turgenev). He offered the MS to Evans who, after some consideration, refused it. My Name is Legion had had only moderate sales, and Morgan was not yet considered as a seriously profitable author. Evans later publicly regretted his error. Meanwhile Lucy, Lady Clifford (the novelist Mrs W.K. Clifford) had seen the manuscript, had loved the story and had taken it to Daniel Macmillan. Macmillan saw the potential at once, and published the novel, which in the meantime had twice changed title: after First Love it had become The Edge of Life and finally appeared as Portrait in a Mirror (Macmillan, 1929). The American publication was once again offered to Alfred Knopf, who accepted it but then, when he heard that Heinemann’s had refused it, asked Morgan to withdraw the offer. Morgan, via Pinker, declined to do so and Knopf went ahead with publication; in America the novel retained its original title of First Love.
As early as January 29th, 1929 an ecstatic Charles Morgan wrote to Mrs Blanche Knopf (her husband’s partner and confidante) ‘The miracle appears to have happened. Portrait in a Mirror . . . has struck oil over here. All the critics have gone ‘all out’. The book was published last Friday. It was given that morning the greater part of a column and the head of the column by all the principal papers . . . The consequence is that the book is the talk of London: at any rate for the moment. I have no official figures, but I gather that all the principal bookshops exhausted their supplies and were re-ordering.’ (5)
The story of a very young painter’s love for a slightly older society woman also won the Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize, an award created by the French house of Hachette (publishers of the magazines Femina and La Vie Heureuse) in 1904 for French novels and in 1919 offered to some allied countries and taken up by Britain. The prize was 1000 francs (£8 or $40) and was intended to ‘reward a strong and original piece of work, excellent in matter and in style, promising for the future, and calculated to reveal to French readers the true spirit and character of England’. The aim was to encourage writers who were felt to be insufficiently known or appreciated.(6)
American sales were more moderate. On May 20th, Knopf wrote, ‘I have unfortunately no exciting news for you. Portrait in a Mirror has reached just about 4600 copies so far, which I suppose isn’t hopelessly bad—it gives us, at least, a substantial foundation on which to publish with a great deal of hope and effort your next book when it comes along. I am glad to know that you are working on it.’(7)
The ‘next book’ in question was a long novel set in the Netherlands during World War I and incorporating much of the setting Morgan had himself experienced during his internment there. Lewis Alison, and English officer who had been a publisher in civilian life, finds himself on parole in a picturesque castle owned by an aristocratic Dutch family. With much forced ‘time out’ on his hands and a library at his disposal, he is able to pursue his cherished dream of writing a history of the contemplative life. However, he falls in love with a young Englishwoman, part of the family, who is married to a German officer away at the front. His love is returned, but the German then comes back, severely wounded. To their own surprise, he and Lewis find much in common; on his deathbed, Von Narwitz effectively bequeaths his wife to Alison. Fully aware of the difficulties that face them after the war, Lewis and Julie know that, like Adam and Eve, they must leave their parenthetical paradise and go to live in the real world.
Morgan finished it in 1931 and called it The Fountain after some lines from Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’ Ode: ‘from outward forms to win/the passion and the life, whose fountains are within’. For its British publication, early in 1932, he was happy to stick with Macmillan’s, who had shown confidence in My Name is Legion and carried Portrait to such a resounding success. He himself had not expected much: ‘I chose in The Fountain what I thought was inevitably an unpopular subject – philosophy, contemplation and what-not.’(8) Considerably to his surprise and pleasure, the book ‘took off’ even more than its predecessor: by March 9th, Macmillan was advertising that they had sold 24,000 copies, and by May 5th Morgan wrote to Roger Barrett that they had sold 33,000 copies and were still selling five hundred per week. Moreover, it too won a prize: the coveted Hawthornden Prize, instituted in 1919 by Alice Warrender and awarded to authors under the age of 41 for the quality of their ‘imaginative literature’. Macmillan also published an Empire edition, for sale in all countries of the Empire but not in Britain or America. Such editions, usually somewhat cheaper in paper and finish but identical in content and typography, were common at the time. (9)
Now, however, we must go back to the autumn of 1931, when on November 23rd Morgan had dinner with Raymond Postgate (1896-1971). This young man from a distinguished intellectual family, a former pacifist and Communist now setting up as a far-left author and biographer, was also the European representative of Alfred A. Knopf Inc. In spite of the fact that he referred to Morgan as ‘the highest of high Tories’, the two seem to have got on well with each other; and on the night of this particular dinner Postgate pointed out to Morgan (as Knopf had told him to do in a message from New York) that his American contract with Knopf’s was running out and that they should talk about renewing it. Morgan, who was also dramatic critic for The Times and wrote columns for American newspapers including the New York Times, said – and confirmed in a brief letter to Postgate on November 25th – that he was at this time too busy with proofs and such to give much thought to contracts, and that they should talk to Pinker about it. Postgate reported this to Knopf, saying that personally he did not believe it: Morgan, he thought, wanted to see how well The Fountain would sell in Britain in order to get better terms for America.(10) Meanwhile, Postgate had received a note from Ralph Pinker, saying that Mr Morgan had shown him Postgate’s note about renewal; ‘The matter of a new contract has not slipped my memory and is still under consideration. I think it would be more satisfactory, and save some trouble, if you did not write to my clients with regard to new contracts without letting me know.’(11)
Alfred Knopf had been reading The Fountain, and on October 6 had written to Charles ‘I finished THE FOUNTAIN last week and I congratulate you on a book that is both beautiful and profound. How well it will sell in these troubled times no one can tell in advance but you may be sure that it will have back of it our undivided and altogether sincere enthusiasm. It is not, of course, what the average patron of the circulating library looks for in a novel, but for myself I can pay it no higher compliment than to say that I think it not unworthy of being mentioned in the same breath with Thomas Mann’s THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, which I regard as probably the greatest work of creative literature (not the greatest novel, you notice) of our generation.’(12) Not having received material for his catalogue in time, he (as he wrote to Morgan) ‘took my life in my hands and printed just what I thought about the book’ which was fulsome and, as Postgate noted, has ‘done you proud from the point of view of sales possibilities.’(13)
By the end of the year, with preparations for The Fountain’s American appearance well in hand, Knopf began to worry about the renewing of his contract with Morgan. On December 23rd he dictated the following memo to Postgate:
THE FOUNTAIN completed our present contract with Charles Morgan. What move, if any, do you think we ought to make now? Pinker, while friendly isn’t the most satisfactory agent in the world to deal with and I sort of hesitate to approach him. Perhaps you would prefer to discuss the matter tentatively with Morgan who writes in a friendly way that he is seeing more of you and seems to like you. Or perhaps you think the whole matter should be left alone until I get there. [AAK was planning a European trip in February.] My only fear is that Pinker will be getting offers from other publishers and might not be above selling Morgan down the river although I doubt that Morgan is the kind of author who will simply be after a big advance—we will pay him a straight fifteen per cent—and who would fail to appreciate the extraordinary personal interest that we have taken in his work here from the beginning.’(14)
Postgate replied to this that he did not expect any problems and that they might as well settle the whole matter with Pinker (‘who is more a fool than a crook’) when Knopf came over.
And now came the bombshell. In the Knopf Correspondence files in Texas we find the following ALS from Morgan to Postgate:
Dear Postgate,
With very real regret, I have had to write the enclosed letter to Mr. Knopf.
I had meant to send it to him in America and a copy to you, but I know [sic]
understand that he will have left New York before it can reach him. May I
therefore entrust it to you, to be delivered or sent to him at the earliest
possible moment?
Yours very sincerely,
Charles Morgan (15)
Unfortunately, the crucial letter he here refers to is missing, and has not been unearthed anywhere. However, we can infer its contents from Postgate’s reply, as well as from his furious telegram to the New York office, quoted at the beginning of this article. Upon receipt of Morgan’s note he at once replied:
Dear Morgan,
I have your letter announcing that you have signed a contract with Macmillans without allowing Mr. Knopf the opportunity of making a counter offer. I am of course astounded.
I will hand Mr. Knopf our letter, which I observe contains no reference to your signed letter to me of November 25th, nor to my reply of the next day.
Possibly if you look up these letters, you will agree that a stronger word than ‘astounded’ might be used.
Yours sincerely,
(signed)(16)
And to Morgan’s agent he wrote:
Dear Mr Pinker,
I have a letter from Charles Morgan which indicates that you and he have
probably sold the rights in his future work to another firm, without giving
Mr Knopf the opportunity to make a counter offer, despite your letter
to me of November 25th.
If this is correct will you please tell me what explanation I am to offer
to Mr. Knopf?
Yours sincerely,
(signed)
From this point on, we have no word from Charles Morgan himself on the subject: the correspondence continues between Postgate and Pinker. The latter replied, saying that Morgan’s letter to Mr Knopf fully explained the circumstances of their accepting the Macmillans offer ‘without further reference to Mr Knopf’. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he continues, ‘the offer was of such dimensions that I will go so far as to say it did not allow of refusal.’ And in a postscript he says, ‘If you would like to come and have a talk on the matter, by all means do so.’ Postgate replies that Morgan’s letter is far from explaining the circumstances; and if the offer was so generous, why not have informed Mr Knopf or himself before concluding? He is going to meet Knopf in Germany and really wants a full explanation. Pinker replies that the explanation has already been given; Postgate’s last word is that he notes ‘that you refuse to give Me Knopf any further explanation, and I shall inform him accordingly’. Pinker finally writes ‘for the record’ that he will be delighted to explain the matter personally to Mr Knopf upon his arrival, and that he looks forward eagerly to meeting him.(17)
As far as extant correspondence is concerned, this is the end of the topic. But Alfred Knopf himself refers to it at some length in his memoirs, and what he says sheds some light on his own personality and on what such an event meant to the publisher involved.
"Looking back over the books we published in 1932 . . .the great event of the year for us was Charles Morgan’s The Fountain. This was selected by the Book of the Month Club, a much more important piece of luck then than now, and almost immediately took wings as a big best seller. Indeed before the year was out I think we had disposed of approximately 105,000 copies in addition to those sent out by the BOMC. The Fountain was the last novel by Morgan on which our contract gave us an option, but long before we published it he assured Raymond Postgate our English representative that he would not move to another publisher without first giving me a chance to discuss the matter with him. I don’t know when I was moved to quite such heady anger as when I learned that he had signed a contract with the Macmillan Company without telling us anything about it. It wasn’t so much the loss of future profits that concerned me as the feeling of shock at being betrayed by a man whom I considered my friend and above all, one incapable of breaking his word. Our relations, very friendly for years, seemed to justify my sense of outrage. But ultimately we met in my office with no hard feelings.
In our Autumn catalog I ran a page headed
“Moriturus te saluto”
which read as follows:
“For, so far as the author of The Fountain goes, I am about to die. Nay, I died in January when giving me no inkling of what he was about he signed a contract with another publisher for his future work. I mention this now because many people, knowing the facts, have wondered at the advertising campaign—expensive and enthusiastic—with which I have backed The Fountain, which is in its hundredth thousand in America as this goes to press. True, I thus benefit the amiable competitor who is to follow me as Mr. Morgan’s publisher, but even more, I think, I benefit the art of letters and the profession of bookselling and serve the American book-reading public which for more than fifteen years has backed so generously—most of the time—my sincerest enthusiasms. The argument of the man vs. the artist will go on, I guess, forever. My duty has been to Charles Morgan the artist.” (18)
As Alfred Knopf says, ultimately there were no hard feelings: by July 14th Morgan wrote to him “. . .will you allow me to say how grateful I am for the skill and courage with which you have published the book and how extremely generous I feel your support of it has been?”(19)
Faced with this extraordinary action and controversy, the first thing we need to know is more about the role of Macmillans and the offer they made to Charles Morgan. On February 22nd 1932 he wrote to Mrs Robert Menell, “ I have a big American contract for three novels.”(20) In March, to Rupert Hart-Davis, “I am now certain of a minimum of £3,000 for any novel I write.”(21) And to Margaret Storm Jameson on April 5th, “I am dead certain now – for three books at any rate – of £30 a thousand [words] of any fiction I write which is much more than journalism will yield.”(22) To put these sums in perspective, a novel of 300,000 words (roughly the length of The Fountain) would net him £9,000, which in 2021 equates to £432,000 or nearly $600,000 US.
How did this offer come about? Fortunately we also have the memoirs of Harold Latham [the “Lathom” of Postgate’s telegram], chief editor at Macmillans New York, which contain a brief chapter on Charles Morgan. In it, he insists that he always scrupulously avoided making approaches to any writers published by others.
“Imagine my surprise, then, when I was asked by the agent who represented Morgan [i.e. Ralph Pinker] whether I would be interested in taking him on. I expressed some surprise and explained my position about “stealing” authors. I was then told that, whether I took him on or not, Morgan was going to make a change in his U.S. publishers, that in no event would he be staying with the company that had brought out The Fountain, that I need therefore have no hesitancy in considering him.
Under these circumstances there was no reason why I should not negotiate for Morgan’s next work, Sparkenbroke, and in due course a contract for this work, with options on future writings, was concluded.
I have never been sure of the reason for Morgan’s desire to change publishers. I think most probably it had to do with his thought that there would be advantages in being published in England and in the United States by the same Company. In England he was published by Macmillan. It may also have been agent-inspired. I have known of many cases in which agents have held out prospects for better terms, larger advances, if a change were made. Knowing Morgan as I now know him, I am inclined to doubt that theory.”(23)
This sheds a completely different light on the affair. Charles Morgan, romantic idealist as he was in his writings, was careful and precise almost to the point of mania about two things: his prose and his finances – evidently because knew that only this could set him free to write as he pleased. He trusted Pinker though not blindly, and if it was Pinker who initially approached Latham we can be sure that he did not do so without Morgan’s knowledge and approval. On the other hand, Ralph Pinker was perfectly capable of exaggerating if he believed it would benefit his client (and thus, his agency); and it is more than likely that the idea of Morgan’s intention to change US publishers in any case was a little Pinkerian icing on the cake.
The Pinker Collection of papers and correspondence now in the New York Public Library provides a certain amount of background useful to our comprehension. As early as June 4th 1928, concerning Evans’ of Heinemanns refusal of First Love, Morgan writes to Pinker that
‘there are, indeed, few [publishers in America] that I should wish to have it – only Macmillan, Cape, Constable and Chatto, I think’(24). And while Alfred Knopf wrote to and about Morgan in terms almost of close friendship, and in return always received friendly and grateful replies form the author, Morgan clearly never quite got over his disappointment at Knopf’s reaction to Heinemanns’ refusal of First Love. ‘My misgivings about Knopf’ he wrote to F.C. Wicken, Pinker’s associate, on April 3rd 1929, ‘arise entirely from his having asked me to withdraw First Love when, having accepted it himself, he heard that Heinemann had refused it.’(25) If Knopf goes all out for First Love, he will stick with him; if not, he will break with him. Big advances interest him only as a sign of his publisher’s willingness to risk all for his book. ‘What I wasn’t is confidence and solidity – a feeling that my publisher will do his utmost for my book because it is my book. And even if he didn’t think it would sell, no publisher who thought of me in that way would have tried to back out of First Love.’
Such an exchange shows clearly the insecurity of a novelist facing the publication of his third novel, after the mysterious disappearance of most copies of the first and only moderate American sales of the (admittedly very odd) second. It was only the great British success of Portrait in a Mirror -- including the Hawthornden Prize – achieved by Macmillan, that gave him the confidence to write and promote The Fountain. For all his expressed admiration and tones of friendship Knopf, Morgan felt, had not actually achieved all that much for him.
And an even more useful statement comes later in the same letter to Pinker of July 26th 1928. He asks Pinker to see if Macmillan would be willing even now to acquire My Name is Legion, since ‘my whole object in life is to have all my books in the hands of one publisher. If one publisher sticks to me, no bribes will get me away from him. I am sure that, in business dealings, long association is everything; disloyalty and impatience are the unforgivable sins. An old-fashioned view; pray God the Macmillans have it; if they don’t, no one does.’(26)
And finally, the relations between Charles Morgan and Alfred Knopf were most illuminatingly analysed by Margaret Storm Jameson, who had been a reader for Knopf and the first to put the two in touch with each other.
‘I forced him on the Knopfs, who did not keep him very long—incompatibility of species rather than any failure of Alfred Knop’s foresight.
“Alfred doesn’t believe in the book [Portrait in a Mirror],” Charles wrote to me in 1929, “though Macmillan’s acceptance shook his unbelief a little; and even if I sent him all the reviews, he still wouldn’t believe; only thousands of copies will convince him, I am afraid, and I don’t hope for much in that line . . .”
This did Alfred Knopf an injustice. It was Charles himself in whom he could not believe—as if he were a hippogriff, or as if he were seeing him in a glass which reflected only Charles’s more arrogant traits, his aloofness, his Platonic idealism, his distaste for anything that offended his style as a human being. The two men never met, however often they may have sat at the same table.’(27)
At this point, we have perhaps reached an explanation for Morgan’s directing Pinker to approach Harold Latham. To Charles, the ideal of all his books in the hands of one publisher, on both sides of the Atlantic, had still not been reached; and from an early date he had been attracted to Macmillan as to no other house, while in Knopf he never managed to have total confidence.
One final aspect that should not be ignored in this affair is the Great Depression. Beginning with the Wall Street crash of October 1929, this had brought the American economy to its knees, and put the British economy into a steep decline, by 1931. Publishing, however, was affected less than any other industry: indeed, the period 1920-1940 is still known in the trade as the Golden Age.(28) This was perhaps less understood in Britain: just before The Fountain appeared in the US on June 1st 1932 Morgan wrote to Roger Barrett, ‘America is in a really desperate plight and I don’t think the angels in heaven could sell a book there’(29). In British publishing, earnings were low: as D.J. Thomas writes in The Prose Factory, ‘a novel by a relative unknown which achieved a sale of 5,000 copies might have cost its backer £500 to publish and promote. The publisher’s return would be just over £1,000. With a standard author’s royalty of 15 per cent. of published price, the writer would receive something over £850 and the gross profit to the publisher weighed in at £250. On the other hand, the publisher’s profit, Jerrold (30) calculated, was no more than £20.’(31) In Britain, the typical advance for a first novel in the 1920s and 1930s ranged from £50 to £100. Graham Greene, whose first novel, The Man Within, had sold surprisingly well, had received from Heinemann an offer (like Macmillan’s to Morgan) for three years for three more books; but the offer was only £600 per year. Many novelists, from Hugh Walpole to Evelyn Waugh, supplemented their income by journalism. Charles Morgan had been employed by The Times as assistant dramatic (theatre) critic since 1921; five years later, when A.B. Walkley, the chief critic, died, Morgan took his place and remained in that post until the beginning of World War II.(32) He also sent a monthly article on the London theatre scene to the New York Times, and wrote occasional pieces here and there.
In view of this, the success of The Fountain and later Sparkenbroke was perhaps less surprising in America than it was in Britain, and Alfred Knopf was able to be less anxious than his English author.
If we attempt now finally to analyse and understand the whole affair, we see a novelist not yet a bestseller and still insecure; an American publisher with a certain liking for, but au fond little understanding of, both the man and his work, not yet quite ready (as, ironically, he was shortly afterwards for The Fountain) to commit himself completely to maximum effort; an agent all too ready to go out on a limb for his author and for himself (nine years later, the Pinker agency went bankrupt and Ralph was arrested for pocketing his clients’ royalties)(33); and a second publishing house that earned the reward of its solid backing, which continued throughout Morgan’s career and bore ancillary fruit in his history of the firm, The House of Macmillan (1943).
POSTSCRIPT
Charles Morgan went on (in his association with Macmillan) to publish two more long novels: Sparkenbroke (1936 - about the love between an aristocratic poet and the wife of a country doctor), which brought together his three great preoccupations, Art, Love, and Death; and The Voyage (1940), set in 1880s France, about a vine-grower and a cabaret singer), which won him a third award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He then turned to shorter novels and plays: of the latter, The Flashing Stream (1938) was a considerable success. It was followed by The River Line (1952) and The Burning Glass (1953). Of his shorter novels, the most successful were The Judge’s Story (1947) and A Breeze of Morning (1951). A great Francophile and much loved across the Channel, Morgan was elected to the Institut de France, the only English author beside Rudyard Kipling ever to be so honoured. He died at the age of 64, in 1958.
NOTES
[1] CLM, letter to Louis Bonnerot, 1 March 1932; in Eiluned Lewis, Selected Letters of Charles Morgan (London: Macmillan, 1967), 95.
[2] James Brand Pinker (1863-1922) had created the foremost literary agency in Britain, representing Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Stephen Crane and James Joyce.
[3] It was Eric, for example, who collected Morgan’s American royalties from Knopf’s and passed them on to Ralph in England.
[4] Margaret Storm Jameson, Journey from the North vol. 1(London: Collins/Harvill, 1969), 170.
[5] Letter in Morgan Correspondence.
[6] The English prize winners were suggested by an English committee, the records and papers of which (1919-1940) are in the Cambridge University Library.
[7] Letter in the Knopf Archive, Harry Ransom Center,, Box 722.5.
[8] Letter to Roger Barrett, 1 April 1932; in Morgan Correspondence.
[9] See Nicola Wilson, “British publishers and colonial editions”, in her The Book World: Selling and Distributing British Literature 1900-1940, ed. Nicola Wilson (The Hague: Brill, 2016).
[10] In-house memo of January 4th, 1932. In Knopf archive, Harry Ransom Center, Box 722.5.
[11] November 25th, 1931. In Knopf archive. This note of fairlly mild reproof clearly annoyed Postgate greatly: on several occasions afterward he refers to it as ‘an infuriated letter’.
[12] This laudatory letter was of course flattering (not just the greatest novel but work of imaginative literature, all genres included), but Morgan would have noticed that it still hedged its bets.
[13] Letter of November 25th 1931, in Knopf archive, Box 722.5.
[14] Memo, December 23rd, 1931, in Knopf archive, Box 722.5.
[15] ALS, February 5th, 1932, in Knopf archive, Box 722.5.
[16] This and the following letter are dated February 8th, and are in the Knopf archive, Box 722.5, as are the letters mentioned in the next paragraph.
[17] Letter of February 16th 1932, in Knopf archive.
[18] Excerpt from TS memoir, Knopf archive, Box 610.4.
[19] ALS July 14th 1932, in Knopf archive, Box 501.7.
[20] In Eiluned Lewis, Selected Letters, 94
[21] In Morgan Correspondence.
[22] in Eluned Lewis, Selected Letters, 97.
[23] Harold Latham, My Life in Publishing (London: Chatto andWindus, 1965), 157-8.
[24] Pinker Collection, NYPL, Charles Morgan Box, letter foldder 4.
[25] Pinker Collection, letter folder 5.
[26] Pinker Collection, letter folder 4.
[27] Margaret Storm Jameson, Journey from the North, vol.1, 171-172.
[28] Cf John Tebbel, Between Covers: the Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), section IV, pp. 201-334.
[29] Letter in Morgan Correspondence.
[30] The reference is to Douglas Jerrold, Georgian Adventure (London: the ‘Right’ Book Club, 1937).
[31] Taylor, p.
[32] A selection of his theatre reviews was edited by Roger Morgan, with an introduction by Carole Bourne-Taylor, and published as Dramatic Critic: Selected Reviews (1922-1939) by Charles Morgan (London: Oberon Books, 2013).
[33] Stape, J. H. ""The Pinker of Agents": A Family History of James Brand Pinker." The Conradian 34, no. 1 (2009): 136.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The manuscript material for this article comes from three principal sources: 1) the Alfred A. Knopf Inc. papers in the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, where Ms Emma Hetrick and Ms Elizabeth Garver have been most helpful; 2) Charles Morgan’s own correspondence transcripts made by his son the late Roger Morgan, former Librarian of the House of Lords, and made available to me by him and by his daughter Lucie Morgan Bert; these files now reside in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, where they have not yet been processed; 3) the James B. Pinker and Son Collection of papers in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, where I have received help from Ms Emma Davidson. I am grateful to Ms Tina Simpson who has undertaken the New York Public Library research for me.
Printed sources:
Margaret Storm Jameson, Journey from the North vol. 1 (London: Collins/Harvill, 1969).
Douglas Jerrold, Georgian Adventure (London: The ‘Right’ Book Club, 1937).
Latham, Harold S., My Life in Publishing (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1965).
Eiluned Lewis, ed., Selected Letters of Charles Morgan (London: Macmillan, 1967).
D.J. Taylor, The Prose Factory: Literary Life in Britain Since 1918 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015).
John Tebbel, Between Covers: the Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
(1)
A remarkable article comparing Sparkenbroke to Pater's Marius
Nadia Palazzani is the author of a 1980 dissertation on CLM, Charles Morgan 1894-1958, at the University of Padua, Italy
Nadia Palazzani
MORGAN'S SPARKENBROKE AND PATER'S MARIUS: A CONTINUATION OF THE AESTHETIC TRADITION.
It is not an easy task to assess the inf1uence in modern English 1iterature of the Aesthetic Movement of the Nineties, it being generally regarded as the literary movement representing the culmination of the reaction against 19th century utilitarianism and, therefore, strictly related to the particular issues of that era. Yet, the influence of Walter Pater, (1839-94), one of the Movement's chief inspirers, extends into the present century and is to be found in the novels of ideas of a contemporary author, Charles Morgan,(1894-1958).In particu1ar, evidence of Pater's influence can be found in his trilogy written between the wars: Portrait in a Mirror, (1929), The Fountain,(1932) and Sparkenbroke,(1936).
The present study will analyse the degree to which Pater's ideas influenced Morgan's, by examining both the thematic para11els, as well as the divergences existing between the two authors' points of view, in order to enable us to assess Morgan's own handling of the themes typica1 of the Aesthetic Tradition. We sha11 begin by tracing and comparing the philosophical and literary trends which influenced Pater and Morgan respectively; then, by concentrating on the development of the heroes of Marius,the Epicurean (1885)and Sparkenbroke, we shall proceed to compare the ideas illustrated in the two nove1s, as both characters are the vehic1es through which these two authors express their respective views.
An autobiographical fact, concerning their university backgrounds, serves as a common link between the two. Both were in fact connected with the same Oxford college, Brasenose, where Pater was elected Fellow in 1864 and Morgan went up in 1919 to read History.
During Pater's time there, phi1osophical thinking at Oxford was still under the inf1uence of the Empiricists, Hume and Mill and it was not until 1870 that the influence of another major philosophical trend, that of German idealism, began to be felt (1). This trend brought with it a renaissance of speculative thinking, alongside a revival of Classical literature, so that from, from the 1870s onwards, the works of Plato and the German philosophers Hegel, Lotze and Schopenhauer became the principal objects of study; indeed Pater's favourite authors, we are told,(2) be1onged to both these periods. Moreover, with the founding of a Hegelian school there in 1870 under the leadership of F.H.Bradley, Oxford became the Eng1ish seat of learning, which, more than any other(3), had absorbed this wave of speculative thinking.
Morgan attended Oxford from 1919 to 1923 and he, too, experienced an atmosphere of inte11ectual revival (4). The influence, on Morgan's ideas, of the same philosophical trend, which had revived and influenced intellectual activity during Pater's years there, is evidenced in K.Dockhorn's article, C.Morgan und Hegel (5), in which the critic examines the dependence of Morgan's ideas on the absolute idealism of Bernard Bosenquet and F.H.Bradley, whose roots can be traced back to Hegel. Another critic, O.Delere, (6) illustrates another connection with this period by tracing Morgan's metaphysics of death back to Schopenhauer's own Todesphilosophie. As far as Plato's influence on Morgan is concerned, Morgan himself admits that he had an extremely creative effect on his ideas: “I think he is to be regarded rather as a seed and stimulation than as a philosophical influence in the true sense .”(7).
Thus, as far as their philosophical ideas are concerned, it can be seen how the two authors were influenced by the same trend, that of German idealism, which, although dominant during Pater's time, a1so made its influence felt after the First World War.
A second connection between Morgan and Pater isto be found in the latter's aesthetic doctrine. As British thought became impregnated with German metaphysics during the last three decades of the past century, growing attention was paid to the subject of esthetics. (8) It should be made clear that the aesthetic ideas which influenced Morgan were not exactly those which caused Pater to become, almost by a accident and against his will, the main influence of the Aesthetic Movement, that is the famous Conclusion to the first edition of his Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Pater growingly disapproved of Wilde's hedonistic interpretation of his aesthetic theories, (10) and on this point Morgan wrote: “I have always felt with Wilde that 'all Art I quite useless 'in the sense that it is not informative, doesn't make men more happy or instruct them. And yet I couldn't accept the Art for Arts 's Sake formula.” (11).
Even though Morgan was critical of the exclusively theoretical premises of Pater's 'philosophy' of sensation, as can be deduced from his comment on it in his Epitaph on George Moore: “Pater's doctrine that sensation is the touchstone of value, a doctrine which Moore,having less moral prejudice than the author of Marius, was able to accept more fully than Pater himself” (12), it is nonetheless this same 'philosophy' which Morgan adopts in Sparkenbroke. That Morgan himself strove to make this doctrine less restrictive and more down-to-earth in this novel, and succeeded, is evidenced by the comments of Louis Bonnerot.Morgan's doctrine of art, love and death,mconsidered the three means available to man of achieving fulfillment has, according to him, “une plenitude à laquelle ne peut prétendre, celle de Pater·qui semble à la fois anémiée, parce que privée de passion ..."(13). Moreover, Morgan was also slightly critical of the way in which Pater has structured his novel,while admitting that,he, too, had written the same type of novel:
I think that , if one is developing a philosophic theme, one is bound to have passages of suspended action, but the ideal is certainly to weave the theme and the incident together wherever it is possible. I did it fairly well in The Fountain - better, I think than it has been done before, (consider the chunks of inactive philosophy·in Marius and Inglesant!)- but still I didn't do it well enough."(14)
Critical works have only touched upon the subject of Morgan's philosophical and aesthetic ideas and their relation to Pater's. In L.Bonnerot's previously quoted article, he begins by outlining the three main influences present in Morgan's novel: J.H.Shorthouse, Walter Pater and George Moore. Concerning Pater's influence, he finds that similarities in doctrine exist, because of their Platonism:
...“c'est l'Académie et c'est de Platon qu'ils sont l'un et l'autre disciples. Ainsi s'expliquent les ressemblances de doctrine que nous pouvons relever à la lecture de Marius, the Epicurean et de The Fountain et plus encore de Sparkenbroke <...> Pater et Morgan affirment tous deux, 1'identité de la contemplation esthétique et de la contemplation religieuse et considèrent la littérature comme un moyen de connaissance mystique(15),
whereby he substantiates his interpretation by quoting directly from the two novels. Yet he does not take his analysis any further in this direction; in particular, as far as aesthetics is concerned, he does not attempt to compare Morgan's views on art with Pater's. He merely touches upon the surface of one aspect of the problem, that of their Platonism, and then goes on to examine other aspects of the nove1.
A shorter and more generic critique of Morgan's book is that of L. Cazamian, who observes:
Mr. Morgan est en sympathie avec les lettres francaises; l'art très conscient de ses romans trouverait chez nous de vraisemblables origines, si ses antécédents les plus proches n'étaient de toute évidence dans la tradition esthétique marquée par Wilde et George Moore. Mais plus qu'à Wilde et meme plus qu'à Moore, on songe en le 1isant à la plus haute 1ignée de l'imagination anglaise, à Blake, à Shelley,à Walter Pater...(16)
The present study aims at examining the degree to which Pater's ideas influenced Morgan' s themes; it also intends to illustrate Morgan's own interpretation of them, with particular reference to the themes of art, life and death and to their inter-relations and interaction.
***********
The first striking similarity between Marius and Sparkenbroke can be found in their respective backgrounds; both are in fact descendants of illustrious families and inevitably attached to the traditions of their forefathers, to their country-homes and to the country-side and nature in general. This can be seen from Marius' celebration of "the "litt1e"or private Ambarva1ia in the first chapter of the book and from Sparkenbroke's participation in the Sparkenbroke Mass, as described at the beginning of the novel.
Concerning the patterns of development of the two heroes, we can see that the main difference lies in the fact that whereas Marius' spiritual development takes place throughout his life, Sparkenbroke's is almost complete,and the reader witnesses only the final concluding phase of his life directly. In this way Sparkenbroke's circular pattern differs from Marius' forward-moving, progressive one, which is further characterized by a gradual opening towards, and acceptance of, a philosophy upholding a higher moral order than ever professed in the past, capable of revolutionizing the old world in its awareness of good and evil and its declaring the suffering of man to be a value, for the first time in history. Again the tendencies would seem to move in different directions; Marius' development moves outwards, from concern for himself towards concern for his fellowmen, Sparkenbroke's, on the other hand, points more and more toward concern for his own self. In bothworks, there is no doubt that the two authors consider the development of the ·inner life to be of far greater relevance than the course of outside events.
Both characters are helped to progress further in this direction through the presence of another person. In Marius' case it is through his friendship with Cornelius, a Christian, who is, moreover, a living embodiment of everything he· believes the new religion represents: “Cornelius <...> has seemed to be but a sign or symbol of some other thing...” (p.134).
For Sparkenbroke, his relationship with Mary Hardy is a natural coro11ary to his aesthetic doctrine. Mary embodies both the phenomena of art and love, because of the inspiring effect she has on his work and, more important, because of that which his imagination sees through her:
The face before him seemed <... > to have now a meditative transparency through which there shone towards him a light not hers ( p.246),
and "Even he did not know her for what she was; he was 1oving her for qualities outside her nature...(p.310). Thus, both Corne1ius and Mary act as living symbols for Marius and Sparkenbroke; in Paterian terms, they are the 'sensible analogues'of their thoughts and feelings.
The philosophy of Heraclitus of Ionia (17) represents the first phase in Marius' spiritua1 philosophical itinerary; the idea that all things are I constant movement and flux, stemming from a single source of perpetual energy, appeals to him initially. The same concepts are also referred to by Sparkenbroke, who also believes life to be of a fluid nature, ever-changing and transient. Furthermore, if life is in is in 'perpetual becoming, it follows that one must "believe in life's power to transmute our needs <... > the art of life is the art of accordance with its changes..."(p.379-80). Marius also comes to a similar conclusion:”He too must maintain a harmony with that soul of motion in things, by constantly renewed mobility of character"(p.80).
Hence, it is clear that, for both characters, constant movement, incorporating constant energy, is the generating source of creativity and progress. This movement is necessary for Marius' searching, restless mind, if he is to renew his ideas and progress in his Epicureanism of the spirit, while Sparkenbroke is well aware of the negative consequences on his fellow men, when this sense of motion is ignored:
We turn away because we have not yet power to cast off our own natures and are, as it were,stagnant, standing apart from that principle of energy, of movement, of perpetual becoming < ... > We are in exile. We have lost our power to 'become' because we haven't the genius to die and be reborn •••(p.245) (18)
An important point, for the purpose of this study, in Marius' spiritual development is reached when, under the influence of Aristippus of Cyrene's philosophy of pleasure and sensation, he comes to accept the belief in the truth of his own sensations and, subsequently,to recognize the ultimate subjectivity of all knowledge, a fact which, lying at the basis of all the philosophies previously studied by him,had prevented him from becoming the advocate of any one single doctrine. In th1s way, being an idealist (19),like Sparkenbroke, in the sense that both delight in “replacing the outer world of other people by an inward world <•••> he was now ready to concede <...> that the individual is to himself the measure of all things, and to rely on the exclusive certainty to himself of his own impressions” (p.76, my italics).
Marius' acknowledgment, in this passage, of the ultimate subjectivity and relativity of knowledge is important, as it brings him a step closer to Sparkenbroke, who, however, throughout the course of his 1ife, had developed this individualistic philosophy much further, believing sensations to be only the superficial components of experience.(20) His aim in life consists in penetrating the superficiality of appearances, through the use of his imaginative faculty, as, “ To grasp fina1ity <...> to transcend the flux, is the only absolute good."(p.287)
In this connection, and under the influence of the philopsphy of New Cyrenaicism, Marius develops his original idea concerning the subjectivity of knowledge further, by recognizing the essential role imagination plays in this philosophy: “Nay! The products of the imagination must themselves be held to present the most perfect forms of life spirit and matter alike under their purest and most perfect conditions”(p.85). Thus, Marius soon reaches a conclusion(21, concerning the perfection of imagined things and the supremacy of the truth they reveal, similar to Sparkenbroke's idea that, "To imagine was to live, to live was to imagine...”(p.185). For the above reason, he decides to undertake an 'aesthetic' education, which prompts in him, as it does in Sparkenbroke, a longing for aesthetic experience.
This experience, Marius feels should involve and stimulate the intellect and the senses, on a perceptive, intuitive level, and, clearly have a moral foundation:
...he would at least fi11 up the measure of that present with vivid sensations, and such intellectual apprehensions, as, in strength and directness and their immediately released values at the bar of an actual experience, are most 1ike sensations <... > while the sou1, which can make no serious claim to have apprehended anything beyond the vei1 of immediate experience, yet never loses a sense of happiness in conforming to the highest moral ideal it can clearly define for itself...(p.83).
On the other hand Sparkenbroke's desire for aesthetic experience has much more of a physical and sensual element to it, as his whole being, body, mind and soul,awaits impatiently' for those moments of ecstatic apprehension of, and penetration into, the world of the spirit, which annihilate physical sensation through absorption of all aspects of individuality:
Beneath the vibration of music, there was among the chestnut-boughs, an interior whispering, not projected sound but a stress secret1y audible like the throbbing of human pulse; and from this profound whisper, hushed and perpetual <…> there came to Sparkenbroke an entry into the tree itself, a knowledge of it, even of its communication between earth and air and of its ascending essence <...> his self was lifted from him; he ceased to feel and know in terms of temporal things, yet felt and knew.(p.394-395).(22)
Moreover, the above passages illustrate the contrast which exists between the Dionysiac principle of artistic creation, present in Sparkenbroke, with its longing for release, revelation, purification and aesthetic transcendence, and the Apo11onian princip1e of the passive contemplation of beauty, active in Marius' case.
An important result of undertaking an 'aesthetic' education, is that it helps both characters to overcome the dissidence they feel exists between their idealistic views of reality, and everyday 1ife itself. In Marius, the dichotomy is expressed in terms of the difference which exists between the contemplative life and the life of practice:
He was become aware of the possibility of a large dissidence between an inward and somewhat exclusive world of vivid personal apprehension, and the unimproved, unheightened reality of the persona1 1ife of those about him.(p.76)
In Sparkenbroke the dichotomy takes the form of the contrast he feels exists between art and life, imagination and reality; for him, "Life was less alive than art, for in life vitality was dissipated in a thousand irrelevant and contradictory movements; its essence seldom appeared.” (p.184). This contrast is, at the same time, both the chief source of his inspiration as an artist, and the main cause of his frustrations as a man, as "l'écrivain <...> aspire au ciel mais habite sur 1a terre et doit par1er aux hommes <...> Il ne peut garder pour lui seul sa vision, il veut la communiquer.”(23)
According to Marius, an aesthetic education should not be purely theoretical:
Not the conveyance of an abstract body of truths or principles, would be the aim of the right education of one’s self or of another, but the conveyance of an art - an art in some degree peculiarto each individual character"(p.82).
This concept is exemplified by Sparkebroke, as his own personal 'art', that of his literary ability, is a complete aesthetic experience, which compensates for the banality of everyday existence:
...his power to write had always been for him the home of his being upon earth - the single permanent and incorruptible thing to which he might return - and his means of communication with a reality beyond all accidents and failures. To lose it would be to lose every thing...( p.377) .
Marius decides that his own 'art' would consist in comprehending "the various forms of ancient art and thought, the various forms of actual human feeling <...> and in turn become the interpreter ·of them to others <...> it determined his choice of a vocation to live by.” (p.87). This idea, concerning the function of the artist, also forms the basis of Sparkenbroke's view; yet by considering him a mediator, or contact, between the visible wor1d and the reality beyond appearance, which his 'art' enables him to reveal, and not merely an interpreter and conveyor to others of his own aesthetic sensations, he expands the original concept. Consequently in his view, the artist alone has the faculty to see “beyond the appearances of a thing, the nature of the thing itself...(p.187).
He wrote in the hunger for perfection; in the the desire to feel and acknowledge a pulse, not his, alive within him; and the word?creation' applied to art appeared to him misleading, an artist being, in his view, not an origin but a contact. This was his only absolute faith; all else in his life lay open to sardonic and destructive criticism (p.283) (24)
Thus, thanks to art, the two heroes are able to overcome the dualism in life which creates the dissidence, of which both are so acutely aware, between the perfection of imagined things and reality itself. This is possible, due to the nature of art itself, which enables the artist to bridge life's dualism, firstly through its power of catharsis and, secondly, because of its mystical-religious nature.
Both characters are very much aware of this first feature of art,as its cathartic power causes men to undergo a kind of purifying conversion:
Detached from him, yet very real there lay certain spaces in his life·<....> Such hours·were oftenest those in which he had been helped by work of others to the pleasurable apprehension of art, of nature or of life. ”Not what I do, but what I am under the power of this vision... (p.88. My own italics)
is what Marius realizes, and Sparkenbroke professes:
...that, when contemplating art we undergo a conversion: <...> that art was the most profound of all all intimations of immorta1ity. Beneath the impact of a work of art <...> we undergo a conversion. Our stiffness breaks, we f1ow again; we are aware, as at no other time, of a continuityin ourselves•••(p.63).
Sparkenbroke takes this idea further, as, in his view, a work of art also possesses an 'immortal' quality, suspended as it is between matter and spirit, which communicates to the observersomething of another reality, and incorporates him for a moment in its essence. (25)
As far as art's mystical-re1igious nature is concerned, Marius realizes that his choice of leading an aesthetic life, would have much in common with, or even be possibly equivalent to a new form of the contemplative life, as both share the basic principle of “the intrinsic'blessedness' of 'vision'- the vision of perfect men and things.” ( p.85).(26) In Morgan's novel, this·concept is interpreted in a strictly aesthetic sense, as it also refers to, and includes, the fundamental innocence of an artist's sourceof inspiration, which gives rise to the vision he expresses in his art, so that,in Sparkenbroke's words: “All perfect art is a likeness of God carved by himself in the sleep of the artist.”(p.188).
Sparkenbroke expands the concept of the aesthetic life being equal to the contemplative life, in the sense that for him, the act of artistic creation is characterized by qualities common to al1 religions and mystical experience; it is also a refusal of the Art-for-Art's-Sake type of aestheticism(27). For Sparkenbroke, the aesthetic experience, paralle1 to the phenomenon of absolute love (28), involves confession, absolution, redemption, release, ecstasy renewal, rebirth and revelation, all this taking place through his unshakable belief in the truth of his creative imagination, and in its unrestricted app1ication. Moreover, art creates in each person the capacity to see people and the world around him as they really are, that is, behind and beyond the veil of superficiality, which marks the exterior aspect of things, as,
Nothing had virtue of itself, or in its relationship with other things or, on the same plane with itself, but only in the degree of its penetration through the unreality of particular aspects to the reality of completed being.(p.396)(29)
In addition, both authors agree that art, if it is to fulfill its function, must also possess a third feature; it must be a craft and a discipline, thus revealing the dual nature of art, and its analogy to the dua1ism inherent in life.(30) The artist must learn to use his instruments most effectively, leaving nothing to chance, so that every element takes on the precise significance the artist intends. The following passage is indicative of Sparkenbroke's struggle for technical perfection, which when achieved, brings him a sense of happiness:
His composition was slow, for he cared above a11 to give, even to complex thought, a verbal sequence of the utmost 1ucidity; thought might be dark, but the mirror of language must be clear <...> A story was not, to him, an aggregate however rich, of the experiences of life, but a se1ective pattern having its origin in them and made always with one purpose – to discover the form, which is the poetry, of character, and so relate it to the universal forms of humanity that whoever read was enchanted into perception and joy.
A joy that he was able, in his novels, sometimes to evoke <...> his story appearing to him as an absolute and excluding unity (pp.1 33-34).
In Marius, a similar passage occurs, which illustrates parallel, to the one above, the connection he feels exists between stylistic perfection and self-knowledge:
Well with him words should be indeed things,- the word, the phrase, valuable in exact proportion to the transparency with which it conveyed to others the apprehension, the emotion, the mood, so vividly real within himself <...> words would follow that naturally, a true understanding of one's self being ever the first condition of genuine style. Language delicate and measured <... > The happy phrase or sentence was really modelled upon a cleanly finished structure of scrupulous thought . ( p.89)
The above passages put forward two similar views concerning the practical aspects of artistic creation, a practice which Pater extends to include all types of intelligent behaviour. The first view is that only a combination of intuition and reason,of the practical and imaginative make up a work of art; one element cannot exclude the other, (31) the artist having both under his control.
The second view is that, in order for the artist to proceed in this manner,using these two aspects of experience, he has to make use of the notion of·'artistic criticism', that is, the abi1ity an artist must possess and exercise, which enables him to see his work objectively, in relation to some context or other, thus recognizing that this faculty is "inherent in the very definition of the creative imagination and of the artistic process."(32)
According to Pater·, this procedure is not necessarily restricted to artists, in the traditional sense of the word; if a man is an artist only inasmuch as he is able "to criticize his own efforts in order to derive the maximum advantage from his experiments with the medium at hand, " (33) then this process is also applicable to Marius. Not on1y does he perform mental experiments with the various philosophies he studies, but, by exercising a critical attitude with regard to his spiritual growth and self-improvement, through the use of his own personal medium. His intelligence, he progresses further; his aim is to get maximum advantage thereof, consisting in the greatest possible serenity and happiness. It is almost as if, by means of his intuitive reasonings, Pater wished to turn Marius' use of his intelligence into an art (34). Thus, a difference in emphasis emerges between the two authors in that Pater·extends this concept to include all men and their creative intelligences,whereas Morgan applies this idea only to artists and their creative imaginations.
In addition both authors agree as to the necessity of a perfect fusion of both theoretical and practical aspects of the aesthetic experience, which creates works of art (35).In this way the dualism in art is analogous to that in life and both art and life interact in the artist's mind in order to create a synthesis. If for Marius the greatest examples of imaginative art present instances of the summing up an entire world of complex associations under some single form...,”(p.241). Sparkenbroke a1so expresses a similar idea, concerning the interprenetation of subject and form, as follows:
The valuable impulse is the impulse of subject - Jesus <...> the whole man. Then the artist draws down the general into the particular. First, he has to choose his aspect: then to pour a11 aspects of the subject into, the single physical aspect he has chosen <...> an artist must not give himself precipitately to a single aspect of his subject < > He must not believe that, in representing a particular form of his subject, he has made a work of art; he must not begin to work until certainty comes to him that all aspects of the subject that 1ie within the range of his perception are crystallized in the selected form.(pp.286-87)
In both novels, the two heroes experience a visionary moment, which has a profound effect on their lives; in Marius' case, it makes his creative reason accept the credibility of the new religion and its principles, so that his aesthetic ideal is 'renewed',in that he identifies it with the doctrine and practice of Christianity (37).
As a consequence, he is urged to further develop the ethical component of his aesthetic theory,·which thus progresses from the doctrine of Art-for-Art's-Sake to that of Art for Humanity's Sake, and is characterized by deeply religious undertones and ethical engagement, proving that "Pater wished to pattern life after the aesthetic experience, but he denied that either the experience or the creation of a work of art was uniquely valuable.(38) In other words, 'art' is not to be interpreted in its restricted meaning of 'fine art', but is to be understood as referring to "all valuable activity or worthwhi1e behaviour (itself a kind of production) <...> artistic 'contemplation' is itself only a type of intelligent practice ...”(39)
Sparkenbroke's aesthetic doctrine unlike Marius' does not identify its principles with those of any single religion. It follows Pater's orginal idea “nell'insistenza sul valore di un'esperienza totalmente personale...”(40), whereas Pater's, in assuming Christianity's ethical basis, and in considering it the only doctrine capable of safeguarding mankind's humanistic values undergoes an evolution and widening of referential range (41). By contrast, according to Morgan, the ethical function of art is based on the liberating effect it has on the imagination of each individual:
I've never really felt before what God was. Now I think He's the imagination...now it is Art for God's sake which is the same as Art for the imagination's sake. Tel1 men stories, not to impose my opinions upon them, but to fluidify their imaginations. It unfreezes the river.(42)
The effect of the vision on Sparkenbroke is to bring him closer to the third absolute phenomenon life offers man, that of death, this being, in fact, the 'new' life he had perceived during the vision:
...he had been gazing through the bars of the Sparkenbroke Mound, had been in his grave; and all he saw and heard that night was seen and heard thenceforward in the power of that exaltation.(p.396)
In Marius also the vision had helped to promote a sense of detachment from the world, and this, together with his decision to return to the place of burial of his ancestors, in order to give them a Christian burial, makes him aware of the form his whole life had assumed, in that,
...all its movement had been inwards; movement of observation only, or even of pure meditation; in part, perhaps, because throughout it had been something of a meditatio mortis, ever facing towards the act of final detachment •••(p.258).
The similarity of the last phase to Sparkenbroke's aspiration “to 'dare the final bound'” (p.119) is evident.
• If we compare Marius' and Sparkenbroke's experiences of death, a parallelism can be found in the fact that, in the same way as the Sparkenbroke family, Marius had also kept his dead ones close to his home. Moreover, he had dissented from the current religion in Rome which considered death a negative phenomenon,in much the same way as Sparkenbroke was critical of modern society's view of it, as "an unwarrantable interference with our human right to do as we please."(p.315) (43).
• Neither Marius nor Sparkenbroke wholly accept the Platonic view of death. According to Marius, it must have more of a subjective note:
“Death must be for everyone nothing less than the fifth or last act of a drama, and, as such, <is> likely to have something of the stirring character of a dènouement (p.258) (50)
In Sparkenbroke's view, death is closely connected with his notion of loss, according to which he must be prepared to give up all earthly things, even his own art:
And he must be content like,Aquinas,to lay aside even his pen if to write should ever cease to be necessary to the completion of the form of his life. Nothing is to be clung to for its own sake; nothing attains its final value until it is abandoned. There is no such thing as loss of things past: either they were complete and therefore not to be mourned or they were incomplete and by Nature rejected. (p.366)
This idea helps to create a positive attitude in him towards death, which he believes to be a progression towards revelation: “ 'for death is not a change of state but a change of longing; it is an incident in a continuous immortality'” (p.327. Marius' view of the phenomenon, if compared with Sparkenbroke's, is similar; he imagines, “the unclouded and receptive soul quitting the world finally <...> and going on its way at last with the consciousness of some profound enigma in things,as but a pledge of something further to come ...”(p.265)
Moreover, both characters, it is interesting to note, carry out an act of self-sacrifice towards the end of their 1ives, which increases their sense of detachment from the world and their possessions in it..(45)
Sparkenbroke and Marius spend their final moments in similar states of mind. Both characters' senses having reached very high levels of receptivity; yet their thoughts move in quite different directions.
Sparkenbroke's whole being is permeated by a sense of absolute wonder and beauty, as if faced with imminent revelation, and
... in certitude of that divine presence which, formerly apprehended as the meditate essence of created things, was now immediate and ever1asting,an absolute singleness exempt from the division of forms.
In this he stood, at first in wonder, for it was eternal to him <...> but,by the last pang of the body, it came into him, as the sun into a candle, so ravishing and including him that wonder laid down its arms and imagination its images.(p.461)
Thus, his thoughts seem to be totally submerged by his ecstatic state of mind and imminent transcendence; moreover, the fact that his final moments are spent in solitude, helps to cancel out any feelings for the future of the world and his fellow men.
Like Sparkenbroke, Marius' sense of receptivity also increases greatly, making him aware that this state of mind is necessary, if revelation is to occur:
At this moment , his. unclouded receptivity of soul <...> was at its height <...> the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatsoever·divine fingers might choose to write there <...> for a moment he experienced a singular curiosity, almost an ardent desire to enter·upon a future ,the possibilities of which seemed so large.(p.264-65)
Yet, by contrast, it is only 'for a moment that Marius contemplates transcendence, after which his thoughts once again return earthbound; one of his final concerns;despite the fact that he had lived most of his life in so1itude, is for the future of mankind, the new religion forming the connection:
... by which he seemed to link himself to the generations to come in the world he was leaving <...> It was too, surprised, delighted, that Marius, under the power of that new hope among men, could think of·the generations to come after him. (p.265)
If Sparkenbroke ends his life dazzled by the light of revelation and transcendence, Marius' final moments are marked by his typical coolness and calm,"·the then perfect clearness of his sou1."(p.266). His imagination, unlike Sparkenbroke's, has not been left free to soar (46): instead, what matters to him, is not mystical transcendence, but the possibility of there existing,in the future, a better world for man to 1ive in, thanks to Christianity's revolutionary doctrine. Marius' faith in the certainty of mystical transcendence is not total; indeed, for him, only the existence of this world is certain, what lies beyond is not. For this reason, Pater suspends Marius' final judgement, avoiding any committing remarks, in marked contrast with the subdued, yet deeply joyful, metaphysica1 certainty of Morgan's Sparkenbroke.
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The present analysis illustrates the many similar ideas existing in the two novels. Yet it can be seen that a different use of them is made by the two authors. In Marius they are discussed in depth, all their implications being taken into account, and they are used as stepping-stones by the hero from which he moves on to study other concepts; in Sparkenbroke, they undergo amplification, so that they form, as recurring leitmotifs, the basic structure of the whole novel. They are, in fact, the means through which the plot evolves and upon which the character of Sparkenbroke depends for its coherence and idiosyncracy. Thus, Pater's philosophy of sensation underlies the very thematic, structural and formal foundations of Morgan's novel. Morgan adopts and extends many of Pater's ideas, so that they become the constants of Sparkenbroke's own personal phi1osophy of 1ife . Moreover , the character of Sparkenbroke,himself born a poet, is an exemplification and extension and, in many respects, a variation of Pater's aesthetic theory.
Concerning art and the aesthetic experience, both authors are aware of its dual nature, of its cathartic and metaphysical aspects and of its more practical, technical features. They also recognize the analogy of the dualism in art with that inherent in life, that is the contrast between imagined things and reality itself. Both characters overcome this dichotomy. By choosing to give priority to the truth revealed by the imagination, yet do not exclude the necessity, for the artist, of acknowledging reality, if the message of a work of art is to be understood by the rest of mankind.
Morgan adopts Pater's view regarding the interpenetration of subject and form completely, whereby a work of art is believed to spring from a synthesis of the many impressions and associations in the artist's mind, fused together in one single form, so that, the creative impulse, which creates the subject is in perfect harmony with its form, the technical, exterior aspect of -the aesthetic experience.
As far as the mystica1-re1igious aspect of art is concerned, both acknowledge the similarity existing between an 'aesthetic' life and a life of religious contemplation. A difference can be found in the type of mysticism each hero believes in; Sparkenbroke's is of a vaguely Platonic denomination, whereas Marius' final choice falls on the mystics of the Christian religion. Consequently, a slight divergence can be found, between the two authors' views regarding the ethical function; for Pater the aesthetic experience is a way of life, which enables man to use his intelligence intelligently for the betterment of himself and society; for Morgan the value of art is based on its capacity to enable man to imagine for himself; by unleashing his imagination, it enable him to see through the apparent diversities of reality, to the unity lying behind.
A slight difference in opinion also exists with regard to death. Morgan attributes slightly more positive features to the phenomenon, believing it to be an ecstasy·comparable to those of love and art, than Pater himself, who deals with the theme in Marius , with a sense of resigned acceptance, believing detachment from this world to be harder than Sparkenbroke.
In fact, although both heroes experience similar attitudes of complete receptivity in their final moments, Morgan and Pater come to different conclusions, reflected in their heroes' final thoughts. Sparkenbroke, we feel, has left the world far behind: his concentration is focused totally on his moment of transcendence and on his own individuality, devoid of any social reference, and hid thought, metaphysical in essence, are permeated by a deep sense of wonder. His outlook typifies the attitude of our ages, in literature, of concern for the individual and his fate and the idea of considering him the pivotal centre of action. By contrast, Marius' final thoughts regarding the new religion, and hishope for an improved future state of the world, are an indication of his anthropological idealism and reflect a Victorian outlook of concern for the oppressed.
Thus, if the conclusions of the two novels are compared, it can be seen that a change in focus has taken place; from focus on the mass of mankind and its future in Marius to focus on the death of one of its components in Sparkenbroke. As a consequence, we witness a lowering of the two heroes heroic capacities, which can be seen, if we compare Marius' slightly mock-heroic death, mistakenlybelieved by the peop1e around him to have been that of a martyr, with Sparkenbroke's very intimate and totally anti-heroic one, consumed in complete solitude, and indicative of the individual's complete isolation from his fellow men.
Yet Pater , too, as the character of Marius proves, had complete faith in the individual, even though, as Marius' final situation illustrates, he still tended to see him as part of a group. By contrast, Morgan takes this view of the importance of the individual even further, in that he considers him a unique,self-contained entity, whose liberty to think and act lies in the very fact of being different from all others; this view, if taken to an extreme, as Sparkenbroke's situation illustrate, can lead to self-centeredness and a breakdown in communication with other members of society.
Consequently, from the importance attributed by both authors to individuality, in fact theirs is almost exclusively a philosophy of individualism, it is impossib1e that either should be the advocate of any single doctrine. Pater's philosophical method, subsequently adopted by Morgan, that ofretaining bits and pieces from various doctrines, and recognizing them as milestones on the path of truth, ref1ects both his eclecticism and esotericism. Unlike Pater, who considers the doctrine of Chris.tianity as being of far greater revolutionary importance than all doctrines of the past, Morgan takes Pater's method to the extreme, as, in his view, no one single utopian doctrine exists which is superior to others: according to him, the individual imagination and each man'·s intelligent use of it,is paramount.
Yet, there can be no doubt that the roots of his ideas have their foundations in the Aesthetic Tradition and in Pater's contribution to it. This is indicative of Morgan's belief that the historical continuity, at the basis of the present,is a consequence of the past; indeed the present being built on the past, cannot be considered separated from it.(48). Consequently, both authors fall back upon their belief in the tradition of Classical literature and a brand of mystical idealism, which, as these two authors illustrate,re-emerging at various times in English literature, rarely fails to act as the creative source of inspiration behind original literary achievements.
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N.B. The following editions have been used in this article:
- W. Pater, Marius·the Epicurean, Everyman's Library, Dent, London, 1968, abbreviated M.
- C. Morgan, Sparkenbroke, The Albatross Modern Continental Library, Rome, 1949, abbreviated S.
l) H.H.Young, The Writings of Walter Pater, Lancaster·Press, Lancaster Pa., 1933. See chapter·"A Survey of British Thought from 1860-1890," pp.10-19.
(2) “Nessuno lo sapeva, seppur sembrava che la filosofia avesse sostituito la religione dato che le sue letture preferite erano Eraclito, Pitagora e Platone, Schelling e Hegel," W.Gaunt, L'avventura estetica, Einaudi,Torino, 1962, translated by Luciano Bianciardi, (p.52)
(3) H.Young, op.cit., p.18. For the influence of German idealism on the Aesthetic Movement, see footnote (18).
(4) "After the darkness and negation of universal war," wrote a correspondent of the Morning Postwho had visited Oxford, "there has come a Renaissance, a rebirth of every form of intellectual activity.” E.Lewis, "Charles Morgan: A Memoir,” Selected Letters of Charles Morgan, Ed. E.Lewis, Macmillan, London, 1967, (p.12)
(5) K.Dockhorn, “Charles Morgan und Hegel”,:in Englische Studien,74, 1940-41 pp.178-188.
(6) O.Delere, Metaphysik und Ethik in den Werken von Charles Morgan, Poeppinghaus, Bonn, 1939,pp.67-69.
(7) Letter to L.Bonnerot, 22nd January,1937,Selected Letters of C.Morgan, p.145.
(8) H.H.Young, op.cit.,p.19 .I Singer traces the origin of the Aesthetic Movement: "For·it was from post-Kantian German idealism <...> that the new theory of art derived its conception of beauty and aesthetic attitude <...> In its broad outlines <...> German aesthetics greatly resembled the institutionalistic aesthetics that went back as far as Plotinus'·modification of Plato's doctrine <...> German aesthetics, and to some extent all the aesthetics that preceded it, distinguished and contrasted two aspects in experience, two limits towards which experience might approximate <...> the world of practice <...> the world of aesthetic contemplation.” I.Singer, "The Aesthetics of 'Art for Art's'·Sake,'” Journal of Aesthetics, 12, 1953,(p.345).
(9) H.Jackson, The Eighteen-Nineties, London, 1913, republished by the Harvester Press, London, 1976,p.28.The Conclusion was in fact left out of the second edition of 1877, lest it should lead to further·'misinterpretation, on behalf of the young people who might happen to read it and re-introduced in the third edition of 1888, after having been slightly altered, in order to bring it closer to its intended meaning. “Nevertheless there was sufficient material in the revised edition to stimulate certain minds in a direction only very closely connected with the austere philosophy of sensation briefly referred to in The Renaissance and afterwards developed by Walter Pater under the idea of a “New Cyrenaicism·” in Marius, the Epicurean (1885) op.cit., p.59.
(10).W. Gaunt traces this development in Pater,which began with his detachment from Wilde and G.Moore, and subsequently developed into an appreciation of aestheticism and self-discipline (p.129). Moreover, “Pater sempre ritornava alla profondità del pensiero platonico - al suo concetto di un mondo indivisibile di bellezza assoluta <..> L'epicureismo di Wilde era per Pater insoddisfacente," op.cit, pp.161-2.
(11) Letter·to Hilda Morgan, 9th Sept.1933, Selected Letters of C.Morgan, p.114. See also footnote 42.
12) C.Morgan, Epitaph on George Moore, Macmillan, London, 1935, p.37.
(13) L.Bonnerot, "Essai sur le dernier roman de Charles Morgan: Sparkenbroke,” Etudes Angaises, 1 ,1937, p.194. Moreover, as the critic points out, Morgan also ensured the presence of other more 'earthly' characters, such as George Hardy and Lady Sparkenbroke, who act as necessary counter-weights to Sparkenbroke's esotericism and whose presence expands incident and plot, (p.198) whereas Pater condenses both idealistic and realistic aspects in one single character, that of Marius, making him “an anti-metaphysical metaphysic, " (p.81).
(14) Letter to Hilda Morgan, 16th Sept.1933, E.Lewis, op.cit., p.113. Inglesant refers·to J.H.Shorthouse's novel John Inglesant, Birmingham, 1880.
(15) L.Bonnerot, op.cit., p.194.
(16) L.Cazamian,"Sparkenbroke de Morgan, ”Etudes Anglaises, 19, 1966, pp.164-7.
(17) F.0livero, Il pensiero religioso, ed estetico di Pater, Soc. Editrice Internazionale, Turin, 1939. See pp.159-162, in which the author explains the appeal of Heraclitus of Ionia to Pater's mental character and traces the way in which modern metaphysical thought, from Bacon to Hegel, has expanded Heraclitean concepts.
(18) As a consequence of this philosophy, both characters are strongly aware of the reality of the present moment; Marius realizes that "...this present moment alone really is, between a past which has just ceased to be and a future which may never come...” (p.79-80), just as Sparkenbroke, using a more poetic and metaphysical language, declares that, ” as I understand it, the essence of being alive is the idea of oneself as swinging, imprisoned between an imagined past and a imagined future and in the knowledge of wings” ( p .147).
(19) Both characters' idealism springs from the influence exerted on them by literature in their youth, it playing an extremely active role in both characters' lives. It gives Sparkenbroke the necessary inspiration to compose his own works: “The imagining of a pen in his own hand touched with personal fire each word that he heard spoken,”(p.27), thus making him interpret reality according to his individual sensations. It encourages Marius to study the works of famous philosophers critically and promotes the development, in him, of an idealistic outlook on life (p.15).
(20) Analyzing Marvell's The Garden he says:”To reduce the world to a green thought in a green shade is still to be in the senses; the expectation, the dread of physical sight, physical feeling and hearing still continue in Marvell's leafiness. It isn't enough. It doesn't take you far enough or deep enough <...> It doesn't take you near enough ...(p.119). Morgan's hero believes there is, “the essential unity of all experience beneath the surface of sensation... (p.295). See footnote (359 for the origin of this idea.
(21) Marius realizes that, “to be occupied in this way, with the aesthetic with the aesthetic or imaginative side of things, is to be in real contact with those elements of his own nature <...> which, for him at least, are matter of the most real kind of apprehension. “ (p.155).
(22) A description of the 'aesthetic' psychology is given as follows: “In the world of practice <...> one used discursive reason in order to connect sensuous presentations that were given in 'immediate experience'<...> In the world of aesthetic contemplation, however, one attended so1e1y to immediate experience itself. Without the use of interpretation <...> one merely focused upon that which was given to sense." I.Singer, (op. cit.), (p.345).
(23) L. Bonnerot, op.cit., p.205.
(24) According to Morgan, one of the functions of art is revelation, and not merely creation: "Art does not create beauty;it reveals beauty, the universal, by making statues, stories , pictures which have the effect of lifting the darkness, as it were a curtain, from the glass through which man sees," C.Morgan, "A Defence of Story-Te1ling,”Life and Letters, July,1934,(p.21).
(25) Whilst contemplating the tomb of Ilaria del Carretto in the Duomo in Lucca, he experiences a moment of "... private communication <...> her silence had whispered in his ear <...>, Jacopo della Quercia <... > had created here a quality that transcended his design <...> The figure of this girl was of one, who having seen reality through blinded eyes and touched it beyond the senses had the genius to wait in the singleness of her expectation.” ( p.382).
(26) W.Gaunt writes that for Pater "La religione, come la virtù, era un capitolo di estetica," op.cit, ( p.58). It is interesting to compare Morgan's view of the connection between art and religion:"It therefore remains open to us, consistently with Plato in the Symposium and with Shelley in his Defence of Poetry, to recognize that the contemplative and poetic acts, though distinct and facing the one towards the earth and the other towards heaven, are complementary <...> art which acknowledges itself to be the communication of a central reality, an enablement of spiritua1 1ight to shine through appearances is, in essence, religion, whatever its apparent subject," C.Morgan; "Sanctity and Song.” Liberties of the Mind, Macmillan, London, 1951, (pp.251 -2).
(27) Morgan admits the existence, in his view, of a close correspondence between the artist and saint: "The poet's original conceptions come to him when, with the contemplative saint, he is looking upward towards the Absolute vision; his beginning to compose is his reversal, his turning back to earth in order tocommunicate with it,” C . Morgan, Liberties of the Mind, (p.250). See also footnote 8.
(28) Of Mary, Sparkenbroke feels: "She has the quality of absolution and renewal, whiçh are the miracle within the apparent nature of love," p.365, and “...she had for him a quality of redemption and release <...> a penetrative simplicity, a creative power to liberate by acceptance,”(p. 309).
(29)Despite unavoidable differences in temperament between the intellectual yet discontented, Marius, and the highly-st rung and romantic Lord Piers Sparkenbroke, both have an innate mysticism in common, of which they had been aware since childhood. Marius' mysticism is based on the old Italian religion of Numa, so that, "To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacred presences, demanding of him a similar collectedness“ (p.11), whereas Sparkenbroke's is based on the concept of Atman and Brahman, as expressed in the Upanishad:"he glowed in the nearness of a being, who, though it had neither features or shape had certain qualities indefinable except in human terms. It had two aspects perceived simultaneously. First, it was an intensification of Piers himself <... > this Being also had a second aspect. Piers felt that if ever he would be possessed by it, he would be possessed by all that is, as a detached flame becomes part of a conflagration or a raindrop loses its identity in the sea. (p.14)
(30) In this connection, the thematic backbone of the two novels, acting as their motivating force, can in fact be seen to be that of “the dualism between the practical and aesthetic aspects of experience, and between the understanding and the imagination...”I.Singer, op.cit., (p.354).
(31)“ What we cannot retain, however, is the belief that there is any inherent split between the imagination and the understanding, between the life of aesthetic contemplation and the life of practice <...>.The painter does not submit to the flow of sense experience; he categorizes it and rearranges it according to his own design,” I.Singer, op.cit., (p. 353).
(32) I.Singer, op.cit., (p. 354)
(33) Ibidem.
(34)See J.Bailey, " A Modern Platonist “, in TLS, 1st Sept., 1910, who illustrates how Marius' method of weighing up the pros and cons of each doctrine he studies, has its origin in one of the two classical traditions of Platonic dialectics, that of the balancing, measuring and questioning of the Platonic dialogues.
(35) "It is the function of art by its intensity to penetrate these incongruities , and to perceive some aspect of order in the chaos of living, some aspect of beauty in that order, some aspect of truth in that beauty, and so to distil experience that we are made partakers of its essence and are enabled to re-imagine it and to renew ourselves,” C,Morgan, The Artist in the Community, (W.Ker Memorial Lecture, Jackson, Glasgow, 1945, pp.29-30)
(36) More specifically Morgan comments: "The fertilizing power is not the subject, but the aesthetic passion which the author pours into it, and this aesthetic passion is expressed not in subject alone or in treatment alone, but in a harmony between them,” C. Morgan , The Artist in the Community, (p.26).
(37) "The purely material world, that close,impassable prison-wall, seemed just then the unreal thing, to be actually dissolving away all around him: and he felt a quiet hope, a quiet joy dawning faintly, in the dawning of this doctrine upon him as a really credible opinion... Must not all that remained of 1ife be but a search for the equivalent of that Ideal, among so-called actual things - a gathering together of every trace or token of it , which his actual experience might present?” M,(p.180-1).
(38)I.Singer, op.cit.p.352.
(39)I.Singer, op.cit.p.358.
(40)W.Gaunt,op.cit, p.225.
(41) “...the actual conditions of our life being as they are, and in the capacity for suffering so large a principle in things <...> it follows that the practical and the effective difference between men will lie in their power of insight into those conditions, their power of sympathy. The future will be with those who have most of it <...> In the mere clinging of human creatures to each other, nay! In one's own solitary self-pity,amid the effects even of what might appear irredeemable loss, I seem to touch the eternal,” (p.244)
42) And further :” The value of art is that it fluidifies the imagination. This idea has it every way...After that the river·flows on to God or Devil. The artist can't imagine for another man. He can only enable him to imagine for himself. This is the link between Art and Religion. This is the DIONYSIAC principle of release. This is the Aristotelian principle of catharsis. This is the whole teaching of Jesus. It fits everywhere," Letter to Hilda Morgan, 19th Sept., 1933, Selected Letters of C.Morgan, (pp.114-59). Morgan develops this concept more fully in a later essay:"Under the spell of art <...> there is inter-penetration of individuality, of time, of place <... > earthbound man liberated from the chains of partial judgment and from the chains of close appearance. Like a bird released from a cage, he soars and sees truth in new aspects <...> he has been a liberated spirit <...> in all life's embittered divisions <...> Art has planted in him a seed from which his own imagination shall spring,” The Artist in the Community(pp. 21-2).
(43) And also "They think that a man with a will to die is gloomy and neurotic <....> It is not so. He is the more sensitive to life <...> because, like Shelley, he is aware of ecstasies beyond the senses,” S, (p.315).
(44) In addition, Sparkenbroke attributes an ecstatic value to death, equal to that existing in art and love, for "These are his three ecstasies, his three deaths to this world that free him from the living death of the body; and, except the devil corrupt them or folly pervert them, they are one death and one life, one transcendence or ecstasy, the reconciliation of suffering and joy.” (pp.125-26)
(45) Marius saves Cornelius' life, after which circumstances cause him to fall ill and die:
At last the great, the critical moment comes, easily, almost unconsciously <...> He had delivered his brother, after the manner he had sometimes vaguely anticipated as a kind of distinction in his destiny...”(p.260). Sparkenbroke refuses to influence Mary's decision-making, regarding her planned elopement with him in any way; thus, in accordance with his notion of loss, he renounces her “not in distress or for refuge as he had in the past, but with a sense of having outgrown even this that had been his necessity, for the life from which the necessity had sprung was itself receding from him. It had already so far receded that though the wood, the stream, the cottage itself, were deeply familiar and beloved, he felt no melancholy in departing from them. (p.125-6)
(46) Indeed Marius looks back upon his life and not forward like Sparkenbroke, into the unknown, his conscience justifying the idealism, which had marked his whole life: "Revelation, vision, the discovery of a vision, the seeing of a perfect humanity, in a perfect world – through all his alterations of mind, by some dominant instinct <...> he had always set that above the having or even the doing, of anything (p.263)
(47) "I drift from book to book, clinging only to what is of immediate value to myself and letting the rest go.” Letters to L.Bonnerot, 22nd January, 1937. Selected Letters of C.Morgan, p.146.
(48) “.... the continuity of history <...> consists in a series of rebirths; mankind renews itself by the natural process of regeneration from father to son <...> There have been revolutions which, though accompanied by violence, have been part of the process of breeding, but the violence has never been the essential and fruitful part of them. Nothing new and enduring comes except out of the old by unbroken inheritance.” C.Morgan, The Empty Room, Macmillan, London, 1941, p.34.
An important review of Sparkenbroke
We have obtained a copy of the first major American review of Sparkenbroke, in the New Yori Times Book Review of April 19, 1936. It occupies the entire front page of the issue, with as illustration a portrait bust of CM by Gordon Alchin -- of which, and of whom, more later. Here is Percy Hutchison's review, not unintelligent if poorly written:
A NEW NOVEL BY CHARLES MORGAN
“Sparkenbroke” Shows a Notable Increase in Imaginative Power
SPARKENBROKE. By Charles Morgan.
551 pp. New York: The Macmillan Company. $2.75.
By PERCY HUTCHISON
Mr. Morgan’s first novel since “The Fountain” was published four years ago shows a notable increase in subtlety, in psychological penetration and in imaginative power. And this in spite of the fact that the earlier book was in these respects notable. Couched for the most part in the poetic prose of which Mr. Morgan has shown himself a master, the poetic effect of the whole is further enhanced by the interpolation (not too frequent) of “excerpts” from the poetry of Piers, Lord Sparkenbroke, the central figure of the story.
It is by design, not chance, that his creator has made Piers a poet. For the novel, however intensely human in lot-interest, however romantic in parts, is primarily intellectual in conception and approach. Basically, “Sparkenbroke” is the analytical portrayal, projected objectively, of a man of super-endowed imagination. And where else than among the artists could Mr. Morgan have found the type the theme of his story called for? Whether Mr. Morgan took Lord Byron for a model one cannot say. There is much to suggest it. But if the model for Piers does happen to have been Byron, it is a Byron intellectualized and spiritualized by a fusion with Shelley. Mr. Morgan’s Piers Sparkenbroke is a piece of character-drawing conceived in understanding and carefully drawn. It is because Piers, poet and philosopher, is drawn with even greater psychological refinement than was Lewis Alison, soldier and philosopher, in “The Fountain,” that the new book gains so much in subtlety.
There are two great legends of antiquity which never pale, and for the reason that each reproduces itself in every succeeding generation. They are the legend of Don Juan and the story of Tristan and Iseult. Piers is a twentieth-century mutation of the first. And the poetic work on which he is supposedly engaged is a twentieth-century embodiment of the second. Also, Mr. Morgan’s story of Piers Sparkenbroke and his involvement with Mary Hardy is a Tristan-Iseult story. And by repeatedly passing back and forth between his own modern fabrication and the ancient tale he achieves nuances of thought and of emotional effect, achieves an illumination he could not otherwise have obtained.
It is a matter of regret that, after four years, Mr. Morgan should not have mastered the difficulties of getting a novel under way. But if a reader finds himself perplexed or annoyed by the book’s initial shufflings between generation and generation, between place and place, the novelist’s picture of sensitive and brooding childhood, as exemplified by the 12-year-old Piers, is sufficiently indelible to at least palliate structural faults. What apocalyptic vision burst upon the boy during the trance which came upon him when he was accidentally imprisoned in the Sparkenbroke tomb, Mr. Morgan wisely refrains from specifying. But he suggests with sufficient clearness the lasting effect on the lad’s mind of that uncanny contact with cold death. As time goes on and Piers moves into adult years, and finds himself an accepted poet, more and more do art and death, in their finality, seem to him mutually to encompass ultimate perfection. For the more hearty reader, he who insists on the zest of life, there may be a touch of morbidity here. But it is in its delicate interweaving of death and art and life that the sharply arresting impact of “Sparkenbroke” largely lies.
After the opening, preparatory chapters on Piers as a boy, the book makes a twenty-year jump. Through the death of his half-brother in the war, Piers has succeeded to the title and the heavily-mortgaged estate. He has married the stolid and wealthy Etty Kaid. He has a son, Richard, 6 years old. Neither the boy nor the mother counts largely in the story. Etty cannot understand the imaginative growth of her husband, the emotional changes which have taken place in him. She can only perceive that in some way she has failed him. But she remains a dignifies, if shadowy, figure to the end. But a pathetic figure also.
Having called “Sparkenbroke” a Tristan-Iseult story it is scarcely necessary to say that in plot it explores that triangle which has come to be regarded as eternal. Strictly speaking, of course, the involvement in the Cornish tale was actually not triple but four-fold. For there was also that other Iseult—Iseult of Brittany, Iseult of the White Hands. And in “Sparkenbroke” it is also a four-fold entanglement if we are willing to regard Etty as Iseult of the White Hands. Who, then, in this novel, is the Irish Iseult? For it is evident that Mr. Morgan desires that the parallel should be pursued. And who is the wronged King Mark? Mary Hardy is the first; she had been Mary Leward. And her husband, George Hardy, who, as competent country doctor has traveled far from the ferocious Mark, must be looked upon as the second.
When Mary is introduced upon the scene she is a girl of 18, moderately beautiful, of slumbering passions, alert and curious as to what the future may have in store. Mary, be it said, Mr. Morgan has fully limned. Her father is an aging pensioner who is happy at the thought that he has engineered an engagement between his child and the son of a wealthy fried of his schoolboy days. Peter’s sole interest, however, is cricket. He is “likely for Kent.” In this fling at English complacency in sport-as-an-end-in-itself one sees all the disillusionment which Morgan brought back from the war. And undeniably there is something of this same disillusionment hanging over the book, as it hangs, whether for better or worse, over so much of modern fiction.
Peter, however, a puppet, just as George Hardy is to prove—too much—Mr. Morgan’s puppet, has a purpose of the author to fulfill. Mary’s father had promoted the match—which she eventually dissolves—to secure financial security for her. She, after one devastating encounter with Piers, turns to George for emotional security. The novel may seem to some, therefore, a but thesis-ridden. But so was another great English romantic novel of love which “Sparkenbroke” inevitably suggests—George Meredith’s “Richard Feverel.” The chance encounter between Mary and Piers in Derry’s Wood, when Mary has lost her way, is only less lyric than that immortal scene between Richard and Lucy above the weir:
Away to the left she heard the trickle of water, the brush of leaves and the low crackle of twigs. * * * She followed the stream’s
curve, wondering if there were not some approach by which she might come nearer to the water and allow it to run over her hand.
She saw no such approach, and was searching for it, with the enchantment of ripples dancing in her mind, when she became
aware she was not alone * * * As he came toward her a little breeze turned the leaves above him, and out of the leaves golden
disks of sunlight were shaken down upon his head and shoulders and about his feet.
We have not followed the various episodes of the novel, but we have shown its general tenor. And we shall not betray the story’s close. Some, on reaching it, may consider that Mr. Morgan has been compelled to call in the deus ex machina, of honorable usage, to his aid in cutting a Gordian knot. But whether or no, he has, through his high imagining, brought to us a spiritual rendering of a dilemma as old as the world. If he has not solved the dilemma it is because it is insoluble. Perhaps King Mark was to be envied! In his swift despatch of Tristan he at least eased his own torture. It is only through philosophic calm that George Hardy can ease his.
“Sparkenbroke” soars far above the level of our humdrum lives. At a time when civilization has lost so many of the props on which it formerly relied, has revised so many of its established mores, Mr. Morgan brings, if not a final reading of life, at least a fresh reading. To be sure there is tragedy for some in “Sparkenbroke.” But the novel is spiritually conceived and, take it all in all, spiritually executed. Not a masterpiece, because too many of the characters are too dimply drawn, and because in the writing, however inspired in parts, there is lacking the great clarity of vision and of execution which is the imprimatur of supreme literary art, it is, nevertheless, a masterly novel.”
~~~~~~~
Some useful titles for the study of Morgan's work and reputation
Our friend Jacqueline Thibault Schaefer from Tennessee has sent us a collection of offprints and photocopies of articles concerning CM, in French, German and (a few in) English. Eventually these will be sent to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, to join the large archive Roger Morgan sent them last year; but meanwhile it seemed useful to print here a brief bibliography of them. Anyone who would like a copy of any of these items (excepting theses and other book-length ones) is welcome to e-mail the Webmaster with a mailing address. At least one of them I hope to reprint here on the website.
A BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MORGAN-RELATED DOCUMENTS FROM JACQUELINE THIBAULT SCHAEFER’S COLLECTION, RECEIVED IN APRIL 2018
FRENCH
1. Bonnerot, Louis, “Essai sur les romans de M. Charles Morgan”, Revue anglo-américaine 10 (Paris, 1932), 123-136.
2. Bonnerot, Louis, “Essai sur le dernier roman de Charles Morgan: ‘Sparkenbroke’”, Êtudes anglaises, Paris, January 1937, 193-209.
3. Bonnerot, Louis, “Charles Morgan et la France” < Mercure de France, tr. as “Charles Morgan and France”, Hibbert Journal XLVIII (Oct. 1944-July 1950), pp. 23-32.
4. Cazamian, Louis, “Les livres anglais: Sparkenbroke’ de Charles Morgan” (1936), in Etudes anglaises 19 (1966), 161-167.
5. Chastaing, Maxime, ”L’imagination chez Charles Morgan”, Vie intellectuelle, 25 (April 1934)(Paris), 295-311.
6. Du Bos, Charles, “Fontaine” in Approximations, VIme série (Paris: Corréa, 1934), 399-447.
7. Du Pange, Victor, Charles Morgan, Classiqes du XXme siècle (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1962) [complete photocopy]
8. Engel, Claire-Eliane, “Charles Morgan”, Profils anglais (Neûchatel, 1946), 13-41.
9. Engel, Eliane, “Charles Morgan, romancier”, Nouvelles littéraires 7 April 1934, p. 8.
10. Frank, André, “Le Voyage”, Nouvelles littéraires 21 February 1946, p. 6.
11. Gérard, Albert, “Charles Morgan et l’amour”, Tijdschrift voor levende talen 9 (1943), 12-17.
12. Gérard, Albert, “Le thème de la mort dans l’œuvre de Charles Morgan”, Tijdschrift voor levende talen 9 (1943), 58-59.
13. Giffard, Hugh, “The Writer and the Naturalist” preceded by “Hommage à Charles Morgan”, Etudes anglaises XXIII:1 janvier-mars 1970, 1-5. [NB: this was a CM commemorative volume of the journal; HG was the model for Ballater]
14. Gillet, Louis, “Un romancier anglais: M. Charles Morgan” Revue des Deux Mondes 1 July 1933, 203-214.
15. Gillet, Louis, “Le singulier voyage de M. Charles Morgan”, Revue des Deux Mondes 15 April 1942, 211-219 [review of The Voyage[
16. Hourcade, Pierre, “Charles Morgan et le roman de la connaissance spirituelle” Cahiers du Sud 21 (1934), 475-484.
17. Jaloux, Edmond, “Fontaine, par Charles Morgan”, Nouvelles littéraires 24 April 1934, p. 3. [review]
18. Lacher, Walter, L’amour et le divin: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Anna de Noailles, David-Herbert Lawrence, Charles Morgan (Paris: Perret-Gentil, 1961), 103-152.
19. Lefèvre, Frédéric, “Une heure avec Charles Morgan”, Nouvelles littéraires 23 June 1934, p. 6.
20. Lessort, Paul-André, “Charles Morgan et l’unité de l’esprit”, Cahiers du Sud 29:2
(1942), 55-62.
21. Madariaga, Salvador de, “Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Charles Morgan (1894-1958)”, Institut de France, Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 13 June 1960 (Paris: Institut de France, 1960) [Official tribute by his successor in the Academy]
22. Madaule, Jacques, “Charles Morgan ou la recherche du paradis perdu”, Esprit 1 (Paris, June 1939) 374-395.
23. Magny, Claude-Edmonde, “Charles Morgan [+ intro]”, Les sandales d’Empédocle: essai sur les limites de la littérature, Etre et Penser: Cahiers de la Philiosophie 11 (August 1945)(Neuchâtel: Ed. de la Baconnière), 14-40, 41-103, 276-281.
24. Michel-Cote, P., “Sparkenbroke, ou le ‘climat’ de la pensée anglaise, Revue hebdomadaire 30 April 1938 (Paris) 543-559.
25. Pugh-Puis, Claude, “Visite à Ballater” Etudes anglaises XXIII:1, January 1970, 6-17 [NB: see no. 11, above]
26. Raimond, Jean, “Mysticisme et romantisme dans l’œuvre romanesque de Charles Morgan” in Aspects du romantisme anglais: mélanges offerts à Jacques Blondel, Centre du romantisme anglais, université de Clermont II (Paris: Bordessoules, 1980), 337-400.
27. Raimond, Jean, “La fuite devant l’autre et le culte du moi dans la poétique de Charles Morgan” in L’autre dans la sensibilité anglo-saxonne (Reims: Presses universitaires, 1983), 93-106.
28. Raimond, Jean, “”Récit et philosophie dans deux romans de Charles Morgan: ‘The Fountain’ et ‘Sparkenbroke’” in Du verbe au geste: mélanges Pierre Danchin (Nancy: Presses universitaires, 1986), 251-260.
29. Simon, Pierre-Henri, “Autour de ‘Sparkenbroke’”, Vie intellectuelle 25 (April 1939), 280-299.
30. Wieder, Robert, “Les lettres de Morgan”, Etudes anglaises XXX:1 (January 1970), 19-22. [See no. 11, above; review of Eiluned Lewis]
GERMAN
1. Brie, Friedrich, “Der englische Künstlerroman (Sparkenbroke von Charles Morgan)”, Geistige Arbeit 5 (Berlin, 1938), 7-9. [Review of Sparkenbroke]
2. Brie, Friedrich, “Charles Morgans jüngste Entwicklung (‘The Voyage’ 1936-1940)”, Mitteilungen über englische Sprache und Literatur und über englishen Unterricht 2, Anglia Beiblatt 53 (1942), 122-130.
3. Dockhorn, Klaus, “Charles Morgan und Hegel”, Englische Studien 74 (1940/41), 168-188.
4. Effelberger, Hans, “Der literarische Esoteriker Charles Morgan”, Die neueren Sprachen , n.F. 1(1955), 220-224.
5. Fehr, Bernhard, “Sparkenbroke und die platonische Idee in England”, Die Tatwelt 13 (Berlin, 1937), 171-178.
6. Fischer, Walther, “Zu Charles Morgans künstlerischer Entwicklung”, Forschungen und Fortschritte, 26:1/2 (January 1950), 16-18.
7. Funke, Otto, “Charles Morgan und sein Romanwerk (1944)”, Wege und Ziele (Bern, 1945) 75-96.
8. Lerch, Emil, “Charles Morgan”, Jahrbuch des Verbandes der Renaissance-Gesellschaften (Basel, 1938), 43-70.
9. Papajewski, Helmut, Das Problem der Wirklichkeit by Charles Morgan, Neue Deutsche Forschungen, Abt. Englische Philologie (Berlin, Junker u. Dünnhaupt, 1940).
10. Pintschovius, Karl, “Menschliche Atmosphäre: Gedanken zu Charles Morgans Romanen”, Die neue Rundschau 49 (1938), 89-104.
11. Riesner, Dieter, “Charles Morgan: ‘Portrait in a Mirror’” in Oppel, Hans (ed.), Der moderne englische Roman: Interpretationen (Berlin, 1965), 222-244.
12. Viebrock, H., “Die Bedeutung der Einbildingskraft bei Charles Morgan”, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 31 (1943), 184-103.
ËNGLISH
1. Clark, B.H. & G. Freedly (eds.), A History of Modern Drama (NY/London: D. Appleton-Century, 1947), p. 197 [brief mention of The Flashing Stream]
2. John, S.B., “The Mirror of the Stage: Vichy France and Foreign Drama” in Literature and Society: Studies in 19th and 20th Century French Literature presented to R.J. North, ed. C.A. Burns (Birmingham UP, 1980), 200-213 [partially on River Line]
3. Painting, David, “Charles Morgan: A Revaluation”, The Anglo-Welsh Review 18: xii (1970), 90-94.
4. Priestley, J.B., “Morgan in a Mirror”, New Statesman 16 July 1960, p. 92.
5. Reid, Donald G.M., Charles Morgan, Novelist: Preliminary Studies [thesis](Dalhousie University, 1981).
6. Saliba, Mona, “Love, Contemplation and Death: the Imaginative Ideal in the Writings of Charles Morgan” [essay] (University of the South, 1981-2)
ITALIAN
1. Palazzani, Nadia, “Charles Morgan’s Novels of Ideas”, Annali VI, Istituto universitario di Lingue Moderne, Feltre (Ravenna: Longo, 1990), 219-243.
THESES
1. Delere, Otto, Metaphysik und Ethik in den Werken von Charles Morgan (Bonn, 1939)
2. Hoffmann, Anna, Die Frauengestalten in den Romanen von Charles Morgan (Tübingen, 1950)
3. Iklé, Charlotte, Individualität und Transzendenz bei Charles Morgan (Zurich, 1961)
4. Kirchner, Gerda, Die Grundideen in Charles Morgans Werken (Innsbruck 1949)
5. Riesner, Dieter, Studien des Bildhaftigkeit in Charles Morgans Prosakunst (Berlin, Freie U, 1953)
6. Schürkes, Claire, Kunst-Liebe-Tod: die drei Wege zur Transzendenz bei Charles Morgan (Marburg, 1941)
7. [? no name, no title-page: typed thesis in English]
Our friend Jacqueline Thibault Schaefer from Tennessee has sent us a collection of offprints and photocopies of articles concerning CM, in French, German and (a few in) English. Eventually these will be sent to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, to join the large archive Roger Morgan sent them last year; but meanwhile it seemed useful to print here a brief bibliography of them. Anyone who would like a copy of any of these items (excepting theses and other book-length ones) is welcome to e-mail the Webmaster with a mailing address. At least one of them I hope to reprint here on the website.
A BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MORGAN-RELATED DOCUMENTS FROM JACQUELINE THIBAULT SCHAEFER’S COLLECTION, RECEIVED IN APRIL 2018
FRENCH
1. Bonnerot, Louis, “Essai sur les romans de M. Charles Morgan”, Revue anglo-américaine 10 (Paris, 1932), 123-136.
2. Bonnerot, Louis, “Essai sur le dernier roman de Charles Morgan: ‘Sparkenbroke’”, Êtudes anglaises, Paris, January 1937, 193-209.
3. Bonnerot, Louis, “Charles Morgan et la France” < Mercure de France, tr. as “Charles Morgan and France”, Hibbert Journal XLVIII (Oct. 1944-July 1950), pp. 23-32.
4. Cazamian, Louis, “Les livres anglais: Sparkenbroke’ de Charles Morgan” (1936), in Etudes anglaises 19 (1966), 161-167.
5. Chastaing, Maxime, ”L’imagination chez Charles Morgan”, Vie intellectuelle, 25 (April 1934)(Paris), 295-311.
6. Du Bos, Charles, “Fontaine” in Approximations, VIme série (Paris: Corréa, 1934), 399-447.
7. Du Pange, Victor, Charles Morgan, Classiqes du XXme siècle (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1962) [complete photocopy]
8. Engel, Claire-Eliane, “Charles Morgan”, Profils anglais (Neûchatel, 1946), 13-41.
9. Engel, Eliane, “Charles Morgan, romancier”, Nouvelles littéraires 7 April 1934, p. 8.
10. Frank, André, “Le Voyage”, Nouvelles littéraires 21 February 1946, p. 6.
11. Gérard, Albert, “Charles Morgan et l’amour”, Tijdschrift voor levende talen 9 (1943), 12-17.
12. Gérard, Albert, “Le thème de la mort dans l’œuvre de Charles Morgan”, Tijdschrift voor levende talen 9 (1943), 58-59.
13. Giffard, Hugh, “The Writer and the Naturalist” preceded by “Hommage à Charles Morgan”, Etudes anglaises XXIII:1 janvier-mars 1970, 1-5. [NB: this was a CM commemorative volume of the journal; HG was the model for Ballater]
14. Gillet, Louis, “Un romancier anglais: M. Charles Morgan” Revue des Deux Mondes 1 July 1933, 203-214.
15. Gillet, Louis, “Le singulier voyage de M. Charles Morgan”, Revue des Deux Mondes 15 April 1942, 211-219 [review of The Voyage[
16. Hourcade, Pierre, “Charles Morgan et le roman de la connaissance spirituelle” Cahiers du Sud 21 (1934), 475-484.
17. Jaloux, Edmond, “Fontaine, par Charles Morgan”, Nouvelles littéraires 24 April 1934, p. 3. [review]
18. Lacher, Walter, L’amour et le divin: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Anna de Noailles, David-Herbert Lawrence, Charles Morgan (Paris: Perret-Gentil, 1961), 103-152.
19. Lefèvre, Frédéric, “Une heure avec Charles Morgan”, Nouvelles littéraires 23 June 1934, p. 6.
20. Lessort, Paul-André, “Charles Morgan et l’unité de l’esprit”, Cahiers du Sud 29:2
(1942), 55-62.
21. Madariaga, Salvador de, “Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Charles Morgan (1894-1958)”, Institut de France, Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 13 June 1960 (Paris: Institut de France, 1960) [Official tribute by his successor in the Academy]
22. Madaule, Jacques, “Charles Morgan ou la recherche du paradis perdu”, Esprit 1 (Paris, June 1939) 374-395.
23. Magny, Claude-Edmonde, “Charles Morgan [+ intro]”, Les sandales d’Empédocle: essai sur les limites de la littérature, Etre et Penser: Cahiers de la Philiosophie 11 (August 1945)(Neuchâtel: Ed. de la Baconnière), 14-40, 41-103, 276-281.
24. Michel-Cote, P., “Sparkenbroke, ou le ‘climat’ de la pensée anglaise, Revue hebdomadaire 30 April 1938 (Paris) 543-559.
25. Pugh-Puis, Claude, “Visite à Ballater” Etudes anglaises XXIII:1, January 1970, 6-17 [NB: see no. 11, above]
26. Raimond, Jean, “Mysticisme et romantisme dans l’œuvre romanesque de Charles Morgan” in Aspects du romantisme anglais: mélanges offerts à Jacques Blondel, Centre du romantisme anglais, université de Clermont II (Paris: Bordessoules, 1980), 337-400.
27. Raimond, Jean, “La fuite devant l’autre et le culte du moi dans la poétique de Charles Morgan” in L’autre dans la sensibilité anglo-saxonne (Reims: Presses universitaires, 1983), 93-106.
28. Raimond, Jean, “”Récit et philosophie dans deux romans de Charles Morgan: ‘The Fountain’ et ‘Sparkenbroke’” in Du verbe au geste: mélanges Pierre Danchin (Nancy: Presses universitaires, 1986), 251-260.
29. Simon, Pierre-Henri, “Autour de ‘Sparkenbroke’”, Vie intellectuelle 25 (April 1939), 280-299.
30. Wieder, Robert, “Les lettres de Morgan”, Etudes anglaises XXX:1 (January 1970), 19-22. [See no. 11, above; review of Eiluned Lewis]
GERMAN
1. Brie, Friedrich, “Der englische Künstlerroman (Sparkenbroke von Charles Morgan)”, Geistige Arbeit 5 (Berlin, 1938), 7-9. [Review of Sparkenbroke]
2. Brie, Friedrich, “Charles Morgans jüngste Entwicklung (‘The Voyage’ 1936-1940)”, Mitteilungen über englische Sprache und Literatur und über englishen Unterricht 2, Anglia Beiblatt 53 (1942), 122-130.
3. Dockhorn, Klaus, “Charles Morgan und Hegel”, Englische Studien 74 (1940/41), 168-188.
4. Effelberger, Hans, “Der literarische Esoteriker Charles Morgan”, Die neueren Sprachen , n.F. 1(1955), 220-224.
5. Fehr, Bernhard, “Sparkenbroke und die platonische Idee in England”, Die Tatwelt 13 (Berlin, 1937), 171-178.
6. Fischer, Walther, “Zu Charles Morgans künstlerischer Entwicklung”, Forschungen und Fortschritte, 26:1/2 (January 1950), 16-18.
7. Funke, Otto, “Charles Morgan und sein Romanwerk (1944)”, Wege und Ziele (Bern, 1945) 75-96.
8. Lerch, Emil, “Charles Morgan”, Jahrbuch des Verbandes der Renaissance-Gesellschaften (Basel, 1938), 43-70.
9. Papajewski, Helmut, Das Problem der Wirklichkeit by Charles Morgan, Neue Deutsche Forschungen, Abt. Englische Philologie (Berlin, Junker u. Dünnhaupt, 1940).
10. Pintschovius, Karl, “Menschliche Atmosphäre: Gedanken zu Charles Morgans Romanen”, Die neue Rundschau 49 (1938), 89-104.
11. Riesner, Dieter, “Charles Morgan: ‘Portrait in a Mirror’” in Oppel, Hans (ed.), Der moderne englische Roman: Interpretationen (Berlin, 1965), 222-244.
12. Viebrock, H., “Die Bedeutung der Einbildingskraft bei Charles Morgan”, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 31 (1943), 184-103.
ËNGLISH
1. Clark, B.H. & G. Freedly (eds.), A History of Modern Drama (NY/London: D. Appleton-Century, 1947), p. 197 [brief mention of The Flashing Stream]
2. John, S.B., “The Mirror of the Stage: Vichy France and Foreign Drama” in Literature and Society: Studies in 19th and 20th Century French Literature presented to R.J. North, ed. C.A. Burns (Birmingham UP, 1980), 200-213 [partially on River Line]
3. Painting, David, “Charles Morgan: A Revaluation”, The Anglo-Welsh Review 18: xii (1970), 90-94.
4. Priestley, J.B., “Morgan in a Mirror”, New Statesman 16 July 1960, p. 92.
5. Reid, Donald G.M., Charles Morgan, Novelist: Preliminary Studies [thesis](Dalhousie University, 1981).
6. Saliba, Mona, “Love, Contemplation and Death: the Imaginative Ideal in the Writings of Charles Morgan” [essay] (University of the South, 1981-2)
ITALIAN
1. Palazzani, Nadia, “Charles Morgan’s Novels of Ideas”, Annali VI, Istituto universitario di Lingue Moderne, Feltre (Ravenna: Longo, 1990), 219-243.
THESES
1. Delere, Otto, Metaphysik und Ethik in den Werken von Charles Morgan (Bonn, 1939)
2. Hoffmann, Anna, Die Frauengestalten in den Romanen von Charles Morgan (Tübingen, 1950)
3. Iklé, Charlotte, Individualität und Transzendenz bei Charles Morgan (Zurich, 1961)
4. Kirchner, Gerda, Die Grundideen in Charles Morgans Werken (Innsbruck 1949)
5. Riesner, Dieter, Studien des Bildhaftigkeit in Charles Morgans Prosakunst (Berlin, Freie U, 1953)
6. Schürkes, Claire, Kunst-Liebe-Tod: die drei Wege zur Transzendenz bei Charles Morgan (Marburg, 1941)
7. [? no name, no title-page: typed thesis in English]
A rare appreciation of Morgan's poetry
Morgan's poetry -- capably edited by Peter Holland a few years ago -- has never received much critical attention. So it was with considerable pleasure that we came upon an article about it in The Poetry Review vol. XXXVII no. 1 of April 1946. And we are pleased to publish a scan of it here. Aneurin Rhys, the author, is still a mystery: if anyone has any information about him, please e-mail the Webmaster.
Morgan's poetry -- capably edited by Peter Holland a few years ago -- has never received much critical attention. So it was with considerable pleasure that we came upon an article about it in The Poetry Review vol. XXXVII no. 1 of April 1946. And we are pleased to publish a scan of it here. Aneurin Rhys, the author, is still a mystery: if anyone has any information about him, please e-mail the Webmaster.
A remarkable study of Sparkenbroke
Here is the text of a remarkable presentation by Jacqueline Thibault Schaefer, Professor Emeritus of the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, given in 1979 at the IXth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association in Innsbruck, Austria. We reproduce it here with Professor Schaefer's kind permission.
A portrait of Barbet?
Looking at Jacques and Germaine Delamain, to whom The Voyage was dedicated (Germaine was CM's French translator), I came across this description of Jacques by his brother-in-law, the novelist Jacques Chardonne; as I read it there grew before my mind's eye an almost perfect picture of Barbet Hazard, The Voyage's protagonist.
Jacques Delamain was a great artist in prose, when he described what he loved: the bird, so rapid in movement, so manifold in its colours, its habits, and almost ungraspable. He was not a born writer, but an accidental one. Suddenly, to express what was his passion and as it were his life’s obsession, he acquired a virtuoso style, a perfect line, infinitely subtle and varied, without overdoing it, without the slightest affectation in the writing; a spare style full of nuance, with extraordinary resources.
At a very early age he settled in the Branderaie de Garde Epée, near Jarnac; he lived in this bocage, his true domain, even spiritualy speaking; there, there was everything he loved and that he never exhausted, in spite of such closeness to the things that were to his taste and of great learning.
He was not close to people, and even avoided friendship; he was unambitious in the outside world, and was at ease only with the English, who talk little; he was British in complexion, not through heredity, very different from his French neighbours. I have known Frenchmen who were Hindus, Northerners, Spaniards. Strangers to their community to the depths of their being, they retreat into a solitude denser than the ordinary withdrawal of men, [and] the result created by such isolation often takes an original form. Doubtless the timidity toward people opened up for him the path that led to nature, refining his native ability to perceive what is hidden from the rest of us. The English also are good observers of nature: she is their best company.
In his retired life he shone, linked at a distance with many friends, always fundamentally generous. He was scrupulous in everything, effortlessly, with a perfect moral elegance; in his business, in his smallest actions, in his way of living, secretly musical, so quick to see what no one else notices, and with no other ambition than to be faithful.
His indifference to the normal attractions of society and to the common desires was in no way aggressive or presumptuous; wisdom was his natural bent. Amid the flowers that were his perpetual delight, naval binoculars always to hand, observing around him the life that interested him, he created his own universe, well rooted in the earth; I do not believe there was room in it for great problems, for any disquiet, nor for dangerous certainties, more disturbing than doubt.
A certain way of living, thoughtful and noble, protects one from many cares, and even lets one depart in peace; one is prepared for any eventuality.
Jacques Chardonne (tr. Roger Kuin)
Jacques Delamain was a great artist in prose, when he described what he loved: the bird, so rapid in movement, so manifold in its colours, its habits, and almost ungraspable. He was not a born writer, but an accidental one. Suddenly, to express what was his passion and as it were his life’s obsession, he acquired a virtuoso style, a perfect line, infinitely subtle and varied, without overdoing it, without the slightest affectation in the writing; a spare style full of nuance, with extraordinary resources.
At a very early age he settled in the Branderaie de Garde Epée, near Jarnac; he lived in this bocage, his true domain, even spiritualy speaking; there, there was everything he loved and that he never exhausted, in spite of such closeness to the things that were to his taste and of great learning.
He was not close to people, and even avoided friendship; he was unambitious in the outside world, and was at ease only with the English, who talk little; he was British in complexion, not through heredity, very different from his French neighbours. I have known Frenchmen who were Hindus, Northerners, Spaniards. Strangers to their community to the depths of their being, they retreat into a solitude denser than the ordinary withdrawal of men, [and] the result created by such isolation often takes an original form. Doubtless the timidity toward people opened up for him the path that led to nature, refining his native ability to perceive what is hidden from the rest of us. The English also are good observers of nature: she is their best company.
In his retired life he shone, linked at a distance with many friends, always fundamentally generous. He was scrupulous in everything, effortlessly, with a perfect moral elegance; in his business, in his smallest actions, in his way of living, secretly musical, so quick to see what no one else notices, and with no other ambition than to be faithful.
His indifference to the normal attractions of society and to the common desires was in no way aggressive or presumptuous; wisdom was his natural bent. Amid the flowers that were his perpetual delight, naval binoculars always to hand, observing around him the life that interested him, he created his own universe, well rooted in the earth; I do not believe there was room in it for great problems, for any disquiet, nor for dangerous certainties, more disturbing than doubt.
A certain way of living, thoughtful and noble, protects one from many cares, and even lets one depart in peace; one is prepared for any eventuality.
Jacques Chardonne (tr. Roger Kuin)
Paul Valéry's Preface to The Voyage
The great French poet Paul Valéry’s Preface to the first French edition of The Voyage, published by Stock, Paris, in 1946. Interestingly, he had not at this time read the book, but such was Stock’s haste to get it into print, and such his admiration for Morgan and his previous work, that this Preface was written and printed anyway – and it is a fine (and exceedingly French) assessment.
I do not believe that, in theory at least, it is possible for a poet – at least for a poet who has never attempted a novel – to say anything whatever about that art that will not seem either utterly naïve or fundamentally malicious. The reason for this, if there is one, and one that may be put in simple terms, might be this: that the poet and the novelist do not at all give the same meaning, or rather the same value, to the same words. Thus, the word LIFE indicates generally, in the novelist, observation and the possibility of varied identifications, while for the poet it awakens the feeling of a power, at once immediate and transcendent, of transformation and preservation, of which the purest product is song.
But it is perhaps the essence of Charles Morgan’s art to make this simplification pointless and illusory. His novels are novels where the song of life remains always perceptible. There is a poet in each of their protagonists. I have had the impression, reading them, that many chapters are organised on the model of sonatas; and especially that the endings of those chapters leave the spirit in that expectation of silence that the last notes of the piece of music or the last lines of a poem exist to awaken in us. But (supposing that my observation is true) this concern or this instinctive character of the work is in no way proper to the novel as genre: it belongs to the world of harmony, that of pure sensibility.
This continued complexity of substance in his works gives to Morgan’s prose a singular charm and depth. Often, it emanates an almost religious solemnity, which gives to love, even in the suggested foreshadowing of its physical powers, a value of universal tenderness.
But love, when it does not confine itself to the exchange Chamfort spoke of, and when it is itself, even the happiest – an attempt by two beings to unite in themselves that which is most unknown of themselves – necessarily evolves on the edge of death. Nothing is more banal than to join those two words love and death; but to communicate as a necessity in great souls the mutual resonance of those extremes of being; to impress upon the mind its fated and sublime reality, as has done the genius reflected in Tristan, is both one of the simplest and one of the most despairing problems an artist can face, precisely because of the banality of those all-too-common terms. It is one of our author’s eminent merits to produce the sensation of this profundity of love, and to produce it by means of the language of the novel. Literature, and prose especially, leaves the reader a freedom which constantly threatens the emotional order of a work, its ‘times’, the tonal differences – all that music can, and that we cannot, note and force the audience to submit to. But in The Fountain, for example, we are held, and we yield to the will of one who is our emotions’ master.
I have so far onely a very superficial impression of this novel The Voyage, and so I cannot speak of it as one should. The story is set in France, among Frenchmen. Perhaps it will seem strange to us: perhaps we may think that one would never meet, in our countryside, the man and the woman who are its protagonists. In any case, nothing would be harder for me, scarcely knowing peasants other than by hearsay, than to imagine and describe the ‘psychology’ of a wine-grower, even one from the South. Morgan certainly has more experience of them than I, but Morgan is English, and that circumstance gives to his undertaking a singular value. When I can read his Voyage at leisure, I look forward to an extraordinarily complex enjoyment. An urban Frenchman who knows the psychology of rural Frenchmen, as represented by an Englishman, makes for a combination that I find all the more attractive for the fact that the Englishman in question is a great, noble and devoted friend of France.
I shall always remember that night, at the Comédie Française, when we saw appear, before the audience assembled there for the poetic celebration of the country’s liberation, alone, grave, living the moment with all his heart, Charles Morgan. He read to us, slowly, with that solemn intonation we French have difficulty giving to reading, the great poem he had composed in honour of our country. Many did not understand, but all were captivated.
Paul Valéry
translation © Roger Kuin
I do not believe that, in theory at least, it is possible for a poet – at least for a poet who has never attempted a novel – to say anything whatever about that art that will not seem either utterly naïve or fundamentally malicious. The reason for this, if there is one, and one that may be put in simple terms, might be this: that the poet and the novelist do not at all give the same meaning, or rather the same value, to the same words. Thus, the word LIFE indicates generally, in the novelist, observation and the possibility of varied identifications, while for the poet it awakens the feeling of a power, at once immediate and transcendent, of transformation and preservation, of which the purest product is song.
But it is perhaps the essence of Charles Morgan’s art to make this simplification pointless and illusory. His novels are novels where the song of life remains always perceptible. There is a poet in each of their protagonists. I have had the impression, reading them, that many chapters are organised on the model of sonatas; and especially that the endings of those chapters leave the spirit in that expectation of silence that the last notes of the piece of music or the last lines of a poem exist to awaken in us. But (supposing that my observation is true) this concern or this instinctive character of the work is in no way proper to the novel as genre: it belongs to the world of harmony, that of pure sensibility.
This continued complexity of substance in his works gives to Morgan’s prose a singular charm and depth. Often, it emanates an almost religious solemnity, which gives to love, even in the suggested foreshadowing of its physical powers, a value of universal tenderness.
But love, when it does not confine itself to the exchange Chamfort spoke of, and when it is itself, even the happiest – an attempt by two beings to unite in themselves that which is most unknown of themselves – necessarily evolves on the edge of death. Nothing is more banal than to join those two words love and death; but to communicate as a necessity in great souls the mutual resonance of those extremes of being; to impress upon the mind its fated and sublime reality, as has done the genius reflected in Tristan, is both one of the simplest and one of the most despairing problems an artist can face, precisely because of the banality of those all-too-common terms. It is one of our author’s eminent merits to produce the sensation of this profundity of love, and to produce it by means of the language of the novel. Literature, and prose especially, leaves the reader a freedom which constantly threatens the emotional order of a work, its ‘times’, the tonal differences – all that music can, and that we cannot, note and force the audience to submit to. But in The Fountain, for example, we are held, and we yield to the will of one who is our emotions’ master.
I have so far onely a very superficial impression of this novel The Voyage, and so I cannot speak of it as one should. The story is set in France, among Frenchmen. Perhaps it will seem strange to us: perhaps we may think that one would never meet, in our countryside, the man and the woman who are its protagonists. In any case, nothing would be harder for me, scarcely knowing peasants other than by hearsay, than to imagine and describe the ‘psychology’ of a wine-grower, even one from the South. Morgan certainly has more experience of them than I, but Morgan is English, and that circumstance gives to his undertaking a singular value. When I can read his Voyage at leisure, I look forward to an extraordinarily complex enjoyment. An urban Frenchman who knows the psychology of rural Frenchmen, as represented by an Englishman, makes for a combination that I find all the more attractive for the fact that the Englishman in question is a great, noble and devoted friend of France.
I shall always remember that night, at the Comédie Française, when we saw appear, before the audience assembled there for the poetic celebration of the country’s liberation, alone, grave, living the moment with all his heart, Charles Morgan. He read to us, slowly, with that solemn intonation we French have difficulty giving to reading, the great poem he had composed in honour of our country. Many did not understand, but all were captivated.
Paul Valéry
translation © Roger Kuin
The following was sent to Melbourne, Australia, where a memorial luncheon was held for Charles Morgan on the 50th anniversary of his death -- see the Nigel Jackson page.
FIFTY YEARS ON: IN MEMORIAM CHARLES MORGAN
Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, I said to my tutor, ‘Isn’t it odd? Charles Morgan [he had died a few short years before] already seems to have been almost forgotten.’ To which the caustic Jonathan Wordsworth replied merely, ‘And rightly so.’ Conversation over.
I was probably the only undergraduate of my year even to have heard of Morgan, much less read him. His name was part of my childhood: my parents read him, and discussed him with their friends. I dimly remember their excitement when The Judge’s Story appeared; a writer had spoken to their thoughts and values, to concerns they might not consciously have known they had. The Fountain and Sparkenbroke also were household names.
A question I never asked myself then, but have pondered since, is whether the attraction they felt had something to do with not being English. Morgan seems always to have exercised his greatest attraction upon those born across the Channel, across the North Sea. The key to this lies, perhaps, in Portrait in a Mirror, where the young protagonist takes issue with the English sense of humour.
I used to think, and in part still do, that Morgan’s enemy, here first discerned, was the irony that characterises most 20th-century art. Yet looking back I wonder if it did not go deeper than that. The very Englishness, the refusal to make a fuss, the comforting habit of not explicitly taking catastrophe too seriously, of hiding shattering emotion behind a cup of tea; that Englishness that muddles through by affecting Philistinism, was not something that, in his art at least, Morgan could accept.
It was his Welshness, perhaps. In Henry V, it is Welsh Fluellen who weeps at the slaughter of the boys and bores his English mates with ‘the laws of war, look you’. There is about Morgan’s work something that embarrasses the English in its pursuit of an ideal, in its refusal of the trivial, in – to use his own term – its singleness of mind.
The seventeenth century would have understood him better, and he knew it. Henry Vaughan, his wife’s Welsh ancestor; Thomas Traherne, the Cornish mystic; the serious conviviality of Great Tew and its pursuit of the infinite; a distillation of Molinos’ quietism; these were among the springs that fed his river.
What thrilled me at nineteen, and rejoices me to this day, is Charles Morgan’s handling of the English language. In diction, in imagery, in rhythm, he surpasses almost all the writers of his own century and a great many of the preceding two. The control he exercises at his best lets him walk the fine line between Stoic dryness and sentimentality. Writing about Cranmer’s Prayer Book he allowed us a glimpse into his own mind’s workshop. On the passage in the Litany, ‘To strengthen such as do stand; to comfort and help the weak-hearted; and to raise up them that fall; and finally to beat down Satan under our feet’, he wrote ‘Where, except in Churchill at war, shall we find the passionate energy that can drive a stress on to three consecutive syllables? We are half afraid of emphasis as we are half-afraid of poetry.’
It is this scrupulous craftsmanship, this discipline, that puts his writings, whether fiction or non-fiction, among the finest that twentieth-century prose style has to offer. One savours Morgan’s prose as one savours Sir Thomas Browne’s, Robert Burton’s, or John Donne’s. I’ll end with a quotation from A Breeze of Morning that has haunted me for forty-five years. ‘But there are moments, above all on spring evenings, when the lakes that hold our moons are sucked into the earth, and nothing is left but wine and the touch of a hand.’
The man who wrote this sentence, and thousands like it, deserves our homage, our attention, and our delighted reading of his work.
Roger Kuin
Liber Amoris
A few years ago, The New Yorker ran a revivew article concerning two biographies of William Hazlitt, which includes some unkind remarks about Hazlitt's Liber Amoris -- almost as unkind as were the comments at its first, anonymous, printing in 1823.
Morganians (some of whom are Hazlittians also) have reason to know better. CM's 'Liber Amoris', printed in the posthumous collection A Writer and his World (Macmillan, 1960), is a model of generous independence of opinion.
Of that fierce, unsparing, vulnerable book, he writes, 'passionate youth, or passionate middle-age for that matter, may see, reflected in its pages, an aspect of love which the aloof world calls 'disgusting' or 'silly' or 'futile' and which the passion-stricken one half-knows to be so in himself. Yet he may find, in these same pages, that assuagement which is given by imagination shared, and is, to the tormented and enraptured, more precious than counsel...it is not a dispassionate book: you pick up what might, after so many years, be a spent ember, and it burns.'
And a long quotation from the Liber shows us what Morgan the writer, as well as Morgan the romantic, loved about it:
I am now enclosed in a dungeon of despair. The sky is marble to my thoughts; nature is dead around me, as hope is within me; no object can give me one gleam of satisfaction now, nor the prospect of it in time to come. I wander by the sea-side; and the eternal ocean and lasting despair and her face are before me. Slighted by her, on whom my heart by its last fibre hung, where shall I turn? I wake with her by my side, not as my sweet bed-fellow, but as the corpse of my love, without a heart in her bosom, cold, insensible, or struggling from me; and the worm gnaws me, and the sting of unrequited love, and the canker of a hopeless, endless sorrow. I have lost the taste of my food by feverish anxiety; and my favourite beverage, which used to refresh me when I got up, has no moisture in it. Oh! cold, solitary, sepulchral breakfasts...
And Morgan: 'Who will, may smile at that. It is extreme, unbalanced, and, fortunately, without a sense of humour. But it is true with a truth that a regulated and discreet sanity could not have communicated. "The sky is marble to my thoughts," wrote Hazlitt, and the saying is of Shakespeare's breed. It has the terrible flash of Troilus and Cressida.'
This may serve to remind some who love CM's novels but have not ventured further, to look into his essays. The two volumes of Reflections in a Mirror and A Writer and his World are easily, and cheaply, available through Abebooks or Alibris, and yield great riches both of thought and vintage English prose.
Morganians (some of whom are Hazlittians also) have reason to know better. CM's 'Liber Amoris', printed in the posthumous collection A Writer and his World (Macmillan, 1960), is a model of generous independence of opinion.
Of that fierce, unsparing, vulnerable book, he writes, 'passionate youth, or passionate middle-age for that matter, may see, reflected in its pages, an aspect of love which the aloof world calls 'disgusting' or 'silly' or 'futile' and which the passion-stricken one half-knows to be so in himself. Yet he may find, in these same pages, that assuagement which is given by imagination shared, and is, to the tormented and enraptured, more precious than counsel...it is not a dispassionate book: you pick up what might, after so many years, be a spent ember, and it burns.'
And a long quotation from the Liber shows us what Morgan the writer, as well as Morgan the romantic, loved about it:
I am now enclosed in a dungeon of despair. The sky is marble to my thoughts; nature is dead around me, as hope is within me; no object can give me one gleam of satisfaction now, nor the prospect of it in time to come. I wander by the sea-side; and the eternal ocean and lasting despair and her face are before me. Slighted by her, on whom my heart by its last fibre hung, where shall I turn? I wake with her by my side, not as my sweet bed-fellow, but as the corpse of my love, without a heart in her bosom, cold, insensible, or struggling from me; and the worm gnaws me, and the sting of unrequited love, and the canker of a hopeless, endless sorrow. I have lost the taste of my food by feverish anxiety; and my favourite beverage, which used to refresh me when I got up, has no moisture in it. Oh! cold, solitary, sepulchral breakfasts...
And Morgan: 'Who will, may smile at that. It is extreme, unbalanced, and, fortunately, without a sense of humour. But it is true with a truth that a regulated and discreet sanity could not have communicated. "The sky is marble to my thoughts," wrote Hazlitt, and the saying is of Shakespeare's breed. It has the terrible flash of Troilus and Cressida.'
This may serve to remind some who love CM's novels but have not ventured further, to look into his essays. The two volumes of Reflections in a Mirror and A Writer and his World are easily, and cheaply, available through Abebooks or Alibris, and yield great riches both of thought and vintage English prose.
- There is a pleasing brief essay by Philip Hills on The Voyage (alas with the feminine article in French) here.
- A fine essay by Jacqueline T. Schaefer on 'Charles Morgan and the Image of the Artist' is in Joep Leerssen and Karl Ulrich Syndram, Europa Provincia Mundi: Essays in comparative literature and European Studies offered to Hugo Dyserinck on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 1992), 321-336. This book is available also as an e-book via Google Play.