Pt. II Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle
May 20, 2019
Pt. II: Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle
G.W.M Reynolds On Vice And Virtue
by
R.E. Prindle
This essay will concentrate on the novels, Robert Macaire or, The French Bandit In England, The Mysteries Of London, Faust, and Wagner, The Wehr Wolf. Their respective dates were 1840, 1844-48, 1845-46 and 1846-47. As can be seen the latter two novels are encompassed by the dates of The Mysteries Of London and they must be related to the greater novel- two side excursions, so to speak.
We know that Reynolds went out on his own in a foreign country at the age of sixteen, going immediately to take up residence in France with a fair sized sum of money in his pocket inherited from his father as he hints in his novel Faust; then in 1833 at the age of nineteen he inherited a bit more through his mother. He was a natural scholar so that he studied extensively in many fields including literature and history. For such a young man, twenty-five and twenty-six in 1839-40 he writes with an astonishing, indeed, unbelievable maturity and knowledge both experientially and from study. Apart from being fictionalized his history seems to be accurate.
He is especially interested in vice and virtue in humanity. The configurations of his interest were formed by his reading of the Marquis de Sade; he read and internalized de Sade’s novels Justine, Juliette and Philosophy of the Boudoir. While de Sade, from whom the term Sadism is derived, is probably known by name only to most. I append here a short biography so that the reader knows how I understand him. De Sade was born in 1740 and died in 1814, the year Reynolds was born so we may assume that de Sade was still something of a sensation when Reynolds hit Paris in 1830.
De Sade’s fame as the source of the term Sadism was well earned although somewhat stale in the 21st century as films and novels have far surpassed his exploits. There is no longer anything to astonish in his novels. His problems began when his parents denied him marriage to the woman of his choice thus causing an extreme reaction. His reaction was so extreme and notorious, causing his parents such grief, that they had him imprisoned where he began writing his novels. Released by the French Revolution, which was crazier than himself, he functioned well. Napoleon, not so tolerant, had him committed to the famous insane asylum of Charenton. This aided immeasurably in making him a cult figure which he remains to this day.
He committed his grief to two most read novels, Justine and Juliette. He posited as a universal reality that a life of virtue led to unhappiness, pain and failure as characterized by Justine; and a life of libertinage and self-indulgence characterized by Juliette led to happiness and self-fulfillment.
When Reynolds read de Sade’s novels between 1830 and 1837 isn’t known. My guess is that he read them sooner than later and the antitheses between virtue and vice worked in him as he began writing.
Author of Mysteres de Paris and The Wandering Jew
An echo of Justine and Juliette can be found in the Mysteries of London. Reynolds transposes the sexes and has two male brothers Eugene and Richard Markham as protagonists. They are associated with two trees. (The symbolism of the two trees isn’t yet clear to me.) A financial disaster hits the Markham family leaving it and them destitute. Eugene, following the path of Juliette’s example opts for a life of crime to repair his fortunes while Richard decides to pursue virtue. They are to meet by the trees twenty years on to compare results.
This gives Reynolds the means to display his knowledge of vice and virtue. He certainly seems to know the ways of criminality. This investigation is continued in the first two novels written in conjunction with Mysteries titled Faust and Wagner the Wehrwolf. The first of his crime novels was Alfred de Rosann, quite astonishing as a novice novel, I will deal with it later, followed by Grace Darling, the Heroine of the Ferne Islands and the Robert Macaire or the French Bandit In England. After a hiatus of two years from 1842 to 1844 when he wrote nothing Mysteries began. Faust and Wagner were written in succession.
The third of his crime novels was Robert Macaire or the French Bandit In England.
One imagines that Reynolds first heard of the famous French bandit at the theater either in 1833 or ’35 or perhaps he saw both. Macaire was a famous French highwayman, but as Reynolds has Macaire tell his sidekick Bertrand, times were changing and the place of the highwayman was becoming as obsolete as buggy whips would in the twentieth century. Thus while Macaire was involved in stagecoach situations his milieu was shifting to swindling and financial crimes. The future was clear. Reynolds has his ear to the ground.
Published in 1840 Macaire was his third effort following Pickwick Abroad. By this novel he has pretty well learned his craft although his powers will grow exponentially by Mysteries. Macaire is tightly plotted and well written with every evidence of Reynold’s powerful mind. It shows little evidence of de Sade, clear evidence, even borrowing, from Frederic Soulie. Soulie was a French writer of ghastly crime/horror fiction who was, at least, an early model for Reynolds.
As in Mysteries of the Court of London an inspiring incident carried throughout the story ends it. The novel involves an enmity between the practitioner of virtue, Charles Stanmore, and the follower of vice, Robert Macaire. Close to the plots of de Sade’s Justine and Juliette.
The novel opens with Macaire in France holding up a stage containing Stanmore and killing two people while sadistically tying Stanmore to one of the large wheels. If the horse hadn’t remained still as Stanmore remarks he would surely have been killed by the revolving wheel. A sadistic crime in itself.
Papers taken from Stanmore tell of a banker in England who looks ripe for the plucking so Macaire and Bertrand head for England. It is not clear how these two desperadoes pass themselves off as businessmen, especially the clownish Bertrand but they do and Pocklington, the English businessmen invites them in, indeed, ask them to take up residence while in London. He has a beauteous sixteen year old niece, Maria, who falls head over heels for the forty some year old Macaire. As she is to inherit a large fortune Macaire plays the swain.
It so happens that Stanmore also has his eyes on Maria so he develops an inveterate hatred of his rival not realizing that the French bandit and Macaire are the same. Now, it also happens that Stanmore’s father had disappeared on a journey to Lyons in France where he was to establish a new business five years previously. He had waylaid by Macaire, robbed and murdered in a town thirty some miles from Paris on the way to Lyons as will appear later in the story. Macaire was acting as a member of an organized ring of criminals to which he still belongs being one of the leaders.
After mentioning that Macaire is posing as the financial agent named LeBeau who he learns is now on his way to London the two bandits determine to kill him before he arrives to prevent his ruining their plans. Using old skills they waylay his stage on his way to London, brutally drag him from the stage and stab him to death. These two are thoroughly evil men. This is important because while Reynolds is contrasting virtue and vice, he also holds that virtue and vice are equally mixed in a person so that after a life of vice, Macaire will very improbably turn to a life of virtue. But, Reynolds believes he can and it’s his story.
Stanmore becomes suspicious of Macaire and more especially Bertrand so he returns to France to investigate them. His findings lead him to an inn in the town in which his father was murdered. He is directed to the out of the way inn in which the murder occurred. The innkeeper intends to kill Stanmore for his money, but the latter overhears the plot being discussed and in the ensuing struggle kills the innkeeper. Questioning the innkeeper’s wife about his father she points out the place in the inn where Stanhope’s father’s body was immured. Concentrating on opening the wall Stanhope fails to notice that the wife has set the building on fire and fled.
The wife runs for some woods where Stanmore overtakes her. Then borrowing an incident from Frederic Soulie (pronounced Souliay) he ties the woman to a tree while he goes back to main road and inn and forgets her in the rush of events. By the time he gets back to her she is dead, half eaten by varmints.
Macaire has to return to France to account for Lebeau’s absence. Macaire gets into financial schemes and is recognized by the police and arrested. He would have been a goner except for his criminal network. Having pulled off a couple successful escapades Macaire does the necessary repairing to the gang’s den to distribute their share of the booty. This gets an immediate reward when his confederates help him escape from two different prisons.
This brings up the question of Reynolds’ own relationship to the law. Reynolds provides such exact descriptions of various prisons, police quarters, court affairs and prison customs that one wonders how he obtained his knowledge and familiarity. As a newspaperman he would have perhaps entered the various criminal retreats but that doesn’t seem a satisfactory explanation. Dick Collins, an eminent researcher of Reynolds and the period of Penny Dreadfuls gives Reynolds a questionable character.
Collins seems to have ransacked official sources for his information but fails to reference them. In addition to cheating at dice, that rather indicates that Reynolds was one of the shifty hangers on in Paris that he mentions in Pickwick Abroad.
Collins says: Quote: It is alleged- on poor evidence- that Reynolds stayed at the expensive Long’s Hotel in Bond Street and was arrested for trying to steal jewelry to pay the bill.
Unquote.
And there were a series of bankruptcies. One in France in which he was arrested in Calais trying to flee. Then in England in 1939 he spent six months in the Queens Bench Prison for unpaid debt. After becoming a leader in the Chartist movement he displeased the leadership because of unnamed financial schemes. So, let us say that Reynolds was probably flexible in his attitude toward strict probity. One does get that feeling.
One wonders then, was Reynolds personally aware of these criminal hangouts; did he actually mingle with them? His knowledge seems too precise for sheer invention. Also he seems too complimentary of the gendarmes who he says have absolute integrity and are the only upright characters in his novels. Was he trying to stay on their good side just in case?
In any event his descriptions of the prisons from which Macaire escapes are described in minute detail. Having once been caught in the meshes of the French police Macaire seems doomed to remain there as the police are hot on his trail after his last escape.
Now, at the inn at which Macaire had murdered his father, a beautiful young orphan girl, Blanche de Longville, had been placed there by Macaire who for some reason had been made her guardian. She had captured Stanmore’s heart, making him forget Maria, and resulting in a marriage. They were living in a posh area in Paris.
Macaire, quite desperate to escape finds his way to Stanmore and Blache’s mansion to throw himself on her mercy after maltreating through her teen years, expecting what that mercy might be wasn’t clear. Stanmore returns home to find police combing the area and Macaire, his arch enemy, in his wife’s boudoir. However Blanche manages to placate him explaining that if Macaire escapes the police and finds his way to Switzerland he is going to change his ways and end his days as the archetypal French bandit.
So, this Macaire, who had robbed him, possibly condemned him to death by tying him to the carriage wheel, actually murdered and robbed his father, beat him out for the love of the delectable Maria and other crimes too numerous to mention as well as heading up organized crime in France, throws himself on the mercy of Stanmore.
Well, love conquers all, doesn’t it? Rather than offend his wife, Blanche, Stanmore forgives all, gives Macaire traveling money, lets him out the back door and directs the police in the opposite direction, and sententiously pats himself on the back for redeeming a hardened criminal. Reynolds has Macaire living out his days living quietly in Switzerland and that redeems his murders and crimes, for you see good and evil are equally mixed in men. No one is totally bad.
His next novel, Master Timothy’s Bookcase concluded his first period and after a two year hiatus when, one presumes, Reynolds was recharging his batteries, perhaps searching for a more successful approach, organizing himself for the grand charge he began his magnum opus The Mysteries of London, that was a great compendium of crime. He was in fact inspired by Eugene Sue’s Mysteres de Paris but Mysteries of London doesn’t reflect much derivation from that work, however, this was apparently because he couldn’t fit much of it into his story.
Wonderful details preyed on his imagination so that at the same time he was writing Mysteries he also wrote two longish novels, Faust in 1845-46 and Wagner the Wehr Wolf in 1846-48.
Faust is rather an extraordinary novel. Here his inspiration was derived from the European myth of the man who sold his soul to Satan. He combines this story with the story of the German criminal organization called the Holy Vehm. As an adjunct to all he gives an exciting account of the Borgias, Pope Alexander VI, Caesar and Lucretia, or Lucreza as he spells it, Borgia. An amazing novel.
In this novel Reynolds extends his field from France and England to encompass Central Europe—Germany, Austria, Carniola and Italy. Eventually he will draw a circle from England into the Mediterranean touching the Africa of Homer’s Lotus Eaters, through the Dardanelles to Mingrelia or ancient Colchis where the Golden Fleece was kept through the Crimea thus encircling historic Europe. Interesting conception.
Whether he visited these parts during his period in France isn’t clear and his details are fairly sketchy although fairly sharp for Italy. Carniola is an Alpine province of Austria along with Styria and Corinthia. Reynolds probably chose this province for a couple of reasons, the first because as no one had probably heard of it, it was therefore exotic and secondly because a ferocious sexual pervert who lived there in a castle as recorded by de Sade in his novel Juliette. This guy was so incredible that even de Sade hastened away.
Murder, crime and gore in profusion, Reynolds seems in a frenzy to outdo de Sade, Frederic Soulie and Eugene Sue combined and a fine job he does of it too.
Eugene Sue in his magnificent Wandering Jew, that great Armageddon, as his story unfolds the great march of Cholera out of the East that advances at the rate of thirty miles a day closes in on the Paris of 1830 and its revolution of that year. Sue knew how to erase millions of people at a time. What a story, and it goes on for over a thousand pages. Now, if Reynolds did reach Paris in 1830 he must have witnessed the devastation caused by the Cholera epidemic or, at the very least, its aftermath which would have been a topic of conversation. If as Collins suspects he arrived in 1833 he still would have heard stories of the great Cholera terror. If the hints in Reynolds novel, Grace Darling, are correct he places the time of that novel in 1833 so he might likely have still been in England at that time. His descriptions of the Revolution of 1830 in Alfred de Rosann are so sketchy that he may not have arrived in France in 1830 on the heels of the action as he claims.
In Faust he replicates the Cholera epidemic of Sue when Faust orders Satan to create an immense bubonic plague in Vienna and Europe that like the Cholera epidemic rises in the East and rolls over Europe. Thus the spectre derived from Sue’s Rodin makes its appearance in Reynolds. Further both the Cholera and bubonic plague are accurate history. Reynolds’ Faust takes place from 1480 through the first decade of the sixteenth century. Reynolds is very careful with his dates so that events actually occurred in the years he indicates. The bubonic plague he mentions occurred between 1500 and 1503. Interestingly he doesn’t blame fleas from rats in Genoa but, like the Cholera, has it arrive from the East. Current theories indicate that that may have been the case. The first plague of mid-fourteenth century swept through Europe so quickly that there must have been another source than ship rats. In the first place no crew would have been immune to the flea bites hence the Med would have been filled with ghost ships while the spread would have been slower and the diffusion more easily traced. Reynolds always appears to have read and thought deeply.
Faust is essentially a historical novel so that the eruption of Vesuvius in 1485 is accurate but the accuracy of the description of the actual eruption must be fictional. The eruption was however a major one.
So also Reynolds account of the Borgias is historically accurate allowing for description and motives to be interpretations. The villains of Sue’s Wandering Jew are the religious sect of the Jesuits, Reynolds replaces them with the German organization of the Holy Vehm whose description is accurate given a little novelistic license. What we have here, then, in this story is a magnificent contrast between virtue and vice, good and evil. The contrasts are carried out on many levels. The Vehm operates as a government within the government just as the Jesuits were a church within the church. In this case the Austrian government is upright but the Holy Vehm is not. Faust once he has sold his soul to Satan is the representative of a blend of virtue and vice with vice having the upper hand. Faust as the story develops is guilty through his machinations of the deaths of millions. As the representative of vice Faust’s counterpart is Otto Pianella who represents undivided virtue. Faust’s wife represents virtue, or Justine, while Faust’s mistress, Ida, Otto’s sister, represents Juliette or vice. Of course, she is as nothing compared to the mighty Lucreza Borgia, the scariest woman who ever lived.
Reynolds while considered a feminist is, actually, a realist. In general, he deplores the manner in which women are treated but he isn’t so silly as to believe all women are above reproach, thus one has a variety of female types. Lucreza Borgia in the novel is a willful completely evil woman while Nisida in the next novel, Wagner the Wehr Wolf is a ‘strong’ woman but a blend of good and evil. Thus, Reynolds avoids the sappy feminist sentiment of the present.
He was perhaps overawed b Lucreza’s ruthless exercising of her will so that there is no good mixed with her evil. Lucreza was not going to go to Switzerland and while away her time after the Borgias’ power was destroyed.
Mortally offended by de Sade’s dictum that vile living always succeeds on this Earth while virtue always leads to unhappiness, in this novel practicing virtue succeeds while vice fails. Perhaps in Sue’s breathtaking Armageddon in which all the characters but one are immolated, Reynolds changes the end so that each virtuous character lives happily in the end while all the vicious characters die or end unhappily.
The Holy Vehm is destroyed, Ida checks out early, the Borgias seemingly on the way to success are thwarted, first their power is broken, then as fugitives Caesar Borgia after a number of failures is killed in an ignominious battle in Spain while Lucreza suffers a horrible death at the hands of her husband on the island of Lissa belonging to the Duke of Ferrara near Venice. This is one of the most terrifying depictions in the novel. Disregarding Lucreza’s terrible reputation the Duke of Ferrara espouses her with the assumption that she will reform her wicked ways, that is, give up vice.
Apparently, she has until Otto Pianella and his family are marooned on the way back to Vienna by snowstorms in the Julian Alps of Carniola. They put up on Lissa which comes to Lucreza’s attention. She arrests Otto and places him in the Iron Coffin. I won’t replicate the entire story that Reynolds makes as suspenseful as possible, but the Iron Coffin is a large room made of iron shaped like a giant coffin. The walls are moveable and gradually compress down to the size of an actual coffin in which the victim is entombed, where he gradually dies of starvation and dehydration.
As Otto’s situation grows dire Satan appears offering him the Faustian deal. No, no, says Otto, never, never, I put my faith in a higher power. So, in a choice between vice or virtue Otto remains true to God, or virtue. Well, one of Lucreza’s retinue finks to the Duke who is outraged that Lucreza has violated her oath so, at the last moment he releases Otto, justifying Otto’s trust in God, while condemning Lucreza to what would have been Otto’s fate. Thus, the terrible end of the truly vicious Lucreza Borgia.
Now, we are down to Faust himself. Faust had driven a lousy bargain with Satan receiving only twenty-six years of seeming prosperity and unlimited power. Now both hands of the clock, or clysidra, clocks hadn’t been invented yet, are pointing straight up. Remembering Reynolds’ description of the 1485 eruption of Vesuvius Satan takes Faust to the edge of the boiling caldera and after a lengthy triumph and lecture Satan pushes Faust in.
De Sade is repudiated, the results of Justine’s and Juliette’s lives are reversed and Reynolds triumphs over the Marquis de Sade.
While the main novel, The Mysteries Of London, raged on in its contests of virtue and vice, Reynolds began another rather lengthy novel he titled Wagner the Wehr Wolf.
And why not? While good and certainly interesting it doesn’t quite toe the mark made by Faust. Faust was well above the average while Wagner is closer to average but still with all of Reynolds’ inventiveness.
Too few people die and Nisida the villainess is a pale reflection of Lucreza Borgia, but still no slouch as a ‘strong’ woman. Nor is there a Jesuit Order or the Holy Vehm, just a highly organized criminal gang that is terrorizing Florence Italy. Reynolds may have lifted that idea from Dumas’ Count of Monte Christo and the gang in the Italian catacombs. The main story takes place in Florence but changes location to more exotic places including Constatinople, name not yet changed to Istanbul, and Sicily.
Reynolds’ geography embraces a rather large area from England, France, Central Europe, the Balkans, Italy to just off the coast of Africa to include the Greek Islands, Western Anatolia and Mingrelia on the East Coast of the Black Sea, formerly the Colchis of the Argonauts then turning west to the Crimea following in the tracks of the Argonauts and that pretty well encompasses the parameters of historical Europe. One wonders how Reynolds is writing all these novels, maintaining a growing family, keeping up on his reading and accumulating fairly detailed historical studies and he wrote several historical novels, Faust being one.
The adoption of a fantastic Werewolf story seems strange, but then, James Malcolm Rymer, his contemporary Penny Dreadful author was scoring big with his novel Varney The Vampire and would soon after write the classic story of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Sweeney Todd, a hit musical fifty years ago was the barber who turned his customers into sausages and sold them to another set of customers. Who would believe cannibalism in nineteenth century England?
Varney the Vampire, an incredibly long novel must have nudged Reynolds’ interest in that supernatural direction so he chose to explore another of the great medieval myths or legends of Medieval Europe, that of the Wehr Wolf. So, really, this era produced the subject matter for the next hundred and fifty years or so, Frankenstein, Faust, Varney the Vampire, Sweeney Todd and Werewolves and organized crime. The Curse of the Mummy would come later.
Wagner has a highly organized criminal gang that is central to the story maintaining its connection to the main frame of Mysteries of London. It is a true underworld inhabiting caverns deep into the earth. Whether meant intentionally or not by Reynolds its lower levels rest next to the lower levels of the Catholic nunnery that has an extensive underground. The doings in the nunnery in its underworld are as criminal as those of the criminals only a few feet awaythrough the rock. The two worlds are blended when the crime world is attacked, and the walls accidentally broken through and down. Thus, both the criminal underworld and the equally criminal nunnery were destroyed.
Reynold’s religious interests are intriguing. At this time in his life Reynolds was thirty-two. The Mysteries had solved his financial problems to this moment so his mental comfort zone was probably elevated. He had every reason to believe he could continue his success although the success of his future blockbuster, Mysteries of the Court of London might have astonished even him. At any rate he was relieved of youthful anxieties; he was successfully launched.
How he developed, or found time to develop his religious ideas isn’t obvious to me. Collins alleges that he did write a book of biblical criticism in 1833 when he was only 19 years old and would have had to have been in London at that time. At this point he has the North European abhorrence of the Catholic Church although an apparent strong belief in the existence of God or a deity, however, that could have been a front so as not to offend the reading public. His attitude toward the Moslem world seems to be a tolerant affection. Wagner makes a visit to then Constantinople, now Istanbul, a mere twenty-five years after the Christian capital fell to the Moslems. He forms connections and in order to free Florence from the dominion of the criminal gang he marches a Moslem army to Florence to do it. I must say I read that episode with a certain amount incredulousness.
One imagines that his fantasy was that he could unite the two worlds. The novel was placed in the years following 1516, a mere twenty-four years after the Moorish expulsion from Spain and the completion of the Reconquista. The Moslem slave raids probably hadn’t begun and from this time to 1830 when the French annexed Algeria and wiped out the Corsairs, the Moslem predations on the Mediterranean coast was constant. Eugene Sue’s The knight of Malta is a good representation of the situation and reads as well as Reynolds.
Sue, as Reynolds, was entranced with Byron’s epic poem The Corsair; the sentiments seem to coincide with their own. Indeed, The Knight of Malta can be read as Byron’s poem in novelized form. The opening lines of Byron establish the mental state:
Quote:
O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Survey our empire, and behold our home!
These are our realms, no limits to their sway—
Our flag the scepter all who meet obey.
Ours the wild life in tumult still to range
From toil to rest, and joy in every change.
Unquote.
To a large extent The Corsair forms a part of the mental equipment of all these early Victorian authors.
In addition to Christian and Moslem concerns one considers his evaluation of the Jews as an independent nation living in and on its host; this is difficult because Westerners have been indoctrinated and conditioned to believe that Jews are innocent victims. They are not, not in Hellenic times, not in Roman times and not in Medieval times and certainly not now. During early Christian times they were given the greatest boon that could be imagined: the monopoly of loaning money at interest. Christians, the Catholic Church, laid its congregation at the feet of the Jews to be exploited.
Do not believe that the Jews became money lenders because they were forced to. They have always been money changers. They did so on the porches of the temple where Jesus overturned their tables as sacrilegious. As usurers, even the simplest mind could easily figure out that the entire money supply must inevitably be in their hands. Nor did they loan on reasonable terms but at expropriatory rates of forty or fifty percent for a single day. The West was impoverished so that in Florence first, a State pawn shop was instituted to save both the State and its people financial grief. Other cities followed Florence’s example.
Thus Reynolds introduces us to the Jewish money lender, Issachar. Now, both Reynolds and Dickens had had their run in with Jewish damage controlmen. Dickens was disciplined over his Jewish character in Oliver Twist, Fagin. Reynolds had been dressed down for some remarks in Grace Darling.
Jewish emancipation from the rule of the Catholic Church had begun in France by Napoleon after 1800, by 1840 it was working its way through Central Europe. The Jews qua Jews didn’t become powerful until after Napoleon’s defeat and Nathan Rothchild’s capture of the English currency in 1815. As a result of England’s victory the Rothschilds were in the early stages of consolidating their power. Naturally one of the first steps was controlling the press and publishing, at that time the only effective means of disseminating information. By the time of Wagner Disraeli had published most of his novels and was becoming a power in the State. Both Dickens and Reynolds had heeded their chastening, Dickens submissively and Reynolds with his usual cheek.
Issachar is portrayed as the archetypal Yiddish money changer living in dirty squalid quarters but above the physical portrayal of the usual Jewish caricature he is lauded as the long suffering noble victim, a man of virtue unfairly maligned and Jews so for millennia. Thus Reynolds has fulfilled his obligation to laud the Jews. He describes Issachar as a man of integrity however Issachar is the biggest cheat and crook alive. Nisida’s mother had pawned the family diamonds with Issachar, however, Issachar without hesitation steals the diamonds replacing them with paste. The father being something of an expert immediately discovers the imposture. Issachar justifies himself in some unsatisfactory way and Reynolds blithely goes on about the long suffering Jews.
It is generally thought therefore that Reynolds was genuinely sympathetic to the Jews. I’m not sure that’s true. I think he was just doing to wise thing so he could go on publishing.
For story continuation, we have Wagner, a ninety year old man, living deep in the Black Forest of Germany with his beauteous grand-daughter. Reynolds is very keen on sixteen year old beauties. They abound in his stories. According to Dick Collins Reynolds married his wife Susannah when she was seventeen. Collins says Reynolds may have been her second husband, she having already been taken to wife at 14.
Clara, Wagner’s granddaughter and main support, disappeared one day no one knew where. Wagner is unable to support himself and about to expire when a demon appears offering to restore him to youth. This a much better deal than Satan offered Faust in the previous novel. All Wagner has to do is spend one day a month as a wolf. He knows the day because his fate is based on the lunar calendar. The contract ends when Wagner fails to honor it. As can easily be seen this, on the face of it is good deal, what makes it a great deal is Wagner also gets a substantial guaranteed annual income. Wagner may be old but he is no fool; he signs the deal.
Now a sprout of forty with cash in hand Wagner need no longer skulk about the woods of the Black Forest where all things strange happen. Anyone who is up with German stories of this period knows there are so many desperadoes haunting these woods that they are no place for a fun loving young Wehr Wolf. Wagner hies himself to Florence, Italy where the climate agrees with his clothes.
There he runs into his granddaughter Clara. It wasn’t easy to pass himself off to her as his grandfather but like any young guy of independent means Wagner is a smooth talker.
He then finds some digs and runs into Nisida, the daughter of a Lord who, in fact, turns out to be the reason that Clara disappeared from the Black Forest. He has persuaded the virtuous and beautiful Clara to abandon her virtue and become his secluded mistress. Daughter Nisida learns this determining to kill Clara and therein hangs the tale.
Reynolds throws in the description of some of Wagners transformations which are exciting and well done. On his monthly rampage Wagner merely tears through the countryside like a tornado.
The other part of interest is at the end when Wagner establishes contact with the Rosicrucian Order in Sicily. This perhaps establishes Reynolds’ own religious position. He is a Rosicrucian. He is said to have been a Deist so that fits. I rather accept that Rosicrucianism was his faith. Having studied the religion somewhat I consider myself a Rosicrucian also if one needs a label. And we all do.
Between 1844-48 then Reynolds has launched his career successfully with his Mysteries of London, worked through his French period and examined a major legend of Germany and Central Europe.
In Part III I will deal with Dickens early output in relation to Reynolds.
Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle, Part I
April 22, 2019
Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle Part I
G.W.M. Reynolds and Charles Dickens
The study of social progress is today no less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart. We live in an age of universal investigation and exploration of the sources of all movements. France, for example loves at the same time history and drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man. These embrace the whole of life. But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
Alfred de Vigny, Cinq Mars, 1826
I have reached the time in life when it’s time to travel back through the years to review my life. While my corporeal years are few compared to eternity my mental psychological and historical life goes back thousands of years but more specifically the last three or four hundred. I am no St. Germain, I don’t claim to have actually experienced those earlier centuries but I have made an attempt to recreate them in my mind. Looking back I find that mankind has made no emotional progress. As my ancestors were so am I, so are we all. If one can’t empathize and sympathize with them one is being snobbish.
I don’t mean to bore you with a mere lineal presentation to the evolution of the human, specifically the European mind, over three centuries. I intend to roam back and forth linking and combining.
In today’s mental climate some may be furious that I would specify the European mind but it is the mind in which my own mind has developed. I have little empathy for the Asian mind, for instance, except as represented by the European experience of it. Nor am I particularly interested in learning another racial mindset when there is so much to be learned of my own.
As a base of reference I have chosen the 1840s and 1850s, a time of great discoveries just before the Darwinian and psychological explosions that were a quantum leap from the past to the present. A leap which in my own time we are in the midst of experiencing. The future will bear little resemblance to the past. Western Civilization is on the brink of extinction and has no desire to live. The Asian mindset seems poised to be its replacement. Both the US and Europe are on the brink of disintegration. Asian hordes are at the door and breaking it down. Kaiser Wilhelm was right about the Yellow Peril. Thus, it seems that I’m taking a sentimental journey.
The journey will be a literary one for the 1840s and 50s were years of great writers and even greater literary masterpieces.
The decades before the before the 60s and the annunciation of Darwin played John the Baptist to Christ. My life has been lived mostly in the literature of that period. The great predecessor to the period was the beautiful time called the Romantic era. The French and Industrial Revolutions had put a period to what had gone before. Man hadn’t changed but the circumstances of life had. Steam power had entered the picture and with it the coming of the railroads and iron ships, those great dividers between the medieval past and the present. Electricity, the telegraph and photography made their appearance. Between the moveable type developed in the fifteenth century and photographic pictures the past could be captured as it was forever. The movies of the twentieth century, even more effective, were an improvement in film technology.
Science destroyed the belief in supernatural beings, the fairies, the elves, the elementals and, yes, even the gods. To destroy the foundations of their belief was easy but to destroy the need for them has proven difficult. Hence the Romantic era when the mind groped to reconcile fancy with science and created beautiful literary effects. It was then that genre literature began to appear alongside so-called literary novels. Genres were considered inferior to literary novels and still are although why isn’t clear. What is clear is the genre novels rule modern literature.
Perhaps literary novels disguise reality under the appearance of things creating an artificial world that doesn’t exist except in the minds of the believers and they don’t want their illusions disturbed. Hence, the popularity of Charles Dickens for nearly two hundred years. Dickens is no Shakespeare but perhaps even better read. Dickens can make grim facts seem palatable, perhaps because of Dickens authorial and censorial distance from the facts diminishes the reality and more genteel and respectable minds can handle the unpleasantness, which is quite grim, because it is happening to different people under different conditions that bear no relationship to their own lives except to be pitied. Dickens specifically writes for the self-satisfied and well to do. Dickens pretties his characters up.
But for every Dickens who has survived the ravages of time there are many, many more who have sunk beneath the waves remembered only by those who think of a vanished Atlantis. Amazingly one of these writers who crashed beneath the waves during WWI, an English contemporary of Dickens, who was as or more popular than he at the time was forgotten after WWI. I don’t know large the market for Reynolds was on the eve of the Great Destruction but I have a copy of The Rye House Plot bound with Omar. It was advertised as rare but it should have been unique. One Norman Hartley Rickard went out and bought the parts for The Rye House Part one and two on 5/13/14 and the two parts for Omar on 6/16/14 then went to the trouble of having them bound together receiving the bound volume back on 7/22/14. He thought that much of Reynolds on the eve of the war. The novels themselves were printed sometime after 1880 by John Dicks as they advertise General Wallace’s Ben Hur. Both books are more obscure Reynold’s titles so that if they were available at the late date of 1914 indicates fair interest in Reynolds. And then the war came.
During a time of prolific writers Reynolds was extraordinary. He not only wrote at least 43 novels, the novels themselves were of extraordinary length. Of his two masterpieces the first, Mysteries of London runs to 2500 pages of smaller type in the current Valancourt Press edition. His master work, Mysteries of the Court of London is ten volumes running to 5000 pages. He has numerous works running to 1500-2000 pages. These were not merely rambling stories but tight and compact, serious sociological and psychological studies with strong historical connections.
While Dickens and Reynolds represent the English contribution to the period, Reynolds, while being English, was also a Francophile. His writing style is a combination of the English and French psychologies. His is such an interesting case that I might as well devote a little space to it indeed these rambles will center on his career.
Reynolds was born in 1814, being two years younger than Dickens. He came from Kent in the South East of England. Much of the scenery takes place there, especially around Canterbury, in his earlier novels. His home town was called Eastry. His father was a naval officer who died in 1822 when Reynolds was eight; at fourteen he was placed in the Sandhurst Military College by his mother apparently to follow in the footsteps of his father. His mother died in early 1830 leaving Reynolds a complete orphan at the age of fifteen. How this affected his situation is not clear but he either chose to leave Sandhurst or was encouraged to seek a career elsewhere sometime in late July as he turned sixteen. His formal schooling ended there. He was one hellacious reader though.
Some say he inherited twelve thousand pounds, some dispute this, but, at sixteen he must have had had enough money to encourage him to emigrate to a new country with a tender age and no skills. He seems to have existed reasonably well. His inquisitive nature led to him to examine all levels of society. His Pickwick Abroad demonstrates this.
There were large numbers of English people who either moved to France, spent long absences there of fled England for legal reasons. It is this society he depicts there in Pickwick Abroad. There are opinions that he was not a stranger to illegal activities there. Pickwick himself, in the novel, dwelt at the Meurice Hotel. The Meurice was begun by a Frenchman who realized that with the number of English in France they needed a home away from home. He therefore created the Meurice to cater strictly to English tastes. Reynolds seems to have been familiar with both residential customs there and the riff raff who lived off the legitimate residents. One wonders what his exact situation was,did he live or perhaps prey on those who did. He was obviously very intelligent and studious. He must have had abilities because he was able to earn money as a journalist becoming familiar with newspaper practices. On his return to England at merely twenty-three years of age he was entrusted to edit the Monthly Review which he revived and set back on its feet.
There is a question of how long he was in France. The general opinion is from 1830 to 1837. Dick Collins in his introduction to Reynolds’ The Necromancer as published by Vallancourt thinks he arrived there in 1835. That doesn’t seem quite right as Reynolds’ experiences would likely take more time to acquire. Reynolds himself says he lived in France for ten years. To justify that he must mean that he arrived in 1830, left physically in 1837 and lived on mentally for another three years while physically being in England. The extra three years would coincide with his writing which is French oriented through is Master Timothy’s Bookcase. This book would be his mental transitioning from France back to England making up the ten years.
At any rate his knowledge of France and French literature would indicate a seven year residence. He returned to England just as Dickens’ Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was being published in parts- that is in installments published monthly or weekly. Reynolds had had an active journalistic and literary career in France publishing his first book there in 1935 at the age of 21 and editing an English oriented magazine.
Rather startlingly, even as Dickens’ Pickwick Papers was still in progress Reynolds began a continuation of the novel called Pickwick Abroad that took place, naturally, in France. As might be expected this plagiarism caused an uproar that would mar his career. Nothing daunted by the uproar Reynolds next appropriated the idea of Dickens’ Master Humphrey’s Clock with his own title Master Timothy’s Bookcase. Both plagiarisms were notably better than Dickens’ originals. The Bookcase took place in France and then in a weak conclusion, one supposes, mirroring reality, shifted to England to end with another Pickwick story, The Marriage Of Mr. Pickwick, and several representations of Mortimer’s, the narrator, life in England. As Bookcase appeared at the end of the ten years this might be what Reynolds termed his ten years stay in France.
Then comes a two year hiatus in which Reynolds wrote nothing. Reynolds was well read. He frequently references his reading including Homer’s Iliad, probably Mallory’s King Arthur, Walter Scott much of the Gothic period and the Romantic Era, most especially Byron. Byron’s poems the Corsair and Giaour made a great impression on him and indeed the next couple generations. He was well versed in French literature. Dick Collins in his introduction makes a very telling point for Frederic Soulie (accent aigu over the e) being a direct influence on Reynolds in his introduction to The Necromancer. Reynolds put together a two volume survey of the literature of France published in 1938 composed mainly of extracts with introductions to the authors. I reproduce the intro for Soulie here in full from Collins which fairly accurately portrays Reynolds approach to writing:
Quote:
Frederic Soulie
Turn we now to that young and successful writer, who descends into the vault of the dead and snatches the cold corse from the tomb, to introduce it into his tale, who calls in the assistance of plague and fire to add fresh horrors to his romances; and who delights more in the violated sanctuary of Death than in the splendor and gaiety of the drawing-room. Turn we to him who has revived the midnight terrors, the phantoms, the robbers, the murderers, the executioners, and the violaters of virgin innocence, that were wont to dwell in the legends of the olden times, or in the folios of a German library; whose patrons were Maturin, Lewis and Radcliffe; and whose readers were timid school-girls and affrighted nursery maids. Turn we to him who has regenerated that school of horror which had nearly exploded within the dozen years;–yes, let us turn to him whose favourite subjects are those which we have dreaded to think of at night in the days of our childhood.
The writer of an ordinary novel may possess a weak, pusillanimous and feeble mind, yet produce an amusing tale. His book may be called a good one; and he himself may pass as a man of talent and capacity. But the author of a romance…must own a powerful mind a vivid imagination and a fertile brain; or else his lucubrations will be vain and futile.
His murders must not be told with the coolness of a newspaper report: they must seem as if they were written in letters of blood themselves. The very page, which narrates their tale, must be surveyed with awe and a species of pleasing and fascinating abhorrence—if the reader can comprehend the antithesis—which create much more than a common interest in the mind. The romance writer must indulge in nothing puerile; no tame or vapid description will be pardoned in him: his work must be all fire, all vigour, all energy and capable of producing a species of electric interest throughout.
Such is the system of M. Frederic Soulie exemplified in his Deux Cadavres. This awe-inspiring romance, which seems as if it had been written in a charnel-house, by the light of those flickering candles that in Catholic countries surround the corpse, and by an iron pen dipped in human gore, in the most extraordinary creation of the brain that ever was yet, in the guise of a historical tale, presented to the world. Let the superstitious and the timid beware of it: they would not forget its terrible incidents for many a long night, after they had once perused it. It is a romance which haunts its reader as a man is haunted by a phantom of the victim whom he has slain: it is a book so full of horrors—and all those horrors so natural and so probable—not once exaggerated by the assistance of powers from beyond the tomb—that he, who reads it, lays it aside with the impression that such things might have been, and interrogates himself whether he be just awakened from a nightmare dream, or whether he have witnessed a series of terrible realities.
The scene is laid in England; and the epoch of the tale is the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. The work commences with the execution of Charles the First, which is described with painful accuracy. This is the first horror. Then comes the desecration of a grave in Westminster Abbey—the parade of a corpse through the streets of London—the hideous ceremony of presenting a jug of beer to the motionless lips of the dead thing, as the procession moves up the Poultry—the visit of two adventurous men to the Chapel in Windsor Castle at midnight—the exhuming of a coffin—the circumstance of one of those men putting his hand to the dead body which that coffin contained and finding by the disserved head that it was the corse of the late King—the journey through dark and dismal roads with that coffin upon a sledge drawn by dogs—rape of a beautiful girl by her lover in an hour of madness—the progress of the plague—murders, duels, riots and deaths—and then the horrid agonies endured by that young girl, who lingered through all the stages of starvation, tied to a tree, till she was wasted away, expired, and found a fleshless skeleton some time afterwards? This is the brief analysis of Les Deux Cadavres: this is the frame-work of the book upon which was built the reputation of M. Frederic Soulie.
Unquote.
This pretty well expresses the style Reynolds adopted combined with his reading of the Marquis de Sade. Reynolds used the episode of the woman tied to tree in Robert Macaire. Unfortunately Frederic Soulie has no translations into English so we can’t enjoy his spectacular style directly.
It appears that this part of quote is an analysis of Dickens:
Quote:
The writer of an ordinary novel may possess a weak, pusillanimous and feeble mind, and yet produce an amusing tale. His book may be called and good one; and he may pass for a man of talent and capacity but an author of a romance…must own a powerful mind, a vivid imagination and a fertile brain; else his lucubrations will be vain and futile….
Unquote.
That sums up Dickens as accurately as possible. If Dickens read this then one can imagine that he would be incensed and develop a deep seated aversion to Reynolds. Indeed, he would many years later say that Reynolds was a despicable person. The quote also expresses a certain amount of envy in his dismissal of Dickens from whom he had just appropriated the format of Pickwick Papers for his own Pickwick Abroad. At the same time the quote illustrates the difference between Dickens and himself.
Reynolds was apparently a theater goer in Paris becoming familiar with the plays of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, both of whom would be major influences of the period 1840-60 and beyond. Dumas, of course, exists today through his incredible novels, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Hugo lives on through his work Les Miserables, recently a very successful stage musical in the US as a revolutionary play. Also making a most profound effect on Reynolds was another extremely prolific author, the great Eugene Sue. In 1843, two years before Soulie died, the parts for Sue’s Mysteries of Paris began appearing and that would galvanize Reynolds back into activity. He immediately began his own first masterpiece, The Mysteries of London. A French writer by the name of Paul Favel also wrote a work titled Les Mysteres De Londres at the time also inspired by Sue. Favel was an excellent crime writer detailing the activities of organized crime through his Blackcoats series. Written sometime after Reynold’s Robert Macaire or the French Bandit in England that mentions Macaire as the leader of a nationwide loose organization of criminal revolutionaries. It begins the story of the great worldwide criminal organizations of today as well as the US’ Statewide and national criminal organizations. The Revolution released them, and Democracy allowed them to prosper.
Reynolds while bursting with ideas seemed unable to express them without a format provided by someone else, hence his use of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers and Master Timothy’s Bookcase as wells as Sue’s Mysteries of Paris—he had to have a format to follow. When Sue’s Mysteries of Paris appeared the plan for Mysteries of London appeared. The basic premise had evolved in Reynolds’ mind, that of two brothers connected to two trees who go separate ways, one of crime and one of rectitude, who then reunite to compare the results of their systems.
This notion may have evolved from Reynolds’ reading of Justine and Juliette by the Marquis de Sade. In de Sade Justine who follows a life of rectitude ends up trashed and her sister Juliette who followed a life license ends up rich and happy. Reynolds reverses the results, complaining that such may be case in individual situations but certainly not systemic.
That is not to say his novels are slavish copies of other men’s work. Oh no, they are amplifications and extensions, completely original alternate versions. Sue, himself had just entered his masterpiece period with The Mysteries of Paris and its successor, the marvelous Wandering Jew. For my tastes The Wandering Jew far surpassed the great Mysteries of Paris and that is saying something in a long way. All these works are massive while the successor to Reynolds’ Mysteries of London, The Mysteries of the Court of London is twice as long as any other novel of the period while its intensity lifts one into the stratosphere. By the time of Mysteries of London Dickens was pursuing Reynolds in an effort to keep up. Reynolds by that time was more successful than Dickens so the latter had even more reason to be bitter.
The novel took four years of serialization to be completed and in that time both Mysteries of Paris and The Wandering Jew by Sue had appeared. The Wandering Jew in 1845, the year Soulie died, so both novels would have had an influence of Reynolds’ novel. For myself, as great as Mysteries of Paris is, I prefer The Wandering Jew. Its style may be offensive and off putting to today’s readers but the book has nothing to do with Jews; it is rather an anti-Jesuit story with the greatest villain ever, the Jesuit priest Rodin and his Invisible Hand.
The story involves a fabulous inheritance due to a number of inheritors including two children from Germany. In order to claim the inheritance they must be in Paris for the reading of the will on a certain date. If they fail to appear the fabulous fortune will fall to the Jesuits. It is Rodin’s task then to prevent the inheritors from reaching Paris. Simply killing them would arouse suspicions hence he has to engineer delays and obstacles hence the Invisible Hand. While without being apparent Rodin’s schemes are always at work.
Here we are introduced to the concept of rather than outright assassination it is better to exploit the weaknesses of the individuals so that they destroy themselves. Hence for one claimant Rodin easily leads him into a life of dissipation in which the man essentially drinks himself to death.
The closer the children get to Paris the more intensely the climax resolves into a final Armageddon in which all of the participants including Rodin and his Invisible hand are killed. The only claimant left standing is a good priest and he of course is a very charitable guy with no other use for the money. With such a model before him Reynolds digs deep keeping his own story racing along but to a relatively weak ending, a slight disappointment very poorly handled. He does much better in Court of London which ends in a real Armageddon.
Even as Mysteries Of London was drawing to a close Reynolds began the eight years of weekly installments of The Mysteries of the Court of London. The latter was a grandiose and magnificent structure. At the time England was only short of a fifty percent literacy rate. So a pretty good living could be made by organizing a group to read these stories to. Thus a man could gather a reading group of perhaps thirty people to whom he read the weekly installment. A really primitive radio setup, eh? I suppose one could organize two or three groups and live rather comfortably. I am not aware of what the readers charged but the penny was divided into half-pennies and even farthings or quarter pennies. For eight years people set aside an hour or two to be read to. This is not unlike todays filmed episodes that go on for years like the Game of Thrones. This is quite marvelous. Reynolds would have been the talk of the town for eight years, actually, combined with The Mysteries of London, twelve years. That’s something of an achievement.
His writing style then was conceived as to sound like he was talking directly to these hearers while always being so intense that their attention did not waver, and he succeeded. One can’t be sure but perhaps the memory of this success drove Dickens wild so that he himself devoted the last years of his life reading from his novels, especially Oliver Twist, to audiences.
Now, Reynolds had a particularly capacious and powerful mind. While he was writing Court of London over eight years he also wrote eighteen additional novels nearly all of which were 600 to 1500 pages. The ability to keep weekly installments in mind and while either consciously or sub-consciously planning several others is beyond phenomenal. While these were coterminous the variety of incident had to be kept fresh throughout the corpus or all would fail. Reynolds was capable of doing that while pacing his novels with fast flowing action. At the same time he is keeping up with social and scientific developments and raising a numerous family. His psychology is usually thoughtful and spot on. He refers, for instance, to Anton Mesmer and his Animal Magnetism that moved toward perfection as hypnotism. While revealing the unconscious, the realization of which would dominate psychology through the system of Sigmund Freud about far off 1920. The unconscious still remains misunderstood.
He makes reference to Franz Joseph Gall’s much misunderstood theory of phrenology, the forerunner of the discovery of the function of brain localities.
His corpus is perhaps too large to be read in full except by the most dedicated scholar, and I mean that in the singular, who would receive no reward for his efforts. The additional reading necessary to understand the full import and value of Reynolds is even more daunting.
The discovery of influences, for instance, and familiarizing oneself with them is a monumental task. Reynolds was born under Romaticism and began his career on the cusp of the Positive period of August Comte and Herbert Spencer.
Indeed Romanticism has never left us. A Romantic revival occurred post-Positivism and the then emerging scientific revelations. Literary styles were changing or evolving through the decades and the epigone of the 1840s and 50s were shadows of their forerunners while still better than the pulp writers they engendered. One of the finest of these was the Anglo-French writer George du Maurier who wrote three classics, almost a trilogy: Peter Ibbetson, Trilby (Svengali) and the Martian. While not as towering as The Mysteries of the Court of London, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Mysteries of Paris and The Wandering Jew they are astonishing works of art.
One of the great journalistic successes of all time, Punch or The London Charivari, the famous humor magazine, was founded in 1842. The magazine remained until the 60s of the twentieth century. During mid-nineteenth century Du Maurier was a regular contributor with both drawings and texts. He probably would have continued with the magazine until his death had not he been rejected for the editorship when it became available. Fortunate for us, for then he turned to writing his novels which were fabulous successes being reprinted until recent times. Like Reynolds his mind was divided between his French and English heritages. Born in France, he was removed to England in his teen years. This was a traumatic experience for him as the cultures of the French and English were so different. Reynolds had the advantage of developing an affection for French culture before he removed from England and although an orphan of only sixteen years he appears to have thought he was moving to a wonderland and was never disappointed. He had the misfortune to have expended his resources, bankrupting himself, thus expediting his return to England.
Du Maurier’s first novel, Peter Ibbetson, would detail his conflict with the English mentality in a beautiful story. As part of the Romantic revival Du Maurier combines the fairy world with proto-science fiction and fantasy. His French childhood in the novel is involved with fairies and his little girl friend Seraskier who reappears in England as the adult Duchess of Towers. Not only that his next novel Trilby is built on a character and situation created by the French Romanticist, Charles Nodier. In his novel also named Trilby, Trilby was a male Scottish fairy. Du Maurier transposes sexes and makes Trilby a woman in his title of the same name.
In Peter Ibbetson, Peter is in the care of his uncle who, upon defaming Peter’s mother, is murdered by him, justifiable homicide by another name; nevertheless he is convicted and sentenced to death but spared hanging through the intercession of the fairy Duchess of Towers.
Languishing in prison he goes bonkers and is transferred to an insane asylum. There he finds that while sleeping he can unlock a door and enter the dreams of the Duchess of Towers. A beautiful hundred pages follows.
Trilby, his second novel, is in one respect a very long fairy tale masquerading as real life. The novel records a fantasy of Du Maurier’s experiences as an aspiring artist in Bohemian Paris. A real font of pleasant memories for George. He remained a Bohemian all his life and made the most of enjoying that life. Trilby was a runaway smash hit equaling in impact Dickens Pickwick Papers.
There is a marked difference between the romanticism of Du Maurier and his contemporary William Morris. Morris writes in an Arthurian mode of pure fantasy while Du Maurier was affected not only by science but the so-called occult world of the founder of Theosophy, Madame Helena Blavatsky. Her The Veil of Isis published in 1873 may very well had had an influence on him. I have as yet no real proof that he read Blavatsky, other than the dream world of Ibbetson and the Duchess, but Theosophy is something that Punch would have been ribald about as well as the Spiritualist Movement.
While Comte’s Positivism did intervene between Romanticism and the Revival the whole fabric of the evolving mindset was blown apart by the issuance of Darwin’s Origin of Species . The Earth trembled beneath the feet of the Victorians and was further shifted by the rapid emergence of psychological analysis. Between Evolution and the developing knowledge of psychology that solidified with Freud’s pronouncements after the turn of the century. The ancient supernatural and fairy mentality had to be reconciled with the new scientific mentality; Mankind would not give up the concepts of the supernatural so easily.
To travel back in time again to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution: by the time of that revolution the Scientific Revolution had been under steam for some little time. Thus, the European mind was developing rapidly. There are some, blind to reality, who will object to such a fact as racist. Associated with race, it may well be, however the fact is that science developed as with no other race on earth. This is fact. So, the European mind was solving nature’s mysteries. As simple as these solutions were they were mind boggling at the time. The very notion that air has weight is incredible to the mind. Even today no child believes air can be weighed until he is so instructed. The fact that air is made up of many gases and that these gases can be separated and that one of these, Oxygen, was the substance of life must have been just too astounding.
By the late eighteenth century then other mysteries could be explained in other ways than the supernatural. All those wonderful fairies, elves and elementals could be demystified and explained naturally. Thus the Gothic novel came into existence and the Gothic novelists made it a point to explain supernatural beliefs as perfectly natural. Thus, the transition from the Medieval world to the modern or rational world progressed. Lyell challenged the supernatural belief that God had created the Earth four or five thousand years previously. He presented the monstrous belief that the planet was immeasurably much older and that it developed under natural processes.
Inevitably these incipient sciences were primitive and left more unexplained that they explained. Resistance to all scientific revelations was strenuous, the European mind having been deeply corrupted by Biblical superstitions. Slowly the superstitious was being rejected. The wonderful and beautiful Romantic period was a confusion of the natural and supernatural as the supernatural was gradually disproved.
Reynolds, Dickens, Dumas, Sue and many others were born into the Romantic Age, experienced and moved out of it as society evolved. Byron was only one important Romanticist but one who influenced that generation experiencing the revelations of science and technological inventions, such as applications like railroad and iron steam ships and the telegraph.
By 1830 science had a firm hold on the imagination and European society was ready to advance to the Positivism of August Comte who organized the loose sciences into specific groupings or disciplines. Thus, writers, who are on the cutting edge of developments, began to amalgamate these developments. Reynolds wrestles to get all these literary genres that affected him into a coherent whole; no easy problem. He and Eugene Sue were prime examples of making order of European intellectual developments. Reynolds especially was a prominent primitive sociologist and psychologist. This makes his work extremely compelling.
The generation born into the Romantic Age and are bound into the transition from the Romantic to the Positivist were passing their prime and from the stage by the 1860s when their influences were being eclipsed by he march of time and a generation was emerging that handled the same material in a different manner.
In 1859, as the style of writing was changing, Darwin’s Origin of Species was published and that put a definite term to the Middle Ages. It was a new world from the 1860s on. Evolution was the issue while in France Jean-Martin Charcot was making great inroads in the study of psychology. The world could never be seen through the eyes of previous years again. In literature the giants had left the earth, their epigone would be much smaller.
Moving across the water to the New World of the nineteen twenties and thirties we have a strange phenomenon in the career of the short story writer, Damon Runyon. Something that emerged out of the Revolutionary/Napoleonic era that wasn’t so obvious before was the rise of Organized Crime. Dickens touched on it in the career of Fagin/Sikes in Oliver Twist. Reynolds, Paul Favel and Sue developed the phenomenon but by the nineteen twenties and thirties in NYC organized crime was virtually an alternate government. Democracy had no idea how to control it. Frank Costello, a leading Mafioso, wanted to make organized crime a legitimate form of business. In his way Damon Runyon aided and abetted Costello.
Runyon, after a terrible childhood in Colorado was brought East to NYC by W.R. Hearst as a sportswriter for his papers. Runyon because of his childhood had an affinity for the outcasts and outlaws. Once in NYC he made Satan’s Square Mile centered on 42nd and Broadway, known also as the Tenderloin, his ‘home.’ He took up a station at a deli called Lindy’s that his stories made famous as Mindy’s.
He sat and observed this immigrant store of criminals during the twenties, committing their antics to print in his short stories. Not really a very good writer other than that of this criminal milieu, he turned rather gruesome situations into charming stories for the uninstructed; the stories got grimmer as time wore on.
Without his knowledge of the actuality of his stories, as I say, one is charmed. The stories are written in the illiterate immigrant jargon of the times, a weak understanding of tenses and so forth that some, the New York newspaperman, Jimmie Breslin who was there at the time but wrote in the 60s, think that Runyon invented. I have actually heard people speak that way so I think it was the lingua franca of Satan’s Square Mile.
At the time I am writing, the American past of 1900-1950 has completely disappeared. At the time Runyon was writing in NYC, Jewish, Italian and Irish colonies were well defined and not yet Americanized except in a very superficial way. After all, unlimited immigration was only suspended in 1924 so that there were hordes of unassimilated immigrants clustered in their colonies. Dialects were heard constantly. Dialect humor didn’t disappear until after the 1950s. My aunt’s had heavy German accents until they died in the fifties or sixties.
In other words, there were still large populations that hadn’t learned English at all and many, many who had a flimsy grasp of it.
At any rate, Runyon uses this immigrant dialect as the basis of his stories, and it is that that really gives his stories interest. No matter, he sat with these criminals ona daily basis and mostly all day at Lindy’s. Without that there isn’t much there. However, he sat with these criminals as a very successful ‘real’ American. He gradually insinuated himself into the underworld as a sort of consiglieri. He was an important advisor within the underworld. He, really became one of them protected by his association with Hearst.
The stories are entertaining enough but then Runyon tried to make romantic characters of these thugs on the stage and in the movies. The effort revealed the situation as it was without the glamour. In what was supposed to be a comedy Runyon filmed a movie called A Slight Case Of Murder with Edward G. Robinson playing a very convincing Mafia Don. It isn’t charming on film.
Runyon contracted Cancer in the thirties dying in 1946. His era died with him. Organized Crime had become Murder Inc. and there was nothing funny about it anymore. The sort of last gasp for Runyon came in 1955 when a big budget movie in striking technicolor (the movies lost something when technicolor was discontinued) called Guys and Dolls was released glorifying the Underworld. Brando and Sinatra starred. The movie didn’t make it.
It would take the horror film, Coppola’s Godfather to put a romanticized Mafia over a decade or so on.
To slide back a century and a half ago I will now review Reynold’s novel Robert Macaire or, The French Bandit In England.
To be continued in Time Traveling With R.E. Prindle, Part II, Robert Macaire.
A Note On G.W.M. Reynolds On The
Reception Of His Pickwick Abroad
by
R.E. Prindle
In March 1836 Charles Dickens began his story The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The story was issued in weekly parts concluding in October 1838. The series had been a great success, actually moving fiction into its modern phase. G.W.M Reynolds- George William MacArthur- noting Pickwick’s phenomenal success decided to piggy back on Dicken’s success so he began a continuation of the novel called Pickwick Abroad beginning three months after Dickens last installment in January 1838 in weekly parts through Aug. 1839.
His continuation was a success also. It did dumbfound the literary circles who considered it a plagiarism. For Reynolds his appropriation of the whole of Dickens’ idea and his cast of characters and, indeed, only a couple months after Dickens concluded, Reynolds began. The public must have said something like: ‘Oh, too much of a good thing.’
Reynolds version was running concurrently with the publication of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers in book form. How much confusion and dismay this may have caused was probably profound. Unheard of. The public unaware with what was happening very likely thought that Pickwick Abroad was, in fact, a sequel to the Papers. Whether the sequel cut into sales of The Papers isn’t known; perhaps it augmented them, the story becoming one in the public mind.
Regardless of copyright violations, copyrights being ill formed at the time, the sheer effrontery of appropriating another writers success was astounding and deeply, even viscerally, resented by Dickens as why shouldn’t it have been. Dickens bore rancor in his heart while it was always remembered by the literary crowd as a gaffe on Reynold’s part.
Both men went on to subsequent great success over the next thirty odd years with Dickens being a legend still. Reynolds who was extremely prolific, composing as many as possibly 40 very long titles actually sold more copies than Dickens. As happens to writers who write copiously the mind becomes worn and exhausted by the age of 60; it loses its flexibility. Following the excellent short biography of Dick Collins as published as a forword in the Vallancourt edition of Reynold’s The Necromancer in about 1862 Reynolds had ceased to write novels and apparently through with that line of endeavor sold all his copyrights to his printer, John Dick. They had been associates through most of Reynolds career.
Now in possession of Reynolds’ copyrights Dick accordingly brought out an edition of the entire corpus save Pickwick Abroad. This would seem to mean that publishing that book would be embarrassing, or, perhaps Dickens may even have requested that exclusion. Perhaps so, but it did sting Reynolds to the core. So that his entire corpus would be available one presumes, Reynolds found a publisher to reissue Pickwick Abroad dated 1864.
The book contains two prefaces, the first appearing to be from the first edition and the second from the 1864 reissue. In it Reynolds make no apologies. I quote the second preface in full:
On perusing the work, preparatory to the issue of this present edition, I see nothing that I regret having written, or that I have thought it prudent to omit. The ensuing pages are, then, a faithful reprint of the original edition, without the slightest abridgement: the plates accompanying it are also those which were expressly designed for the work, by Alfred Crowquill and Mr. Phillips.
With these words do I introduce the new edition of “PICKWICK ABROAD” to the public—sincerely hoping that its cheapness will have the effect of multiplying a hundred fold the number of readers.
He wasn’t kidding about the cheapness either.
I think the feeling of insult by Dick’s omission of the book is deeply felt. And who knows but that a great of satisfaction by that omission was felt by Dickens.
There is also an issue of how long Reynolds resided in France. In the First Preface written in 1839 he says he resided among the French for ten years. If so, it was only possible from 1830 when he was sixteen to 1837-8 just before he turned 25. Collins who has researched he issue thinks that Reynolds was only in France for a couple of years from ’35 to ’37. One must choose between Reynolds and Collings. Now, the age figure 25 occurs frequently in Reynolds early writing usually in connection with a death. Psychologically, then, it would appear that the Reynolds of his youth died in 1839 when he was twenty-five and Pickwick Abroad was a success. In fact in the legend of Edmund Mortimer as told in Master Timothy’s Bookcase, Edmund Mortimer the literary alter ego of Reynolds, belongs to a family in which the male dies in his room in his mansion at the age of 25. Thus with the publication of Pickwick Abroad the previous G.W.M. Reynolds in the character of Edmund Mortimer died and the second G.W.M. Reynolds took his place. Reynolds was reborn in his mind in 1839. The legend of the Mortimers then continues into it eighth incarnation and through Reynolds II reborn from the ashes of Mortimer I, the Mortimer line lives on.
Another of the mysteries Reynolds so loved to unravel, this one a mystery of his heart.
The Mysteries of G.W.M. Reynolds
March 19, 2019
The Mysteries of G.W.M. Reynolds
by
R.E. Prindle
Part I
It is now over two hundred years past since Walter Scott ended his great series of novels. Closing in on two hundred years since G.W.M. Reynolds began his truly amazing career that puts him in the pantheon of great novelists. Not exactly the household word of his contemporary, Charles Dickens, but after a century of neglect he is now making a belated reappearance. With the rise of on demand publishing his whole extensive catalog is now available although it requires some searching. The British Library is leader in the field.
Unfortunately the BL is reprinting the Dick’s English Library editions that use diamond point for print. At least the books aren’t heavy. For anyone beginning reading Reynolds, Valancourt Press of the US has a beautiful paperback edition of what may be Reynolds’ most popular work, the 2400 page Mysteries Of London. That book was inspired by the French writer Eugene Sue’s great work The Mysteries of Paris.
If your mind is attuned to the period Eugene Sue who was as prolific, if not more so, than Reynolds, is just as readable especially his two great masterpieces Mysteries of Paris and the Wandering Jew. The latter book has nothing to do with Jews, rather the Jesuits, but Sue uses the medieval legend of the Wandering Jew as a framing device.
Sue inspired Reynolds for numerous titles. Reynolds was accused of plagiarizing frequently and this may be true in the sense that he often used their structures. Dumas had Auguste Maquet who researched material and provided a story outline that allowed Dumas to put his entire effort into composition without having to invent the story line so he could clothe the skeleton of the story. In that sense Sue’s Mysteries of Paris provided the format for what was already in Reynolds’ mind.
Sue and Reynolds were part of that crop of novelists born from 1800 to 1816 and either died or petered out about 1860. Their brains were exhausted, worn out by their prodigious output. His contemporaries are the key to understanding Reynolds’ work. They were all essentially sociologists and psychologists. It might be advisable here to note that Reynolds born in 1814 left England at the age of sixteen on his own arriving in France in the turmoil succeeding the French Revolution of 1830 then returning to England in 1837.
Those seven years were the most formative years of his life. Not unlike the end of the century’s George Du Maurier who spent his childhood as a Frenchman then going to England with his French heritage. Reynolds developed an Anglo-French style of writing. His is not the pure English style of the period. It is much richer and fuller. He digs deeper.
As in his 1840 novel Master Timothy’s Bookcase he explains that his joy in life is exploring and explaining mysteries, getting behind the effects and seeking causes. He is not satisfied with surface appearances. He does so with spectacular results. Unfortunately he began his career by plagiarizing the characters and basic plot, such as it was, of Charles Dickens, (born 1812) Pickwick Papers, not to mention parodying Dickens’ title: Master Humphrey’s Clock with Master Timothy’s Bookcase. The loss of credibility cost Reynolds as he was shunned by the literary establishment while opening a feud that lasted their lives through.
Reynolds shows his rue in the 1864 reissue of Pickwick Abroad. To justify himself, in a preface he quotes from ‘a small sample of the favorable reviews which the greater portion of the press bestowed upon “Pickwick Abroad.”
‘From the Sunday Times: “Mr. Reynolds proceeds in his striking imitation of Boz (Charles Dickens). Would it were not so. The writer has powers that may be more worthily employed to working out an original story (which to a certain degree, this is) in an original manner.”’
And then from the Sun: ‘”In Pickwick Abroad” were not the work built upon another man’s foundation we should say it was one of the cleverest and most original productions of the modern British Press. We rise from the first Number with the only regret that Charles Dickens himself had not written it.’
In such a manner Reynolds tries to justify himself. As the work was published serially over twenty numbers and the second quote refers only to the first Number, by the twentieth part Reynolds himself seeks to exculpate his plagiarism, or perhaps, borrowing might be a kinder word. Afterall, Chretian de Troyes work The Holy Grail had four different continuators. Perhaps Reynolds should have described his Pickwick Abroad as a ‘continuation.’ But no, as we will see, he tried to appropriate Dickens characters.
Nevertheless, in his last part p. 607 of the 1864 reissue he writes:
“We must now think of bidding adieu to our friends” said Mr. Pickwick, “and of shortening the hour of departure as much as possible. One of the most important periods of my life has been passed in Paris; and though I have occasionally met with disagreeable adventures, still the reminiscences of them are almost entirely effaced from my mind by the many – many happy hours that I have spent in this great city since the day I left England. The numerous songs, tales, and anecdotes that I have heard or read are carefully entered in my memorandum book; and on my return to England I shall place the whole in the hands of some gentleman connected with the press, and who at the same time is conversant with France, and acquainted with the character of her inhabitants, for the purpose of laying them before the public in proper form.”
“The talented editor of your travels and adventures in England would be the most fitting for such a work,” observed Mr. Chitty. “He is the most popular writer of the day, and from the manner he executed the important task you formerly entrusted to his care and abilities certainly deserves your confidence in this instance.”
“No, –” returned Mr. Pickwick: “I am sorry to say that he declines the labour, and it therefore remains for me to find one who will be bold enough to take it, with the fear of being called imitator and plagiarist before his eyes. I am perfectly aware that there will be much hypercriticism to contend with – that many journalists will be severe, if not actually overwhelming, in their remarks on the new undertaking.”
‘Severe and overwhelming.’ Reynolds must have been bold indeed to continue through twenty parts, reach a conclusion and be off and running in a career that would span twenty-three years and involve from 20 to 35 million words. This guy, Reynolds turned out enormous works one right after the other, without pause and sometimes working on two or three at a time. Just amazing.
His masterwork, The Mysteries of the Court of London ran to ten volumes and about 5000 pages and took him eight years to finish while writing other novels. Marcel Proust is still blushing.
The Court of London is too staggering. There is no let up over the course of the work.
He was fortunate in his choice of wife in that she wrote for herself while also being the first editor who transcribed what must have been scurrilous penmanship as Reynolds must have been turning out thirty to fifty pages a day. The mere editorship must have been a consuming task. In addition, Reynolds kept a close eye on French literature as is evident by who he borrowed from. Sue (born 1804) was a constant source after his Mysteries of Paris published in parts 1841-43. Reynolds must have been reading the parts when issued. Paul Favel (born 1816) who wrote his own Mysteries of London beginning in 1843 which very probably was an influence on Reynolds who was keeping a close eye on literature from France. Favel is quite worthy too.
At least Reynolds implies as much in his 1840 novel Master Timothy’s Bookcase in which his apparent alter ego is the hero Edmund Mortimer. As a foundation for his later work Bookcase is essential reading. A stunning work in itself it is as nothing to Mysteries of London and The Court of London. Reynolds had a very powerful mind. He was capable of extraordinary mental gymnastics discussing the most complicated subjects in readily understandable terms.
Bookcase borrows the title and in a nearly unrecognizable form the method of Dickens’ Master Humphrey’s Clock. There was no need for Reynolds to make reference to Dickens work, or as roughly as Reynolds says he was treated for Pickwick Abroad, it was not enough to make him stop. Indeed the feud or assault continued to Dickens’ death which came before Reynolds’.
In Humphrey’s Clock, a number of old stories, were stored in the clock case from which members of Humphrey’s club extracted stories to read. Reynolds took the notion to a level that was impossible for Dicken to match.
The premise of the Bookcase concerns seven members of the Mortimer family as told through the life of the last Mortimer, Edmund. The genius of the family appears before each generation in turn and offers to give them through life the quality they think will make them happy.
The first Mortimer chose glory, the next literary fame, then love, success in all enterprises, Health, Wealth and finally Edmund the hero of our story chose Universal Understanding. Of course, for each quality there was an upside and a downside; in all cases the downside prevailed eroding happiness and becoming a curse.
Reynolds very cleverly shows the downside of universal understanding. The Genius of the family named Timothy provides Edmund with a magical bookcase that solves all mysteries for him. Like his subconscious the bookcase is always with him providing a written scroll to answer whatever mystery Edmund asks.
If one remembers the US radio commentator Paul Harvey, his shtick was : You’ve heard the story, now, here’s the backstory. Harvey explains the mystery much as Timothy’s magical bookcase does.
One is also reminded of The Divine Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus, tr. 1650. In it the scholar explains how Poemander helped him solve mysteries. Reynolds was very well read so there is no reason to believe he hadn’t read the book. The scholar explains the situation thus:
My thoughts being once seriously busied about the things that are, and my Understanding lifted up, all my bodily Senses being exceedingly holden back, as it is with them that are heavy of sleep, by reason either of fulness of meat, or of bodily labour; Methought I saw one of an exceeding great stature, and of an infinite greatness, call me by my name, and say unto me, ‘What wouldst thou hear and see: Or what wouldst thou understand to learn and know?
Then I said, Who art thou? I am, quoth he, Poemander, the mind of the great Lord, the most mighty and absolute Emperor: I know what thou wouldst have, and I am always present with thee.
Then I said, I would learn the things that are, and understand the nature of them, and know God, How? Said he. I answered that I would gladly hear. Then said he, Have me again in mind, and whatsoever thou wouldst learn, I will teach thee.
And there you have the magic bookcase, the unconscious of Freud, the auto-suggestion of Emile Coue. The biblical injunction: Seek and ye shall find. In a reasonable sense Edmund took the particulars of a situation worked them through on an unconscious or semi-conscious sense just as Reynolds does in his explications.
Thus, through the first couple hundred pages Reynolds has Edmund living his life, meeting people and involving himself in their problems, the back stories of which are explained by recourse to Timothy’s magic bookcase.
All goes well until Edmund is accused of a murder which he didn’t commit but which circumstantial evidence indicates he did. In trying extricate himself his explanations were so vague and bizarre to his judges, but not to we readers, that he is convicted and sentenced to be hanged but then he is considered to be insane and his sentence is commuted to life imprisonment in the Bicetre Insane Asylum.
He is then sent to the famous French prison for the insane where he is considered to be a mono-maniac. He is imprisoned with three other mono-maniacs. Now, Reynolds wants to introduce a discussion of the circulation blood. I think this really clever the way he leads his story to this point, creating a false ending with the monomaniac interlude and then Edmund will be freed from the life sentence when during the 1830 French revolution the revolutionaries throw open the prison doors and unleash a small army of loonies on Paris.
Edmund’s fellow inmate, a doctor, had contested William Harvey’s right to be called the discoverer of the circulation of blood, contending that Plato had been before him. Reynold’s describes the situation:
‘The first (monomaniac) was an old man of sixty-five, with long grey flowing locks, with long grey hair flowing from the back part of his head, the crown and region of the temples being completely bald. He was short in stature, stooping in his gait, and possessed of a countenance eminently calculated to afford a high opinion of his intellectual powers, he was however a monomaniac of no common description. Bred to the medical profession he had given, when at an early age, the most unequivocal proofs of a fertile and vigorous imagination. He first attracted attention towards the singularity of his conceptions by disputing the right of the Englishman, Dr. Harvey, to the honour of having first discovered the circulation of the blood. He maintained that Harvey merely revived the doctrine, and that it was known to the ancients. This opinion he founded upon the following passage in Plato:–“The heart is the centre of a knot of the blood -vessels, the spring or fountain of the blood, which is carried impetuously around: the blood is the food of the flesh; and for that purpose of nourishment, the body is laid out into canals, like those which we draw through gardens, that the blood may be conveyed as from a fountain, to every part of the previous system.”
The young physician was laughed at for venturing to contradict a popular belief, and was assailed by the English press for attempting to deprive we Englishmen of the initiative honour of the discovery. He was looked upon as an enthusiast, and lost all the patronage he had first obtained by his abilities.
Thus, Reynolds as part of his story introduces an extraneous discussion of the circulation of the blood in which he was interested. And then Reynolds goes on to explain the purposes of what will be his own more than vast body of work.
“Of a surety…there are individuals in his world whose motives are so strange that they escaped human comprehension. Many an action in a man’s life is explained by some little sentiment or feeling, lurking at the bottom of his soul, and buried in the most infallible mystery. The most extraordinary and important deeds are frequently regulated or indeed engendered, by motives so trivial that, if judged by the side of other men’s minds, they would appear totally incapable of exercising so powerful a control over a sensible imagination. We are apt to exclaim against the explanations frequently given by romanticists and novelists, to account for the conduct of the heroes or heroines, as unnatural and being at variance with probability; but, in the great volume of human nature, we trace the motives of character, and eccentricities of disposition, which seem to justify the wildest descriptions of the professed dealers in fiction. No romance, which emanates from the imagination is so romantic as the tales of real life. Oh! If the veil were withdrawn from all eyes—if the whole world could read the mysteries and secrets of the heart—how much villainy would be suddenly exposed—how much how many unjust suspicions explained—and how many supposed motives of applause as rapidly turned into evident causes of blame.
So, there you have the goals towards which Reynolds is striving in all his work with his very powerful mind.
After Edmund escapes from the Bicetre Asylum he immediately returns to England. Here the stories of deep mystery end and there is an interlude before a long story titled The Marriage of Mr. Pickwick. Ends the book. I will deal with the Pickwick story in another part.
It would appear that the French part of the Bookcase story represents Reynolds’ sojourn in France in fictionalized or perhaps, hypnoid state. In the interlude Reynolds looks back and examines that stay from a more sober point of view. Here in an interesting interchange between Edmund, already an alter ego, with another man who appears to be a different alter ego. The second alter ego gives a different brief history of what might have been a portrait of Reynolds in France seen from a different perspective. It is well to bear in mind that Reynolds arrived in France when he was sixteen with a very ample inheritance of 12,000 pounds. Such a young sport with money must have been seen as easy prey to sharpers. As his stories are replete with such characters and stories, indeed, Pickwick Abroad is a virtual catalog of sharp and indeed, criminal practices, Reynolds must have had the same approximate encounters. It is most likely that at least one or two succeeded and probably more as he went through 12,000 pounds in six years. Here is the passage; Edmund, the sober Reynolds and Mr. Ferguson, the flighty Reynolds.:
As Sir Edmund was returning home…he stopped for a moment to request a light for his cigar at a lonely cottage which stood on the way to his own mansion. A young man with a pale countenance and yet with an ironical and smirking expression thereupon, answered the knock on the door, which stood half open. The individual immediately addressed Sir Edmund by name and claimed acquaintance with him.
“I have seen you before,” said he:–your face is familiar to me.”
“I reside in the neighborhood,” answered the baronet; “and that may be the reason—”
“No.” Interpolated the stranger. “ I have seen you elsewhere. I never stir out of my own house and therefore well aware that I couldn’t have seen you in the vicinity. I was once a man of the world, now I am a misanthrope.”
“Indeed,” said Sir Mortimer; “and yet,” he added glancing around him, “methinks that for a misanthrope you are tolerably comfortable.”
“It was in Paris that I saw you.” Exclaimed the stranger, without heeding the observation, and having reflected for a moment. “Ah, now I remember you well, and who you are—and the strange adventure which befell you there. But, believe me, I am delighted to see you released from that horrid dungeon into which you were cast. I never believed your guilt,–I knew you were innocent,–indeed, I was fully able to judge of the force of a combination of circumstances, all collected against you, from my own experience in a most extraordinary scene of adventures, and yet”, he added with remarkable rapidity of utterance, which was evidently characteristic of him, “mine was rather a laughable than a serious history. Did you know me by name in Paris? Did you ever hear of Mr. Ferguson, who had acquired the honourable distinction to the name of the ‘Man of the world? No! Well—I believe I was as much entitled to the name as the Barber in the ‘Arabian Nights Entertainments’ was to that of Silent…’
Undoubtedly as a sixteen year old in 1830 Reynolds over the next six years flattered himself as being a man of the world, which he was, he ruefully recalls, as much as the obviously talkative Barber in the Arabian Nights had received the sarcastic name of Silent.
Also Reynolds having read the Arabian Nights shows how he must have passed much of his time in France. The work was translated into French from 1702-1713 by Antoine Galland and first in England as late as 1844 by Edward Lane.
Reynolds was exceptionally well read for such a young man. He was only twenty-six in 1840 when this book was written. He was interested in all the Liberal Arts including psychology as being developed by the great Anton Mesmer and his successors and hence the inkling of the sub- or unconscious. And he considered himself a teacher. Quite extraordinary.
As there will be discontinuity between this period and part two and three I will discontinue here and pick up on the continuation shortly.
3477 words
Far Gresham’s Dilemma: A Short Story
January 24, 2018
A Short Story
Far Gresham’s Dilemma
by
R.E. Prindle
Pages torn from the memoirs of Far Gresham 12/25/1981
Edited by R.E. Prindle
My troubles had been increasing. I struggled to avoid what I knew would be the inevitable conclusion. I had seen the situation developing itself, had done my best to avert it by taking evasive actions years before, but the juncture and collision of the two forces were unavoidable. When the collision occurred I knew, I hoped that I wouldn’t, but I knew that I would buckle and collapse before the concentrated hatred of my enemies. My probable reaction had been impressed into my psyche decades before. I knew this, but I, as we all are, was powerless to resist this old imprinting. Coinciding with the objective phenomena had been the gradual disintegration of my personality. Self-analysis had cleared me of nearly all deleterious psychological reactions but now I was faced with trying to exorcise the central external factor which controlled my psyche; which compelled reactions in me which were irrational and beyond my control.
I was now approaching forty-two. Over the years as I had peeled back the layers of the onion seeking that core which would liberate me from my thralldom and allow me to face the world with a clear mind and cohesive purpose. I had resolved many aspects of my personality but this one remained beyond my grasp. All my efforts to convince myself to deal with this central problem had been rebuffed by my subconscious mind. I thought I had come close on several occasions, but fear always held me back. I had convinced myself that the event was of minor importance. I believed that, while this occurrence held me in thrall, that, while it had humiliated the child I had been, this terrible happening would turn out to be insignificant. I was both right and wrong.
I was too late to alter the outcome of my objective situation but I did find salvation for my subjective situation. The latter was of the greater importance to me. The period was one of very troubled sleep. I had had several successive weeks of disturbing dreams. They did not frighten me. I knew that negotiations were being undertaken by my conscious and subconscious selves. The violence of the dreams only indicated the significance of the matter under consideration. The dreams occurred every night and seemed to last through the whole night. Obviously a climax was imminent.
The revelatory dream, that dream that liberated me from the enthrallment to the traumatic circumstances was preceded by a brief little dream that set the stage for the major revelation. The dream was a quiet little dream, merely a vignette. It was a peaceful little dream set in a scene that was potentially terrifying. Strangely, it was not.
I became conscious of looking into a darkened warehouse filled with rows and rows and stacks and stacks of boxes. In the aisles there was a man searching frantically and desperately through the boxes in the gloom of the shadowy warehouse. There was no light. I didn’t know how he expected to find anything. But he continued to search in a manner approaching frenzy.
Aroused by the noise, a guardian appeared to investigate. I recognized him immediately; it was Death. Death had not the fearsome, ugly appearance as he is usually depicted. He was a kindly looking avuncular old man with an understanding expression on his face and a shock of gray hair. He had come out to investigate the noise. He found a Burglar in the House of Death. I recognized the Burglar too. It was me. I wondered what I was looking for.
The information was immediately forthcoming, for Death, without approaching the Burglar asked him what he was doing.
The Burglar was very distraught, his expression revealed a deep distracted anguish. He replied: ‘I’m looking for my dead self. My first personality was murdered and taken from me. I need him to make myself whole again.’
Death looked at the Burglar with some amazement: ‘Are you dead?’ he asked.
‘No.’ replied the Burglar, ‘It’s my original self who was murdered. I’m looking for his ghost.’
‘If you’re not dead then you can’t be here. Death told the Burglar in a kindly manner. ‘You must leave now or stay forever.’
But the Burglar was too distraught to comprehend his danger and blurted out: ‘But you don’t understand, I can’t leave until I find my original self.’
Death seemed to be amused rather than angered by this impertinent reply. He emitted a low warm chuckle: ‘I don’t understand? Ha. Ha. I don’t understand! If you have misplaced it or allowed it to atrophy then you have come looking in the very wrong place. You should search your own pockets first.’ His voice lowered to a tone of stern rebuke: ‘Leave now and bother me no more until I come for you.’
Darkness closed in from the edges until the middle disappeared. When I awoke I enjoyed a certain calmness amidst my general disturbance. I relaxed in a state of excitement. I knew what to do but I didn’t know how to go about it. I actively tried to compel my conscious to vex my subconscious to make it give up the secret. It was very reluctant to do so. One night in this long period of stormy dreams my subconscious presented me with a new metaphor to see if I could interpret it correctly.
When the dream took form I found myself in the playground of a grade school with another boy who was looking to me for guidance. The ground rose in three slight equal gradients to the school building which was perhaps a hundred yards in the distance. It was daytime but there was no light. No grass grows on a playground and there were only a few tufts around the occasional tree in this one. In the distance just outside the building stood a figure pointing something in my and this other boy’s direction. Taking time to get a clear look at this figure, who was a mere shadow, I discerned that he was pointing a rifle at me. This other boy said: ‘What is that red spot on your chest?’
I looked down and saw the red dot from a laser rifle centered on my heart. I immediately leaped to the side to get the dot off my heart knowing that with the laser beam on me the rifleman couldn’t miss. He stood stationary, but, now aware of the laser beam I rolled around on the ground, adopted stooping and standing postures, but no matter what I did the laser beam remained on my heart. Although I was clearly in his sights the rifleman didn’t pull the trigger. All this time the other boy kept advising me to be calm, that the rifleman wasn’t shooting. Good calm advice but the laser beam wasn’t aimed at his heart.
Finally, convinced that no shots would be fired, I ran from the schoolyard and headed for some city streets lined with middle class houses. I rushed toward them and was actually among the houses when a sentry who was stationed in a guard house which I had already passed commanded me to come back to him. I was beyond his reach and ought to have kept going but the sense of guilt which had pervaded my life prevented my continuing. I returned to the sentry box. I stood before the sentry awaiting his decision. I had broken into a nervous sweat, as had been my habit, and stood twitching guiltily. He did and said nothing. Ignored me.
Astonished at his lack of interest in me I began to wonder what this dream might mean and how it was related to my central childhood fixation. While I was standing there in my consternation my subconscious, deriding my inability to grasp the meaning of the metaphor, decided to show me the central fixation of my life, the one situation that controlled my responses to everyday life and all personal relationships. But this was no easy task. For I resisted. For this intense shame, humiliation and debasement had encased the memory behind a stout concrete block wall, or so it was represented in my dream. Perhaps the method of penetrating this wall had been suggested to me by an old movie I had seen years before, the name of the movie was The Children Of The Damned.
In this movie several intelligences from outer space had been sent to Earth to assume control of Earthmen. They were in the form of babies, the movie was produced in the wake of the Nazi Era so the babies, soon to be children, were blond and blue eyed. Obviously a thinly disguised simile for the ‘Blond Beast’. They were very aggressive. As eight-year olds their intelligence surpassed all but the most learned Earthmen. Earthmen soon grasped their danger and set out to destroy the super intelligent aliens. But the children’s penetrating intelligence, which was able to read minds, detected every plot against them. Finally a noble Earth martyr carried a brief case loaded with dynamite, a few years later he would have been able to fill his pocket with plastique, into the classroom. In order to foil the intelligence of the alien children he concentrated his thoughts on a brick wall. The children, standing in a semi-circle around him, directing their intelligence to shattering his wall, which was graphically portrayed in the movie. As the wall was destroyed bricks flying everywhere the martyr’s thoughts of the briefcase shown clear, of course, the children were too late. The bomb exploded blowing eight space kids and one noble martyr back into outer space.
So, as I stood in terrific anticipation, my subconscious directed an energy against the wall which separated me from my dead self; the assassinated child of my youth, the murdered child of another time; the hope of another universe. The concrete wall was disintegrating before my eyes. Fragments flew in every which way. As the hole in the wall was enlarged the object of the search by the Burglar in the House of Death revealed itself. Its full horror was exposed to my view.
My mind’s eye received the image. It was a scene, a snapshot. I can see this still photograph of my degradation today, now, just as it was presented to me on that night, in that dream. I was unable for several weeks thereafter to comprehend the scene. I could see the picture but try as I might I could not actually remember the sequence of events. Still my mind began to slowly reconstruct the situation.
This period of my life, from four to eight, had always been jumbled In my memory. I had never been able to arrange events of that period into chronological order. I was now able to unfold those years and reconstruct my life of that period.
The picture I was shown was simply this. A group of twelve children, we would all have been six or seven in the second grade, were standing in a semi-circle around a child in frozen motion on one foot in mortal terror and a cold sweat. Elsewhere on the playground, this was during recess, stood twelve other children in disarray. This was the incident that shaped my reactions to life, that directed my responses against my will.
There was still no memory. The scene was not brought to life, converted from a single snapshot into a cinematic motion picture. Nor has it since. The memory was and is too painful. Yet I have been able to reconstruct that terrible moment and the steps that led up to it.
Partially I did this from memory; partially from research. I never contacted any of my former classmates. I went back to the Valley and collecting the name of my classmates from the school archives and examining the archives of the Valley Star around those years I have been able to reconstruct the following account. As in all wars there was an ante-bellum period. It begins actually, before I was born.
My mother had never wanted me. In her family the eldest female cousin was given the rights of primogeniture. As I was the first born child of my mother and her three sisters, she had desperately hoped for a daughter so that she could leap to being chief among her sisters. Her disappointment when I was born was severe. She never forgave me for not being a girl, nor was she prepared to assert my rights against my female cousin born four years later. It is just as well that she abandoned me for I can never forgive her for having abandoned my rightful role as eldest cousin in my extended family. My cousin, Danielle, when she was born had displaced me. This early abandonment in favor of my cousin has also left its mark on my character. My mother was no mother to me.
She, while in high school inadvertently set in motion the animosity directed at me in the second grade. Such is the unpredictability and uncertainty of life. She, while in the twelfth grade, accepted a date with a boy by the name of David Hirsh. David Hirsh was the son of Solomon Hirsh who owned Hershey’s Department Store. I do not know what my mother’s parents did but I do know that they were not well to do, nor were they ever of the social station the Hirshes enjoyed. Well to do boys only date girls from a lower social stratum for one purpose. Perhaps my mother was too naïve to know this, or perhaps she flattered herself that this rich kid might actually fall in love with her. He, on his part, being a rich kid, expected to score. Go all the way as they expressed it in those days.
Cars had not attained the universality in 1936 that they posses at the present. David Hirsh had a car of his very own which he could drive to school and park for all to see. His status at school was very high. Picking my mother up in his new automobile he employed a trick that undoubtedly antedated cars. He drove her a few miles out of town, parking the car in a grove of trees by the side of the road he quite bluntly told her to put out or get out. My mother would not be intimidated by a boy who threw off the disguise of a knight in shining armor and announced he was nothing but an arrogant rich cad in a shiny automobile. She got out. Dismayed at this rejection of what he considered a low class broad who should have been grateful for his attention, he shot off a few uncomplimentary remarks about my mother’s national antecedents. Now, from 1900 to, say, 1940 when immigrant nationalities were still in process of acculturation, national antagonisms were high. Even in the thirties, after immigration had been closed down in 1924, foreign accents were common and ethnic traits still persisted. My mother while not having an accent could still be identified as a Pole by her vocal rhythms. She still clung to certain Polish articles of dress. She still had a romantic attachment to the Polish babushka, or kerchief worn over the head and tied beneath the chin. Thus in this ethnic jostling racial and national slurs were commonly expressed. Fist fights occurred over national differences. Immigrants were stopped on the streets by natives and compelled to recite the pledge of allegiance of kiss the American flag.
Therefore the following passage in historical perspective should not be alarming. It is history. It is the way it was. Hirsh knew that my mother was of Polish ancestry. Everyone knew everyone else’s national antecedents. It was important. Now, irritated to the point of distraction by my mother’s refusal of his improper proposal, mixing nationalities freely he called a dumb Polack and a stupid Bohunk. Either he was ignorant of his geography or in is frustration he lost touch with who he was talking to. Perhaps in his sexual rut he saw double. I don’t know.
There is an old saying: People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. This old saying applies to everyone but it especially applied to David Hirsh. For, as his name indicates, he was Jewish. One of the many nationalities with representatives in the United States. In a world of immigrant antipathies there are pejorative nicknames for every group of people. My mother’s mind was well furnished against any contingency of name calling.
As David Hirsh inched slowly along just behind my mother shouting these derogatory national epithets, as well as others even more personal, my mother absorbed in her disappointment was oblivious to everything else. Then regaining some composure she began to hear what he was saying. Taking umbrage at this very unjust conduct, she returned a few sharp epithets. She used words like ‘kike’ and ‘sheeny.’ Words that have all but lost their meaning today.
Disappointed in love, his heart filling with rancor at what he later described as that ‘arrogant Polack bitch,’ Hirsh heard those words flung back at him and his heart in turn became cold. With that marvelous ability that human beings have of disregarding their own provocative words and actions, David Hirsh immediately forgot his insult of ‘Put out or get out’ and the ethnic slurs he had first hurled at my mother. Swallowing hard he decided that he had been rejected because he was Jewish and my mother was an anti-Semite. He gave the car the gas, drove off in a shower of gravel and left her to walk home.
The matter might have rested there except for the fact that Hirsh was prone to dig his own grave. He would always be an adept at self-embarrassment because of his vindictiveness. Hirsh had boasted to his friends who he was going to date, what he was going to do to her and where he was going to do it. In those ancient times before macadam and concrete had completely altered the landscape as we knew it, the roads were graveled, especially in rural and semi-rural areas. As the Valley is very wet, deep wide ditches ran along each side of the road to drain the fields. Three of Hirsh’s friends, out to watch the action and verify Hirsh’s boasts, witnessed the whole thing from within a ditch. The next week at school Hirsh was not allowed to forget or even accept responsibility for his action. ‘She’ had done it to him. She must pay.
Two years later my mother married my father. As they say, I was the result of that union. Four years later my mother divorced my father. We went to live with her parents. While we lived there I entered Kindergarten at Emerson Grade School. At five I had not yet heard of class consciousness. I was apparently the only innocent in the room. At Emerson the classes were all of about twenty-five students. My room divided into two social classes. There were twelve students in each group, that I will call after one of the two classes in H.G. Wells’ story of the Time Machine, the Eloy. There were twelve students in the group I denominate Morlocks, plus myself. I remain uncomprehending of class differences to this day.
Amongst my classmates was a boy named Michael Hirsh. Michael was the son of the same David Hirsh who had dated my mother. David Hirsh had not forgotten the consequences of his unfortunate behavior. Thus the biblical heritage expressed itself as the ‘sins’ of the Mother shall be visited on the son.
Michael Hirsh, as I now believe, on his father’s instructions, set about to humiliate me to avenge his father’s humiliation of himself. Kindergarten was not a happy time for me. I was rejected by the Eloy and seeing the abject disposition of the Morlocks, I had no desire to take a place with them. Rejected by my mother because I was a boy, I was now rejected by my classmates.
I was a lonely boy and perhaps consequently a difficult one. Thus the year passed. I played alone in the schoolyard and remained ignorant of my situation.
Did I mention there was a war on? Yes, this was 1943 and 1944. Hitler and Tojo were out to conquer the world. Millions of men were in uniform. Industrial manpower was in short supply. Prior to the wars the Valley did not have a large Black population. Blacks were encouraged to migrate North to work in the factories as the White boys had been drafted for the war. Thus racial antagonisms were added to immigrant national antagonisms. I’m not bragging. Many times I have wished that I wasn’t that way, but I believe in equality before the law and fair play. Laugh at me if you will. It’s my way and I’m not going to change, can’t, won’t.
One day in Spring, just before summer vacation, as Kindergarten was drawing to a close three little Black kids were introduced into our midst. Here is where the direct meaning of my dream begins. A tremor went through the class. Today you can search the country over without finding a person who will admit that they were ever prejudiced against Black people. David Hirsh was no exception. Hirsh stayed as well informed as a busybody. Aware of the Black kids time of arrival he instructed his son Michael what to do when they arrived.
Michael, who had a habit of emphasizing his opinions with his projected index finger, shook it at each of us and told us that under no circumstances were we to fraternize with the Black kids. I thought this was wrong, but, already an outsider, I wasn’t going to make it worse for myself by objecting.
On the way to recess Michael Hirsh re-admonished us. Once outside, however, he added a new condition. He demanded that the Black kids sit on the edge of the sand box and not move during recess. This was going too far. I took offence. As I played alone I was not averse to the Black kids having to play alone, but I could not condone their not being allowed to play within themselves.
By coincidence I was standing between the Black kids and Hirsh who stood there shaking his finger at them. Hirsh stood before the Eloy who were gathered behind him. I have never been overly keen on fighting. I was always small for my age. Hirsh was a good two inches taller than me. I told Hirsh and the Eloy that I didn’t think it was right to make those kids sit there during recess. He told me that was the way it was going to be. I said, No, I might refuse to talk to them but I couldn’t allow this. I exhorted the Black kids to get up and fight with me against the injustice. Hirsh was dumbfounded. No one had ever challenged his authority before. I was not only challenging him I was offering to fight him. Those little Black kids left me hanging out to dry. They wouldn’t budge. Fortunately Hirsh was a coward. He had already stepped back into the protective pocket of the Eloy. I had envisioned Armageddon but now Hirsh and the Eloy had melted away.
I thought it was over. I had no idea of the seriousness of my crime. Michael Hirsh went home and bawled to his father. His father had not anticipated that his son would be challenged. He had failed to provide his son with the appropriate response. Michael Hirsh’s self-confidence was shattered. I had no idea what I had done. As my mother, by standing up for herself, had humiliated David Hirsh, so now I had likewise humiliated Michael Hirsh. David Hirsh was enraged. Failing to see the injustice of his cause, a second time, he determined on revenge.
After school the next day Hirsh padded up behind me and hissed into my ear: ‘We’re going to get you.’ I did believe he meant what he said. But the year was over and it would have to wait till next year.
At just this time my mother made her first attempt to abandon me. She arranged for me to go live with a family named Smith. The Valley straddles the River and is therefore divided into two distinct towns with two distinct characters; The East and West sides. The East Side was gradually claimed by the incoming tide of Blacks. The Whites moved out into the hamlets, or West Side. The Smiths lived on the West Side of the River. I transferred from Emerson to Thoreau. I was relieved, for I knew that had I remained at Emerson Hirsh and the Eloy would have their vengeance.
Except for the longer minutes with which childhood is endowed my relief was short lived. In May of that year the Smiths informed my mother that I could no longer stay with them. My mother, still unwilling to accept me, found room and board for me with a family named Johnson. On the East Side. In the Emerson school district. I was terrified. I returned to Emerson in the mid-First Grade. There was an electric shock amongst the Eloy as the message ‘He’s back’ flashed from mouth to mouth.
By this time I had forgotten the reason for my persecution. I was so concerned about the enmity of the Eloy that I never thought to reason why. My offense was certainly a justified one, or what I would have thought my so-called offence to have been. Actually Hirsh and the Eloy didn’t consider their action against the Blacks as unjust. Therefore, in their eyes, my offence consisted of an act of insubordination; a refusal to keep the place they had assigned me. The Eloy were unrelenting; I was harassed continually. The Morlocks either actively followed orders to interfere with me or were too timid to resist. The teacher acquiesced in the attitude of the Eloy. Perhaps David Hirsh put pressure on her after Michael informed him I was back. Authority is always week kneed. It will always accept the position of the stronger. Justice is not a factor in its decisions.
Taken by surprise, David Hirsh, his son and the Eloy could not obtain a revenge that would gratify their desires during the four remaining months of the first grade. David Hirsh thought long and hard on the matter. The Biblical answer was an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The punishment must fit the crime. David Hirsh’s thoughts roved back to the celebrated Dreyfus Affair in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Dreyfus, a Jew, had been convicted of spying. Part of his punishment was a brutal degrading. He had been compelled to stand before his assembled brother officers as he was stripped of the insignia of his association with the French army; had them torn from his uniform and thrown in the mud. Ruminating on this famous cause celebre he associated it also with his son’s embarrassment. For as difficult as it is for me to conceive, Michael Hirsh took my objection to his injustice in the same manner in which I will describe my humiliation. In his mind David Hirsh sought to avenge both Dreyfus and his son on me.
Hirsh formulated his plan, instructed and drilled his son and the Eloy in the procedure. I remained with the Johnsons in a state of agony, fearing the approach of September.
I know that winter had not arrived as the leaves were still on the trees, so it is possible that I was gotten on the first day of school. I still do not know exactly what happened. I am only surmising from an interpretation of the photograph I was shown in my dream; or perhaps I am drawing up information reservoirs my subconscious still denies me access to. I have thought that my punishment was the requirement imposed on the Black children two years previously in Kindergarten. But in reality it was the ‘punishment’ I had had unknowingly imposed on Michael Hirsh. David Hirsh had instructed his son what to do. His son executed perfectly. At recess the Eloy arranged themselves in a semi-circle around me. The worthless Morlocks, who were excluded from all Eloy intercourse hung listlessly in the background where they belonged. In Kindergarten Hirsh had encountered me in the point position. Exposed, he had retreated into the protection of the Eloy behind him. His lack of character at that moment was the crime with which I was charged. Now, as the keystone in the arch surrounding me, protected deep within the pocket which enclosed me, from within which authority always works, coward that he was, all authority is cowardly, he was prepared to deal with me. I ha no problem with fear. I would have fought if challenged. I might have fought if Hirsh had been on point as in Kindergarten. Maybe the movie of the Alien Kids acted as a mild solvent, loosening the cover on my suppressed memory which decades later allowed me to recover a souvenir of this incident, for just as the Space Kids glared hatred at the Noble Martyr only to break his reserves too late, so the Eloy gathered around me and glared hatred into my soul. If they had all set upon me physically the result could have been borne, but I could not resist their cumulative concentrated hatred. I crumbled beneath the projected blizzard of hatred. David Hirsh achieved more than his goal. He not only humiliated me he killed my soul. Michael Hirsh, in the keystone was shaking the customary finger at me. He told me that I was to take a step toward him and stop when he told to stop. I raised my foot and he said stop. In that awkward position I was told to remain for the duration of recess. Thus I was substituted for the Negroes in Kindergarten.
I hope the reader doesn’t think badly of me. I don’t know that I am ashamed today although I resent myself for having complied. I know in my heart that they would have backed down if I had resisted.
Hirsh must have been the shadowy figure in my dream. His finger must have been the laser rifle, or perhaps the laser beam was a symbol of the hatred projected on me. The figure never fired because the laser beam represented a hatred that would never cease.
The memory of the event was immediately suppressed by me. I died at that moment. As Abram became Abraham and Jacob became Israel, so even though my name remained the same I became a different person, a stranger in a strange land. I therefore did not give an appropriate response to my punishment. David Hirsh had expected me to go the Michael Hirsh and the Eloy and beg forgiveness for my original sin, accept my punishment and go forth and sin no more. They were disappointed for I felt, not remembered, only their rejection. While I would never have asked their forgiveness, I might have tried to correct the matter.
Throughout the second grade I endured the active resentment of the Eloy joined with the passive acquiescence of the Morlocks, for they were forbidden to speak to me. They were powerless in their self-accepted mortification, useless in their ineffectuality. The symbol of authority, the teacher, without ever seeking my side of the story, said that I had been justly chastised. Authority lacks integrity completely.
I became a very distraught little boy.
As the second grade ended my mother informed me that I would be leaving the Johnsons. After the emotional wrench of leaving the Smiths I had prepared myself for further disappointment by making no attachment to the Johnsons. My only question was, where to next? I knew it was serious when she kneeled down to address me face to face. It’s always serious when an adult lowers themselves to a position of equality with the child.
She told me that she wanted me to enter the Children’s Home. The Municipal Orphanage. I went numb. First, I had a mother, or thought I did. Second, I had passed the back fence and stared horrified at the inmates. I didn’t know then that she meant to abandon me entirely but I subconsciously feared such a thing. I resisted stubbornly although I saw that no matter what I said she was going to put me there anyway. Finally, in an attempt to save face, I asked her if I would still have to attend Emerson. She said the Children’s home was in the Longfellow School District. Only have trusted this perfidious woman I severed myself from humanity and entered the House of the Distraught. The boys dorm was on the fourth floor. But my experience in the Orphanage is not germane to my story and I return to the war against me by the Hirshes.
Beset by psychological distresses before I entered the Orphanage, my emotional anxieties increased a thousand fold. I have often compared the sensation to an excess of electrical current passing through a transformer. All fuses blew. Wires broke loose and flashed fire to the skies. There was a loud hum, a boom, and then silence. I do not know how I survived and recovered even though that recovery would take forty years. As shattered as I was I received no mercy from David Hirsh.
I was now eight. The two wars, the European and Pacific had ended. The Japanese Empire and the Axis Powers had gone down to defeat. The enormity of the Nazi policies became apparent after the war. The impression of the American people was incalculable. The terrific inhumanity of the Nazis was difficult to comprehend. The wholesale slaughter of people for which they had no use, both within and without the borders of Germany the murder of as many intellectuals as they could get their hands on, the slaughter and debasement of the Polish nation, other Eastern and Central European Slavs and, of course, the attempted extermination of the Jews were staggering to the American mind. The single mindedness of the Nazis in the pursuit of their goals was incredible. The human mind changed from the shock of recognition.
The destruction of the Jews created a feeling amongst the Jews comparable to my own upon entering the Children’s Home. For the five years after the war, the American Jews were devastated. They had suffered no discomfort in the US but the ant colony had been disturbed, all ants were affected. They began to see Fascists everywhere. They trembled in fear that it might happen, would happen, in the United States. A Jewish writer, Ben Hecht, stated the feeling most poignantly when he stated the feeling simply as: The Jews struck out.
David Hirsh took it very hard. For the Jewish immigrants America had been a land of unexampled opportunity and freedom from the national conflicts of which they had been a part of in Europe. Their history had been one of conflict. Prior to the nineteenth century they had been in conflict with Catholicism. After the French Revolution when the influence of Catholicism had waned they began a pan national confrontation with the Pan Germans and Pan Slavs. As they butted heads with the Slavs in particular it became apparent that the Slavs would not bend to the Jewish will. By mid-nineteenth century the conflict had become bloody. A group of French Jews decided that the only recourse was to remove the Jews from Slavdom and colonize elsewhere. The Jewish Colonization Association was formed. Beginning in 1860 it was begun to transfer the entire Jewish population from Slavdom to colonies ranging from Argentina to Canada. The majority came to the United States. The difference between the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe and the United States was as between night and day. A transition from the rural routes to Coney Island. From medieval technology to a land of scientific marvels. From the attentive supervision of the Russian government to the complete indifference of the American government. They arrived as opportunity became a byword for America. Most stayed where they landed in New York City. Solomon Hirsh, David’s father, who was not without resources, or at least had contacts with men with resources, looked West, staked out the Valley as his personal duchy and built up a successful department store.
David Hirsh, born in 1918 in the Valley knew nothing of Eastern Europe. His life had been a life of plenty when plenty was enough for anybody. Good clothes, good food, good cars, good social position. David Hirsh had never known any more discrimination than Poles, Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians or any one of dozens of nationalities. He had known less. So in those fifty years or so of immigration he as well as a great many Jews had grown lax in their attention to the religion of their fathers. A great many would probably have become lapsed Jews but for the events in Europe during the thirties and especially in the wake of the European war. Nazi atrocities reversed the trend and confirmed them in their commitment to Judaism. David Hirsh was one of these.
It didn’t happen here. David was now twenty-eight heading into the power years of his thirties and forties. He was rich and influential in the Valley community. Always good looking, tall and well proportioned, the weight one always gains with age had filled out his form and features admirably. He had married well. He had married the former Linda Webster, an Episcopalian. By so doing he had joined two Valley fortunes. The Hershey Department Store money and the Webster Coal Yard money. He had three lovely children, well, two plus Michael. The Department store and the Webster coal yards still prospered, although the increasing chain store competition after the wars would undermine the base of the department store and the Webster’s assumption of the continued use of coal didn’t foresee the switch to gas and oil would see the coal yards and department store sit idle and empty. Still David Hirsh had everything. Family, position and the money to buy anything he could conceive. He was an American citizen in the best of all possible worlds.
Always of an imperious temper and a vindictive mind he now brooded over the European disaster of the Jews, as did all Jews and knew not what to do. As usual he wanted revenge, which meant against all the goyim; for he believed the whole world was responsible as he and the Jews believed it had sat idly by and let it happen. His grief distorted his perception of reality; although to a certain extent he was right. For, while no one but the Nazis would have attempted such an atrocious deed, still the world had been rather indifferent to the fate of the Jews.
But if all the goyim were guilty he was faced with too many targets. Unable to find satisfactory victims for his anger, he turned to child abuse and directed this additional hatred to me. He didn’t exactly remember why he believed it but he believed that my mother was an anti-Semite because of her rejection of his rude advances. He projected his own inadequacies on me and in his mind made me the future father of a nation of anti-Semites. The memory of his humiliation because of his frustrated designs on my mother still rankled in his mind. It mattered not whether he had caused his own embarrassment. Reversing responsibility came easy to him as it does to most people. It only mattered to him that he had suffered humiliation, and from an inferior bitch in his mind. He always sought to avenge his thwarted crimes, to heap injury on injury, to add insult to insult.
I had not begged for forgiveness after my humiliation so he believed that I had not been hurt, that I had stood there In jest. His natural vindictiveness now augmented by his rage against the world, Hirsh had planned a nasty reception for me as I entered Third grade. However I had evaded his net that year by transferring from Emerson to Longfellow. He was unaware that he had already hurt me as much as mortal man can be hurt; for myself had died of remorse on that September morn. He had murdered my self-esteem and I could not continue in life. I carried my dead self around with me and my walking body was half dead. It would be forty years before I could retrieve my dead self from the House of Death and begin to re-integrate my personality.
But the challenge to Michael Hirsh’s dignity by my rebellion had been severe; although I neither knew nor cared. He was being groomed to be an ever victorious man of affairs; for some reason my revolt had shattered his self-confidence and lowered him in the esteem of the Eloy. He was never to attain the same kind of self-confidence as he had enjoyed in Kindergarten again. For this I was blamed although Michael was only of mediocre talent and authority and would have had and did enjoy much lesser stature in a world larger than his Emerson class.
It didn’t take the Hirshes more than a month to locate me in the Orphanage and at Longfellow. One day in late October I saw Michael Hirsh conferring with a third grade classmate, one of the Websters, although I didn’t know the connection at the time. I knew I was in for more trouble. I was but it wasn’t that bad. The kids of the Children’s Home were kept a separate group at Longfellow. The old two class Eloy-Morlock division was broken up. The Orphanage insulated me from direct vengeance. David Hirsh watched, he stalked. He was unhappy and frustrated. He brooded and planned. A thirty year old man, acting anonymously, waged his war against a defenseless eight year old boy. The third grade passed. Hirsh planned his move for my fourth grade.
In the fourth grade I understood why the Eloy-Morlock division had disappeared. As I was turning nine the organization of the world began to become apparent. I began to see more tings. There were probably two third grade classes at Longfellow but if so I was ignorant of the other. In the fourth grade there were definitely two different class rooms. One upstairs, in a large bright airy room where the Eloy were assigned and another in a half basement, the windows level with the ground, to which we of the Children’s Home were assigned as well as others who were not fortunate enough to be assigned upstairs.
Our teacher was a woman named Miss Marks. She was a very old miss. Miss Marks was a Sephardic Jew. Her ancestors had arrived from Brazil in 1654 in the first contingent of Jews to arrive in the United States. Her name as she pointed out to us several times had been Marques in Portuguese. Her ancestor who had landed as Marques turned up several years later as Marks. She was very international in her outlook. Our study program revolved around readings about children of other lands.
As improbable as it may seem, David Hirsh devoted great gobs of time to divining his next plan to wreak vengeance on me. The plan he devised was complex, requiring the involvement of dozens of people and the complicity of hundreds. Thus, should it fail his reputation would be placed in jeopardy. David Hirsh started his campaign in the spring of my third grade, just before the humidity of summer. He was powerful amongst the Jewish community and very influential among goys. His wife Linda, nee Webster, was equally socially and politically active as her husband. She was of top standing among the women of the town. Enlisting supporters they, together, began a campaign to separate the kids from the Children’s Home from their own on the reasoning that as a class of social lepers or ‘white niggers’ we were detrimental to their childrens’ welfare. They worked hard to have a separate facility assigned to us. Failing that they wanted that, at least, we might be made to attend classes within the walls of the orphanage as, in fact, was the case with the Catholic Orphanage down the street. We were to be contained so that we might not contaminate their children. This separation might have occurred in democratic America except for the almighty dollar, God bless it. The expense could not be justified. There was seemingly no real objection to the deed.
Frustrated in their ambition, driven by their vindictiveness, the Hirshes foolishly adopted Plan B. Incredibly it succeeded if only temporarily. But for one woman its success might have been permanent.
Hirsh still thought that I had merely sloughed off my lesson in the second grade. Thus in his mind I had not only humiliated his son in Kindergarten but had done the same thing in the second grade. I had been accorded he dignity of a rebuke by Michael Hirsh himself. There was a certain dignity to that that ought to be appreciated. Handled properly by myself I might have gained honorary admission to the Eloy. Now I was to be treated to the same indignity that the Black kids had endured. I was to be their ‘nigger’ forever.
The Hirshes now sought to separate their children from we of the Orphanage within the class. Miss Marks made the orphans sit together along one wall. The Hirshes influence in town was so great that the School Board was persuaded to prevent us from playing, not only with, but playing on the same playground with the parented kids. During recess Miss Marks was compelled to separate the Orphanage kids from the parented kids. We were compelled to sit on benches and watch the parented kids play. If an additional participant was needed one of us was called up.
As we stood before Miss marks while she, suppressing her embarrassment, explained this to us, it all seemed vaguely familiar. I couldn’t remember my ritual murder but I did remember Kindergarten. For many years I thought the fourth grade incident was the only revenge attempted. I saw through the attempt immediately. The notion was repugnant to Miss Marks, as it should have been to any honest and fair person. She implemented the requirement but reluctantly. Inadvertently I defeated the Hirshes in a minute. My victories over them were always Pyrrhic.
As recess began Miss Marks instructed us in the new program. Whether I remembered Michael Hirsh and the Blacks or whether I was as indignant in the fourth grade at such nonsense as I had been in Kindergarten, I don’t know. The others from the Orphanage sat down obediently. I grabbed a ball and ran off to play by myself in another part of the playground. As I couldn’t quickly persuade any of the others to follow me, I left them. Immediately there was a chorus of ‘You’ve got to sit down.’ It came from both groups. My reply was a very aggressive ‘Make me.’ No one was riding point that day. They never do when a fair fight is in the offing.
Then a ruse was attempted. Someone of the parented kids left the field and a substitute was needed. One of ours was called off the bench to come and tell me that I was selected as the replacement. I wish I could say that I said a witty or trenchant thing but angry people seldom do. I was angry. I just said ‘no.’
David Hirsh and Michael Hirsh had been parked in a side street facing the yard looking at the scene through their windshield expecting to enjoy my humiliation. They both stared in disbelief as their efforts were foiled again. David Hirsh’s head sagged to the rim of the steering wheel. Mechanically he turned the key in the ignition and angrily shifted into first. Both David and Michael’s faces twisted into expressions of chagrin. Their brows hooded their eyes, their mouths gaped as the edges turned downwards. Their perfidious design had failed again. Another bitter pill.
Miss Marks was overcome with shame and remorse. She had tried to recover her self-respect by offering me the role of substitute. A role I rightly took as another insult. Her Judaism was offended by such criminal discrimination. Unlike Hirsh she suffered from the restrictions which had been placed on her people at other times in other far places. Her Portuguese ancestors had been lucky to escape the Inquisition. They had found a refuge in Brazil only during the short period of Dutch control of the colony. When the Portuguese regained Brazil her ancestors fled to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, later to be called New York. She remembered, or knew this only too well. Rather than inflicting punishment on innocent others for remembered conflicts she sincerely wished to remove injustice from the world.
The second day of the segregation was too much for her. After school that day she informed the Principal of Longfellow that she would have to resign if the segregation continued. As the Hirshes, the instigators, were well known for their wish to segregate we orphans and they attended the temple together, so that David was well known to her, she then went immediately to him to whom she offered her unwelcome opinion. Nor was she kind or diplomatic. She vented her full indignation and threw her own guilt at his feet. David Hirsh was abashed. The next day the order of segregation was rescinded. She was a courageous woman. She acted as an individual, not as one of a collective.
The repercussions of the failure of their plan were very serious. The whole concept of what America stood for had been violated. In the aftermath the reflection on the consequences of their action caused many embarrassed faces in the Valley. As the prime movers, the Hirshes bore the brunt of the blame. The two lost some fair credibility. The concern was not so much the justice or injustice of their crime, for, in society the only concern is whether one succeeds or gets away with it. The credibility was lost because the Hirshes displayed poor judgment. While misjudging their own chances of success they had humiliated all the other people that they had involved. That is a cardinal sin. They never were to enjoy the same confidence again. Hirsh, as was becoming his habit, sacrificed a great deal to his vindictiveness. He was becoming his own worst enemy.
Hirsh was not one to learn from experience. Conscious of his loss of credibility which he now blamed on me, he now made two quickly and poorly conceived efforts to destroy my reputation, such as it was, and credibility, such as any enjoyed by orphans.
The far sides of the streets surrounding the Orphanage were lined with rows of fine mature maple trees. The branches spread over the streets and yards. There were a number of men, homosexuals and perverts, who stood near the tree trunks in the shade hoping for a little short action. We were prime targets. Deprived of love, denied respect, both sexes were susceptible to minor blandishments. My mother had always advised me not to talk to strangers so I always walked by them like they were not there.
Hirsh had determined to influence the direction of my future life. As the twig is bent, so the tree inclines, he said. So he got two social rejects, men who had made a life of doing dirty deeds dirt cheap in order to be associated in any capacity with the successful rich, to wait for me along the back fence. On that day I happened to be walking back from school with Richard Grainger. They mistook Richard for me.
One said to Richard: ‘Hey, you little bastard. Youi know where you’re going? You’re going to be a criminal and die in the electric chair. You’re a thief. God hates you and you are going to spend your life in prison.’
We were young and small, at the impressionable age for imprinting. Richard was terrified and took the man’s curse literally. I had watched. Now forming my opinion I began to curse them as old bums and failures. Just as I had begun the other man realized their error and said: ‘Uh, oh, I think you nailed the wrong one.’ They had. They had also destroyed Richard’s life for he believed them, took their suggestion in, and fulfilled their prophecy.
Hirsh had failed again. He tried once more. The fall and winter had passed. Spring burst out once again. Hirsh had learned my habits. In those days before super markets and convenience stores there was an old dilapidated rundown little grocery store every few blocks. There was one two blocks from the Orphanage. We used to take our money gained from the deposits of beer bottles and whatever there to buy candy.
There, one Saturday, I found Michael Hirsh and thee of his friends waiting for me. I asked Hirsh why he was out slumming. Badinage passed between us. I went into the store to buy some candy. I was followed by Hirsh and his friends. They jostled around me while I paid. I elbowed back. Taking my candy I left the store followed by the Hirsh gang. Outside they gathered around me. But Hirsh reaching into my back pocket pulled out a candy bar and said: ‘Hey, Gresham, what’s this?’ He had placed a candy bar in my back pocket while jostling me in the store. In later years he would have been astute enough not to have taken it out of my pocket himself. He was young and inexperienced.
I said, ‘Looks like a Butterfinger.’
‘Yeah? Did you pay for this? Looks like you’re a thief, doesn’t it Gresham?’
‘That candy bar’s not in my hand, Hirsh. It’s in yours. Looks like you’re the thief.’ The grocer, seeing the candy bar in my back pocket as I left had come to the door.
‘Hey, mister,’ I said, ‘Michael Hirsh here stole this candy bar from you. Better make him pay for it. He’s got lots of money.’
Hoisted by his own petard again, Hirsh turned shamefaced, threw the candy bar down and he and his friends stalked off. His witnesses witnessed against him and Hirsh forfeited his hoped for role of a leader forever. The Hirshes would never learn.
What might have happened next remains unknown. I turned ten. At ten we were farmed out to foster parents. The Wardens took me way to the other side of town.
The Hirshes had been instrumental in the formation of my personality. My character was beyond their reach.
My dream had revealed the controlling fixation of my life. In the process my personality had completely disintegrated. The personality that had sustained me in place of my dead self was gone. I stood exposed and naked to the world while I groped to re-integrate my personality. It was a long row to hoe before my subconscious released the past to free me by a dream.
I, Dynamo 