Under the bedroom door Light like gold foil. Butter light of the room at dusk. Headlight. Lamplight. Awake at night some quiet person in light snow. Old light, handed down from the stars. Flashlights, tucked under blankets.
Light shows. Show lights, flashing on the pavement. Every hillside at dusk, brimming with light. Porchlights, one after another. An owl, undoing the night. Sometimes, a lone light pulling into the drive.
advent
FELICITY SHEEHY
front matter
56.1
VOLUME 56, NO. 1
s u m m e r 2026
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MLS 56.1 contents
Article The Miltonic Counterplot in George Orwell’s Anti-Pastoral, Coming Up for Air Adam Marcinkowski
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Creative Writing Jenn Blair: Something Like Scales That Was the Day
34
Chloe Elisabeth Onorato: Still Life
36
Felicity Sheehy: August September
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Review Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick. Lives Revised: Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath Gary Leising
58
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article
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S
et during a period of economic insecurity, fascism’s rise, and a looming world war, George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (CUFA) follows one man’s doomed attempt to retrieve his pastoral past.1 That man, George Bowling, is an overweight, middle-aged English insurance salesman with fake teeth and a sticky, soapy neck. After winning seventeen quid, he forgoes hiring a prostitute to instead take refuge in his childhood town from a dystopian life penned in by predatory mortgage lenders, overrun with a sickening cornucopia of ersatz products, and menaced by the overhead buzz of bomber planes. Dominated by antagonistic forces yet galvanized by nostalgic memories, Bowling seeks out flowery meadows and peaceful woodlands and rivers full of fish. But while he dreams of recovering gold and green, he unearths only an anti-pastoral nightmare: his hometown is unrecognizable; he cannot escape modernity’s celluloid, rubber, and chromium steel; and the secret pond he treasured as a child (whose depths symbolized inner life by sheltering the largest fish he had ever seen) has become a trash pit.2 In the end, Bowling returns home with barely three quid left, and his wife Hilda accuses him of running off with another woman anyway. Between the falls from grace tormenting ineffectual protagonists like Bowling, the recurrent motifs of tyranny, liberty, and rebellion, and the descriptions of an infernal world, scholars have observed that “so much of Orwell’s writing operates within Miltonic terms of reference” (Cook and Waddell 148). Orwell even credits Milton’s Paradise Lost with teaching him “the joy of mere words,” a pleasure that, when coupled with his “need to describe things,” inspired him to write “naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly
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for the sake of their sound” (18: 317). I recruit this influence here to propose that if CUFA depicts pastoral lost, then Orwell, whether consciously or not, borrows from Milton a formal technique for evoking pastoral regained. Early commentary links Orwell’s experiments with form to what Raymond Williams calls “the figure of the intermediary (the shock-absorber of the bourgeoisie,’ as [Orwell] once referred to people like himself) […] who goes around and to whom things happen” (George Orwell 47–48). While CUFA constructs this intermediary from Bowling, out of his failed quest emerges what might be called, after Geoffrey Hartman, a “counterplot”: an indirect feeling that “does not often work on the reader as independent theme or subplot, but lodges in the vital parts of the overt action, emerging from it like good from evil” (3). Hartman observes this effect in Paradise Lost’s pastoral images, which interpose themselves between reader and hell, sparing the former the full brunt of the latter (like the countryside Tuscan artist with his telescope, viewing the moon, which Milton compares to Satan’s shield). But whereas Milton’s counterplot conjures a divine perspective ab extra, with seemingly “omnipotent knowledge that the creation will outlive death and sin,” arising from “the imperturbability of the summer’s day,” CUFA’s counterplot surfaces through a double narrative voice: a first-person “I” mediating modernity for a second-person “you” (Hartman 2–3).3 It is, I argue, this narratee’s presence throughout this ostensibly anti-pastoral story that preserves what Paul Alpers defines as “the central fiction of pastoral”: not the greenspaces or golden ages, but the herdsmen whose conventional lives, their pleasures, and their complaints, represent those who are dominated by forces beyond their control (x).4 Although CUFA’s critics frequently acknowledge its pastoral themes, little has been said about its connection to this mode’s long history.5 As a King’s Scholar at Eton College, Orwell would have studied
what his friend William Empson calls “the old pastoral”—the earlier bucolics, idylls, elegies, and romances, whose “essential trick” was to “imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor” by making simple people express universal truths in sophisticated language (11). Much of this literature also contributes to what Raymond Williams identifies as the “escalator” of nostalgia, a perpetual longing for the past expressed and dramatized in an idyllic countryside whose supposed innocence often obscures the realities of rural exploitation (The Country and the City 9). Definitive examples of pastoral, however, frequently acknowledge this artifice, as, for example, when the ekphrastic goatherd’s cup in Theocritus’s Idyll I (considered one of the first pastoral poems) depicts a small boy engrossed in the art of “twisting a pretty cricket-cage” while nearby foxes steal his lunch (1.52). This allusion to an infantilized Homeric poet by the urbanite Theocritus establishes pastoral as a deliberately out-of-touch literary mode, and such self-awareness can absorb some of what Williams refers to as “counter-pastoral,” or the “utilitarian or materialist, perhaps even peasant response” to pastoral mythologizing (The Country 18). One might think here of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, with its displaced and starving shepherds, its clueless hero pinning poems to trees in an Arden that was, in 1599, being deforested, and the ironic embarrassment of a stupid small-town William (possibly performed by the originally small-town playwright) by the courtly fool Touchstone. In CUFA, Orwell personifies these ambivalences in Porteous, a retired schoolmaster and classicist who “is great on the poetry of childhood […] Wordsworth. Lucy Gray. There was time when meadow, grove, and all that” (7: 75). If “old Porteous stands for Culture,” he also has “all the mannerisms” that isolate him from the working class (7: 161–162). Yet, Bowling finds something “hospitable in the
right kind of way” about his tweed-jacketed friend whose bachelor pad is brimming with books, antiquated tchotchkes, and whiskey sodas, and something charming about how he strolls with that “classy Oxford feeling of nothing mattering except books and poetry and Greek statues, and nothing worth mentioning having happened since the Goths sacked Rome” (7: 162). Rather than launching an agon with this past, Bowling views the tradition with mourning: “He’s dead. He’s a ghost. All people like that are dead […] They can’t defend themselves against what’s coming to them, because they can’t see it, even when it’s under their noses” (7: 168, original emphasis). Although Porteous argues that, pace Williams’s escalator, “[t]here is nothing new under the sun,” Bowling counters that this time it’s different: “the old life we’re used to is being sawn off at the roots” (7: 165–166). Faced with traditional crises, one might aspire to elitist comforts, but the machine of modernity devastates the imagination-supporting landscape of tradition and so poses a far greater threat than some peckish foxes. Some suggest that CUFA might be Orwell’s most modernist novel.6 Beryl Pong, for instance, reads its plot—which records Bowling’s fussy sense of disgust while moving between his bleak present, his fears of the future, and his fond memories of childhood—as sharing with other modernist novels an “intertwining of subjectivity and time” to document and critique modernity’s traumatic ruptures (405). Orwell, moreover, assembles this vulnerable and scandalized subject by adopting, for the first time, a fictional first-person narrator who complicates the enduring question of “who is speaking” in his novels. As Orwell later admitted to Julian Symons, his own character was “constantly intruding on that of the narrator,” especially in “the part about fishing,” which was one of the “masses of experience which one passionately wants to write about,” and yet there is “no way of using them up except by disguising
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them as a novel”—a “vice that is inherent in writing a novel in the first person, which one should never do,” and he would never do again (19: 336). At the crossroads of Orwell’s modernist experiments with narrative voice and his interest in pastoral, one additionally finds his reputation at stake. As Rebecca Solnit notes, “nearly every book of his contains evocations of rural English scenery and the pleasures taken in it,” and critics often frame these reveries as the limited political quietism of a lower-upper-middle-class ex-Burmese policeman descended from slave-owners and colonial administrators who subscribes to a conservative mythology of Englishness (27).7 At the same time, however, Lorraine Saunders, suggests that these critiques can be met with a formalist analysis that recognizes that “in Orwell’s fiction it is the nature of limitation that Orwell, through various narrative devices, is exploring” (Saunders 51n21, original emphasis).8 If extricating Orwell from his protagonists can sometimes be challenging, “close reading reveals how Orwell takes care to put in place key linguistic markers that will signal the various vocal transitions” between perspectives (Saunders 4). For Saunders, Orwell’s earlier novels delineated their characters’ limited perspectives from a “more mature” Orwell by juxtaposing free indirect discourse with the “excessive use of the second-person ‘you’” who both relates to but also sees beyond that point of view (Saunders 57, 53). While she convincingly argues that throughout these novels, “there is a feeling that Orwell, with his multiple uses of ‘you’ and ‘you yourself,’ is referring to himself,” CUFA upends this easy connection between author, reader, and character, as its “you” is imagined by Bowling rather than an omniscient narrator, all while Orwell’s psyche sometimes seeps into Bowling’s “I” (Saunders 58). These slippery pronouns establish within the novel what Annabel Patterson might describe as a poetics of pronominal play—a rhetorical strategy she uncovers in Virgil’s
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pastoral Eclogues, which both obscures a “wickedly shifting authorial presence” while provoking the reader into having, “consciously or unconsciously, an ideological response” (4, 7). 9 Consider, for instance, the following two passages (from which Orwell’s novel takes its title): The very thought of going back to Lower Binfield had done me good already. You know the feeling I had. Coming up for air! […] We’re all stifling at the bottom of a dustbin, but I’d found the way to the top. Back to Lower Binfield! (7: 177, emphasis added) I’m finished with this notion of getting back into the past. What’s the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don’t exist. Coming up for air! But there isn’t any air. The dustbin that we’re in reaches up to the stratosphere. (7: 230, emphasis added) If Bowling’s “I” records the experience of a tormented individual who aggrandizes himself, leaves a collective “we” in the dust, only to be disabused by modernity and collapse back into that “we,” then opposite this “I” hovers a counterplotted “you” potentially located somewhere beyond the stratosphere, one that knows Bowling’s thoughts and feelings, and so, perhaps, tumbles along with him into the hellish dustbin. But then the second passage’s interrogative leaves open the possibility of a “you” whose ideological response might differ.
Pastoral Lost: Anti-Pastoral and Hyper-Pastoral Commentary on pastoral in CUFA routinely foregrounds Bowling’s assertion that “[f]ishing is the opposite of war” (7: 85). For Robert Van Dellen, fishing “represents a kind of pure, innocent link
with tradition,” whereas “the bomb represents a break from tradition, the disrupter of continuity and security” (62). Anthony Shuttleworth extends this opposition to include modernity’s artificiality: “If fishing is the opposite of war, then it is so because it is the opposite of fraud, self-deception, ersatz and kitsch” (215). Within the pastoral tradition, however, this dichotomy between nature and war repeats a cliché as old as the Iliad, which frequently raises “the theme of pastoral seclusion […] as the opposite of war” (Griffin 197). This poem’s bucolic references form what might be called Homer’s counterplot: that “the Iliad is not only a poem of war, it is also a poem of peace” (Taplin 17). But if Homer evokes pastoral to condemn war’s devastation, he simultaneously affirms war’s power to circumscribe this opposition by carving bucolic scenes onto the surface of Achilles’s shield, an ironic object because it is “an instrument of war in a war poem, covered with scenes of delightful peace, of agriculture, festival, song and dance” (Taplin 1). Bowling’s traumatic encounter with an “[e]rsatz” frankfurter, seemingly made of fish, which “burst in [his] mouth like a rotten pear,” suggests that modernity’s colonization of the natural world further undermines even this limited resistance (7: 23–24). His revulsion inspires fears of a sickening overabundance, where everything is “slick and streamlined”; where there is “no vegetation left, everything cemented over”; where when biting “into something solid, a sausage for instance, that’s what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth” (7: 24). The lack of future tense in Bowling’s assertion “[t]hat’s the way we’re going” implies that this future has already arrived: fishing cannot oppose war because the fish are bomb-like, descending into his mouth like ordinance into trenches, screaming at him “you b—” as they pop and ooze between his ill-fitted dentures (7: 24). After seeking reassurance (“Is it going to
happen?”), Bowling spots a poster of King Zog and reports that “King Zog’s name—but I suppose, as I’d already seen the name several times that day, it was mixed up with some sound in the traffic or the smell of horse-dung or something—had started memories in me” (7: 27). Inspired by this name and this noise and this stench, Bowling flees into part two, the novel’s longest section, where he recalls his prewar life, and creates space on the page away from the hopelessness. These memories awaken in Bowling what Leo Marx describes as “sentimental pastoral”: an “inchoate longing for a more ‘natural’ environment” and a “piety toward the out-of-doors expressed in the wilderness cult, and in our devotion to camping, hunting, fishing, picnicking, gardening, and so on” (Marx 5). Bowling succumbs to this sentimentality when, in the novel’s third section, he pauses by a “spot where the grass beside the road was smothered in primroses” to “have a smell at the spring air, and perhaps even pick a few primroses if there was nobody coming,” and it leaves him wondering if you can relate to his experience: I was looking at the field, and the field was looking at me. I felt—I wonder whether you’ll understand. What I felt was something that’s so unusual nowadays that to say it sounds like foolishness. I felt happy. I felt that though I shan’t live for ever, I’d be quite ready to. (7: 171, original emphasis) This sojourn convinces Bowling to physically, rather than mentally, flee to Lower Binfield. It also foreshadows this journey’s failure by transitioning into what Marx calls “complex pastoral,” which “begins as a conventional tribute to the pleasures of withdrawal from the world,” but “is transformed by the interruption of the machine into a far more complex
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state of mind” (Marx 15). After Bowling hears the “zoom of a car coming up the road,” this machine ejects him from the sentimental garden and back into the complex world with “a kind of jolt” (7: 174). Embarrassed by the thought of a grown man frolicking, Bowling adjusts his fly, pretending to empty his bladder in public lest the passersby think he was profanely smelling flowers. In the novel’s fourth section, Bowling is fully shaken from his pastoral fantasies. He feels a “jolt” when he discovers his old home is now a commercial tea shop, and then “[a]nother jolt” when he finds his former fishing spot overrun by a “continuous chain of men fishing, one every five yards,” each from “some fishing-club or other,” and a river “crammed with boats—rowing boats, canoes, punts, motor-launches” all “full of young fools with next to nothing on, all of them screaming and shouting and most of them with a gramophone aboard as well” (7: 198, 213–214). The nearby forest, moreover, has been terraformed into Upper Binfield, or what one inhabitant calls the “Woodland city” before “waving his hand at what was left of the trees,” exclaiming, “te-hee! Nature!” (7: 227). Bewildered, Bowling listens to the resident explain his community’s pledge to live a natural, simple life while dwelling in “faked-up Tudor houses with the curly roofs and the buttresses that don’t buttress anything” (7: 228). He then peers behind this bizarre simulation to discover his cherished pool has been drained and filled with tins because they “could hardly have a pool of water here among the houses. The mosquitoes, you know” (7: 229). Finally, to belabor the point, the RAF accidentally bombs Lower Binfield, blowing both Bowling’s hopeful nostalgia and “a greengrocer’s shop out of existence” (7: 235). The slick merchandise, curated landscapes, and membership clubs occupying Bowling’s hometown suggest what Torben Larsen calls “hyper-pastoral,” which occurs when the garden is brought to you by
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a machine that “sells an experience of anti-modernity without actually affording the visitor any escape from inauthenticity” (15, 20). If anti-pastoral depicts sentimental pastoral’s opposite, and complex pastoral its interruption, then hyper-pastoral is ersatz pastoral—the form co-opted and commodified. It transforms the riverbank and woodland city into a simulacrum of nature, all while the pollution and noise and junk that enable the simulation make it impossible to experience the real thing. Bowling’s encounter with hyper-pastoral finally convinces him that fishing cannot be conceived as war’s opposite because the sausages are now made of fish, and the “fish, no doubt, [are made] out of something different” (Orwell 7: 24). Of course, he also admits that “you” knew this from the start: “I know you knew what was coming. But I didn’t” (7: 188, original emphasis). And this opposition between “you” and “I” begs the question: what else might you know that Bowling doesn’t?
Boyhood Heroism and Null Pastoral Previous attempts to redeem the pastoral in this novel typically focus on the restorative effects Bowling experiences when recollecting his life before the solids melted into unbreathable air. Words like “[r]oach, rudd, dace, bleak, barbel, bream, gudgeon, pike, chub, carp, trench” all have a “solid” sound fastening them to the experience of people who “hadn’t heard of machine guns” and “didn’t live in terror of the sack or spend time eating aspirins, going to the pictures and wondering how to keep out of the concentration camp” (Orwell 7: 76). For Bowling, “fishing was the real thing,” and “[e]very detail has stuck clear in [his] memory,” such that he could “write a book on the technique of fishing” (7: 70–71). He then proves it: “Very small kids generally fish with a bent pin,” but later learned to “make a pretty good hook […] by bending a needle in a
candle flame with a pair of pliers”; “The farm lads who knew how to plait horsehair” and could make something “almost as good as gut” (7: 71). For bait, they could “pour turpentine” into a “wasp’s nest” to capture and bake “Wasp grubs,” make “bread paste,” catch “brown flies” or “earthworms” or “brandling[s],” or use “grasshoppers” which were the “best bait there is” (7: 71–73). Although Orwell’s fiction typically exposes “the dream of pastoral happiness […] as an unsustainable fantasy,” David Dwan notes that his personal writings “contain the same spots of joy” formed by collecting and cataloguing the various nouns that populated his landscapes: Devonshire cream, glass paperweights, turnips, shortbread, crumpets, and broken clock springs (Liberty, Equality, and Humbug 192–193).10 And in these moments, CUFA reads like memoir. Indeed, it is a young Eric Blair fishing along the River Orwell who buttresses Bowling’s childhood experiences. These lists are a formal pastoral convention (perhaps a bucolic adaptation of Homer’s catalogue of the ships), one which distinguishes that “which takes human life to be inherently a matter of common plights and common pleasures” from epic and tragic “ideas of heroic autonomy and isolation” (Alpers 93). For Patricia Rae, their recollection serves a practical purpose: “to remind [Bowling] of his authentic inner self, so he will soon be able to call upon that self to withstand the pressures of wartime” (“There’ll be”152). But then Bowling’s narrative sense of self keeps shifting from pastoral to epic. After he catches up with his brother Joe and his truant preteen gang—“the Black Hand”—and lands a fish, he, for instance, experiences a masculine-coded feeling of power:
fishing cannot oppose war because the fish are bomb-like, descending into his mouth like ordinance into trenches, screaming at him “you b—” as they pop and ooze between his ll-fitted dentures.
I knew that I wasn’t a kid any longer, I was a boy at last. And it’s a wonderful thing to be a boy, to go roaming where grownups can’t catch you, and to chase rats and kill birds and shy stones and cheek carters and shout dirty words. It’s a kind of strong, rank feeling, a feeling of knowing everything and fearing nothing, and it’s all bound up with breaking rules and killing things […] Thank God I’m a man, because no woman ever has that feeling. (7: 66)
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In this moment, Bowing confuses his forms and then raises that confusion into a representative anecdote: “not [his] own particular childhood, but the civilisation [he] grew up in […] And fishing is somehow typical of that civilisation” (7: 76). This mix-up suggests that what Bowling seeks as an adult playing hooky from his wife and kids isn’t fishing’s tranquility. It’s rather the heroic autonomy he experienced as a delinquent. Bowling’s vision of this lost civilization recalls the horseshit that inspired his reveries. Lower Binfield (a name foreshadowing the problem) was once dominated by the great Binfield House, built around the time of Queen Anne by people who “imagined that the good days would last for ever” but which now sits abandoned, “rotting,” and unnoticed by Bowling until he was seven (7: 77–78). That Binfield House (later converted into a “looney-bin”) was already noticeably decaying throws into relief Bowling’s claims about his parents’ obliviousness: Mother never lived to know that the life she’d been brought up to, the life of a decent Godfearing shopkeeper’s daughter and decent God-fearing shopkeeper’s wife in the reign of good Queen Vic, was finished for ever. Times were difficult and trade was bad, Father was worried and this and that was ‘aggravating,’ but you carried on much the same as usual. The old English order of life couldn’t change. (7: 111–112, emphasis added) Instead of introducing solid-sounding nouns, the determiners “this and that” point beyond Bowling’s perspective to reveal protective parents who spoke their anxieties softly. That Bowling only first “began to get glimpses of what people call ‘real life,’ meaning unpleasantness,” just before turning sixteen, further suggests a sheltered childhood secured by the quiet care of his parents rather than some lost civilization (7: 93).
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Bowling frequently admits his fallibility: “Before the war,” he says, “and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all year round. I’m quite aware that that’s a delusion. I’m merely trying to tell you how things come back to me”; “Before the war it was always summer—a delusion, as I’ve remarked before, but that’s how I remember it […] that’s what I see when I shut my eyes” (7: 37, 106–107). It takes World War I to finally give Bowling a full dose of life’s unpleasantness. It was “like an enormous machine that had got hold of you. You’d no sense of acting of your own free will, and at the same time no notion of trying to resist” (Orwell 7: 115). But if the Boer War had a similar effect, there were still earlier wars—there has always been an earlier war, all the way back to the Trojan War, each dispelling soldiers of their boyhood fantasies. Bowling’s inability to recognize this escalator motif closes his eyes to further contradictions. As Annette Federico argues, Bowling’s solitary and private activities “may be said to constitute an ethics of hope,” especially fishing, which “is literally structured around waiting and hoping” (60, original emphasis). But for those anticipating deployment or hiding from machine gun fire with their heads down in dark basements or muddy trenches, waiting and hoping and facing what Bowling calls “the ghastly boredom of the war stretching out for ever”—for these lonely soldiers with nothing to do but wait and hope, war is fishing (7: 84). Rather than this passivity, Bowling seems more interested in restoring an epic heroism, that violence perpetuated by him and his friends, those “cruel little beasts” who flexed their freedom by bullying a classmate into an asylum, knocking down the birds’ nests, and popping the toads with air pumps (Orwell 7: 70). Bowling briefly reflects upon these inconsistencies when he thinks of Porteous and his “baloney” poetry:
The truth is that kids aren’t in any way poetic, they’re merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish. A boy isn’t interested in meadows, groves, and so forth. He never looks at a landscape, doesn’t give a damn for flowers, […] Killing things—that’s about as near to poetry as a boy gets. (7: 75) The abbreviation “and so forth” is a rhetorical aposiopesis marking the imagination’s closure. It presents the non-poetic boy’s null pastoral experience. Only after exiting the garden and living at West Bletchley does Bowling mature enough to appreciate landscapes and flowers, and this newfound sensitivity underpins Bowling’s fears about modernity: once nature is gone, what hope is there for maturity? All that will remain is a bunch of “poor suckers” falling for modernity’s scams and willing to “die on the field of battle to save [their] country from Bolshevism” (7: 13) And yet, it is not obvious that Bowling is all that mature. While on holiday with Hilda and his kids—“You know the kind”—he proposes fishing, but Hilda immediately strangles the idea after learning that “the set-out that I’d need, rod and reel and so forth, would cost round about a quid” (7: 88–89). Appalled, she emasculates him for “[t] he idea of wasting all that money on a thing like that! Absurd! […] And fancy you going fishing at your age! A great big grown-up man like you. Don’t be such a baby, George!” (7: 89, original emphasis). What seems dismissive cruelty is really the recognition that Bowling cannot restore his childhood. She understands that this “and so forth” means that the indistinguishable commercial rubbish has already abbreviated the grasshoppers, the bent hooks, and the self-chiselled rod. Not until he arrives at Lower Binfield and buys “a split-cane rod […] and hooks and gut and so forth,” does Bowling come to this realization (7: 212). The solid things
he associates with his childhood are gone: “Fishing, indeed! At my age! Really, Hilda was right” (7: 230). More devastatingly, the phrase “and so forth” first appears in the novel when Bowling dismisses Hilda’s concerns over life’s “petty disasters”: the cost of butter, the worn-out boots, the rising gas bills, the installment on the radio—“‘You don’t seem to realise how serious it is,’” she says to him, “and so on and so forth” (7: 7, original emphasis). Bowling refuses to hear Hilda’s complaints, focusing instead on the seemingly more urgent crisis: modernity’s encroachment on his autonomy. By wielding this “and so forth” as a shield to deflect Hilda’s fears into a mere aggravating “this and that,” Bowling transforms her into another version of his simple and stupid parents. But if their quiet worries offered him security, Hilda’s complaints represent an ongoing threat. Her nullified mind lacks “any kind of joy in life, any kind of interest in things for their own sake,” and that mindlessness is catching (7: 141). These fears revert Bowling to his vicious childhood state: Well, Hilda and I were married, and right form the start it was a flop. Why did you marry her? you say. But why did you marry yours? These things happen to us. I wonder whether you’ll believe that during the first two or three years I had serious thoughts of killing Hilda. (7: 140) As Federico observes, “In imaging the reader as friend and interlocutor, and in constantly asking for the reader’s participation, Orwell asserts the persistence of human desire for companionship and understanding,” and yet this desire is perpetually at odds with Bowling’s heroic aspirations (53). The result is an asymmetry between plot and counterplot. Feeling alone while with his wife, Bowling wonders about a more mature, counterplotted “you” who, quizzically, forms an “us” by empathizing with his inability to empathize with others.
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Bowling, Polly, and The Realist Novel But war makes foreigners frightening, and Bowling turns to the realist novel in his twenties to cope with his wartime trauma.
This asymmetry hinges on different approaches to reading. Although, in his essays and novels, Orwell frequently treats reading (like fishing) as a “momentary refuge,” as Helen Tyson points out, he also often warns about the “dangers of any too easy identification with, or absorption, within a book” (14). This trepidation casts suspicion upon Bowling’s second favorite pastime: “And besides fishing there was reading” (7: 90). As a teenager, Bowling got his “biggest kick” from the sorts of stories Orwell criticizes in “Boys’ Weeklies” for having two basic ideological assumptions: “nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny” (7: 90; 12: 66). But war makes foreigners frightening, and Bowling turns to the realist novel in his twenties to cope with his wartime trauma. While guarding eleven tins of bully beef for the West Coast Defence Force, Bowling “had a sort of debauch of reading that made a certain difference to [his] outlook” (7: 90). Out of these books, which “weren’t in the least highbrow,” one stands out: But now and again it so happens that you strike a book which is exactly at the mental level you’ve reached at the moment, so much so that it seems to have been written specifically for you. One of them was H. G. Wells’s The History of Mr Polly, in a cheap shilling edition which was falling to pieces. I wonder if you can imagine the effect it had upon me, to be brought up as I’d been brought up, the son of a shopkeeper in a country town, and then to come across a book like that? (7: 124) Just as Bowling sees a mirror of himself in Polly, he also “knows ‘you’, and what ‘you’ are like: him” (Mechie 188). His conversational style then seduces “you” into acquiescing to this arrangement by asking “you” to conceive “yourself ” as someone who, like Bowling, identifies with Polly’s character. The allure of this intransitive identification is, however, disrupted by the last sentence’s tortured grammar. While punctuated as a question, this sentence is actually in the indicative: Bowling’s only indirectly wonders about whether “you” are at the “right
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mental level.” This indeterminacy ultimately suggests a reader who escapes Bowling’s inability to imagine anyone unlike himself. For Jefferson Hunter, CUFA’s allusion to The History of Mr Polly “quite deliberately invokes and then refutes” the latter “so as to indicate the situation of the novel, as Orwell saw it, in 1939” (39). That situation was grim. In his essay “Inside the Whale,” published ten months after CUFA, Orwell anticipates Ian Watt’s foundational study on the novel’s rise by predicting its fall. Watt had argued that the realist novel reflected a bourgeois ideology that fixed truth to “individual experience” rather than “conformity to traditional practice” (13). Instead of imposing top-down character types, this new form assembled protagonists through the accumulation of particulars (“particular experiences at particular times and at particular places”) (34). Orwell, however, observes that political writers in the 1930s began moving towards omniscient narrative viewpoints, thereby counteracting the novel’s creation of this particularized “autonomous individual” (12: 110). He then predicts that the politics heralded by this new authoritarian poetics will cause the self-sufficient individual to be “stamped out of existence,” and along with it “literature, in the form which we know it, must suffer at least a temporary death” (12: 110). Orwell, who once took pleasure in reading Wells to escape from the “dull-witted schoolmasters” at Eton, elsewhere suggests that “Thinking people who were born about the beginning of the century, are in some sense Wells’s own creation”; from his perspective, Wells represents this dying literature (12:540, 539). Consequently, CUFA isn’t just a rewrite of Polly’s utopian escape into Cockaigne, it is, as José Manuel Mota argues, also a dystopic reconsideration of Wells, “who is part of an irretrievably lost personal literary utopia of Orwell” (42).11 Like CUFA, The History of Mr Polly operates within Miltonic terms of reference. It “embodies a
striking amount of paradisial imagery to reinforce its underlying theme of the Fall of Man and the return to Paradise” (Hammond, H. G. Wells 107). Its omniscient narrator recalls Polly’s fall from an Edenic childhood before propelling the plot forward: Polly attempts suicide, commits arson, abandons his wife, defeats Jim at the Battle of Potwell Inn, does a little fishing, which, “as the golden page of English literature testifies, is a meditative and retrospective pursuit,” and settles down “in the smooth, still quiet of the mind,” with the nameless innkeeper, the “fat women” whose “jolly chins clustered like chubby little cherubim about the feet of an AssumptioningMadonna” (325, 342, 271). For J. R. Hammond, Polly is an “archetypal figure whose actions and aspirations bear a profound relevance to modern man”; his history is a “parable on the nature of happiness which would embody simultaneously a powerful allegory on the theme of paradise regained” (H. G. Wells 114, 104). Critics tend to read CUFA as a straight anti-pastoral critique of Polly’s paradise restored.12 For them, modernity’s material transformations foreclose Polly’s utopia. But CUFA’s critique runs deeper. Its plot hinges on Bowling failing to realize that Polly’s paradise—the apotheosis of bourgeois autonomy represented by solitary fishing and the company of a quiet, nameless woman—might not be all that paradisial. By spewing forth indistinguishable commodified junk so fast that the individual drowns in it, modernity presents the realist novel’s attempt to create a subject rooted in particulars with a formal problem. Bowling’s solution—try to come up for air by securing his identity to the more unique relics in his past— does not resolve this structural issue, since, as Alex Woloch points out, “once you are committed to ‘particularity,’ how do you curtail it?” (The One 19). In his revision to Watt’s theory, Woloch argues that the realist novel circumvents infinite regress by transposing the issue: it “is structurally destabilized
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not by too many details [...] but by too many people” (The One 19, original emphasis). Against the “one” of a protagonist, Woloch places the “many,” all the minor characters who act as “the proletariat of the novel” by flattening themselves into types to support the former’s individuality (The One 27, original emphasis). The History of Mr Polly begins with this characterization process in turmoil. It starts with Polly’s mock-epic wrath—a bristling hatred towards his family, his neighbours, and even himself, provoked by his wife Miriam handing him his brown bowling hat rather than his preferred grey cap. If these frustrations seem an overreaction, the narrator notes that “[b]ehind the superficialities of Mr. Polly’s being, moved a larger and vaguer distress” (7). His insides must have been like a badly managed industrial city during a period of depression; agitators, acts of violence, strikes, the forces of law and order doing their best, rushings to and fro, upheaval, the Marseillaise, tumbrils, the rumble and the thunder of the tumbrils. (5) Polly’s inner conflicts mirror his outer ones: in both cases, there are too many people making demands instead of either doing their jobs or, failing that, buggering off. And the resolution is the same. He escapes into a reactionary quietism free from their hubbub, shared only with a woman who, despite being so round, has been flattened into silence. If, as Hammond suggests, CUFA seems “a conservative, indeed a reactionary, novel,” then it is so because Bowling refuses to acknowledge the fullness of Polly’s impact (Hammond A George Orwell 155). He instead protests that what “really made an impression on me, wasn’t so much the books I read as the rotten meaninglessness of the
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life I was leading” (7: 126). Thus, while Orwell chafes against his predecessor’s utopian vision, Bowling echoes Polly’s narcissism, repeating the latter’s reactionary commitments.13 He hates all others, fantasizing that everyone—the Mrs. Wheelers, and the Miss Minnses, and the Sir Herbert Crums running their mortgage scams, and all his colleagues, and the bankers, and the government employees working in the shadows, and Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle, and his wife Hilda in front—is collectively chasing him to Lower Binfield, coming to take his individuality away. Victimized by this imaginary mob, Bowling turns inward and becomes captivated by his isolated self. But unlike Eve in the Garden, there is no heavenly voice to warn him away from this false and isolating self-image, and so “the effect of all this [guarding his beef tins], plus the books [he] was reading, was to leave [him] with a feeling of disbelief in everything” (7: 127). In his earlier novels, Orwell uses the second-person pronoun to manage the relationship between the one and the many. For example, in A Clergyman’s Daughter, “you” first appears in the second sentence, after Dorothy awakes, and “The alarm clock continued its nagging, feminine clamour, which would go on for five minutes or thereabouts if you did not stop it” (3: 1). For Saunders, this line creates “a subjective, intimate mood,” one that invites “you” into the protagonist’s internalized misogyny, extending Dorothy’s point of view beyond her particularity (53). The effect of “your” involvement is to establish characters like Dorothy as “not unique but typical: the individual is also a representative type” (Saunders 58). In CUFA, this relationship is rendered more complex by Bowling’s “I,” which constantly resists type:
Do you know the active, hearty kind of fat man, the athletic bouncing type that’s nicknamed Fatty or Tubby and is always the life and soul of the party? I’m that type […] But also I’ve got something else inside me, chiefly a hangover from the past. I’ll tell you about that later. I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. (7: 4, 20) Bowling’s problem, as George Woodcock suggests, is a formal one: he “is really a comic minor character magnified, seen from the inside, and provided a history” (345). His place is amongst the many, but he models his “thin” identity on the novel’s individuating form, and, on that basis, turns against his peers. This reactionary, even counterrevolutionary identity succeeds at producing contradictions within Bowling’s stream of consciousness: I thought I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That’s an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it’s next door to impossible not to imagine that they’re all waxworks, but probably they’re thinking just the same as you. (7:25) In these passages, the “you” provides Bowling with a narrative device to displace and defer the paradoxes supporting his self-image as both thin and fat, individual and type, or major and minor character. “You” know what he means, and, also, he’ll tell “you” more about that later. The contradictions and displacements, which define Bowling’s disordered thoughts and drive CUFA’s meandering plot forward, come to an abrupt halt when, after Bowling returns home, Hilda confronts him with evidence that he lied about going on a business trip. Caught, Bowling fears a row might “go on till three in the morning” (7: 247). This realization leaves him with three options:
All I wanted was the line of least resistance. And in my mind I ran over the three possibilities, which were: A. To tell her what I’d really been doing and somehow make her believe me. B. To pull the old gag about losing my memory. C. To let her go on thinking it was a woman, and take my medicine But, damn it! I knew which it would have to be. (7: 247) The multiple choice invites an ideological response from the reader. Many see Bowling’s fall as complete and conclude that there is a “sense that any of Bowling’s three options would have much the same outcome” (Morrell 238).14 Others believe that although “most rebellions end in rather unheroic failure [...] it is better to act and to rebel than to do nothing at all,” and so they answer “A”: Bowling keeps heroically protesting and explaining even if to no avail (Woodcock 344).15 The novel’s counterplot presents another option. According to David Wykes (who is part of the first group), CUFA has two weaknesses: it is plotless and a monologue. These combine to limit the novel’s perspective, reducing a character like Hilda to “little more than the caricature shrew on a Donald McGill postcard” all while “Orwell’s own inherent fairness makes the reader rebel against George’s refusal of sympathy towards her” (Wykes 106). But if Bowling’s limitation results from his failure to rebel against Polly, and if Orwell’s “fairness” compels the reader to rebel against Bowling, then the multiple-choice ending may be meant to provoke “you” into looking past Bowling to empathize with a working-class mother, who manages the bills, who takes care of the children, and who is stuck with a resentful husband. Perhaps this reader is supposed to ask: why isn’t apologizing one of Bowling’s options?16
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Pastoral Regained: Proletarian Literature In a 1940 radio discussion for the BBC titled “The Proletarian Writer,” Orwell praises those who put “working-class experience and working-class values on to paper” while also questioning the broader category of “proletarian literature,” or a literature by and for the working class (19: 297). For Nick Hubble, Orwell’s arguments against this category “read like a journalistic transcription” of Empson’s opening chapter to Some Versions of Pastoral, as both writers identify similar problems—that revolt against capitalism is transitory, that good literature seeks permanence, and that the education and resources needed to write such literature alienates the working-class writer from their heritage. But if Orwell thought working-class complaints (like “the sink smells”) could not create art “likely to last so long as the siege of Troy” (19: 297), Empson identifies these protests as the latest version of a long pastoral tradition, hence his purported “reason for dragging this old-fashioned form into the discussion is that [he] think[s] good proletarian art is usually Covert Pastoral” (13). Empson defines pastoral as “putting the complex into the simple,” and this broad classification intersects with so-called “proletarian literature” insofar as both “describ[e] the lives of ‘simple’ low people to an audience of refined wealthy people, so as to make them think first ‘this is true about everyone’ and then ‘this is specially true about us’”—a definition that applies to much of Orwell’s writing (25, 159). Orwell, for instance, spent two years tramping around Paris and London so he could know the poor intimately. His subsequent book, Down and Out in Paris and London, transmits that intimacy to his more well-off readers through the rhetorical deployment of a second-person pronoun that, as Sandrine Sorlin notes, “encourage[es] the participation of the readers in the re-enactment of Orwell’s life among the poor” (38):
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It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty—it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. (qtd on 38) This “you” makes the experience of poverty seem true for everyone, especially the reader, and Orwell achieves a similar, universalizing effect in The Road to Wigan Pier, not just through his use of “you,” but also by using rhetoric to connect with and complicate his subjects, raising their condition into what Jeffrey Hunter calls “a politically significant fact” (Alpers 40).17 While riding the train, Orwell, for instance, “almost” catches the eye of a “slum girl” who had the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen […]. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe. (Orwell 5: 1) This passage uplifts through empathy and understanding her struggle with a stinky sink into the more poetic but equally alliterative “dreadful destiny”—an ill-fated outcome meted out by an unjust society in which we all take part and are all vulnerable. While Orwell can reframe his experiences with poverty as a version of pastoral, Bowling cannot. When, as a sixteen-year-old, he glimpses his old babysitter Kaite Simmons (whose family slept five to a bed, who had a baby, perhaps from incest, taken at fifteen, and who married a tinker) by the “dreadful wooden shacks beside the railway line,” he exclaims:
Poor Katie! […] A wrinkled-up hag of a woman, with her hair coming down and a smokey face, looking at least fifty years old, came out of one of the huts and began shaking out a rag mat. It was Katie who must have been twenty-seven (7: 41). This is sympathy without political fact. Poor Katie simply fades into destitution and out of the narrative. Upon her exit, space is made for Bowling’s first girlfriend, Elsie Waters—whose body will provide Bowling with the powerful feeling that “[s]he was mine and I could have her” (7: 109). Later, during his return to Binfield, Bowling recognizes Elsie, and the subsequent blazon combines this misogynistic objectification with his romanticized boyhood: It was horrible, and yet I got a kind of scientific kick out of studying her back view. It’s frightening, the things that twenty-four years can do to a woman. Only twenty-four years, and the girl I’d known, with her milky-white skin and red mouth and kind of dull-gold hair, had turned into this great round-shouldered hag, shambling along on twisted heels. It made me feel downright glad I’m a man. No man ever goes to pieces quite so completely as that. (7: 217) Bowling’s reaction preserves his masculine sense of self by substituting sympathy for disgust, and political fact with reactionary odium. He flattens Elsie into “pieces,” stitched together into a monstrous figure lacking an inner life and then secures his inner authenticity through opposition. He might be fat and toothless, but at least he’s not a hag! This is, of course, a comically flaccid defense of his supposedly superior masculine interiority, and Bowling knows it. It’s why, in his return home, he resorts to whining (“but Hilda—”) rather than meeting his wife’s accusations with worthwhile answers: “If I spent a
week explaining to Hilda why I’d been to Lower Binfield, she’d never understand. […] Gosh! Did I even understand myself?” (7: 246, original emphasis). He wants to explain the reason for visiting the scenes of his boyhood, but the answer he found is unsatisfactory. An attentive reader might note that Bowling only actually describes his childhood as paradisial once. It was the day he first followed the gang to the fishing pool: “All I was thinking of was the green pool and the carp and the gang with their hooks and lines and bread paste. It was as though they were in paradise and I’d got to join them” (7: 60). Right after he catches his fish, the narrative voice shifts to “we”: “How we gloated!”; “How we shouted to see him!” (7: 63). This pronominal transition to a first-person plural suggests that paradise may have more to do with community than solitary fishing or heroic boyhood. From this observation, one might reconsider Bowling’s claim that “Fishing is the opposite of war,” except now with its succeeding sentence: “But it wasn’t at all certain that we could bring it off ” (7: 85). Who is this “we?” While deployed in France, Bowling’s fellow soldier Nobby, “a gypsy looking chap” whose surname Bowling cannot remember discovers a pool full of fish behind a clump of poplars, and the sight inspires the “thought of escaping, for perhaps a whole day, right out of the atmosphere of war” (7: 85). While sharing the skills they learned as children, the pair scrounge for and fashion a poplar rod, a bent needle bartered from a whore, a reel of sewing thread, a cork for a float, and some medical gut swapped for cigarettes, before turning in for the night. War wins again, however, when deployment orders arrive, the soldiers are marched away, and Bowling “never saw or heard of [the pool or the fish] again”; he suspects “it got poisoned with mustard gas later on” (7: 88). But then Bowling seems to unconsciously understand that this communal activity temporarily
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disperses war’s smothering, isolating atmosphere, as the episode occurs out of chronological order, in the middle of his description of adolescence, and nearly thirty pages before Bowling narrates his enlistment. Because of his commitments to a self-sufficient, heroic, or bourgeois individualism, Bowling treats it as a failure rather than recognizing that the community he formed with Nobby (whose name is slang for wealth and class) enabled that escape. This failure of the imagination shapes Bowling relationships with others. For instance, when he leaves behind his new rod and tackle because “[f]at men over forty-five can’t go fishing,” but then returns home emptyhanded to his children, who ask after their presents, it is a missed opportunity for Bowling to have passed on to his children what he and Nobby and Joe and the Black Hand all shared—an opportunity to experience one of those rare moments of connection when he feels like his “sole importance has been to bring these creatures into the world and feed them while they’re growing” (7: 237, 8). But these moments of connection are fleeting, as “[m]ost of the time [his] separate existence looks pretty important to [him]” and so their plea for presents makes him feel like “a kind of tame dairy-cow for a lot of women and kids to chase up,” and he subsequently threatens to wallop them if they don’t go back to bed (7: 8). In a review article for Encounter, John Wain once suggested that there are only “two passages in Orwell’s fiction that are genuinely moving” (78). The first is Animal Farm’s description of Boxer—his final, unavailing efforts to kick his way free from
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the slaughterhouse van. The second is Bowling’s experience visiting his old home, now a commercial tea shop, when, standing awkwardly, where “Father’s armchair used to stand,” he feels overcome with a “longing to tell somebody that I’d been born here, that I belonged to this house, or rather (what I really felt) that the house belonged to me” (7: 199). When Bowling does try to speak to the waitress who works there, she only gives him a silent, “frigid look” (7: 199). She is Bowling’s hellish version of the silent woman at the end of Polly’s quest, a “young woman in a print wrapper […] with a sour expression” (7: 199). The irony of this lonely ending is that Bowling does tell someone about his experience: “you.” As I have argued throughout, that telling draws upon pastoral convention to lament the loss of those conventions. It allows a deeply flawed minor character who is compelled to see himself as a realist novel’s major character while increasingly being subjected into passivity by a hostile and streamlined world to complain about it. And it is by treating those complaints as pastoral that Wain can raise Bowling’s failed trip into something archetypical, a representative anecdote, or a political fact: it is “the perfect emblem for the English people, barely tolerated strangers in their own country, robbed of their past” and only welcome if they “spend a shilling on tea and cake [they don’t] want” (79). In this way, Wain does for Bowling what Bowling cannot do for others. That he is able to do so after reaching the novel’s end, suggests, if not pastoral wholly regained under modernity, then at least the possibility for the best of pastoral retained. ■
NOTES 1. I would like to thank Karen Valihora as well as the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and suggestions for clarifying some of the ideas presented here. 2. See Terry Gifford for anti-pastoral as a “natural world [that] can no longer be constructed as a ‘land of dreams,’ but is in fact a bleak battle for survival without divine purpose” (120). For this pool as a metaphor for interiority, see Rae, “There’ll be,” 156 and Shuttleworth 213. 3. Critics have noted that Orwell’s “you” is “an inescapably dialectical pronoun, referring simultaneously to the one and to the many” (Mechie 192). For Empson, the relationship of the one to the many is central to the pastoral mode’s “idea of everything being included in the humble thing” (24). In his discussion of how Elizabethan double plots connect the one to the many, Empson offhandedly remarks that “Wuthering Heights is a good case of double plot in the novel, both for covert deification and telling the same story twice with the two possible endings” (74). For studies that expand this observation to explore “the persistence within the novel of a pastoralism,” see Griener, “Bleak House: Pastoral” 79. and Karen Valihora, “Emma Pastoral.” 4. For powerlessness as a theme in CUFA, see Van Dellen 57–59 and Hammond A George Orwell Companion 155. 5. Rae situates Orwell’s novel alongside the “proleptic elegists” of the 1930s (“There’ll be” 152); Clarke argues CUFA “responds to a well-established literary tradition of writing about England” that emerged during the previous decades (534). Hubble reads CUFA as an intermodern pastoral defined by Empson’s category of pastoral comic primness, an ironic stance that “simultaneously accept[s] and revolt[s] against social conventions” (134), as, for example, when Bowling accepts and resists “highbrow” literature: “a ‘good’ book was a book one didn’t have any intention of reading” (Orwell 7: 124). 6. Rae describes CUFA as exhibiting a “distinctly ‘modernist’ sort of nostalgia,” and argues elsewhere that his narrators’ ironic narrow-mindedness demonstrates an “appreciation for modernist literary techniques” (“There’ll be” 150; “Orwell” 246). Morrell suggests CUFA exemplifies how modernist literary techniques become “commonplace” (238). 7. See, for instance, Williams Orwell 22–29, Rushdie, “Outside the Whale”; and Satia, “Orwell and Empire.” For CUFA as Orwell’s “most conservative piece of writing,” see Rae, “There’ll be” 149, 162n1.
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8. See also Woloch’s suggestion that the question “what Orwell might think of a political crisis?” be replaced with “what form of writing might Orwell have pursued in relation to any of these crises?” (Or Orwell, 5). 9. Patterson contends that Virgil’s “contrastive positioning of the pronouns” creates an unresolved tension between the poet’s individual aspirations and social responsibilities (2, original emphasis). One may be reminded here of Williams’s praise of Orwell’s “double vision”—his experience as someone simultaneously “dominator and dominated” or perpetually negotiating the human need for comfort with the discomforting feeling of privilege (19). 10. For Solnit, these lists produce “an inventory of what is available at least to the imagination, and sometimes a reaching for assurance that there is some kind of abundance beyond the privation at hand” (239). 11. In “Wells, Hitler, and the World State,” Orwell considers Wells’s inadequacy under modernity alongside his belief that turning against Wells would constitute a “parricide” (12: 539). 12. Hammond also notes that “Whereas Mr. Polly could be described as an allegory on the theme of paradise regained, Coming Up for Air is a fantasia on the theme of paradise destroyed” insofar as “almost every aspect of Lower Binfield has been changed—either removed altogether, or urbanised, or so altered as to be almost unrecognisable” (A George Orwell Companion 156–157). See also Meyers 76; Hunter 40; Clarke 535. 13. For Narcissus and Echo as solitary pastoral figures of “fixation and rigidity” who harken back to the Cyclops in Theocritus’s Idyll XI, see Valihora 525. 14. For a review of these critics, see Saunders 110n20. 15. See Saunders 110–111; Hubble 135. 16. For the working-class mother as Orwell’s “hero,” see Ingle 296n23. 17. Hunter’s notion of Orwell raising experiences of poverty to political fact echoes Alpers’s description of pastoral as a “representative anecdote” for “those whose lives are determined by the actions of powerful men or by events and circumstances over which they have no control” (24).
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WORKS CITED Alpers, Paul. What Is Pastoral? U of Chicago P, 1996. Clarke, Ben. “Orwell, Englishness, and Class.” Waddell, pp. 528–542. Cook, Elizabeth and Nathan Waddell. “Orwell and John Milton.” Waddell, pp. 147–161. Dwan, David. Liberty, Equality, and Humbug: Orwell’s Political Ideals. Oxford UP, 2018. Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. New Directions, 1974. Federico, Annette. “Making Do: George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 37, no. 1, 2005, pp. 50–63. Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. 1999. Routledge, 2010. Greiner, Rae. “Bleak House: Pastoral.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 1, 2013, pp. 75–93. Griffin, Jasper. “Theocritus, The Iliad, and the East.” The American Journal of Philology, vol. 113, no. 2, 1992, pp. 189–211. Hammond, J. R. A George Orwell Companion: A Guide to the Novels, Documentaries and Essays. St Martin’s Press, 1982. ———. H. G. Wells and the Modern Novel. Macmillan Press, 1988. Hartman, Geoffrey. “Milton’s Counterplot.” ELH, vol. 25, no. 1, 1958, pp. 1–12. Hubble, Nick. “Intermodern Pastoral: William Empson and George Orwell.” New Versions of Pastoral: Post-romantic, Modern, and Contemporary Responses to the Tradition, edited by David James and Phillip Tew, 2009, Rosemont Publishing, pp.123–135 Hunter, Jefferson. “Orwell, Wells, and Coming Up for Air.” Modern Philology, vol. 78, no. 1, 1980, pp. 38–47. Ingle, Stephen. “Orwell, Consumption, and Destitution.” Waddell, pp. 283–293.
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Larsen, Torben H. Enduring Pastoral: Recycling the Middle Landscape Ideal in the Tennessee Valley. Brill, 2010. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America. Oxford UP, 1964. Mechie, Calum. “Funny Old Fatty Bowling: Coming Up for Air and George Orwell’s Comedic Common Man.” We Speak a Different Tongue: Maverick Voices and Modernity 1890–1939, edited by Anthony Patterson and Yoonjung Choi, Cambridge Scholars P, 2015, pp. 185–199. Meyers, Jeffrey. “Orwell’s Apocalypse: Coming Up for Air.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 1975, pp. 69–80. Morrell, Sascha. “Orwell and Modernism.” Waddell, pp. 229–248. Mota, J. Manuel, “Coming Up for Air and The History of Mr. Polly: Utopian Yearnings, Triumphs and Defeats.” The Wellsian: The Journal of the H. G. Wells Society, no. 31, 2008, pp. 34–42. Orwell, George. The Complete Works of George Orwell. Edited by Peter Davis, Secker and Warburg, 1997–1998. 20 vols. Patterson, Annabel. Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry. U of California P, 1987. Pong, Beryl. “Orwell, War, and Violence.” Waddell, pp. 397–411. Rae, Patricia. “Orwell, World War I modernism and the Spanish Civil War.” Journal of War & Culture Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 2009, pp. 245–258. ———. “‘There’ll be no more fishing this side the grave’: Radical Nostalgia in George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air.” Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics, edited by Tammy Clewell, Palgrave, 2013, pp. 149–165. Rushdie, Salman. “Outside the Whale.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, Granta Books/ Penguin Books, 1991, pp. 87–101. Satia, Priya. “Orwell, Race, and Empire.” Waddell, pp. 347–370. Saunders, Loraine. The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell: The Novels from Burmese Days to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ashgate, 2008.
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Shuttleworth, Anthony. “The Real George Orwell: Dis-simulation in Homage to Catalonia and Coming Up for Air.” And in Our Time: Vision, Revision, and British Writing of the 1930s, edited by Anthony Shuttleworth, Bucknell UP, 2003, pp. 204–220. Solnit, Rebecca. Orwell’s Roses. Penguin, 2022. Sorlin, Sandrine. The Stylistics of “You”: Second-Person Pronoun and Its Pragmatic Effects, Cambridge UP, 2022. Taplin, Oliver. “The Shield of Achilles Within the Iliad.” Greece and Rome, vol. 27, no. 1, 1980, pp. 1–21. Theocritus. Idylls. Translated by Anthony Verity, Oxford UP, 2002. Tyson, Helen. “Orwell the Reader.” Waddell, pp. 3–16. Valihora, Karen. “Emma Pastoral.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 74, no. 315, 2023, pp. 518–531. Van Dellen, Robert J. “George Orwell’s ‘Coming Up for Air’: The Politics of Powerlessness.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 1975, pp. 57–68. Waddell, Nathan, editor. The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell. Oxford UP, 2025. Wain, John. “Here Lies Lower Binfield: On George Orwell.” Encounter, Oct. 1961, pp. 70–82 Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. 1957. Penguin Books, 1985. Williams, Raymond. George Orwell. Fontana, 1971. ———. The Country and the City. Oxford UP, 1973. Woloch, Alex. Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism. Harvard UP, 2016. ———. The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton UP, 2003. Woodcock, George. The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell. Little Brown and Co., 1966. Wykes, David. A Preface to Orwell. Longman, 1987.
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JENN BLAIR
SOMETHING LIKE SCALES fell from the murderous man’s eyes and left him, horseless, on the road to Damascus praising God. How it bothered me as a child! The laziness of simile. Gross imprecision of the word. Why couldn’t the teller be more exact about what type of error dropped away? Early this morning they line up sober, quiet, white bands around one wrist. Sufferers at the pools of Bethesda, lingering. My husband fills out forms, part of the crowd here today hoping for the cloud to be rent. Haze to dissipate. No magazines on the end table. Nothing but parking lot, a large red rooster in a frame. One woman asks another two chairs away if she feels nervous. I was,
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at first, but then I prayed and asked for the peace that passes understanding. Settling down around her, benevolent film. When his turn finally arrives, my husband is wheeled down the hall, head slightly bent, and I wonder. Afterwards, a nurse gives instructions for the mauve-capped drops in the little bag: she just helped her own father pay to get his first procedure done: so amazed at how the world looked he leapt on his lawnmower the very same day, her distraught mother running out to chide him: Go inside at once John or you’ll not get your other eye! We leave, thankful, wary: we may have been younger than most in there waiting, but the margin’s not as wide. Anymore. Tall, mysterious children already know how to make plans which have nothing at all to do with the pair walking into a diner now for breakfast, fussing over the menu and bodies which creak and sputter but still mostly work. Those people who oversalt eggs talking yet again about the slightly hazy-minded parents who shield them from oblivion and death—the ones who—whenever we say we’re taking a trip— sternly command us to call when we get home.
JENN BLAIR
T H A T WA S THE DAY Sarah F. came over in time to see my mother pinning up an ironed bedsheet behind the kitchen table: the official backdrop for some bell peppers she’d bought that morning. I tried not to completely die as she hunched over their squatty haunches with her camera, painstakingly rearranging the semi-obedient gnarled nudes in poses which, to our eyes, seemed almost identical to the last. I saw a lady do that in the movies once. I think she was kind of off in the head. I didn’t dare tell my wary friend about what was in the garage freezer nestled between petite peas and boxes of nutty buddy bars—a bag holding a bird she’d found expired lying on the ground out in the pear
orchard a few months before— its plumage a frosted row of bright green-blue fire, breast an incandescent flame burning, shining even in death: didn’t dare say how its stilled wings only seemed paused—a brief cessation— lying there on the stained, warped baking sheet as a rapt, middle-aged woman adjusted-readjusted her lens focusing and re-focusing on what almost looked capable of fluttering again if only one could conjure the one right word, lean down careful, utter it. I used to vow I was nothing like her, sealing the bathroom off with duct tape, putting slices of corrugated cardboard in the window above the bathtub holding a sliver of cracked soap, dull pink razor, and chemical trays: rubber-tipped tongs gripping paper and willing it, shaking it, hard—harder—till shapes finally began to emerge in the water, the world which always passed me by much too quickly and did not ever seem meant for me, suddenly rushing in—familiar, strange— pinned down, magnificent, flowing.
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M
ama takes him to a small room with blue-gray walls and tiny gold squares hanging on them. She calls them paintings, but Rhys is too short to see them without being lifted, and Father has not arrived yet. On the other wall he sees a much larger panel, three of them, bent together like an unfolded letter. “Stay here, and I’ll come get you when I’m finished, alright?” She strokes his hair and kisses his head. He nods automatically, and his bravery is rewarded with another kiss. Then he is alone in the room with the too-small paintings on the back wall, and too many people he doesn’t know weaving around him. Rhys does not waste time trying to peer up at the small squares. He crosses the room to stand in front of the large trifold painting and almost forgets he is not allowed to crawl beneath the velvet ropes and sit on the floor. There is a lot in this painting to keep a small child’s attention. Every available inch is covered with people and animals doing all sorts of strange things that keep him well entertained. The middle panel is his favorite, as it contains the most figures and the brightest colors. He recognizes the globe, the horses, and the plump owls. He tries counting them, but quickly gets confused and instead stares. Rhys loses track of time. The taller bodies around him still briefly before sliding past, but Rhys stays put because his mother told him to, and because he notices that one of the tiny figures is moving. He stares at the other figures, but they remain still. So, he returns to the image of the man in blue, walking through the left panel and clambering up on what looks like a gray giraffe. Rhys watches him, fascinated, as he perches atop his mount. He blinks in surprised delight when the man catches his gaze and winks. “How are you doing that?” Rhys whispers. “Riding the giraffe?” “Well, he was just staying put, so I climbed up.” The man in blue smiles at him, and Rhys can’t help but smile back. “Is it fun?” “I’m sure it would be,” says the man, “if he were moving.” Rhys nods solemnly in agreement. It’s not much fun if the giraffe is standing still. The man in blue swings his legs around to gaze at Rhys as though he’s the interesting one. “Do you like art?” “Mama likes art.” Mama thinks Rhys does, too, but Father says he should practice his letters and numbers. Father doesn’t like talking about art. “You’ve been here longer than anyone else, and you spotted me.” The man grins. “You were climbing the giraffe,” Rhys points out, and the man laughs at his puzzled expression. Rhys goes quiet when Father’s hand lands on his shoulder and grips it.
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“Don’t talk to yourself,” he says gruffly, and starts pulling Rhys away. “Where’s your mother?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t know?” Father looks upset, and Rhys looks back at the room. “Can I stay here until she comes?” Father shakes his head. “What’s there to see except depravity in that so-called art? I don’t know what your mother was thinking, leaving you here . . . Why not in the café like a normal woman?” Rhys doesn’t know what depravity means, and he doesn’t understand why Father is upset when he was perfectly happy to stay and talk to the man in blue. “Mama told me to stay there until she came to get me.” Father makes a snorting noise that reminds Rhys of the portly hogs in the painting. He does not giggle, because that will make Father even more upset. “Well, I’m here now, and we’re leaving.” Father’s hand steers him away from the painting. Rhys looks for the figure, but he cannot see him beyond the forest of legs and knees. He thinks about telling Father that he was talking to the figure, not to himself. But Father looks upset, and Rhys has learned it is better to leave him be when his voice sounds the way it does now. Rhys is determined to see the man in blue again. He thinks they were becoming friends.
His mother has been working at the museum for two years, which means for two whole years Mama has not come back home before he goes to bed. Rhys misses her, but at least he sees her on the days Father needs to leave for “business.” He refuses to let Rhys stay home alone, refuses to pay for “hired help,” so he tells Mama to take Rhys with her to “work.” “Keep him out of trouble,” Father commands, “It’s indecent to let a child wander around a museum staring at inappropriate pictures.” Mama agrees and, as soon as they arrive, lets Rhys wander. It’s glorious. “Don’t leave the museum” is the only rule, and he is happy to follow it. These days are spent hunting for the man in blue. It becomes a game: he finds him back in the trifold painting, then in landscapes, then in painted rooms with flowers and fruit, and in a royal court with kings, and even in the company of Mary and Jesus. The man is not the best hider, and it is difficult for him to take turns seeking when there
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is no place for Rhys to hide. But they sit and talk for hours. The man in blue leads him all over the museum, changing his appearance between frames to fit each scene within them. It mesmerizes Rhys, and he learns how to spot him from the blend of other figures. He grows to recognize the man with the same ease he recognizes Mama and Father. The man learns his name, but never gives his own, preferring to smile and flit away to show him something else. Rhys secretly calls him Prado since that’s the name of the museum he lives in. That is the danger of naming something—from there, attachment begins.
... Father stops letting him go with Mama to see the museum. He takes him to “business” instead, tells him to study the other men and what they do. They all look exactly like Father from the shoulders down, wearing dull suits that Father never lets Rhys hug him in. Rhys is bored and says so once the men leave. Father gives him a scary look and tells him he’s teaching him how to be a successful businessman. “You’ll thank me one day when you’re well off and a man of import. You’re named after a king: it’s time you learn how to rule the kingdom I will pass down to you.” He scoffs and adds, “It’s more important than anything you might be picking up in a musty crypt for cloth and paint.” Rhys thinks of Prado’s kind smiles, his bright eyes, his easy laugh. He thinks of how Mama says that art doesn’t talk at you, but invites you to chat, and decides that Mama is being truthful. He has never felt lonely at the Prado Museum. He feels lonely as he sits in the corner of his father’s office, allowed only to take notes and listen as Father trades too-loud laughs. Rhys tries to draw the art he sees from memory, and hides the doodles when Father demands to see his notes.
... Unexpectedly, Father moves away and takes Rhys with him, and Rhys is not allowed to go anywhere with Mama anymore. He overhears the words incompatible and divorce—words that Rhys learns mean forbiddance and hatred. He does not see Mama for five years. He forgets about Prado.
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... Rhys returns to Madrid after Father’s death. Mother has legal custody of him—more so than his stepmother Belen has. He arrives sullen because he has to move schools and leave behind the stepsiblings he’s finally bonded with, and he’s standoffish because Mother has become a stranger to him. Except for old glimmers, he recalls snatches of sunlit afternoons in marble hallways lined with gilt frames. Time to trade the apron strings for Italian weave, Father was fond of saying until Rhys learned to stop asking why they’d left Mama and home. Rhys knows how to be his father’s and Belen’s son. He doesn’t remember how to be his mother’s child. Mother looks the same, except happier. Her ring finger is still bare, but there is a lightness to her that Rhys’s fragmented memories of his childhood did not include. He thinks it is because she has been happier without him. He is wrong. “My, how you’ve grown,” she gushes and smooths her hands over his face and through his hair as though relearning him by touch as much as by sight. “Mother,” he replies, because Mama is not what a man would call his maternal figure. He finds himself regretting it when he sees his mother’s eyes flicker before she smiles at him again as though nothing happened. She asks him about his life, how his classes are going, how Belen and his stepsiblings are doing. It angers him until he realizes that, by asking, she is trying to show she cares. “What are you thinking of studying for university?” “Business.” “Oh! What kind of business?” “Don’t know yet. I’ve still got a few years before I have to decide.” He doesn’t want to tell his mother that he dreads the idea of it, that he’s perfected fooling his father and Belen into thinking he likes it. No, not yet. Mother accepts his answer and nods when he comes back from classes inundated with faux internship proposals and mock-product pitches. She clears a place for him in her office to work, though she is rarely there. Her job as a curator and conservator isn’t done on spreadsheets and graphs. Eventually, he gives in to his curiosity and on a whim follows his mother to the storage rooms where masterpieces wait for permanent display or to be touched up and mended before being returned to the public eye. He feels as though he is in a church. He speaks softly and keeps his fingers laced in benediction, so he does not touch everything he sees though he longs to do just that.
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He feels himself being watched with painted eyes, and he doesn’t think anything of it. At first.
...
Rhys walks with his mother as she gives tours. He stumbles when she stops at Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and remembers spending an afternoon staring at it. There is something missing from it, or so his instincts tell him. He tries drawing again, and discovers that it comes to him easily, willingly, the way his father’s business cunning did not. It is a comfort to be naturally good at something, to have his new friends watch him sketch with silent awe and his mother pin up his works around her office. Their flat becomes a private collection of his own art, each one signed and dated and hung up. Rhys learns a lot about the process of restoring art. His mother specializes in Spanish oil paintings before 1800. She teaches him the tricks of her trade. How to look for the special varnish that gives older paintings their distinctive glow, how to determine whether the dirt is ethnographic or not (the former you leave on, the latter you don’t), and how certain hues were created (most ethically, others not). His mind is a collage of his mother’s making. Rhys visits the storage rooms to view the art not on display (about 95% of a museum’s works are here, his mother tells him). He goes to the vault for another reason—to start applying to university in secret, hiding from his father’s disapproving ghost. Once a week, he writes letters to Belen and his stepsiblings, sealing them and sending them off on his way back to the flat he shares with his mother. For two more years, he tells his mother that he is applying to business programs. He juggles his time between attending classes and catching a bus to El Museo de Prado, to check in on his mother and to sit in the galleries, alone. Rhys asks his mother if she ever feels lonely. “The art keeps me company,” she confides as they meander towards the exit one evening. “We trade life stories all day—a most exhausting job!” She shares a conspiratorial smile with Fra Angelico’s angels delivering the annunciation. Rhys stares at the two angels: one gold-haired and winged, wearing rose-colored robes, and the other with dark hair and golden wings in sapphire robes that match the arches of the tempera ceiling. Mary appears disconcerted in the face of their intense stares; his mother relishes their interest. No wonder his father couldn’t stand the place.
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... Rhys finds the letter waiting for him in the tiny cubby mailbox. He sets it aside as he brings the rest upstairs and leaves the various magazines in a pile on the kitchen counter. He accompanies his mother to work, keeping up the conversation as though his life isn’t about to change. His heart skips when he sees the crown-like façade of the museum arise, inexorable and breathtaking as dawn. Even Velázquez himself seems to eagerly lean forward atop his bronze perch as they pass by him on their ways inside. Rhys can only endure the anticipation long enough to escort his mother to her office before he explodes under the pressure. It is early enough in the morning that he can sprint through the halls without censure. Precious artworks blur past and his footfalls echo like startled pigeon’s wings in the yawning gallery air. He intends to return to the storage vault. But his feet carry him elsewhere, drawing him along familiar routes until he finds himself halting in front of Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath. David crouches over the felled form of his foe, knee planted on his shoulder as though to keep him down despite the grisly evidence swinging from his child’s hands that Goliath will never stand again. Goliath’s expression is frozen in dismay, huge fists clenched in defiance even in death. David looks merely resigned, not triumphant, bent over with a kingdom’s weight on his hunched shoulders. Rhys knows how David feels. He takes the letter out and opens it. Carefully, he unfolds the paper within, expecting to see Bosch’s gruesome Garden ooze out between the creases. Instead, Rembrandt’s Judith greets him with the formal monumentality of a queen and the tearful joy of a hero’s return. He reads it again, and again, just to be sure, discovering new magnificent details that only confirm the mastery of the artist. He wants to frame the letter, as sentimental an urge as that may be. Rhys’s fate has become an open road. David and Goliath remain locked in their eternal conflict, too focused on each other to watch as he lapses into emotionality. His father would have his head if he saw these tears. He’d rage that he’d raised Rhys to view emotions as weakness—and maybe there is some truth to that. David is never depicted as cowering or crying for his mother when he goes to face an enemy. But Father’s giant shadow looks much smaller on the ground beneath a youth whose hair and face bear some resemblance to Rhys’s. Behind the Biblical pair, a third man garbed in midnight blue kneels prostrate on the ground behind the boy king. His wide eyes are full of awe and amazement, forever preserved in a moment of divine revelation.
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Rhys is already rehearsing how he is going to tell Mama and doesn’t notice that the third man—who shouldn’t be there at all—is looking at him, not at the newly-crowned ruler of Israel. His fealty is sworn to another king.
... As Rhys enters the Courtauld Institute’s private gallery for his first After Impressionism: Routes into Early Modernism course, he is almost moved to tears again when he sees the Monets, the Botticellis, the Renoirs, the Cézannes, the Degas’s, the Seurats, the van Goghs . . . He must bring his mother here, he thinks, as he trails after his professor, last among his classmates as they walk too quickly past masterpieces he could spend all day gazing at. Professor Dashiell stops in front of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, standing off to the side so the students have a clear view and launches into a lecture about Manet’s life and the painting. Rhys half-listens, lost in a daydream about his mother’s face when she learns he has seen her favorite painting in person. The woman’s expression is even more inscrutable, he thinks with amusement. Her male customer is less enigmatic about his feelings as he offers a charming smile, proffering a yellow rose. “For your first essay, you will choose a work of impressionist art and analyze the techniques used by the artist,” Professor Dashiell summarizes as she passes out the instructions. “Choose a piece that speaks to you. Believe me, your instructors can tell whether you really connect with the work.” Some of the students giggle nervously. Rhys is unintimidated—his mother is far more frightening when it comes to art. He meanders through the room, pausing in front of each artwork for an unconscious minute, waiting to feel . . . something. An unmistakable sign, preferably. He continues his circuit. The urgency to find the piece remains, but in the presence of such magnificent works of art, it is a distant concern. “Rhys!” He whirls around, startled by the clarity of the whisper. He rounds the partition wall housing a fleet of Seurat’s postcard-sized works, ready to return a softer salutation but he encounters only an empty corner, occupied solely by Manets. He pauses before a hasty study of a woman who is turning to her dreamlike partner. The warmth and levity of the scene, ambiguous as it is, reminds him of the gilded theater halls of France. Rhys spares a backward glance at Degas’s bar, at the lonely woman with her ghostly mustachioed customer, and returns to the woman and her laughing partner.
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... The merciless slashes of Professor Dashiell’s red pen are almost too painful to look at. Opening compliments sour into bewildered questions—“Where are you getting this?” and “I don’t follow”—and settle into the final death knell: “Please visit my office.” Rhys obeys, sitting in a chair that is too big for him. The brightness of the open windows, the prints of various artworks on the walls, and the hideous spider plant skittering in the autumn breeze dispel the hazy memory of a businessman’s crypt. Professor Dashiell cuts to the chase: “I appreciate your choosing Manet’s Au Bal, and your analysis of the woman, Marguerite de Conflans, is quite impressive.” Here she pauses, and Rhys feels the tentative glow from her praise waver as the professor’s brow furrows. “However, from this paragraph onward, I . . . your subject . . .” She shakes her head. “Who are you talking about?” Rhys wets his lips. “The woman’s dance partner. He’s tucked behind her—” “Yes,” Professor Dashiell interjects, “but only in a few gestural strokes. Enough to imply the shape of a man, but not in the amount of detail you describe.” She folds her hands together—perhaps to keep herself from strangling him. Her eyes are confused and, horribly, pitying. “I don’t understand. I stood in front of it for an hour,” he stammers, “I know what I saw.” She sighs. “Perhaps what you think you saw. Go back to the gallery and take another look.” Full of self-righteous anger, he storms into the Institute’s gallery, back to the Impressionism room, back to Manet— The painting waits, and the initial pull he felt towards it is gone—gutted by Professor Dashiell’s disapproval. The woman is there, and so is the man—but only a few ochre brush strokes suggest his presence. Rhys clearly remembers the man in the glossy suit, immaculately pomaded hair, pink-cheeked and eyes dancing as he gazes back at Marguerite. Professor Dashiell does not allow rewrites.
... Visiting his mother at work midway through the semester with a bouquet of flowers for her birthday, Rhys asks her if museums are frequently the victims of pranks, or, embarrassingly, haunted.
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“Hardly—we have vigilant guards working night and day to ensure that nobody harms these priceless artifacts. To your second question . . . what brings that about?” There are certain things he can’t tell his mother: that he once snuck some priceless pieces from storage to school to show them off. That his father swore he’d never loved another woman as much as he loved Belen. That he doesn’t like his pretentious and strange-looking name. The Manet mix-up is another he’s added to the list. “Nothing in particular,” he says evasively, careful not to be caught in her all-knowing gaze, “but I thought I would ask. There are so many old relics, priceless works, I couldn’t help but wonder . . .” “The art is plenty lively without ghosts!” His mother laughs. “You used to tell me about how Bosch’s painting spoke to you. That’s not haunting, Rhys, that’s the power of the artist and of the work itself!” Rhys thanks her and leaves before she can see how much she has unsettled him with her words. Suddenly all he can think of is the surreal image of a tiny man laughing and riding a giraffe. He doesn’t get far enough to reach Bosch’s garden. In the corner of his eye, he spots it: a blue shape shifting seamlessly between the frames on the wall beside him, creeping on silent feet. It’s not his imagination, not when he feels that telling prickle of eyes on him. Rhys whirls around, and the figure freezes too late, half-visible in Rubens’s The Three Graces. It’s the man he remembers seeing in the Garden—seeing everywhere, he realizes with a jolt—only he’s changed to fit Rubens’s style as he steps into the world of the Graces. While Bosch played with miniatures caught in metamorphoses, Rubens’s larger subjects are painted with luscious decadence. Skin glowing like flower petals, hair entwined with pearls and jewels, and veils shimmer like summer heat. The man, though not nude as the trio of deities are, is just as striking with his square clean jaw, dark hair, and flame-like eyes. He looks like he belongs there, even though Rhys has seen this painting all his life and knows that he is not supposed to be there. They stare at each other, and then, the figure grins at him mischievously. “You know, for a while I thought I was never going to see you again,” he remarks, and the audacity of that voice being the same as the one that called out to him that afternoon leaves Rhys incandescent with rage, “So imagine my delight when you returned—taller and broodier, perhaps, but also handsom—!” “You.” The man’s pleased expression ratches up one skeptical brow. “What about me?” “You cost me a paper at the Institute! You—I can never speak to Professor Dashiell
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again because you were in the Manet!” The man’s other eyebrow joins its twin. “You wrote an essay about me?” He preens. “It won’t happen again.” “Promises, promises . . .” The figure grins at him, so smugly delighted about the paper that Rhys pointedly stares at the innocuous tree along the left side of the panel. It’s less offensive than looking at him, rude as it may be. Logic returns to him. “How are you alive? What are you? How are you doing that?” The figure’s smirk turns into something softer, more befitting the presence of the Graces. “I remember a little boy asking me that very question some time ago. Perhaps you know him? He looked remarkably like you.” “He was me. And you haven’t answered my questions!” “Since when does art answer questions?” “You are not art! You’re . . . some sort of demon, a revenant sent to torment me!” Rhys is breathing hard, his face uncomfortably warm, and his body thrums with the desire for a fight. The man’s face registered surprise, then restraint, contrasting starkly with his previous bacchanalian vivacity. “I’m not a demon, and I certainly don’t want to torment you, Rhys.” “Then why do you keep following me?” A voice that sounds like his own from years ago longs to shout the name Prado! But he doesn’t dare bring that token of familiarity to light. Prado merely settles on the ground in front of the three women and studies him with that same eager attention he remembers in a Fra Angelico angel, and, before that, atop a tiny gray giraffe. “Because I want to?” Prado laughs, and the sound is just as lovely as he remembers. “Though I am truly sorry about your paper, dear friend.” “Dear friend?” Rhys repeats dubiously. “I barely know you. You barely know me.” “I know your mother,” says Prado, and he raises a mollifying hand with all the command and grace of a conductor. “She’s noticed me, too. Nuria Rhodes, correct? She’s a master with those little spatulas. Some of the restorers they’ve hired in the past are real butchers, butchers, but when she’s wielding the tools, it barely even tickles.” Rhys’s outrage is mingled with relief, but he says anyway, “Leave my mother alone!” “I haven’t done a thing to your mother! Goodness, I don’t know why you’re so determined to think the absolute worst of me!” Prado’s ruffled countenance smooths out as he studies him. Rhys feels oddly forgiven, though for what or why he’s unsure.
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Rhys supposes he should be comforted by this. He only feels trapped.
... Despite reassurances that he’s harmless, Prado keeps following him. Rhys sees him everywhere: he’s easy to spot, now that he knows who he’s looking for. Prado keeps Seurat’s angler company on his ceaseless hunt, sits at Cézanne’s fruit and flower-laden table, drops by a bandaged-up van Gogh, and traipses through Renoir’s fields. Prado gossips with Bell’s lady friends, window-shops in Kokoschka’s Tunis market, skips through the Rubens room, and contemplates Botticelli’s crucified Christ as though he’s a tourist himself. Once, notably, when Professor Dashiell admonishes, “And be sure to check that your work is authentic!” after giving instructions in the gallery for the next assignment, Rhys swears he sees one of Degas’s little ballerina statuettes move her head. He corners Prado in a glass case housing Pesselino’s diminutive annunciation. “Can you leave paintings?” “Sadly, I cannot. It must have been a trick of the light.” Prado smiles disarmingly and asks him about his paper. Rhys starts telling him about his idea, and he puts the question out of his mind.
...
“It doesn’t matter what van Gogh smelled like! Professor Dashiell wants to know about color psychology, not whether he wore Penhaligon’s or 4711.” “I beg to differ! The colors will never change, but who else could tell you that he preferred—” “Cease and desist. Van Gogh’s toilette is not going to help me analyze his use of Naples yellow!” Rhys stomps away from Prado, sealing his lips before he gets shushed by other patrons.
...
“How did it go, dear friend?” “Surprisingly well. I think I’m finally on the road to redemption in her eyes.” “Ah, a long and grueling journey to be sure. Aren’t you glad to not spend it alone?” “Tch. What does a painted figure know of walking?” “You’d be surprised!”
...
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“I’m studying the Renaissance this semester.” “The Renaissance! One of my favorite eras!” “You say that about all of them.” “Only because it’s true!” “. . . right. I was thinking of visiting the National Gallery—for a change in pace, and more variety. They have Michaelangelos, Raphaels, van Eyck, and even a few da Vincis.” “Then what are we waiting for? I’ll catch up with you.” “How will you get there?” “A magician never reveals his secrets, dear friend.” “You’re infuriating.” “Well, that’s not a secret!”
...
“I’m postponing our meeting tomorrow.” “Is everything alright, Rhys?” “My mother is sick.” “Goodness. You should go to her if she’s that ill . . .” “It’s not that bad, and I can’t visit for long. I have exams coming up. It was easier when we both lived in Madrid.” “How inconvenient! . . . You know, I can—” “You are not following my mother or coming to my home. I need some place to serve as a refuge from you.” “You wound me, Rhys, you really do.”
... Prado appears at just the right time, in Rhys’s opinion. They both watch Stefanya leave in a dervish of woolen scarves and windblown tresses. At least he has the decency to hide behind some of Rousseau’s expansive jungle leaves—and safely away from the startled tiger. “Well, that didn’t look good. What did I miss?” “Nothing,” Rhys says as he turns and stalks away. Prado has become accomplished at sneaking through paintings, though sometimes people frown in brief confusion or rub their eyes before shrugging off the flash of azure they think they’ve seen. Prado looks harried and unconvinced as he catches up in van Dyck’s Charity. “That
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didn’t look like nothing. She took off and you’re upset!” Rhys glares at him, and for a moment, he imagines how easy it would be if he were more like Prado. The man exudes charm, has a flawless complexion, enchanting smile, and a lyrical baritone that makes everything he says sound like poetry. He never wears the same thing, and is always dressed impeccably. Stefanya wouldn’t have been able to resist him. He’s never awkward as long as Rhys has known him. He’s never snappish, or rude, or cruel. Prado, beautiful as his namesake. “So what? Leave me be for once!” He forgets to check his volume. Rhys is escorted from the gallery with a warning, and Prado finally obeys, he and Charity wearing similar trampled expressions.
... Rhys doesn’t take any more dates to art museums. Somehow, he doesn’t feel comfortable under Prado’s gaze. He blames Prado for most of his dates describing him as “sweet, but a little too skittish.” He keeps trying to date, and every time he’s out and about, he swears he catches glimpses of Prado watching him from the billboards and posters. He interrogates him later, sometimes sober, sometimes not, and Prado tells him he wouldn’t do that. Drunkenly, Rhys believes him.
...
Rhys graduates at the top of his class. His mother is there, and so is Belen, though they do not sit together. His mother dabs her eyes, and Belen applauds with enough strength to mimic thunderclaps ringing her endorsement. There is no artwork in the Barbican Center’s concert hall, but there is a projector behind him with a slideshow of pictures featuring the graduating class. Rhys can feel Prado’s gaze on him as well, and for once he sets aside his petulance and basks in the glow of his own success.
...
Rhys travels for a while after graduating. He visits the United States, Italy, France, Russia, the Netherlands. He doesn’t tell Prado, but he does send his mother and Belen letters. He doesn’t see Prado. But he does meet Annika.
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... They get married in Barcelona on a day as picturesque as a Cassatt garden party. The basilica of Santa Maria del Mar is a palace of worn sacred stone and stained-glass windows so colorful they put O’Keeffe’s imagination to shame. Annika is a vision in her white dress splashed with iridescent hues. Rhys can’t look away. They face the altar together. The priest asks if anyone has any objections, and the ringing silence is music to his ears. The stained-glass colors shift when he opens his eyes, and he almost jumps when he sees that the main rose, once depicting Mary’s coronation, has been replaced by a breathtaking angel with cerulean wings. Roses of deep vermillion seem to drift down in an intangible wind, and the angel’s feathers, robes, and hair all undulate as though drowning. The sun shining through his golden halo is almost blinding, but Rhys squints, desperate to see his face, and only looks away when tears course down his cheeks.
... “You never told me you were getting married.” Prado’s voice is tentative. It doesn’t suit him. “I was busy planning, travelling, working. You know how it is.” “Do I? You wrote your mothers, but never bothered to tell me.” Rhys didn’t plan on having his honeymoon interrupted. Not when Annika was waiting for him in the car, ready to go with him to the isle of Jersey. Prado folds his arms and suddenly Rhys remembers they’re in his London flat, not at a basilica or a museum, and his eyes narrow. “Get out of my family pictures.” Prado doesn’t move. “I almost missed your wedding—can you believe that?” Rhys shakes his head. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want you there—” “Could have fooled me.” Prado laughs, and the sound is so false it stops Rhys in his tracks. But Annika is waiting, his wife is waiting, and he doesn’t want their panicky excitement to fade any more than it already has. “Okay, I should have said something—” “Do you know how that felt? We’ve been together practically your whole life! I was there the last time I saw Nuria and your father while they were still married, I was there
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when teenaged you came back from Portugal, I was there when you got into Courtauld, I was there at your graduation!” The frame Prado stands in seems to shake as he raises his voice. He looks frightened and distraught. He looks heartbroken. Rhys shakes his head and leaves.
...
“Annika, leibling, how are you?” “I’m so happy, die Mami. Jersey is beautiful . . .” “ . . . but something is troubling you.” “No, not troubling me! It’s Rhys. He’s been in a mood all morning. I think it has something to do with the break-in at Museo del Prado.” “I heard about that as well—they took several works and damaged others, didn’t they? Your husband must be devastated.” “Yes, I’m sure that’s it. I want to talk to him about it, but I doubt he will want to.” “He loves you, Anni. Talk to him.”
...
Five children, seven grandchildren, several pets, and his mother’s passing later, Annika has learned not to take Rhys to art museums, or he becomes upset and jumps at his own shadow. She listens to him when he talks to her about art in a way that reminds her of a song, or of poetry. He lovingly describes the paintings he studied and the ones he visited in storage as their sole visitor for years. She soothes him when he has night terrors, calling out to Prado, and she can’t imagine a worse thing for him to dream about: art that has either gone missing or that was so callously destroyed. Annika does listen to him until she can’t. She dies in an accident—failed brakes, according to the London police. Rhys is not well after that.
...
“Der Papi?” Rhys feels his son lay a careful hand atop the scratchy hospital blankets covering his own hand. It takes more effort than he likes to open his eyes. When he does, he falls in love
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with his youngest son all over again. Seeing his eyes and hearing his voice, the strength of devotion energizes him. “Yes, cielo?” Because all his children are heaven to him. “Have you heard the news?” “There’s always news, Ernst.” His son laughs quietly. “Not always art-related news.” He shows him a picture in the daily paper. “They found a portion of the art taken from the Prado in that heist. It came up at auction, and the museum is taking it back to check for damages and restoration.” Ernst beams. “Isn’t that the greatest news?” Rhys squeezes his hand, unable to answer. “I brought you something to celebrate!” Ernst reveals in his other hand a rectangle wrapped in blue tissue paper. Rhys thanks him with a brush of his hand against Ernst’s cheek, teases the package open . . . and bursts into tears. The monitors on his bed start to blare, and nurses flood in. “I didn’t mean to!” Ernst cries as he’s ushered away, doctors reassuring him that Rhys will be alright. Rhys doesn’t let the nurses take the gift away. Ernst tells him later, once he’s calmed down, that he finally decided to draw the man he always heard Rhys talking about—did he really talk about him that much?—and figured since he called him “Prado” that it was a fitting gift to commemorate the day. Ernst is an incredible artist. Every medium he touches happily works with him: watercolors don’t run, oil paints dry quickly, and sketches leap off the page. This sketch of Prado is no different. It is a graphite drawing, with charcoal and white colored pencil to deepen shadows and reveal highlights. The longer he looks at it, the more it looks like him, until charcoal-smudged lashes flutter, and Prado blinks at him in surprise. Rhys holds his breath, self-conscious in a way he hasn’t been in a long time about his appearance, and also acutely aware of the decades of silence, the terms on which they’d last seen each other. “Now this is a far cry from the trunk those ruffians kept me locked away in for I don’t know how long!” Prado exclaims, and then he presses close and lays a hand that Ernst didn’t sketch against the glass, gazing at him hungrily through the pane of cheap glass. “Hello, dear friend. It’s been a while.” ■
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FELICITY SHEEHY
AUGUST A hard month. Like gold, flattened to coin. Or corn, snapped from the stalk— something done once and not again. Cicadas know this. All day they leave their bodies behind singing even into evening, falling like leaves before leaves. You can do this too, walking the warm earth at dusk. Before you the peach-stunned trees. And above you, the white syllables of stars. And your neighbor’s field, unfastened with flies, already filling with darkness. 54 Modern Language Studies 56.1
FELICITY SHEEHY
SEPTEMBER Windfalls from day to day, now, sunflowers darkening overnight, milkweed unstuffing itself, all in one go—one, then another. White hours. Birds slip their own knot. Thin skies touch down, then take off again. Fog in the morning and the evening like two sides of a glass. You wake at dawn, changed, watching sun thicken the door. Apples knock on the window, bees fleck in the grass. Across the meadow, a fox lights the wick of his tail, and the mole makes a new sentence in the garden, his body turning over an ellipse. Outside, the stars build the night on their own, and walnuts drop from the trees to lie in fresh-broken halves. Things have been naming themselves. Let your neighbour light his fires. There are secrets not till now divulged. “September” draws upon John Evelyn’s advice to “gather your windfalls from day to day,” as well as his comment that his text contains “Secrets not till now divulged” in The Gardener’s Almanac (1683).
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review
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Lives Revised: Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2025. 196 pp. $40.00/hardcover, $19.95 ebook.
Gary Leising, Utica University Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick’s previous publications, Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination (LSU Press, 2019) and The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill (co-edited with Peter K. Steinberg, LSU Press, 2021) already established her as the foremost expert in Assia Wevill studies as well as an important scholar practicing literary and feminist recovery studies. One might reasonably wonder whether another full-length book on Wevill is necessary. Goodspeed-Chadwick’s Revised Lives: Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath (LSU Press, 2025) responds with a resounding yes. As with much recent Plath studies, the availability of new archival material demands continued reassessment of Wevill as a writer of journals and letters, as an advertising professional, as a translator, and—as this book shows— as an individual worthy of study in her own right. Furthermore, the book’s outstanding section on Ted Hughes offers a new way of looking at his writing about Wevill and Plath in Capriccio and Birthday Letters, employing the lens of trauma studies. As Goodspeed-Chadwick makes clear in her earlier volume on Wevill, she has been regrettably seen mostly as “the other woman” in the tragic Hughes-Plath love story. Even that has not always been the case, as the earliest Plath scholarship either omitted her or discussed her under another name (she was called “Olga” in Edward Butscher’s Sylvia
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Plath: Method and Madness [1976]). There has been, Goodspeed-Chadwick argues in her previous book, “an eclipse of [Wevill’s] personhood” (5). Her life and, we might conclude, her personhood were honored and explored in the earlier biography Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love (2006) by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev. In her previous volume GoodspeedChadwick described her project as an attempt to “shed meaning on our own times concerning gender roles and power in heterosexual relationships; femininity and its challenges, dangers, and pleasures; and our knowledge about and understanding of trauma and its manifestations and representations in life and art” (Reclaiming 2-3). In these goals she succeeded admirably, but in Revised Lives she amplifies the project. There are, I posit, two especially important additions to Wevill and Hughes scholarship: her view of Wevill and Hughes as subjects, particularly as they have been described in interviews by people who knew them; and a new understanding of Hughes’s own writing about Wevill employing the methods of trauma studies. The first section of the book is titled “Real World Encounters,” and its second chapter is descriptively titled “Assia and Hughes as Subjects in Interviews and the Lives of Other People.” On a practical level, this chapter’s beginning clarifies why a second book on Wevill came into existence: a “wealth of
materials—public, private, and archived—that have emerged since” Goodspeed-Chadwick’s previous work (24). One intriguing example is an unpublished memoir by Martin Baker, who worked with Wevill as a writer at Ogilvy and Mather. Readers can follow a footnote to find the web address for a YouTube video, “Unfinished 1968,” which features excerpts from a film Baker co-produced with Wevill. The video also includes “the only extant videos of Assia in color” (29). While this may seem trivial, one important hallmark of Goodspeed-Chadwick’s work is that she honors individual human lives. That is, Assia is not merely important because of her affair and subsequent relationship with Hughes, nor because that affair ended Hughes’s marriage to Plath. She is, in this moment, a real person captured on film at a dinner party, covering her face with a plate either playfully or to avoid being filmed because she was sensitive about her physical appearance. While Wevill may be seen in literary biographies as the other woman, a femme fatale whom we are to cast as evil (as an example of this oversimplifying of her persona, I remember a scholar once telling me that we can remember how to pronounce her name—it rhymes with devil, not evil, he said), Baker points out that “most of the female employees [at the ad agency] seemed to like her” (30). Much of this section analyzes the ways interviewees have described Wevill, focusing in particular on recordings of interviews conducted by
would-be Plath biographer Harriett Rosenstein, now available at Emory University. What makes this section unique among Plath scholars is Goodspeed-Chadwick’s discussion of the interviewees’ relationships with Wevill and, to a lesser extent, Hughes. She considers the interviews, that is, in terms of context and positionality: “how we respond to others reflects just as much as on us and our biases and values as it does on the people we are judging within the grid of identity politics,” she writes (31). Not taking what’s said in the interview as truth, but questioning why the individual may be sharing a particular anecdote or opinion becomes the biographical critic’s responsibility. For example, she makes us aware that Wevill “could not win” with a close friend of Plath’s such as Elizabeth Compton Sigmund (45). The interview with Sigmund reveals that Wevill had taken some Plath manuscripts; it does not, however, appear to share that such manuscripts were “covertly sent… to [Wevill’s] sister in Canada as insurance for Shura,” to be sold to provide for Wevill’s daughter with Hughes, should anything happen to Assia (43). Because Goodspeed-Chadwick serves her readers as a critical interlocutor of these interviews, she does more than a biographer who might use these to report facts. Instead, mindful of biases and positionality, she suggests ways that the interviewer might have contributed to a biased response. Again, to refer to the Sigmund interview:
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Declaims Rosenstein, “I couldn’t imagine if I were Assia having that baby [the one Assia aborted immediately after Plath died].” She adds in a whisper that she would have killed herself if she were carrying Hughes’s baby in the wake of Plath’s suicide. (45) Such revelations are useful, not only because they make us wonder whether the biographer was leading her interviewees to answers she wanted, but also because they are symptomatic of the gossipy nature of much speculation on the lives of GoodspeedChadwick’s subjects. Although reasons for the presence of bias in previous biographical studies are legion, comprehensive archival work such as Revised Lives serves as a useful correction. Thinking of the gossipy nature of some discussions about Wevill, Plath, and Hughes, I recall a quotation from Ted Hughes’s book, Poetry in the Making: “we like to read about other people. We want to know everything about them. In fact, we are very nosy by nature” (42). It may be ironic (or understandable) that such a statement comes from someone who exerted a great deal of effort to keep other people from reading about his private life. What is remarkable about Goodspeed-Chadwick’s stance on Hughes’s relative silence regarding both Plath and, especially,
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Wevill, is her analysis of it through a lens of trauma studies. As Goodspeed-Chadwick notes, the interviewees, as well as biographers and scholars, assign blame for Plath’s and Wevill’s suicides to Hughes. Rather than continue that tradition, GoodspeedChadwick recognizes the traumatic effects of both deaths—as well as the death of Shura and, shortly after those of Assia and Shura Wevill, Hughes’s mother. However, it is not only Hughes who receives this treatment: “trauma permeates the lives and stories of Hughes, Assia, and Plath,” she writes. She further clarifies that her work intends “to affirm that all parties suffered in the traumatic aftermaths of tragedies without minimizing responses” (102). Doing so calls for a great deal of balance on her part. She must empathize with their suffering while not making excuses for what we might consider bad behavior or problematic writing on the part of those who suffer. She recognizes Hughes’s experience of trauma, citing Jonathan Bate’s biographical description of the poet’s life being in pieces, and she explains, “To my mind, there exists no more fitting metaphor or language for trauma than that which refers to a life as fragmented and in shattered and broken pieces. Certainly Hughes could not be understood to be healed and whole” (105). She demonstrates this by analyzing a range of Hughes’s writing, including
letters, poems, drafts of poems, and previously unavailable archival documents. Her method is, to risk redundancy, thoroughly holistic. Her insights into relevant poems in Crow, Capriccio, and Birthday Letters offer readers new approaches to the material. For example, she describes how we can read the latter book’s poem “Grand Canyon” as presenting an “intrusive nature of trauma with the onomatopoeic ‘PAUM!’” (117). Her discussion of images of blackness in Crow poems provides helpful insight into Hughes’s writing as both connected to his position of privilege and as experiencing trauma. As he processes his experiences and emotions, GoodspeedChadwick tells us, “Hughes relies on power dynamics, as epitomized by race, gender, and traumatic experiences, to depict the unsafe world that mirrored the very one in which he lived” (113). Many readers may be most interested in the final section of the chapter on Hughes, which deals with unpublished writing. Goodspeed-Chadwick notes that her discussion here of both published and unpublished writing distinguishes this volume from Reclaiming Assia Wevill, which dealt with published poems. As she writes about trauma in Hughes’s world, attention to the physicality of notebooks and manuscripts reminds us of the life behind the writer: “he was a flesh-and-blood person, but his (and
“She must empathize with their suffering while not making excuses for what we might consider bad behavior or problematic writing on the part of those who suffer.”
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“That said, it does open up the possibility of new approaches to Plath’s work. Considering trauma, how might we reinterpret a poem connected to Wevill such as “The Munich Mannequins”? Or, going further back in Plath’s life, how might her father’s death be a trauma influencing her work as the deaths of Plath, Wevill, and Shura affect Hughes’s?”
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Plath’s) mythological transposition of their lives into characters in myths they both wove blurs the person with the character” (125). Thus, she reminds us of the difficulty of biographical criticism. While manuscripts from the British Library receive thoughtful consideration in this chapter, readers will be drawn to the discussion of a notebook acquired by Emory University in 2022. Only eight of the hundred pages in this notebook were written on. In 2023, Goodspeed-Chadwick was the first researcher to access these poems about Assia and Shura, private pieces of writing in which Hughes began to “work through the traumatic deaths of his partner and daughter” (133). The discussion of these few poems will fascinate readers, not only because they are new, but also because they fit well into GoodspeedChadwick’s argument that Hughes is writing in response to his own trauma. As with any good work of literary criticism, it is a strength that a reader may see relevance to the arguments in Revised Lives beyond the scope of its present discussion. For example, its discussion of Assia Wevill’s translations of Yehuda Amichai may prompt us to wonder what Goodspeed-Chadwick might make of Hughes’s translations, such as his Tales from Ovid or his work translating Aeschylus. Jonathan Bate discusses these translations well in his biography of Hughes, but one wonders what Goodspeed-Chadwick’s focused lens of trauma studies might add. Further, one might ask similar questions about the work of Sylvia Plath. Of the
three lives identified in the subtitle, hers is discussed the least. This makes sense, however, for at least two reasons. First, as Goodspeed-Chadwick notes (and as readers with even a basic awareness of trends in Plath criticism will know), Heather Clark’s recent Pulitzer Prize finalist biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath provides a comprehensive and scholarly assessment of Plath’s life and work. (She describes Clark’s work as “especially relevant for our time,” explaining how it dovetails with her own feminist recovery of Assia Wevill (8). Second, the focus of the book is on Wevill, who was an important figure in Plath’s life for less than a year. There is, then, much less in Plath’s writing than in Hughes’s that addresses Wevill’s multifaceted influence on these lives, and Goodspeed-Chadwick has already addressed Plath’s poems thoroughly in her previous book. So, for her to do so here would be repetitive. That said, it does open up the possibility of new approaches to Plath’s work. Considering trauma, how might we reinterpret a poem connected to Wevill such as “The Munich Mannequins”? Or, going further back in Plath’s life, how might her father’s death be a trauma influencing her work as the deaths of Plath, Wevill, and Shura affect Hughes’s? Ultimately, though, such criticisms are a bit unfair, as readers must recognize the limits of a single book. It should, however, be seen as a strength of this volume’s approach and importance that it inspires readers to think of further applications of its principles. ■
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contributors Jenn Blair’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in the Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Rattle, Appalachian Review, Copper Nickel, the Cimarron Review, and the Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. Her poetry book Face Cut Out for Locket is out from Brick Road Poetry Press, and her poetry book Malcontent is out from Press Americana. She’s from Yakima, WA. Adam Marcinkowski is a Canadian researcher and educator who currently teaches at Acadia University. He has previously published on the theatrical and rhetorical sublime in French Studies and the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. He has essays on the significance of curiosity in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and on the impact of the novel’s rise on Joanna Baillie’s understanding of tragic katharsis, forthcoming in The Adam Smith Review and European Romantic Review, respectively. Chloe Elisabeth Onorato is a creative writer who teaches at George Washington University and American University, where she received her MFA in Fiction, the Kermit Moyer Prize for Literary Achievement in Prose, and served as Editor-in-Chief of FOLIO Literary Journal. She was a Fiction Finalist for the New Millennium Writings Award 2025, and her work was one of the top ten stories for the Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award 2025. Her writing and her art have featured in various literary magazines. Felicity Sheehy is the author of two chapbooks: Losing the Farm (2021), which won the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize, and Almanac (forthcoming 2026), which won C&R Press’s chapbook prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Irish Times, The Yale Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate in early modern English literature at Princeton University.
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