Oscar Wilde is remembered these days for being 1) witty (“I have nothing to declare but my genius”) and 2) gay, in a far-from-ideal period of history in which to be gay (Bosie, Reading gaol and all that). I suppose all writers can be boiled down to a simple phrase (Orwell: edgy political allegory and warning to future generations; Tolkien: medievalist purveyor of elf-lore, etc). However, whilst describing Wilde in a sentence or two is all well and good, it’s good to know that his actual work continues to be consumed on stage and screen — all four of his so-called drawing-room plays have been made into films (not to mention operas and musicals) and all four have regularly been performed on stage up and down the land. And to anyone who enjoys their wit sharp and acerbic, his plays are brilliant.
Wilde wrote nine plays in all (not quite the 39 that are attributed to Shakespeare but then Wilde did die at 46, and in fact wrote nothing much after his spell in prison) and of these it is the four aforementioned drawing-room plays that are the most prominent: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The latter, sub-titled a Trivial Comedy for Serious People, was first performed on 14ᵗʰ February 1895 at the St James’s Theatre in London. It is a farcical comedy featuring two young men-about-town assuming double lives — and the name Ernest — whilst wooing the two young women of their affections.
The play parodies contemporary social mores and manners, and introduces two great supporting characters in the form of the formidable Lady Bracknell and the fussy governess Miss Prism. With the best quips, Lady Bracknell is a bitingly comedic character, played over the years in various incarnations by Edith Evans, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Gwen Taylor (and even David Suchet). Hers is the line “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness” and of course the famously haughty exclamation “A handbag?!”. Watch Judi Dench’s version in the “interrogation” clip below (though she chooses to almost whisper the handbag line instead of going for the full-blown outraged exclamation of Edith Evans et al).
The successful opening night marked the zenith of Wilde’s career but even as he was basking in the plaudits from the appreciative audience, forces were gathering that would lead to his downfall. The Marquess of Queensberry, whose son Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie) was Wilde’s lover, was scheming to throw a bunch of rotten vegetables at the playwright at the end of the performance. This act of retribution was thwarted by security but soon the feud would lead to a series of legal trials between March to May 1895 which would result in Wilde’s conviction and imprisonment for homosexual acts. Despite the play’s early success, Wilde’s disgrace sadly caused it to be closed in May after 86 performances.
I don’t get out on boats very often, admittedly, but there is a very appealing aesthetic, isn’t there, of being on a boat in a slow-flowing river in the middle of summer? Think of punting down the river Cam, with the hum of insects in the hot air, a straw boater shielding your eyes from the sun, and a hamper full of posh grub and champers (and some friend doing the actual punting). I’m thinking Brideshead Revisited, though it does occurs that that would have been the river Churwell, it being based in Oxford, and anyway, the nearest I’ve got to that in recent years is hiring a rowing boat for half an hour on the river Nidd at Knaresborough.
And then there’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K Jerome, perhaps the single most representative novel to treat the general theme of messing about in boats. Published in 1889, the comic novel describes a two-week boating holiday on the Thames, from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back again. The three men consist of the narrator “J” and his two friends George and Harris, along with a fox terrier named Montmorency (and plenty of tea, whisky, and pipe tobacco). Their voyage is punctuated by stop-offs at boarding houses and pubs and historical sites, and the three men argue and squabble throughout the trip, alternating between comic riffs and bants, anecdotes, and musings about timeworn truths.
The book actually started out with the intent to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, inspired by a real-life boating holiday Jerome had spent with his wife on a Thames skiff. However, humorous elements began to take over (Jerome had already cut his teeth in the genre of humorous writing with his 1886 essay collection, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow) and he soon abandoned the travel guide idea in favour of the comic novel. He swapped out his wife for two real-life friends, George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel (called Harris in the book), who evidently offered more by way of comic resource than poor old Mrs Jerome (One Man and his Wife in a Boat perhaps doesn’t quite cut it)!
Three Men in a Boat, Penguin 1985
The book was a roaring success, and although his subsequent writings never quite hit those heights (his 1900 sequel about a cycling tour in Germany titled Three Men on the Bummel was only moderately successful), his humour lives on to this day in Three Men in a Boat which remains widely read and is as fresh and witty as the day it was written.
It probably comes as no surprise to learn that many of the comedy set pieces concern victuals; here’s an excerpt in which the gastronomically incompetent men try to puddle together an Irish stew from the leftovers in their hamper:
George gathered wood and made a fire, and Harris and I started to peel the potatoes. I should never have thought that peeling potatoes was such an undertaking. The job turned out to be the biggest thing of its kind that I had ever been in. We began cheerfully, one might almost say skittishly, but our light-heartedness was gone by the time the first potato was finished. The more we peeled, the more peel there seemed to be left on; by the time we had got all the peel off and all the eyes out, there was no potato left—at least none worth speaking of. George came and had a look at it—it was about the size of a pea-nut. He said: “Oh, that won’t do! You’re wasting them. You must scrape them.” So we scraped them, and that was harder work than peeling. They are such an extraordinary shape, potatoes—all bumps and warts and hollows. We worked steadily for five-and-twenty minutes, and did four potatoes. Then we struck. We said we should require the rest of the evening for scraping ourselves. I never saw such a thing as potato-scraping for making a fellow in a mess. It seemed difficult to believe that the potato-scrapings in which Harris and I stood, half smothered, could have come off four potatoes. It shows you what can be done with economy and care. George said it was absurd to have only four potatoes in an Irish stew, so we washed half-a-dozen or so more, and put them in without peeling. We also put in a cabbage and about half a peck of peas. George stirred it all up, and then he said that there seemed to be a lot of room to spare, so we overhauled both the hampers, and picked out all the odds and ends and the remnants, and added them to the stew. There were half a pork pie and a bit of cold boiled bacon left, and we put them in. Then George found half a tin of potted salmon, and he emptied that into the pot. He said that was the advantage of Irish stew: you got rid of such a lot of things. I fished out a couple of eggs that had got cracked, and put those in. George said they would thicken the gravy. I forget the other ingredients, but I know nothing was wasted; and I remember that, towards the end, Montmorency, who had evinced great interest in the proceedings throughout, strolled away with an earnest and thoughtful air, reappearing, a few minutes afterwards, with a dead water-rat in his mouth, which he evidently wished to present as his contribution to the dinner; whether in a sarcastic spirit, or with a genuine desire to assist, I cannot say. We had a discussion as to whether the rat should go in or not. Harris said that he thought it would be all right, mixed up with the other things, and that every little helped; but George stood up for precedent. He said he had never heard of water-rats in Irish stew, and he would rather be on the safe side, and not try experiments.
Last week’s University Challenge asked which literary work opens with these lines: “We are at rest five miles behind the front. Yesterday we were relieved, and now our bellies are full of bully beef and beans”. Like a shot, I metaphorically spat out my cornflakes in a garbled attempt to get my answer out before the brainiacs on the quiz show – “err, err, I know this…orl-quiet-onza-western-front…”! I had recognised the line due to having only just read the book, giving me one of those serendipitously rare advantages in TV’s toughest quiz.
All Quiet on the Western Front (in the original German, Im Westen nichts Neues, literally “In the West, nothing new”) is a semi-autobiographical novel by Erich Maria Remarque, drawn from his experiences as a German veteran of World War I. The book is a first-person, present-tense portrayal of life in the German trenches in the Great War, a story of extreme physical and mental trauma, punctuated by boredom and ennui. The narrator, Paul, has come to the trenches straight from school — reminding us of the young age of these lads — and he is accompanied by several classmates, all spurred on by their teacher to enlist and none of whom will return home.
It is rightly considered to be one of the greatest war novels of all time, and it comes as no surprise to learn that it was one of the books banned and burned by Nazi Germany in the 1930s (who weren’t keen on the subversive “war is hell and really isn’t worth it” tone of the book). It has been translated to the big screen on three occasions, most recently, — and successfully — by Edward Berger’s 2022 adaptation, which won four Academy Awards.
When the novel isn’t focused on the nightmare of trench warfare, we learn of life during the “quiet” times in between action on the front line, marked in random order by boredom, black humour, camaraderie, and obsession with finding food to supplement their meagre rations. The excerpt I have chosen below describes one such illicit mission by Paul and his mate Kat to steal a goose from regimental headquarters. This theme of hard-won sustenance, which probably only those who have experienced genuine hunger can truly appreciate, is exquisitely described. It has an air of comedy caper about it, but ends with the sublime satisfaction of satiety, a rare moment of calm before the inevitable return to reality.
Kat hoists me up. I rest my foot in his hands and climb over the wall.
Kat keeps watch below.
I wait a few moments to accustom my eyes to the darkness. Then I recognise the shed. Softly I steal across, lift the peg, pull it out and open the door.
I distinguish two white patches. Two geese, that’s bad: if I grab one the other will cackle. Well, both of them–if I’m quick, it can be done.
I make a jump. I catch hold of one and the next instant the second. Like a madman I bash their heads against the wall to stun them. But I haven’t quite enough weight. The beasts cackle and strike out with their feet and wings. I fight desperately, but Lord! what a kick a goose has! They struggle and I stagger about. In the dark these white patches are terrifying. My arms have grown wings and I’m almost afraid of going up into the sky, as though I held a couple of captive balloons in my fists.
Then the row begins; one of them gets his breath and goes off like an alarm clock. Before I can do anything, something comes in from outside; I feel a blow, lie outstretched on the floor, and hear awful growls. A dog. I steal a glance to the side, he makes a snap at my throat. I lie still and tuck my chin into my collar.
It’s a bulldog. After an eternity he withdraws his head and sits down beside me. But if I make the least movement he growls. I consider. The only thing to do is to get hold of my small revolver, and that too before anyone arrives. Inch by inch I move my hand toward it.
I have the feeling that it lasts an hour. The slightest movement and then an awful growl; I lie still, then try again. When at last I have the revolver my hand starts to tremble. I press it against the ground and say over to myself: Jerk the revolver up, fire before he has a chance to grab, and then jump up.
Slowly I take a deep breath and become calmer. Then I hold my breath, whip up the revolver, it cracks, the dog leaps howling to one side, I make for the door of the shed and fall head over heels over one of the scuttering geese.
At full speed I seize it again, and with a swing toss it over the wall and clamber up. No sooner am I on top than the dog is up again as lively as ever and springs at me. Quickly I let myself drop. Ten paces away stands Kat with the goose under his arm. As soon as he sees me we run.
At last we can take a breather. The goose is dead, Kat saw to that in a moment. We intend to roast it at once so that nobody will be any wiser. I fetch a dixie and wood from the hut and we crawl into a small deserted lean-to which we use for such purposes. The single window space is heavily curtained. There is a sort of hearth, an iron plate set on some bricks. We kindle a fire.
Kat plucks and cleans the goose. We put the feathers carefully to one side. We intend to make two cushions out of them with the inscription: “Sleep soft under shell-fire.” The sound of the gunfire from the front penetrates into our refuge. The glow of the fire lights up our faces, shadows dance on the wall. Sometimes a heavy crash and the lean-to shivers. Aeroplane bombs. Once we hear a stifled cry. A hut must have been hit.
Aeroplanes drone; the tack-tack of machine guns breaks out. But no light that could be observed shows from us. We sit opposite one another, Kat and I, two soldiers in shabby coats, cooking a goose in the middle of the night. We don’t talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communion with one another than even lovers have.
We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close to one another, and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our feelings cast by a quiet fire. What does he know of me or I of him? formerly we should not have had a single thought in common–now we sit with a goose between us and feel in unison, are so intimate that we do not even speak.
It takes a long time to roast a goose, even when it is young and fat. So we take turns. One bastes it while the other lies down and sleeps. A grand smell gradually fills the hut.
Then he says: “It’s done.”
“Yes, Kat.”
I stir myself. In the middle of the room shines the brown goose. We take out our collapsible forks and our pocket-knives and each cuts off a leg. With it we have army bread dipped in gravy. We eat slowly and with gusto.
“How does it taste, Kat?”
“Good! And yours?”
“Good, Kat.”
We are brothers and press on one another the choicest pieces. Afterwards I smoke a cigarette and Kat a cigar. There is still a lot left.
Back in 2003, whilst on a cruise of the Black Sea, we dined each night with an elderly couple, Evan and Vivien Davies, who turned out to be charming and interesting company. They were clearly well-connected and rather posh, and Evan in particular had lived what sounded like a pretty adventurous life back in the day: British Commando during the war; member of Special Branch’s anti-terrorist unit, responsible for protecting Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin (1945–50); and Assistant Superintendent of Police, British Malaya (1950–52). We got on tremendously well despite an age difference of some four decades and I’ll never forget Evan, responding to being gently nudged by Vivien to calm down at one point, stating to the table: “I do apologise – I do tend to get giddy when in good company”! To cap it all, Vivien mentioned that she had recently attended the funeral of Sir Wilfred Thesiger…
Wilfred Thesiger! I knew that name…one of the greats of British exploration, perhaps the last great British explorer. Between 1945 and 1950 Thesiger criss-crossed the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula, with the help of the Bedu people with whom he acquired a lifelong bond, and with whom he endured hardships and real-and-present dangers on an almost daily basis. Carrying basic supplies and water stored in goatskins (to be refilled at waterholes perhaps hundreds of miles distant), Thesiger set out with his Bedu companions on camelback across hundreds of miles of arid, sun-bleached dunes and gravel plains. In certain areas where there were tribal tensions and they could be violently robbed of their camels, they had to be constantly on their guard and prepared to defend themselves, whilst in other areas Thesiger had to be passed off as a fellow Arab otherwise he could easily have been shot for being an infidel Christian.
Pestered by a friend to write about his experiences, he eventually wrote Arabian Sands, which was published in 1959 and is now considered a classic of travel literature. I have just got round to reading it and indeed it is a remarkable memoir. The insights into the lives of the Bedu are profound, and I was certainly taken with a couple of the characters in particular – bin Kalima and bin Ghabaisha — who became hard and fast friends with the man they called Umbarak. This paragraph sums up the sense of satisfaction that Thesiger derived from his experiences:
In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilisation; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found, too, a comradeship that was inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquillity was to be found there. I had learnt the satisfaction that comes with hardship and the pleasure which springs from abstinence: the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving for sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn.
This also informs the sense of loss that Thesiger expresses elsewhere when he bemoans the inevitable erosion of traditional Bedouin ways by the march of modernity and the large-scale development beginning to be brought to the region by the American oil companies. How he would have been astonished and dismayed by modern-day Dubai and Abu Dhabi!
You could have safely bet that at some point in this series of blogs I was always going to visit a certain trinity of British university dons who have done more for the literary fantasy genre worldwide than, well, any other trinity of university dons. Huge. Immense. The Ronaldo, Messi and Mbappé of children’s fantasy literature — I am talking of course about Lewis Carroll, C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien. If your bet had been an accumulator you would be quids in, too, because I shall certainly be visiting C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien at some point in the future, but for today let’s look at the grandaddy, that long-time maths professor at Christ Church Oxford, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson AKA Lewis Carroll (1832–1898).
Lewis Carroll, what an interesting character! First and foremost, he was a mathematician and long-time university scholar, specialising in geometry, algebra and logic; under his real name, he published eleven books on maths-related subjects. He was also an avid puzzler and is credited with the invention of the “word ladder” – you know it, that puzzle that involves changing one word into another, one letter at a time. He loved word play, amply displayed in his nonsense poems Jabberwocky (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876).
However, it is of course Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (commonly Alice in Wonderland) for which Lewis Carroll will be forever remembered. As we all know, it details the story of a girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole (and boy, don’t we hear that phrase a lot these days: “going down a rabbit hole”?) into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. Carroll first outlined his story whilst out on rowing trips on the Thames near Oxford which he often undertook with members of the Liddell family (Henry Liddell being the Dean at Christ Church).
When he told the story to Henry’s daughter Alice Liddell, she begged him to write it down, which he duly did and then passed the manuscript to another friend and mentor, the novelist George MacDonald. The enthusiasm of the MacDonald children for the story encouraged Carroll to seek publication, and so he approached Macmillan Publishers, who loved it. After the possible alternative titles were rejected – Alice Among the Fairies and Alice’s Golden Hour – the work was finally published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 (followed up of course by Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There in 1871). The rest, as they say, is history.
The artist John Tenniel provided a brilliant set of wood-engraved illustrations for the book, of which we can see a gallery of some of the universally familiar characters here:
Ah, the bookshelf in our classroom during my later years at primary school, I remember it well. Replete with titles and illustrated covers promising tales for children of adventure and derring-do in exotic lands: Robinson Crusoe, King Solomon’s Mines, Treasure Island. It had all the girls’ classics, too: Black Beauty, Little Women, What Katy Did, Heidi, and Anne of Green Gables. Of course, I never read any of the latter books…until recently, that is, when I finally read L M Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, having been inspired to do so by watching Netflix’s excellent Canadian TV adaptation, Anne with an E (2017).
The novel was published in 1908 by Canadian author L M Montgomery (Lucy Maud Montgomery 1874–1942). Set in the late 19ᵗʰ century, it recounts the adventures of 11-year-old orphan girl Anne Shirley sent by mistake to two middle-aged siblings, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who run their farm in the close-knit community of Avonlea in Prince Edward Island, Canada. They had planned to adopt a boy who could help them with the farm work and so when Anne arrives, their first instinct is to send her straight back. However, her exuberant pleading persuades them to keep her for a trial period and soon her personality wins them over.
Amybeth McNulty as Anne Shirley in “Anne with an E”
Anne is talkative to the extreme, hugely imaginative, dramatic, an extractor of joy from life wherever it may exist, and a touchstone of youthful idealism, if a little prone to defensiveness over her red hair, freckles and pale complexion. She is also insistent that her name should always be spelt with an “e” at the end, hence the title of the TV adaptation. In this she was played impeccably by Amybeth McNulty, the more so now that I have read the book and see how accurately she nailed the character. The whole series turned out to be a largely faithful rendering of the book and certainly it was a heart-warming depiction of a simple turn-of-the-century lifestyle in rural Canada, well wroth the watch.
Since its publication, Anne of Green Gables has sold more than 50 million copies — that’s actually not far behind J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books albeit having had a century longer to sell copies! And it has that accolade for good reason, so who knows, I may even have to delve into Black Beauty or Heidi next?
Anne of Green Gables, 1st edition book coverL M Montgomery
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910) was of course the great American writer and humourist better known by the pseudonym Mark Twain, and lauded as the father of American literature. His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) as well as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). The latter novel I had on my bookshelf as a boy although I must admit I don’t remember reading it; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, on the other hand, was a staple of my generation that everyone read.
Clemens used a litany of pen names: before “Mark Twain” he had written as “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass”, “Sieur Louis de Conte”, “John Snook” and even just “Josh”. There are a number of competing theories about the pseudonym he conclusively decided to adopt, my favourite being the riverboat call from his days working on steamboats: “by the mark, twain” (referring to sounding a depth of two fathoms, which was just safe enough for a steamboat travelling down the Mississippi). However, another theory talks about his keeping a regular tab open at his local saloon and calling the bartender to “mark twain” on the blackboard, and I get the impression that he enjoyed the speculation and never conclusively confirmed one or the other.
He was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which later provided the setting for both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In his early years he worked as a printer and typesetter, and then, as mentioned, a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, before heading west to join his brother Orion in Nevada to speculate unsuccessfully in various mining enterprises. Finally, he turned to journalism and writing which soon won him success and praise from his critics and peers, and led him to his true vocation.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written throughout in vernacular English and told in the first person by Huckleberry “Huck” Finn. The book comes across as an authentic portrayal of boyhood and it is awash with colourful descriptions of people and places along the Mississippi River. Set in a Southern antebellum society marked by the prevalent practice of slavery and its associated societal norms, it often makes for uncomfortable reading, but at the same time it is a scathing satire against the entrenched attitudes of those days. The novel explores themes of race and identity long before that was a phrase, but also what it means to be free and civilised in the changing landscape of America.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1st editionMark Twain
People are apt, these days, to consider modern life rubbish and that we’re living in a quasi-dystopian society run by fools and cowards and spiralling towards disaster. Fair enough; it would be pollyannish of me to disabuse them of that notion, given the realities of the world, but let me quickly provide a crumb of comfort by pointing out that at least we’re still able to enjoy life’s little pleasures like this blog. And we can at least dream of how it might have been, how we might have been led by philosopher-kings in a just and ideal society enjoying a golden age. A utopia, if you will…
I don’t know if there ever has been a real-life utopia, but it’s perhaps unlikely, given that there have been so many imaginings of one, dating back to 370BC when Plato described the attributes of a perfect state in The Republic (and from where we get the term and idea of the “philosopher-king”). I suppose bright sparks have been lecturing their comrades on how things should be done for as long as humans have lived together, but the written form — utopian literature — gets properly kicked off with Sir Thomas More’s word-coining book Utopia published in 1516.
Thomas More (1478–1535) was the noted Renaissance humanist who was at various times lawyer, judge, statesman, philosopher, author, and Lord High Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. Quite the achiever, and he is even a saint now, since being canonised in 1935 as a martyr (having been executed as a result of failing to acknowledge Henry as supreme head of the Church of England).
“Utopia” is derived from the Greek prefix ou-, meaning “not”, and topos, “place” – so, “no place” or “nowhere”. Interestingly, More had initially toyed with naming his fictional state by the Latin equivalent of “no place” — Nusquama — so we might today have been talking about Orwell’s 1984, for example, as a dysnusquamian novel!
In any event, More’s vision inspired many others to describe their own versions of an ideal utopian society, including Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) (see what he did there?), H G Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905), and Aldous Huxley’s utopian counterpart to his decidedly dystopian Brave New World, namely Island (1962). Well, we can keep imagining…
Well, Halloween is coming round again so I thought it timely to write about a compilation of creepy tales that I have recently finished reading by the 19th century American short-story writer Washington Irving (1783–1859). If you are unfamiliar with the author, you may be more familiar with the titles of two of his more famous stories: Rip Van Winkle (1819) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820). He was one of the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and he was admired by the likes of Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley and Walter Scott.
Irving had more strings to his bow than just short story writing: he was a diplomat, serving as American ambassador to Spain in the 1840s, and a historian, responsible for several histories of 15th-century Spain. This no doubt explains why several of Irving’s stories are set in and around Granada and involve ghostly encounters in places like the Alhambra Palace with long-gone Moors from before the Reconquista. Many other stories, on the other hand, are set deep inside another area close to Irving’s heart, rural New York State including the Catskill Mountains (where Rip Van Winkle is set) and the bucolic environs of modern-day Tarrytown on the Hudson river (where The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is set and where, in fact, Irving would end his days).
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow story revolves around local schoolmaster Ichabod Crane and his competition with town alpha-male “Brom Bones” for the hand of beautiful heiress Katrina van Tassel. The supernatural element to the story, however, is provided by local legend which has it that a Hessian soldier who was decapitated by a cannonball in battle still roams the area as a Headless Horseman. Irving was by no means the first to invoke the motif of the headless horseman – they have appeared in numerous stories from Gaelic, Scandinavian and German folklore, for example – but Irving’s is the one that has resonated down the ages, right down to Tim Burton’s (somewhat liberty-taking) movie of 1999, Sleepy Hollow.
Ichabod’s encounter with the headless horseman happens after his rejection by Katrina at the van Tassel household and he is returning home, crestfallen, on a borrowed horse, Gunpowder. Passing though a menacing swamp, he sees a cloaked rider and is horrified to see that the rider’s head was not on his shoulders but in his saddle. A frenzied race ensues as Ichabod rides for his life, desperately goading Gunpowder down the Hollow; as they cross a bridge, Ichabod turns back in terror to see the headless rider rear his horse and hurl his severed head directly at him: the missile strikes Ichabod and sends him tumbling headlong into the dust. The following morning, Gunpowder is found chomping at the grass, with the only sign of Ichabod, who is never seen again, being his discarded hat alongside a mysterious shattered pumpkin…
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s great tragic play, Faust (1808), tells the notorious tale of Dr Faust and his deal with the Devil, a theme that we see recurring in Western art and literature time and time again. Dr Faust is the learned German scholar who is disillusioned by his inability to discover life’s true meaning despite his mastery of the sciences and the traditional and conventional modes of thought. In desperation, he considers resorting to the arts of magic to resolve his frustration, and this attracts the attention of the demon Mephistopheles who will tempt Faust into signing a contract in blood: a lifetime of the Devil’s servitude in exchange for Faust’s immortal soul.
There’s plenty to unpack here and several interesting avenues we can go down. First of all, what of this eponymous character, Dr Faust? Well, he was based upon a real person, one Johann Georg Faust (c.1480 – c.1540), who was an obscure German itinerant alchemist, astrologer, and magician. In the decades following his death, he became the subject of folk legend, transmitted in so-called chapbooks, beginning in the 1580s. Chapbooks, rather than being books for chaps (at least, not exclusively), were actually short, low-budget street literature that were very popular with the public throughout Europe (this was before Waterstones).
The legend of Faust was seized upon long before Goethe: Christopher Marlowe adapted the persona into his play The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus in 1604, and the Faustbuch brand of chapbook survived throughout the early modern period. Thus, when Goethe wrote Faust, he was dramatising a long-established tradition.
How about the character of Mephistopheles? Here too, we find Mephistopheles appearing for the first time in the early Faustbuchs; he is not the Devil himself but a demon working on behalf of the Devil, and in fact, since he was invented by the anonymous author(s) of the Faustbuch, he is solely a literary character and doesn’t form part of the traditional hierarchy of demonology. In Goethe’s hands he is not only cold-hearted and cynical, as you’d expect, but also supremely witty, and has all the best lines (hence we are reminded of the modern-day observation that “the Devil has the best tunes”).
And the deal itself? The devil and his fiendish temptations have been a literary staple ever since Eve bit the proverbial apple, and mankind has always been grimly fascinated by the trope of trading one’s soul for wealth or superhuman powers, from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. In the case of Goethe’s Faust, the whole is a symbolic and panoramic commentary on the human condition, written in verse throughout, and a classic of European literature. To the Devil his due…
Eugène Delacroix, Faust and MephistophelesGoethe
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