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At the Fault Line

i
ii
 At the Fault Line
Writing White in South African
Literary Journalism

Claire Scott

iii
Published in 2018 by University of KwaZulu-Natal Press
Private Bag X01
Scottsville, 3209
Pietermaritzburg
South Africa
Email: books@ukzn.ac.za
Website: www.ukznpress.co.za

© 2018 Claire Scott

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

ISBN: 978 1 86914 394 7

e-ISBN: 978 1 86914 395 4

Managing editor: Sally Hines

Editor: Lisa Compton
Typesetter: Patricia Comrie
Indexer: Ethné Clarke
Cover design: Marise Bauer, M Design
Cover artwork: Thought by Kathleen Costello

Chapter 4 of the present work appeared in 2011 as ‘  “Tales of Ordinary Murder”:

Intersections of “Whiteness”, Violence and Belonging in Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s
Heart and Kevin Bloom’s Ways of Staying  ’, English Academy Review 28(2): 40–51.

Printed and bound in South Africa by Creda Communications

iv
 Contents

Acknowledgements vii

1 Introduction 1
2 Ways of Telling 14
3 Writing Whiteness 40
4 Intersections of Whiteness, Violence and Belonging 59
5 Landscapes of Fear and Mistrust 83
6 Beneficiaries and Complicities 113
7 Whiteness and the ‘In-between’ 140
8 Moving towards Conclusion(s) 171

Select Bibliography 181

Index 190

v
vi
 Acknowledgements

Writing often appears to be a solitary task, but many people have

contributed to my journey with this book in countless ways.
I owe special thanks to the following individuals for collegial
support, generous reviews and feedback, stimulating coffee- and wine-
fuelled discussions, surprising light-bulb moments and valuable insights,
and friendship: Jill Arnott, Matthew Beetar, Louise Buchler, Michael
Chapman, Kai Easton, Oscar Hemer, Fiona Jackson, Antjie Krog, Julia
Martin, Subeshini Moodley, Sally-Ann Murray, Jean Rossmann, Amy
Scott, Cheryl Stobie, Anton van der Hoven and Desiray Viney.
I am particularly indebted to Duncan Brown, not only for this book’s
title, but for his ongoing guidance, encouragement and mentorship.
Sally Hines and Lisa Compton have been the most amazing editorial
team and I am very grateful for their input and guidance.
A heartfelt thank you to my parents, Neil and Yvonne: for all you
have done, and all that you are, and all that you do for me and my family.
Last, but never least, my love and gratitude goes to Rory, always:
(anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is
your doing, my darling).
This book is dedicated to our children, Keira Kate, Connor Flyn,
Ethan Riley and Freya Grace: the world’s a better place since you came
along.

vii
viii
 Introduction  1

Introduction

Whites need to find new narratives to explain who they are,

what they are doing in Africa, and what their relationship is
to the indigenous people and to the continent.
— Melissa Steyn, ‘ “White Talk” ’

. . . [  I  ]f South African whiteness is a beneficiary of the

protectiveness assured by international whiteness, it has
an opportunity to write a new chapter in world history . . .
Putting itself at risk, it will have to declare that it is home
now, sharing in the vulnerability of other compatriot bodies.
— Njabulo Ndebele, Fine Lines from the Box

How do I ‘flee’ towards black . . . if I have never cared to

know what black means? So my first question is this: is
it possible for a white person like myself, born in Africa,
raised in a culture with strong Western roots, drenched in a
political dispensation that said black people were different
and therefore inferior, whether it is possible for such a
person as myself to move towards a ‘blackness’ as black
South Africans themselves understand it?
— Antjie Krog, Begging to be Black

At the 2010 Franschhoek Literary Festival, authors and journalists Antjie

Krog and Rian Malan engaged in an intense debate that foregrounded
key issues in current discourses about whiteness. Malan argued that
white South Africans were excluded from the national conversation

1
2  At the Fault Line

due to their white skin, while Krog countered that South African
whiteness continued to enjoy unwarranted privilege and protection.
Eusebius McKaiser (2010: 13) later commented in the Sunday Times
on this highly publicised debate, arguing that the positions presented
by both Krog and Malan with regard to whiteness in South Africa are
flawed, but that ‘white consciousness can emerge from all of this in
healthy shape by locating itself between the Krog–Malan dichotomy’.
The subtext to these discussions is that white identity in South Africa
is being subjected to intense scrutiny and contestation, and that white
psyches continue to be challenged and disrupted.
Narratives, or stories, travel through various generic forms: history,
the novel or short story, and journalism are three ‘authorised’ forms
most often associated with storytelling. It is the point at which these
forms intersect, interpenetrate and compete that, I would argue, offers
the most complex and fertile opportunities through which to explore
stories and the way in which they produce narratives of identity and
belonging. These moments of indeterminacy destabilise accepted
notions of identity and belonging, and thereby allow for new forms to
emerge. Thus, in order to link up with broader discussions that attempt
to envision new ways of negotiating identity, nationalism and race, this
book investigates the social construction of whiteness in South African
non-fiction narrative texts, specifically literary journalism narratives.
I identify literary journalism as a particularly useful subgenre within
the broader category of creative non-fiction, and I favour the term
over others, such as narrative journalism, because it foregrounds the
productive fault line between the two ostensibly opposing genres of
literature and journalism. I have decided to limit this project to literary
narratives written by contemporary South African journalists for two
reasons: firstly, a number of studies have already examined whiteness
and issues of white South African identity within post-apartheid novels
and fictional works; and secondly, readers bring a very specific set of
expectations regarding ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ to the work of writers
they consider to be journalists, which gives these texts a particular
power and charge. (I will expand on this idea when I discuss the overlap
between literature and journalism in Chapter 2.) The central questions
that concern this work are how whiteness is constructed and negotiated
 Introduction  3

within the framework of literary-journalistic narratives, and what textual

strategies the writers employ to reimagine possibilities for narratives of
identity and belonging for white South Africans. Further, this book seeks
to suggest what this engagement with whiteness has to offer broader
understandings of South African identity and the construction of a
productive national narrative of belonging, though one which does not
admit of easy closure.
The disintegration of apartheid resulted in dramatic shifts in the
social and political landscape in South Africa. While it could be expected
that after two decades a new equilibrium would have been established,
social identities within South Africa remain highly contested and
fluid, and issues of race and racism remain stubbornly insistent in the
national discourse.1 With this country’s history of racial segregation,
its overemphasis of racial difference, and its current attempts to build
a non-racial (some might claim multiracial) national discourse, it is
unsurprising that engagements with racial identity, particularly one as
maligned as whiteness, are met with hesitancy and scepticism. However,
in order to find their place within the national narrative, white South
Africans need to rethink their stories, to redefine their positions in
society, and to reimagine their own narratives of identity and belonging.
Importantly, this is not to recentre a now displaced white privilege, but
rather to begin to see South African whiteness alongside, dependent
upon and part of the multitude of South African narratives that intersect
and overlap in attempts to create a new national story.

Telling stories
Antjie Krog (2007: 35) argues that ‘while the readership of the novel
was fast declining, the readership for non-fiction and real-life stories
was rapidly growing . . . [as] a global postmodern world could no longer
be expressed though the former genres and . . . writers [are] slowly
working towards a completely new form – as yet without name’. In fact,
I would argue that literary journalism is perhaps one term that could
be used to describe the form to which Krog refers. Literary journalism
is a particular genre that several South African journalists appear to
be engaging with as they attempt to limn a new set of narratives for
white South Africans. It is significant that journalists have chosen a
4  At the Fault Line

literary format for this engagement, in which they use the structure,
conventions, form and style of the novel while clearly foregrounding
their journalistic activities and priorities. The result is a form that might
in places read like a novel but that enjoys what Tom Wolfe ([1973]
1990: 49) described as ‘an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost
forgets what a power it has: the simple fact that the reader knows all
this actually happened  ’.
There is a common perception among many readers, and even
some journalists, that journalists write ‘the truth’ and that their stories
are presented objectively and without bias, or at least as something
fairly close to this ideal. However, as South African journalist Max du
Preez says, ‘One of the reasons I haven’t gone into writing fiction is
because . . . I think there’s a higher obligation on the writer in terms
of truth. My truth [as a journalist] can be tested . . . When you write
fiction you have to be truthful and authentic and it’s hard to test you’
(quoted in Smith 2008). Nevertheless, traditionally journalists are seen
as camping with the historians rather than the novelists and writers of
fiction, in terms of the perceived veracity of their narratives. Yet there
exists a double bind for historians and all writers of ‘fact’: Karl Simms
(2003: 88) notes that while ‘history . . . aims at the truth and deals with
historical facts . . . the very act of interpreting those facts in the name of
truth leaves open the way for alternative explanations, and thus destroys
objectivity’. Simms goes on to argue that ‘the reading of history and
the reading of fiction both change social reality’, thereby implying that
the actual ‘truth’ itself is not of paramount importance; rather, through
the struggles of meaning and the acts of interpretation and reading,
individuals and societies begin to understand themselves (Simms 2003:
96). This idea is reinforced by Cornel du Toit (cited in Norval 1999:
511), who, in examining both personal and national history, ‘suggests
that dealing with the past is a historical act of interpretation’ and ‘it is
through this activity, this memory-work, that we reshape and redefine
ourselves, our communities and our histories’.
This drive to use narratives – storytelling – to make sense of a
rapidly changing social and political milieu is voiced repeatedly. In
The Waiting Country: A South African Witness, Mike Nicol (1995: 12)
comments:
 Introduction  5

These days when history is so much with us; when sometimes I

am truly afraid and when sometimes I know what is happening
is unique . . . I suppose that in the end all we really have are the
stories . . . These stories have to be told and retold because in
the telling and the remembering and the not forgetting we may
be able to create a narrative of our lives.

Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (1998: 3) indicate that ‘the need to
tell the underside of apartheid history, and to outline its implications
. . . is matched by a desire . . . to find a form of narration capable of
acknowledging difference without fearing it and without fetishizing
it’. I suggest that the literary journalism of Rian Malan, Kevin Bloom,
Jonny Steinberg and Antjie Krog, with which this book engages,
represents attempts to find this ‘form of narration’ that will open new
rhetorical spaces in which South Africans can learn to converse. Both
Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart (1991) and Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998)
have provided rich ground for critical engagement, and a number of
papers either present the two texts in opposition to one another or
else attempt to establish a dialogue between them.2 However, these
articles have centred on the concept of confession, whereas in this
book I attempt to expand this discussion to explore the depiction and
construction of whiteness. I argue that, due in part to the authors’
backgrounds in journalism, these texts offer a useful point of departure
for an examination of whiteness in the post-apartheid South African
context. I also turn my attention to Krog’s more recent text Begging to be
Black (2009), in which she engages in a complex negotiation of identity
as deeply relational. I argue that the challenging textual shifts Krog
performs between geographic locations, time periods, content and styles
work to present new possibilities for a white South African identity that
is not immobilised and isolated by the past. I examine Bloom’s text Ways
of Staying (2009a), which emerged in response to ‘the bizarreness of my
own country . . . the strangeness of life in post-apartheid (postcolonial)
South Africa’, and is a text that self-consciously engages with the theme,
‘for lack of a less hackneyed, over-used phrase, [of] “post-apartheid
white South African identity”  ’(Bloom 2009b: 72). Furthermore, Bloom’s
text responds to both Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart and Krog’s Country of
6  At the Fault Line

My Skull in attempting to negotiate the issues of identity, racism, fear

and belonging facing white South Africans in today’s complex national
milieu (Bloom 2009b: 72). And I explore Steinberg’s first book-length
literary journalism narrative, Midlands (2002), for the ways in which he
transforms his investigative journalism into a literary narrative account
of whiteness in rural South Africa. These writers all seem to grapple with
the recurring themes of ‘history’, ‘narrative’ and ‘identity’, and through
exploring the narratives of their personal and national history, they
attempt to make sense of their current situation. Because these writers
operate from within the discourse of journalism, ‘a central cultural field
which writers exploit for a variety of reasons and where, crucially, they
self-consciously construct their public identities’ (John Hartley cited in
Keeble 2007: 3), the narratives they produce are particularly useful for
any exploration of identity, and in this case white identity.3 For these
narratives open a space in which both the writers and their readers are
able to ‘[select], [edit], and [borrow] from the cultural resources available
to them to reinterpret old selves in the light of new knowledge and
possibilities’, and to ‘invent and recombine fantasy and fact in both
new and predictable ways’ (Steyn 2001: xxi–xxii).
In order to explore the ways in which these writers negotiate form,
content and genre in the construction of their literary journalism, I
draw on post-structuralist assertions that ‘language is the place where
actual and possible forms of social organisation and their likely social
and political consequences are defined and contested . . . it is also the
place where our sense of ourselves, our subjectivity, is constructed’,
and that ‘history [narrative] writing is a site of struggle over meaning
which has important implications for how we understand the present
and the possibilities for change open to us’ (Weedon 1997: 21, 171). I
use a hermeneutic approach because, as Simms (2003: 50) points out
in his discussion of Paul Ricoeur’s conceptualisation of hermeneutics,
‘hermeneutics finds in the hidden intentions of its texts instructions
on how to behave in the world, ethically and politically’. Furthermore,
Simms (2003: 34–5) suggests that the ‘goal of hermeneutics is
understanding. Hermeneutics is based on the premise that texts say
something not only about themselves, but also about the world at
large. By reading texts in a hermeneutic way, we come to a greater
 Introduction  7

understanding of the world.’ Thus, by exploring South African literary

journalism, this project attempts not only to understand the production
of whiteness within those specific texts, but also to gain a broader
understanding of the production of whiteness within South African
society post-1990. The hermeneutic approach is therefore appropriate
here, as ‘we do not impose our understanding on the text, but rather
let the text increase our understanding of life, which we do once we
have put the book down’ (Simms 2003: 41–2).

The postcolonial space

In looking specifically at the narratives of identity of contemporary
white South Africans, and in placing that examination within its
historical context, Annie Coombes notes that it is important

to acknowledge that ideas of ‘self ’ and ‘nation’ were forged

not only in response to the heterogeneous nature of the
aspirations of the migrant and largely European communities
which first colonised and settled in what were often perceived as
outposts of empire, but that they were also derived in response
to the challenges presented by the reality of encountering
indigenous peoples with highly differential political, cultural
and social structures . . . In other words, the colonizers’ dealings
with indigenous people – through resistance, containment,
appropriation, assimilation, miscegenation or attempted
destruction – is the historical factor which has ultimately
shaped the cultural and political character of the new nations,
mediating in highly significant ways their shared roots/routes
(2006: 1, 3).

Postcolonial theory therefore offers a useful contextual framework for

this project as it encourages an active engagement with what Dennis
Walder (1999: 2) terms ‘a double awareness: of the colonial inheritance as
it continues to operate within a specific culture, community or country;
and of the changing relations between these cultures, communities and
countries in the modern world’.4 Moreover, according to Walder (1999:
60), ‘post-colonial theory is needed because it has a subversive posture
8  At the Fault Line

towards the canon, in celebrating the neglected or marginalized, bringing

with it a particular politics, history and geography’.5 In discussing a
postcolonial approach to research, Sara Ahmed (2000: 11) suggests:

Post-colonialism is about re-thinking how colonialism operated

in different times in ways that permeate all aspects of social
life, in the colonized and colonizing nations. It is hence about
the complexity of the relationship between the past and
present, between the histories of European colonization and
contemporary forms of globalization . . . To this extent post-
coloniality allows us to investigate how colonial encounters are
both determining, and yet not fully determining, of social and
material existence.

And in response to this, Yasmin Gunaratnam (2003: 20) states:

Research that thinks through the postcolonial, is research that

is involved in a ‘race riot’ at the epistemic level, overturning
the understanding of ‘race’ and ethnicity as neutral, unitary and
ahistorical categories, and demonstrating the social construction
of the categories and their connections to other categories of
difference.

Most importantly, as Melissa Steyn (2001: xxviii) comments: ‘If colonial

narratives provided the social identity of whiteness, postcolonial
narratives must help to redefine and complicate identities for those
interpellated by discourses of whiteness, by bringing them into dialogue
with “other” identities.’ The texts that this project examines exhibit an
acute awareness of the necessity of bringing whiteness into conversation
with ‘other’ identities, and it is my intention to explore both the ways
in which that is attempted and the degree to which the texts succeed
in their respective efforts.

Chapter outline
In the past decade, South African literature has witnessed an explosion
of creative non-fiction addressing the issue of white identity and
 Introduction  9

belonging. Interestingly, many of these ‘literary’ texts have been

published by journalists and can be described as literary journalism. Rian
Malan worked as a journalist on the crime beat in Johannesburg, South
Africa, during the 1970s, before going into exile in the United States.
He published My Traitor’s Heart, a dark personal narrative of identity,
in the early 1990s. Antjie Krog, a renowned Afrikaans poet, worked as
a radio journalist covering the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission from 1996 to 1998. She also published several pieces in
the weekly newspaper the Mail & Guardian. Krog received international
acclaim for her first English literary narrative Country of My Skull (1998).
Kevin Bloom wrote for the magazine Maverick before its closure in
2009, and now contributes to the online news site Daily Maverick. His
book Ways of Staying (2009a) was written as part of a master’s degree
programme in creative writing at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Finally, Jonny Steinberg reported on constitutional law and policing for
Business Day before turning his attention to the rising number of farm
murders in South Africa and writing the prize-winning creative non-
fiction narrative Midlands (2002). A key question that Chapter 2 seeks to
address is what literary genres offer these journalists in their engagement
with issues of whiteness and white identity that conventional forms of
journalism do not. I will also interrogate how the journalistic influences
both the construction of their literary narratives and their reception,
as well as how literature has shaped their journalistic endeavours. It is
significant that these writers are challenging the conventions of genre,
both literary and journalistic, during a period of social and political
flux, and I suggest that in attempting to limn a new narrative form,
they are in fact outlining new possibilities for white identities and ways
of belonging.
This book also attempts to contribute to the growing field of
critical whiteness studies by investigating not only the deployment of
whiteness in selected examples of literary journalism, but also the way
in which South African journalists attempt to engage with new ways
of narrating in order to redefine white South African identity and
belonging. In Chapter 3, I offer a brief survey of the field of critical
whiteness studies and comment on its relevance and application to the
South African literary context.
10  At the Fault Line

As part of the broader project that examines the construction and

performance of ‘whiteness’ in literary journalism narratives by South
African journalists, Chapter 4 explores the deployment of ‘tales of
ordinary murder’ as a strategy to envision and contest ways of staying
and ways of living in ‘this strange place’. Both Malan’s My Traitor’s
Heart (1991) and Bloom’s Ways of Staying (2009a) present catalogues of
murders as the authors engage with the broader themes of white South
African identity and belonging. This chapter looks at the ways in which
white identity is both constructed and performed in these moments of
violence and, using Homi Bhabha’s notion of the ‘unhomely’ (1992),
suggests what these representations of whiteness might offer to our
understanding of white South African narratives of identity. Mary West
suggests that the concept of ‘Be-longing’ (2009: 13), with its implied
nostalgia and sense of lack, characterises a white South African literary
engagement that is self-consciously obsessed with the perceived threats
to white South Africans and the apparently precarious position they
occupy within the ‘dark heart’ of Africa. This chapter concludes by
exploring whether Malan and Bloom are able to negotiate productive
‘ways of staying’ for white South Africans or whether their engagement
with ‘tales of ordinary murder’ simply reinforces the notion of the
‘un-belonging’ of whiteness in Africa.
In the preface to Midlands, Steinberg’s investigative non-fiction
narrative that explores farm murders in South Africa, the author states
that his ‘intention was to record the stories of four or five murders
across the country, to use breadth and variety to capture the texture
of the epidemic’ (Steinberg 2002: viii). However, he finds himself
compelled to focus on the story of just one particular murder, that of
Peter Mitchell, ‘a 28-year-old white man . . . shot dead on his father’s
farm’ in the southern midlands of KwaZulu-Natal. Steinberg (2002:
viii–ix) suggests:

Mitchell was killed, not just figuratively, but quite literally, on

the southern midlands racial frontier . . . Those who murdered
Mitchell did so in order to push the boundary back . . . For
his part, the dead man’s father knew the score, and resolved
to defend his land and fight to the finish . . . This was a silent
 Introduction  11

frontier battle, the combatants groping hungrily for the

whispers and lies that drifted in from the other side.

This extract is indicative of several key themes that Steinberg returns

to throughout Midlands – namely, ‘the border’, ‘lies and mistrust’
and ‘communication and miscommunication’. Chapter 5 seeks to
examine the construction and performance of whiteness at these key
moments, and to critique Steinberg’s use of the tropes of ‘mistrust’
and ‘miscommunication’ as defining features of a post-apartheid, rural
whiteness. I suggest that as a means to understanding the context for
Steinberg’s Midlands and to developing a more nuanced engagement
with the theme of ‘the border’, Alistair Fraser’s (2007) reformulation
of Derek Gregory’s (2004) notion of the ‘colonial present’ is especially
useful. I also refer to Grant Farred’s (1997) engagement with the term
‘settler’ as well as social psychology’s conception of ‘perceived racial
threat’ and ‘threat projection’ (Stevens 1998; Riggs and Augoustinos
2004).
Krog’s literary narrative Begging to be Black (2009) is marketed as the
third part of a retrospective trilogy comprising Country of My Skull (1998)
and A Change of Tongue (2003). I suggest that this calls for a rereading of
the first published text. With the increasing engagement with ‘whiteness
studies’ in South African literary criticism, and considering West’s
examination of A Change of Tongue and expressions of white identity
in her book White Women Writing White (2009), it is useful to explore
Country of My Skull from this perspective. In Chapter 6 I suggest that
Krog’s focus on and engagement with the feminine voice in Country of
My Skull is significant in that the feminine appears to offer a potentially
redemptive space through which a renegotiation of white identity
and belonging can be enacted. This is not, however, a straightforward
position, as Krog draws on numerous women’s narratives, some of
which foreclose the possibility of a white identity that is integrated into
a multicultural or non-racial South African society. I also look at the
concept of complicity in relation to Country of My Skull and consider
Krog’s engagement with the position of the white beneficiary.
Chapter 7 attempts to trace the evolution of Krog’s preoccupation
with the issues of whiteness, identity and belonging as they culminate
12  At the Fault Line

in Begging to be Black. I have deliberately omitted a discussion on Krog’s

A Change of Tongue, not because the text does not offer rich material
for exploration, but because much has already been said elsewhere
regarding the production of whiteness within this particular narrative.
My own master’s thesis (Scott 2006) examines the issues of belonging
and identity in A Change of Tongue, while more recently, as I have
already mentioned, West’s book White Women Writing White presents a
detailed discussion of Krog’s engagement with whiteness in her second
literary narrative. As such, it is germane to my purposes to gesture
towards the initial concerns Krog raised in Country of My Skull and then
focus on the potential conclusions she reaches in Begging to be Black.
This argument also constitutes a response to Stewart Motha’s article
‘  “Begging to be Black”: Liminality and Critique in Post-apartheid South
Africa’ (2010) and his concept of ‘postcolonial becoming’, as well as
offering an interrogation of the notions of the ‘interconnectedness’ and
‘complicity-as-folded-together-ness’6 as contrapositives to the accepted
tropes of whiteness in a post-apartheid/postcolonial context.
Finally, Chapter 8 suggests some possible conclusions that can be
drawn from this discussion.

Notes
1. See, for example, the Mail & Guardian series titled ‘The Whiteness Debate’,
which ran between July and October 2011: https://mg.co.za/specialreport/
on-whiteness (accessed 4 January 2012).
2. See, for example, Van Zanten Gallagher (2002) and Osinubi (2008).
3. For a detailed discussion of the public identity of author, poet and journalist
Antjie Krog, see Anthea Garman’s doctoral thesis, ‘Antjie Krog, Self and Society:
The Making and Mediation of a Public Intellectual in South Africa’ (2009).
4. The term ‘postcolonial’ is used in various ways, and my approach is to use it
as both a historical term and a hermeneutic lens, as this allows me to develop
a more nuanced discussion.
5. One challenge particular to looking at South African literature from a
postcolonial perspective is the question, when does South Africa become
postcolonial? It could be argued that the formation of the Union of South
Africa in 1910 marked the end of British rule, while from an Afrikaner
nationalist perspective the year 1961, when South Africa became a republic,
could be viewed as the end of colonialism, and then again, more recently, the
 Introduction  13

first democratic elections of 1994 can mark the demise of colonial rule. As
Walder (1999: 2) suggests, this last view implies that only those texts produced
after 1994 can then be termed postcolonial, and this can be limiting in terms
of literary analysis and engagement from a postcolonial perspective.
6. See Sanders (2002).
14  At the Fault Line

Ways of Telling

Because the novel differs from other accounts . . . of reality

by not being verifiable, it must carry conviction in its mode
of expression. The novel’s truth lies, hence, in the form.
But the traditional novel appears to have become fixed in a
form that is simply inadequate in a rapidly changing world
that calls for new methods.
— Oscar Hemer, Fiction and Truth in Transition

Creative non-fiction has become in a sense ‘the genre’ of

South African writing . . . writing which makes its meanings
at the unstable fault line of the literary and journalistic, the
imaginative and the reportorial.
— Duncan Brown, ‘Creative Non-fiction’

I believe non-fiction writing is . . . about unearthing a hidden

or unacknowledged or unnoticed life.
— Antjie Krog, ‘Creative Non-fiction’

Writing back to Disgrace

Oscar Hemer’s book Fiction and Truth in Transition: Writing the Present Past
in South Africa and Argentina explores the question, ‘What can fiction
tell us about the world, that journalism and science cannot?’ (Hemer
2012: 31). Hemer contends that ‘obviously, fiction’s truth – if there is
one – must entail something other than the factual truth of journalism
or science’, and he goes on to state, ‘I was particularly interested in
literary and fictional strategies that consciously transgress the genre

14
 Ways of Telling   15

boundaries in a deliberate attempt to achieve and communicate a

deeper understanding of reality’ (Hemer 2012: 13, 14). Hemer presents
a detailed examination of South African literary production of the
transitional period of apartheid’s demise and the emergence of the new
democratic South Africa. He pays particular attention to the writing of
the urban space, looking at texts by Ivan Vladislavić and debut novels
by black writers such as Phaswane Mpe and Kgebetli Moele; the literary
response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, focusing on
Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull; and the ‘continuing dominance of
whiteness’, examining J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (Hemer 2012: 203). In a
conversation with Vladislavić, Hemer comments that ‘one quite strong
tendency in fiction today is this aim to make it look like a documentary’,
to which Vladislavić responds:

We live in such a highly documented and reported-upon world.

Fiction’s claims on being able to tell you something special about
an experience or an event or life have been weakened or appear
to have been weakened in the face of this image-laden, over-
documented and written about world, so that documentaries
have almost absorbed the qualities of fiction . . . The Afrikaans
writer Johann Rossouw . . . quotes J.G. Ballard to the effect that
we now live in a world that is dominated by fictions, whether
in advertising or commerce or politics or television. We are
living in an enormous novel, Ballard says. In this context, a
conventional novel does not stand a chance. This fictionalized
reality can only be opposed by the eye-witness account – the
autobiographical story, the non-fiction version that pits actual
experience against our invented realities (Hemer 2012: 95).

While acknowledging the trend towards non-fiction narratives – a point

I will return to shortly – Hemer suggests that the genres of non-fiction,
particularly journalism, lack ‘something’. He comments on the starting
point of Krog’s Country of My Skull:

When reviewing her journalistic endeavour in retrospect,

however, [Krog] realized that there was something missing –
16  At the Fault Line

something that she had not been able to convey, and something
which journalism alone could not disclose. Hence, she went
back to the records to tell the story all over again, this time in
a more personal and semi-fictional way, which defies genre
classification (Hemer 2012: 181).

In commenting on the New Journalism, but perhaps reflecting on all

creative non-fiction endeavours, Tom Wolfe ([1973] 1990: 49) states
that ‘it enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets
what a power it has: the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually
happened  ’. Thus, while I agree with the idea that fiction may offer a
means of accessing a deeper ‘truth’ than that which is superficially
available in more factual discourses, I would argue that Hemer overlooks
the importance of the reader knowing ‘this actually happened’. The
importance of this element of creative non-fiction is that the reader is
forced to engage with a character, his or her issues and actions, ‘without
the option of dismissing him as a problematic fictional construct, as . . .
hostile readers might do with David Lurie or Petrus in J.M. Coetzee’s
Disgrace ’; in effect, ‘one uses non-fiction in order to remove the escape
clause for the reader’ (Brown and Krog 2011: 60). It is this idea that
informs my engagement with South African literary journalism. I want
not only to explore the ‘truths’ made available through imaginative,
creative writing, but to acknowledge the ways in which the conventions
of non-fiction genres such as journalism push the reader to engage with
those, often uncomfortable, ‘truths’.
In a statement made at the Human Rights Commission Hearing
on Racism in the Media in 2000, the African National Congress
(ANC) opened its argument with an interrogation of J.M. Coetzee’s
novel Disgrace. In doing so, the ANC unintentionally blurred the lines
between fiction and fact, literature and journalism. The issue at stake,
for the ANC, was the representation of the post-apartheid black man.
It argued that Coetzee ‘represents as brutally as he can, the white
people’s perception of the post-apartheid black man’ as conforming to
General Barry Hertzog’s description: a ‘faithless, immoral, uneducated,
incapacitated and primitive child’.1 The ANC further argued that
it is this stereotype that informs the work of white South African
 Ways of Telling   17

journalists, contributing to generally racist attitudes within the media.

It is significant, but perhaps unsurprising, that Coetzee’s Disgrace is
singled out and included in the ANC’s presentation to the Human Rights
Commission. Carol Iannone (2005: 1) comments that ‘Disgrace aroused
a raging controversy in South Africa when it was published in 1999,
won an unprecedented second Booker Prize for its author, and became
the first of his novels to achieve notable sales in his native land’. The
novel has become a set work for English studies in both high schools
and universities, and it retains its currency in contemporary critical
debates.2 Antjie Krog (Brown and Krog 2011: 66) has commented that
‘Disgrace has ripped open more debates and conversations about South
Africa and colour than any newspaper or non-fiction book ever did.
So a good novel is immensely powerful.’ The story centres on David
Lurie, a disgraced middle-aged university professor who has lost his
job over an affair with a student. In the aftermath of the scandal, Lurie
retreats to his daughter Lucy’s Eastern Cape farm to reflect on his life.
One evening, three black men invade Lucy’s home; they gang-rape her,
shoot her dogs, loot her house, and set her father alight before stealing
his car. Lurie is outraged and insists on involving the police and seeking
justice. In contrast, Lucy is adamant that such responses would make
it impossible for her to continue living on her farm. In order to stay in
the home she loves, and in order to feel that she is part of the broader
South African community, Lucy chooses to cede her land to her black
neighbour and farm manager, Petrus, and to become, in effect, his third
wife. She also chooses to have the baby that she is carrying as a result
of the rape. Lucy comments that perhaps this ‘is the price one has to
pay for staying on’ (Coetzee 1999: 158). Iannone (2005: 2) suggests, in
response to this assertion:

[  T  ]he reader, however, or at least any reader not terminally

immersed in white guilt, is liable to be horrified. While Coetzee’s
purposes in this novel are ambiguous and not fully worked out,
there is no doubt that he intends to raise disturbing questions
about the nature of the new South Africa and the place of white
people in it. It is common knowledge that attacks by blacks
on white farmers in rural South Africa have become rife under
18  At the Fault Line

the new government. It was this very aspect of the novel that
caused the ANC to condemn the book as a racist call for white
South Africans to emigrate.

Iannone (2005: 3) goes on to say that ‘we can see Disgrace as offering
guilty white readers the opportunity to indulge in self-hatred and to
savour the pleasure of contemplating the abasement of Western man
and woman, while imagining a spiritual reward for doing so’. In a review
of recent Coetzee criticism alongside Krog’s Begging to be Black, Michael
Chapman (2010: 157) points to the ‘heightened sense of unease that
one . . . experiences in the reading to completion of [Disgrace]’. I suggest
that this unease stems from Coetzee’s tendency to narrow down the
available options and crystalise the positions of both his characters and
his readers. It is this fixedness or frozenness that Krog responds to in
Begging to be Black as she searches for an interconnectedness that does
not erase or override difference. Krog dedicates Begging to be Black to
‘Petrus’ and attempts to find a way through to Petrus and his story, and,
simultaneously, to allow the space in which Petrus might begin to step
out of the static relationship with David Lurie that Coetzee depicts.
In this sense, Krog is writing b(l)ack to Coetzee’s Disgrace, loosening
the ties that fix Coetzee’s characters in their unyielding positions, and
seeking ways towards becoming-other. In a similar way, both Jonny
Steinberg’s Midlands and Kevin Bloom’s Ways of Staying contain traces
of Disgrace, and both texts echo Coetzee’s concerns in interesting ways.
It is also significant that Coetzee, Malan, Bloom, Steinberg and Krog
all draw on the theme of ‘the journey of discovery’, which Leon de
Kock (2016: 58) argues is a recurring South African literary trope. In
arguing for a reading of South African literature that ‘pivots around a
continuingly problematized notion of transition’, De Kock (2016: 2,
59) suggests that these writers, working in the space between fiction
and non-fiction, ‘with . . . a sense of unknowability amid a scene of
unresolved heterogeneity in South African culture at large . . . take on
their burden of (re)discovery, as if nothing can be taken as known,
again, and as always’. Hedley Twidle (2012: 23) also picks up on the
idea of ‘journeying’ within these texts when he argues that ‘these are
works in which the common South African literary trajectory from
 Ways of Telling   19

rural to urban in reversed’. As I will argue later, the ideas of transition

and journeying ‘between’ offer perhaps the most productive routes
for engagement with the contemporary South African context. These
themes are also reflected in the journeying made possible by the term
literary journalism, indicating texts that are always in-between and
always in transition.
It is telling that in his ‘Reflexive Essay’, which formed part of his
master’s thesis in creative writing, Kevin Bloom (2008) discusses at
length the parallels between his own book Ways of Staying and Coetzee’s
Disgrace. Bloom (2008: 224) comments that Ways of Staying is ‘a book
written from a position of fear’ and, as such, is part of the South African
literary lineage that includes Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, Malan’s
My Traitor’s Heart and Coetzee’s Disgrace. Bloom (2008: 225) states, ‘I
wanted somehow in Ways of Staying to communicate the intractable fact
that while the most profound white fears have a basis in myth, they
are also real fears and so cannot be buried or wished away’, and to this
end he is acutely aware of the parallels between the factual narrative
of Jamie Paterson’s rape in Ways of Staying and the fictional story of
the rape of Lucy Lurie in Disgrace. Furthermore, Bloom (2008: 225)
comments that the ‘fiction may throw some light on the fact’ in terms
of making explicit the anxieties and fears of whiteness in post-apartheid
South Africa. Bloom (2008: 228) suggests that the pervasive fear that
characterises South African whiteness, expressed in Ways of Staying as
the sense that ‘privately, quietly, as a result of our own complicated guilt,
we believe that we deserve to be hated, to be hurt, and to be killed’, is
given form in Coetzee’s Disgrace when Lucy intimates that perhaps her
rape is ‘the price one has to pay for staying on’.
Drawing on the work of Jonny Steinberg, Anthony Altbeker and
Gary Kynoch, De Kock (2016) presents a compelling argument that
‘the specter of “crime”  ’ is a pervasive, albeit contested, signifier within
post-apartheid South Africa and its literatures. De Kock (2016: 64)
quotes Steinberg, who argues that ‘the profundity of the fear of crime
is deep enough to go all the way down . . . “Crime” has nestled inside
the most exquisitely intimate and private domains of white experience.
It has taken its place among the categories through which people
experience the fundamentals of their existence.’ However, Steinberg (in
20  At the Fault Line

De Kock 2016: 61, 63) also shows that despite ‘white fears of crime as
a form of retribution’, white South Africans ‘were far less likely to be
killed in their own homes than their black counterparts, who continue
to bear the brunt of crime in the post-apartheid period’. This is an
important observation because it highlights the disconnection of the
white imaginary to the social realities of the South African context,
and it reveals one of the limitations within the work of Malan, Bloom,
Steinberg and Krog: namely, a tendency to reinforce pervasive white
anxieties.

Narrating the nation

Benedict Anderson’s well-rehearsed formulation of the nation as ‘an
imagined community’ foregrounds the constructed nature of the
concept, and thereby allows for the continual reimagining of the same.
This emphasis on the reimagining or retelling of the nation is important
as it eschews the tendency towards fixed and rigid nationalisms, while
simultaneously encouraging a perception of the nation state as always-
already in a condition of change as it constantly reimagines itself
within a continually shifting global environment. Furthermore, it is the
repetitive nature of this reimagining and retelling that works to build a
coherent national narrative; as Homi Bhabha (1994a: 297) points out,
‘the scraps, patches, and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned
into the signs of a national culture, while the very act of the narrative
performance interpellates a growing circle of national subjects’.
In discussing the role of truth and reconciliation in post-apartheid
South Africa, Susan van Zanten Gallagher (2002: 112) notes that the
country ‘still faces the need to construct a new national narrative . . .
the idea of being a South African still [needs] to be inhabited and enacted;
it [needs] a narrative. The moral and social bankruptcy of apartheid
has robbed the country of a viable story.’ Several attempts have been
made to forge a new national narrative that espouses inclusivity and
multiculturalism. Van Zanten Gallagher (2002: 116) further argues:

[  T  ]he [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] process [was]

designed to construct a communal narrative by weaving
together numerous individual strands . . . giving shape to a
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we are scratched by the seams. What we want to contemplate is the
beauty and the smoothness of that well-ordered plan which it is so
difficult for us to discern. When Burke counselled a grave and
anxious gentleman to “live pleasant,” he was turning him aside from
the ordinary aspects of existence.
There is a charming and gracious dogma of Roman Catholicism
which would have us believe that all good deeds and holy prayers
make up a spiritual treasury, a public fund, from which are drawn
consolation for the church suffering, and strength for the church
militant. A similar treasury (be it reverently spoken) holds for us all
the stored-up laughter of the world, and from it comes human help in
hours of black dejection. Whoever enriches this exchequer should be
held a benefactor of his race. Whoever robs it—no matter what
heroic motives he may advance in extenuation of the deed—has
sinned heavily against his fellow men. For the gayety of life, like the
beauty and the moral worth of life, is a saving grace, which to ignore
is folly, and to destroy is crime. There is no more than we need,—
there is barely enough to go round. If we waste our little share, if we
extinguish our little light, the treasury is that much poorer, and our
neighbour walks in gloom.
The thinkers of the world should by rights be the guardians of the
world’s mirth; but thinking is a sorry business, and a period of critical
reflection, following a period of vigorous and engrossing activity, is
apt to breed the “plaintive pessimist,” whose self-satisfaction is
disproportionate to his worth. Literature, we are assured by its
practitioners, “exists to please;” but it has some doubtful methods of
imparting pleasure. If, indeed, we sit down to read books on
degeneracy and kindred topics, we have no reason to complain of
what we find in them. It is not through such gates as these that we
seek an escape from mortality. But why should poets and essayists
and novelists be so determinedly depressing? Why should “the
earnest prophetic souls who tear the veil from our illusory national
prosperity”—I quote from a recent review—be so warmly praised for
their vandalism? Heaven knows they are always tearing the veil from
something, until there is hardly a rag left for decency. Yet there are
few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth. Granted that our
habit of exaggerating the advantages of modern civilization and of
modern culture does occasionally provoke and excuse plain
speaking, there is no need of a too merciless exposure, a too
insulting refutation of these agreeable fallacies. If we think ourselves
well off, we are well off. If, dancing in chains, we believe ourselves
free, we are free, and he is not our benefactor who weighs our
shackles. Reformers have unswervingly and unpityingly decreased
the world’s content that they might better the world’s condition. The
first part of their task is quickly done. The second halts betimes.
Count Tolstoi has, with the noblest intentions, made many a light
step heavy, and many a gay heart sad.
As for poets and novelists, their sin is unprovoked and
unpardonable. Story-telling is not a painful duty. It is an art which, in
its best development, adds immeasurably to the conscious pleasure
of life. It is an anodyne in hours of suffering, a rest in hours of
weariness, and a stimulus in hours of health and joyous activity. It
can be made a vehicle for imparting instruction, for destroying
illusions, and for dampening high spirits; but these results, though
well thought of in our day, are not essential to success. Want and
disease are mighty factors in life; but they have never yet inspired a
work of art. The late Professor Boyesen has indeed recorded his
unqualified delight at the skill with which Russian novelists describe
the most unpleasant maladies. He said enthusiastically that, after
reading one of these masterpieces, he felt himself developing some
of the very symptoms which had been so accurately portrayed; but to
many readers this would be scant recommendation. It is not
symptoms we seek in stories. The dullest of us have imagination
enough to invent them for ourselves.
“Poverty,” said old Robert Burton, “is a most odious calling,” and
it has not grown any more enjoyable in the past three hundred years.
Nothing is less worth while than to idealize its discomforts, unless it
be to sourly exaggerate them. There is no life so hard as to be
without compensations, especially for those who take short views;
and the view of poverty seldom goes beyond the needs of the hour
and their fulfilment. But there has arisen of late years a school of
writers—for the most part English, though we have our
representatives—who paint realistically the squalor and
wretchedness of penury, without admitting into their pictures one ray
of the sunshine that must sometimes gild the dreariest hovel or the
meanest street. A notable example of this black art was Mr. George
Gissing, whose novels are too powerful to be ignored, and too
depressing to be forgotten. The London of the poor is not a cheerful
place; it is perhaps the most cheerless place in Christendom; but this
is the way it appeared in Mr. Gissing’s eyes when he was compelled
to take a suburban train:—
“Over the pest-stricken region of East London, sweltering in
sunlight which served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination;
across miles of a city of the damned, such as thought never
conceived before this age of ours; above streets swarming with a
nameless populace, cruelly exposed by the unwonted light of
heaven; stopping at stations which it crushes the heart to think
should be the destination of any mortal,—the train made its way at
length beyond the outmost limits of dread, and entered upon a land
of level meadows, of hedges and trees, of crops and cattle.”
Surely this is a trifle strained. The “nameless populace” would be
not a little surprised to hear itself described with such dark
eloquence. I remember once encountering in a third-class English
railway carriage a butcher-boy—he confided to me his rank and
profession—who waxed boastful over the size and wealth of London.
“It’s the biggest city in the world, that’s wot it is; it’s got five millions of
people in it, that’s wot it’s got; and I’m a Londoner, that’s wot I am,”
he said, glowing with pride that was not without merit in one of mean
estate. The “city of the damned” appeared a city of the gods to this
young son of poverty.
Such books sin against the gayety of life.

All the earth round,

If a man bear to have it so,
Things which might vex him shall be found;
and there is no form of sadness more wasteful than that which is
bred of a too steadfast consideration of pain. It is not generosity of
spirit which feeds this mood. The sorrowful acceptance of life’s
tragedies is of value only when it prompts us to guard more
jealously, or to impart more freely, life’s manifold benefactions. Mr.
Pater has subtly defined the mental attitude which is often mistaken
for sympathy, but which is a mere ineffectual yielding to depression
over the sunless scenes of earth.
“He”—Carl of Rosenmold—“had fits of the gloom of other
people, their dull passage through and exit from the world, the
threadbare incidents of their lives, their dismal funerals, which,
unless he drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise,
settled into a gloom more properly his own. Yet, at such times,
outward things would seem to concur unkindly in deepening the
mental shadows about him.”
This is precisely the temper which finds expression in much
modern verse. Its perpetrators seem wrapped in endless
contemplation of other people’s gloom, until, having absorbed all
they can hold, they relieve their oppressed souls by unloading it in
song. Women are especially prone to mournful measures, and I am
not without sympathy for that petulant English critic who declined to
read their poetry on the plea that it was “all dirges.” But men can be
mourners, too, and—

In all the endless road you tread

There’s nothing but the night,

is too often the burden of their verse, the unsolicited assurance with
which they cheer us on our way. We do not believe them, of course,
except in moments of dejection; but these are just the moments in
which we would like to hear something different. When our share of
gayety is running pitifully low, and the sparks of joy are dying on life’s
hearth, we have no courage to laugh down the voices of those who,
“wilfully living in sadness, speak but the truths thereof.”
 Hazlitt, who was none too happy, but who strove manfully for
happiness, used to say that he felt a deeper obligation to Northcote
than to any of his other friends who had done him far greater service,
because Northcote’s conversation was invariably gay and agreeable.
“I never ate nor drank with him; but I have lived on his words with
undiminished relish ever since I can remember; and when I leave
him, I come out into the street with feelings lighter and more ethereal
than I have at any other time.” Here is a debt of friendship worth
recording, and blither hearts than Hazlitt’s have treasured similar
benefactions. Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson gladly acknowledged his
gratitude to people who set him smiling when they came his way, or
who smiled themselves from sheer cheerfulness of heart. They
never knew—not posing as philanthropists—how far they helped him
on his road; but he knew, and has thanked them in words not easily
forgotten:—
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being
happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world,
which remain unknown even to ourselves, or, when they are
disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.... A happy
man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or
she is a radiating focus of good-will; and their entrance into a room is
as though another candle had been lighted.”
There is little doubt that the somewhat indiscriminate admiration
lavished upon Mr. Stevenson himself was due less to his literary than
to his personal qualities. People loved him, not because he was an
admirable writer, but because he was a cheerful consumptive. There
has been far too much said about his ill health, and nothing is so
painful to contemplate as the lack of reserve on the part of relatives
and executors which thrusts every detail of a man’s life before the
public eye. It provokes maudlin sentiment on the one side, and
ungracious asperity on the other. But, in Mr. Stevenson’s case,
silence is hard to keep. He was a sufferer who for many years
increased the gayety of life.
Genius alone can do this on a large scale; but everybody can do
it on a little one. Our safest guide is the realization of a hard truth,—
that we are not privileged to share our troubles with other people. If
we could make up our minds to spare our friends all details of ill
health, of money losses, of domestic annoyances, of altercations, of
committee work, of grievances, provocations, and anxieties, we
should sin less against the world’s good-humour. It may not be given
us to add to the treasury of mirth; but there is considerable merit in
not robbing it. I have read that “the most objectionable thing in the
American manner is excessive cheerfulness,” and I would like to
believe that so pardonable a fault is the worst we have to show. It is
not our mission to depress, and one recalls with some satisfaction
Saint-Simon’s remark anent Madame de Maintenon, whom he
certainly did not love. Courtiers less astute wondered at the enduring
charm which this middle-aged woman, neither handsome nor witty,
had for her royal husband. Saint-Simon held the clue. It was her
“decorous gayety” which soothed Louis’s tired heart. “She so
governed her humours that, at all times and under all circumstances,
she preserved her cheerfulness of demeanour.”
There is little profit in asking ourselves or others whether life be
a desirable possession. It is thrust upon us, without concurrence on
our part. Unless we can abolish compulsory birth, our relish for the
situation is not a controlling force. “Every child,” we are told, “is sent
to school a hundred years before he is born;” but he can neither
profit by his schooling nor refuse his degree. Here we are in a world
which holds much pain and many pleasures, oceans of tears and
echoes of laughter. Our position is not without dignity, because we
can endure; and not without enjoyment, because we can be merry.
Gayety, to be sure, requires as much courage as endurance; but
without courage the battle of life is lost. “To reckon dangers too
curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat that runs through all
the winning music of the world, to hold back the hand from the rose
because of the thorn, and from life because of death,—this is to be
afraid of Pan.”
 THE POINT OF VIEW
Look contentedly upon the scattered difference of things.—
Sir Thomas Browne.

Fiction is the only field in which women started abreast with men,
and have not lagged far behind. Their success, though in no wise
brilliant, has been sufficiently assured to call forth a vast deal of
explanation from male critics, who deem it necessary to offer
reasons for what is not out of reason, to elucidate what can never be
a mystery. Not very many years ago a contributor to the
“Westminster Review” asserted seriously that “the greater
affectionateness” of women enabled them to write stories, and that
“the domestic experiences, which form the bulk of their knowledge,
find an appropriate place in novels. The very nature of fiction calls for
that predominance of sentiment which befits the feminine mind.”
It is not easy, however, to account for Miss Austen and Miss
Brontë, for George Eliot and George Sand, on the score of
“affectionateness” and domesticity. The quality of their work has won
for them and for their successors the privilege of being judged by
men’s standards, and of being forever exempt from that fatal word,
“considering.” All that is left of the half-gallant, half-condescending
tone with which critics indulgently praised “Evelina” is a well-defined
and clearly expressed sentiment in favour of women’s heroines, and
a corresponding reluctance—on the part of men at least—to tolerate
their heroes. Mr. Henley voiced the convictions of his sex when he
declared his readiness to accept, “with the humility of ignorance, and
something of the learner’s gratitude,” all of George Eliot’s women,
“from Romola down to Mrs. Pullet” (up to Mrs. Pullet, one would
rather say), and his lively mistrust of the “governesses in revolt,”
whom it has pleased her to call men. Heroes of the divided skirt,
every one of them, was his verdict. Deronda, an incarnation of
woman’s rights. Tito, an improper female in breeches. Silas Marner,
a good, perplexed old maid. Lydgate alone has “aught of the true
male principle about him.”
This is a matter worthy of regard, because the charm of a novel
is based largely upon the attraction its hero has for women, and its
heroine for men. Incident, dialogue, the development of minor
characters,—these things have power to please; but the enduring
triumph of a story depends upon the depth of our infatuation for
somebody that figures in it, and here, as elsewhere, the instinct of
sex reigns supreme. Why is it impossible for a man, who is not an
artist or an art-critic, to acknowledge that the great portraits of the
world are men’s portraits? Because he has given his heart to Mona
Lisa, or to Rembrandt’s Saskia, or to some other beauty, dead and
gone. Why do we find in the Roman Catholic Church that it is
invariably a man who expounds the glory of Saint Theresa, and a
woman who piously supplicates Saint Anthony? The same rule holds
good in fiction. Clarissa Harlowe has been loved as ardently as
Helen of Troy. Mr. Saintsbury gives charming expression to this truth
in his preface to “Pride and Prejudice.”
“In the novels of the last hundred years,” he says, “there are vast
numbers of young ladies with whom it might be a pleasure to fall in
love; there are at least five with whom, as it seems to me, no man of
taste and spirit can help doing so. Their names are, in chronological
order, Elizabeth Bennet, Diana Vernon, Argemone Lavington, Beatrix
Esmond, and Barbara Grant. I should have been most in love with
Beatrix and Argemone; I should, I think, for mere occasional
companionship, have preferred Diana and Barbara Grant. But to live
with and to marry, I do not know that any one of the four can come
into competition with Elizabeth.”
This choice little literary seraglio is by no means the only one
selected with infinite care by critics too large-minded for monogamy,
while passions more exclusive burn with intenser flame. Of Beatrix
Esmond it might be said that Thackeray was the only man who never
succumbed to her charms. Women have been less wont to confess
their infatuations,—perhaps for lack of opportunity,—but they have
cherished in their hearts a long succession of fictitious heroes, most
of them eminently unworthy of regard. We know how they puzzled
and distressed poor Richardson by their preference for that
unpardonable villain, Lovelace, whom honest men loathe. Even in
these chill and seemly days they seek some semblance of brutality.
The noble, self-abnegating hero has little chance with them. The
perplexed hero has even less. It is a significant circumstance that, of
all the characters upon whom Mrs. Humphry Ward has lavished her
careful art, Helbeck of Bannisdale, who doesn’t know the meaning of
perplexity, and who has no weak tolerance for other people’s views,
makes the sharpest appeal to feminine taste. But masculine taste
rejects him.
Rejects him, not more sharply, perhaps, than it is wont to reject
any type of manhood put forward urgently by a woman. There was a
time when Rochester was much in vogue, and girls young enough to
cherish illusions wove them radiantly around that masterful lover who
wooed in the fashion of the Conqueror. But men looked ever
askance upon his volcanic energies and emotions. They failed to see
any charm in his rudeness, and they resented his lack of retenue.
Robust candour is a quality which civilization—working in the
interests of both sexes—has wisely thought fit to discard. Even Mr.
Birrell, who is disposed to leniency where Charlotte Brontë’s art is
concerned, admits that while Rochester is undeniably masculine,
and not a governess in revolt, he is yet “man described by woman,”
studied from the outside by one who could only surmise. And of the
fierce and adorable little professor, the “sallow tiger” who is the
crowning achievement of “Villette,” he has still more serious doubts.
“Some good critics there are who stick to it that in his heart of hearts
Paul Emanuel was a woman.”
Does this mean that femininity, backed by genius, cannot grasp
the impalpable something which is the soul and essence of
masculinity? Because then it follows that masculinity, backed by
genius, cannot grasp the impalpable something which is the soul and
essence of femininity. Such a limitation has never yet been
recognized and deplored. On the contrary, there are novelists, like
Mr. Hardy, and Mr. George Meredith, and Mr. Henry James, who are
considered to know a great deal more about women than women
know about themselves, and to be able to give the sex some
valuable points for its own enlightenment. Just as Luini and
Leonardo da Vinci are believed to have grasped the subtleties
hidden deep in the female heart, and to have betrayed them upon
their imperishable canvases in a lurking smile or a gleam from half-
shut eyes, so Mr. Meredith and Mr. James are believed to have
betrayed these feminine secrets in the ruthless pages of their novels.
Mr. Boyesen, for example, did not hesitate to say that no woman
could have drawn a character like Diana of the Crossways, and
endowed her with “that nameless charm,” because “the sentiment
that feels and perceives it is wholly masculine.” Why should not this
rule work both ways, and a nameless charm be given to some
complex and veracious hero, because the sentiment that feels and
perceives it is wholly feminine? Mrs. Humphry Ward strove for just
such a triumph in her portrait of Edward Manisty, but she strove in
vain. Yet if the attraction of one sex for the other be mutual, why
should it enlighten the man and confuse the woman? Or is this
enlightenment less penetrating than it appears? Perhaps a rare
perfection in recognizing and reproducing detail may be mistaken for
a firm grasp upon the whole.
Certain it is that if men have looked with skepticism at the types
of manhood presented with so much ardour by female novelists,—if
they have voted Rochester a brute, and Mr. Knightley a prig, and
Robert Elsmere a bore, and Deronda “an intolerable kind of
Grandison,”—women in their turn have evinced resentment, or at
least impatience, at the attitude of heroines so sweetly glorified by
men. Lady Castlewood is a notable example. How kindly Thackeray
—who is not always kind—treats this “tender matron,” this “fair
mistress” of the admirable Esmond! What pleasant adjectives,
“gentlest,” “truest,” “loveliest,” he has ever ready at her service! How
frankly he forgives faults more endearing than virtues to the
masculine mind! “It takes a man,” we are told, “to forgive Lady
Castlewood.” She is the finest and most reverent incarnation of what
men conceive to be purely feminine traits. In a world that belongs to
its masters, she is an exquisite appurtenance, a possession justly
prized. In a world shared—albeit somewhat unevenly—by men and
women, she seems less good and gracious. “I always said I was
alone,” cries Beatrix sternly. “You were jealous of me from the time I
sat on my father’s knee.” And the child’s eyes saw the truth.
It has been claimed, and perhaps with justice, that the irritation
provoked by Thackeray’s virtuous heroines is born of wounded
vanity. Mr. Lang observes that women easily pardon Becky Sharp
and Blanche Amory, but never Amelia Sedley nor Laura Pendennis.
For the matter of that, men easily pardon Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton.
They do more than pardon, they delight in these incomparable
clerics, and they adore Miss Austen for having created them. Mr.
Saintsbury vows that Mr. Collins is worthy of Fielding or Swift. But
their sentiments towards the excellent Edmund Bertram, who is all
that a parson should be, are not wholly unlike the sentiments of
women towards Amelia Sedley, who is all that a wife and a mother
should be; nor are they ready to admit that Mr. Darcy and Mr.
Knightley are worthy of Elizabeth and Emma. Lord Brabourne has
recorded a distinct prejudice against Mr. Knightley, on the ground
that he interferes too much; yet it is plain that Miss Austen
considered this interference as a masculine prerogative, exercised
with judgment and discretion. He is what women call “a thorough
man,” just as Amelia is what men call “a thorough woman.” Mr. Lang
bravely confesses his affection for her on this very score: “She is
such a thorough woman.” It evidently does not occur to him to doubt
Thackeray’s knowledge, or his own knowledge, of the sex.
Around Fielding’s heroines the battle has raged for years. These
kind-hearted, sweet-tempered creatures have been very charming in
men’s eyes. Scott loved Sophia Western as if she had been his own
daughter,—he would have treated her differently,—and took especial
pleasure in her music, in the way she soothed her father to sleep
after dinner with “Saint George, he is for England.” Sir Walter and
Squire Western had a stirring taste in songs. Dr. Johnson gave his
allegiance without reserve to Fielding’s Amelia. He read the
inordinately long novel which bears her name at a single sitting, and
he always honoured her as the best and loveliest of her sex,—this,
too, at a time when Clarissa held the hearts of Christendom in her
keeping. Amelia Booth, like Amelia Sedley, is a “thorough woman;”
that is, she embodies all the characteristics which the straightforward
vice of the eighteenth century conceived to be virtues in her sex, and
which provoke the envious admiration of our own less candid age.
“Fair, and kind, and good,” so runs the verdict. “What more can be
desired?” And the impatient retort of the feminine reader, “No more,
but possibly a little less,” offends the critic’s ear. “Where can you find
among the genteel writers of this age,” asks Mr. Lang hotly, “a figure
more beautiful, tender, devoted, and, in all good ways, womanly,
than Sophia Western?” “The adorable Sophia,” Mr. Austin Dobson
calls her,—“pure and womanly, in spite of her unfavourable
surroundings.” Womanliness is the one trait about which they are all
cock-sure. It is the question at issue, and cannot be lightly begged.
But Sophia’s strongest plea is the love Sir Walter gave her.
For Scott, though most of his young heroines are drawn in a
perfunctory and indifferent fashion—mere incentives to enterprise or
rewards of valour—knew something of the quicksands beyond. He
made little boast of this knowledge, frankly preferring the ways of
men, about whom there was plenty to be told, and whose motives
never needed a too assiduous analysis. Mr. Ruskin, it is true,
pronounced all the women of the Waverley Novels to be finer than
the men; but he was arguing on purely ethical grounds. He liked the
women better because they were better, not because their goodness
was truer to life. He was incapable of judging any work, literary or
artistic, by purely critical standards. He had praise for Rose
Bradwardine, and Catherine Seyton, and Alice Lee, because they
are such well-behaved young ladies; he excluded from his list of
heroines Lucy Ashton, who stands forever as a proof of her author’s
power to probe a woman’s soul. Scott did not care to do this thing.
The experiment was too painful for his hands. But critics who talk
about the subtleties of modern novelists, as compared with Sir
Walter’s “frank simplicity,”—patronizing phrase!—have forgotten “The
Bride of Lammermoor.” There is nothing more artistic within the
whole range of fiction than our introduction to Lucy Ashton, when the
doomed girl—as yet unseen—is heard singing those curious and
haunting lines which reveal to us at once the struggle that awaits her,
and her helplessness to meet and conquer fate.
 There are fashions in novel-writing, as in all things else, and a
determined effort to be analytic is imposing enough to mislead. We
usually detect this effort when men are writing of women, and when
women are writing of men. The former seek to be subtle; the latter
seek to be strong. Both are determined to reveal something which is
not always a recognizable revelation. In the earlier “novels of
character” there is none of this delicate surgery. Fielding took his
material as he found it, and so did Miss Austen. She painted her
portraits with absolute truthfulness, but she never struggled for
insight; above all she never struggled for insight into masculinity. She
knew her men as well as any author needs to know them; but her
moments of illumination, of absolute intimacy, were for women. It is
in such a moment that Emma Woodhouse realizes, “with the speed
of an arrow,” that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself.
There is nothing “subtle” in this; nothing that at all resembles Mr.
Hardy’s careful explorations into the intricacies of a character like
Eustacia Vye, in “The Return of the Native.” There is nothing of Mr.
James’s artfulness, nothing of Mr. Meredith’s daring. These two
eminent novelists are past masters of their craft. They present their
heroines as interesting puzzles to which they alone hold the key.
They keep us in a state of suspense from chapter to chapter, and
they too often baffle our curiosity in the end. The treatment of Miriam
Rooth, in “The Tragic Muse,” is a triumph of ingenuity. “What do you
think of her?” “What can you make out of her?” “What is she now,
and what is she going to be?” are the unasked, and certainly
unanswerable, questions suggested by every phase of this young
woman’s development. The bewildered reader, unable to formulate a
theory, unable to make even a feeble conjecture, is much impressed
by the problem laid before him, and by the acuteness of the author
who deciphers it. If to evolve a sphinx and to answer her riddle is to
interpret femininity, then there are modern novelists who have
entered upon their kingdom. But one remembers Rochefoucauld’s
wise words: “The greatest mistake of penetration is, not to have
fallen short, but to have gone too far.”
 MARRIAGE IN FICTION
They fought bitter and regular, like man and wife.
Since the days of Richardson and Fielding, English novelists have
devoted themselves with tireless energy to the pleasant task of
match-making. They have held this duty to be of such paramount
importance that much of their work has practically no other raison
d’être. They write their stories—so far as we can see—solely and
entirely that they may bring two wavering young people to the altar;
and they leave us stranded at the church doors in lamentable
ignorance of all that is to follow. Thackeray once asked Alexandre
Dumas why he did not take up the real history of other people’s
heroes and heroines, and tell the world what their married lives were
like.
It would have been a perilous enterprise, for, notwithstanding two
centuries of practice, novelists are astonishingly bad match-makers.
We know what happened when Thackeray himself undertook to
continue the tale of Ivanhoe and Rowena, whom Scott abandoned to
their fate, with merely a gentle hint of some mental deviations on the
bridegroom’s part. Sir Walter, indeed, always shook hands with his
young couples on their wedding-day, and left them to pull through as
best they could. Their courtships and their marriages interested him
less than other things he wanted to write about,—sieges and
tournaments, criminal trials, and sour Scottish saints. He had lived
his own life bravely and happily without his heart’s desire; he
believed that it was the fate of most men to do the same; and he
clung stoutly to Dryden’s axiom:—

Secrets of marriage still are sacred held,

Their sweet and bitter from the world concealed.
 In real life this admirable reticence is a thing of the past; but the
novelist, for the most part, holds his peace, leaving his readers a
prey to melancholy doubts and misgivings.
The English-speaking novelist only. In French fiction, as Mr. Lang
points out, “love comes after marriage punctually enough, but it is
always love for another.” The inevitableness of the issue startles and
dismays an English reader, accustomed to yawn gently over the
innocent prenuptial dallyings of Saxon man and maid. The French
story-writer cannot and does not ignore his social code which
urbanely limits courtship. When he describes a girl’s dawning
sentiment, he does so often with exquisite grace and delicacy; but he
reserves his portrayal of the master passion until maturity gives it
strength, and circumstances render it unlawful. His conception of his
art imposes no scruple which can impede analysis. If an English
novelist ventures to treat of illicit love, the impression he gives is of a
blind, almost mechanical force, operating against rather than in
unison with natural laws. Those normal but most repellent aspects of
the case, which the Frenchman treats openly and exhaustively, the
Englishman ignores or rejects. His theory of civilization is built up
largely—and wisely—on suppression.
But why should the sentiment or passion of love be the chosen
theme of story-writers, to the practical exclusion of other interests?
Why should it be the central point around which their tales revolve?
When we look about us in the world we know, we cannot think that
love is taking up much time and attention in people’s lives. It
dominates gloriously for a brief period,—or for brief periods,—and
then makes way for other engrossing influences. Its might and
authority are recognized; but the recognition does not imply constant
concern. The atmosphere of life is not surcharged with emotion, as is
the atmosphere of fiction. Society is not composed of young men
and women falling madly but virtuously in love with one another, nor
of married men and women doing the same thing on less legitimate
lines.
To these rational arguments, which have been urged by restless
critics before now, M. Paul Bourget makes answer that novelists deal
with love because, under its white heat, all characteristics become
more vividly alive, and are brought more actively and more
luminously into play. Man is never so self-revealing as when
consumed by passion. We see into his heart, only when it is lit by the
flame of desire. Moreover, love being natural, and in a manner
inevitable, there is not in treating of it that suggestion of artifice which
chills our faith in most of the incidents of fiction.
But is the man whom we see revealed by the light of love the
real man? Can we, after this transient illumination, say safely to
ourselves, “We know him well”? Is it his true and human self, son
naturel, to use an admirable old French phrase, which is both
quickened and betrayed by passion? Putting cynicism aside,
rejecting Lord Bacon’s dictum, “Love is a nuisance, and an
impediment to important action,” we are still doubtful as to the value
of traits studied under these powerful but perishable conditions. It is
not what a man does when he is in love, but what he does when he
is out of love (Philip drunk to Philip sober) which counts for
characterization. That pleasant old romancer, Maistro Rusticiano di
Pisa, tells us that a courtier once asked Charlemagne whether he
held King Meliadus or his son Tristan to be the better man. To this
question the Emperor made wise reply: “King Meliadus was the
better man, and I will tell you why. As far as I can see, everything
that Tristan did was done for love, and his great feats would never
have been done, save under the constraint of love, which was his
spur and goad. Now this same thing can never be said of King
Meliadus. For what deeds he did, he did them, not by dint of love,
but by dint of his strong right arm. Purely out of his own goodness he
did good, and not by constraint of love.”
It is this element of coercion which gives us pause. Not out of his
own goodness, nor out of his own badness, does the lover act; but
goaded onward by a force too impetuous for resistance. When this
force is spent, then we can test the might of his “strong right arm.”
Who that has read it can forget the matchless paragraph of
adjectives in which the Ettrick Shepherd contrasts the glowing
deceits of courtship with the sober sincerities of married life? “Love,”
he sighs, “is a saft, sweet, bright, balmy, triumphant, and glorious lie,
in place of which nature offers us in mockery during a’ the rest o’ our
lives the puir, paltry, pitiful, faded, fushionless, cauldrified, and
chittering substitute, truth.”
Small wonder that novelists content themselves with making
matches, and refrain from examining too closely the result of their
handiwork. They would have more conscience about it, if it were not
so easy for them to withdraw. They are almost as irresponsible as
poets, who delight in yoking unequal mates, as proof of the power of
love. Poetry weds King Cophetua to the beggar maid, and smilingly
retires from any further contemplation of the catastrophe.
Shakespeare gives Celia—Celia, with her sweet brown beauty, her
true heart, her nimble wit, her grace of exquisite companionship—to
that unnatural sinner, Oliver; and the only excuse he offers is that
Oliver says he is sorry for his sins. So I suppose Helen of Troy said
she regretted her indiscretion, and this facile repentance reinstated
her in happy domesticity. But the novelist is not at play in the Forest
of Arden. He is presumably grappling with the dismal realities of
earth. Nothing could be less like a fairy playground than the village of
Thrums (“If the Auld-Licht parishioners ever get to heaven,” said Dr.
Chalmers, “they will live on the north side of it”); yet it is in Thrums
that Mr. Barrie marries Babbie to the Little Minister,—marries her
with a smile and a blessing, as though he had solved, rather than
complicated, the mysterious problem of life.
The occasional and deliberate effort of the novelist to arrange an
unhappy union in order to emphasize contrasts of character is an
advance toward realism; but the temporary nature of such tragedies
(which is well understood) robs the situation of its power. In the
typical instance of Dorothea Brooke and Mr. Casaubon, George Eliot
deemed it necessary to offer careful explanation of her conduct,—or
of Dorothea’s,—and she rather ungenerously threw the blame upon
Middlemarch society, which was guiltless before high Heaven, and
upon the then prevalent “modes of education, which made a
woman’s knowledge another name for motley ignorance.” In reality,
Dorothea was alone responsible; and it is hard not to sympathize
with Mr. Casaubon, who was digging contentedly enough in his little
dry mythological dust-heaps when she dazzled him into matrimony. It
is hard for the unregenerate heart not to sympathize occasionally
with Rosamond Vincy and with Tito Melema, whom George Eliot
married to Lydgate and to Romola, in order that she might with more
efficacy heap shame and scorn upon their heads. The moral in all
these cases is pointed as unwaveringly as the compass needle
points to the North Star. This is what happens when noble and
ignoble natures are linked together. This is what happens when the
sons of God wed with the daughters of men. We are not to suppose
that it was poor Mr. Casaubon’s failure to write his “Key to all
Mythologies,” nor even his ignorance of German, which alienated his
wife’s affection; but rather his selfish determination to sacrifice her
youth and strength on the altar of his vanity,—a vanity to which her
early homage, be it remembered, had given fresh impetus and life.
The pointing of morals is not, however, the particular function of
married life. The problem it presents is a purely natural one, and its
ethical value is not so easily ascertained. For the most part the sons
of men wed with the daughters of men. They do not offer the
contrast of processional virtues and of deep debasement; but the far
wider contrast of manhood and of womanhood, of human creatures
whose minds and hearts and tastes and instincts are radically unlike;
who differ in all essentials from the very foundations of their being.
“Our idea of honour is not their idea of honour,” says Mr. Lang,
speaking for men, and of women; “our notions of justice and of
humour are not their notions of justice and of humour; nor can we at
all discover a common calculus of the relative importance of things.”
This is precisely why we wish that novelists would not neglect
their opportunities, and shirk their responsibilities, by escaping at the
church door. What did really happen when Babbie married the little
Minister, and added to the ordinary difficulties of wedlock the
extraordinary complications of birth and training, habits and
character, irreconcilably at variance with the traditions of the Auld-
Licht rectory? We know how the mother of John Wesley,—and
incidentally of eighteen other children,—a dour, stern, pious parson’s
wife, refused to say amen to her husband’s prayer for King William,
and dwelt apart from her reverend spouse and master for twelve
long months, rather than relinquish a sentiment of loyalty for the
rightful sovereign of the land. Such incidents stand in our way when
we are told musically that—
Love will still be lord of all.
Mrs. Wesley loved her husband, and she did not love the banished
and papistical James; yet it was only King William’s death (a happy
and unforeseen solution of the difficulty) which brought her back to
submission and conjugal joys.
For one of the most ill-assorted marriages in fiction Miss Austen
must be held to blame. It was this lady’s firm conviction (founded on
Heaven knows what careful and continued observation) that clever
men are wont for the most part to marry foolish or stupid women. We
see in nearly all her books the net results of such seemingly
inexplicable alliances. In what moment of madness did Mr. Bennet
ask Mrs. Bennet to be his wife? Nothing can explain such an
enigma; but Miss Austen’s philosophy, and her knowledge of that
commonplace middle-class English life, which the eighteenth century
had stripped bare of all superfluous emotions, enabled her to prove
—to her own satisfaction at least—that Mr. Bennet was tolerably
content with the situation. It is not too much to say that he enjoys his
wife’s absurdities. Only in his few earnest words to Elizabeth, when
Darcy has asked for her hand: “My child, let me not have the grief of
seeing you unable to respect your partner in life,” do we catch a
glimpse of the Valley of Humiliation which he has trodden for twenty-
four years. A still more emphatic illustration of Miss Austen’s point of
view is afforded us in “Sense and Sensibility,” when Eleanor
Dashwood decides that Mrs. Palmer’s surpassing foolishness cannot
sufficiently account for Mr. Palmer’s rudeness and discontent. “His
temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others
of his sex, that, through some unaccountable bias in favour of
beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman; but she knew that
this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be
lastingly hurt by it.”
Fortified by such philosophy, convinced that the natural order of
things, though mysterious and unpleasant, does not entail
unhappiness, Miss Austen deliberately marries Henry Tilney to
Catherine Morland; marries them after an engagement long enough
to have opened the bridegroom’s eyes, were it not for the seventy
merciful miles which lie between Northanger Abbey and the rectory
of Fullerton. With an acute and delicate cynicism, so gently spoken
that we hardly feel its sting, she proves to us, in a succession of
conversations, that “a good-looking girl with an affectionate heart
and a very ignorant mind cannot fail of attracting a clever young
man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward.” When
Catherine delivers her priceless views upon the unprofitable labour
of historians, we know that Mr. Tilney’s fate is sealed.
“You are fond of history!—and so are Mr. Allen and my father;
and I have two brothers who do not dislike it. So many instances
within my small circle of friends is remarkable. At this rate, I shall not
pity the writers of history any longer. If people like to read their
books, it is all very well; but to be at so much trouble in filling great
volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look
into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls,
always struck me as a hard fate. And though I know it is all very right
and necessary, I have often wondered at the person’s courage that
could sit down on purpose to do it.”
To be told that history is made admirable because you read it, is
flattering indeed. Mr. Tilney is satisfied that Catherine has “a great
deal of natural taste,”—an impression which her artless admiration
for his talents deepens into agreeable certainty. When he asks her
hand in marriage, Miss Austen reminds us with dispassionate
candour that his attachment originated in gratitude. “A persuasion of
her partiality for him had been the only cause of his giving her a
serious thought.” There is a final jest about beginning “perfect
happiness” at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen, and
the curtain is rung down upon a lifetime of irrational ennui.
The world of the novelist is full of such strange mishaps, and our
sense of inquietude corresponds with our conviction of their reality.
Mrs. Ward probably does not expect us to believe that Jacob
Delafield and Julie Le Breton lived happily and harmoniously
together. There is something as radically inharmonious in their
marriage as in the union of conflicting elements. It is not a question