"Less Than Zero" by Brett Easton Ellis

Clay, 18, returns to California from his New England college for a month over Christmas. He socialises and parties with his California friends, most of whom have parents who work in the movie industry or modelling etc. They could be clones: "thin, tan bodies, short blond hair, blank look in the blue eyes, same empty toneless voices" (p 140). These spoilt rich kids drink, party, take drugs and sleep with one another in a hedonistic lifestyle which seems to have no cares or consequences. As the book progresses we get glimpses of a darker side: bodies and souls that have been wrecked by drug abuse, payments required, violence and death. But almost nobody seems to care.

Clay hardly ever does anything; he almost always observes.

This book includes scenes I found very disturbing:

• The watching of a snuff movie involving children being tortured and mutilated; subsequently those watching enact a copycat gang rape of a minor
• The discovery of the dead body of a young man in an alley which is treated as a thing to go and see
• Drug debt leading to male prostitution (Clay's - paid - role in this is to observe the sex act taking place; reinforcing his role as the eternal onlooker)

The style of the book is an unstructured ramble which put me very much in mind of the work of Jack Kerouac in, for example, On the Road. The narrator, Clay, goes from party to party recording what occurs with the impartiality of a fly-on-the-wall documentary. There seems no 'story'. It is only after we discover the reason for Julian's repeated attempts to contact Clay that the Faustian theme emerges: there are dark and sometimes savage consequences for the way you live your life. 

The documentary feel of the first part adds verisimilitude, as does the (typically American writers' habit of) regular name checking for consumer items.

The poor make occasional appearances as maids and bystanders. They are very much in the background like Bruegel characters in the corner of the eye, mutely making a point. They are often perceived as a threat: 

• "I don't like driving down Wilshire during lunch hour. They always seem to be too many cars and old people and maids waiting for buses and I end up looking away." (p 32) 
• "We pass a poor woman with dirty, wild hair and a Bullock's bag sitting by her side full of yellowed newspapers ... Blair locks the doors." (p 131)

The nihilism of this book (and not just in terms of the young people, or the extended California society, but in terms of the meaning of human life) is summed up in this exchange:

When we got into the car he took a turn down a street that I was pretty sure was a dead end. 

'Where are we going?' I asked. 

'I don't know', he said. 'Just driving'. 

'But this road doesn't go anywhere', I told him. 

'That doesn't matter'. 

'What does?' I asked, after a little while. 

'Just that we're on it, dude', he said.

Other moments to treasure:

• "I don't watch a lot of the movie, just the gory parts. My eyes keep wandering off the screen and over to the two green Exit signs that hang above the two doors in the back of the theater." (p 88)
• "'You don't need anything. You have everything', I tell him. Rip looks at me. 'No. I don't. ... 'What don't you have?' 'I don't have anything to lose'." (p 177)
• "The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city."

This was the debut novel of Brett Easton Ellis. Clay makes a subsequent appearance, back at college, in The Rules of Attraction. BEE also wrote American Psycho.

Brilliant and disturbing. Catcher in the Rye on cocaine. 

September 2020; 195 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"David Golder" by Irene Nemirovsky

Published in 1929, just after the Wall Street Crash, David Golder was the breakthrough second novel by French author Nemirovsky who subsequently wrote Suite Francaise, a trio of novellas that were unfinished when the author died in Auschwitz and were subsequently rediscovered in 1998.

David Golder tells the story of a rich man. At the start he refuses to enter into a risky deal with his partner who kills himself the next day, bankrupt. Golder then suffers a heart attack on the train journey to his posh villa in Biarritz where his wife and daughter are entertaining guests and leading extravagant lives; they forever bombard him with requests for money. He is on a treadmill. Can he get off? And will he be happy if he does?

It seems that the moments when he is and was happiest is when he is or was poor.

It is a strange plot. One repeatedly feels that one is reaching the climax, the big reveal, the transformation scene. But, like the reality of any addiction, there is always the moment when the best intentions meet the flawed humanity. In this way it is more honest than its fairy tale or Hollowood correlates. The near death experience of the heart attack on the train doesn't provoke a lasting change in his lifestyle. His life keeps on going up and down. Until the end. Just like real life.

The style is strange as well. Much of it is very intense and written from a perspective clautrophobically deep inside Golder's mind. This can scarcely be otherwise for the heart attack on the train scene. "He had time to think 'I'm dying', to feel he was being pushed, thrown over the edge of a precipice into an abyss, a crater, as narrow and suffocating as a tomb. ... deep, murky water that swept over him and was dragging him down, lower and lower, into the wide gaping hole." Of course a near death experience needs to be this intense. But it is also rather cliched. Melodramatic. It reeks of nineteenth century literature (and the introduction tells us that Nemirovsky was compared to Balzac and Dostoevsky) rather than twentieth.

A near death experience can be melodramatic. Less convincing to modern readers are the characters. Although Golder himself, rich banker wondering in late life what the point of it all is, can be nuanced, his grasping wife Gloria is a pantomime villain, his daughter Joyce is utterly spolit, her gigolo boyfriend a two-dimensional parasite, the doctor a quack who will tailor his diagnosis to suit the paymaster, Golder's friend Soifer an archetypal miser and so on. Yet this story was hailed as astonishingly mature when it was published; Nemirovsky compared to Balzac or Dostoevsky.

I wondered whether the character of Carleton Myatt, the trader in currants who travels to Istanbul on Graham Greene's Stamboul Train was based on Golder. But in Greene even the minor characters have quirks and peculiarities and, in particular, inconsistencies that put flesh on their bones.

Nevertheless, David Golder is only a short book and it is worth reading just for the verve with which Nemirovsky gallops through her plot.

Selected quotes:

• "He was crushing his face into his hands in shame." (p 98)
• "'It's a long road', he said out loud
•  'Yes', said Soifer, 'long and hard and pointless'." (p 122)

Other books by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Devil's Doctor" by Philip Ball

Philip Ball is the author of the brilliant Critical Mass which is about phase transitions. This is a very different book. This is a biography of Paracelsus,a renaissance doctor and alchemist who was half-way between a scientist and a magician.

His real name was Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim and I has assumed that the word 'bombastic' derived from his boastful style of writing (Ball calls it "verbose, undisciplined and ungrammatical", it contains many neologisms, at least one undefined, as with other alchemical writings sometimes it seems to seek to conceal more than it reveals, and it was argumentative, frequently insulting, libellous and vituperative). But Ball tells us that 'bombast' was cotton padding "and it is from this origin that the connotation of 'puffed up' derives." (p 18)

His mum died young so he was brought up by his dad, a (probably unqualified) country doctor; they were poor and Paracelsus suffered from rickets in his youth. He was knocking around at the same sort of time as Agricola, who studied metals and mining, and Agrippa, who was an out and out magician and someone very like Paracelsus: "it is clearly unrealistic to demand too much coherence from a character as contrary as Agrippa of Nettesheim. He was apt to say whatever came into his head, and if it was not the same thing as he said the day before, it was nevertheless equally likely to offend someone." (p 87)

Ball suggests that aspects of the life of Paracelsus may have contributed to the legend of Faust and he tells the story of Johann Faust who, according to Adrien de Jonghe in Batavia, worked for Coster, the inventor of printing, but stole the secrets and sold them to Gutenberg (the reality is probably that ne of Gutenberg's backers was called Johann Fust). I must check this against Ruickbie's biography of Faustus. Furthermore, Ball points out that Simon Magus, the gnostic magician who sought to purchase church office (hence the sin of simony) and challenged St Peter to a miracle battle, had a companion called Helen of Tyre, not a million miles from the Helen of Try who appears in  Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.

Ball follows Paracelsus on his travels from North Africa to Scandinavia including a spell in Russia when he is captured by the Mongol hordes, and follows the travails of his thought through his extensive writing. It was, like all times seem to be, a very interesting time; Paracelsus met Erasmus and Zwingli of the Protestant Reformation; Osiander refused to publish a book by Paracelsus and went on to publish De Revolutionibus by Copernicus.

But there is sometimes too much detail. Detail can easily transmute the surface glitter of alchemy into base metal, though here Ball comes up with perhaps the best line of the book: "if you want men to leave no stone unturned in their enquiry into nature, say that there is gold to be found under one of them." This is the only way to make sense of the thousands of men who devoted their lives to the noxious, laborious and fruitless art of alchemy: it wasn't even as if popular opinion held alchemists in high esteem or egged them on in the societal belief that their efforts would one day be rewarded. Alchemists were hated, feared and mocked. Among the more famous and successful alchemists Ball describes is the Londoner Simon Forman who appears in The Lodger by Charles Nicholl. It struck me that the principle of The Philosopher's Stone was catalysis and that enzymes, biological catalysts are very much like The Stone in their dual ability to facilitate chemical reactions and to create life.

First and foremost, Paracelsus was a doctor and he wrote a book describing the ideal doctor (doesn't sound much like him!) who "must not be married to a bigot, should not be a runaway monk, should not practise self-abuse" and "must not have a red beard". (p 209)

But he was a rough bird who admitted "I do not wash to the satisfaction of everyone." (p 340)

But Paracelsus still dabbled in the occult. He believed that he could make a homunculus by sealing sperm into a glass vessel and heating it in horse manure for forty days. (p 344)

Unusually for a biographer, Ball continues well beyond the death of Paracelsus in Salzburg. There are two chapters devoted to tracing his legacy in detail.

Ball points out that the word 'disaster' literally means 'bad star'. "To most, astrology was just the way the world worked. But the philosopher needed a reason why - a mechanism."

There were a lot of interesting things in this book but, perhaps like the writings of Paracelsus himself, there was too much and I sometimes lost my way.

June 2016, 398 pages

Novels and books about Magic and Magicians reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Dr Faustus" by Christopher Marlowe

I saw the RSC production of this play on Saturday (matinee) 24th September 2016 at The Barbican Theatre in the City of London; it starred Sandy Gierson and Oliver Ryan as Faustus and Mephistopheles (Sloth was played by Richard Leeming who had so impressed me with Abel Drugger in The Alchemist the week before). The RSC made sense of the play but a lot of the drama comes from knockabout comedy and extravagant spectacle and I couldn't help thinking that if Shakespeare rather than Marlowe had written this play we might have had more sense of the existential crises suffered by Faustus; I might have cared when he was dragged to Hell.

This was an interesting experience! The copy that I have purports to reproduce the 1616 quarto edition of the play. It is not split into acts or scenes so I cross-referenced it with the Kindle edition, based on the First Quarto of 1604, the earliest extant edition, which has fourteen scenes (though no division into Acts). But there are significant differences in the text between these two editions.

The story: scene by scene
The basic story is the same. Faustus, a scholar, is dissatisfied with Logic, Medicine, Law ("This study fits a mercenary drudge, /Who aims at nothing but external trash") and Divinity (we are all sinners so we must all die: "What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera"). So he resolves to study Magic.

O, what a world of profit and delight,

Of power, of honour and omnipotence,

Is promis'd to the studious artizan!

He asks his manservant Wagner to summon his friends Valders and Cornelius who will helps him to summon demons. Whilst waiting for them a Good Angel and a Bad Angel appear, warning and tempting. But Faustus is determined:

'Tis magic, magic that hath ravish'd me

In Scene 2, two scholars appear and engage in word play with Wagner.

Scene 3. In a grove at night Faustus speaks Latin and summons Mephistophilis. When he arrives, Faustus says:

I charge thee to return and change thy shape;

Thou art too ugly to attend on me: 

Go, and return an old Franciscan friar;

That holy shape becomes a devil best.

So M exits and then re-enters as a friar. This is just one of a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment that the play contains.
M now tells F about how Lucifer and his mates were cast from hell. And F asks

How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?

and M replies:

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:

Thinks't thou that I, that saw the face of God,

And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?

This is great stuff. M is warning F of the consequences of rebelling against God and M regrest being a devil because of what he has lost. In this sense it is NOT "better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all" as Tennyson was later to claim in In  Memoriam.
Nevertheless, F offers his soul to the devil if in return he can have "whatsoever I shall ask".

Scene 4 is 'a street' and is a comedy routine between Wagner, the servant, and a Clown

Scene 5: we are back in Faustus' study. He is debating with himself (and the the Good and Bad Angels) about whether he should sing the contract. He tells himself "The god thou serv'st is thine own appetite" and the Evil Angel calls prayers the "fruits of lunacy". Then Mephistopheles appears and Faustus, using his own blood, signs the contract donating his sou to Lucifer, "Chief lord and regent of perpetual night". The blood dries up and Faustus cannot finish the contract till Mephistopheles brings fire to warm it back into liquid again. Then F says: "Consummatum est"; it is finished, the words spoken by Jesus on the cross in the Latin of the Vulgate Bible translation of St Jerome, the version Faustus mentions in Scene I.
This is surely an incredibly significant line. Marlowe is drawing parallels between Faustus and Jesus.

Faustus now reads the text of what he has just signed and, it being accepted by M, begins to seek knowledge from M. Learning is the motivation for F. But the King James Bible states: "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." (In the Vulgate: eo quod in multa sapientia multa sit indignatio; et qui addit scientiam, addit et laborem; in Wycliffe's translation "for in much wisdom is much indignation, and he that increaseth knowing, increaseth also travail"). The first thing he wants to know is where is hell and M replies:

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd

In one self-place; but where we are is hell

Very modern!
F now asks M for a woman:

For I am wanton and lascivious,

And cannot live without a wife.

But the "hot whore" M offers is rejected. It is not until much later that F sees Helen of Troy and falls in love.

In Scene 6, again in the study, F quizzes a procession of the Seven Deadly Sins; each tells him who they are and who their parents were. The Sins speak in prose (Wrath admits to "wounding myself when I could get none to fight withal").

Now there is another comic scene in which two rustics, Robin and Dick, have stolen Faust's magic book and wish to pronounce its spells, but they cannot read.

I guess this is the end of an Act or we are half way through the play because the Chorus who started us off and will finish comes on at this stage. The nest few scenes are Faustus and his side-kick Mephistopheles going to exotic places and, using fireworks and conjuring tricks, playing jolly japes on the locals. It seems that F has sold his soul so he can play some practical jokes. He spirits Bruno (perhaps Giordano Bruno the Dominican philosopher who was burnt at the stake for his heretical views regarding the Copernican system in 1600; this would have been too late for Marlowe (who died in 1593) and does not appear in the earlier Faustus, (my version remember is dated 1616 when it might have been topical), who is an anti-pope, away from the rather foolish Pope Adrian. F and M caper about, hitting cardinals and stealing food from the Pope; this so annoys the religious princes that they decide to excommuniate the 'ghost' and F says:

Bell, book, and candle, - candle, book, and bell, -

Forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell!

Another comic interlude in which Robin and Dick have stolen a cup from a vintner and summon a grumpy Mephistopheles from Constantinople to help them. M turns Dock into an Ape and Robin into a Dog providing Robin with the wonderful innuendo:
A dog! that's excellent: let the maids look well to their porridge-pots, for I'll into the kitchen presently

More merry japes as Faustus meets the Hol Roman Emperor and plays tricks on his courtiers. When, later, they waylay him in a lonely place they cut off his head but he has a false head on and so, having seemed to die, he gets up again. As well as 'It is finished' from the cross, Faustus is now resurrected! Is Marlowe blaspheming or just drawing parallels?

In another comic interlude, Faustus tricks a horse dealer who chops his leg off (but it is a false leg ...)

Faustus is at a posh dinner party with the Duke and Duchess of Vanholt. F says "I have heard that great-bellied [I presume he means pregnant rather than fat] women do long for things that are rare and dainty." The horse seller and Robin and Dick and other clowns disturb the party with their complaints against F. More merriment.

Scene 13: Back home. Faustus has made his will. Some scholars ask F who the most beautiful woman in the world was and Mephistopheles brings in Helen of Troy. Faustus, who has been encouraged by an old man to the brink of repentance, is seduced:

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? -

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. -

Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies! -

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. 

Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips ...

O, thou art fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars

Then Lucifer, Beelzebub and Mephistopheles walk in. Lucifer is here

To view the subjects of our monarchy

Those souls whose sin seals the black sons of hell

and they tell Faustus to prepare to surrender his soul that very night.

Now the scholars are back, concerned that F looks ill:

He is not well with being over-solitary.

The Good and Evil Angels are there, the Evil one smirking

He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.

The clock strikes 11 PM, half past,, then midnight and Faustus, protesting, pleading, is dragged to Hell.
The Chorus returns and says

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight

Discussion

It is not great literature. It is clearly written for the theatre. The comic interludes would be done these days before the curtain to enable scenery to be changed behind. They are there to lighten the mood of the play and to allow some rustic punning. It is almost formulaic in its structure, alternating serious drama with rustic comedy. But then the middle of the play is the opportunity for Faustus to tour the world being silly. One can see the dramatic potential in having fire-works whizzing about on stage and heads being chopped off and regrown and people sprouting horns from their heads but it is clumsy knockabout stuff.

Of course there are the classic lines but not so many that this play could be in the same league as, say, Macbeth.

Perhaps I need to read the 1604 version. Perhaps some of the things I liked least are the additions made by lesser playwrights after Marlowe's death.

In a lecture to the Gresham College 'How to be a Shakespearean atheist' Ryrie (2019) points oiut that Faustus "claims not to believe in Hell while having explicitly made a pact with the devil. The conventional caricature would call that an outrageous example of wishful thinking. In fact it is more like a defiant refusal to submit to reality."

I also recommend:

• Dead Man in Deptford, a brilliant fictional biography of Marlowe by Anthony Burgess
• Shakespeare and Co by Stanley Wells, a set of biographies of Shakespeare's contemporaries
• Faustus by Leo Ruckbie, a biography of the German alchemist who may be the man behind the legend

April 2014; Not only did my edition not have scenes; it didn't even have page numbers! And I can't be bothered to count them.

Other plays reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde

This famous story, rated 27th in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time, is fundamentally a retelling of the story of Faust.

The bargain is made between protagonist Dorian Gray (DG) and the painting, and Lord Henry Wootton (LHW) is the tempter, Mephistopheles to Dorian’s Faust.

LHW is a knowing Mephistopheles. He realises that his influence will be to corrupt Dorian. “All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view. ... Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul.” (Ch 2) But he goes on to encourage Dorian to be tempted: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” (Ch 2) Later, LHW determines to possess DG’s soul: “He would make that wonderful spirit his own.” (Ch 3) Later, DG acknowledges their relationship: “I cannot help telling you things. You have a curious influence over me. If I ever did a crime, I would come and confess it to you. You would understand me.” (Ch 4)

But when DG falls, he falls: “If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” (Ch 2). This is a very explicit Faustian bargain.

Or is this novel a retelling of the story of Frankenstein?

If LHW is Mephistopheles and Dorian is Faust, what is the role for Basil Hallward, who actually creates the painting? In a sense, as creator, he is God. The story opens in Basil’s studio which is surrounded by a beautiful garden. Is this the garden of Eden? Is the artist in the act of creation a proxy for God? Or is he to be regarded as usurping the powers of God, as Victor Frankenstein did?

Basil is instantly afraid of what he has created. In chapter one, foreshadowing the eventual denouement, he tells LHW “we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.” He goes on to say that he will not exhibit the painting because “I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.” and finally, he warns LHW: “Don’t spoil him. Don’t try to influence him. Your influence would be bad.” Perhaps we can regard Basil as having foreknowledge, another god-like attribute.

Finally, Basil returns to Dorian to warn him about the rumours he has heard. In this sense he acts like Dorian’s conscience (in Freudian terms, the superego) which is another God-like property. Dorian shows Basil the disfigured painting which makes Basil urge Dorian to pray. Instead, Dorian murders Basil. God, as Nietzsche later said, is dead.

Dorian Gray is a paean to the importance of beauty?

There is a fundamental association in this book between beauty and moral goodness. The aesthetic movement in which Oscar Wilde was prominent was obsessed with beauty. In his preface, Wilde says: “The artist is the creator of beautiful things. ... Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. ... Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect.”

The trouble with idolising beauty is that it equates ugliness with badness. This happens repeatedly through the book. For example:

• One woman is described as “a perfect saint amongst women, but so dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book” (Ch 3)
• “I can sympathize with everything except suffering,” said Lord Henry ... “It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing.” (Ch 3)
• The lower class characters are inevitably ugly. Sibyl Vane’s mother Is a “faded, tired-looking woman” with “thin, bismuth-whitened hands” (Ch 5). The theatre manager and usurer (inevitably, in those anti-Semitic days, a Jew) is “hideous” with “greasy ringlets”, a “soiled shirt” and “an air of gorgeous servility”. (Ch 4) Harriet’s brother “was thick-set of figure, and his hands and feet were large and somewhat clumsy in movement. He was not so finely bred as his sister.” (Ch 5) The audience in the music hall are described as “common rough people, with their coarse faces and brutal gestures” (Ch 7)
• It’s not just that DG’s portrait grows old. It reflects his soul and here the equivalence of goodness with beauty, of wickedness with ugliness, is made explicit. “What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace. They would defile it and make it shameful.” (Ch 10)
• After rumours begin to circulate that DG is wicked and immoral, they are not believed because DG looks so pretty. “Even those who had heard the most evil things against him—and from time to time strange rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs—could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him. He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world.” (Ch 11) Basil Hallward has heard the rumours but can’t believe them: “At least, I can’t believe them when I see you. Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.” (Ch 12)

This equation of prettiness with moral rectitude is hugely simplistic and highly prejudicial. Such shallow thinking undermines any suggestion that Wilde might have had some sort of insight into the nature of life.

Homosexuality

There are hints of homosexuality throughout:

• The reference to the Satyricon, whose narrator and protagonist is gay.
• The hero of the ‘yellow’ book imagines himself as Elagabalus, a notoriously gay teenaged Roman Emperor. (Ch 11)
• The ‘yellow’ book also mentions “the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, child and minion of Sixtus IV., whose beauty was equalled only by his debauchery, and who ... gilded a boy that he might serve at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas” (Ch 11)
• In Chapter 12, Basil asks Dorian: “Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton and his dreadful end? What about Lord Kent’s only son and his career? I met his father yesterday in St. James’s Street. He seemed broken with shame and sorrow. What about the young Duke of Perth? What sort of life has he got now? What gentleman would associate with him?” The book was written in 1890- 1891, shortly after the law criminalising homosexuality had been passed (1885) and very shortly after the Cleveland Street scandal when a male brothel catering to aristocrats was discovered in London. Suicide, self-exile, shame and ostracism were in those days the common ends of gentlemen in society who were outed as homosexuals.
• DG is described by LHW as “this son of love and death”. On a literal level it describes Dorian’s parentage: his mother ran away with a soldier and died in giving birth to him. He is also likened to Adonis, whose own birth came through the incestuous coupling of his mother Myrrha with her own (unknowing) father; he was discovered by Aphrodite, the goddess of love who later fell in love with him, and taken to be fostered by Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. He was also loved by Apollo, taking the feminine role in their relationship. So Adonis was bisexual.

But there are alternative interpretations. Adrian Singleton is revealed to be an opium addict.

The plot

The book starts in the painting studio of artist Basil Hallward, who is making the portrait of a beautiful young man, Dorian Gray. Lord Henry Wootton sits in on the sitting and points out that the portrait will stay beautiful while Dorian grows old: “there is such a little time that your youth will last” (Ch 2) Dorian wishes it was the other way around. “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” (Ch 2). Be careful what you wish for ...

Dorian then becomes infatuated with an actress called Sybil Vane. It is interesting that he becomes entranced by a person whose profession is to pretend, to make convincing fakes. He becomes obsessed with her and she falls in love with him. They become engaged. But then he watches a performance in which she acts badly; he sees through the illusion. He repudiates her and she, heart-broken, kills herself.

It is now that he notices for the first time that the portrait has changed.

He realises that the portrait, like the scapegoat laden with the sins of the community and driven out into the desert, or like Jesus, crucified for the sins of mankind, the portrait represents for him a ‘get out of jail free’ card. It will suffer (there is a hint that we might be talking about STIs such as syphilis) while he will lead a charmed and charming life. Not only that, but he could monitor his rake’s progress through the image it portrayed: “This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. ... Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything.” (Ch 8)

Now he embarks upon his wicked progress through the world. He hosts lavish parties. He is inspired by a ‘yellow’ book which LHW has given him to host lavish parties and become a connoisseur and collector. His early dissipations involve little more than collecting beautiful objects: Gothic art, perfumes, music, jewels, embroideries, ecclesiastical vestments etc. These things don’t seem so terribly wicked in themselves, although one might argue that Dorian’s incredible wealth might be put to better use. Perhaps the wickedness lies in the intemperance. In Dante’s Inferno, the sinners in hell include those who are misers and those who are extravagant; Dante, like most mediaeval thinkers, was following Aristotle's lead in saying that virtue lies in not going to extremes.

Basil Hallward, disturbed by the rumours about Dorian (though he can’t believe them), comes to warn Dorian that he is in danger of losing his good name. They argue and Dorian shows Basil the picture. Horrified, Basil tries to make Dorian pray, instead Dorian murders him. He pays someone to dispose of the body.

He revisits scenes of dissipation and begins to regret his lifestyle choices. Finally, after another discussion with LHW, he returns home and stabs the portrait. He is discovered dead with the dagger in his own heart. The portrait has reverted to its beauty; Dorian has, in death, become old and disgusting.

The parties

There is a reference to the Satyricon. Dorian hopes that he will become to London what Petronius, thought to be the author of the Satyricon, was to the Rome of Nero, its style guru, its Beau Brummel. But the Satyricon is also famous for the section describing Trimalchio's banquet and this could well be the inspiration for Dorian’s parties (Trimalchio is also referenced by F Scott Fitzgerald when talking about the parties thrown by The Great Gatsby). Furthermore the Satyricon's hero is openly gay which reinforces the homosexual theme.

The yellow book

He reads a 'yellow' book that LHW has given him. There has been critical discussion about which book this was. It can't refer to the "Yellow Book" magazine since DG was published in April 1891 and the YBmag was published between 1894 and 1897. Rather, the yellowness probably refers to the fact the lascivious French novels were often wrapped in yellow paper.

Wilde tells us: “It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediæval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book.” (Ch 10)

Also: “The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had himself known this curious fancy. In the seventh chapter he tells how, crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as Tiberius, in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books of Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and the flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as Caligula, had caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and supped in an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as Domitian, had wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible tædium vitæ, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of the circus and then, in a litter of pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the Street of Pomegranates to a House of Gold and heard men cry on Nero Caesar as he passed by; and, as Elagabalus, had painted his face with colours, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon from Carthage and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.” (Ch 11)

Many critics have opted for À rebours by French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans whose single character, Jean des Esseintes, is eccentric and reclusive, the final descendant of an aristocratic family. He retreats into an aesthetic world of literature, painting and religion. The title, which means Against Nature, might refer to the author's reaction against Naturalism, the Zola dominated style in which he had previously worked, although he retained the use of minute detail to achieve verisimilitude.

Evaluation

While the ‘yellow’ book is described as “a novel without a plot”, Dorian Gray is fundamentally an allegory with little more than plot. The characters are mostly puppets playing their preordained roles. Dorian is sometimes interesting but his soliloquies are marred by melodrama. I found LHW a most unsatisfactory character. He is a character who seems to speak entirely in epigrams, which makes him a witty and charming dinner party conversationalist, according to the book, although to me he sounded shallow. His typical gambit is to voice a paradox or a controversial view. There is no attempt to justify his platitudes, or to offer any evidence in their support. He just spouts, like an oracle, and then moves on. Even Dorian criticises him for this telling him: “You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.” (Ch 8) I quickly became bored of his interminable witticisms. Basil, who has the advantage of an interesting perspective on life, is missing for the bulk of the narrative, only required to start the whole thing off and then wheeled on later to be murdered. The lower-class characters are unsurprisingly stereotyped. It is the failure of characters that undermine the claims of this book to be considered a masterpiece. Its position in the canon is due to the conception, which is brilliant.

Selected quotes:

• “The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.” (Ch 1) The bourdon note comes from a stopped organ pipe and is a very low note, strong in fundamental, which creates a sort of humming buzz; its name derives from the French for bumblebee. OW is at once separating London from the beautiful garden surrounding the beautifully decorated artist’s studio that he has so far described, and simultaneously making London the background for the work of art he is creating. It’s also interesting that he has chosen an unusual word, as though to emphasise his own vocabulary.
• “I really can’t see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus” (Ch 1)
• “beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.” (Ch 1)
• “The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.” (Ch 2). This is a very egotistical perspective on life.
• “Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.” (Ch 2)
• “His father ... had retired from the diplomatic service in a capricious moment of annoyance on not being offered the Embassy at Paris, a post to which he considered that he was fully entitled by reason of his birth, his indolence, the good English of his dispatches, and his inordinate passion for pleasure.” (Ch 3)
• “the one advantage of having coal was that it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of burning wood on his own hearth” (Ch 3)
• “In politics he was a Tory, except when the Tories were in office, during which period he roundly abused them for being a pack of Radicals.” (Ch 3)
• “Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.” (Ch 3)
• “The mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value, as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect form whose shadow they made real ... Was it not Plato, that artist in thought, who had first analyzed it?” (Ch 3): The Platonic Theory of Forms.
• “Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.” (Ch 3)
• “Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things.” (Ch 3)
• “I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says” (Ch 4)
• “Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty.” (Ch 9)
• “he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system” (Ch 11)
• “The harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert’s grace, and Chopin’s beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven himself, fell unheeded on his ear.” (Ch 11)
• “Society—civilized society, at least—is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.” (Ch 11)
• “The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people they slander. In this country, it is enough for a man to have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him. And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? ... we are in the native land of the hypocrite.” (Ch 12)
• “Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault.” (Ch 16)
• “all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.” (Ch 16)
• “His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him.” (Ch 20)

Dorian Gray is an allegory rather than a novel. Although the concept is brilliant, it lacks complex characters and is further undermined by its social snobbery and aesthetic elitism. 

I first read this and blogged about it in March 2016. This post is the result of a re-reading and re-evauation in March 2024.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God