Month: April 2020

Dreaming of Ruritania

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Zenda 8

Grove Koger

In my post for December 18, 2019, I wrote about the novel Lost Horizon and wondered how we could account for its enduring popularity. I reasoned that in some cases, such popular or “minor” classics create “myths in fictional form—compelling embodiments of dreams and fears that linger just below the conscious level.” I’m not completely happy with that formulation, but in the weeks since, I haven’t come up with a better one. In any case, another outstanding instance of the form is Anthony Hope’s most famous romance, which entered our world in April 1894.

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Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda: Being the History of Three Months in the Life of an English Gentleman (Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith, 1894)

Anthony Hope was born in Clapton, London, as Anthony Hope Hawkins in 1863 and studied to become a lawyer before turning his mind and considerable energy to writing. He was forced to publish his first novel, A Man of Mark, himself in 1880, but persevered and eventually began to sell more successful efforts. (It’s of some interest that while A Man of Mark is now forgotten, it featured an imaginary country.)

Hope seems to have begun The Prisoner in late 1893 and finished a first draft by the end of the year. It was then published the following April to wide acclaim from readers and fellow writers alike, including Robert Louis Stevenson. While he subsequently wrote quite a few more books, including a prequel (The Heart of Princess Osra) and a sequel (Rupert of Hentzau) to The Prisoner, neither is read today. It’s as if Hope had spent a few magical weeks in another world in 1893 but managed to convey the elusive experience only once. (I’m reminded, in this regard, of H.G. Wells’ fine story “The Door in the Wall.”)

Prisoner 1

The Prisoner opens, a little unpromisingly, like one of the brittle social comedies then popular. But when its protagonist, Rudolf Rassendyll, travels from his home in England to the Central European kingdom of Ruritania, it modulates into another mode. It seems that Rassendyll plans to attend the coronation of the new Ruritanian king—himself named Rudolf—who also happens, thanks to a scandalous liaison between ancestors of the pair, to be a distant relative. Embarrassingly enough, Rassendyll has even inherited the red hair and straight nose that are distinguishing characteristics of the Ruritanian royal family. When it turns out that the young Englishman and the king-to-be are actually identical in appearance if not character, and—what’s more—that the latter has been drugged and imprisoned in a castle in the little Ruritanian town of Zenda, the stage is set. Add the beautiful Princess Flavia, who’s betrothed to the dissolute heir-apparent, and we have the prospect of an impossibly romantic but perilous and dishonorable denouement.

Prisoner 2

But of course Rassendyll, as the novel’s subtitle makes clear, is an English gentleman. I’ve seen him described as “ridiculously honorable,” but that label misses the mark. To the teenage boy I was when I first read the novel, he’s instead extravagantly honorable—a dream character who appealed to the dreamer in me. (Which isn’t to say that I didn’t harbor other, more down-to-earth dreams at the same time.) I suspect that most of us still have a dreamer dwelling within, and I’m pretty sure that accounts for The Prisoner of Zenda’s continued appeal.

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That appeal has been widespread, inspiring a play, an operetta, a musical, countless movies, other novels (Robert Heinlein’s Double Star, for instance), a board game, and so on. It even created its own genre—the Ruritanian Romance. I’ll add that it also inspired me to write my own very modest tribute, “The Fall of Ruritania,” which appeared in Quail Bell Magazine in 2013; see  http://www.quailbellmagazine.com/the-unreal/prose-the-fall-of-ruritania.

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If you’d like to learn more about Hope, Sir Charles Edward Mallet wrote a biography, Anthony Hope and His Books: Being the Authorised Life of Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, in 1935 (London: Hutchinson). The Prisoner is analyzed in at least two academic studies—Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination, by Vesna Goldsworthy (Yale UP, 1998), and Ruritania: A Cultural History, from the Prisoner of Zenda to the Princess Diaries, by Nicholas Daly (Oxford UP, 2020). The 1961 Pyramid edition includes an introduction by Robert Gorham Davis, and the 1999 Penguin edition an introduction by Gary Hoppenstand.

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The images for today’s post are (top to bottom) the cover of the Pyramid edition, the one I read as a teenager; an illustration by Charles Dana Gibson from an 1898 edition; a plan of the Castle of Zenda from a 1921 edition; the cover of a board game from 1896; and a still of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Ronald Colman from the 1937 film version.

Nordhoff & Hall’s Hurricane

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Nordhoff & Hall - Hurricane

Grove Koger

Today’s post from the series I’m calling “Sea Fever” deals with my favorite novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, the latter of whom was born April 22, 1887.

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The Hurricane. Boston: Little, Brown, 1936

Nordhoff and Hall’s seventh collaboration was inspired by a story that Hall heard from a doctor in Tahiti. It seems that a Polynesian boy had been imprisoned for a minor offense and had managed to escape, only to be hunted for the rest of his life. The two writers expanded the anecdote and set it in the Tuamotu Archipelago, also known as the Paumotu, or Low, or Dangerous Archipelago, the string of atolls in the South Pacific that had served Jack London so well in “The Seed of McCoy.” They also researched the storm that had struck the Tuamotu atoll of Hikueru in 1903—the basis, by the way, for another of London’s stories, “The House of Mapuhi.”

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Narrated by Dr. Kersaint, a Breton who has practiced in the archipelago for fifteen years, The Hurricane follows the travails of Terangi after he strikes back at a drunk Caucasian official in a Tahiti bar and is jailed for six months. Terangi escapes, only to be caught and imprisoned again—and escape again. When he inadvertently kills a man, he incurs the obsessive wrath of the French administrator of the islands, de Laage. A terrible hurricane, to which Nordhoff and Hall devote about half of their short novel, then sorts out the fates of Terangi, de Laage, and the other islanders. 

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Nordhoff and Hall are among that rarest of breeds, individual writers able to meld their separate contributions seamlessly into a coherent whole. The two also dwell in a kind of netherworld of literate writers whose works are ignored by critics, due in part, I suspect, to their well-earned popularity. But in The Hurricane in particular, Nordhoff and Hall created a work whose unwavering vision of human experience is as compelling as Joseph Conrad’s. It’s the pair’s most successful book after “The Bounty Trilogy” and easily their most poetic.

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Nordhoff and Hall also collaborated on Faery Lands of the South Seas (1921; nonfiction); Dark River (1938); No More Gas (1940); Men without Country (1942; also published as Passage to Marseille); and The High Barbaree (1945). If you’d like to know more about the pair, I recommend James Norman Hall, My Island Home: An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952); Paul L. Briand Jr., In Search of Paradise: The Nordhoff-Hall Story (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1966); and James Norman Hall by Robert Roulston (Twayne, 1978).

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The cover of my prized 1963 Pyramid copy of The Hurricane was painted by Chuck McVickers. The black-and-white photograph shows Nordhoff (right) and Hall (left), and is taken from the dust jacket of Briand’s biography. The color photograph is of the the island of Takapoto in the Tuamotus, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license. At the bottom is the cover of the Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and Great Lakes (edited by Jill B. Gidmark; Greenwood Press, 2001), for which I wrote the entry on the pair.

 

 

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Henry James on Tour

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James - LittleTourInFrance

Grove Koger

Today’s post from my book When the Going Was Good deals with what is probably Henry James’ most genial book, a series of refreshingly informal impressions of provincial France. The author, who was born in New York City on April 15, 1843, became a British citizen in 1915 and died in London the following year.

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A Little Tour in France (Boston: Osgood, 1884)

Familiar with Europe even as a child, American (eventually British) novelist Henry James became an expatriate in his early thirties. He set much of his fiction abroad, contrasting the innocence of the New World with the sophistication of the Old, and devoted a considerable body of journalism and other nonfiction to Britain and the Continent.

HenryJames

A Little Tour in France is based on an actual tour that James made in October 1882 at the suggestion of a publisher. Constructed on the principle that “though France might be Paris, Paris [is] by no means France,” the tour and its account take him through the chateau country and Provence, with stops at such familiar points as then-desolate Chambord, the great walled city of Carcassonne, and Avignon, sometimes for no more than a few hours.

Carcassonne

Those for whom James’ fiction holds no attraction may nevertheless enjoy this informal volume, which bears the same relationship to its author’s more ambitious works as artists’ spontaneous sketches bear to their grander but sometimes lifeless “masterpieces.” James refers slightingly to his book as a series of “impressions, immediate, easy, and consciously limited.” Yet he is a genial companion and an acute observer, and little of note of escapes his bemused attention. In Carcassonne he enumerates with frank hedonism “olives and cypresses, pergolas and vines, terraces on the roofs of houses, soft, iridescent mountains, a warm yellow light,” and wonders “what more could the difficult tourist want?”

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The Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition (New York, 1983) contains an introduction by James’ biographer Leon Edel that was subsequently reprinted in the Penguin edition (Harmondsworth, 1985). The Oxford edition (Oxford, 1984) contains a foreword by Geoffrey Grigson. The attractive versions published by Sidgwick & Jackson (London, 1987) and Weidenfeld & Nicolson (New York, 1987) reproduce some of Joseph Pennell’s illustrations from early editions along with additional works by other artists, many in color. Both A Little Tour and Italian Hours appear in The Library of America volume Collected Travel Writings: The Continent (New York, 1993), along with other travel essays, a chronology, notes on the text by Richard Howard, and a glossary of foreign words and phrases.

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The image at the top of today’s post is the cover of the 1900 Houghton Mifflin edition. The portrait of James is by an unknown photographer and shows him in 1890, six years after the publication of his Little Tour. The colorful poster of Carcassonne was designed by E. Paul Champseix and published by the French railway line Compagnie du chemin de fer de Paris à Orléans. 

Palma’s Magical Cathedral

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Palma cathedral

Grove Koger

Over the years, Palma de Mallorca has turned out to be one of our favorite destinations, and we’ve been lucky to have sampled it as often as we have. This week’s blog is drawn from articles I wrote about Mallorca and Catalonia for Boise Journal and Art Patron, both now sadly defunct.

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We found much of Palma nondescript when we first visited it in 2003. As we wandered down its streets, we discovered that its old quarter could boast a few modernista architectural gems, but the best was yet to come, as the manager of our pleasantly rundown Spanish hostal gave us permission to enjoy the building’s roof. After climbing flight after vertiginous flight of stairs, we found ourselves outside, facing the great façade of the city’s Cathedral of Santa Maria. Built of yellow sandstone over the course of several centuries and completed in 1601, the structure is one of the largest cathedrals in Europe and seemed to fill half the sky, even from several blocks away. As the sun set slowly behind us, its ornately carved stone faded from tan through pink to violet; Monet’s famous cathedral, we thought, had nothing on “ours.”

Palma cathedral 3

That evening a stream of seagulls wound its way overhead from the interior of the island. As they neared the cathedral, they banked to float in lazy circles. Perhaps they were taking advantage of the thermals rising off the enormous stone structure and the adjacent Palau d’Almudaina, but it looked as if they were making a kind of avian obeisance. That night we observed a startlingly different spectacle across the street. The barred gates of the palace were closed, but above the pond just inside the entrance, dozens of bats swung in silent, frenzied circles, chasing the myriad insects attracted by the water.

On later visits to Palma, we stayed in another hostal offering an elevator and a comfortable roof terrace furnished with tables and chairs. While our room itself was tiny, we were able to enjoy morning cappuccinos and evening cervesas on the terrace as we once again watched the play of sunlight and shadow on the cathedral’s magnificent façade. No five-star hotel could have offered us a finer luxury.

Palma cathedral 2

The photograph at the top of today’s post shows the Cathedral of Santa Maria from the roof of the second hostal I mentioned (now upgraded to a hotel and renamed Apuntadores 8), while the others were taken from the streets around it.