Brahms, violin sonata #2 in A major, Op. 100.
I actually read this the weekend before last, but didn't record it because I missed my Tuesday entry afterwards. It's a lightweight, humorous book that describes roughly five years of Fothergill's life as an innkeeper in the Oxfordshire village of Thame, running the Spread Eagle Hotel. He was doing this in the mid to late 1920s, and one of the interesting things about the book is the way it reflects that period's different mores. Fothergill was very concerned to have his hotel reflect high standards, and he had little compunction about telling his guests off if they transgressed. This provides a good part of the humour in a Basil Fawlty kind of way, but some of his clients' sins seem pretty minor. He does things like tell Oxford undergraduates off for bringing shop-girls to dinner, and he insists that couples must be married if they are to share a bed.
There's plenty of name-dropping, though most of the names meant nothing to me, but the fact that he was hobnobbing with the rich and famous of his time is a reflection of the way he transformed the hotel into an institution with very high standards. I was even more interested to learn from the Introduction that Fothergill was a member of Oscar Wilde's set twenty years earlier, and quite the Bohemian aesthete that he later tends to turn his nose up at.
This is a collection of five stories, two quite long, and three shorter pieces. The first was Typhoon itself, being the story of a steam-ship on a journey to a Chinese city, carrying on the order of a hundred ‘coolies’ home after their tour of duty. The ship encounters a massive typhoon, and the captain takes rather a pig-headed approach to it, refusing to divert around the bad weather. This story is basically a very well told adventure story, with a number of different characters getting a chance to put their view of events. (None of the Chinese characters get a voice, needless to say.)
The next story is Amy Foster. This is rather a strange and unaffecting story, that is over almost before it begins. The Amy Foster character is rather inscrutable, which doesn't help. The most interesting part of the story is the account of how ‘Yanko’ made it from his birthplace in Central Europe to an English sea-side village, and his reactions to the bewildering sights he saw. Given that Conrad made a journey with similar start and end-points (Poland to England), there's probably a deal of personal experience bound up in some of the descriptions, but it's still rather an unsatisfying story.
Next was Falk. This story featured another impossible woman, but a trio of interesting men in a memorable situation. Like Typhoon, this story is also set in South-east Asia, and the atmosphere and particulars of the story are very convincing. The awful hotel-keeper Schomberg from Victory also makes an appearance.
The last short, short story is Tomorrow. I found this decidedly creepy, and a very nice example of a short story. It's about an old man who is obsessively waiting for his son's return ‘tomorrow’ and what happens when the son finally does show up. There are really just three characters portrayed in the story and they're all quite real.
Finally, the last story in the collection I had was The nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. When first published in the US, this was sold under the title The children of the sea because of American racial sensibilities. This is quite a good alternative title, because the story is all about the crew of the Narcissus and their child-like simple-mindedness and violence. The story covers their voyage from Bombay to London, and they are shown at their best in coping with the massive storm that hits them off the Cape of Good Hope. They cope less well with James Wait, the ‘nigger’ who claims to be sick for pretty well all of the voyage, and Donkin, a shifty trouble-maker. This is another great tale of sea-faring adventure, but with plenty of psychological meat, as the various interactions among the crew are explored.
More Conrad, Under Western eyes.
Comments