The Executor, by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark at the Wikipedia: click here

The Executor: review

Interview: click here

Some summaries of her works: click here

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:

The driver's seat

MURIEL SPARK

Muriel Spark was born in 1918 in Edinburgh.

She had some education but she didn’t go to university. She worked as a secretary in a department store.

When she was 19 she got engaged to Sidney Spark, 13 years older than herself and together they went to Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where they got married.

When she was 20 she had a son and soon after she discovered her husband was maniac depressive. They put their son in a convent school, and she left her husband and went back to Great Britain, where she worked for the secret service during the WWII. She only took care of her son sending him some money regularly, so when he went to England he was brought up by his grandparents in Scotland.

Muriel lived in London, New York and finally, when she was 50, near Rome, where she met the artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine. Together they settled in Tuscany, where they lived ever after. Some people believe they were lesbians, but all their friends and themselves always denied it.

Muriel died in 2006, when she was 88, and she left all her properties to Penelope, and nothing to her son. She had a strained relationship with him, because he decided to be a practicing orthodox Jewish, as his grandfather was a Jewish. But Muriel, who was brought up in the Presbyterian religion, converted to Catholicism when she began to write: she said religion was important to understand the human nature, and so for her writings.

She started to write during the WWII and she published her first novel, The Comforters, when she was 39. The novel dealt with the conversion to another religion.

Her most wellknown novel is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published when she was 43. The star of the novel is a young teacher with different and new ideas about pedagogy, but working in a traditional school. There she has a group of six or seven girls that are her faithful pupils. The style is innovating because the narrative has a lot of flashbacks and flashforwards, and doesn’t follow a straight time line.

Other novels of hers are Robinson, Mememto Mori and Mandelbaum Gate. As you can imagine from the title, Robinson deals with three people stranded in a desert island after a plane accident. Mememto Mori is a kind of thriller where a circle of old people got recurrently an anonymous call with the mysterious message “remember you must die”; the question is to discover who phones these people and why. Mandelbaun Gate is situated in Israel at the moment of Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem and in an almost war situation between the Arabic world and Israel; the protagonist is a woman who’s looking for her boyfriend, an archaeologist working in Qumran.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The driver's seat were made into films.

Muriel Spark also wrote several short stories and essays.

THE EXECUTOR

The Executor has something of autobiographic, as Muriel Spark left all her literary material (like manuscripts and diaries) to a Scottish university at her death. In our story, a famous writer does a similar thing (and he’s also Scottish, like Muriel Spark).  There always has been a debate about using the life of one’s own to produce a literary artefact; some people are all the time looking for autobiographic elements in a work in a kind of morbid curiosity, and some other people can despise a work only for having these elements. I think that nobody can get rid of their own life, so it is almost impossible that it doesn’t impregnate all we do, all we make. I think the question is another one: is the writer’s life useful to make literary their work, or does the writer only want to tell us their life (which can be interesting or not)? In our case, our authoress makes profit of a life purpose of hers to create a short story, but with so much art that, although we know there is something of her life in there, we forget it almost immediately because the story takes us beyond the anecdote and very far away from it.

Susan Kyle is appointed executor of the literary work of a famous Scottish author. According to his last orders, she gives everything to an institution. But not exactly everything, because she cheats the institution keeping a manuscript of an unfinished novel (in order to finish it herself?, in order to sell it afterwards at a very high price?, for mere whim?). But somebody (or a ghost) knows about her doings and send intimidating messages to her on the manuscript about the novel and even about her private life. Is she going to finish the story herself? Is she going to destroy the manuscript and thus to get free from her persecutor or the spirit? Is she going to give it to the institution, at last? Are we going to know the end of the manuscript narrative? So read the story: I’m not going to be a spoiler!

QUESTIONS
 
What is Librium?
Explain the proverb “Still waters run deep” in the context.
Tell us something about Brueghel the Elder.
According to the writer himself, he was “a speck in the horizon” in the painting of modern literature. What did he want to mean?
 
Talk about the characters:
 

The writer

The narrator

The people from university

Elaine

Mrs Donalson

Jamie

Greta

 
Who are these and why are they mentioned?
 

Angus Wilson

Saul Bellow

Mary Whitelaw

Jonathan Brown

Mrs Thatcher

 
Where are the Pentland Hills?
What is the meaning of this expression: “I’m not the one to let the grass grow under my feet”?
What is the meaning of this phrase in context: “even though is only Nature”?
In the context, what is the problem with the words “lunch” and “dinner”?
What happens with the unfinished manuscript?
Summarize the unfinished novel.
How does the unfinished novel end?
What do you think is the meaning of the last inscription by the uncle’s handwriting?
 
VOCABULARY

die out, heading (n), shroud, filing (v), sheaf, sideboard, snoot, have somebody on, stoke, manse

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, by Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane at the Wikipedia: click here

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky at the Wikipedia: click here

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky: summary

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky: audiobook

Movie

Presentation, by Josep Guiteres

STEPHEN CRANE

Crane was one of America's leading realist writers who influenced most modern American naturalism.

Biography

He was born in 1871 in Newark (New Jersey). He was the fourteenth and last child of a married couple belonging to the Methodist church. He married Cora Taylor, owner of the so-called Hotel de Dream, a combination of a hotel and a nightclub brothel.

 In 1890, he worked as a reporter of the slums in New York. In 1893, he wrote his first novel, Maggie, where he describes the life of a girl of the streets.

In1895, he wrote a classic of American literature, The Red Badge of Courage, where he describes realistically the psychological complexity of fear and courage on the battlefield in the context of the American Civil War. This novel was made into a film by John Huston.

In 1897, he was hired as a correspondent for the Greco-Turkish war, and in 1898, for the Spanish-American War.

He wrote The Open Boat and Other Tales which narrates his experience in a shipwreck for four days. In 1900, before his death from tuberculosis in Badenweiler (Germany), he wrote his possibly most popular book, Whilomville Stories.

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

Jack Potter, sheriff of Yellow Sky, married his girlfriend in San Antonio in the morning. They are happy but nervous about their new status as a couple and uncomfortable with their clothes that attract the attention of people, but they are so in love that don't even realize it.

Now they travel in a luxurious Pullman train from San Antonio passing through the plains of Texas to Yellow Sky. Potter worries that the inhabitants of Yellow Sky will be offended because he didn't inform them of his decision to marry, therefore he wishes to get home without attracting attention.

Meanwhile, in the "Weary Gentleman" saloon, a young man enters announcing that Scratchy Wilson, the last member of a gang of criminals, is drunk and prowling around town with two loaded pistols, and the barkeeper closes the doors and windows.

Wilson walks through the town playing with his guns, but, as nobody pays attention to him, he decides to go to Potter's house, but he finds him on the street.

Wilson challenges Potter, who tells him that he is unarmed because he’s just got married. When Wilson sees the bride, changes his mood, forgets the challenge, holsters his pistols, and he leaves in a huff.

 OPINION

In my opinion this short story defines the writer as realistic and modern: When people look at them in a strange way because of their appearance they don't even realize it; when Wilson is on the street giving war and the others are calm in their houses and in the bar; when everything seems to end in a great tragedy…

No way, don't worry, nothing happens here and in the end everything is settled easily.

QUESTIONS

Say something about these characters:
 
Jack Potter
The bride
Scratchy Wilson
The barkeeper
The drummer
 
Tell us something about San Antonio.
What is a Pullman?
Describe the train.
Talk about the train workers’ behaviour.
Describe the atmosphere inside the saloon.
How do the couple feel about Yellow Sky people?
How do the couple love each other?
 
Can you find any good descriptive images?
There are some actions that nowadays are clichés in a Western. Can you find some?

VOCABULARY

frame house, keening, leaden, heinous, parade, bliss, hangdog (glance), drummer, tear, pen, galoot, starboard

Eveline, by James Joyce

James Joyce at the Wikipedia: click here 

Dubliners at the Wikipedia: click here

Eveline (with audiobook): click here

Eveline: study guide

Eveline: quiz

Eveline: analysis

Eveline: symbolism

Eveline: power point

Eveline: Animation

Eveline: Italian free version by Roberto Rosselini

Presentation, by Glòria Torner

JAMES JOYCE

James Joyce is one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. He is known for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods, including interior monologue, use of complex network of symbolic parallels and invented words and allusions in his novels, especially in his main novel Ulysses.

BIOGRAPHY

James Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, was born in 1882, in Dublin (Ireland) into a middle-class family.

He was the eldest of ten children. At the age of six he went to a Jesuit boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. But, as his father was not the man to be affluent for long; he drank, neglected his affairs and borrowed money from his office, and his family sank deeper and deeper into poverty, Joyce didn't return to Clongowes College in 1891; instead, he stayed at home for the next two years and tried to educate himself. In 1893 he and his brother Stanislaus were admitted to Belvedere College, a Jesuit grammar school in Dublin. Joyce was a brilliant student and there did well academically.

He entered the Trinity College Dublin in 1898. There he studied modern languages, English, French and Italian, and read widely, particularly in books not recommended by the Jesuits. He began to write verses and experimented with short prose passages that he called Epiphanies. To support himself while writing, after graduation in 1902, he went to Paris to become a doctor, but he soon abandoned this idea.

He went back home in April 1903 because his mother was dying. He tried several occupations including teaching; he also began to write his first novel, Stephen Hero, based on the events of his own life, and he also began to write the short stories published as Dubliners in 1914.

Joyce had met Nora Barnacle in June 1904, and they began a relationship until his death; they probably had their first date, and their first sexual encounter, the day that is now known as “Bloomsday”, the day of his novel Ulysses. The couple left Dublin and emigrated together to continental Europe where he taught languages in Pola (Croatia) and Trieste (Italy), where their son Giorgio was born. He also lived for a year in Rome, where he worked in a bank and where their daughter Lucia was born.

Joyce visited Ireland in 1909 and again in 1912, this time with his family. In 1914 he rewrote and completed the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, and he began to write Ulysses.

In 1915 the Joyce’s couple moved to Zürich and in 1916 he published his play Exiles. It was also the year that chapters from Ulysses, his novel in progress, began to appear in the American journal, “The Little Review”. The completed book would not appear until 1922. Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill were two of the first to buy the ready famous new book.

Ulysses, the most notable novel of the twentieth century, his main novel, is a gigantic work. All the action takes place in and around Dublin in a single day. The novel is the chronicle of the Dublin journey of the main character, Leopold Bloom, on an ordinary day. The three central characters: Stephen Dedalus, (Telemacus) the same hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) a Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife Molly (Penelope), the unfaithful woman. The events of the novel loosely parallel the events in Odysseus’s journey home after the Trojan War. Joyce employs interior monologue, stream of consciousness, parody and almost every other literary technique to present his characters.

Finding out that he was gradually gaining fame as an avant-garde writer, Joyce set himself in Paris to finish his Ulysses. His last book was Finnegan's Wake, published in 1939. Joyce's eyes began to give him more and more problems, and he travelled to Switzerland for eyes surgery.

Joyce died at the age of 59 in January 1941, in Zurich for a perforated duodenal ulcer.

EVELINE

Eveline is one of the fifteen short stories published in 1904 by the journal “Irish Homestead” and later in a collection in 1914, called Dubliners. Joyce himself offers a general plan for the book, revelling that he wants to present Dublin under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. Eveline opens the section dealing with adolescence.

The story begins “in medias res”, at the middle of the plot.

Eveline, a young Irish woman about nineteen years old, sits by her window. The short first paragraph reveals Eveline’s state of mind: the verb “invade” suggests the dullness and tiredness of her life, her lack of energy. She is thinking about the aspects of her life. Her mother is dead and her older brother Ernest too. Her remaining brother, Harry, is busy working, and he is away on business. She works very hard at home and at work. She muses on Miss Gavan, from the Stores: she always takes advantage of any occasion to humiliate her in front of other people.

She plans to leave home, to leave her abusive and violent father and her existence of poverty in Ireland and to seek out a new and better life. She has already consented to it, but then she says “Was that wise?” and she begins to question the decision she has made, she sees both sides of the question “Was it worth it?”

She thinks she has had shelter and food at home and also the security of the known things. But her thoughts are driving her away because she has decided to elope with Frank, a sailor who is her secret lover, and start with him a new better life in Argentina. But before leaving home to meet Frank, she hears an organ grinder outside (it's the same melancholy air from Italy played by the street musician the day her mother died), and, remembering the promise she made to her mother to look after her home, she begins to change her decision.

Another important word at the end of the story is the noun “gate”. At the dock where she and Frank are ready to embark on a ship together, she will not take this way out; at the very last moment, she takes the painful decision of not leaving with him. She will remain at home.

Themes

The description is a portrait of an unhappy woman of the lower social class in provincial Dublin.

The conflict between staying at home or leaving with her love with the promise of a new start in a new country.

The triumph of the sense of duty and responsibility.

Eveline’s anguish, frustration and pessimism.

Style

I want to emphasize some literary style traits used in this short story:

Joyce choice his favourite narrative technique: the free indirect style. The verbs are mainly in past tense, 3rd person. He changes from time to time to present tense.

Most of the long descriptions in nearly every paragraph begin with the same syntactic structures: She sat at the window, she looked round, she had consented to go away…

He uses many abstracts words (substantives and adjectives) meaning thoughts: to be free; feelings: being tired, and senses, hearing: she could hear a street organ playing, her mother voice saying constantly “Derevaun Seraun”…”, smell: the odour of dusty cretonne, and also the same sounds in one sentence: She looked round the room, reviewing all its...

CONCLUSION

In my opinion, I have read a wonderful pessimist and realistic story. The sensibility of the person, Eveline, is described by the language.

QUESTIONS

Say something about these characters:

Eveline Hill

Ernest Hill

Harry Hill

The father

The mother

Miss Gavan

Frank

Keogh

Tizzi Dunn

The man who’s in Melbourne now

 
Describe the place where Eveline lives.
Eveline has two letters. Who were they for, and what do you think they say?
What good things did her father do for her?
What gave her palpitations?
What used to happen on Saturday at Hill’s?
Describe Eveline everyday’s work.
How did Eveline love Frank?
What was her father’s opinion about the affair?
What was the effect of the melancholy air from Italy played by the street musician?
Why do you think she didn’t go at the end?

VOCABULARY

concrete, cinder path, have an edge on somebody, squander, strut, elate, maze, mist

SOME NOTES ABOUT EVELINE

A man from Belfast: he had to be Protestant (Irish people are Catholics) and Unionist.

Brown houses: for Joyce brown was the colour of the paralysis of Ireland

Blackthorn stick: according to Celtic folklore, blackthorn carries bad luck. Jesus thorns crown was made of blackthorn.

“To keep nix” means “to keep watch”.

Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-90) was a French nun, enthusiastic of self-mortification; she was some years paralysed, and she had visions of Christ. She was canonized in 1920.

Melbourne: lots of Irish people went there because of the famines.

“They had come to know each other”: it’s a very ambiguous sentence, because it can be in the Biblical sense.

The Bohemian Girl: it was a light opera (1843). The count’s daughter is abducted by some gypsies. She grows up with the gypsies until a Polish count disguised as a gypsy marries her. She discovers who she is and goes to his father, who, at the end, forgives her for getting married.

Italian organ player: at the time a lot of Italians who lived in Ireland were musicians, actors, artisans, pedlars…

Patagonians: in the 19^th century they believe Patagonians were giants.

Deveraun Seraun!: perhaps a Gaelic expression that means “death is very near”.

The Family Man, by V. S. Pritchett

V. S. Pritchett at the Wikipedia: click here

The Family Man: analisis (text and audio)

Summaries of other Pritchett's stories: click here

PRESENTATION, by Rafel Martínez

BIOGRAPHY

Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett, was born in Suffolk, on 16 December 1900, he was the first of four children of Walter Sawdon Pritchett and Beatrice Helena. His father, a London businessman, started several businesses, but due to his insecurity and his tendency to credit and embezzlement, had to close the businesses and disappear, so the family was forced to change their address to different cities, such as Ipswich, Woodford, Essex or Derby, which forced the children to change schools frequently, all to circumvent the persecution of the numerous creditors of Walter, the father.

The family moved to East Dulwich and he attended Alleyn's School, but when his paternal grandparents came to live with them at age 16, he was forced to leave school to work as a clerk for a leather buyer in Bermondsey. The leather work lasted from 1916 until 1920 when he moved to Paris to work as a shop assistant. In 1923 he started writing for The Christian Science Monitor, which sent him to Ireland and Spain. Pritchett, along with his friend and writer Gerald Brenan, is one of the few Englishmen who, in the early 1930s, toured the Spanish territory. From that youthful experience, Pritchett wrote Marching Spain, which appeared in 1928. However, it was not until 1954 that, already a consecrated writer, he published The Spanish Temperament, an excellent travel chronicle about our country.

In 1936 he divorced his first wife and married Dorothy Rudge Roberts, by whom he had two children; the marriage lasted until Pritchett's death in 1997, although they both had other relationships.

During the Second World War Pritchett worked for the BBC and the Ministry of Information while continuing to write weekly essays for the New Statesman. After World War II he wrote extensively and embarked on various university teaching positions in the United States: Princeton (1953), the University of California (1962), Columbia University and Smith College. Fluent in French, German and Spanish, he published acclaimed biographies of Honoré de Balzac (1973), Ivan Turgenev (1977), and Anton Chekhov (1988).

Sir Pritchett was appointed a Knight Bachelor in 1975 for "services to literature" and a Companion of Honour in 1993, in addition to other multiple decorations and mentions throughout his life, which makes him the best English author of his time.

Sir V. S. Pritchett died of a stroke in London on 20 March 1997.

THE STORY

This work, written by V.S. Pritchett, like all the other tales of him, are considered masterpieces that make their author to be considered as the best writer in England of the 20th century.

Like all his works, these are stories of normal people, with ordinary lives and that the author deals with that typical English irony, the well-known English humour. In most cases the actors are put in scenes that we all recognize as picturesque and that the author deals with his fine vision of double meaning and irony that the reader finds so funny.

In this case it is one story of a middle-class promiscuous man called William Cork with the pet name ‘Bunny’. He is a womanizer, a professor at a college, a married man with children, and a compulsive flute player. He has affairs with numerous women. The story is told from the viewpoint of one of his mistresses from the college, a jewellery designer called Berenice. In the story, Berenice comes face to face with Florence Cork, the obese wife of William. Mrs Cork has come across a letter sent to William in secret and she presumes Berenice is the sender.

The author fills with constant hints, especially sexual, the interpretation of his actors, with comic scenes such as when Bernice and Mrs Cork treat the theme of William's flute, one referring to her husband's musical instrument and the other, Bernice, understanding the flute's reference as William's penis, her lover.

ANALYSIS

I have to confess that it is my first approach to a work by V. S. Pritchett and when I chose the title The Family Man, at first I confused it with the American film, A Family Man, directed by Mark William, and with main actors, Gerard Butler, William Defoe, that is about a businessman who must choose between promoting himself running a large Chicago company or tending his family life.

After reading three times Pritchett's work, I have ended up understanding many phrases and its double meaning that are the characteristic of its author, where he mixes simple events of normal lives with his fine humour and typical English irony.

Now that I have known a work by Pritchett, I promise to look for and read other works, to confirm that in his genre he was the best author of his time.

QUESTIONS

William Cork: appearance, personality, job...
Benerice Foster: appearance, personality, job...
Benerice's flat
Benerice's father
What is a Quaker?
Sexual allusions in the story
Florence Cork: appearance, personality, job...
Benerice's talent for lying / telling the truth
Describe the affair between William and Benerice
When Benerice thinks about marriages going on holiday, she imagines "the legs of their children running across the sand". Why the legs?
Who was Rosie?
How does the relation between Benerice and Florence progress?
What does William usually do after making love with Benerice?
The necklace
Mrs Cork said: "Don't be jealous of Mrs Glowitz, dear. You'll get your turn." What's the double meaning of this sentence?
Can you tell the difference between "swoosh her hair" and "put it up"?

VOCABULARY

dawdle, piquancy, blob, droop, lurch, flourish, soft-soap, twaddle, flopped, rummage, harass, bicker, slapdash, hang-dog, wisp, dab (dabbing), pushy, talk somebody's head off

SOME NOTES ABOUT V. S. PRITCHETT

He had a terrible handwriting and his manuscripts were so full of corrections and blots that only his wife was capable to decipher his texts and type them. She used an Imperial typewriter, and she typed with such a speed and strength that it sounded exactly as a gun machine.

V. S Pritchett was born in 1900, so he used to say that he was as old as the century, or that the century was as old as he. He wanted to be called V.S.P. because he didn’t like his first name Victor. His mother would rather like a girl and she would name her after the queen Victoria, but, as he was a boy, he was called Victor.

When he was a child his family used to move house frequently, and he sometimes lived with his grandparents near York. His father never lasted long in a job and changed employment very often.

Pritchett couldn’t go to university (his family were poor) and he had to work in a leather company, but he could work for the firm as a clerk in Paris. However he wanted to be an artist. He started to paint because in 1921 Paris was full of artists. He did his first picture in two weeks, but when he looked at it he saw was a failure, so he abandoned his painting career after fifteen days. Then he decided to write, but one has to have something to write and he didn’t have anything to say. However, by chance, he had a lucky strike: there was a jokes contest in a newspaper; you had to write a joke and send it to the paper. His joke (it was a regular joke) was published and, although he didn’t get any money, he was very happy. Now he knew that if you don’t have anything to say, at least you can tell what others say, and he started his career as a writer.

To write well he thought he could imitate what writers did before him, and he discovered that some writers used to walk a lot, and so he walked very long walks. Also he read that Barrie (the author of Peter Pan) said the best thing to do to start writing was to write about small things or about things that are near you. Following this piece of advice he wrote about his room, send the text to the newspapers and... three newspapers accepted his articles. Now he could say he was a real author because he earned money with his texts.

He didn’t like to reread his articles or his stories because afterwards he found them very poor, and so he got very sad about his talent; but then he discovered that this was a common feeling in lots of writers: it’s the depression after the work is done. So some writers, as himself, get satisfaction in the act itself, and not after the text is deemed finished.

After Paris, in 1923 he travelled to Ireland (after obtaining the independence from Great Britain and in the middle of a civil war) and became a newspaper’s correspondent. There, in that country fond of beer and whiskey, he discovered that drinking alcohol don’t make you write better, but exactly the other way round, and he banned liquors forever when he wrote.

He wrote his first short stories in Ireland, where from an Irishman he got the inspiration for the short story Sense of Humour, and in Spain, about where he wrote a pair of books.

The Family Man was published in 1979 in his collection of short stories On the Edge of the Cliff.