The Fall of the Idol, by Richmal Crompton

 

Richmal Crompton at the Wikipedia

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RICHMAL CROMPTON, by Josep Guiteres

BIOGRAPHY

She was born in Bury, Lancashire in 1890, and died in 1969. She was an English writer, specialized in children’s books and horror stories.

She was the second child of Edward John Sewell, a protestant pastor and parochial school teacher, and his wife Clara; her older brother John Battersby was also a writer under the pseudonym John Lambourne.

Richmal Crompton attended St Elphin’s school and won a scholarship to classical studies at Royal Holloway College London, where she graduated Bachelor of Arts, and, in 1914, returned to teach classical authors at St. Elphin’s until 1917. Then, when she was 27 years old, went to Bromley High School in South London, teaching the same subject until 1923. Having contracted polio, she lost the use of her right leg. In 1923 and from then on, she spent her free time to write.

In 1924, she created her famous character William Brown, the protagonist of thirty-eight books of children’s stories in the naughty William saga that she wrote until her death.

She is also the author of a collection of stories about ghosts, the horror novel Dread Dwelling, in 1926, and Bruma, in 1928. As a writer of horror stories, she is eminent.

She never married and had no children; she was an aunt and a great-aunt.

 

THE FALL OF THE IDOL

The Fall of the Idol corresponds to chapter 4 of Just William with her famous eleven-years-old character William Brown.

In this chapter the writer tells us the adventures of William narrating his falling in love with his teacher, Miss Drew.

William, as a good student, sat in the back row. Being in love, he changed his seat to one in the front row. While the teacher explains the lesson, William has his fantasies with the teacher, but she constantly asks him questions about what she explains, and so he is forced to study.

Every day the teacher arrived at class, she used to find some small detail on the table of some admirer, but that morning the table and the chair were full of greenhouse flowers, evidently left by the lover. When William got home, he found his sister and two policemen who were looking for the flower thief.

The next day, Miss Drew was talking to another teacher. William, who was nearby, understood that Miss Drew liked lilacs; so, William got lilacs by stealing them from the window of a house with the subsequent uproar of the owner.

When Miss Drew entered the classroom, she said: “William, I hate lilacs”. Disappointed, his love vanished, and, as a good student, he sat again in the background.

My opinion: I liked this story because it is simple, short, entertaining and written with the fabulous typical English humour.

QUESTIONS 

Talk about your school days: were they happy or boring?

What is your opinion of this saying: “Teach anything at school and, funny it may be, at once it becomes boring”? (Remember the example of sexual education in the film by Monty Phyton “The Meaning of Life”.)

William caught a lizard and kept it in his pocket during the class. Do you have an anecdote to explain about your school days?

What happened to William’s lizard?

Who is the “malicious blind god”?

William starts giving presents to his teacher. What is your opinion about giving presents to your teacher… or to anybody?

What things you don’t do by halves? Do you always finish the book you are reading or the film you are watching?

Could William be married by the Pope? Why?

What do you think of helping your children with their homework?

“He hugged his chains”: what does it mean? Can you give more examples?

What do you imagine William wanted to do with the pipe in the garden?

Can you describe a “guelder rose” and a syringe”?

Explain the adventure of the syringe.

What is the meaning of “the idol has feet of clay”?

What do you think William felt like at the end: angry, happy, or disappointed?

 

VOCABULARY

figures, mug, 3 ½ d, mouth organ, putty, obliging, blood-curdling, outshine, hothouse, riot, soulfully, nonplussed, hubbub, conservatory, week’s mending, babbling, leading article, beaming, ole, ornery, rent, jarred, literal

My First Fee, by Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel at the Wikipedia

Reading Isaac Babel

Life and stories

ISAAC Babel, by Glòria Torner

Isaac Babel is the first major Russian Jewish writer of the first part of 20^th century. He was a master of the short story, and also a playwright, a journalist and did reports and film scripts. His fame is based on his stories about the Jews in Odessa.

The author has two leitmotivs in his life:

If the world could write by itself, it would be like Tolstoy.”

“I felt that it was pointless to write worse than Tolstoy.”

BIOGRAPHY

Isaac Babel was born in the Jewish ghetto of Odessa, Ukraine, in 1894.

Babel’s childhood was relatively comfortable, though he witnessed pogroms in Southern Russia in 1905. However, his family was untouched. His father was a successful businessman who installed his family in one of the best streets in Odessa.

In his teens, Babel wanted to get into the preparatory class at the Nicholas I Odessa Commercial School, but he couldn’t. As a result, he was schooled at home by private tutors. Between 1905 and 1911, he studied the Talmud, violin, German, French, besides of Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish.

He began writing short stories at the age of fifteen in imitation of Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert. His first stories were written in French. He entered the Kyiv Institute of Finances and Business Studies, and he graduated in 1915.  

In 1916, he moved to St. Petersburg where he met Maxim Gorky, his literary hero, who published some of Babel’s stories in his literary magazine Letopis. In 1917, he worked for a short time as a translator for the Cheka and as a reporter for Gorky’s newspaper Novaya Zhizin.

During the Russian Civil War, he returned to Odessa where he was an editor for a small publishing house, and, after the Civil War, he became a reporter for The Dawn of the Orient, a Russian newspaper published in Tbilisi. He married Yevgenia Borisovna Gronfein in 1919; their union produced a daughter, but his marriage was broken by the husband’s infidelities.

In 1923, he published The Tales of Odessa, a collection of short stories set in the Odessan ghetto. The stories describe the life of Jewish gangsters before and after the October Revolution.  He moved to Moscow and, in 1926, he published The Red Cavalry, thirty-four short stories about the brutal realities of war with horrific violence. During these years, a number of Babel’s family emigrated to Paris, including his mother, sister and, finally, his wife. In 1928, he wrote his first play, Sunset. His next play, Marya, described political corruption, prosecution of the innocent and black market in the Soviet society. This play was intended to be performed in 1935, but was cancelled and was not performed in Russia until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

All the short stories of Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories, filled only two small volumes and were published in 2002.

Babel was arrested by the N.K.V.D., a precursor of the K.G.B. in May 1939 at his cottage in Peredelkino, a writer’s colony. The secret police confiscated nine folders from the dacha and fifteen from his Moscow’s apartment. Under interrogation and probable torture at Lubyanka, Babel confessed a long association with Trotskyists and an engagement in anti-Soviet activity, including being recruited into a spy network. He was held in Buturka Prison, and, on January 27, 1940, he was shot on Stalin’s orders for espionage. Babel’s last words were “I’m innocent, I have never been a spy... I’m asking only for one thing, let me finish my work.”

MY FIRST FEE

This story was written in the 1920s, and it’s apparently an expansion of an earlier piece called Answer to an Inquiry. Both are variants of the same story: an adolescent boy tells a forlorn, indecent and wholly imaginary tale about himself to a tender-hearted prostitute. It went unpublished during Babel’s lifetime for sexual prudery, not appearing in print until the early 60s, when it was published in New York, first in Russian, then in an English translation.

The story begins with a long description in first person. The springtime has arrived in the town, Tiflis (Tbilisi), where the narrator (perhaps an alter ego of the author), a twenty-years-old young man, is living. He is working as a proof-reader for the printing press of the Caucasus Military.

He describes the room that he has rented from a Georgian couple and the sensual atmosphere of their neighbours. But the most important is that the narrator, who feels lonely, decides to look for love, runs out of the house and walks along the Kura River at night. Tortured by lust, he decides to solicit a prostitute, called Vera, whom he is infatuated with.

Now the story goes on, sometimes in direct dialogue in third person between the writer and the prostitute, and also with narrative and descriptive writing. Before Vera sleeps with him, she asks him for the money he has, and the writer gives her ten rubbles. They decide to go to Borzhom, and he has to accompany her as she makes her rounds and spends his money. Later, they go up to Vera’s room. There, in the prostitute’s bed, Vera prepares to get laid with the narrator, and he tells her that he has never been with a woman. Then he invents a tale.

This second story is about a boy living with an older Armenian man called Stepan Ivanovich, in Baku for four years when he was fifteen years old. Stepan Ivanovich’s friends ruined him because he gave them bronze promissory notes, and their friends cashed them and left promissory notes unbacked. Then the writer left him and decided to live with a rich church warden. He finishes the story arriving at a convincing ending with the death of his old man and his own arrival in Tbilisi now with twenty rubbles.

Returning to the first story, he spends the rest of the night making love with the thirty years old prostitute Vera, who tutors the young man in the erotic arts. Vera is moved by the other story and come to consider the narrator as a “sister” prostitute rather than a man. In the next morning, Vera insists on returning the narrator’s money. From his perspective, this money is the first fee he has earned for writing a story. Vera is his “first reader.”

At the end of the story, the author explains the relation and the meaning between the story and the title.

 

Themes

There are two stories and two different themes explained together in the story, one inside the other one, as the Russian doll called matryoshka.

1.    Babel walks up through the steps of crafting a plot. The writer who wants to be known telling a frankly sexual fiction for sex to a prostitute, perhaps a fictitious tale about his life.

2.  The loneliness of a man looking for love and sex. He “experienced a love you will never experience.” To be a writer, does one need to look for love?

Conclusion

Sometimes difficult to understand his prose, with long descriptions with sexual allusions just to explain a strange, sharp and unrealistic story. My First Fee it’s a story about how to write a story.

QUESTIONS

Tell us about the characters

The narrator

Vera

Stepan Ivanovich

Fedosya Mavrikevna

Where is Tiflis? What do you know about its country (language, religion, history…)

The narrator feels the spring in his skin. How do you feel the spring? What qualities of spring affect you the most?

What do you know about Tolstoy?

“I was a dreamer and didn’t have the knack for the thoughtless art of happiness”. That is, a dreamer cannot be happy: do you agree? Why?

Why did the narrator ask Vera is she was going to Palestine?

What is Borzhom (Borjomi)?

What information do you have about Golovin and the boyars?

“A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life”. What is your opinion?

What do you think Vera’s preparations to get laid with the narrator were for?

What does the image “like a toad on a stone” suggest?

Where is Kherson? And Baku?

Why does he say he’s a bitch, a whore?

What is the relation between the title and the story?

 

VOCABULARY

murky, part, whisking, shrews, babbling, hanks, sapping, sultriness, burrowing, dauntless, gruelling, raiment, apish, tenner, wilted, hightail, dough, banged, lackluster, potbellied, dogged, throes, drab, took after, promissory note, auctioned, squeezed, taproom, quaked, cavorting, braying