Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie, by Beryl Bainbridge

BIOGRAPHY & SUMMARY, by Begoña Devis

Beryl Margaret Bainbridge was born in Liverpool in 1932, and she was an English novelist known for her psychologic portrayals of the lower-middle-class English life.
At the age of 14, she was expelled from the Merchant Taylor’s Girls School, when she was caught with a “dirty rhyme” (as she later described it) written by someone else in her gymslip pocket. She then went on to study at Cone-Ripman School, a boarding school near London, where she found she was good at History, English, and Art. The summer she left school, she fell in love with a former German prisoner of war, Harry Arno Franz, who was waiting to be repatriated. For the next six years, the couple corresponded and tried to get permission for him to return to Britain so that they could marry, but permission was denied, and the relationship ended in 1953.
The following year, she married Austin Davies. She had two children, but the marriage was short, and Beryl soon found herself a single mother. In 1958, she tried to commit suicide by putting his head in the gas oven. In his own words, “When you are young, you have those ups and downs.” She had a third daughter with Alan Sharp in 1965. Sharp, a Scotsman, was at the start of his career as a novelist and screenwriter; Bainbridge would later let it be thought that he was her second husband; in truth, they never married, but the relationship encouraged her on her way to fiction. She began writing to help fill her time, mainly recounting incidents from her childhood. His first novels were very well received by critics and were successful among readers, although they did not bring her much money. Her first novel, Harriet Said... was written around this time. It would be the third that he would publish, since many editors rejected it, and one of them went so far as to claim that the protagonists were “almost incredibly repulsive”.
She was the author of eighteen novels, two travel books, two essays, two volumes of stories and five works for theatre and television. She was nominated five times for the Booker Prize, and in 2011, she was awarded the posthumous prize (she died in 2010) for her literary work. In 2008, The Times included her in the list of “The 50 most important writers since 1945”. The Guardian called her “a national treasure.”

SUMMARY

When Mrs Henderson arrived home, her husband asks her how much the woman she worked for as a maid had tipped her for Christmas. “Nothing at all”, answered she. “We have theatre tickets instead.” “Thank you very much”, Mr Henderson said ironically.  “The kiddies will like it”, she replied, “it’s a pantomime. We have never been in a pantomime.”  Their son Alec, who was still living with them, explained to them that it wasn’t a pantomime, but a play with fairy tale elements, which was about boys lost in Never-Never land. “It’s written on several levels”, he added.

“I’ve been a lost boy all my live”, muttered Charles Henderson when he heard his son. And he was right, in fact, he still is: His son doesn’t respect him - he calls him Charlie, knowing how much that bothers him - and his wife never seems to listen to him. He feels isolated. And as for other important things, he has lost almost everything: his house, his garden, his open spaces. They moved ten years ago, and now they have a house with a bathroom with hot water and good plumbing, but that’s not enough for him. At night, when Charles returns from work and enters that flat - which for him is like the cabin of an aeroplane, high and closed, not being able to take him anywhere - he looks out the window and can only see sky and clouds, and sometimes hundreds of stars. Then, he wonders: “Is life just about taking a good bath?” And besides, “Does a man need so many stars?” He had enough with the only one he could see from his outside toilet. “It’s quality that counted, no quantity”, he thought.

Finally, the day arrived, and everyone went to the theatre: Charles, his wife, his son Alec, and his daughter Moira with her children. One of them, Wayne, who was also characterized by his mischief, got into trouble as soon as they left the house, in the lift. The situation got worse because Alec drove madly. Furthermore, when they passed through the old Charles neighbourhood, he looked longingly at the open fields, and remembered the stream where they fished and the esplanade where people played football. Alec only saw a grimy suburb and laughs at it. “What fields? What stream? Never-Never land”, he mocked him. Charles started to feel sick, his stomach to hurt, but no one seemed to care about that.

During the first act, everything seemed strange, there was an actor playing a dog, and Charles didn’t really understand who or what Tinkerbell was. During the acts two and three, Charles dozed. All was confusing to him, he was dreaming he was fishing in the canal and there appeared a big crocodile with a clock ticking inside it. He had pain in his arm.

His confusion increased when Alec claimed that the fact that Wendy’s father and Captain Hook were played by the same actor was an allegory of the fact that every father wants to kill his children. However, according to Charles, the reason was the savings that this entailed. But who wants to argue with Alec? Indeed, he would like to strangle his son when he says those things.

During Act Fourth, Charles was getting worse and worse. He asked his wife for a peppermint, but she silenced him, everyone seemed engrossed in the play. Charles dozed, confusing things that happened on stage with memories from when his son was a child, like the fear he felt one day when Alec came home late. Suddenly, something dramatic was happening on stage: Tinkerbell was fainting and everyone looked devastated. Charles saw how his entire family, even his wild grandson, were moved to tears watching the flickering of the fairy’s light descend. What was happening? His heart was beating so hard that he though Alec was going to scold him for making noise.

Finally, while the entire audience applauded passionately at Peter Pan’s demand “If you believe, clap hands, clap hands, and Tinkerbell will be alive”, Charles died. His last words were “Help me”, to which his wife replied “Shut up”, while clapping frantically for Tinkerbell to come back to life.

PERSONAL OPINION

This short story is written on several levels, just like it happened in Peter Pan, according to Alec, or at least it touches on several aspects, such as:

- The class difference. The rich may find it degrading to give money to the poor, but for them, it is more than a necessity.

- The change in life and values after the II World War, when people went from living in the countryside to living in the city, and the capitalism is gaining more and more strength.

- The generational conflict, represented by Charles and his son Alec, who despises his father’s values, ridicules his way of thinking and treats him with open contempt.

- The loneliness you can feel even surrounded by the people you love, especially when communication has long since broken down.

- The irony of sometimes letting ourselves be carried away by what is happening in fiction, causing those feelings of drowning out what we should feel in real life.

For all these reasons, I liked the story and found it very interesting, especially because of the last question I pointed out. Do our own lives seem so uninteresting to us that we are more interested in what happens on stage, or on TV, or in the movies? Is it perhaps a way to escape from our feelings?

I’m sure we’ll talk about it in a while.

QUESTIONS

-Debate: What are your politics about giving / not giving tips?

-What about presents: do you prefer giving money, or presents? When you buy your presents, do you always ask for the “present receipt”?

-What can you tell us about the personality of the characters?

-“One star was all a man needed”. What do you think the real necessities of a person are?

-Driving is a singular experience for every person: in your opinion, what is the most important skill for a driver? What do you think of the French campaign “Drive as a woman”?

-What do you know about Peter Pan? In your view, is childhood so happy as the cliché says? Do you think everybody would rather be a child and not an adult?

-In your opinion, what is the relation between the title and the story?

-According to you, what is the meaning of Charles’s death and the end of the story? 

VOCABULARY

pantomime, head nor tail, smutty, putting up with, by heck, mouthing, outlandish, foregone, (give it) houseroom, bashed, exalted, sideboard, on a par, fiddling, rumpus, turn, belt up, slum, pandering, cosy, carry-on, coddled, yawning his head off, tantrums, tiddlers, moth balls, engrossed, cotton, heatedly, codswallop, throttle, fly off the handle, dangling

Analysis

British Council activities about the story

Interview with the writer

British Council again

Prezi presentation

Another interview with the writer

In the Hours of Darkness, by Edna O'Brien

EDNA O’BRIEN, by Glòria Torner

She is one of the most representative contemporary authors in Ireland as a novelist, playwright, children’s and youth literature, memoirist, scriptwriter, poet and short-story writer.

 

BIOGRAPHY

Josephine Edna O’Brien was born in 1930, in Tuamgraney, County Clare, a small rural village in the west of Ireland. The youngest of four children, she grew up in the atmosphere of Irish National Catholicism of the 1940s, marked by an alcoholic father, who was a farmer, and a strict mother in religious practice who considered writing “a path of perdition”.

After finishing primary school in her village, she was educated at the Convent of Sisters of Mercy, a boarding school in Galway.  In her 20s, she went to university in Dublin where she graduated in Pharmacy in 1950 and where she worked briefly as an apothecary. In 1952, against her parents’ wishes, she married the writer Ernest Gebler, with whom she had two children. They settled in London, where O’Brien turned to writing as a full-time occupation. Ten years later, in 1962, she escaped from a loveless marriage and moved to the desolate suburban London where, at least, she felt free to write.

Her life has been divided between England, where she has lived for more than 50 years and where she writes, and Ireland, where her writing comes from and where it endlessly returns, exploring her home country from a more detached perspective.

Edna O’Brien has publicly acknowledged that James Joyce’s works, especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, were her main inspiration and led her to devote to literature for the rest of her life.

Her first novel, The Country Girls, written when she was 30, was published in 1961.  It is the history of two girls who live in a backward and repressive country, especially in rural areas of Ireland. They grow up in their strict homes, attend a convent school from which they are expelled and travel to Dublin and London in search of imaginary opportunities, love and sex. This book was considered a scandal in her country and she was labelled an enemy of Ireland. Her family felt humiliated by this book. It was the first instalment of a trilogy, written in autobiographical style, completed with The Lonely Girl, later published as Girl with Green Eyes, and Girls in the Married Bliss. Now, these two books are set in London, and there the protagonists become disillusioned with marriage and men in general.

She has written more than twenty works of fiction where the main themes are Ireland and women. Some of them are: The High Road, Down by the River, In the Forest, The Light of Evening, The Little Red Chairs, and the last one, written in 2019, Girl, which was inspired by the Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped by members of Boko Haram.

Other notable works include a dramatic work about Virginia Woolf, two important biographies, of James Joyce and Lord Byron, and an autobiographical essay called Mother Ireland.

She also has published nine short story collections where their setting varies, although Ireland appears in several of them. One of them is From Mrs Reinhard and Other Stories, where In the Hours of Darkness is included.

 

 

SUMMARY

The story opens when the protagonist, Lena, a middle-aged divorced woman, is going on her way from London to Cambridge. She is accompanying her son, Iain, who is about to start his university studies. Along the way, she draws a parallelism between her memories of her loneliness feeling of a day in the rural land surrounding Sydney in Australia, where she had been before, and this present situation. She describes the English landscape with these words: “devoid of houses and tillage”, “depopulated land”.

When they are already approaching Cambridge, Iain observes the university complex with optimism, but Lena, who is imagining the general atmosphere of study, is intrigued and frightened. She would like to be in her hotel bedroom reading the novels of Jane Austen, her favourite writer. She reflects on the future that awaits her: she will remain alone because Iain is the youngest child, the last one who lived with her. The pessimism and the loneliness for her future begins now, with these words, “bereft of her children”.

Arriving at the hotel in Cambridge, Lena observes things she didn’t expect: the hotel is near to a car park, ruined, with a lot of bars and a general confusion and noise, a “big ramshackle place”. When the porter, who takes Lena to her room, loses his way, she gets dismayed.  She also dislikes her single room because it isn’t a familiar looking room and the furnishing represents everything she hates. At that moment, she would like to be at home, and she pronounces the sentence “Bad place to die”.

Then, wanting a cup of tea, Lena goes to the lobby where there are other guests. Her new impression is more negative than the previous ones. There is a lot of confusion in the lobby, full of shopping bags that prevent a fluid passage. 

Later, in the College, she thinks she is watching a scene not of academic life, but of a commercial life, and the people there don’t look like scholars or academics, they look like salesmen or tradesmen. After a while, Lena, her son, a young professor, two first course students and their host meet to have dinner. Lena says the meat is “lovely”, even though it is not true, and all the dinner is not very successful. The conversation turns to a professor with peculiar and strange habits, or about the reasons why the students are expelled before the end of the course; but Lena, however, is not listening because she is concentrated on the beauty of the evening outside. Although the dinner has started early, their host is the first to leave. Then Lena goes to the host’s bedroom, where she has left her coat before. There he starts talking about the reasons why he has never married. She gets frightened when she looks at a violent image: a painting of a wolf with a man’s eyes hanging on the wall.  At that moment, she impulsively kisses the host.

After dinner, Lena and her son stay for a while outside, walking on the street. They part at her hotel, where Lena says good night to Iain. They decide to visit the town the following morning because they know the time to separate is approaching.

This first descriptive part of the story, the adventure of moving house, has become a desolate experience with a dark atmosphere. She has imagined a better introduction for her son, but now everything seems to work against her, and this second part will be like a nightmare.

Lena goes to her room, but instead of the quiet room she has booked, she begins to hear loud noises and discovers there is a party going on. She leaves her hotel to find a place to sleep in her son’s, but when she gets to the College, she sees a young man wearing a small motorcyclist’s leather jacket coming towards her; at first, she doesn’t recognize him, but then she realizes that he is Iain; he’s going “in search of adventure”. They talk and joke for a time, and they say good night again.

She goes back to her noisy hotel, and the manager asks her if she would like another hotel; she decides to move to another one, but this second new hotel is worse than the first one. She finds the porter with an aggressive Dalmatian dog; he leads her to a room where another woman is sleeping, and both are annoyed by the mistake. At last, she arrives to an empty room very similar to the one she has just left.  It’s impossible for Lena to relax and sleep, although she decides to take sleeping pills. Waiting till morning in this room, she spots a notice above the mirror with an amusing comment, and, after that, she sits in a chair and waits for a moment. Finally, she decides to spend the night in the armchair.

Curious and surrealist ending of the story!

 

Two remarks

The importance of the title: “Darkness” means in a literal level “at night”, but in a symbolic level it means “difficult period”. There are also some symbolic images like “the wolf with a man’s eyes”, “a drunken woman holding up a broken silver shoe”, or “the Dalmatian dog”.  

As the story is written in autobiographical style and the narrator uses the Lena’s point of view along all the story, the events and feelings of past, the feelings and facts of present and the thoughts of future of Lena are present all around the story.

 

QUESTIONS

-Why does the narrator think of Jane Austen?

-The narrator feels sad because she’s leaving her son at the University. Do you think

her son feels the same?

-When you travel, what do you prefer, renting an apartment or staying in a hotel? Tell us your reasons why.

-Did you ever have a full English breakfast? How did you like it?

-How would you like to be greeted in a new place, as for instance, job, school, club…?

-In your view, why did the narrator kiss the College host?

-Did you have a bad experience with pranks at school / work? In your opinion, do they have to be forbidden?

-What are the advantages of studying in a boarding school?

-What do you need to sleep comfortably? What do you do if you can’t sleep? Do you take any pills?

-What is the relation between the title and the story?

 

VOCABULARY

tillage, tawny, bleached, predicament, bereft, props, toddler, lobby, ramshackle, buxom, spatters, spurned, china, freshmen, sorted ... out, johns, touch and go, cockerel, seed, sherbet, grouse, tackle, game, demurred, sprouts, raspberry chantilly, frayed paisley, cruise, forborne, knit up the ravelled, laced, rusticated 

Writers talk about Edna O'Brien 

Structural Anthropology, by Adam Mars-Jones

A BIT OF BIOGRAPHY

According to the Wikipedia, Adam Mars-Jones is a British novelist and film critic; he was born in 1954, so now is 70; his father was a judge and his mother a lawyer, people belonging to the high establishment (so, being gay, we have to suppose he didn’t have an easy life when he was young).

He studied English in Cambridge.

He had a polemic with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan about feminism, the false feminism and the patriarchal model. In his essay Venus Envy about this topic, he used anthropological concepts, so this science isn’t something unknown to him.

The most celebrated books of his are a series of novels (Pilcrow, Cedilla, Caret –all punctuation symbols) around a character, John Cromer, a gay teenager with mobility issues who describes the world around him; there isn’t much plot in the story, only little stories related to the hero, or witnessed by him. The author defines this series as semi-infinite, because he can go on with them without ending.

He has also short stories collections, as Lantern Lecture, and writes regularly in newspapers, as The Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement.

SUMMARY

This is an atypical short story, because it’s written like an essay, not like a tale with characters and a plot. There’s an anecdote (a deceived wife drugs her adulterous husband and, while he’s asleep, she sticks with superglue his right hand round his penis), but the most part of the text is a pseudo-anthropological analysis of the anecdote that tries to discover the deep meaning of the wife’s doing and its relation with the human behaviour or the collective psychology. For this kind of analysis, the author uses the structuralist technique and concepts.

The structuralism is a method of linguistic analysis born in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, and basically says that you cannot discover the true essence/value/meaning/…whatever of an element without keeping in mind its relation with the other elements in the set. According to this idea, there’s no possible definition of “yellow” without keeping in mind the rest of the colours. The basic tools are pairs of opposites (cold/hot, singular/plural, etc.). Claude Levi-Strauss took advantage of this method for his anthropological studies of the South America tribes.

So the narrator pretends to use this method to study and understand the sociological and psychoanalytical pattern of the event (anecdote), and so he (or she) uses pairs of opposites to elucidate its signification. So the whole thing is a joke full of ironies at the expense of this method, nowadays already old-fashioned.

QUESTIONS

-What do you know about anthropology?

-When does an anecdote / story become a myth? Sure in your family there is a story which is repeated in the great meetings: this is a kind of myth. Don’t you have one?

-What do you know about the triangle Vulcan-Mars-Venus?

-What do you think it’s the main difference between culture and nature? Can you give some examples?

-When is food a drug? Do you follow a diet? Do you believe in diets?

-Has a wedding to be public? Give your reasons.

-According to your opinion, must a religion canvass people, or has it to restrict itself to the private sphere?

VOCABULARY

startling, tangle, retaliate, receding, binding, release, patterning, spurned, diminished, unstintingly, cleave, cleave

Review

A mention

Video: books by Adam-Mars Jones

A review of Venus Envy