Bedbugs, by Clive Sinclair

BIOGRAPHY
There is another famous Clive Sinclair, the one who was an entrepreneur and an inventor. He’s known for having produced the first pocket calculator, and then, the home computer ZX Spectrum.
But our Clive Sinclair is the author.
He was born in London in 1948. He was of Jewish origin, and his surname was Smolensky. He studied at different universities: East Anglia, California and Exeter.
He defined himself as a short stories’ writer. Even his first novel, Bibliosexuality, was originally a collection of short stories linked one to another.
He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1981 for his collection Hearts of Gold.
Asked about what he wrote, his answer was “Sex, death and Jews”, but he was also fascinated with cowboys and the Far West, and True Tales of the Wild West is a collection of stories in the Western style.
He also was compared to Kafka, Borges and Nabokov. In 1983 he was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists alongside with Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Graham Swift.
He died aged 70 in London.
 
SUMMARY
Joshua, a university English teacher with a marriage in failure, is offered to give a summer course in Cambridge about First World War Poets to a group of German students, mostly girls. He accepts the offer because of the money and also because, as he is a Jew, can avenge his people and forefathers calling mentally his course “Rosenberg’s Revenge”, being Rosenberg one of the poets who was Jewish. But, although Cambridge is only thirty miles from his place, Bury St Edmund, he has to sleep in the college because he is also going to provide the students some entertainment, not only lessons. But the rooms the university has provided for him and his students are infested with bedbugs coming from a nearby building, recently demolished.
So he starts the lessons, where he finds some unfriendly students and some acolytes. One night, for the evening entertainment, they went to the theatre where they could see The Lesson, by Ionesco, a controversial play since it’s an allegory against the Nazis. After the play, Inge, his main devotee, goes with him to a pub where she proposes to produce a similar play. Then, at the college, Inge goes to Joshua’s room with the excuse of exterminating his bedbugs, but there she has an accident going down the modernist stairs, and they get laid.
On the last Saturday, Joshua takes his students on a visit to Bury St Edmund, where he lives and where Rosenberg trained before going to the front. Inge has a minor accident, and he decides to take her home to cure the small scratching; there they find his wife, and, as if his wife doesn’t show any suspicion about their affair, they had a nice dinner.
On Tuesday they have the show, but before the performance, Joshua has a strange vision: he sees, or dreams to see, his wife dead in their kitchen with a knife stuck in her belly. The play is a very singular one: it’s similar to Ionesco’s because there are only three characters, but in our case, Joshua is dressed up as a woman, Inge as his husband, and another student is a TV set. The story ends when Joshua disguised as a housewife shoots her husband six blanks, shouting madly “Daughter of Germany!”
 
QUESTIONS
-What do you know about…?
            bedbugs, lice, fleas, ticks, mange
            Rosenberg (Great War Poet)
            Bury St Edmund
            The Lesson, by Ionesco
            Baader-Meinhof
            Martin Buber
-Do you think Germans are still anti-Semites?
-Anti-Semitism is something you find in a lot of countries and in a lot of epochs? What can be the reason?
-“Women not interested in War? What nonsense! War involves everybody.” Debate: do you think women have to be involved in military conflicts? Or: if you want to stop a military conflict, you mustn’t take part in it?

VOCABULARY
congress, bantam, looms, concerns, rubbed the cow’s nose, routed, phony, counterfeit, lop off, rash, hives, louse, prowler, spunk, pardon my French, Aussie, hatch, sulks, loony, crannies, Spreadeagled, supine, agape, gibbering, cavorts, comes, props, blanks

Was She the Only One?, by Graham Swift

SUMMARY, by Glòria Torner

The first sentence we read, “was she the only one?” is the repetition of the title, and it appears twice more in this initial paragraph. And with this humdrum question, the writer is introducing to us the memories of an elderly woman, Lily Hobbs, who remembers her complex relationship with her first husband, Albert Tanner, and, one year later, her different second marriage with Duncan Ross and their two daughters, Joyce and Margaret.

Every 25^th of June, Lily remembers her first love. She got married when she was eighteen years old. Her happiness was short-lived because Albert had to leave home to go to war. At that moment, she kept his new white shirt, the last one her husband had worn before leaving home, without washing it. She hung it in the wardrobe as an object of blind adoration. Lily caressed, smelled and put on this “sacred shirt” that reminded her of a magical memory of him with desperate romanticism. Now this shirt means love.

During the war, Albert wrote some letters to Rose, but, when months went by, he wrote her less. After a while, she knew that her husband had had his first leave, but it was cancelled. The shirt is still without washing. And now the shirt also means fidelity.

A few months passed, and then Alfred returned home for fifteen days, but he wasn’t the same man. She was waiting for love, but he didn’t touch her. He was a cold and strange man who didn’t look like a soldier, but a salesman, or almost a criminal. She doubted whether he has injured or is still healthy. Then he explained to her that he was suffering from shell shock, and he has to report to a doctor to evaluate his illness.

This is the moment that Lily hesitates about washing the shirt, but she decides not to do it. At home, Albert, who is very angry seeing the shirt in a poor condition, orders her to wash it because he believes that his wife has had an affair. This climax of suspicion and disturb is increasing in a huge aggressivity. Lily thinks that, perhaps, he is preparing his desertion. Anyway, she washes it, and she thinks that, by doing so, he will calm down and will love her again. The shirt means crisis.

One day, Lily proposes him a plan to go on a boat to Marlow on Sunday. It would be a nice excursion because Lily wants to make love. Lily tells him she wants him to wear the shirt during the trip, and he does it. They were very happy, the weather is fine and they enjoyed being together. Now the shirt means sexual desire.

But suddenly he has a change of mood: he says he wants to go back because he must return to the war. This is the second time the shirt remains hanging in the wardrobe, but now it’s no longer a fetish object. It means sadness.

Later, Lily decides to throw it to the fire. Burning the shirt means heartbreak, poignancy, desperation and hate.

Two days later, Lily receives a telegram telling her that her husband, Albert Tanner, has died “of wounds”, on the 25^th of June, ending the short marriage between Lily and Albert, like an elegy about how the war wasted lives and blasted hopes.

Following the story, she also remembers her second life. Three months later, Lily is going to Reading because of a job as a maid. On the train, she met Duncan. It was a lucky meeting because in him, she finds her new husband, the man who gives her love and sex.

But now she goes on remembering and thinking about the relationship between her sad past, Albert, and her real present, Duncan, who satisfies her desires.

At the end of the story, the first interrogative sentence becomes an affirmative one: that closes the story with this maxim.

 

SOME QUESTIONS AND REMARKS

After reading this sad and melancholic story, there are some questions in my mind:

Is the first marriage a real one, or it is only loneliness? Has she had sexual pleasure only in the second marriage?

Is “Albert” his name before leaving home, and “Bert” after going to war? I don’t know.

The story doesn’t follow any linear order from the beginning to the end. The writer wants to mix memories, sometimes in direct dialogue in third person between, sentences in second person to her second husband, and also with narrative and descriptive writing; and with the adding of “voice-over”, it becomes a complex text.
Finally, the story, “was she the only one”, is a reflexion about how a war can change a man.

TOPICS TO DEBATE

-Is it a film cliché, smelling our beloved clothes in order to remember them? Do you believe pheromones really affect humans?

-What do you know about shell shock? Have you seen the film Benediction or Regeneration or Johnny Got his Gun or Colonel Redl??

-Bert was a little fastidious: do you think his character made him prone to shell shock? Do you think some illnesses are psychosomatic?

-What do you think about military service? Has it to be obligatory?

-What implications does the word “appetites” have when meaning a woman’s sexual desire? Can shell shock cancel sexual desire?

-Did she really wish Albert went back to the front? What was harder for her: her husband’s shell-shock or her husband being in the trenches?

-Do you approve of desertion or shirking?

-What can you tell us about the beginning of the WWI?

-Why do you think he had become a corporal so quickly?

-“Wear this shirt for me” meant for Lily “let’s make love”. Do you remember other expressions from literature meaning “let’s make love”?

-“Hello, Lily. Can I come in?” was a very formal greeting and Lily felt it immediately. Can we discover other people mood only for the words they have chosen? Do you know any example?

-What is now “the height of sexiness”? What does “sexiness” depend on?

-Do you think our sweat smell differently according to our feelings / mood? They say animals are scared when they are going to die and that this fear corrupts their flesh, so we are eating corrupted meat all the time. What do you think about it?

-“He wanted to go back and be really dead”: was it the true reason?

-Why did she think the “intelligence” was hers?

-For children, do you prefer having boys or girls? In some countries there’s a preference for girls, and in some other for boys? Do you know why?

 

VOCABULARY

stud, ripe, fussy, leave, shell shock, measles, MO, lent, fabric, sheer, skulking, bellowed, private, mangle, break down, tub, fumblingly, thwarted, coaxing, tit-for-tat, willow, swan, put-upon, jetty, oars, loll, reeking, flustered, intelligence, cope, swathe, morsel, decoy

 

Mary Postgate, by Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling at the Wikipedia

Mary Postgate, analysis

Mary Postgate, essay

Audiobook

RUDYARD KIPLING

 

BIOGRAPHY

 

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in 1865. His family were very important people, and they were related to politicians and artists of the time, people that belonged to the Establishment.

When he was five, he was taken with his sister to the UK, where they were left with some cruel relatives. There he went to a poor boarding school, where he had to endure its military discipline.

When he was sixteen, he went back to India, where he worked as a journalist because he couldn’t be a soldier as he was short-sighted. But, thanks to his job, he could make himself deeply acquainted with the true Indian life.

While working as a journalist, he wrote his first poems and short stories, and those were widely read. So, when he went to England at the age of 24, he was already a well-known author. His stories were very popular because people liked exotic countries and because his style was lively and brilliant, something he undoubtedly learnt from his job as a journalist.

When he was 27, he married Carolina Balestier, sister of an American publisher, and the couple settled in Vermont. They travelled a lot, but, four years later, they returned to England because Rudyard couldn’t cope with the American lifestyle.

When he was 42, he got the Nobel Prize for literature, and he was the first English writer to get it.

During the WWI, he was pro-war and lost his son in the trenches. Then he worked in an official institution in nationalistic propaganda to support the army in the conflict; he wrote things like “Germans aren’t human beings, they are beasts”. From then on, he began to lose popularity because his topics started to be too fantastic and difficult.

He died in 1936, when he was 71 years old.

He wrote about his childhood and teenager experiences in Stalky & Co. His novel Captain Courageous is very famous for the film adaptation starring Spencer Tracy; it’s also famous Kim, the narrative about an Irish orphan having to earn his living in India. But Kipling is better when he writes short stories, like the Jungle Books. It’s also well-known the film adaptation of The Man that would be King, with Sean Connery and Michael Caine. A very interesting collection of stories for children is Just so Stories where he explains fabulously the mysteries and wonders of the nature, as for example, why the elephant has a trunk, or why the cheetah has stains in its skin.

You also have to know the poem If, because a president whose name it’s better not to remember, said he liked it.

If-, by Rudyard Kipling

 

 

MARY POSTGATE

This is the story of Mary Postgate, a very simple-minded servant who is contracted to work for Miss Fowler, a rich old spinster. Some time after starting her job, Miss Fowler has to adopt a nephew because his parents had died, but Mary Postgate is who takes care of him, protects him, defends him and indulges him. However, this nephew, Wyndham (Wynn), treats her very badly, although she doesn’t seem to notice, or she doesn't hate him for it. Then the WWI breaks out, and Wynn enlists as a pilot. He dies in a training flight, but Mary never shows her sorrow, she only wants to do practical things. Miss Fowler asks Mary to burn almost all his possessions. And then, when she is making things ready for the fire, there is a shocking incident: a barn has collapsed and has killed a girl. People think about a bomb dropped from a German plane, but the doctor says the barn was already decaying and that it collapsed by itself. Short after this, when Mary lights the fire, he sees an aviator badly injured in a tree nearby.  Is he German, French or English? Has he dropped a bomb? Is he going to die? Is Mary going to help him or call the police?

 

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters

Mary Postgate

Miss Fowler

Wyndham (Wynn) Fowler

What do you know about the WWI?

What are Taubers, Farmans and Zeppelins?

Why does Miss Fowler ask Mary, “What do you ever think of, Mary?”, and on what occasion?

What is Contrexéville?

Explain Wynn’s accident and the women’s reaction to it.

Miss Fowler said, “Old people and young people slip from under a stroke like this [her nephew’s death]. The middle-aged feel it most”. What is your opinion?

Why did Mrs Grant say, “he’ll be practically a stranger to them”?

What do you do with the things of a dead person, a relative?

What nationality was the agonizing pilot in the tree? How do you know?

What would Wynn have done with the injured pilot?

Did this aviator kill Edna with a bomb? How do you know?

How did this pilot die?

Was it justice or revenge?

Was any love between Mary and Wynn? Why do you think so?

What is the meaning of these questions: “Mary, aren’t you anything except a companion? Would you ever have been anything except a companion?”?

Why is Mary “quite handsome” at the end?

 

 

VOCABULARY

unflinchingly, slander, odd, cliques, unitemised, shamble, butt, gazetted, bouts, cassowary, bathchair, stinking, tow, buttoned up, fended her off, wailed, gaudy, barrow, goloshes, assegai, O. T. C., pewter, unearthed, fret-saw, condemned, paviour, char