Miss Pulkinhorn, by William Golding

Analysis

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BIOGRAPHY

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911. His father was a teacher, but the family was very poor. Nevertheless, they were able to pay his studies in a grammar school and then at the university.

He worked as a teacher like his father before him. He got married and had two children. During the WWII, he served in the Royal Navy as an officer and commanded a ship, although he didn’t belong to the ruler classes.

All his life he was disappointed with the humankind and said “men produced evil as bees produced honey”, and that he lived under (not in) the British class system and that this system was indestructible. This is more or less the message of his most famous book, Lord of the Flies. The novel narrates how a group of educated children gets stranded on a desert island after a plane crash, where all the adults die. They try to organize a society to survive on the island, but they fail because of a disagreement between them that drives them to war and to a regression to savagery.

At the beginning, the book (under the name of Strangers from Within) was rejected by the publisher, but then, after some changes in the text, was accepted. It was published in 1954.

The Spire, published in 1964, is about the construction of a spire on the Salisbury Cathedral. The dean is obsessed with the spire, but the cathedral doesn’t have any foundations, and his stubbornness will destroy human lives around him.

Rites of Passage, which got the Booker Prize in 1980, tells the story of Edmund Talbot, a man sailing to Australia during the Napoleonic time. Edmund Talbot keeps a journal where he records the life on the ship. But, if at the beginning the passage is amusing, it soon becomes cruel because the sailors bully another passenger, Reverend Colley.

William Golding got the Nobel Prize in 1983, after an unexpected and even contentious choice. Other nominees were Claude Simon, Anthony Burgess, Graham Green, and more.

He died at 81 in Cornwall.

SUMMARY

Sir Edward, the organist of a cathedral, tells us the story of two sanctimonious people: Miss Pulkinhorn, a bigoted old woman, and a sincere devotee (and perhaps mystic), lunatic old man.

Miss Pulkinhorn watches the behaviour of all people who goes to church, because she thinks that everybody is a Pharisee. According to the organist, she wants to punish one way or another everybody, even himself; and he feels a bit relieved when he is made Sir, because then he knew she couldn’t do any harm to him. But her worst enemy is the fervent old man; she is envious and thinks that he is a hypocrite because he goes to church three times a day to pray ecstatically in front of the Sacrament. She wants to give him a lesson, to punish him for his supposed fake piety.

By the way, you must know that the Sacrament is the holy Host, the bread that means Jesus's body, and that it is kept in a kind of cupboard called sanctuary with a candle near it; if the candle, or light, is lit, then the Sacrament is there; if not, the candle is put out.

One day, Sir Edward has to go to the cathedral to leave a note giving instructions to his substitute because the next day he is going to London. He almost forgot and went there very late. In his way there, he crossed paths with a priest (the precentor) who was carrying the Sacrament to give Canon Blake the last rites, because he was agonizing.

Inside the church, there were only two people more, the verger (or sacristan) Rekeby, who was checking that all things were all right, and Miss Pulkinhorn, all the time spying. After a while, the devout old man entered the church. This time he was late because he had met a poor man and had given him his jacket and shirt, in a kind of charity work; so he was beaming when he kneeled to pray in the chapel of the Sacrament. But the verger, in his round to check the things, saw that the candle of the Sacrament was on, but he didn’t see the old man, because he was in the back of the chapel. However, the Sacrament wasn’t there, and Rekeby thought the precentor had forgotten to blow the candle out; so he put the light out. Now the old man realized that he was praying to the void, and he felt so frustrated that he had a fit: he laughed and cried, went away and collapsed near the door. The organist and Rekeby heard his cries and went to help him; they carried him to the verger’s cottage, and from there he was taken to the hospital, where he died some days after. Meanwhile, Miss Pulkinhorn was still inside the church, but she didn’t come to help.

But, how was it possible the light was on if the Sacrament wasn’t there? The organist suspected that Miss Pulkinhorn lit it after the precentor had put it out when he went away with the Host to Canon Blake. But she made a mistake: as she saw the old man wasn’t coming, although he was always punctual, she thought he wouldn’t come at all and was going to put the candle out again, when she met Sir Edward and couldn’t do it and had to go by.

Sir Edward believed she wanted to chastise the old man, showing him his piety was a fake. But he didn’t say anything and kept watching her from the distance. Miss Pulkinhorn had to know of Sir Edward suspicions, because the evening of the events they saw each other inside the church. However, she went on attending the church with the same stiffness and affected righteousness as ever.

The time passed, until one day, all of a sudden, Miss Pulkinhorn approached Sir Edward and told him that her conscience was perfectly clear. Nevertheless, she died seven days after.

QUESTIONS

-What are the thirty-nine articles?

-Do you like visiting churches? Is there any you liked best? Is there anyone you remember because of something curious or interesting?

-Have you sung in a choir? Can you tell us your experiences with singing?

-How religious is Sir Edward?

-In your view, what was Miss Pulkinhorn’s cause of death?

-There’s the moon acting upon the characters. Do you think stars, planets and constellations have any influence in our lives?

VOCABULARY

chapter, what with, rubric, flat, buns, shoddy, ambulatory, sat out, instep, enmeshed, smouldering, curdles, steel-sheer adamant, decani, chantry, stumps, spell, close, turned up, flue, cantered, cheapened, precentor, pyx, aumbry, guttered out, anthem, rush-bottom

Matrilineal, by Tessa Hadley

Art Pepper

SUMMARY, by Nora Carranza

At the very beginning of Matrilineal, we know that Helen had left her husband forty years ago.

At that time, she was married to Phil, and they had two little girls: Nia and Sophie.

The family lived in an apartment at the top floor of a house situated in a nice street of a good neighbourhood. There were beautiful trees and gardens around the building.

To get to their flat, it was necessary to climb up an exterior metal staircase which produced a strong noise at every step they take, no matter how carefully they were. A retired Reverend lived on the flat below theirs. He was always looking through the curtains when the family went up and down, and also complained when they speak aloud, or play music or made some noise on the top floor.

The couple was not very well off, only Phil worked. He was a jazz musician; he played the alto saxophone and gave lessons at a college. Helen was a dancer before having the girls. Since then, she worked at home, took care of Nia and Sophie, took them to play in the gardens or went shopping with them for what was necessary at home, or to visit her mother by bus.

Helen had kept the physical aspect of a dancer and had a natural condition for spontaneous elegance.

The story explains that one grey afternoon Helen was at home; Sophie was sleeping and Nia playing with her doll. Helen used that quiet moment for scrubbing the floor. Unexpectedly, Phil arrived early: one lesson had been cancelled, and he returned happy at home to practise with his alto.

But Helen was not pleased at all with that possibility. They started an old quarrel, about playing music at home, the Reverend complaining, the difficulty of changing home…

When Helen met Phil, she fell in love with him because of his music, his body and movements on stage, the attraction he had over the audience. Now that all seemed evaporated, he accused Helen of killing him, and she threw the scrub at him hitting his head. Nia was astonished.

That same evening, Helen left home with her children and arrived to her mother’s apartment. The father was dead and, the lady, Nana Allen, lived on top of a hairdresser’s and also worked there. Helen didn’t have a close relationship with her mother, they were quite different.

Anyway, that evening the grandmother was helpful with the three visitors. She prepared something to eat, put the girls to sleep and talk to Helen for hours, although they saw facts in different ways.

Nia is who remembers those facts forty years later. By then, Phil was dead (he died of a heart attack in his fifties), Sophie got married and had three children; Nana Allen also died long ago, and Helen is in her sixties. She’s still an elegant woman, has had two important relationships, but didn’t get married again.

When Sophie tells her mother her memories about that evening, Helen didn’t remember it at all; she sincerely believes she was in love with Phil, she loved his music and, besides, she could have had a career as a dancer (not her idea when married).

Nia proposed Helen a trip to New York, to visit a painting exhibition, and there they went.

Nia had started to be worried about that trip because Helen could get ill, or they both could start arguing, even if they went normally well together.

After a rainy arrival at New York, little by little they got confident with the hotel and the city, did many visits and enjoyed the museum. Helen seemed completely satisfied when, after visiting the Met, they got back to the hotel. Nia went out for some food because her mother preferred to stay in bed. Finally, they ate, enjoyed watching television and felt asleep early.

When Nia woke during the night, she perceived the heat and presence of her mother, as when she was a small girl, and happily felt asleep again.

Perhaps the idea of Matrilineal is that some things are transmitted along generations from mother to daughter, in spite of differences and distance, and they need each other along lifetime, mainly when life becomes hard.

QUESTIONS

-“Forty years ago, Helen left her husband.” The narrator doesn’t use the word “divorced”. Do you think they got back together for some time, or they got divorced immediately? How do you know?

-Think about where they live. Why is this scenery important ?

-Can you tell us what mum advices her children about clothes? Do you think it’s a good piece of advice?

-Do you think Helen left dancing because she had children, or because she didn’t like dancing so much?

-They had problems with their neighbours downstairs. What are the typical problems with neighbours?

-“Helen left Phil at about half past six.” Why do you think the narrator tells us the time so exactly?

-In your opinion, did the weather have any influence in the incident between Helen and Bill?

-The narrator says they were poor. What details give us this idea?

-What is your experience / opinion about practising music at home?

-What do you know about Art Pepper?

-Why does Phil attract people? Do you think that is enough to be in love with someone? What do you do with a person of only one quality or talent?

-The college had complained about Phil’s hair. What can you say about etiquette at work / school?

-What method do you have to calm yourself down when you feel extremely irritated?

-When Helen imagined him dying in an accident after a concert, do you think she really wanted him dead?

-In your opinion, do their children understood what happened?

-Does the physical constitution determine a person’s character? I mean, do fat people are nicer / funnier than thin people? Or is it only a cliché?

-Mrs Allen has a special pronged fork. Do you have a very special object, tool, instrument… ? What is the meaning of this tool in the story?

“Love is such a lie. In marriage, it’s a lie.” Is this a universal truth, or only a moment of irritation?

-Singing / writing about love, does it mean one knows what love is?

-Do you think we can efface from our memory moments of our life because they were annoying us or because we feel remorse?

-What do you know about Greenham Common?

-What do you need to do to have a good trip in company?

-What do you travel for? What are you looking for when you travel?

-What is the meaning of the visit to NY in the story?

 

VOCABULARY

pollarded, matching, nonchalant, cut and line, valet, patent, intimation, driftwood, backcombed, slacks, hilly, tugs, chunky, soundproof, portentousness, off-beat, alto, insane, cot, starkly, moorland, muffled, fleece, thrush, leading rein, buoyant, wary, retail, bill, wig, poised, quivering, stubbornness, bleat, nana, quilt, barrel, special pronged fork, adamantly, seersucker, matted, puckery, crossly, perm papers, cheated, crumble, whorls, rougher, dado, pampered, rough, cornered, conveyor belt, shredder, skewed, rakishly, Ladies, surly, seediness, courtroom drama

 

The Teacher's Story, by Gita Mehta

Gita Mehta at the Wikipedia

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Gita Mehta, The Teacher’s Story, by Elisa Sola

 

Gita Mehta, biography

 

Gita Mehta is an Indian writer and documentary filmmaker. She was born in Delhi in 1943 into a well-known Odia family. She’s alive, and she’s 79 years old.

Odia people are native to the Indian state of Odisha, which is located in Eastern of India, and they have their own language, Odia, which is one of the classical languages of India. India is an independent republic since 1950, and Odisha, formerly Orissa, became independent into the republic of India on April 1936.

Gita’s father, Biju Patnaik, was an Indian independence activist and a Chief Minister in post-independence Odisha, and her brother, Naveen Patnaik, is the Chief Minister of Odisha since 2000. In 2019 Gita Mehta was nominated for one of the highest civilian awards in the field of literature and education, the Padma Shri, but she declined, because the general elections were coming and she didn’t want to harm her brother.

She was educated in India and in the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. In her professional career, she has produced and/or directed 14 television documentaries for UK, European and US networks. During the years 1970–1971 she was a television war correspondent for the US television network NBC.

She is the widow of Sonny Mehta, former head of the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, whom she married in 1965. She has one son, Aditya Singh Mehta. Her books have been translated into 21 languages and been on the bestseller lists in Europe, the US and India. Her fiction and non-fiction writings focus exclusively on India - its culture and history - and on the Western perception of it. Her works reflect the insight gained through her journalistic and political background.

She has published 5 works: Karma Cola in 1979, a non-fiction book about India and its mysticism; Raj, her first novel, in 1989, which is and colourful historical story that follows the progression of a young woman born into Indian nobility under the British Raj. In this novel, she mixes history and fiction. The next work is A River Sutra, published in 1993, a collection of short stories, including our story, “The Teacher’s Story”. Her latest work was Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India, in 2006, which is a collection of essays about India since Independence.

Mehta divides her time between New York City, London and New Delhi.

 

The Teacher’s Story

 

Gita Mehta is an Indian writer that she has written about Indian culture and society. In this short story, the author shows us how the life in India is. We know the paanwallah, the paan leaves, betel leaves, the samosa, the paisa, the Quawwali singers of Nizamuddin, the tanpura, the raga, the street hawkers, the goats and shepherds in the marble mausoleum of the Victoria Memorial…

The Teacher’s Story is one of the six stories that make up the novel A River Sutra. These stories are: “The Monk’s Story", “The Teacher’s Story”, “The Executive’s Story”, “The Courtesan’s Story”, “The Musician’s Story” and “The Minstrel’s Story”.  Every main character of the novel represents a particular community.

These six stories are presented by a nameless narrator who is in dialogue with his close friend Tariq Mia. In this novel, Gita Mehta uses not only one narrator, but sub-narrators. For instance, in the Monk’s Story the narrator is the nameless narrator, but in The Teacher’s Story the narrator is Tariq Mia, an old Muslim Mullah who is the best friend of that narrator. Therefore, the story is told from third person point of view and makes the narration omniscient. The technique of the novel is similar to the epic Mahabharata because these narrators aren’t involved in the novel as a character. However, they know omnisciently everything that happens, because they have been told or witnessed.

The kind of narration, very simple on the surface level, with flat characters, seeks to give moral lessons to the people, and it roots with the ancient Indian tradition of story-telling. In ancient times' story telling was a skill, and Gita Mehta wants to tell a traditional story with its moral message.

The main character of The Teacher’s Story is Master Mohan, a very sensitive person who sees broken his dream to become a famous singer when he was child because of his tuberculosis. Due to that, he became a teacher’s music like his father, who couldn’t see his dream come true. However, Master Mohan, despite not having fulfilled his dream and being blamed for it by his wife and children, is not a bitter man and continues to look for a way to live with his goal. On this path, he meets Imrat, a blind and poor boy with a great ability to sing: good voice and good hearing, and they both immediately make a bond.

Master Mohan teaches little Imrat to turn him into what he couldn’t be: a splendid singer, and they both form a family, the sweet family that they don’t have, because they both are orphans in some way (Master Mohan is rejected by his family and the boy is abandoned by his sister because she can’t raise him).

In the end, the boy achieves fame in the form of a record contract, but his voice is so pure that he is murdered out of envy, in an act of much cruelty that has a moral explanation: “such voice is not human. What will happen to music if this is the standard by which God judges us?”

If I had to compare this little story with a piece of music, I would do it with de Ravel Bolero, because it rises in tone to the final ecstasy: the pure voice of Imrat who can’t survive in this world of evil and is silenced with a sword.

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters

-Master Mohan

-His wife

-His father

-His children

-Mohammed-sahib

-The paanwallah

-Imrat

-Imrat’s sister

What are the Quawwali singers of Nizamuddin?

Why did Mohan keep Imrat?

Can you tell us about the attacks from Mohan’s wife and children against Imrat?

What do you know about the taboo against eating pork? What other taboos you know that are strange for us?

What do you think about children’s cruelty? Is it something biological, or something that they learn from society, family, school?

Try to make a description of the Victoria Memorial Park in Calcutta.

What’s the Ochterlony’s Needle?

Who was Amir Rumi?

What kind of song did the boy sing? I mean, what was the topic of the songs?

Tell us adjectives for Imrat voice.

What is Tansen’s tamarind tree?

When did the miracle of an offer for a recording contract happen?

Don’t you think there is a contradiction singing for God and at the same time singing for a recording contract?

In your opinion, what happened to Imrat at the end? How do you know?

 

VOCABULARY

paanwallah, paan, betel, sahib, yoked, taunts, paisa, muffling, drilling, relishing, struts, tablas, sheikh, prodded, welling, pimp, puffed up, clumsiness, greed, drone, tanpura, raga, hawkers, samosa, pandering

Never, by H. E. Bates

Summary

Wikipedia

H.E. Bates's books in films

Bates's website

Bates: The Modern Short Story

 

H. E. Bates, Never, by Elisa Sola

 

BIOGRAPHY

Herbert Ernest Bates was born on the 16th of May, 1905 (nineteen o five), in Rushden, Northamptonshire. Therefore, he was an English author.

His grandfather Charles Lucas was a shoemaker and led Herbert to walk around the countryside, and this is where he learnt to appreciate the plants and wildlife of the area of North Bedfordshire, where his grandmother's family came from. In fact, many of his stories describe life in rural areas of England.

He was educated at Ketting Grammar School, where he enjoyed football and athletics. His English teacher there was Edmund Kirby, who was to influence his studies of literature and poetry. He left school at sixteen and became a junior reporter in the Northampton Chronicle, but he hated his job. Then he took a job as a clerk for a leather merchant and it was there where he wrote his first novel The Two Sisters, when he was merely twenty years old. in 1925, when he was 21 years old, he found a company willing to publish this book.

In 1931 he married Marjorie Hellen and they moved to Little Chest, in Kent. There they bought a granary which they converted in a beautiful garden. In this environment he could write and quickly gained a reputation for writing stories about country ways.

During World War II he continued writing stories, alongside with his duties in the RAF, under the pseudonym of "Flying Officer X". In some of his stories, he wrote about several people who were identifiable to the locals. In fact, he dedicated several of his books to the people who had influenced his life: the character Uncle Silas (in a series of stories) is his great uncle Joseph Betts. Another famous character was Sam Smith, who was a friend whom he had learnt about poaching (stealing game).

Marjorie and Herbert had four children: Ann, Judith, Richard and Jonathan who were grown with the same love for nature. Herbert wrote also a book about gardening and an autobiography.

H.E. Bates died in 1974, aged 68, after a serious illness, but his greatest success came after his death, when his son Richard produced a television series based on the Pop Larkin family in The Darling Buds of May, and its sequels as well as adaptations of My Uncle Silas, A Moment in Time, Fair Stood the Wind for France, and Love for Lydia.

H. E. Bates has a road named after him in his town of Rushden.

 

NEVER

In the short story “Never” by H. E. Bates, a teenage girl by the name of Nellie decides that she wants to leave home, because her life is monotonous, but in reality, she doesn’t want to leave, or she can't leave.

The author describes a shading landscape and a depressed mood of the girl. All the elements in the story are chosen to recreate a sad and depressing atmosphere. Everything suggests that the girl is suffering from a mental illness. I think that she has a depression. Even at one point of the story she acknowledges that she isn’t well: "I hate everyone. I've changed until I hardly know myself". Some elements used by the author to create this atmosphere are:

1. The constant hesitation: "what shall I take? The blue dress with the rosette? What else? What else" / "Should she go to Elden or Olde?"

2. The repetition: "It was all confused. It was all confused" (she is confused and the landscape is confused too (clouds, half-dark room) / "I'm going away, I'm going away (she had said hundred times during the afternoon)", "She counted the money a dozen times", he moved her fingers anxiously.

3. The obsessive tune of the waltz in her mind, with the train schedule: "Elden 6.13, Olde 6.18"... The domestic sound of the tea cups reveals us the routine that she hates.

4. The cold throughout the story and the heat at the climax, when she thinks that she is about to leave. In the beginning she is in a drowsy, half-dark room, a sunset, with great clouds across the sky. We imagine a cold atmosphere. In the middle of the story, at the climax, she "felt warm", her breast rises and falls, her body felt a light thrill and she wishes she had no more fear, but in the end cold returns: "she felt cold... It was cold."

4. The weight: In the beginning her luggage is light, but after her euphoria, the luggage is heavy.

5. The light: The story begins in a "drowsy, half-dark room" (it was afternoon) and ends in the same "drowsy room", but "absolutely dark" (it was black night), like the future of the girl. The last words of the story "Some day! Some day!", are in contrast with the title: Never! From this point of view, it's a circular story.

With all these sensory elements: light, height, temperature, sound..., the author creates an atmosphere of deep discomfort. The familiar environment of the girl is also negative because her father is moaning about his lack of luck, and her routines are empty of excitement or energy. She acts only to fill up the day.

Faced with this, the girl wants to break this dynamic, but she is so afraid that she is unable to take the step in order to change her life.

Many people had dreamed of some new exciting adventures, new experiences, something very different from the same old existence. Some of them take this step, others are still questioning whether they're ready for it, and finally, others give it up. 

QUESTIONS

Describe the protagonist: age, interests, personality

What is the meaning of “sat in a heap”?

Talk about her family.

Why do you think she wants to go away?

What’s her biggest worry about going away?

What are her daily routines?

What things did she put in her bag to go away?

What is Elden 6.13 and Olde 6.18?

Where can you find the rhythm of a waltz in Elden 6.13 and in Olde 6.18?

What will be the best moment (day, week, year) to run away? Why?

There’s a big ellipsis of time in the story. What ellipsis is this one and why?

When she packed her things the bag “was not heavy” (page 392, line 17), but then it “grew heavy” (page 393, line 24). What is your opinion about this change?

Did she really want to go? How do you know?

Why the “red ring” was mocking her?

What weather elements pictured her disappointment?

Do you think she even went out of the house? Why?

What is a rite of passage? What rites of passage do you know?

Tell us about any “rite of passage” (yours, your children...) or any anecdote, any moment you remember of your adolescence, something that was decisive in your life.

VOCABULARY

guide, rotten, rosette, mending, hand, ace, trump, mournful, utter, prattle, strum, thrill, bottom G, flat, fitful