Ben Jonson’s Volpone – Hypocrisy and Greed Satirized

Last year I picked up Harold Bloom’s book on Shakespeare, which got me on a serious Shakespeare kick. I had not read any of his works since high school, and, rereading them, I found them enormously entertaining. Another Elizabethan playwright mentioned by Bloom was Ben Jonson, so I decided to check out something of his. His most popular play is Volpone, which was first performed in 1605.

While Jonson is certainly no Shakespeare (who is?), Volpone is quite a fun play to read. All of the characters’ names reference animals: Volpone is a “sly fox”; Mosca, his servant, is a “fly”; Voltore, a lawyer, is a “vulture”; Corbaccio, a greedy old man, is a “raven”; and Corvino, a merchant, is a “crow”. The basic plot is one of Volpone and Mosca leading on Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, making them think each one is the sole heir of Volpone’s estate. Volpone enjoys pretending to be at death’s door while his would-be heirs outdo each other bringing him gifts to influence him.

Their greed exposes their hypocrisy, as Voltore is willing to perjure himself in court, Corbaccio disinherits his own son, and Corvino offers his virtuous wife, Celia, to Volpone – all in the hopes of being named Volpone’s beneficiary. Of course everything falls apart, not least because of Volpone’s need to gloat over the subjugation of his suitors. He disguises himself, goes out into the street, and says that he has died and left everything to Mosca. Mosca tries to betray him and actually claims title to Volpone’s estate, but the court manages to see through the web of lies and deceit he and Volpone have weaved.

There are some minor characters who are great fun – Sir Politic Would-Be, an absurd knight who is much taken with his business acumen and political knowledge; his wife, Lady Would-Be, whose incessant talking drives Volpone to distraction; and Peregrine, a travelling merchant who meets Sir Would-Be and is amused by his boasting.

There are lots of double entendres and subtle digs at the old men’s lust for women and wealth. When Mosca persuades Corvino to offer his wife to Volpone, he assures Corvino that nothing physical will actually occur:

He knows the state of’s body, what it is; That nought can warm his blood sir, but a fever; Nor any incantation raise his spirit: A long forgetfulness hath seized that part.

Ben Jonson. Complete Works of Ben Jonson (Kindle Locations 13592-13593). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

Mosca and Volpone take almost sadistic glee at driving Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino to greater and greater acts of depravity in order to acquire Volpone’s wealth:

VOLP: I shall have instantly my Vulture, Crow, Raven, come flying hither, on the news, To peck for carrion, my she-wolfe, and all, Greedy, and full of expectation —

MOS: And then to have it ravish’d from their mouths!

VOLP: ‘Tis true. I will have thee put on a gown, And take upon thee, as thou wert mine heir: Shew them a will; Open that chest, and reach Forth one of those that has the blanks; I’ll straight Put in thy name.

MOS [GIVES HIM A PAPER.]: It will be rare, sir.

VOLP: Ay, When they ev’n gape, and find themselves deluded —

MOS: Yes.

VOLP: And thou use them scurvily! Dispatch, get on thy gown.

Ben Jonson. Complete Works of Ben Jonson (Kindle Locations 14270-14276). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

A couple of completely innocent persons are almost sentenced to torture and imprisonment through the machinations of Mosca and Volpone – Celia, the wife of Corvino, and Bonario, Corbaccio’s son, who rescues her from Volpone as he is about to assault her. Fortunately, this is a comedy, and all is set right in the end.

Elizabethan England must have been a wondrous time for theatergoers. Even an understandably overshadowed talent like Jonson produced really high quality drama for the masses. I enjoyed Volpone a lot, and I’m looking forward to reading more of his work.

P. G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred In The Springtime

P. G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred In The Springtime has all the elements that make his books so much fun: mistaken identities, eccentric Earls and Dukes, love-stricken young persons who face insurmountable odds to getting married, and endless plot complications that all manage to get solved. It is set in Blandings Castle, where Clarence, the Earl of Emsworth, only seeks peace and quiet to raise his prize-winning pig, The Empress of Blandings. Alas, peace and quiet are the last things he gets in this tale.

It begins with Pongo Twistleton (no one since Charles Dickens is as good at creating characters’ names as Wodehouse) visiting his friend, Horace Davenport to touch him for 200 pounds. He has a bookie’s enforcer breathing down his neck, and he has to raise the funds to save it. Horace is engaged to Pongo’s sister, Valerie. Unfortunately, while she was vacationing in France, the jealous Horace hired a private investigator, Claude “Mustard” Pott, to tail her. She found out and was justifiably furious, breaking their engagement.

Horace had lately been spending his evenings taking dancing lessons, because Valerie insisted he improve his dancing before their wedding. His instructor is one Polly Pott, who just happens to be Claude Pott’s daughter. (By the way, the cover illustration shown above is Horace after attending a masquerade ball with Polly.) She is engaged to Ricky Gilpin, who needs 250 pounds to open an onion soup stall in London. His uncle (and Horace’s) is Alaric, Duke of Dunstable, who is adamantly opposed to Ricky getting any money and marrying Polly. He has invited himself to stay at Blandings Castle. He has an explosive temper and is liable to destroy furniture with a poker if he doesn’t get his way. He’s nuts, and he insists everyone around him is “potty”. His personal secretary is one Rupert Baxter, who was once Clarence’s secretary, except he kept getting into situations – through no fault of his own, except that he’s an “extremely unpleasant tick” – that make him look like he’s off his rocker. Anyway, Dunstable mentions to Clarence that he would do a better job caring for The Empress, so he should give her to him. Clarence is speechless with shock, but his sister, Constance, insists he must hand over his beloved pig, or else their furniture is liable to be destroyed.

The Uncle Fred in the title is The Earl of Ickenham and uncle of Pongo and Valerie. He’s also an old friend of Claude Pott. He meets Polly and immediately decides to help her and Ricky get the money for his onion soup venture by pretending to be Sir Roderick Glossop, the famous brain specialist, and visiting Blandings Castle to treat Dunstable. Polly will pose as his daughter and charm Dunstable to the point that he has to give her and Ricky his blessing (and money). Pongo will pose as the fake Glossop’s secretary. Unbeknownst to them, Horace is already at Blandings, where he is hiding from a jealous Ricky who saw him dancing with Polly.

Polly’s father Claude may be a detective, but he used to be a racetrack bookie, and he is always on the lookout for an easy mark to score money off of. As Uncle Fred explains,

   “I wouldn’t for the world say a word against Mustard – one of Nature’s gentlemen – but his greatest admirer wouldn’t call him a social asset to a girl. Mustard – there is no getting away from it – looks just what he is – a retired Silver Ring bookie who for years has been doing himself too well on starchy foods. And even if he were an Adonis, I would still be disinclined to let him loose in a refined English home. I say this in no derogatory sense, of course. One of my oldest pals. Still, there it is.”
   Pongo felt that the moment had come up to clear up a mystery. Voices could be heard in the passage, but there was just time to put the question which had been perplexing him ever since Polly Pott had glided imperceptibly into his life.
   “I say, how does a chap like that come to be her father?”
   “He married her mother. You understand the facts of life, don’t you?”

Uncle Fred’s scheme goes off the rails from the beginning, when the real Sir Roderick Glossop boards their train bound for Market Blandings and joins them in their compartment. To avoid any further spoilers, suffice it to say that every single person whom Uncle Fred wouldn’t want to show up at Blandings Castle, eventually does show up. Despite everything going wrong that possibly could, Uncle Fred remains unflappable and manages to rise above the chaos he creates. The book is laugh-out-loud funny in many places, and, of course, there is a happy ending.

One of the delights of reading Wodehouse is his wonderful use of the English language to elevate the most mundane things. Here’s Uncle Fred opining on lorgnettes (a pair of glasses with a long handle):

God bless my soul, though, you can’t compare the lorgnettes of today with the ones I used to know as a boy. I remember walking one day in Grosvenor Square with my aunt Brenda and her pug dog Jabberwocky, and a policeman came up and said that the latter ought to be wearing a muzzle. My aunt made no verbal reply. She merely whipped out her lorgnette from its holster and looked at the man, who gave one choking gasp and fell back against the railings, without a mark on him but with an awful look of horror in his staring eyes, as if he had seen some dreadful sight. A doctor was sent for, and they managed to bring him round, but he was never the same again. He had to leave the Force, and eventually drifted into the grocery business. And that is how Sir Thomas Lipton got his start.”

Here Wodehouse extols the quality of the local beer:

Nothing can ever render the shattering of his hopes and the bringing of his dream castles to ruin about his ears really agreeable to a young man, but the beer purveyed by G. Ovens, proprietor of the Emsworth Arms, unquestionably does its best. The Ovens home-brewed is a liquid Pollyanna, forever pointing out the bright side and indicating silver linings. It slips its little hand in yours, and whispers, “Cheer up!” If King Lear had had a tankard of it handy, we should have had far less of that ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks’ stuff’.

Every Wodehouse novel is great fun, and Uncle Fred In The Springtime is especially wonderful. Wodehouse set several tales at Blandings Castle, and you can read them in any order. Uncle Fred is a perfect introduction to that idyllic estate.

Everybody Behaves Badly, In Both Fiction and Real Life

From L to R: Hemingway, Harold Loeb, Lady Duff Twysden, Hadley Hemingway, Donald Ogden Stewart, Patrick Guthrie

Book number 12 of 2024!

In an earlier post, I shared my thoughts on Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises. I read it, because I was given Everybody Behaves Badly, Lesley M. M. Blume’s nonfiction account of how that novel was written. Now that I’ve read Blume’s book, I’m really glad I took the time to read Hemingway’s novel first. Everybody Behaves Badly (The title is taken from a line the character Jake Barnes says: “Everybody behaves badly, given a chance.”) is the fascinating story of how Hemingway was driven to be a famous writer from his first days as a reporter.

He was a master of self-promotion, managing to get introduced to all the right people at the right times. After he married Hadley Richardson, who was his biggest cheerleader, they planned to honeymoon in Italy, where he had done some war reporting. However, his writing had impressed the then-popular writer Sherwood Anderson, and he urged them to go to Paris. He even provided Hemingway with letters of introduction to all the “best” artists of Paris’ thriving modernist community.

Thanks to Anderson’s introductions, Hemingway soon ingratiated himself into Gertrude Stein’s salon group. As long as she was useful, he obediently listened to her writing advice. He also got an editorial job at Ford Madox Ford’s literary journal. At this point in his career, besides his journalism, he had only published a slim volume of not-very-good short stories. Yet he managed to get everyone in Paris excited about his work, including F. Scott Fitzgerald.

His friend from the States, Harold Loeb, joined him in Paris, and they became involved in a group of dissolute ex-pats that included Loeb’s mistress, Kitty Cannell, Algonquin Roundtabler Donald Ogden Stewart, Lady Duff Twysden, and Duff’s lover Patrick Guthrie (see picture above). Hemingway was desperately trying to find something that he could write a novel on. He was getting nothing but rejections of his short stories from publishers, and they all wanted him to submit a novel.

Eventually, the Paris group took a trip to see the bullfights in Pamplona, Spain, and after they returned to Paris, Hemingway had his inspiration – he would write up their exploits in novel form. This he did, basically writing up everything they did (but leaving out his wife, Hadley) and changing only the names. He never told his friends that they were thinly-disguised characters in his upcoming novel.

Meanwhile, Hemingway managed to get out of his publishing contract with Boni & Liveright (which Sherwood Anderson had helped him get), and he jumped to Charles Scribner’s. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, believed in Hemingway enough to risk his job to get him signed. At the time, Scribner’s was a fairly staid and conservative publisher, having authors like Edith Wharton and Henry James on their roster. Fitzgerald was their hot young writer, but even he was considered old-school compared to Hemingway’s radically stripped down writing style.

Just before Hemingway submitted his manuscript for The Sun Also Rises, Sherwood Anderson published his latest novel, Dark Laughter. Hemingway was so contemptuous of it that he immediately wrote a parody of it, The Torrents of Spring, which he demanded Scribner’s release before The Sun Also Rises. All of his friends were appalled and urged him to not publish it, because it was so hurtful to the man who had got his career going. (Poor Anderson – he is also lampooned in William Faulkner’s second novel, Mosquitos.)

Scribner’s reluctantly put out Torrents, just so they could get their hands on The Sun Also Rises. Of course, it didn’t sell many copies at all, but Anderson was deeply hurt by it. Years later, he wrote in a letter that, “In the case of Hemmy, there is always the desire to kill.” Anderson would not be the only person Hemingway stabbed in the back on his rise to fame.

Once The Sun Also Rises was released, all of his friends who had encouraged and supported him when he and Hadley were desperately poor in Paris were shocked to see themselves portrayed with such unflattering portraits. Lady Duff was haunted by Hemingway’s portrayal of her as an alcoholic nymphomaniac. After her divorce with her English husband was finalized, she was kept from seeing her son, largely due to how she was characterized in the book. Hemingway’s friendships with Loeb and Stewart never recovered. As Loeb later said, “The book hit me like an uppercut.”

Hemingway’s and Hadley’s marriage also fell apart. He had been having an affair with another American ex-pat, Pauline Pfeiffer. After months of traveling together in an awkward ménage a trois, Hadley finally agreed to a divorce, taking herself and their little son, Bumby, back to the states. Hemingway was free to begin work on his next novel. As Stewart cracked years later, Hemingway seemed to need a new woman to write every new novel.

Blume does an excellent job of fairly and without judgment chronicling the rise of Hemingway from a lowly foreign correspondent to “the voice of the lost generation”. She doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to his selfishness and lack of gratitude. He had no compunction about stabbing his strongest supporters in the back if he didn’t need them any longer. And yet, she also illustrates how dedicated he was to his craft. He never quit working on developing a new and modern style of writing, which endures to this day. He was by no means an admirable person, character-wise, but he was certainly a gifted writer. I suppose he is another case of having to ignore the personal foibles of the artist to enjoy his or her work.

Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises – Beauty In The Midst of Aimlessness

The last time I read Ernest Hemingway was in high school, when A Farewell To Arms was assigned in my 11th grade English class. I liked it, but not enough to read more of his stuff.

This past Christmas, I was given Lesley Blume’s Everybody Behaves Badly, which is an account of Hemingway and other American expats living in Europe in the mid 1920s. So, I figured before I tackled Blume’s book, I should read the novel Hemingway based his experiences on: The Sun Also Rises.

Published in 1926, it was Hemingway’s first novel and it made a big splash. In an earlier post, I wrote about William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which came out around the same time. The two works could not be more different, stylistically. Where Faulkner is elusive and opaque, with sentences running to paragraph length, Hemingway is terse and to the point. It looks like it should be easy to write like him, but it isn’t. Every word counts.

The Sun Also Rises chronicles the adventures and misadventures of a group of dysfunctional Americans and Brits in France and Spain. Jake Barnes, the narrator, is a journalist who was injured in WWI and is impotent. Robert Cohn is an acquaintance of his, Bill Gorton is a childhood friend, and Lady Brett Ashley is the beautiful woman about whom they all orbit. She is engaged to Michael Campbell, a bankrupt Scotsman, but she flits from one man to another.

In Paris during the day, they go from one café to the next, bickering and carousing. At night, they hop from one bar to another. If there is one constant, it’s a high level of alcohol consumption. From the beginning, Hemingway sets an atmosphere of aimlessness and nihilism. At the front of the book, he quotes Gertrude Stein’s epigram, “You are all a lost generation.”

Barnes and Gorton plan to go fishing in Spain, and then meet everyone in Pamplona for the annual fiesta and bull-fights. The most pleasant passages in the book describe Jake and Bill in the Spanish countryside, fishing for trout. Hemingway has a way of creating perfectly clear visual images of scenes with few words.

I got my rod that was leaning against the tree, took the bait-can and landing-net, and walked out onto the dam. It was built to provide a head of water for driving logs. The gate was up, and I sat on one of the squared timbers and watched the smooth apron of water before the river tumbled into the falls. In the white water at the foot of the dam it was deep. As I baited up, a trout shot up out of the white water into the falls and was carried down. Before I could finish baiting, another trout jumped at the falls, making the same lovely arc and disappearing into the water that was thundering down. I put on a good-sized sinker and dropped into the white water close to the edge of the timbers of the dam.

I did not feel the first trout strike. When I started to pull up I felt that I had one and brought him, fighting and bending the rod almost double, out of the boiling water at the foot of the falls, and swung him up and onto the dam. He was a good trout, and I banged his head against the timber so that he quivered out straight, and then slipped him into my bag.

Bill Gorton and Jake Barnes have a relaxed time until they go to Pamplona and meet up with Brett, Robert, and Mike. By this time, Brett has spent a few days (and nights) with Robert, and there is understandable tension between him and Mike. There are also wonderful descriptions of the fiesta and the bull-fighting.

Bill provides some comic relief, but it only serves to reinforce the feeling of pointless ennui:

Bill was buying shoe-shines for Mike. Bootblacks opened the street door and each one Bill called over and started to work on Mike.

“This is the eleventh time my boots have been polished,” Mike said. “I say, Bill is an ass.”

The bootblacks had evidently spread the report. Another came in. “Limpia botas?” he said to Bill.

“No,” said Bill. “For this Señor.”

There’s also a memorable line when he talks with Mike about his bankruptcy:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Jake, Robert, and Mike are all in love (or lust) with Brett, with the predictable results. I love how Hemingway describes her so succinctly here:

She had just been brushing her hair and held the brush in her hand. The room was in that disorder produced only by those who have always had servants.

Lesley Blume writes that F. Scott Fitzgerald was the last writer of the 19th century, the last Romantic, a Strauss. Hemingway, on the other hand was the first truly modern writer who ushered in the 20th century – a Stravinsky. I think it is hard for us in the 21st century to realize how revolutionary his writing style was in 1926, because we are so accustomed to it now. I suppose literature would still be written in the style of Henry James if not for Hemingway, and for that alone I am eternally grateful.

The Sun Also Rises is a moving depiction of a generation that was ruined by The Great War. Prewar European civilization and culture was the highest expression of humanity in history, and in a few years it was irrevocably shattered. There was no returning to innocence after the horrific slaughter of the war. As Brett and Jake discuss in one of their last conversations,

You know I feel rather damned good, Jake.”

“You should.”

“You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.”

“Yes.”

“It’s sort of what we have instead of God.”

“Some people have God,” I said. “Quite a lot.”

“He never worked very well with me.”

“Should we have another Martini?”