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Showing posts from April, 2021

E: It's a Battlefield (1934)

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five chapters, written Sept 1932 to Aug 1933 "a large inclusive picture of a city which should use my experience as much as my imagination"  [ wikipedia ] [ goodreads ] [ editions/covers ] reviews w/spoilers: [ astrofella ] Kinglake [ quoted passage ]  wooden bear? JM Murry Lady Ottoline Jim Drover, a bus driver Milly, his wife Conrad Drover, his brother Kay, Milly's sister Surrogate, rich economist (based on John Middleton Murry, according to GG) Jules, cafe worker Conder, Communist journalist Caroline Bury, society hostess (inspired by Lady Ottoline Morrell)

D: Stamboul Train (1932)

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five parts set in April 1932? written from January to July  US title: Orient Express [ wikipedia ] reviews w/spoilers: [ astrofella ]   George Santayana, "Everything is lyrical in its ideal essence; tragic in its fate and comic in its existence"  audio inspiration [ youtube ] zoom JB Priestley Mabel Warren Janet Pardoe Josef Grünlich Carleton Myatt Eckman Coral Musker Dr. Czinner Stein Savory (JB Priestley found this defamatory : eg Dickens, pipe-smoking, blunt fingers) Eckart   Part One Ostend I II plate-lifter   Part Two Cologne Part Three Vienna Part Four Subotica Part Five Constantinople

C: Rumour at Nightfall (1931)

 '[Frank] Swinnerton’s assessment of the novel [Evening News, 20Nov1931] was clear-cut: ‘Its setting is Carlist Spain; its characters are three in number; its story a simple triangle; and its mysteriousness infinite … Mr Greene’s [characters] spend their time in hinting. You would think they concealed a difficult profundity … [Their] actions are … simple; their talk seems to belong to another world. It is the incongruity that baffles the reader. Not one of these people can give a plain answer to a plain question. Their tongues jump heavily into irrelevance. They are not so much evasive as gravely incomprehensible, even to one another.’' [Asperger's?] 'In Richard Greene’s telling, Graham’s bipolar disorder afflicted him not just, or even mostly, with overexcitement and depression but above all with a terrible boredom , which he could alleviate only by constant thrill-seeking ' three parts, ten subsections inspired by Conrad's Arrow of Gold  also Henty [ wikipedia

000: unpublished, etc (1924ff)

pace: 500 words/day 1924: " Prologue To Pilgrimage" (usually called Anthony Sant ) 73,000-word s, about a black boy born to white parents 1925: Babbling April (poems) [ quotes-pdf ] 1925–26: "The Episode " 82,000 words 1927: marriage 1927–28? " Fanatic Arabia" seven page fragment 1950s? " Lucius" 18,000 words   https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=ggs stories: "The End of the Party" (1929) "The Second Death" (1929) "Proof Positive" (1930) "I Spy" (1930) 1930: begun writing a biography of John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester 1935: The Bear Fell Free  

B: The Name of Action (1930)

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'In 1980, at the age of seventy-six, when he drove himself to re-read The Name of Action, he admitted that a few months afterwards he had forgotten what happened finally to his heroine – ‘so little does she live or matter’. And of his hero, Oliver Chant, he admitted that he was ‘only a daydream in the mind of a young romantic author, for it takes years of brooding and of guilt, of self-criticism and of self-justification, to clear from the eyes the haze of hopes and dreams and false ambitions.’  inspired by Moss's " Defeat "? title suggested by Clemence Dane 11 chapters [ wikipedia ] [ archive ] [ goodreads ] [ editions/covers ] Hamlet : Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sickled o'er with the pale cast of thought. And enterprises of great pith and moment — With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action .  TS Eliot quote :     "Between the idea     And the reality     Between the motion

A: The Man Within (1929)

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 GG was 25yo (‘I was married and I was happy... In the evenings I worked at The Times [reviewing films? no, 1935 ], and in the mornings I worked on my third novel.’) Writing to his future wife about it in 1926 he describes ‘a gorgeous long cold-blooded letter by an anonymous informer to the Admiralty’ which gave him the subject of The Man Within – ‘the hero of the novel has got to be an informer’. The letter must have taken him back instinctively to the betrayals involved in his time at St John’s. 11 chapters in three parts original title: "Dear Sanity" took two years to write partly inspired by poem  partly inspired by Harper's Smugglers  [ wikipedia ] [ goodreads ] [ editions/covers ] reviews w/spoilers: [ astrofella ]   [ad on back jacket of 'rumour at nightfall'] lighted turnip oikia = house ( Greek )   takes place 18thC? Francis Andrews Carlyon  Elizabeth deceased guardian  Mrs Butler, charwoman priest Lewes Mr Farne Sir Henry Merriman Lucy  Sir Edward Parkin