B: The Name of Action (1930)

'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

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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
    And the act
    Falls the Shadow
                                    For Thine is the Kingdom
    Between the conception
    And the creation
    Between the emotion
    And the response
    Falls the Shadow"

cf Ulysses ep15 open? "The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o'-the wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fans." [GG bought c1925]

Palatinate (white)

Oliver Chant

Kurtz

Mrs Meadmore