Black Beethoven and the Black Mozart

Portrait of Beethoven (detail), by Joseph Maehler, 1805

Was Beethoven Black?

It's no surprise that in a year of reckoning with systemic racism the speculation that Beethoven had African ancestry has resurfaced. (Of course, every human who has ever lived has African ancestry, but I don't think that's what's meant. Also, let's not forget that race is a social, rather than biological, category. But I digress.)

The evidence is circumstantial: Beethoven's complexion was described by acquaintances as dark, his nose was described as round, and he was nicknamed "The Spaniard." Beethoven's family history has been traced back several centuries, and was Flemish, but of course nothing can be ruled out.

In "Beethoven was black" (The Guardian, 7 September 2020) Philip Clark writes that the speculation may have originated in an interview with the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose father was from Sierra Leone and whose mother was a white Englishwoman. Coleridge-Taylor noted the resemblance between his own features and Beethoven's, as described by contemporaries and represented in engravings and paintings. But Coleridge-Taylor was using the question of Beethoven's identity to highlight the racial prejudice he himself had just experienced during a recent visit to the United States: "If the greatest of all musicians were alive today, he would find it impossible to obtain hotel accommodation in certain American cities."

Following up on Coleridge-Taylor's insight, it's especially interesting to me that the question of Beethoven's race seems to recur during moments of widespread black political mobilization. Coleridge-Taylor's interview took place in 1907, just a few years after the publication of W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and the founding of the Niagara Movement (1905), and a few years before the founding of the NAACP (1909). Beethoven's ancestry next receives prominent attention, according to musical scholar Dominique-René de Lerma, in J.A. Roger's Sex and Race, Vol. 3 (1944); during World War II, racism's contradiction of American ideals was made starkly apparent as African-Americans fought against fascism abroad but found themselves facing prejudice and violence at home. Rogers provocatively turns the question of Beethoven's race around: "there is not a single shred of evidence to support the belief that he was a white man."

During the Black Power movement of the 1960s, both Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael asserted that Beethoven was black. In 1969 Rolling Stone carried an article entitled "Beethoven was Black and Proud!," and in his comic strip Peanuts Charles Schulz had Schroeder, on hearing that Beethoven may have been black, discover that all along he's been playing soul music.

This year the question of Beethoven's race has arisen again, in part because issues of racism have once more come to the fore, and partly because it is the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth. In a recent article, "Was Beethoven Black?," (Smithsonian Magazine, 23 June 2020) Nora McGreevy quotes University of Michigan history professor Kira Thurman:

There’s a way in which white people, historically, have constantly denied black people any kind of association with genius. And in a lot of ways, there is no figure that we associate more with genius than Beethoven himself. The implication of the idea that Beethoven might be black was so powerful, was so exciting and so tantalizing, because it threatens to overturn how people have understood or talked about race and racial hierarchy in the United States and around the world.

But of course the whole 19th- and early 20th century notion of musical history as a succession of geniuses is precisely what led to the exclusion and neglect of composers who did not fit prevailing (i.e., racist and sexist) models of genius. One of the most exciting developments in classical music during my lifetime has been the rediscovery of music outside of the established canon (see, for example, my post on Anna Beer's Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music).

As Thurman has written, "So instead of asking the question, 'Was Beethoven Black?' ask 'Why don’t I know anything about George Bridgetower?'"

Portrait of George Bridgetower by Henry Eldridge, before 1821. 

Image source: British Museum

Bridgetower was a virtuoso violinist and composer. His father was Afro-Caribbean and his mother was German-Polish. As a child he may have studied with Haydn; he gave concerts before Habsburg Emperor Joseph II and Britain's King George III and Queen Charlotte, and later became first violinist in the orchestra of the Prince of Wales (the future George IV).

In April 1803, at age 24, Bridgetower was invited to Vienna by Prince Joseph Franz Maximilian von Lobkowitz, a patron of Beethoven, to play the set of Beethoven's string quartets (Op. 18) dedicated to the Prince. The violinist charmed and delighted the bearish Beethoven, and he immediately began composing a piece for them to play together at a concert given for Bridgetower's benefit in late May.

The concert was postponed for two days to enable Beethoven to finish composing, and even so he just made it: it wasn't until 4:30 in the morning on 24 May, the day of the concert, that Beethoven asked a student to copy out the first two movements for the violin (the third movement had been composed some time before). In the event there was only time to copy the first movement before the concert began. Patricia Morrisroe in the New York Times, 4 September 2020, describes what happened next:

Beethoven and Bridgetower took the stage for the morning concert, having never rehearsed the piece. Bridgetower was sight-reading.

Beethoven had given Bridgetower an opening solo that began with an explosive declaration, moving into a fiery, sensual dialogue. At one point, Bridgetower surprised Beethoven by imitating and then expanding on a short piano cadenza in the first movement. Beethoven, jumping up, hugged him, crying, "My dear boy! Once more!"

After the performance, Beethoven presented Bridgetower his tuning fork and wrote a dedication on the score: "Sonata mulattica composta per il mulatto Brischdauer, gran pazzo e compositore mulattico" ("Mulatto sonata composed for the mulatto Bridgetower, great mulatto madman and composer").

However, Bridgetower and Beethoven later fell out (it was very easy to fall out with Beethoven). When the piece composed for Bridgetower was finally published in 1805 it was dedicated to another violinist, Rudolphe Kreutzer, and has been known ever since as the "Kreutzer Sonata." The designation is doubly invalid, first because the work was written for Bridgetower, but also because Kreutzer never played it (he found the piece that Bridgetower had sight-read at the first performance to be "unintelligible"). Kreutzer, though, has been immortalized by his tenuous association with this work, while Bridgetower has been largely erased from music history.

The first movement of the Kreutzer Sonata, performed by Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VVIjtaer54

Was Mozart Black?

Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Image source: New York Times

Mozart wasn't black, but there was a "Black Mozart." As Marcos Balter, professor of music composition at UC San Diego, writes in "His Name Is Joseph Boulogne, Not 'Black Mozart'" (New York Times, 22 July 2020), "this erasure of Boulogne’s name not only subjugates him to an arbitrary white standard, but also diminishes his truly unique place in Western classical music history."

Joseph Boulogne's father was a Frenchman who owned a plantation on Guadeloupe, and his mother was an Afro-Caribbean slave. Meaningful consent is not possible, of course, when one partner holds life-or-death power over the other. Remarkably, though, when Boulogne was about 10 his father took him and his mother back to France and paid for his education, including fencing and music lessons.

Boulogne became a champion fencer and a highly regarded violinist. When in 1769 the composer François-Joseph Gossec was forming an orchestra for his Concerts des Amateurs series he invited Boulogne to join the violin section; within a few years he had become concertmaster and then musical director, and the orchestra established a reputation as one of the best in Europe.

Boulogne was also a pioneering composer. According to Balter he wrote some of the first string quartets by a French composer, and achieved his greatest success with the eight symphonies concertantes he wrote between 1775 and 1778. A symphonie concertante features two (or more) solo instruments with orchestra; Balter calls it "a virtuosic dialogue that emulate[s] a musical duel."

Interestingly, in 1778 Mozart travelled to France and stayed for a time in the same house as Boulogne. During and immediately after that visit in 1778 and 1779, perhaps inspired by the work of Boulogne, Mozart wrote six symphonies concertantes. Balther also reports that another musicologist, Gabriel Banat, has identified a musical passage in a Mozart symphonie concertante that seems to derive from a Boulogne violin concerto from 1777.

Here is a performance of the Allegro from Boulogne's Symphonie Concertante in G major by the Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRBUA5rgaLs

Boulogne would go on to negotiate the commission for Haydn's six "Paris" symphonies and conduct their premieres in 1786. He also composed operas, one (Ernestine, 1777) with a libretto by the author of the scandalous Les liaisons dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Boulogne's vocal works were not as popular as his instrumental music, however, and most have been lost entirely or in large part. One opera, Le Droit de seigneur (1784), is known only by a single surviving aria, but the title suggests that Boulogne may have written an opera based on Beaumarchais' Le mariage de Figaro two years before Mozart and Da Ponte premiered Le nozze di Figaro in Vienna.

As Balter writes of this accomplished composer and musician, "Boulogne doesn't need to be anyone's second best—let alone anyone's Black echo."

Update 9 September 2020: Ars Minerva, the SF Bay Area group focusing on neglected composers of the Baroque and Classical eras, will present a "Cocktails & Chit-Chat" event on the life and music of Joseph Boulogne on Thursday 17 September, 6 pm Pacific Time; for details see the Ars Minerva website.

Deep shallows: Miss Marjoribanks

Margaret Oliphant, before 1894 (detail). Photo: Hayman Seleg Mendelssohn. 
Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

With my interest in the novelists influenced by Jane Austen, I'm surprised that I haven't come across Margaret Oliphant before. But then, perhaps that's not so surprising.

Oliphant does not appear on any of the "best books" lists I've discussed previously on E&I: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, 100 novels, and The 100 greatest British novels. She is absent even from many lists focussing on the 19th century. Barnes & Noble's "45 [actually 46] Novels Written in the 19th Century That Deserve a Place on the Modern Bookshelf" includes, incredibly, only six women authors; Oliphant is not among them. [1] She also does not appear in the top 500 books on Goodreads "Best Books of the 19th Century". [2]

Remarkably, this neglect began in the 19th century. No work by her appears on the Daily Telegraph's list of the "The 100 Best Novels in the World" published in 1899; it seems that less than two years after her death her novels were largely forgotten. And this is strange, because she was quite popular in her day.  "For most of the 1860s," writes critic John Pemble, "Margaret Oliphant outsold not only Trollope, but Dickens and Thackeray too." [3]

What sparked my interest was an appreciation by Tom Crewe in the London Review of Books of Mrs. Oliphant's 1866 novel Miss Marjoribanks (pronounced, I learn, "Miss Marchbanks"). Crewe writes that Oliphant's novel "is surely the most interesting and entertaining example of a woman writing about men in the 19th century." It is the next-to-last novel in her Chronicles of Carlingford series [4]; if that series owes something to Anthony Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire and Gaskell's Cranford stories, Miss Marjoribanks has a truly original heroine. Crewe quotes the critic Q.D. Leavis' description of the novel as a bridge between Austen's Emma and Eliot's Middlemarch, and Lucilla Marjoribanks as "'a triumphant intermediary between their Emma and Dorothea, and, incidentally, more entertaining, more impressive and more likeable than either.'" [5]

She is certainly wittier, although one of the running jokes in the book is that every other character thinks Lucilla is joking when she's actually quite serious. Just returned from school, Lucilla constantly reassures her widower father (and everyone else within earshot) that her chief concern is to be of comfort to him. She is completely sincere in her own way, but Dr. Marjoribanks, like Pride and Prejudice's Mr. Bennet and Emma's Mr. Woodhouse before him, has settled into a life of easy habit, and has his doubts:

'I suppose you mean to give parties, and drive me out of my senses with dancing and singing.—No, Lucilla, you must wait till you get married—that will never do for me.'

'Dear papa,' said Lucilla sweetly, 'it is so dreadful to hear you say parties. Everybody knows that the only thing I care for in life is to be a comfort to you; and as for dancing, I saw at once that was out of the question. Dancing is all very well,' said Miss Marjoribanks thoughtfully; 'but it implies quantities of young people—and young people can never make what I call society. It is Evenings I mean to have, papa.' [6]

And have them she does, while her father retreats to his library, where "the sense of security and tranquillity with which he established himself at the fire, undisturbed by the gay storm that raged outside, gave a certain charm to his retirement. He rubbed his hands and listened, as a man listens to the wind howling out of doors, when he is in shelter and comfort." [7]

Margaret Oliphant by Frederick Sandys, 1881. 

Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

To my eyes, Lucilla also prefigures Middlemarch's Rosamond Vincy, but without Rosamond's essential frivolity. Like Rosamond, Lucilla is highly concerned with appearances: dress, decoration, and music as a form of women's self-display. But unlike Rosamond, Lucilla is not interested in these things in order to attract men, whom she thinks of as "that inferior branch of the human family." [8] As she explains to her neighbor when inviting her to dinner,

'Dear Mrs Chiley. . .it doesn't matter in the least what you wear; there are only to be gentlemen, you know, and one never dresses for gentlemen. You must keep that beautiful black velvet for another time.'

'Well, my dear,' said Mrs Chiley, 'I am long past that sort of thing—but the men think, you know, that it is always for them we dress.'

'Yes,' said Miss Marjoribanks, 'their vanity is something dreadful—but it is one of my principles never to dress unless there are ladies.' [9]

Lucilla's real aim is "to revolutionise society in Carlingford," which she finds in a "lamentable condition"; in pursuit of this goal, "young men, like old men and the other less interesting members of the human family, were simple material for Miss Marjoribanks's genius, out of which she had a great result to produce." [10]

She succeeds. At the second of her Thursday Evenings ("her brilliant but perilous undertaking"), Lucilla comes downstairs to find her house thronged with all Carlingford society; it is so packed that no one can move, and guests are standing on the stairs waiting to get in.

But the scene changed when the rightful sovereign entered the gay but disorganized dominion where her subjects attended her. Before any one knew how it was done, Miss Marjoribanks had re-established order, and what was still more important, made room. 'You girls have no business to get into corners. The corners are for the people that can talk. It is one of my principles always to flirt in the middle of the company,' said Lucilla; and again, as happened so often, ignorant people laughed, and thought it a bon mot. But it is needless to inform the more intelligent persons who understand Miss Marjoribanks, that it was by no means a bon mot, but expressed Lucilla's convictions with the utmost sincerity. [11]

The mock-heroic terms in which Lucilla's drawing-room triumphs are presented (monarchy, revolution, naval maneuvers, knightly combat) invite us to treat her ironically, but never contemptuously. Ruth Bernard Yeazell noted that "the sustained irony with which Oliphant treats her heroine co-exists with an exuberant delight in Lucilla's 'own consciousness of superior Power'." [12] And as Q.D. Leavis, who led the modern rediscovery of Oliphant, wrote,

Though we may start with the fear that Lucilla is so limited that she will bore us, this is presently seen to be far from being so, since it is soon apparent that she hands out her stock phrases, the acceptable clichés of the age, as passwords, camouflaging herself in conventional clothing to conceal her originality and get her own way. . .Imperceptibly Lucilla grows ever more interesting and endeared to us as ten years pass before our eyes. [13]

Oliphant shows us the depths of Lucilla's shallowness: the momentous and very real concerns—and dare we say, feelings?—that roil beneath Lucilla's imperturbable surface, and the many subtle contests of strategy and shifts of power that occur over the course of each of her Evenings.

Title page of Volume II of Miss Marjoribanks, Blackwood, 1866. 
Image source: Internet Archive

The disdain for and exasperation with the male sex expressed by almost every female character of Miss Marjoribanks seem to have had their root in Margaret Oliphant's life experience. When she was 24, Margaret Oliphant Wilson, already a published writer, married her maternal cousin Frank Oliphant, a painter and stained-glass designer. In Miss Marjoribanks, the drawing-teacher father of Rose and Barbara Lake is portrayed as having pretensions far above his talent; he may be a partial portrait of Oliphant's husband. Frank died seven years into their marriage of the tuberculosis he could no longer conceal from his wife. He had taken the family to Rome for its supposedly salutary climate, and died there; Margaret was left pregnant, stranded in a foreign country with two small children (three others had died in infancy), and £1000 in debt. She had to write her way into solvency, and keep writing to maintain a precarious financial stability.

She supported two brothers (one an alcoholic, one a widowed business failure), two nieces, a nephew, and her two adult sons. She toiled to send the nephew and both her sons to Eton, but none of them were able to sustain gainful employment; ultimately both her sons died in their 30s, predeceasing Margaret, as did all her children. In her Autobiography she wrote that "life is full of dreadful repetitions." [14]

It was most likely her success and her prolific output that allowed her husband, sons and nephew to choose to be "idle and aimless." [15] Oliphant was a writing machine: she produced 98 novels (more than double the novelistic output of Trollope), 25 non-fiction books and translations, 50 short stories and over 300 articles. The mind boggles. She wrote so much that she told her publisher she had developed a permanent hole in her forefinger "from excessive use of that little implement," her pen. [16] She thought of her novels as "the shadow life into which I dare not put all my experiences, nor disclose my heart." [17]

The recently widowed Margaret Oliphant, ca. 1860. From The Bookman. 
Image source: Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two

She could not help but compare herself to other writers. Of George Eliot, whom she knew personally, she wondered "if I am a little envious of her?. . .I have written because it gave me pleasure, because it came natural to me, because it was like talking or breathing, besides the big fact that it was necessary for me to work for my children. . .Should I have done better if I had been kept, like her, in a mental greenhouse and taken care of?" [18] Of Eliot and George Sand, she wrote that they "make me half inclined to cry over my poor little unappreciated self. . .I would not buy their fame with their disadvantages, but I do feel very small, very obscure beside them, rather a failure all round." [19] This from the woman who published more than ten dozen books.

Oliphant—perhaps wanting to avoid taking on another dependent—never remarried. Comparing herself to Charlotte Brontë, whose heroines obsess over the men they love and flee alone across moors on stormy nights, she wrote, "I have learned to take perhaps more a man's view of mortal affairs,—to feel that the love between men and women, the marrying and giving in marriage, occupy in fact so small a portion of existence or thought." [20]

Her nonchalance about the institution is reflected in the attitudes of her heroine. While Lucilla, like Emma Woodhouse, spends a great deal of time matchmaking, she views her own potential suitors with detachment, weighing their advantages and disadvantages coolly. When it appears that her two most likely suitors are about to marry other women, Lucilla takes the news with equanimity.

Mrs Chiley kissed her young friend once more with lingering meaning. "My dear, I don't know what They mean," she said, with indignation; "everybody knows men are great fools where women are concerned—but I never knew what idiots they were till now; and you are too good for them, my darling!" said Mrs Chiley, with indignant tenderness. Perhaps Miss Marjoribanks was in some respects of the same way of thinking. . .To have Mrs Mortimer and Barbara Lake preferred to her did not wound Lucilla's pride—one can be wounded in that way only by one's equals. She thought of it with a certain mild pity and charitable contempt. Both these two men had had the chance of having her, and this was how they had chosen! And there can be little wonder if Miss Marjoribanks's compassion for them was mingled with a little friendly and condescending disdain. [21]

No weeping, wailing, or gnashing of teeth here. Instead of the heroine's relationships with men, the focus of Miss Marjoribanks, as in other Oliphant novels, is her "complex relationships with other women." [22]

Margaret Oliphant had an unfavorable view of her own work. "I shall not leave anything behind me that will live," she wrote. [23] She was wrong. Q.D. Leavis wrote of certain scenes in Miss Marjoribanks that "I know nothing finer of its kind in all Victorian fiction" and that they were "greater than in an Austen novel." [24] High praise indeed, but it is difficult to disagree with her. As long as there are readers who appreciate wicked irony, keen wit, emotional complexity, and independent, self-directed women, Miss Marjoribanks will be (re)discovered, and treasured.

---

1. Also missing from the Barnes & Noble list: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Brontë, Maria Edgeworth, George Eliot, Susan Ferrier, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, George Sand, Mary Shelley, and many others. 
2. Hester is #594, and Miss Marjoribanks #788, although its average rating of 3.77 out of 5 puts it in the company of Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (#98, 3.77), Charlotte Brontë's Villette (#64, 3.76), Thackeray's Vanity Fair (#51, 3.79), and Dickens' Great Expectations (#18, 3.78). Books on the Goodreads list are ranked by "score," which seems to be some combination of average rating and number of votes, rather than solely by average rating.
3. John Pemble, "Besieged by Female Writers,"  London Review of Books, Vol. 38, No. 21, 3 November 2016. https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n21/john-pemble/besieged-by-female-writers
4. The other works in the series: "The Executor" [short story] (Blackwood's Magazine, May 1861); The Rector and the Doctor's Family (Blackwood, 1863); Salem Chapel (Blackwood, 1863); The Perpetual Curate (Blackwood, 1864); and Phoebe Junior: A last Chronicle of Carlingford (Hurst and Blackett, 1876). List adapted from Richard Stotesbury, "Q.D.Leavis: An Appreciation (with a select bibliography)." https://www.stotesbury-reviews.com/q-d-leavis-an-appreciation-with-a-select-bibliography/
5. Tom Crewe, "On the Shelf," London Review of Books, Vol. 42, No. 14, 16 July 2020. p.16. https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n14/tom-crewe/on-the-shelf
6. Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks, Zodiac Press, 1969, Ch. VI. 
7. —, Ch. XII.
8. —, Ch. II.
9. —, Ch. VII.
10. —, Ch. II, Ch. III and Ch. VIII.
11. —, Ch. VI. 
12. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, "Doubling the Oliphant," London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, 7 September 1995. https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n17/ruth-bernard-yeazell/doubling-the-oliphant
13. —, Introduction by Q.D. Leavis.
14. Quoted in John Sutherland, "Nelly Gets Her Due," London Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 21, 8 November 1990. https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n21/john-sutherland/nelly-gets-her-due
15. Quoted in  Susannah Clapp, "Criminal Elastic," London Review of Books,
    Vol. 9, No. 3, 5 February 1987. https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n03/susannah-clapp/criminal-elastic
16. Quoted in Yeazell.
17. Quoted in Sutherland.
18. Quoted in Crewe.
19. Quoted in Yeazell.
20. Quoted in Crewe.
21. Miss Marjoribanks, Ch. XXXI.
22. Finola Austin, "Review: Hester, Margaret Oliphant (1873)," The Secret Victorianist, 2 January 2015. http://www.secretvictorianist.com/2015/01/review-hester-margaret-oliphant-1873.html
23. Quoted in Sutherland. 
24. Miss Marjoribanks, Introduction by Q.D. Leavis.

The dead man who is an author: The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, around the time of the publication of Memorias Pósthumas de Braz Cubas.
Photo: Marc Ferrez. Image source: PublishNews

Is it possible to make judgments about the quality of a translation if you don't read the language of the original? The answer may seem obvious—of course not!—but as I've tried to show previously with works such as Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Machado de Assis' Memorial de Ayres, I think it's not so simple. In each case, using my own judgment of readability and some investigation and comparison to try to determine fidelity to the meaning of the original, I was able to point out flaws and felicities in the attempts of various translators to render these works into English.

What has inspired me once more to wade into waters that wiser ones would avoid is the near-simultaneous publication of two new translations of Machado's Memorias Pósthumas de Braz Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas). Posthumous Memoirs, first published in Brazil as a serial in 1880 and then issued as a book in 1881 (with at least three more editions issued in Machado's lifetime) is unquestionably a masterpiece. To read my first thoughts on encountering this great work, please see my previous post on the novel.

Posthumous Memoirs employs many techniques that we now think of as postmodern, although they are as old as novels themselves, and some are as old as storytelling: metafictional strategies, self-referentiality, irony, typographical playfulness. Here is the entirety of Chapter CXXXIX, "How I did not become a minister of state":

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The next chapter begins, "There are things that are best said by silence; such is the substance of the previous chapter."

The novel's status as a classic may be justification enough for new translations: how many different English versions of Eugene Onegin or Madame Bovary are there? But given the vast corpus of literature that has not yet been translated into English, it's curious when new translations are published of works for which multiple English versions already exist. I've been able to identify five English translations of Machado's novel: by William L. Grossman (São Paulo Editôra, 1951 and Noonday, 1952), E. Percy Ellis (Instituto Nacional do Livro, 1955), Gregory Rabassa (Oxford, 1997), Flora Thomson-DeVeaux (Penguin, 2020), and Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (Liveright, 2020). Of these Ellis's Posthumous Reminiscences of Braz Cubas is not discussed in this post because it was unavailable to me.

Image source: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The first translation into English was William L. Grossman's Posthumous Memoirs of Braz Cubas, published in Brazil in 1951. Curiously, when the translation was republished the next year in the U.S. by Noonday Press it was retitled Epitaph of a Small Winner. This title has no source in the original: "epitaph" in Portuguese is epitáfio, not memorias, which means "memoirs" or "memories"; where "small winner" comes from or what exactly it means is anyone's guess. It's certainly not Brás Cubas' estimation of himself, and the equivalent phrase appears nowhere in Machado's text. Perhaps the title was forced on Grossman by an editor; let's hope it wasn't his own choice.

The narrator of Posthumous Memoirs is skeptical and self-deprecating, and unsparingly points out his own blindnesses, follies, hypocrises, and failures. As the (correct) title implies, he's also dead. In the first chapter, "The death of the author," Machado writes, "eu não sou propriamente um autor defunto, mas um defunto autor." (My translation: "I'm not exactly an author who is a dead man, but a dead man who is an author.")

Grossman's translation grossly over-explains: "I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing." Machado's eleven words have become Grossman's thirty-one. Rabassa is better: "I am not exactly a writer who is dead but a dead man who is a writer," although by using "dead" before the conjunction and "a dead man" after, he doesn't preserve Machado's reverse parallelism ("autor defunto" / "defunto autor"). Neither do the other translators: Thomson-DeVeaux has "I am not exactly an author recently deceased, but a deceased man recently an author" ("recently," of course, is not in Machado's original). And Jull Costa and Patterson obscure the parallelism still further: "I am not so much a writer who has died, but a dead man who has decided to write" (and "decided to" is another addition to Machado).

In Posthumous Memoirs Machado's prose is generally (so far as I can judge) lean, spare, and elegant in its simplicity. The narrative voice is that of a man who, now that he's dead, can finally speak plainly. Elaboration is not only needless, it misrepresents the narrator's directness.

But overall Grossman's text is not markedly less faithful than other translations, and sometimes it's more so. Here is his rendering of the opening sentences of Chapter XI, "O menino é pai do homem," or "The child is father of the man" [1]:

I grew; and in this the family did not help; I grew naturally, as the magnolias and cats grow. Perhaps cats are less mischievous, and surely magnolias are less restless, than I was as a boy.

The first thing that struck me are the two semicolons in the first sentence, a highly unusual construction. The semicolons are not Grossman's invention, however, but Machado's, whose first sentence reads:

Cresci; e nisso é que a família não interveio; cresci naturalmente, como crescem as magnólias e os gatos.

Here is how the three other translators render this passage:

I grew. My family had no part in that. I grew naturally, the way that magnolias and cats do. Cats may be less sly and magnolias are certainly less restless than I was in my childhood. (Rabassa)

I grew up; this the family had no part in; I grew naturally, the way magnolias or cats do. Cats may be less shrewd, and magnolias are certainly less restless than I was as a child. (Thomson-DeVeaux)

I grew, and in this my family played no part at all; I grew quite naturally, just as magnolia trees and cats do. Although cats might be less cunning, and magnolia trees certainly less restive than I was as a child. (Jull Costa and Patterson)

Only Grossman and Thomson-DeVeaux have followed Machado's actual sentence structure and included both semicolons. And although it may seem like a trivial point, I think the semicolons reveal something about each translator's approach. In that first sentence Machado wants to give the same weight to the pauses between each of the thoughts expressed. Rabassa accomplishes this, but substitutes a full stop for Machado's pauses, which changes the rhythm. The rhythm is also altered by Jull Costa and Patterson's use of a comma and a semicolon, which give the pauses differing emphases.

Image source: Oxford University Press

Word choice and order, of course, also differ among these translations. I would translate the second phrase "e nisso é que a família não interveio" as "and in this the family did not interfere." (Another good choice would be "intervene," which is the exact English cognate of "interveio.") Grossman has "in this the family did not help," which is somewhat similar, but doesn't seem quite right—it's not chiefly help, but correction that his parents and other adult relatives don't offer this "little devil." The other three translations both miss the idea of not-so-benign neglect (we can "play no part" in events that don't concern us or that take place at a distance) and sound clunky in varying ways to the mind's ear: "had no part in that" and "had no part in" both end weakly, while "played no part at all" adds an emphasis ("at all") not present in Machado.

The narrator grows "naturally" or "quite naturally," as do "magnolias" ("trees," added by Jull Costa and Patterson, seems unnecessary, and the word "trees" (árvores) is not in the original) and (not "or," as Thomson-DeVeaux has it) cats. Grossman is the only translator to include a form of the word "grow" three times, as Machado does; the other three omit the third repetition, and again end the sentence weakly, on the unnecessary "do." I might translate this phrase, "I grew naturally, in the same way as magnolias and cats."

But the cats: are they less "mischievous," "sly," "shrewd," or "cunning" than the narrator? Machado wrote,

Talvez os gatos são menos matreiros, e, com certeza, as magnólias são menos inquietas do que eu era na minha infância.

"Matreiros" suggests sneaky, devious, or wily more than "mischievous" (Grossman) or "shrewd" (Thomson-DeVeaux): "sly" (Rabassa) or better yet "cunning" (Jull Costa and Patterson) seem closer to the meaning of the original.

And the magnolias: are they less "restive" (Jull Costa and Patterson) or "restless" (the others)? "Inquietas" is usually translated as "restless," but I like "restive," with its additional sense of recalcitrant, refractory, unruly, impatient of control or authority. I think I would have translated this sentence, "Perhaps cats are less guileful, and, certainly, magnolias are less restive than I was in my childhood." None of the published translators try to match Machado's rhythm by including all three commas; Grossman comes closest, with two, while Rabassa omits them (as he does frequently throughout his translation).

I've advocated for trying to follow Machado's diction and sentence structure as closely as possible. Sometimes, though, in order to best convey the meaning of the original it's necessary not to follow it too literally. In Chapter LXXVIII we learn that the husband of Bras Cubas' mistress Virgília has been offered "uma presidência de província" ("a provincial presidency"). Instead of "presidency" Jull Costa and Patterson offer "governorship" or "governor," which seem like better English equivalents.

Image source: Liveright Publishing

But not all of Jull Costa and Patterson's attempts to substitute English equivalents work as well. In Chapter XI we see the narrator as a six-year-old child riding on the back of Prudêncio, "um moleque de casa"—literally, a "house-boy," but more precisely, a house slave. Prudêncio is on his hands and knees with a rope or cord between his teeth as a bridle; the child is holding the "reins" and has a switch in his hand:

eu. . .fustigava-o, dava mil voltas a um e outro lado, e ele obedecia, — algumas vezes gemendo,— mas obedecia sem dizer palavra, ou, quando muito, um — «ai, nhonhô!» — ao que eu retorquia: — «Cala a boca, besta!»

My translation: "I. . .flogged him, forced him to turn a thousand times to one side and the other, and he obeyed, — sometimes groaning, — but he obeyed without saying a word, or, at most, an — "Ow, nho-nhô!" — to which I retorted: — "Shut your mouth, beast!"

In his translator's introduction William Grossman describes "Nhonhô" and "Yayá" as "common nicknames for the male and female children, respectively, of well-to-do families." More specifically, they are forms of address used by children's social inferiors, especially slaves; "nhonhô" is a truncated and doubled form of "senhor" ("master," "sir," or "mister"). Rabassa translates it probably as well as it can be rendered into English as "little master," while Grossman leaves it untranslated (perhaps the best choice, with an explanatory note).

Jull Costa and Patterson, though, render it as "Massa." Later in the chapter a group of slavewomen refer to the narrator's uncle as "sinhô João." "Sinhô" is another form of "senhor," but strangely, given their choice to try to translate "nhonhô," Jull Costa and Patterson leave "sinhô" untranslated. Grossman translates "sinhô João" as "Mist' João," while Rabassa translates it as "Master João." Thomson-DeVeaux renders it as "Massa João."

As a translation of either "nhonhô" or "sinhô," "Massa" is a jarring choice, reminiscent for this reader of Stephen Foster, blackface minstrelry, and other supposedly comic attempts to render the speech of black American slaves and slave descendants. Yes, black writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay used "Massa" too. But to the modern ear it can't help but evoke an offensive tradition; Grossman and Rabassa, in my view, found much better solutions in both cases.

Machado's grandparents on his father's side were freed slaves; he grew up poor, and was under no illusions about the horrors of slavery and poverty. In Chapter LXVIII, the narrator happens across a crowd watching one black man whipping another (the translation is Grossman's, lightly edited):

The victim did not try to flee; he merely groaned, "No, have mercy, sir; sir, have mercy!” But the other responded to each supplication with a new lash of the whip. 

"Take that, you devil!" he was saying. "Here’s some more mercy for you, drunkard.''

"Sir!" groaned the victim.

"Shut your mouth, beast!"

I stopped, I looked. . .Good heavens! The man wielding the whip was none other than my house slave Prudêncio, whom my father had freed some years earlier. I approached him; he stopped immediately and kissed my hand. I asked him whether the other black man was his slave. 

"Yes, Nho-nhô, he is.". . .

On the outside the episode I had witnessed was grim; but only on the outside. When I opened it up with the knife of rational analysis, I found a curious and profound kernel. It was Prudêncio's way of ridding himself of the blows he had received—passing them on to someone else. I, as a child, had sat on his back, had put a rein in his mouth, and had beaten him mercilessly; he had groaned and suffered. Now, however, that he was free and could move his arms and legs when and as he pleased, now that he could work, relax, sleep, as he willed, unrestrained, now he rose and changed places: he bought a slave and paid to him, in full and with interest, all that he had received from me. See how clever the rascal was!

The brutality and humiliation visited on one generation are passed on to the next. In a world in which one's fate is a chance of birth, so is one's ability to be virtuous. Brás Cubas's insouciance about the violence he has delivered and has seen perpetuated is more devastating than any omniscient authorial comment could be.

But perhaps Brás Cubas comes to recognize, in death if not in life, the cruelty of inflicting injustice and suffering. The final sentence of the novel is "Não tive filhos, não transmiti a nenhuma creatura o legado da nossa miséria": "I did not beget children, and so did not bequeath to any creature the legacy of our misery."

As I've tried to show in this post, each of the translations has strengths and weaknesses. Despite its title, Grossman's translation is not bad, but it softens some of the family and social dynamics. Rabassa's translation best replicates Machado's spareness (his is the shortest version by far), but he substitutes a staccato rhythm for Machado's succession of meaningful pauses. Jull Costa and Patterson try to subtly flesh out Machado's lean prose, at the risk of making his bemused, detached narrative voice seem more effusive and emphatic.

Image source: Penguin Books

Thomson-DeVeaux's translation deserves special mention for three reasons: first, she includes an extensive introduction and notes, highlighting in particular the way that the legacies of slavery haunt the narrative. The scene quoted above in which Prudêncio beats his own slave takes place in the neighborhood of Valongo; Thomson's notes inform us that Valongo was the site of Rio de Janeiro's slave market, at one time the largest in the Americas. As Machado's original readers would have recognized, Prudêncio's beating of his slave is an echo of the brutality inflicted in the same place over centuries on literally millions of men, women and children.

The second feature that makes Thomson-DeVeaux's translation stand out is that hers is the only one that begins each of Machado's chapters on a new page, as in the original. Machado's chapters are quite short, sometimes consisting only of a single paragraph—or, as in Chapter CXXXIX, an ellipsis. The other translations separate the chapters only by a few blank lines, so that a new chapter can start in the middle or at the bottom of a page. The bottom of the page is where Chapter CXXXIX begins in Rabassa's translation, which undercuts the humor: there is room for only three lines of ellipsis, and you have to turn the page to realize that the ellipsis is the entirety of the chapter.

Finally, as noted in the beginning of this post, the novel was originally serialized and then went through several editions. The other translators use one of the later editions as the basis of their version; Thomson-DeVeaux is the only one to include material from the earlier editions of the novel.

But in whatever version you choose to read Machado's brilliant work you'll be amazed that a novel written 140 years ago can seem this modern. As I wrote in my earlier post linked above, the narrator offers "unflattering honesty about himself and his motives: greed, fear, lust, envy, indolence, boredom, a desire to avoid difficulty and embrace immediate pleasure. Motives which, on reflection, are uncomfortably familiar." While the simultaneous publication of two new translations may seem like a surfeit of riches, if you have not yet acquainted yourself with this astonishing novel you now have two new reasons to do so.

---

1. A small point: Grossman and Rabassa title this chapter "The child is father to the man" (emphasis added here and following). But in "My Heart Leaps Up" (1802), Wordsworth wrote "The child is father of the man." It was Gerard Manley Hopkins who slightly misquoted Wordsworth by writing "'The child is father to the man,'" which appeared as Fragment 68 in the posthumous Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins now first published (1918). Machado and Brás Cubas could only have known Wordsworth's poem, as the Hopkins was published a decade after Machado's death. Full marks to Thomson-DeVeaux and Jull Costa and Patterson for referencing Wordsworth by using "of," rather than referencing Hopkins by using "to."

In memoriam: Saroj Khan

Saroj Khan in Nartakee (1963)

On July 3 Saroj Khan passed away. If you have watched Indian films from any of the past four decades you have probably seen her work as a choreographer; she also worked as a child actor in the 1950s, a background dancer in the 1950s and 60s, and an assistant choreographer in the 1960s and 70s.

Khan's parents fled Karachi during the Partition in 1947 and came to Mumbai (then Bombay). Her birthdate is given in Shalini Venugopal Bhagat's New York Times obituary as Nov. 22, 1948, although that date doesn't seem as though it fully accords with her appearance as a background dancer in songs such as "Aaiye Meharbaan" from Howrah Bridge (1958), when, if her birthdate is accurate, she would have been 9:

Saroj in "Aaiye Meharbaan" from Howrah Bridge (1958).

If there is any inaccuracy in her birthdate, it may be due not to the usual (and completely justified) concerns about age discrimination in the film industry, but rather to the fraught politics of Partition and the need to ensure that there was no question about her place of birth.

Her father, a well-to-do businessman in Karachi, had to abandon his wealth when he fled to Bombay. As a young girl of three or four, Saroj displayed a keen aptitude for dance, and her parents were advised to seek work for her in the city's film studios. Here she dances as Radha in "Bansuriya Kaahe Bajai" from Aagosh (Embrace, 1953):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfL9g3B9Oeo

As she grew older Saroj continued to perform as a dancer in films such as Taj Mahal (1963), Teesri Manzil (Third Floor, 1966) and Do Raaste (Two Ways, 1969), but she also served as assistant choreographer to the Kathak masters B. Sohanlal and his brother B. Hiranlal beginning with Kalpana (Imagination, 1960) and continuing with films such as Nartakee (Dancer, 1963) and Mera Saaya (My Shadow, 1966), teaching dances to the great Vijayanthimala among many other actresses.

According to Shalini Venugopal Bhagat's obituary, Sohanlal began an intimate relationship with Saroj when she was 13 and he was in his early forties; she considered it a marriage, although he was already married and she was below the minimum legal age of marriage. Whatever Saroj's feelings may have been—in a 2018 interview commenting on the casting couch she said "It depends on the girl, and what she wants to do. . .Why would you sell yourself if you have the talent?"—the difference in their ages and Sohanlal's position as a professional mentor starkly raise the issue of meaningful consent.

Saroj named as B. Sohanlal's assistant in the opening credits of Nartakee.

In 1974 Saroj became a full choreographer in her own right with films such as Geeta Mere Naam (My name is Geeta) and Dost (Friend). She not only created movement, but instructed her dancers in their gestures and facial expressions, an integral aspect of what her dances communicated. She achieved wide recognition beginning in the 1980s when she choreographed films starring the expressive Sridevi, including Mr. India (1987), ChaalBaaz (Trickster, 1989), Chandni (Beloved, 1989), and Lamhe (Moments, 1991). From Lamhe, Sridevi and the Rajasthani singer Ila Arun in "Morni Bagama":

https://youtu.be/Uj0iJoz76a8?t=89

Some of Khan's most memorable choreography was set on Madhuri Dixit. The annual Filmfare Best Choreography Award was instituted in 1989 to honor Khan's work on "Ek Do Teen" from Tezaab (Acid, 1988), the film that made Dixit a star:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e46o5ca6Wns

Khan received the first three, and five of the first six, Best Choreography Awards to be bestowed, and won a total of eight times, the most of any choreographer. Five of her awards were for numbers featuring Dixit, including "Humko Aaj Kal Hai Intejaar" from Sailaab (Flood, 1990), "Dhak Dhak Karne Laga" from Beta (Son, 1992), and "Choli Ke Peeche" from Khal Nayak (Anti-Hero, 1993).

Beginning in the late 1990s and she worked extensively with another great dancer, Aishwarya Rai (now Aishwarya Rai Bachchan), in films such as Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (My Heart Belongs to Another, 1999), Taal (Rhythm, 1999), Devdas (2002), Kuch Naa Kaho (Don't Say Anything, 2002), and Guru (2007). From Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, the astonishing "Nimbooda," which won the first of Khan's three Best Choreography Awards for dances featuring Rai:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLsIl0G0qlM

Many North Americans' introduction to Bollywood was Ashutosh Gowariker's film Lagaan (Land Tax, 2001), which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. Khan choreographed the dance "Radha Kaise Na Jale," featuring Gracy Singh and Aamir Khan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNnvL0ztJhA

I'll end this post with "Dola Re Dola" from Sanjay Leela Bhansali's version of Devdas, which featured Madhuri Dixit as the courtesan Chandramukhi and Aishwarya Rai as Devdas' childhood sweetheart Parvati, and which of course was another winner of the Best Choreography Award:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0PwUqsN1us

Saroj Khan went on to choreograph for many other films, including Veer-Zaara (2004), Swades (My Country, 2004), Mangal Pandey: The Rising (2005), Jab We Met (When We Met, 2007), Taare Zameen Par (Like Stars on Earth, 2007), Love Aaj Kal (Love Nowadays, 2009), and Agneepath (Path of Fire, 2012). In 2012 she was the subject of a documentary directed by Nidhi Tuli, The Saroj Khan Story, which was a key source for this post. Khan's death is a major loss for Indian cinema and for lovers of dance across the world. Our thoughts are with her family, friends and colleagues.

English literature: Happy ever after?

Jean Gabin as Inspector Maigret in Maigret et l’affaire Saint-Fiacre (1959), directed by Jean Delannoy. 

Image source: Pinterest

In an article on the novels of Georges Simenon in the London Review of Books of 4 June, the novelist and critic John Lanchester writes:

The reader whose idea of the novel is formed by the English canon may at some stage start to read books in the French tradition. At that point, it may suddenly seem that everything one has previously read has essentially been children’s literature. Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, even Austen and Eliot, are all wonderful writers, but their work is founded in wish fulfilment, happy endings and love conquering all. The side notes and off notes and internal dissent are all there, of course, but they are subtextual, subtle, inexplicit. The main current of the English novel is in the direction of Happy Ever After, along the lines of Miss Prism’s deathless observation: 'The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.' When you turn from that tradition to the work of Laclos, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, Maupassant and Proust, it’s like getting a glass of ice water in the face. Everybody lies all the time; codes of honour are mainly a delusion and will get you into serious trouble; the same goes for love; if you think the world is how it is described in consoling fictions, you have many catastrophic surprises in store. Above all, the central lesson of the French tradition is that people’s motives are sex and money, and you can write about those things as sex and money, directly, no euphemisms required.

Hmm. I'd like to suggest a few counterexamples to what Lanchester identifies as "the direction of Happy Ever After" in 19th-century English literature, in works by the very authors he names; I'm sure that many more could be identified. Be forewarned that multiple spoilers follow.

• Charles Dickens: In Bleak House, Richard Carstone, a young man full of promise, gets drawn into the endless court case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, neglects his health to pursue the case, is bankrupted and dies of consumption. Jo, a street kid, dies after infecting the heroine with smallpox, while his sympathetic friend and protector Nemo dies of opium overdose. Lady Dedlock, married to the much older Sir Leicester and thinking that a secret she has kept from him is about to be exposed, flees into a bitterly cold winter night and dies trying to reach the grave of her first love, without realizing that Sir Leicester's knowledge of her secret makes no difference to his devotion. 

• William Thackeray: In The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., Redmond Barry, a charming rogue, bankrupts himself and his rich wife, loses his young child to a tragic accident, drowns his sorrows in drink, and ends the novel in prison.
  

  The great and rich are welcomed, smiling, up the grand staircase of the world; the poor but aspiring must clamber up the wall, or push and struggle up the back stair, or, pardi, crawl through any of the conduits of the house, never mind how foul and narrow, that lead to the top. (Ch. 10)

  In Vanity Fair, "a novel without a hero," the anti-heroine Becky Sharp uses sex to try to secure her social and financial position, with very mixed results: she ends up as a widow with a questionable reputation and a very modest income.

• Anthony Trollope: To choose just an example or two out of many, in the Palliser novels Lady Laura Kennedy chooses security over passion and winds up trapped in a loveless marriage, while Lady Glencora Palliser has a loveless marriage thrust upon her by her socially ambitious family. Here are Lady Glencora's meditations in the novel Can You Forgive Her? as she contemplates running away with the man she actually loves (and whom we know is shallow and unworthy):
  

  'I am not such a fool as to mistake what I should be if I left my husband, and went to live with that man as his mistress. . .But why have I been brought to such a pass as this? And, as for female purity! Ah! What was their idea of female purity when they forced me, like ogres, to marry a man for whom they knew I never cared?' (Ch. 47)

  In The Eustace Diamonds we are given access to the thoughts of Lucinda Roanoke, a young American woman who is being maneuvered by her aunt into an engagement with a man she despises:
  

  When she was alone she stood before her glass looking at herself, and then she burst into tears. Never before had she been thus polluted. The embrace had disgusted her. It made her odious to herself. And if this, the beginning of it, was so bad, how was she to drink the cup to the bitter dregs? Other girls, she knew, were fond of their lovers—some so fond of them that all moments of absence were moments, if not of pain, at any rate of regret. To her, as she stood there ready to tear herself because of the vileness of her own condition, it now seemed as though no such love as that were possible to her. For the sake of this man who was to be her husband, she hated all men. Was not everything around her base, and mean, and sordid?. . .How should she escape? And yet she knew that she meant to go on and bear it all. Perhaps by study and due practice she might become—as were some others—a beast of prey and nothing more. The feeling that had made these few minutes so inexpressibly loathsome to her might, perhaps, be driven from her heart. She washed the tears from her eyes with savage energy, and descended to her lover with a veil fastened closely under her hat. 'I hope I haven't kept you waiting,' she said. (Ch. 42)

  Children's literature?

• Jane Austen: Many of her major and minor characters wind up in unions with unsuitable partners. In Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby trades sex for financial security by abandoning Marianne Dashwood, whom he loves, and marrying an heiress he doesn't feel anything for, Miss Grey. In the same novel, Lucy Steele trades sex for financial security by breaking her engagement with Edward Ferrars to marry his wealthier brother Robert, although whether she cares anything for either of them is doubtful. In Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas trades sex for financial security by marrying the pompous Mr. Collins, and spends her days trying to distance herself from him in their modest parsonage. In Mansfield Park Maria Bertram trades sex for financial security by marrying the rich but dull Mr. Rushworth, but then runs off with Henry Crawford; after her divorce, Crawford is unwilling to marry her, leaving Maria a social pariah. In Northanger Abbey Isabella Thorpe trades sex for financial security by engaging herself to James Morland, but breaks off the engagement when she learns that he is not as wealthy as she thought and finds (or so she thinks) a better prospect in Henry Tilney's older brother Frederick. When she discovers that Frederick has no intention of proposing to her, she attempts to return to James—to no avail, which leaves her socially tainted.
  
  In a famous exchange in Sense and Sensibility which is hardly subtextual, subtle, or inexplicit, the sisters Marianne and Elinor openly debate in front of their visitor Edward Ferrars the role of money in personal happiness—which, since a woman who lacked independent means was dependent on the income of her husband, must include for them both the choice of marriage partner:
  

  "What have wealth or grandeur to do with happiness?"
  
  "Grandeur has but little," said Elinor, "but wealth has much to do with it."
  
  "Elinor, for shame!" said Marianne, "money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. Beyond a competence, it can afford no real satisfaction, as far as mere self is concerned."
  
  "Perhaps," said Elinor, smiling, "we may come to the same point.  Your competence and my wealth are very much alike, I dare say; and without them, as the world goes now, we shall both agree that every kind of external comfort must be wanting. Your ideas are only more noble than mine. Come, what is your competence?"
  
  "About eighteen hundred or two thousand a year; not more than that."
  
  Elinor laughed. "Two thousand a year! One is my wealth! I guessed how it would end." (Ch. 17)

  Not only does Austen not employ euphemisms, her characters name quite precisely the amount of income they are hoping to achieve through marriage. Is there a French novel with an equivalent scene?

• George Eliot: In Middlemarch we witness the resolutions of "three love problems," two of which result in miserably unhappy marriages. Dorothea Brooke marries Edward Casaubon, a "formal studious man thirty years older than herself," believing that the research project to which he has devoted decades of his life will be worthy of the sacrifices she makes to help bring it to fruition; she is crushingly disappointed. After a late-night bedroom argument,
  

  she sat listening, frightened, wretched—with a dumb inward cry for help to bear this nightmare of a life in which every energy was arrested by dread. But nothing else happened, except that they both remained a long while sleepless, without speaking again. (Ch. 37)

  Tertius Lydgate, another character passionately dedicated to a life purpose, is similarly thwarted by his choice of marriage partner, the beautiful but vain, shallow, and demanding Rosamond Vincy. Middlemarch shows the human cost of Victorian social mores that demanded that men and women unite themselves for life when they barely knew one another.
  
  In Daniel Deronda, the flirtatious, pleasure-loving Gwendolen Harleth marries the domineering Henleigh Grandcourt, and is made miserable by his tyrannical control. Although, like Casaubon, Grandcourt ultimately dies (horribly), his death does not free Gwendolen to marry the man she loves, because in the meantime that man has fallen in love with another woman.
  
  In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver cannot choose between her long-pledged devotion for Philip Wakem and her attraction to her dashing new suitor Stephen Guest. Before she can resolve her dilemma she and her brother Tom are drowned together during a flood.

In short, for these characters there is no "happy ever after." And this is not only true in the novels of the 19th-century English authors named by Lanchester, but of others such as Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights, in which the lovers Heathcliff and Catherine both marry people they don't love, and both die in misery), Charlotte Brontë (Villette, in which it's suggested that the heroine's great love drowns at sea), Elizabeth Gaskell (Ruth, in which the disgraced heroine nurses her seriously ill seducer back to health, is infected by him, and dies), and George Gissing (New Grub Street, in which struggling writer Edward Reardon finds himself trapped in an incompatible marriage, and smart, sincere, and deeply-feeling Marian Yule is emotionally abandoned by her cynical, social-climbing journalist fiancé Jasper Milvain).

Lanchester is a better critic than this ill-considered and, I have to say, lazy contrast between English and French literature would suggest. I recommend that he, and all my readers, (re)acquaint themselves with the great, complex, and thoroughly adult novels listed above.