Commonplace 44 George & Godwin Peak & Dyce Lashmar.
In previous posts, we looked at George & Egoism. It is to be remembered there is a very clear distinction between egoism and egotism: click for revision of the terms. Broadly speaking, Born In Exile's Godwin Peak is an egoist, and Our Friend The Charlatan's Dyce Lashmar is an egotist. Godwin is arrogant, intellectual and dishonest, bending morality to his will; Dyce is opportunistic, suave and superficial, and nothing without the love of a good woman.
Born in Exile is the tale of Godwin Peak's struggle to master by whatever means he can muster the forces that influence and control his life, exemplified by his determination to attain acceptance in the influential middle classes by marrying Sidwell Warricombe. A winner of prizes at Whitelaw College - ironically, including one in moral philosophy - he is driven by resentment and envy, but also the certain knowledge he is naturally, innately equal - and often, superior - to those of whom he seeks approval. Lacking adequate financial resources and family connections, he makes use of what he has. That is low animal cunning but rationalised down to a sort of philosophical exercise. Because he doesn't value religion, he has no moral problem with pretending to be a Christian in order to earn a living, which will prove he is middle class and make himself socially equal to the family - the Warricombes - who are the microcosm of all he wants to be. It also provides him with the added value of being able to get one over on middle class hypocrisy. By being driven by internal forces to lie and deceive in the name of fulfilling what he sees as his destiny, Godwin proves to be the biggest hypocrite of them all, as he jettisons the personal morality by which atheists function humanely. Anyone who has ever posed as something they are not (all of us?) feels both sympathy and understanding of what compelled him to his doom.
Then we have Dyce Lashmar - the 'Coming Man' George so despised, and yet here, makes seductively likeable, a man so shallow and lacking in intellect that his main talent is a facility for worming his way into society via what he sees as the desperation of women to be accounted for in marriage - and by his succeeding in politics. Despite a good, expensive education, he has risen no further than a part-time teacher. His relationship with his doting mother has taught him women are easily-manipulated and he has an oily, odious gigolo-like lowlife charm, which he believes, erroneously, women will swoon at. Of course, none of these women - and Charlatan is full of women characters - falls for any of it, but what Dyce has in spades is self-confidence, mainly due to a total lack of insight in any given situation, plus a touching belief that his own shallow talents - which either infuriate or endear, depending on your capacity for generosity and forgiveness - are enough to get him through to his destiny in politics. He is an idiot boy man-child, who needs a woman of phenomenal patience and finds it in Iris - named after the Greek goddess who linked heaven and Earth for the Greeks and who in subsequent traditions, personified faith, wisdom and hope.
Like Godwin, Dyce's elevation to a higher realm of influence is based on a lie. By luck, he stumbles upon a theory of sociology and convinces himself that, because these ideas chime with his own, he might as well make use of them to win favour. He soon begins to regard these ideas, in spirit, if not in law, as his property. Lying about it is a means to end but the end will justify the means - is the sum total of his wonky morality. He then slides freely over truth as he pragmatically switches allegiances between prospective marriage partners, avoiding the consequences of his amorality until the whole deck of cards collapses. But Dyce's lack of ability is precisely what his patroness requires if she is to achieve her aim of humiliating an old foe also running in the election. Arch-manipulator, Lady Ogram, throughout Dyce's 'journey', is just one of the women who are really running his show. He is disregarded by all except the widowed Iris who seems initially blind to his faults, but who then plays him like a violin and wins him by sheer determination and genuine affection for him. She has seen through all his nonsense, and yet forgives his faults. Dyce is not academically bright or well-connected, but he has a spark of decency because he is always kind to Iris's son (one of his students) from her first marriage and, when her money has been swindled away, comes good when he sees it as possibly the making of him. Finally, the story ends with one of his more useful traits coming to the fore: the ability to get back on the horse after a fall. It is one of my favourite of George's books (partly because it feels as if he enjoyed writing it) and I would have appreciated more. Our Friend The Charlatan: The Sequel, would have been fun.
In Charlatan, we have a mostly happy ending; in Exile, we have tragedy, not of the heroic kind of a man wandering off into the blizzard to save his companions, but a pathetic, measly, sordid petering out. Godwin finds his own good woman and loses her respect and then decamps off inconsolable to the Continent and dies alone. It's a pointless death, read of in a letter and told to us in passing, as if George has run out of steam, and not been able to think up a fitting end for such a compelling character - very much like his own end. And, yet, is the very nothingness of it that is Godwin's final punishment for opposing the Natural Order of things. Godwin Peak was driven by a cynical and pessimistic intellectualism that set itself above the sort of mealy-mouthed morality of those who live in comfort and who adopt faith as a marker of respectability and not necessarily from deeply-held beliefs. By comparison, Dyce is a spiv who would do well in a small way, anywhere.
Deep in our reader's heart, we know Godwin deserved better than he got, and should have been given a shot at redemption. Dyce Lashmar is an amateur blackguard on many levels but has potential. He dabbles in many things he is not suited to - politics being the natural line for one so able to dissemble and con others. He lacks any sort of genuine talent or knowledge - especially of politics, but that is the depths of his egotism - he tells himself he is a natural and so doesn't need to go the groundwork or learn his trade. He is self-obsessed, vain, deluded and amoral in a sort of innocent way, as if morality is a mere detail. Dyce is a sort of cliché of the middle-class young man of mediocre talent but enormous ego to think if he wills it, it is sure to happen because it is his birth-right to rule.
Darwinism of the soul is at play in both journeys. Despite evolving enough towards the light, Godwin plunges into despair when he is eventually exposed as a fraud. Godwin's unapologetic egoism prevents him from stepping back from his pre-conceived ideas about what people value or might value in him, to re-evaluate his central mission in life. And, no matter how hard he tries to be refined, and suavely middle-class, it is the very low class innate facility for base animal cunning - as George would have viewed it - that is his prime skill. Throughout the novel, Godwin has to contend with an external enemy in the form of Bruno Chilvers - everything Godwin wants to be but never can be: handsome, innately aristocratic, suave, popular, middle class to the gunnels. Decidedly not a spiritual Christian, but who becomes a very successful minister with adoring parishioners. The envy this provokes in Godwin sets him off on his road to perdition. But, as much as he longs to be Chilvers, he despises the deferential ease with which his rival slides through life, wasting his intellect on such a trivial line of work (to both the novel's hero, and its author!), charming everyone while pretending to care - the ultimate cynic, albeit with a public face of concern. Chilvers is a fraud in a socially acceptable way because he gets away with it. Godwin becomes a social pariah when his fraud is discovered. Neither man is a Christian by philosophy - both are playing their game to achieve their own ends.
Dyce weasles his way round without any conscience because what would a politician do with a conscience, but this is a sophisticated, middle class modus operandi from the son of a clergyman - Dyce's father is the Reverend Lashmar. And so we have the Darwinian Godwin adapting to his environment, but whose nerve fails at the last minute, and Dyce coming from his safe middle class background which means he never has to question his place in the natural order of life. It is Godwin caught up in the maelstrom of social change who suffers, while safe Dyce drifts through life playing at it all like it's an amusing game.
One thing they share ( and share with their creator) is a facility for objectifying and exploiting women ruthlessly. These two novels are both tales about 'survival of the fittest' - Dyce prevails where Godwin fails. That is the 'Coming Man' nightmare - it won't be the Godwins who will rule; it will be the Dyces, in George's pessimistic world. This aspect of Godwin resorting to proletarian type is what makes Exile such an insight into George's own psyche. All George's affected 'aristocratic' ways, his revulsion for the 'lower' classes, his snobbishness - these were all to disprove to the world the notion that 'you can take the boy out of the lower middle classes, but you can't take the lower middle classes out of the boy'. And did George ever stop to wonder if a bit of Dyce Lashmar was living inside his own soul? Did he ever think he was, himself, the Charlatan at Owens, an arriviste mixing with the rightful middle classes at ease with themselves in a way George never was, but always strived to be. Was the mini crime spree undertaken to fund a lifestyle of book buying, fine wines, and decent clothes? That makes more sense than to waste the ill-gotten gains on Marianne aka or any girl. After all, it was not women he was seeking to impress with his class credentials, but male fellow students. George spent a good deal of energy for the rest of his life trying to prove he was middle class and that it was genetic more than familial. This was to be exemplified by matters of sensibility, refinement and good taste - for books, affected and totally predictable taste in Art, appropriate hats, fine dining, cigars, books, travel... and vulgar snobbish pronouncements about alleged 'inferiors'.
Godwin Peak is an aspect of George in his youth. Born in Exile is a story with which every working-class undergraduate will identify. One of the challenges post-WWII had for working class teenagers was they had a chance at a university place. Working out how they might blend in with their new peers from financially better-off families, often from public schools, and with buckets of self-confidence and an innate sense of entitlement that working-class kids just did not have, was a giant leap in social evolution. Working class kids had to learn not to doff their hats and tug their forelocks at their 'betters' - like their parents had to do. Adopting middle-class norms of taste and manners took a lot of skill and practise, and a capacity for deceit that left many feeling guilty for turning their backs on their roots. At worst, you were a class traitor; at best, you were a faux middle-class toff. For a good study of this in the twentieth century, see Peter Flannery's tv series Our Friends in the North click
Both Godwin and Dyce are the sort of brash and driven young men with no legitimate arena in which to demonstrate their excellence, until they stumble across scams they can make use of - both being something they are not. Godwin disgraces himself after being exposed as a fraud thanks to the persistent efforts of Sidwell Warricombe's brother who smells a rat from the get go. Poor Godwin dies of shame in the end. Dyce loses his chance for a married fortune when Iris's modest income is defrauded from her. But, what he has lost in financial security, he makes up for when he discovers - thanks to a modest bottle of claret - that he has, after all, a conscience, a heart and a pair of balls When Iris asks him if he loves her (yet again), Dyce replies, 'It's certain I don't hate you!' - which might have been the closest George ever got to saying and meaning 'I love you' to any of his three wives - well, two of them at least!
'Raymond Peak', the original title of the book (!) was written in 1891 during the early months of George's marriage to Edith. George was deep into reading Darwin and already beginning to rue the day he married 'beneath him' - he writes in the Diary for April 21st: 'Wrote to Mrs (Fred) Harrison, telling her of my marriage, and that henceforth I am shut off from educated people'. This is eight weeks into the marriage and probably coincided with Edith's first signs of pregnancy (she has 'indigestion', often a first sign, on April 24th), though whether or not either realised it is doubtful - the doctor visited Edith on May 4th. He would have dropped the bombshell. George's probably psychosomatically-induced typical cold/sore throat/feverish man flu returned and life became a slog once more. All the zest for life a regular sexual relationship had brought was derailed. And, the prospect of several months of enforced celibacy will have deflated him in more ways than one. May 17th - 'Edith ill with dyspepsia or whatever it may be - Constant sickness and misery'. Any thoughts Edith had on the subject - if recorded - were redacted in the Great Diary Rewriting of the latter part of the decade and the beginning of the new century to come.
In previous posts, we looked at George & Egoism. It is to be remembered there is a very clear distinction between egoism and egotism: click for revision of the terms. Broadly speaking, Born In Exile's Godwin Peak is an egoist, and Our Friend The Charlatan's Dyce Lashmar is an egotist. Godwin is arrogant, intellectual and dishonest, bending morality to his will; Dyce is opportunistic, suave and superficial, and nothing without the love of a good woman.
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| Knight at the Crossroads by Victor Vastnetsov 1882 |
Born in Exile is the tale of Godwin Peak's struggle to master by whatever means he can muster the forces that influence and control his life, exemplified by his determination to attain acceptance in the influential middle classes by marrying Sidwell Warricombe. A winner of prizes at Whitelaw College - ironically, including one in moral philosophy - he is driven by resentment and envy, but also the certain knowledge he is naturally, innately equal - and often, superior - to those of whom he seeks approval. Lacking adequate financial resources and family connections, he makes use of what he has. That is low animal cunning but rationalised down to a sort of philosophical exercise. Because he doesn't value religion, he has no moral problem with pretending to be a Christian in order to earn a living, which will prove he is middle class and make himself socially equal to the family - the Warricombes - who are the microcosm of all he wants to be. It also provides him with the added value of being able to get one over on middle class hypocrisy. By being driven by internal forces to lie and deceive in the name of fulfilling what he sees as his destiny, Godwin proves to be the biggest hypocrite of them all, as he jettisons the personal morality by which atheists function humanely. Anyone who has ever posed as something they are not (all of us?) feels both sympathy and understanding of what compelled him to his doom.
 |
| Prince Ivan Riding a Grey Wolf
by Victor Vastnetsov 1889
|
Like Godwin, Dyce's elevation to a higher realm of influence is based on a lie. By luck, he stumbles upon a theory of sociology and convinces himself that, because these ideas chime with his own, he might as well make use of them to win favour. He soon begins to regard these ideas, in spirit, if not in law, as his property. Lying about it is a means to end but the end will justify the means - is the sum total of his wonky morality. He then slides freely over truth as he pragmatically switches allegiances between prospective marriage partners, avoiding the consequences of his amorality until the whole deck of cards collapses. But Dyce's lack of ability is precisely what his patroness requires if she is to achieve her aim of humiliating an old foe also running in the election. Arch-manipulator, Lady Ogram, throughout Dyce's 'journey', is just one of the women who are really running his show. He is disregarded by all except the widowed Iris who seems initially blind to his faults, but who then plays him like a violin and wins him by sheer determination and genuine affection for him. She has seen through all his nonsense, and yet forgives his faults. Dyce is not academically bright or well-connected, but he has a spark of decency because he is always kind to Iris's son (one of his students) from her first marriage and, when her money has been swindled away, comes good when he sees it as possibly the making of him. Finally, the story ends with one of his more useful traits coming to the fore: the ability to get back on the horse after a fall. It is one of my favourite of George's books (partly because it feels as if he enjoyed writing it) and I would have appreciated more. Our Friend The Charlatan: The Sequel, would have been fun.
 |
| Composition No 7 by Wassily Kandinsky 1913 |
Deep in our reader's heart, we know Godwin deserved better than he got, and should have been given a shot at redemption. Dyce Lashmar is an amateur blackguard on many levels but has potential. He dabbles in many things he is not suited to - politics being the natural line for one so able to dissemble and con others. He lacks any sort of genuine talent or knowledge - especially of politics, but that is the depths of his egotism - he tells himself he is a natural and so doesn't need to go the groundwork or learn his trade. He is self-obsessed, vain, deluded and amoral in a sort of innocent way, as if morality is a mere detail. Dyce is a sort of cliché of the middle-class young man of mediocre talent but enormous ego to think if he wills it, it is sure to happen because it is his birth-right to rule.
 |
| Sirin and Alkonost: Birds of Sadness and Joy by Victor Vastnetsov 1896 |
Dyce weasles his way round without any conscience because what would a politician do with a conscience, but this is a sophisticated, middle class modus operandi from the son of a clergyman - Dyce's father is the Reverend Lashmar. And so we have the Darwinian Godwin adapting to his environment, but whose nerve fails at the last minute, and Dyce coming from his safe middle class background which means he never has to question his place in the natural order of life. It is Godwin caught up in the maelstrom of social change who suffers, while safe Dyce drifts through life playing at it all like it's an amusing game.
One thing they share ( and share with their creator) is a facility for objectifying and exploiting women ruthlessly. These two novels are both tales about 'survival of the fittest' - Dyce prevails where Godwin fails. That is the 'Coming Man' nightmare - it won't be the Godwins who will rule; it will be the Dyces, in George's pessimistic world. This aspect of Godwin resorting to proletarian type is what makes Exile such an insight into George's own psyche. All George's affected 'aristocratic' ways, his revulsion for the 'lower' classes, his snobbishness - these were all to disprove to the world the notion that 'you can take the boy out of the lower middle classes, but you can't take the lower middle classes out of the boy'. And did George ever stop to wonder if a bit of Dyce Lashmar was living inside his own soul? Did he ever think he was, himself, the Charlatan at Owens, an arriviste mixing with the rightful middle classes at ease with themselves in a way George never was, but always strived to be. Was the mini crime spree undertaken to fund a lifestyle of book buying, fine wines, and decent clothes? That makes more sense than to waste the ill-gotten gains on Marianne aka or any girl. After all, it was not women he was seeking to impress with his class credentials, but male fellow students. George spent a good deal of energy for the rest of his life trying to prove he was middle class and that it was genetic more than familial. This was to be exemplified by matters of sensibility, refinement and good taste - for books, affected and totally predictable taste in Art, appropriate hats, fine dining, cigars, books, travel... and vulgar snobbish pronouncements about alleged 'inferiors'.
 |
| Lady In Blue by Konstantin Somov 1897-1900 |
Both Godwin and Dyce are the sort of brash and driven young men with no legitimate arena in which to demonstrate their excellence, until they stumble across scams they can make use of - both being something they are not. Godwin disgraces himself after being exposed as a fraud thanks to the persistent efforts of Sidwell Warricombe's brother who smells a rat from the get go. Poor Godwin dies of shame in the end. Dyce loses his chance for a married fortune when Iris's modest income is defrauded from her. But, what he has lost in financial security, he makes up for when he discovers - thanks to a modest bottle of claret - that he has, after all, a conscience, a heart and a pair of balls When Iris asks him if he loves her (yet again), Dyce replies, 'It's certain I don't hate you!' - which might have been the closest George ever got to saying and meaning 'I love you' to any of his three wives - well, two of them at least!
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| The Bogatyrs click by Victor Vastnetsov 1898 |
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| Sadko click by Ilya Repin 1876 |
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