analiticheskoe_chtenie

4.What words and phrases recur in the story? What meaning do they convey?

5.Pick out and speak on the details that reveal Mr. Ferraro's attitude to his wife, to his employees, to workers in general, to his art collection, to his god and ... to himself.

6.Characterize Mr. Ferraro's manner of speaking. What stylistic reference, thematic bias and emotive quality is his vocabulary marked by?

How is Mr. Ferraro's manner of speaking revealed, only through his direct speech, or both through direct

and represented? Prove your point.
7. Speak on the implication contained	in the		following:
"... he remembered that Hitler had		been	educated
by the Jesuits, and yet hopelessly	he	hoped."

8.How does Mr. Ferraro's manner of speaking as well as his manner of reasoning revealed in the above-quoted sentence and elsewhere characterize him?

9.What is the author's attitude to Mr. Ferraro? Does he make his attitude quite obvious or, on the contrary, prefers to be noncommittal? Paraphrase and comment · on the tone as well as on the way this tone is expressed in the following: "God has made man in his image and it -was not unreasonable for Mr. Ferraro to return the compliment and to regard God as the director of some supreme business which yet depended for certain of its operations on Ferraro and Smith." "Mr. Ferraro

... would walk rather as God walked in the Garden, through his library lined with the correct classics and his drawing-room, on the walls of which hung one of the most expensive art collections in private hands." Also comment on the story's title.

10. Is the writer's attitude to other characters different from his attitude to Mr. Ferraro? What is the tone. of the few details that depict Mrs. Ferraro and her Jesuit advisers? Pick out and comment on the tropes used in the portrayal of Miss Saunders. What image of Miss Saunders do those tropes suggest?

11.What can you say about the plot-structure and the composition of the story? In what way are they suggestive of the idea conveyed in the story?

12.Summarize your impressions of the story in a page-· long written statement.

lOO

AMERICANS IN ITALY. MR. EGLANTINE.

by Sinclair Lewis

[S. Lewis, the satirist, was an unsurpassed master of portraying characters that represent different types of contemporary Americans. His Babbitt, for instance, has become a byword of everything that is ignorant and boastful, self-satisfied and money-mad. S. Lewis' satirical method is largely based upon a grotesque, on a revealing detail, overstatement, understatement, paradox and irony.]

Mr. Vernon Eglantine is thin and rather tall and as

respectable	looking as an English muffin. He resembles
a professor	in a five-elm college, and that is what he was

until that slight misconception of his interest in a girl student, when the college president is said to have him chased down the steps of Old Main and halfway to the library. Since then, he has prepared house organs for large and robust Cleveland farms, written verse for greeting cards, and translated scandalous novels from languages he does ndt quite understand into English, which you'd better not understand; And for thirty years he has been a veteran of American artistic colonies in Europe, along with his latest wife, Mitzi, who is jolly and has large amounts of black hair, not often washed. Verny and Mitzi are usually shaky from ten a. m., when they rise till tenten, when they have their first cognac.

They were insiders in the good old days of the Left Bank in Paris. Ten thousand Americans lived in Pads · then and had their own bars and restaurants and newspapers. There Verny added to his literary art and the art of sponging. His speciality was ·getting the names of rich new American arrivals )ram the local papers, calling on these innocents to ask, with. all his skinny and storklike solemnity, about a hypothetical uncle back home, and

gratefully	inviting the· tenderfoot of the boulevards DUt
to a fat	lunch. Good old Mitzi always just happened to

drop in at the restaurant and she got invited too. Sometimes, with Verny's bright conversation and hints

. of how to see in Paris what could not be seen, the lunch was good for a hundred-dollar touch, so thankful was the cultural sucker at having this new friend to show him the soft and dusky underside of Paris. Sometimes it was only twenty-five- and a dollar and a half accepted cheerfully. Anyw<\y, it was always a lunchenough sordid solid

101

sustenance to last the Eglantines for two days, so that they could reserve their cash for the more necessary provender of grappa and brandy.

When the magnificent luncheon bill was reverently borne in, on silver,Verny as host would look at it yawningly, and do a skilled and professional fumble. Oh! He had left his purse at home! Never mind; they knew and loved him here in this brocaded restaurant, they'd take his check. And he would actually, with the slow art of the old master, bring out a real check book, but what do you think? All the checks had been used up.

Sometimes the Eglantines had a quarter of an hour of warm pleasure in watching the downfall of the sucker, who ten days before had been a canny banker or salesman back home. Sometimes it was only five sly, exquisite min-

utes. But always, finally,		the sucker paid for the lunch.
Except	that the Eglantines made it a		principle that if
he had	"lent" them, as it	was called,	over seventy-five

dollars, they themselves would pay, out of the fistful of paper francs which Mitzi carried in her greasy black and gold handbag.

They felt that they were spiritually soiled by having thus to associate with American businessmen, but they made up for it in their wonderful permanent friends of the Latin Quarter cafes: women with faces like athletic young men, young men with faces like petulant girls, and all the geniuses who for ten years now had b,een writing a non-objective free-verse play about Edgar Allan Poe. (After 1946, this play, all the hundred lines of it so far written, would be turned into an existentialist drama with Lord Haw Haw as the hero.)

When War II came to make such annoying inconvenience to gentle people like the Eglantines, Verny and Mitzi escaped to England, where she washed her hair (early in 1941 it was) and he took to shaving and was employed by the government as an expert on American culture. Much later, they found that they should have returned to America, for their old friend Hank Hiller, who in Paris had never rated much higher than Anatole France, had gone to California and founded an academy of geniuses who stupefied America with admiration by spelling all the five-letter words with four letters, so that, reading them, young ladies in Bennington College became able to shock their ex-prospector grandfathers.

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The Eglantines frolicked back to Paris in '47, but all the glories of their particular France, so nicely rotting like a decaying pear, were gone, and it was cold. They decided to take their combination of American enterprise and French culture to Italy, early in 1948..

Naturaiiy they first tried Capri, that lovely rock island of the sirens, which ever since the Emperor Tiberius has been a refuge for slightly frowsy genius. But they discovered there much better hobohemians and cadgers than themselves, Russians and Hungarians and Peruvians and Javanese, and they ail spoke real spoken Italian. Verny did not speak it, no, not enough to caii an ItaHan pussy-cat. He merely translated from it and wrote articles on the young Italian poets. And Capri was so smaii, with so few boats, that nasty shopkeepers could get to you about that little matter of the five thousand lire for wine and cheese.

They moved to the neighbouring island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples, where the damp brethren were gathering but all of these ingrates were inclined to keep their lire for themselves. Indignantly, they went on to Florence. They did find, in the Camiiio and Sostenza, in Florence, such smaii, cheap, exceiient restaurants jammed with American art students. and Russian mystics and Italian pianists, as in Paris had always meant pickings, but in disgust they also found that even the most arty-looking Anglo-Americans went regularly to church; that some of

·the English rather liked England, and some of the Americans still hankered after ice-cream soda and Grant Wood's paintings.

They were broke. Mitzi had to do baby-sitting for the wife of an American vice-consul, and Verny had to go to work and finish up his book on Romanesque Art: A Handbook for Normal Schools. He went so far as to walk nine whole blocks to look at the Tuscan Gothic Church of Santa Maria Noveiia, which was the most intensive laboratory work he had ever done on the subject, and it took him

seven cognacs to recover. .

Then the good rumors came in. On the Ligurian coast, below Genoa, in a 'bus-stop viilage where Ezra Pound had once lived, robed in purple petulance, the Boys and

Girls were beginning to flutter in·, and the beautiful realm
of art freed from morals and oatmeal porridge would soon	'
be established again.

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To this village fled Verny and Mitzi, and the first person they saw walking down the tiny Corso was a rich arid languorous American gent in Basque trousers and sash and rope sandals, and with him were a young lady in severe riding breeches and starched white shirt, and another young lady in a smock so artistic and modern and novel that it might have been worn by her grandmother, who used to be the shock of the more advanced artistic circles in West Virginia.

The strangers and the Eglantines all looked at one another knowlingly.

"Have a strega?" murmured the American gent. Verny and Mitzi sighed and smiled and felt good -

like a Hemingway hero after the seventh beer, and they knew that in Europe there would never be a time when Americans too sensitive to cope with high schools and tarpon fishing and gum and air-conditioning will not be able to find somewhere an asylum where the lesshairy Whitmans will sit together from half past ten to two o'clock in the1morning and tell one another how superior they are to all the Babbitts in Iowa and Ireland and Oslo and South Uruguay.

The Eglantines are still at that village on the Italian Riviera and every day they still say to each other, after borrowing lunch money, "I do hope this place won't be ruined by all these dreadful American tourists."

		TASKS
1. Enumerate	the different ways Mr. Eglantine used
to make his	living in.	·

2.List words and phrases that belong to the thematic group of "speciality", "skill". What meaning are these words imbued with in the present story?

3.How did the Eglantines practise their art of sponging? Pick out the details that show that they enjoyed that practice.·

4.What was there .about Mr. Eglantine that could win the trust of American tourists? Pick out sentences/phrases which speak of Mr. Eglantine's appearance. Comment on their tone. ·

5.What is the author's attitude to the "artistic" set the Eglantines were proud to associate with? Prove your point.

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6. Observe how the author speaks of Mr. Eglantine's

·reluctance to do honest work. Name the figures of speech contained in the following sentence and comment on their effect: "He went so far as to walk nine

whole blocks to look at the Tuscan Church of Santa Maria Novella, which was the most intensive laboratory

work he had ever done on the subject, and it took him seven cognacs to recov~r." _

7. What people did the Eglantines live off? What attitude to these people did they profess to have? How do you understand the sentence: "The strangers and the Eglantines all looked at one another knowingly."?

8.What makes the last sentence of the story "I do hope this place won't be ruined by all these dreadful American tourists" sound bitterly ironical?

9.What type of Americans is depicted in the story? Write

a page-long statement on how the author depicted the type.

THAT EVENING SUN

by William Faulkner

[With all its contradictions and distortions, mysticism and violence W. Faulkner's total work mirrors the tragic tumult of life in the Southern States. In his best works, such as this, W. Faulkner has achieved an almost impossible penetration into the characters' pained and twisted hearts. "The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself ... alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat." (W. Faulkner))

I

Monday is no different from any other weekday in Jefferson now. The streets are paved now, and the telephone and electric companies are cutting down more and more of the shade trees - the water oaks, the maples and locusts and elms - to make room for iron poles bearing clusters of bloated and ghostly and bloodless grapes, and we have a city laundry which makes the rounds on Monday morning, gathering the bundles of clothes into brightcoloured, specially made motor-cars: the soiled wearing

of a whole week now flees		apparitjonlike	behind	alert
and	irritable electric horns,	with a long	diminishing
noise	of rubber and asphalt	like teari'ng silk, and		even

the Negro women who still take in white people's washing after old custom, fetch and deliver it in automobiles.

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But fifteen years ago, on Monday morning the quiet, dusty, shady streets would be full of Negro women with, balanced on their steady, ·turbaned heads, . bundles of clothes tied up in sheets, almost as large as cotton bales, carried so without touch of hand between the kitchen door of the white house and the blackened washpot beside a cabin door in Negro Hollow.

Nancy would set her bundle on the top of her head, then upon the bundle in turn she would set the black straw sailor hat which she wore winter and summer. She

was	tall,	with	a high, sad face sunken a little where
her	teeth	were	missing. Sometimes we would go a part

of the way down the lane and across the pasture with her, to watch the balanced bundle and the hat that never bobbed nor wavered, even when she walked down into the ditch and up the other side and stooped through the fence. She would go down on her hands and knees and crawl through the gap, her head rigid, uptilted, the bundle steady as a rock or a balloon, and rise to her feet again and go on.

Sometimes the husbands of the washing women would fetch and deliver the clothes, but Jesus never did that for Nancy, even before Father told him to stay from our house, even when Dilsey was sick and Nancy would come cook for us.

And then about half the time we'd have to go down the lane to Nancy's cabin and tell her to come on and cook breakfast. We would stop at the ditch, because Father told us to not have anything to do with Jesushe was a short black man, with a razor scar down his faceand we would throw rocks at Nancy's house until she came to the door, leaning her head around it without any clothes on.

• "What yawl mean, chunking my house?" Nancy said. "What you little devils mean?''

"Father says for you to come and get breakfast," Caddy

said. "Father says it's over a half an hour now, and	you've
got to come this minute."
"I ain't studying no breakfast," Nancy said. "I going
to get my sleep out."
"I bet you're drunk," Jason said. "Father says you're
drunk. Are you drunk, Nancy?"	.
"Who says I is?" Nancy said. "I got to get my sleep
out. I ain't studying breakfast."
So after a while we quit chunking the cabin and went
back home. When she finally came, it was too	late for

106

me to go to school. So we thought it was whisky until that day they arrested her again and they were taking her to jail and they passed Mr. Stovall. He was the cashier in the bank and a deacon in the Baptist church, and Nancy began to say:

"When you going to pay me, white man? When you going to pay me, white man? It's been three times now since you paid me a cent-" Mr. Stovall knocked her down, but she kept on saying, "When you going to pay me, white man? It's been three times now since - " until Mr. Stovall kicked her in the mouth with his heel and the marshal caught Mr. Stovall back, and Nancy lying in the street, laughing. She turned her head and spat out some blood and teeth and said, "It's been three times now since he paid me a cent."

That was how she lost her teeth, and all that day they told about Nancy and Mr. Stovall, and all that night the ones that passed the jail ~ould hear Nancy singing and yelling. They could see her hands holding to the window bars, and a lot of them stopped along the fence, listening to her and to the jailer trying to make her stop. She didn't shut up until almost daylight, when the jailer began to hear a bumping and scraping upstairs and he went up there and found Nancy hanging from the window bar. He said that it was cocaine and not whisky, because no nigger would try to commit suicide unless he was full of cocaine, because a nigger full of cocaine wasn't a nigger any longer.

The jailer cut her down and revived her; then he beat her, whipped her. She had hung herself with her dress. She had fixed it all right, but when they arrested her she didn't have on anything except a dress and so she didn't have anything to tie her hands with and she couldn't make her hands let go of the window ledge. So the jailer heard the noise and ran up there and found Nancy hanging from the window, stark naked, her belly already swelling out a little, likea little balloon.

When Dilsey was sick in her cabin and Nancy was cooking for us, we could see her apron swelling out; that was before father told Jesus to stay away from the house. Jesus was in the kitchen, sitting behind the stove, with his razor scar on his black face like a piece of dirty string. He said it was a watermelon that Nancy had under her dress.

107

"It never come off of your vine, though," Nancy said. "Off of what vine?" Caddy said.

"I can cut down the vine it did come off of," Jesus said. "What makes you want to talk like that before these chillen?" Nancy said. "Whyn't you go on to work? You done et. You want Mr. J ason to catch you hanging around his kitchen, talking that way before these chillen?"

"Talking what way?" Caddy said. "What vine?"

"I can't hang around white man's kitchen," Jesus said. "But white man can hang around mine. White man can come in my house, but I can't stop him. When white man want to come in my house, I ain't got no house. I can't stop him, but he can't kick me outen it. He can't do that."

Dilsey was still sick in her cabin. Father told Jesus to stay off our place. Dilsey was still sick. It was a long time. We were in the library after supper.

"Isn't Nancy through in the kitchen yet?" Mother said. "It seems to me that she has had plenty of time to have finished the dishes."

"Let Quentin go and see," Father said. "Go and see if Nancy is through, Quentin. Tell her ·she can go on home."

I went to the kitchen. Nancy was through. The dishes were put away and the fire was out. Nancy was sitting in a chair, close to the cold stove. She looked at me.

'"Mother wants to know if you are through," I said.

"Yes," Nancy said. She looked at me. "I done finished." She looked at me.

·"What is it?" I said. "What is it?"

·"I ain't nothing but a nigger," Nancy said. "It ain't none of my fault."

She looked at me, sitting in the chair before the cold stove, the sailor haton her head. I went back to the library. It was the cold stove and all; when you think of a kitchen being warm and busy and cheerful. And with a cold stove and the dishes all put away, and nobody wanting to eat

at that hour.	. .
"Is she through?" Mother said.
"Yessum,"	I said.

"What is she doing?" Mother said.

"She's not doing anything. She's through."- "I'll go and see," Father said.

"Maybe she's waiting for Jesus to come and take her home," Caddy said.

108

"Jesus is gone,'' I said. Nancy told us how one morning she woke up and Jesus was gone.

"He quit me," Nancy said. "Done gone to Memphis, I reckon. Dodging them city police for a while, I reckon."

"And a goad riddance," Father said. "I hope he stays there".

"Nancy's scaired of the dark," Jason said. "So are you," Caddy said.

"I'm not," Jason said. "Scairy cat," Caddy said. "I'm not," Jason s.aid.

"You, Candace!" Mother said. Father came back.

"I am going to walk down· the lane with Nancy," he said. "She says that Jesus is back."

"Has she seen him?" Mother said.

"No. Some Negro sent her word that he was back in town. I won't be long."

"You leave me alone to take Nancy home?" Mother said. "Is her safety more precious to you than mine?"

"I won't be long," Father said.

"You'll leave these children unprotected, with that Negro about?"

"I'm going too," Caddy said. "Let me go, Father." "What would he do with them, if he were unfortunate

enough to have them?" Father said. "I want to go, too," J ason said.

"Jason!" Mother said. She was speaking to Father. You could tell that by the way she said the name. Lil<e she believed that all day Father had been trying to think of doing the thing she wouldn't like the most, and that she kl'lew all the time that after a while he would think of it. I stayed quiet, because Father and I both knew that Mother would want him to make me stay with her if she just thought of it in time. So Father didn't look at me. I was the oldest. I was nine and Caddy was seven and Jason was five.

"Nonsense," Father said. "We won't be long."

Nancy had her hat on. We came to the lane. "Jesus always been good to me," Nancy said. "Whenever he had two dollars, one of them was mine." We walked in the

lane. "If I can just get through the	lane," Nancy said,
"I be all right then."
The lane was always dark. "This	is where J ason got
scaired on Hallowe'en," Caddy said.

109