Simone Weil vs George Orwell on political language

Around the time of the Second World War, both Simone Weil and George Orwell were lamenting the misuse of language. At first glance, this is not altogether remarkable, for criticisms about language’s mistreatment seem constant throughout history. However, both Orwell in “Politics and the English Language” and Weil in “The Power of Words” are writing with a certain heightened seriousness that we can argue is lacking in previous laments over language’s decline. Surrounded by war in a century where possibilities for slaughter were fast proving limitless, understanding how language could contribute to bloodshed was of paramount importance. As a result, the writers go beyond that standard argument we may already be familiar with – that sloppiness in language indicates and produces sloppiness of thought.  

No, their goal was loftier than that. As Weil put it, “To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis – to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving lives.”

Orwell

Of the two, it is Orwell whose essay is more practical. Many of us read “Politics and the English Language” today as a kind of guide to decent prose style. That was what prompted me first to glance at it a few years ago. Orwell begins his piece with a series of examples of bad, careless prose. From these he identifies a few common elements – “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision” chief among them. He goes into detail, noting problems like pretentious, often Latinate diction; the use of meaningless words in art criticism; needlessly complicated language (generally when we use compounds when a single verb will do); and finally, the dying metaphor – the metaphor which by its familiarity has all the impact of a fish’s flailing upon the whaler’s deck. Orwell then follows up his criticisms by ending with a list of advice that you feel you ought to pin onto your fridge door:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

“Politics and the English Language” was published just after the end of the Second World War. It lacks some of the urgency of Weil’s essay, which was written when she returned from the Spanish Civil War, where she had been volunteering with the anarchists. For Weil, that war was obviously a prelude of the horrors to come – horrors she might prevent, if only she reached the right people with her voice. Orwell, meanwhile, has the resignation of an older man – he was already in his forties, while Weil was my age (twenty-five) when she wrote her essay. Though Orwell’s criticism of bad writing listed above is important, there is an attack on political writing in particular that I consider far more crucial than the sloppiness of aged professors and arts critics.

It is this part of Orwell’s piece that we can read fruitfully next to Weil’s. Orwell’s main problem with political writing is that it uses meaningless words, or at the very least words that have been emptied as much of their meaning as possible. “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” Even “democracy” has no meaning, Orwell notes, except as a thing that is desirable, and hence a thing you use to describe what you personally want.

This meaningless has the result that “words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different”. By saying he acts for democracy, a general launching a coup can gather the support of an unthinking population at large, while his real goal is the consolidation of his own power. I say unthinking, because such actions rely on a reflex – the reflexive view that democracy is good, and hence those who claim to act in its name must deserve our support.

Meaningless words allow for reflexive action, while another tool we often use, consciously or not, is abstract language. By replacing specifics with euphemisms or vague terminology, we numb our listeners to the real content hidden behind the words. For “Purges”, read the systematic arbitrary imprisonment and murder of our enemies without fair trial; for “liquidation,” read “murder”; and to give a more modern example, for “special military operation” read “war”. Orwell notes that the key element of such language is that it lets us to “name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” In Orwell’s time, most political writing gladly abused this kind of language – and it wasn’t all fascists and communists’ doing. After all, we were still “pacifying” and “bringing civilization” to the colonies at this time in the Allied world, a great hypocrisy Weil is very critical of as well.

For Orwell, “Political writing is bad writing” because political writing demands this kind of numbing language. “Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” The point of most pamphlets is not to persuade, but to set light emotions that have already been charged by a tensed time, while keeping the mind itself dormant. Writers do this by repeating language that identifies the enemy and identifies our own group. Hence “democracy”, or “communism”, or “fascism”, or “dogs”, or “rats” in Orwell’s time. In our own day we might read “woke” or “leftists” or “alt-right” in the same, utterly meaningless way. Such language, emptied of meaning, and packed with group-associations, dehumanises people and also makes concepts unreal. By never defining “woke” or “fascist” seriously, there is no way to understand any associated political programmes in a way that might leave a space open for compromise and finding common ground.

To conclude, we can say that Orwell’s essay argues our goal must be clear language, because clear language is sincere and comprehensible. And because it lacks the evasiveness built into the abstract and the meaningless, it forces us to stay within acceptable moral boundaries in our politics. “We must murder our political opponents to ensure we maintain power” is only rarely a phrase that we can actually say without opposition. If we all actually aimed at sincerity of prose and voice, we would never end up in those rare situations in which such language can go unopposed at all.

Weil

Orwell’s arguments are straightforward and sensible. Clear language is honest language, and honest language keeps our politics in good bounds. Bad language allows for dangerous suggestions, whether we mean for this or not. Weil, however, goes more directly into why meaningless language in particular (words like “fascist” and “communist” and “woke” in their regular usage) is outright dangerous. She is explicit where Orwell only hints at the benefits of clear language, when she says that clear language can potentially save lives.

This is because Weil’s topic, in “The Power of Words”, is language and war. Specifically, it is about the language we use to justify wars. Here we come back to the problem of meaningless language that Orwell spoke of. Weil notes that our modern wars “are conflicts with no definable objective”, a type of conflict that is inevitably most bitter. I imagine many of us would disagree with Weil instinctively. The most obvious example of a war that has a definable objective is Allies’ participation in the Second World War. But now, think of any other war, and the matter becomes much more difficult. We all know that in the case of the Great War the sides “sleepwalked” into the conflict. You can possibly think of some other examples to confirm or deny this, but what is interesting are the arguments Weil makes about the consequences of meaningless war goals.

In any war where the goals are defined, it is possible to “weight the value of the stake against the probable cost of the struggle and decide how great an effort it justifies.” This serves a preventative purpose, as when we define goals in this way, we find that war rarely if ever proves a worthwhile activity. But more important than preventing war, clear goals allow for ending it by making a compromise between the sides’ goals possible. Alternatively, in a meaningless war, “there is no longer any common measure or proportion”, and thus a compromise is impossible – including with ourselves, about the worthiness of fighting at all.

No war can be entirely meaningless but the meaning that fills a meaningless war is an extremely dangerous one. The only possible meaning for a meaningless war is the cost of it, in other words the sacrifices and pains it has demanded. This is unavoidable, except by having a real goal, and it results in wars that are self-perpetuating, and last until both nations are utterly ruined. In such a war, the argument “the dead do not wish it”, cannot be fought against, because there are no real objectives to measure the necessary future sacrifices with. And so, we fight, we die, and we water the grass with our blood.

The Trojan War, over Helen, is an example of a meaningless conflict. Helen was just a symbol, and like a chalice filling with blood she gained her meaning as men died for her. But in Weil’s world, “the role of Helen is played by words with capital letters.” Words like fascist or communist have limited meanings except to identify, as noted above, an in-group and an out-group. This prevents the limited practical differences between the totalitarian regimes of the USSR and Hitler’s Germany, for example, from being an obstacle to them declaring each other mortal enemies. The capitalisation of such words takes away any practical meaning to them and thus the concreteness that, again, might allow compromise. 

These meaningless words which serve only to create the conditions for bloodshed are not limited to those hefty ideological words, though. “National interest” and “national security” are other examples of words whose meaning appears neutral, but which under Weil’s gaze reveal themselves to be primarily about securing the resources to succeed in war. Because success in any potential war is based on ensuring that others do not succeed, national interest inevitably leads to national conflict, and compromises are impossible where there can be only success and failure.

A binary choice, victory or defeat, success, or failure, are the rails which these abstract, capitalised words force us to travel along. For Weil, this is insanity. Everything, for her, lies upon a spectrum. This is the way of thinking which she wants us to adopt in our own lives. When there are no absolutes, distinctions can always be drawn, and ground shifted between positions to allow for a compromise.

By contrast, once we think only in isms and absolutes, murder appears permissible. When we cannot kill capitalism, for it is too abstract to wound with blade or bomb, we decide to kill capitalists instead. Everything soon becomes justifiable when the goal is an ill-defined victory. What shocks Weil is the way that human beings seemingly will choose death and violence over actually interrogating the meaning of the words that they are using to justify the most barbarous acts: “apparently it is easier to kill, and even to die, than to ask ourselves a few quite simple questions.” It is disappointing that this really does seem to be the case.

Similarities and Differences

Both Orwell and Weil in these essays take language as their topic, and they follow a well-travelled path in deploring contemporary language’s lack of clarity. Orwell focuses on how abstract and vague language numbs us to potentially horrific facts, ultimately allowing us to tolerate the intolerable – colonialism, totalitarianism, and so on. Weil is less interested in giving writing advice. The words that are her enemies in “The Power of Words” are not just words on the page, or even words in speeches, but words in the mind. Given capital letters and made abstractions, they carry us into conflicts that we cannot end because they brook no compromise by denying common ground or any sense of measurement and limit.

Orwell’s call in “Politics and the English Language” is primarily to write better, so that we might think better and avoid bad positions; Weil demands instead that we interrogate what we believe and set ourselves up to think according to “the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends”. Both writers’ messages are important, but Weil’s one is the more urgent and more lofty.

It will not have escaped readers’ notice that there is a hot war going on at the time of writing, and plenty of internal conflict closer to home for those who live outside the combatants’ lands. These two essays provide guidance about the ways that language plays into creating and sustain such violent divisions, whether they are physical or still as yet merely verbal. That clarity is a virtue is undeniable. And Orwell’s essay is such a joy to read that everyone should study it as a model for effective prose.

But Weil’s essay, to my mind, is the more important at the present time. The ongoing war is for one side utterly meaningless, and for the other in danger of becoming abstracted in the way Weil warns against. It is easy, when suffering greatly, to make sacrifice one’s argument for continuing battle. But this makes compromise impossible and thus anything except a peace reached through exhaustion. That is not to deny that the one side’s stated goals are reasonable and generally moral. But there must be a limit to the cost we are willing to put in for that victory, no matter how moral or even just that victory may be. By losing sight of Weil’s ideas of boundaries and proportion, we can fall into a situation where inertia and the blood already clogging the trenches are preventing the thing that is almost certainly most worthwhile of all: peace.

The Letters of Simone Weil

Simone Weil is probably my favourite thinker, alongside Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. What makes her work so brilliant is the way she manages to combine a real earthiness of focus on real problems and real solutions with an understanding that the reason why we care is because what is at stake is nothing less than the soul. Writing during the Second World War and passing from pacifism to accepting violence in battling Hitler, she has a great deal to teach us as we go through yet another time of suffering and mass slaughter. With her eye on human dignity and the way that humans get caught up in violence, revenge and justifications for murder that cannot handle scrutiny, she is essential reading.

But, as hinted above, Weil was also a thinker who could and did change her mind. One of the most striking things about her is that she had a religious awakening at the beginning of the 1940s with an intensity and results that went far beyond even Tolstoy’s. As a result, there are almost two ideas of Weil in competition with one another. The one I’ve preferred – the heroic woman who in spite of physical frailty and constant headaches (she is almost a mirror of Nietzsche, with an almost diametrically opposed philosophy: “even when he is expressing what I myself think, I find him literally intolerable”) – worked in factories and on fields, and even volunteered with the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War to get close to the working class so she could truly understand the struggles they faced.

What best encapsulates this Weil is her riposte to Simone de Beauvoir when the latter once said in conversation that the main thing in life was finding meaning. Weil immediately countered by saying that it was obvious de Beauvoir had never been hungry.

But then there is another Weil, the one after her conversion. She has not abandoned her practical concerns, but the balance has shifted. To a sceptic, this Weil deserves de Gaulle’s remark, made when he came across her while they were both working in London on the war effort – “elle est folle!” (“She is mad!”). The soul is now key, the solutions to our human problems seem considerably less practical, a little less rooted in the world. This is ironic, because her most beautiful book, The Need for Roots, stems from this period. Still. It is this Weil that made the extraordinary choice to die through voluntary starvation mixed with tuberculosis, denying to eat anything more than the rations allowed her had she lived in France. Such a decision certainly would not be compatible with her earlier views and is only dubiously compatible with her later ones. That this happened is amazing, nevertheless.

Reading her Seventy Letters: Personal and Intellectual Windows on a Thinker translated by Richard Rees is interesting first of all as an encounter with the person behind the thoughts. Do we find more continuities or discontinuities here between the Weils above? Readers hoping for such will be disappointed. Although the letters have a kind of internal coherence between time periods, the lack of annotations is unhelpful given the casual reader’s knowledge (or strictly speaking, lack thereof) of Weil. To give an example, her correspondents are rarely introduced. Some of them, when googled, draw a blank too.

For those trying to create a full picture of Weil, this book is not entirely sufficient. Its subtitle, “windows on a thinker”, is quite apt. We are peering into Weil’s world through various windows, but at no point can we shuffle backwards to get a good view of the house itself. We have biographies for this, of course, but it is still something of a disappointment. The book is short –  just under two hundred pages – so there was certainly scope for adding more missives. One glaring, if certainly deliberate omission, is the Letter to a Priest (Édouard Couturier), which is published separately. Reading the selected letters, we are suddenly thrown from an atheistic, if sympathetic, to an obsessively religious Weil who is mentioning God at every turn, without the key stopping points in between. It’s certainly jarring.

Still, we get our windows. Let’s peer in. We begin with various letters to schoolchildren she had once taught, filled with advice (“suffering doesn’t matter, so long as you experience some vivid joys. What matters is not to bungle one’s life. And for that, one must discipline oneself”) and a deep understanding of the political challenges of 1933-34 when the National Socialists had just gained power in Germany and Soviet influence on French communist agitators was growing. Various letters to trade unionists detail her understanding of the effects of factory life upon the individual, in particular the loss of dignity caused by repetitive work and constant submission.

In the letters describing her factory experiences, what is most impressive is her curiosity. “Because I don’t feel the suffering as mine, I feel it as the workers’ suffering; and whether I personally suffer it or not seems to me a detail of almost no importance. Thus the desire to know and understand easily prevails.” Her curiosity strikes us, as does a certain raw honesty, perhaps naivety. Weil had what today we might call “no filter.” The longest series of letters, to “B”, a factory manager, ends because Weil shares her delight at the victory of the French left in the elections of 1936, which unsurprisingly her correspondent does not.

This incident is quite typical, as far as I can make out for Weil. She puts in real effort in the letters first to make the manager appreciate the suffering of his workers, and how the workers’ lot could be improved without challenging the existing order (Weil was no fan of revolutions but expected revolutionary change to happen through achieving general consent to it): “It is very difficult to judge from above, and it is very difficult to act from below. That, I believe, is in general one of the essential causes of human misery.” She wrote articles for the factory newspaper, was a visitor there, and regularly spoke to B. She asked for such simple, practical things as an anonymous suggestion box for workers. This is what I mean when I describe Weil’s earthiness – real solutions to real problems.

For those of us familiar with Weil’s work on oppression, the letters contain much of the first germs of ideas regarding the effects of the work on people which later made their way into her essays: “my experience taught me two lessons. The first, the bitterest and most unexpected, is that oppression, beyond a certain degree of intensity, does not engender revolt but, on the contrary, an almost irresistible tendency to the most complete submission. … The second lesson is that humanity is divided into two categories – the people who count for something, and the people who count for nothing.” What they also do, quite clearly, is indicate her political leanings, or rather clarify her attitude towards things like revolutions, which are often only implicit in her other writings.

Further letters before the war detail a trip to Italy, where she met some fascists and had discussions with them to understand their views, which she condemned utterly (“if I had any choice in the matter I would prefer hardship and starvation in a salt-mine to living with the narrow and limited horizon of these young people”), and of course saw some old buildings and paintings. We see Weil’s mastery of languages as she quotes Greek, Latin, and Italian poetry to her readers. But one thing that is worth noting is that we get the odd, brief look at a Weil who could possibly be described as happy. For most of the remaining letters Weil is so full of self-loathing and guilt that her joy only comes through almost self-pitying laments: “Why have I not the n existences I need, in order to devote one of them to the theatre!”

By far the most interesting letter of this period was to the French writer Georges Bernanos, where she shares her experience in the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer. Fortunately, she was injured in an accident involving cooking oil (passion, seriousness, and a certain awkward incompetence seem to be the hallmarks of Weil), which almost certainly saved her life, given she would pick quarrels with people who, her own letters show, saw very little value in life and would easily and probably gladly have rid her of hers. But this letter, anyway, is a single, tantalising exception beside various reasonings on the war, only some of which are interesting.

The next series of letters concerns algebra, in particular as it was done in ancient cultures. Weil’s brother, André, was a famous mathematician (who lived to 92 – how much of Simone we likely lost…!) and she herself was at ease discussing the theories. It is not my area. But Weil’s interest is infectious, and like with Wittgenstein, maths is for Weil very much a mirror of the soul, or perhaps a key to it, but certainly not some irrelevancy. It made me think of a beautiful moment in her essay “Human Personality” where she says that perfection is impersonal, because a correct equation is always correct and undifferentiable, while an incorrect equation bears the mark of its writer in how exactly it is wrong. Although, again, some footnotes would have been helpful. Weil was not a systematic thinker, and wrote brilliantly on a whole range of subjects, but that means that specialist academics or your blogger are unlikely to be comfortable in every single one of the fields she was.

In 1942 we witness the aftermath of her religious awakening through a letter to a man wounded in the Great War, Joe Bousquet. I had a sense that something was off about Weil here, and sure enough it did not take many paragraphs for her to start discussing “the nuptial consent to God.” The problem is not God, but what comes after for Weil. If she was harsh to herself before, there is little forgiveness now. She talks about how daydreaming is an evil because it distracts us from the pain we need to reach God. And then, for those unaware of more indirect expressions of it, she states “my attitude towards myself… is… a mixture of contempt and hated and repulsion.”

Compare the above to a phrase only two years before: “there are so many modern people … in whom sadness is connected with a loss of the very instinct for happiness; they feel a need to annihilate themselves.” Weil has come to see, as far as I can make out based on the letters and her essays, that annihilation is precisely what we should aim for. I am not, all told, with her. I am not sure her recipients are necessarily either. But in the annihilation of her personality she found God waiting, so how are we to blame her? We must trust to her feelings, and the sense of a task from God that she gained, even if we struggle to follow her in her beliefs. But if we are reading her letters, we are probably at least slightly sympathetic to her.

The final section of the Selected Letters sees Weil go from exile in the United States to living in London. She regretted leaving Marseilles, where she had been after French capitulation, feeling too distant from the war. Unfortunately, she found work in London supporting the Free French unrewarding too: “The work I am doing here will be arrested before long by a triple limit. First, a moral limit; because the ever increasing pain of feeling that I am not in my right place will end in spite of myself, I fear, by crippling my thought. Second, an intellectual limit; obviously my thought will be arrested when it tries to grasp the concrete, for lack of an object. Third, a physical limit; because my fatigue is growing.”

What Weil wanted was “any really useful work, not requiring technical expertise but involving a high degree of hardship and danger.” She wanted to be parachuted into France, perhaps to sabotage something. It is from this period that her famous “Plan for an organization of front-line nurses” originates. This idea of unarmed women airdropped onto the front line to provide first aid, has a reputation for being silly and impractical (it was what prompted de Gaulle to call her mad), so I was interested to read it. The criticism, I think, is somewhat unwarranted. There is symbolic beauty in the idea of a group of angelic carers fighting ideologically against the beasts of the SS, as Weil is keen to emphasise. And as for the impracticality of providing first aid at the front and taking people’s last messages home, I’m not sure that’s entirely without its practical value, and certainly has some moral value. Regardless, she was unable to get it supported.

The war concern fades into the background with the remaining letters, which are for Weil’s family. These are some of the least pleasant to read in the whole collection. What I like about Weil, whether in her essays or in her letters, is her authenticity. She was terribly naïve at times, but always true and earnest.

In April 1943, Weil left her London lodgings to enter a hospital, and was later transferred to a sanatorium. “I cannot eat the bread of the English without taking part in their war effort”, she wrote. But, working with the Free French, she was working. It was just that her self-loathing meant that she couldn’t allow herself to believe that she had done enough.

What would be merely silly had it not killed her, becomes disgusting when we learn, in one of very few notes the editors provide, that Weil still addressed her parents as if she was living at her old lodgings. And the lies go further, with her pretending to a knowledge of the ongoings of London life, which was obviously denied to her in bed, and to a health denied her too. “There’s been a misunderstanding. There’s no change for me, and none in prospect, so far. I still live quietly in my room, with my books distributed between it and the office.” This is extraordinary stuff to read, less than a month before she died, from a woman who it seems was pathologically compelled to tell the truth.

Extraordinary, and utterly, crushingly, depressing. “Au revoir, darlings. Heaps and heaps of love,” her final letter ends. No doubt she lied to her parents out of a desire to conserve their happiness, already challenged by the war. But the whole thing is just too sad for words. Weil’s heroism, her bravery, her desire to help, are all annihilated by a self-loathing that allows her just to float away from the life she had once spent trying to improve for others, as if she had never cared about such things at all.

And so, finishing the Selected Letters, I must be honest and say that if anything they lowered my opinion of one of my few philosophical heroes. If before I had thoughtlessly accepted the hagiographic view of Weil, too angelic to live, accepting a self-imposed starvation out of a magnanimous love of her countryfolk, now I think of her sacrificing honesty, common sense, and her goals for ideas that are either incomprehensible or, when I can understand them, unacceptable. Her intelligence and passion are awe-inspiring, and my respect for them both only grew reading the letters. But it is only the early Weil whom I can anymore say that I like.

For more letters, I read some of Joseph Conrad’s here.

Just a Ghost Story? Dickens’s “To Be Read at Dusk”

“To Be Read at Dusk” is a ghost story by Charles Dickens. Or rather, it is emphatically not a ghost story at all – “I don’t talk of ghosts” one of the characters declares. Instead, it is a collection of different encounters with what we might term the inexplicable. We can just leave it there, but as with many other similar tales, we may find something beneath the surface that the characters have missed.

The story begins with our narrator, sitting out in the Swiss Alps, and eavesdropping on the conversation of five nearby couriers, men who have worked in private houses as personal servants. They are discussing their experiences of the supernatural. One, a German, tells three stories and a Genoese man tells another, the longest.

The German’s Stories

At least one of these encounters will be familiar to us. The German tells of an old Marchesa who during a dinner party declared in shock that her sister, far away in Spain, had died. And so it was. My grandmother likes to tell stories about her own talents for detecting the deaths of her relatives. And my own father, the night before he died, visited me in a dream. It is a mystery how such a thing can happen, but since I do not as a rule dream, it feels wrong to call such a thing a mere coincidence. I imagine you, too, reader, can find examples of this mysterious sense.

The German also mentions the time when his mind was suddenly filled with thoughts of an old friend of his, with everyone reminding him of him on the street, and then to his surprise actually meeting the man that day, though he had believed him elsewhere. It is a more innocent version of the story above, for death sits outside of this arrangement. Yet there is something here that does not quite add up – “what do you call that?” he asks.

At the end of “To Be Read at Dusk” the German tells a final story, this time from when he was in the service of an Englishman. Just before he departed on a long journey the man’s twin brother seemed to send him a message in a dream. Sure enough, word soon arrives that the twin is near death from illness. When the first brother arrives his dying twin only has time to declare before expiring: “James, you have seen me before, to-night – and you know it!”

These stories all focus on what we cannot seem to explain. After relating the experience of seeing his friend, another courier, a Neapolitan, compares such things to the blood of San Gennaro liquifying back in Naples. That is a miracle, but to the others it is inappropriate – one gets the impression they are talking about something more serious. “That!” Cried the German. “Well! I think I know a name for that.” Bollocks, in short.

But as with a lot of stories set in the 19th century, we have here a certain uneasy relation to the supernatural. We may disbelieve miracles, but not quite the everyday inexplicable. Though we may try. The Englishman, on receiving his twin’s message, goes to the German with the hope of putting his mind to rest through the latter’s more scientific vision:

“You come from a sensible country, where mysterious things are inquired into, and are not settled to have been weighed and measured – or to have been unweighable and unmeasurable – or in either case to have been completely disposed of, for all time – ever so many years ago. I have just now seen the phantom of my brother.”

But nothing can be done, and nothing can be explained. Each of these stories tells us precisely nothing, except that such things do happen. They remind us that our world is filled with things that cannot be explained, and that mystery is better accepted than denied. For a 19th-century reader perhaps these tales were enough to make one lose sleep, but they did nothing for me. Our eavesdropping narrator, however, feels a chill, because after hearing the stories he goes back to talking to the very American he had avoided by listening in to the couriers in the first place. This man, from his new and naïve country, tells a more prosaic tale about “one of the largest acquisitions of dollars ever made”. The narrator, clearly, prefers a world that can be explained, even if, by comparison with the previous stories, it is hardly an exciting one.

The Genoese’s Tale: The Obvious Reading

The three previous encounters with the supernatural take up about a third of the length of “To Be Read at Dusk”. They set us up to approach the central tale, told by the Genoese courier and sandwiched between the German’s stories, as being another example of things that cannot be explained. Yet somehow, this does not quite add up. Here the mystery seems, if anything, more complex and more worthy of our attention too.

The Genoese courier tells of his hiring by a young English gentleman to accompany him, and his soon-to-be wife, on a trip to a slightly forlorn palace on the coast between Genoa and Nice for a few months of rest and relaxation. “All we had was complete; we wanted for nothing. The marriage took place. They were happy. I was happy, seeing all so bright.” The newlywed couple, the courier, and another servant, the wife’s maid, head to the palace. On the way, however, the courier notices something amiss about his mistress. He sees her “sometimes brooding in a manner very strange; in a frightened manner; in an unhappy manner”. He is perplexed, but eventually manages to get from her maid the information that she “is haunted”.

A dream before her marriage, of a man wearing black, with black hair and a grey moustache. This is the image that haunts her. The characters fear that they might find such an image at the palace when they arrive, but there is no such likeness anywhere, even among the many paintings. At the same time, our narrator’s description of the palazzo makes us think of gothic tales, and we are on the lookout for any indication of our man, knowing that his presence in the story will probably be fatal.

It does not take long for such a man to arrive, in the form of one Signor Dellombra, whom the Genoese describes as possibly an Austrian noble travelling incognito. When he is shown in for dinner the woman faints, but after her husband talks with her, she agrees to see him again. The couple have had no other guests in all the time they have been there. The husband insists he keep coming, so that his wife might master her fear of him, and this works, albeit incompletely. Eventually, the group go to Rome, where one day the wife disappears. Attempting to find her, the courier and her husband discover that she fled in the carriage of a man they recognise as Dellombra, but as he sent the horses of the station all in different directions, they are unable to give chase, and they never see the woman again.

On the face of it, this is another story about the presence of the supernatural. Like the Englishman in the German’s final story, the young husband here has a largely rationalist viewpoint, and sees himself as needing to go about “curing mistress of her fanciful terror.” Unfortunately, he was wrong in thinking he could fight fate in this manner. Signor Dellombra is a more mythic force, and he achieves what he must have been set on earth to do – to steal away the man’s wife from the bliss of their honeymoon. In this reading, the supernatural seems more hostile than it does in the other stories, but there does not appear to be a greater message here.

The Genoese’s Tale: Alternative Reading

Yet that is far from the case. There are clues in the text that support an alternative reading, things which our Genoese narrator may have missed but which, most likely, will not pass us by entirely unnoticed. We must, for this, consider not the grieving husband, nor the attentive but limited narrator, but rather the wife herself.

What do we learn of her? That she is “a fair young English lady, with a sufficient fortune.” Interestingly, immediately, we might notice that “He was enamoured of [her]”, not that the feeling was mutual. Our only indication, possibly, of that is that “they were going to be married.” As noted, they are married, and the narrator declares that “they were happy.” Perhaps they were, but then why is the woman immediately afterwards gloomy?

This gloom comes upon her when she is alone and appears to be dispelled when he comes and shows her affection. “By and by, she laughed, and then all went well again.” The dream, perhaps, is real, but there are other things that might make any of us unhappy. This is her life: “[she] would sing, and play the harp, and copy the old pictures, and stroll with master under the green trees and vines, all day.” That is her life. And she is happy – isn’t she? For master says so: ““Now Clara,” Master said, in a low voice, “you see that it is nothing? You are happy.”” The narrator says so too. “She was beautiful. He was happy.” But wait, have I not forgotten the “s” on the second sentence? No, we know that the woman is beautiful, but never that she is happy. Indeed, we read this exact sentence twice, with the second time near the end of the story, as if to nudge us towards questioning the sentiments the story contains.

The woman’s life is boring. When Dellombra appears, she is shocked to see the figure in her dream. Her husband, “almost angry”, at this, “and yet full of solicitude” – as I write this, I wonder whether the latter part of the sentence is the Genoese narrator quietly, like Stevens in The Remains of the Day, trying to excuse his master from something that is not quite right. Master forces mistress to see Dellombra again, though she says that the man terrifies her.

““Again? Why, surely, over and over again! Are you cold?” (She shivered)” In a single short speech the master has revealed a certain disregard for his wife and her feelings, which are indicated subtly by Dickens showing us her hidden reaction of horror at his words.

So, then, the woman may not be happy at all in her new relationship. She may need the affection of her husband to remind kindle in her any kind of joy. She has a mysterious dream, a horrific one shortly before her marriage which seems to presage not its end, but rather its lifelessness. When she actually sees Dellombra (and it is she who identifies him as the figure of her dream, while nobody else notices, suggesting that her description of the dream’s contents was perhaps even deliberately vague) and is forced to spend time with him, we read that “she would cast down her eyes and droop her head, before the Signor Dellombra, or would look at him with a terrified and fascinated glance, as if his presence had some evil influence or power upon her.” That rather sounds like a woman who is, at least partly, in love.

Her fainting and illness, her clinging to her husband’s influence, all read now like attempts to ward off this pernicious spirit which she feels as much within herself as within Dellombra – she knows that it will destroy the sacred bonds of her marriage. Yet it does not work. Somehow, in Rome, Dellombra finally gets to her, and they flee together. According to reports in the posthouse, Dellombra passed with “a frightened English lady crouching in one corner.” Yet are we to read her fear simply as that of a person trapped or may there also be a kind of liberated fear here too, which the Genoese narrator is unwilling to pass on to us as his listeners? It is impossible to say.

Conclusion

Sandwiched between tales of funny coincidences, this tale could just be another mysterious inexplicable tale, albeit one with added horror elements. Ironically, however, this tale embodies that classic fantastical trope – that there is always more to things than we may think. Instead of being merely a story about a fatal encounter, we can read this tale as telling us, unwillingly perhaps, about a relationship that merely appears to be perfect, and then only to one member of it. Through the two narrative layers – the Genoese, and the narrator himself – we are limited in what we can glean. But that just leaves an enduring mystery, albeit a much more prosaic one. How can a situation like this arise? How is it that in such a story its main victim is so deprived of her own voice? What was she really thinking?

Alas, we cannot know. But it makes “To Be Read at Dusk” a much more curious little collection of stories than it first appears. Some mysteries, certainly, cannot be explained. Yet some tragedies, equally certainly, can be avoided. Could this one have?