The Master: Reclaiming Zangwill's Only Künstlerroman.
[In the following essay, Falk closely reviews Israel Zangwill's The Master—examining how themes of morality are explored, how it falls into the künstlerroman genre, and whether it was inspired by Elizabeth Bishop's grandfather, George Hutchinson.]
Israel Zangwill's status as an important writer is firmly established. His weakest works are falling out of sight, while his best confirm his claim to fame. The Big Bow Mystery (1892) is recognized as a pioneering work in the locked-door genre of mystery. The King of Schnorrers (1894) merrily reappears in new editions every decade or so, often with the original illustrations by George Hutchinson, propelled, as it seems, by its own comedic energy. As for Children of the Ghetto, its standing as an undisputed classic has been recently consolidated by Meri-Jane Rochelson's scholarly new edition (1998). All three are readable; all three are still read, not by scholars only, but also by the general public: the first for its suspense, the second for its humour, the third for its portrait of a peculiar people.1
At the same time, other works recede into shadows. Among them The Bachelors' Club (1891), still funny, but too strained; Jinny the Carrier (1905), too slow-moving; and The Master (1895), too ponderous, too discouraging because of its small print, dense pages, heavy prose-style, and its scarcity in all but the larger university libraries.2 Yet these too can attract attention in unexpected ways. Jinny touches on a modern concern because it deals with the question of a woman earning her own living in a male-dominated society. A joke from The Bachelors' Club has made its way into the popular film You've Got Mail, where Tom Hanks, playing the part of a bachelor encumbered by two lively bratty children, explains that the little boy is really his uncle, which indeed he is.3 Whatever the provenance of this joke in the film, Zangwill readers will recognize it from the story “A New Matrimonial Relation” in The Bachelors' Club. They may even recall the amusing drawing which accompanied the story.4 Like the illustrations to The King of Schnorrers, this drawing was also done by George Hutchinson, at one time Zangwill's favourite illustrator. And even The Master has seen a revival of interest: it is being read and reread by scholars interested in poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) ever since new research revealed a connection between this novel and Bishop's great-uncle, George Hutchinson.5
The connection to George Hutchinson was not known to London critics, or even to Zangwill's British and American biographers. It was known in Nova Scotia to friends and relatives of Hutchinson, and articles about it were published in several little-known journals, and then forgotten again. But now that the connection has become more widely known, The Master can be reexamined in a new light. It is now possible to treat The Master seriously as a source of knowledge about George Hutchinson and his family, and to treat the detailed descriptions of life in Nova Scotia in the 1860s and 1870s as authentic. Conversely, it is also possible to reexamine the novel's structure, so as to observe Zangwill's way of fashioning a serious work of fiction out of the facts of George Hutchinson's early life, his family background and his career. While reviews in 1895 were mostly directed against the novel's excessively ornate prose, it now makes sense to concentrate on the novel's substance rather than on its style.
The plot is straightforward. The hero, Matt Strang, a poor boy growing up in rural Nova Scotia, yearns to become a famous painter in London. After the death of his father at sea, young Matt goes to work to support the family and to save money for his trip to England. In London he meets with many hardships; sick and destitute he returns to Canada. Here he meets with more bad luck and is sent to prison for debt. Upon his release he marries Rosina Coble, the prosaic daughter of a prosperous merchant. Matt settles with his wife in London, but although he achieves success, happiness still eludes him. He falls in love with a beautiful, cultured woman with whom, he thinks, he could attain true happiness and fulfillment of his artistic ideals. On the brink of abandoning his wife and children and transgressing against his basic sense of decency, he is recalled to his senses by a chance meeting with his childhood sweetheart from Nova Scotia. He gives up his dream of happiness, returns to his unloved wife and peevish children, and renounces his position as celebrated painter. He decides to dedicate his art to depicting the harsh everyday life of London's working class among whom he will now make his home.
The story-line is engaging; most scenes have dramatic power. There is usually a clear sense of place and time as the story progresses; the main character remains sympathetic and for the most part convincing. The pretensions of London's artistic circles are criticized without mercy, the despotic rule of the Royal Academy is challenged—but all this was not sufficient to please the reviewers in the spring and summer of 1895. They perceived a good story with a serious theme, but were so perturbed by the book's unwieldy prose that they almost unanimously declared The Master to be a good book spoiled by its own verbosity and stylistic flourishes. As if by a common decision, the reviewers offered a crop of metaphors from horticulture, carpentry (or metallurgy), and biology to suggest how the novel may be improved in style to be worthy of the author's intent. The Athenaeum suggested pruning, the Dial recommended both pruning and “working over with a file from first to last,” while H. G. Wells in the Saturday Review came up with the memorable if grim image of a bug called “reduvius” which has the unsavoury habit of surrounding itself in an impenetrable cocoon of grimy particles.6
It is indeed true that reading The Master requires an effort reminiscent of trying to read a novel in an unfamiliar language. The result may be very rewarding, but the effort tends to be tedious. Still, some passages, especially in the beginning, create a clear feeling of place and atmosphere, as in the novel's opening scene, where we see Matt and his younger brother waking early on a winter morning to the loud voices in their home:
Within the lonely wooden house weather-boards and beams cracked; without, twigs snapped and branches crashed; at times Billy heard reports as loud as pistol-shots.
Matt curled himself more comfortably and almost covered his face in the blanket, for the cold in the stoveless attic was acute. In the grey half-light the rough beams and the quilts glistened with frozen breaths. The little square window-panes were thickly frosted, and below the crumbling rime was a thin layer of ice left from the day before, solid up to the sashes, and leaving no infinitesimal dot of clear glass, for there was nothing to thaw it except such heat as might radiate through the bricks of the square chimney that came all the way from the cellar through the centre of the flooring to pop its head through the shingled roof.7
We might desire a shorter and clearer sentence in place of the last one and we could do without the metaphor of the chimney which pops its head through the roof, but apart from this the scene is well established; there is a sense of the cold inside and out; there is also a feeling of isolation caused by the freezing of the windows. The attic itself is clearly situated with regard to the rest of the house: the chimney links the attic vertically with the cellar and with the roof. The noises reach the boys from the lower part of the house while they seek comfort in each other's presence. Readers are drawn into this scene: we know where we are as we wait to learn the meaning of the strange noises.
On the other hand, elsewhere the book abounds in examples of long and dreary sentences woven into very long paragraphs. The following is a description of Matt's first impressions of London after he arrives there as a young man of twenty:
But the Titanic city awoke strange responses in his soul: something in him vibrated to the impulse of the endless panorama. Often his fingers itched for the brush, as if to translate into colour and line all this huge pageant of life; for the spell of youthful poesy was still on his eyes, and if he could not see London as he had seen his native fields and sky and ocean, all fresh and pure and beautiful, if in the crude day its sordid streets seemed labyrinths in an underworld, unlovely, intolerable, there were atmospheres and lights in which it still loomed upon his vision through the glamour of fantasy, and chiefly at night, when the mighty city brooded in sombre majesty magnificently transfigured by the darkness, and the solemn river stretched in twinkling splendour between enchanted warehouses, or shadowed itself with the inverted architecture of historic piles, or lapped against the gray old Tower dreaming of ancient battle.8
When, in their turn, modern scholars took up a discussion of The Master, the question of the novel's readability was not one of their primary concerns. Elsie Bonita Adams offers an analytical discussion of the novel, stressing its importance as a vehicle through which Zangwill was able to explore the theme of an artist's growth and development through several stages: his exuberant youth, early manhood when circumstances almost made him despair of becoming an artist, and finally his attainment of the stature of a true artist, which he reaches through much suffering and sacrifice of his personal happiness.9 Joseph Udelson, like Adams, also concentrates on what the novel has to say about art and the individual artist, and the artist's position in society. He also expresses the view that the novel was intended “as a serious contribution to the contemporary debate raging over the function of the artist in society. In The Master Zangwill is aligning himself with Max Nordau, in denouncing the Pre-Raphaelite's bohemianism, Emile Zola's naturalism, and Oscar Wilde's ‘art for art's sake’ movement.”10 Indeed, the question of the artist's function in society was dear to Zangwill's heart, and in The Master the problem is dealt with in terms of a personal dilemma, its resolution dependent on the artist's background and life history. The more recent, biographical approach to The Master is included in Rochelson's discussion of Zangwill's novels in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. In addition to presenting the views of early reviewers and modern scholars, Rochelson speaks of the possible link between the life of George Hutchinson and that of the novel's hero, Matt Strang, and she also says that the novel is due for a reevaluation.11
In order to proceed towards a reevaluation, it will be useful to consider the views of several earlier Nova Scotian writers. Two major essays appeared in Nova Scotia early in the twentieth century, and additional references to the novel appeared in print more than once. In Nova Scotia there lingered a feeling that a rather remarkable Nova Scotian book was created by a famous British novelist who possessed a vast amount of intimate knowledge of Nova Scotian life in all its aspects. However, the first two essays on the topic (apart from an even earlier newspaper article) were published in journals with limited circulation, so that writers who came later were led to new speculations, without knowledge of the pieces already published.12
The first literary discussion which touched on the topic came from the pen of Archibald Macmechan, a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, himself a writer of fiction. In “Halifax in Books” (1906) he quoted a long description of Halifax from The Master, with the added explanation that “Matt is the hero of the story, the country boy of genius who becomes a great painter in London. His prototype is George Hutchinson, a Folly Village boy, whose father was master of a small vessel and was lost at sea.”13 Macmechan, apparently aware that Zangwill had never visited Nova Scotia, adds “Zangwill never saw Halifax and must have relied upon descriptions.”14 In 1906, barely eleven years since the publication of the novel, it seems that knowledge about the hero's prototype, George Hutchinson, was limited to mere essentials.
Some twenty years later, another lover of Nova Scotian literature spoke out about The Master. Judge Aza J. Crockett of Pictou wrote an essay about books which he considered indispensable for a village library in Nova Scotia, “My Invisible Nova Scotia Library.” The good judge gave free expression to his feelings of admiration and his curiosity:
… I have some books by authors who are not Nova Scotians or even Canadians. What thoughts and questionings arise as I turn to The Master, that extraordinary book of I. Zangwill's—a book that fascinates one so much. How did Zangwill ever come to know so much and so intimately about the life and aspirations of a Nova Scotia boy from the marshes of Masstown? Was he ever here, or did someone tell him … ? I am told that the Nova Scotia boy with the yearnings to express himself in the art of painting became one day a great painter in London, and spent a week with the famous author in a house-boat on the Thames, and that The Master is the result.15
The judge continues: “Those with instincts of the higher critic, after an examination of the style, confidently point out what portions were written by the artist and what was the work of the brilliant literary genius, and you may still find in Nova Scotia homes portraits the proud possessors of which will inform you that there is a work of the artist whose boyhood and youth are depicted so realistically in this Nova Scotia romance.”16 Neither Macmechan nor Judge Crockett expressed disapproval of the novel's prose style. As for the pleasant speculation that parts of the book were actually written by the artist, there appears to be no support for such a notion.
If Judge Crockett refrains from naming the artist, the omission does not seem to stem from ignorance. His friends, the owners of the portraits, would naturally name the painter, but the judge was trying to recommend the book as a novel, not for its biographical content, so the painter's name was not relevant to his discussion. On the other hand, naming the “brilliant literary genius” appears to have afforded the judge a good deal of satisfaction, though it seems that neither Macmechan nor Crockett knew very much about Zangwill or about Zangwill's other books. A mere glance at The Bachelors' Club or The King of Schnorrers would have revealed to them the connection between Hutchinson and Zangwill. Neither of them mentions the further puzzle that the great interpreter of Nova Scotian setting and atmosphere was a London-born Jew. Neither of them is aware of what the initial “I” in Zangwill's name stands for. But between them, they passed on to future readers of The Master three important points, which would have eliminated many a subsequent misunderstanding, had the two essays gained wider readership: Macmechan revealed the artist's name, Judge Crockett pointed to a time spent together by Zangwill and Hutchinson in a houseboat on the Thames and, very importantly, they named the location where the artist grew up. Folly Village, Great Village, and Masstown were a cluster of villages on the Cobequid Bay near Truro in Colchester County in Nova Scotia. Masstown was originally known as “Cobequid,” the name used by Zangwill for Matt's home village. Great Village remains the current name of the village where the painter George Hutchinson spent his youth.
There is no indication that Judge Crockett was familiar with Macmechan's article. It was to become a constant feature of the attention paid to The Master in Nova Scotia: those who were subsequently interested in The Master and brought it anew to public attention were themselves unfamiliar with information already published by their predecessors. Notably, when the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada came to create a plaque in honour of the Halifax-born artist Gilbert Stuart Newton R. A. (1794-1835), the plaque, unveiled in 1952, proclaimed Newton to have been the prototype of Israel Zangwill's novel The Master. One notes that Zangwill's first name thus stands revealed. But the plaque errs in linking Zangwill's novel with Newton. The historian responsible for the wording of the plaque was Provincial Archivist, the late Dr. D. C. Harvey. As Sandra Barry demonstrates in the essay “What's in a Name? The Gilbert Stuart Newton Plaque Error,”17 Dr. Harvey and his advisors decided on the wording of the plaque without sufficiently checking into the background of the novel: beguiled by the prospect of linking two illustrious names, that of a famous British writer and of a Halifax-born artist who became a member of the Royal Academy, they assumed a connection where there was none. The plaque is displayed on the facade of a public building in Halifax.
Once more, when John Bell included a selection from The Master in his anthology Halifax: A Literary Portrait (1991), he suggested that Zangwill's contact was with a certain Michael Williams (1878-1950), author of an autobiographical work The Book of High Romance (1919).18 That contact, however, as Bell himself notes, belongs to the period after, and not before, the publication of The Master.19 In his book Williams mentions a letter of encouragement which he received from Zangwill twenty-five years earlier and which he cherished for a long time afterwards.20 It would have been natural for Williams, then an aspiring young writer living in Halifax, to write to Zangwill upon reading the serialized version of The Master and it was characteristic of Zangwill's generous nature to reply. But there are no grounds for any further speculation. Thus it was the lot of the writers and historians who had an interest in The Master, including Bell (1991) and myself (1993), to be unaware of the information already available. Bell, it seems, was even unaware of the existence of the historic plaque. For me the plaque served as a starting-point for a new investigation, which led back to the artist George Hutchinson.21
Since then, extensive new research on the life of American-born poet Elizabeth Bishop and on her Nova Scotian relatives has brought a significant amount of information on George Hutchinson, who was Bishop's great-uncle, brother of Bishop's Nova Scotian grandmother Elizabeth (Hutchinson) Bulmer. As recorded by Sandra Barry in her book on Bishop,22 George Hutchinson was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1852, and brought up in Folly Village, adjacent to Great Village, in Nova Scotia. His father, a ship's master, died at sea when George was in his early teens. According to family tradition, young George wished to become a painter and at an early age he travelled to London to study painting. In 1874 Hutchinson was married to Eleanor Jones in London. The following year the young couple travelled to Nova Scotia, where their two children, Benjamin and Mary, were born. The couple returned to England with the children and, according to the census of 1881, settled in Pancras Road, where their third child, a girl, was born. At this time Hutchinson enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools, winning a prize of £50 for drawings from life. The announcement of the prize was picked up by the local press: the Novascotian reported the honour with pride.23 George Hutchinson died in retirement in England in 1942. He was survived by his second wife.
In the 1881 census Hutchinson reported his occupation as portrait painter. He was not a successful portrait painter. The few portraits which have been preserved in Nova Scotia—presumably executed during his visits to his home province—are painted in harsh colours and do little to illuminate the character of their subjects. And yet he was the winner of a prestigious prize for drawing figures from life: his true talent lay not in portrait painting but in drawing black and white cartoons and humorous illustrations.
It was Hutchinson's talent for illustrating that brought him in contact with Zangwill. Their close cooperation began in 1890 when Hutchinson became a regular contributor of drawings and caricatures to Puck and Ariel of which Zangwill was a de facto editor, becoming the official editor in 1891.24 From then on, for at least six years, their relation remained close, and their cooperation mutually satisfactory. Hutchinson drew the illustrations to The Bachelors' Club in 1891, to The King of Schnorrers in the Idler in 1893/94, and to the feature “My First Book” by Zangwill, also in the Idler in 1893. “My First Book” is a miniature merry-go-round of mutual compliments: Zangwill ascribes the success of The Bachelors' Club, at least in part, to George Hutchinson's deft illustrations; George Hutchinson expresses his feelings of friendship in drawing a comic portrait of Zangwill titled “Mr. Zangwill at Work” that is still one of the more appealing informal sketches of the “brilliant literary genius.”25
There is external evidence that Zangwill was particularly anxious about the success of The Master. Ernest Samuels, in his biography of Bernard Berenson, reports that in September 1894 Mary Costelloe wrote to Berenson from England that Israel Zangwill brought her a manuscript of The Master to read, seeking her critical opinion. She unhesitatingly reported to Berenson that she found the book “abominable,” adding in passing that she found the author “loathsomely ugly.” She apparently conveyed her view to Zangwill in greatly modified form for he expressed an appreciation of her critique and proceeded with the publication of The Master in book form.26 Also, as Joseph Leftwich recalls, Zangwill was fond of saying even many years later on that The Master was his favourite book.27 Leftwich also reports that Zangwill was pleased with the notice in the Leeds Mercury which said that The Master was superior to Children of the Ghetto.28 Evidently the reviewer at the Leeds Mercury was able to disregard such things as a solemn river, twinkling splendour and enchanted warehouses, and to cut to the heart of the story. And that story still has power to engage readers' sympathies.
When read not with the eyes of Mary Costelloe or H. G. Wells but with the eyes of the reviewer at the Leeds Mercury, or possibly of a reader in the year 2001, The Master has merits that can recommend it and even render it fascinating. One striking aspect of the novel is Zangwill's success in creating a fully rounded character, a young dreamer, timid, yet fully trusting in his own talent as a painter, a romantic who is driven by his experience of cruel poverty into a marriage of convenience, an idealist who betrays his ideals to please the crude taste of London society, an admirer of refinement and beauty who gives up his chance of fulfilling his dreams of love when these dreams stand in conflict with an even higher ideal—obedience to the voice of conscience.
Matt Strang, the novel's hero, is a man who never ceases to examine his own motives or to pass judgement on his own conduct. But rather than coming out as a prig, Matt is likeable for he is described with the kind of indulgent affection that writers usually reserve for their own reminiscences of boyhood and youth. At the beginning of the novel Matt is a very young boy—we first see him as he is awakened from a dream by loud noises in the family home. This is an intimate moment which fixes the reader's close relation to Matt. It is also a moment which symbolically establishes the dichotomy between dreams and reality—a dichotomy which rules Matt's life in youth and in adulthood.
Matt is instantly more real to the reader than even the young Esther Ansell of Children of the Ghetto. The Master opens with the name “Matt” repeated twice by Billy, Matt's younger brother, whereas Esther's name appears the first time not as “Esther” but as “Esther Ansell,” a formality which distances her from the reader. Also, because she is introduced as a small figure walking rapidly through a crowd in a dark cold street, the reader must follow her from a distance. The narrative progresses for a while before Esther's feelings are made known at all.29 To be sure, there are sound artistic reasons for the initial distance. First we see Esther as a part of a crowd, and only gradually we are allowed to focus on her as an individual. But in the meantime the opportunity for reader-subject intimacy is lost, and subsequently not readily established. Not so with Matt. We first see him and hear him as he wakes up in the morning; we hear Billy calling him by his childhood name, we sympathize as Matt tries to fall asleep again, and we are made privy to a dream which recommences as Matt drifts back to sleep. And we are never to lose the intimacy thus established.
Another striking aspect is Zangwill's choice to convey images of landscape, both in Nova Scotia and in England through the eyes of young Matt rather than through the eyes of the narrator. The beauty of Nova Scotia and the dismal aspect of overcrowded, soot-covered London are rendered primarily through Matt's consciousness—the consciousness of an intuitive artist. What Matt sees are not simply the woods, fields, the expanse of water, sunsets and clouds or an urban landscape. What he sees are pictures—sights which he longs to paint. Again, readers are brought in close union with the boy: we rarely get glimpses into the landscape except through Matt's eyes. As well, people and their way of life, with their manner of speech and their actions, are presented through Matt's eyes, at first with a young boy's naive vision, later with a young man's growing awareness which brings with it bitter disenchantment.
Even more remarkable is the novel's insistence on fusing the consciousness of an artist with the consciousness as well as the morality of a Nova Scotian. For Matt is a Nova Scotian through and through; his Nova Scotian childhood and youth dominate his personality even more decisively when he is away from his native province. When he finds himself in London, he is naturally handicapped in practical matters by being a stranger, but, morally and artistically, he is always guided and sustained by memories of his native province. The abiding paradox of Matt's development as a man and artist lies in the fact that he comes to London to learn, but he finds, gradually and by painful steps, that his true learning had taken place when he was still a boy in Nova Scotia. Of course, he needed to go to London to find out precisely that. Exile teaches people to recognize true moral values.
Matt's development as an artist is the crux of this novel. Whatever happens to him either advances him on the road to becoming an artist, or hampers him. In spirit he is an artist from birth. His life experiences help him actualize his artistic potential. His progress as an artist is much clearer than that of Esther Ansell. We know that Esther is a bright child and a lover of stories. But we do not know when and how she became a writer. When we find out, in the second part of the novel, that she is the author of an important book, we learn nothing of the process which led to that moment. With Matt, however, we take part in every painful step leading to his becoming a painter.
The novel is divided into three parts or “Books.” Matt is about thirteen-years-old when we first meet him; however, since chapter two is a retrospect harking back to three years prior to the novel's opening chapter, we get an additional glimpse of Matt as a boy of ten. Apart from this flashback, the novel progresses in a chronological order. Book One describes Matt's youth on the farm in Cobequid Village near Truro in Nova Scotia. In Book Two he is seen arriving in London to begin his studies at the age of twenty. He stays in London for fifteen months before returning to Nova Scotia. In Book Three he goes to London again, accompanied by his wife. When the novel concludes, he is close to thirty, the father of two children, no longer young, now a man fully conscious of his own limits as well as of his moral and artistic obligations. Thus there are no gaps in the narrative: Matt's life and the process of maturing as man and artist are fully accounted for.
The novel, so clearly inspired by Hutchinson's life story, uses authentic details of family and village life in Book One, begins to diverge from historic facts in Book Two, and makes a radical departure from Hutchinson's story in Book Three. But disappointingly, as the novel moves from the hero's youth to maturity, from a pastoral setting to urban setting, its dramatic and descriptive powers decrease, it loses momentum, and towards the very end takes on certain characteristics of melodrama. The dialogue, likewise, is at its best when it renders the native idiom of Nova Scotia, and becomes stilted in the abstract discussions about art, life, and morality in the later parts of the book. The characters in Book Three speak and behave more like artificial creations than like the authentic persons we encountered in Book One and Two. Even Matt himself seems less authentic as an adult than he was as a boy and later as a very young man in Books One and Two.
Book One, which introduces young Matt, is the most captivating and closest to facts: Matt's father dies at sea as did Hutchinson's father. Matt has an older sister, Harriet, two younger brothers, Billy and Teddy, and still younger siblings. George Hutchinson had an older sister, Elizabeth, two younger brothers, John Robert and William Bernard, and a much younger sister, Mary (a two-year-old child who is mentioned in chapter one). Matt's widowed mother marries Deacon Hailey soon after her husband's death; Hutchinson's mother also married soon after she became a widow. Matt's sister, Harriet, marries her beau shortly after the death of the father: Hutchinson's sister, Elizabeth, also married early. Hutchinson was a witness at his sister's wedding in 1871 but he left for England some time after.30 As the narrative follows real events, the prose remains vigorous and the young protagonist's feelings are vividly conveyed.
Book One creates a well-defined microcosm with Matt at its centre. The atmosphere of the poor household is well projected, as is the sense of isolation of the village whose only contact with the large world is through the rural mail delivery, which, as often as not, brings bad news instead of the coveted good ones; a community which must provide its own amusements in the form of mudding or other frolics, where the music is provided by the only musician “Ole Jupe” the Black fiddler, where rent must be paid to an exacting and unscrupulous proprietor, where even back-breaking work brings meagre earnings, and where a young boy with the soul of an artist feels that he must strike out or else suffocate in an environment which has no use for art or artists.
Book Two begins with Matt's arrival in England. Here the description of the naive twenty-year old who, upon arriving at Southampton, proceeds directly to London in order to lose no time, and upon arrival in London goes directly to the National Gallery in order to see, at last, great paintings by great artists without further delay—this description of the young “respectably clad steerage passenger … clean-shaven except for a dark-brown moustache, which combined with the little tangle of locks on his forehead to suggest the artistic temperament”31 could easily be based on a photograph of George Hutchinson at twenty. The narrative of Matt's first experiences in England is convincing, and in a general sense is still close to the story of Hutchinson's own arrival in England. It is known that Hutchinson was about twenty or so when he left home and crossed the Atlantic. Matt meets with bitter disappointments and with great hardships in London and in near despair is forced to return to Nova Scotia at the end of a fifteen-month stay. Hutchinson also returned to Nova Scotia after staying in England for about two or three years. Still, the fictional narrative diverges from facts in several important details, of which Matt's marriage to Rosina Coble has the most serious consequences for the novel's central conflict, which is not resolved until the very end. The characters of Matt's uncle Matthew and cousin Herbert do not have a parallel in the Hutchinson story—at least not at the present state of biographical research. Yet they play an important part in the fictional narrative: they represent the kind of indifference, cynicism, loss of conscience and loss of true values which Matt will have to confront and combat to save his own soul at the time of his great spiritual crisis before the novel's end.
Book Two also gives an interesting example of the way Zangwill has marshalled the intersection of fact and fiction. Chapter eight of Book Two, “Gold Medal Night,” describes a formal ceremony at the Royal Academy at which Herbert is awarded a gold medal for a painting which he would have never successfully finished if it had not been for the willing help of Matt who takes no credit for his brush strokes at all, but sits humbly through the ceremony, cold, hungry, and excruciatingly bored by the President's seemingly endless address. In reality it was Hutchinson, as already mentioned, who won the Academy award—not a medal, but the much more useful cash. That award was presented to Hutchinson by Academy President, Sir Frederic Leighton, in December of 1885. The scene in chapter eight gives a wicked satirical representation of Leighton even though the president is not named and the presentation to Herbert, given the internal chronology of the novel, belongs roughly in 1873, while Leighton did not become president until 1878. Still, the satire would have been recognizable to all who were aware of Leighton's notoriously long biennial Academy Addresses. Interestingly, early reviewers shied from mentioning this irreverent portrait of the majestic man, who in 1895 still held the post of President of the Academy.
From the ending of Book Two onwards The Master leaves behind the true story of George Hutchinson and proceeds along a path of fiction. Matt's wife Rosina is the daughter of a well-to-do Halifax merchant, whereas Hutchinson's first wife, Eleanor, was the daughter of a gasfitter from Clapham, and most probably as poor as Hutchinson himself. Hutchinson's wedding took place in a church in Lambeth—and both groom and bride gave the working-class Kennington Road as their address.32 Making Rosina a Nova Scotian, and placing the wedding in Halifax, ensured that her image could not be confused with Hutchinson's real-life wife. There is no ground for supposing Eleanor mean, stingy or petty; she was no Rosina in any sense.
But the petty, penny-pinching Rosina, hopelessly prosaic and devoid of any appreciation of her husband's artistic temperament, becomes the pivot for the conflict which dominates Book Three of the novel. She does not figure in the novel as a character whose inner life is capable of change or development—her main function in the narrative is to represent those realities of life which Matt perceives as obstacles to the attainment of his destiny as an artist. Matt hires a studio in a fashionable part of London in order to be able to work in peace and to be away from Rosina. He paints to please his rich clients so that he may become free of his dependence on Rosina's money—a dependence that embittered his soul almost since the beginning of his married life.33 When he gains fame and becomes accepted among the London elite, he no longer admits to being a married man. It is among the glittering elite that he meets Eleanor Wyndwood who seems to him the ideal of womanhood. The idealized Mrs. Wyndwood is one of the novel's least convincing characters. We know her only through Matt's adoring eyes. In Matt's eyes, she is the embodiment of grace and elegance which his soul had been longing for. In the novel's quasi-epilogue it is made clear that her true character did not deserve Matt's adulation.34 Readers may be led to reflect at that point on the curious paradox that Matt, the gifted observer of the human form and of human physiognomy, is not a good judge of character. Many of his disappointments stem from this particular failing.
In order to develop, and then to resolve the conflict in Matt's life, Book Three departs radically from George Hutchinson's life. Whereas Matt becomes a much sought-after society painter, Hutchinson was no more than a reasonably successful illustrator and cartoonist. Hutchinson did not have to flee his success in order to achieve peace of mind: his success waned of its own accord, especially with the advent of photography which soon began to be favoured by magazine editors as a cheaper and more attractive method of illustration than etching, drawing, and painting. Just a few years later, in 1896, Hutchinson, apparently discouraged by lack of commissions, again went to Nova Scotia hoping to earn money by painting and giving art lessons. In 1898 he was back in London once more, sharing quarters with Zangwill on a houseboat at Twickenham Ferry.
The Master excels in construction and overall plan. Matt's calling in life is clear from the very beginning. His desire to paint is made plain from the very first chapter of the book, as is his talent. His very name, Matthew, suggests not only the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30, and, by association, the use of the same parable as a metaphor in Milton's famous sonnet “On His Blindness,” but also the Hebrew meaning of the name, “the gift of God.” The novel's action follows Matt's movement from his home village to the great city where he suffers defeat, from that city back home, and once more to the great city where he eventually reaches the height of fame he had so eagerly desired, only to find out that fame without artistic integrity is hollow, and that fame and success must be given up for true fulfillment to become possible. Poor George Hutchinson—he knew much of struggle and disappointment, and very little of heady success, which he would have been most likely to embrace eagerly. The story of the success is not Hutchinson's story; it is rather an abstract construct—Zangwill's own projection of the meaning and the burden of being an artist. Matt's internal struggle and its resolution which depends on his renunciation of all hope of happiness is powerfully evoked in the novel's final chapter, and is no less dramatic than the description of Hannah Jacobs's renunciation of her beloved David in the last chapter of Book One of Children of the Ghetto.
Hutchinson was not a romantic in pursuit of an ideal. In 1893 he was past forty, a family man, busy securing orders for illustrations. He was never choosy about what work he did, so long as it would pay the rent and put food on the table. His published drawings in Puck, Ariel, the Idler and the boys' magazine Chums testify to his readiness to draw whatever was marketable. Clearly, the adult Matt Strang, the hero of Book Three, the artist struggling with his conscience and pondering the meaning and purpose of Art, is no longer based on Hutchinson; rather he takes on some characteristics of Zangwill himself.
When Matt becomes a successful painter and gains a place in London's fashionable society, he acquires the tastes of a man-about-town, frequents elegant artistic gatherings, and becomes attracted to women of intelligence and beauty. In 1893 it was Zangwill, not Hutchinson, who was basking in fame; it was Zangwill who developed a taste for good company, well-cut clothes, and an elegant hat and cane. It was Zangwill who became attracted to intelligent, cultivated women, one of whom would eventually become his wife some ten years later. It was Zangwill, not Hutchinson, who would be thirty years old in 1894. It was Zangwill who needed to examine the direction his career was to take. He was the artist who must decide how he will use his one talent—in the service of higher ideals, or in pursuit of success. In Book Three the departure from George Hutchinson's life-story is extreme; except in his outward appearance, the hero is no longer modelled on George Hutchinson. Rather, he becomes something new: a man of Hutchinson's background, faced with Zangwill's adult dilemmas. Matt Strang, the lionized painter of Book Three, is a new creation.
A comparison of Zangwill's formal portrait reproduced in Dreamer of the Ghetto35 with the amateur photograph of Hutchinson included in Remembering Elizabeth Bishop36 shows a number of differences between the two men. Hutchinson, a lanky figure with a head of hair which could still be described as a “tangle of locks,” a big moustache and a roguish expression, dressed in rumpled tweeds, comfortably reclined in a canvas chair with his dog on his knee, bespeaks a man at ease, satisfied with life at the present moment, oblivious of the sufferings of the world and not troubled in the least by any abstract conflict between moral obligations and personal happiness.
Zangwill's portrait, on the other hand, shows a man meticulously dressed, but not necessarily comfortable. The pose is rigid. Although the portrait is taken indoors, the sitter is wearing stiff, cumbersome outdoor attire. The portrait bespeaks the subject's awareness of his own social position with its concomitant obligations, a sense of responsibility, an inner seriousness. There is no smile in this portrait or in any one of the other commonly reproduced Zangwill portraits. Zangwill's eyes seem to focus on the vision of austere Duty. Matt's ultimate decision, to put his art in the service of society, if it is to be understood as a reflection of Zangwill's own choices with regard to his career, may be taken to signify Zangwill's musings on his own choices for the future, or even, as an explanation in retrospect, of the reasons why he accepted Judge Sulzberger's challenge to write a “Jewish Robert Elsmere” three years earlier.37
That Zangwill chose to borrow, so to speak, Hutchinson's boyhood, even though he did not intend to use Hutchinson's later career in the novel, shows that the plan for the novel was carefully laid. The boy, Matt, is a very appealing protagonist in the first part of the novel. His home in Nova Scotia provides a romantic backdrop. His early struggles in London are made the more bitter by the fact that he is alone in the uncaring metropolis, callously treated by his unfeeling uncle, and by his egotistic cousin Herbert. When much later Matt becomes the darling of London elite, his tall figure, his moustache, tangled locks and artistic appearance make him a natural object of adoration of the beautiful Eleanor, and make his own struggle against temptation as passionately romantic as the novelistic convention of the time permitted. This is not to say that the book was constructed only for the purpose of examining abstract ideas. Evidently the Nova Scotian boyhood of his friend held a fascination for Zangwill and may have served as a stimulus for creating this intricate novel.
In one of his stories, “The Clearing House of Memory,” Zangwill invents a scenario where people can trade their own unwanted memories for those of others.38 To trade the memories of a childhood confined to London's East End for those of a boy roaming barefoot among the open fields of Nova Scotia—this is a very appealing proposition. To describe with such passion, and in such vivid detail, scenes which he had never seen, must mean that Zangwill came to love those scenes which he heard described by his friend. It is also extremely likely that Zangwill not only heard the descriptions but also had ample opportunity to see Hutchinson's sketches of the scenes in Folly Village and vicinity. Early in their acquaintance Zangwill must have seen Hutchinson's “Winter Sketches in Nova Scotia” published in the Illustrated London News in January 1889. Much later, when the two friends shared a houseboat on the river Thames, Zangwill would see Hutchinson at work, sketching and painting scenes from nature and possibly scenes from memory also.
The houseboat story is true, if little known to Zangwill's admirers then as now. The boat, named The Swan, belonged to Zangwill; it was moored at Twickenham Ferry for a sufficiently long time to be remembered with nostalgia by old-timers such as Arthur M. Young, a sometime contributor to the Idler, and regular visitor at literary gatherings at the nearby “White Swan” (still a popular riverside drinking place) facing Eel Pie Island. In the Christmas issue of the Illustrated London News in 1923 Young wrote: “I call to mind the time when … nearly on the same mooring where the floating boathouse now is, that splendid artist [George Hutchinson], one of our first ‘black and white’ men, had, in conjunction with Zangwill, the eminent novelist and playwright, the Swan houseboat. Here would foregather many of the greatest men in literature, music and art of the day.”39 What Judge Crockett believed to have been a week spent together on the boat was apparently a more prolonged arrangement by which Zangwill and Hutchinson shared the houseboat. Hutchinson was most probably left in charge when Zangwill was busy in town, but both men evidently shared the quarters when Zangwill wanted to get away from the pressures of city life and enjoy the pleasures of tranquillity on the river combined with the company of beer-imbibing men of arts and letters. Among those frequenting the literary gatherings, Young mentions Swinburne, the “decadent” poet par excellence, and Henry Vizetelly, the man who outraged the guardians of public morality by publishing Zola's works in English.40 The jolly crowd at the “White Swan” was evidently quite Bohemian. The riverside idyll came to an end in January 1898. In a letter dated January 16, Hutchinson wrote to Zangwill from the “Swan” houseboat describing a gale which had nearly destroyed the boat two weeks earlier, and requesting Zangwill's consent to the sale of the wreck at the low price of ten or fifteen pounds. Many years later, writing to Zangwill from Ipswich in 1911, Hutchinson recalled again, with warm feelings, the old days of the river-boat.41
A close reading of The Master does indeed lead to the conclusion that Zangwill chose to side with those who thought it imperative to link art and morality, as observed by Udelson, and as also argued more recently by William J. Scheick in relation to The Big Bow Mystery.42 However, the book does not support a unified theory of morality. In spite of the abstract deliberations which occupy many pages of The Master, the matter is treated as a deeply personal moral dilemma to be solved by the artist as a responsible individual. The Nova Scotian Matt Strang has an intuitive understanding of the demands of art: for him, art demands native talent, dedication to one's craft, courage, honesty, humility. When, after a period of public success and private mortification, Matt wrestles with his conscience, he receives unexpected guidance from his Nova Scotian friend, Ruth Hailey, who has already turned her own life into one of serving a higher cause—in her case, the cause of Women's Rights. Matt is a man of conscience, but it is a private conscience. Although often called a “puritan” by his cousin and even by the narrator, Matt is neither a church-goer nor an adherent of any religious persuasion. When Matt returns to his studio in Camden Town, his decision seems to foreshadow the kind of career choice which some years later (in 1911) was to be put into action by no lesser a painter than Walter Sickert (1860-1942), also a friend of Zangwill's, who moved his studio to Camden Town and created the “Camden Town Group” of avant-garde Impressionist artists. So although there is much deliberation about art and artists in Book Two and Three, the novel cannot be easily shown to champion one school of thought over another, except that it speaks vehemently against the stranglehold exercised by the Royal Academy. True creativity, new techniques, Impressionism, technical innovations, all are judged on individual merit, not on their adherence to a specific school, and an artist's moral mettle is judged on the basis of both his private and his public life-choices.
As for the relationship between Zangwill and Hutchinson, it can be said once more that a warm, comfortable friendship between them existed, in spite of, or possibly because of, the great difference in their background, upbringing, and temperament. The letters from Hutchinson to Zangwill that survive were written in 1896 (from Nova Scotia), in 1898 (from the houseboat), and in 1911 (from Ipswich), when Hutchinson found himself in one of his all too frequent financial difficulties. The letter from Nova Scotia is especially interesting, as it reports on the enthusiastic reception of The Master by Hutchinson's own sister and her family in Great Village. Hutchinson appears happy with the good reception, and rather peeved at an American critic who had cast doubt on the accuracy of the description of shad-spearing (in chapter two of Book One). The letter includes an invitation to Zangwill to come out for a visit. The remaining letters to Zangwill are equally friendly and frank in such matters as Hutchinson's professional and financial setbacks, and his less than happy life with his second wife, Lily, in the 1911 letter. In 1909 Lily wrote to Zangwill for help “not knowing where to turn,” and in the one instance where a carbon copy of Zangwill's letter to Lily survives, we see Zangwill's genuine concern with Hutchinson's well being.43
It was not foreign to Zangwill's creative process to model his characters on people he knew: in Children of the Ghetto, Melchitsedek Pinchas is generally acknowledged to be based on the poet Naphtali Herz Imber; Moses Ansell is thought to represent Zangwill's own father; Esther Ansell is thought to be Zangwill's alter ego. In The Master, Zangwill wove a romance in which he combined the early struggles of his Nova Scotian artist friend with his own meditation on the meaning of living up to one's potential as an artist.
The result is an intriguing blending of one artist's life-story with the author's own reflections on the consequences of accepting a higher calling and dedicating one's life to a high ideal. A novelist's choice to project the story of his own life onto the character of a painter was to be repeated by Somerset Maugham in his novel Of Human Bondage in 1915, and by others as well. The Master has the merits of a well-constructed linear plot, a sympathetic main character and for the most part well-delineated secondary characters, vividly described scenes set in rural Nova Scotia and visually appealing scenes set in parks, art galleries, and artists' studios in London, Paris and Florence. It has humour and all the elements of a popular romance—missing one thing only, a crisp literary delivery. This is a weakness which cannot easily be remedied and it was identified correctly by the earliest reviewers. To reintroduce the book to modern readers a new attractive edition would be needed at the very least. Modern readers are well schooled in visualizing a novel in terms of cinematic images, something which this novel's visual quality naturally invites. At present however, the only possible access to The Master is through its own exuberant stylistic thickets. Still, the effort, when undertaken, is well repaid.
Notes
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An early version of this paper was presented at “Symbiosis,” a conference on Anglo-American literary relations, at the University College of St. Mark and St. John in Plymouth, UK, in March 1997.
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Israel Zangwill, The Master (London: William Heinemann, 1895). All references will be to this edition. A German translation by H. H. Ewers was published as Der Meister: Ein Künstler-Roman (Berlin: S. Cronbach, 1910), hence my title. A copy of the German translation is in the National and University Library in Jerusalem.
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You've Got Mail. Director Nora Ephron. Warner Brothers. USA, 1998.
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Zangwill, “A New Matrimonial Relation,” Chapter 9, in The Bachelors' Club, 214-32 (London: Henry and Co., 1891), illustration, 221.
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See Sandra Barry, Elizabeth Bishop: An Archival Guide to her Life in Nova Scotia (Hantsport, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press, 1996). Among recent studies of Elizabeth Bishop, Barry's book is particularly relevant to the present discussion. I owe thanks to Sandra Barry for generously sharing with me information on Hutchinson and on his family background.
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Athenaeum (18 May 1895), Dial (1 July 1895); the review by H. G. Wells, “Mr. Zangwill's ‘Master,’” Saturday Review (18 May 1895) is quoted at length in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (Detroit: Gale Research, 1985), 16: 441-42.
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The Master, 5.
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Ibid., 126.
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Elsie Bonita Adams, Israel Zangwill (New York: Twayne, 1971), 65-67.
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Joseph H. Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 124.
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Meri-Jane Rochelson, “Israel Zangwill,” Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1999), 197: 302-15; 310-311.
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The newspaper article was published in Truro Daily News, 17 November 1896. It and the two essays by Macmechan and by Crockett are discussed by Sandra Barry in “What's in a Name? The Gilbert Stuart Newton Plaque Error,” Acadiensis, 25:1 (Autumn 1995, Fredericton, New Brunswick), 99-116.
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Archibald Macmechan, “Halifax in Books” Acadiensis 6:3 (July 1906, Saint John, New Brunswick), 201-17.
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Ibid., 216.
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Aza J. Crockett, “My Invisible Nova Scotia Library,” Dalhousie Review (Halifax, Nova Scotia), 6 (1926/1927), 449-508.
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Ibid., 450-506.
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Barry, “The Gilbert Stuart Newton Plaque Error” (1995), see note 12 above.
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John Bell, ed., Halifax: a Literary Portrait (Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield Press, 1991), 102-106.
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Ibid., 102.
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Michael Williams, The Book of High Romance (New York: MacMillan, 1918/19), 37.
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Lilian Falk, “A Nineteenth Century Literary Representation of Nova Scotia Dialect,” Papers from the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association, 17 (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Saint Mary's University, 1993), 33-39.
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Barry, Elizabeth Bishop, 31-33.
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Novascotian (Halifax, Nova Scotia), 30 January 1886.
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Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto, 73.
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Zangwill, “My First Book,” Idler, 3 (February-July 1893), 629-41. Mr. Zangwill at Work (London: Chatto and Windus, 1893), 639.
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Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: the Making of a Connoisseur (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 200-201.
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Joseph Leftwich, Israel Zangwill (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957), 134.
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Ibid., 296.
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Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto. Meri-Jane Rochelson, ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1998), 73.
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For detailed history of Hutchinson's family see Barry, Elizabeth Bishop, 29-39.
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The Master, 117.
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This information comes from the Family Records Centre, London, UK, in 1999.
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The Master, Book Three, chapter I, 283-87.
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The Master, Book Three, chapter X, 453-60; especially page 455.
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Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto, 111. Zangwill is about 33-years-old in this photograph.
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Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). Photograph no. 8, captioned “George Hutchinson, Elizabeth Bishop's great-uncle.” Hutchinson is about 54-years-old in this photograph. Photographs are between page 186 and 187.
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See Udelson, Dreamer, 81.
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Zangwill, “The Clearing House of Memory,” The King of Schnorrers: Grotesques and Fantasies (London: William Heinemann, 1894).
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Arthur M. Young, “Tales of the Thames,” Illustrated London News, 24 December 1923 (Richmond Cuttings, Vol. 12, #67). Richmond Public Library, Local Studies Collection, London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. This information was obtained in April 1997.
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Ibid.
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Hutchinson to Zangwill. Letter from the “Swan” houseboat, Twickenham Ferry, 16 January 1898. (Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, File A 120/391).
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William J. Scheick, “Murder in My Soul”: Genre and Ethos in Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery,” ELT, 40:1, 1997.
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The Hutchinson file at the Central Zionist Archives (A120/391) has six items, all attesting to the friendship between these two men. I owe thanks to Dr. Meri-Jane Rochelson for telling me about the existence of these letters which constitute a most important documentary basis for reconstructing the Hutchinson-Zangwill relation.
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