MICHAEL SEAN STRICKLAND

The Author of The Author of “Trixie”

Caine’s novels in the first person:

The Irresistible Intruder (October 1913)

Mention the following from § 7:

William Caine, the English novelist, who came to America this spring for his first visit, has become so infatuated with the country that he has taken a bungalow on the New England coast for the summer. Mr. Caine will remain here until the appearance in the autumn of his new novel “But She Meant Well,” a companion story of his spring success “The Irresistible Intruder” (“Men and Women; Gossip and News About Prominent Persons,” The Buffalo Commercial, Wednesday, July 29, 1914, p. 5).

Publius, sort of angelic Cupid character (named after Ovid); Hannah, demoniac ditto (named "after" Caine's sister); yet both effect, are catalysts for, the same ends: adult love relationships

Also, in But She Meant Well, Hubert stalks Beatrice (give examples); while the major conflict in The Irresistible Intruder is that the female protagonist stalks the narrator, Fennell; the woman feels ashamed of this, and so runs away from him, because the whole beginning of their romance has been a lie; yet Fennell could care less about it

Corollary, woman as pursuer or instigatrix of romance in The Irresistible Intruder, as in in But She Meant Well, it is the women who are the intellectuals

Bildad the Quill-Driver (December 1915)

W. S. Caine's letters from Egypt in Newton 1907

At her graduation from Arlington High School, Massachusetts, on June 26, 1896, at the young but plausible age of fifteen going on sixteen, Miss Edith Gordon Walker read a poem entitled “The Mother of Sohrat.” [REF.] Who was Sohrat? Sohrat is a possible transliteration of the Perso-Arabic for Socrates, if the h is meant to be a uvular fricative similar to the q in the usual transliteration. Sohrat is a not uncommon misspelling of the Sohrab in Firdawsi’s Shahnameh and Matthew Arnold’s retelling of the relevant episode therefrom in his Sohrab and Rustum (1853). I assume that Edith Gordon Walker’s Sohrat is also a typo for Sohrab. In any case, it shows her early interest in things “Oriental.”

The Strangeness of Noel Carton (May 1920)

The start of Noel’s dream of himself as his character Nigel, which starts of chapter III of his novel: “I ran downstairs through a quite unfamiliar house, with Piranesi prints of Rome thick on the walls of the staircase and a broad, grooved banister-rail under my hand” (HJ: 91; P: 84–85). Recalls a passage from Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit:

Innerhalb des Hauses zog meinen Blick am meisten eine Reihe römischer Prospekte auf sich, mit welchen der Vater einen Vorsaal ausgeschmückt hatte, gestochen von einigen geschickten Vorgängern des Piranese, die sich auf Architektur und Perspektive wohl verstanden, and deren Nadel sehr deutlich und schätzbar ist | In the interior of the house my eyes were chiefly attracted by a series of Roman views, with which my father had ornamented an anteroom. They were en¬ gravings by some of the accomplished predecessors of Piranesi, who well understood perspective and archi¬ tecture, and whose touches were clear and excellent

Caine’s three major novels written in the first person can be summarized each with its own motto, respectively as follows: Love conquers convention; The world is insane; Antisemitism leads inevitably to homicidal madness.

"Precursors" — his “standard” authorial intrusions throughout all his novels, starting with Pilkington; his The Pursuit of the President, which consists of several first-person narratives by eight different characters — Peter Cattermole, Cyril Flowerdew, Claude Ashton, Amy Boydell, William Philbrick, Sarah Bolitho, George Tosh, Frederick Bristow; chapter XXI of Boom! (misleadingly called, in the French translation of 2025, a “Note Intercalaire de l’Auteur”); his “non-fiction” books, An Angler at Large and The New Foresters.

[Notes:] Though the unreliable narrator has been integral to literature since at least the time humans beings began to tell stories, the concept of it apparently went unnamed until 1961. Perhaps this lack of a concept of unreliable narrator is what led the reviewers of The Strangeness of Noel Carton so far astray, none more so than those writing for the TLS and The New York Times Book Review: [quote and discuss]

Even Caine's friends, such as Stephen Graham (1930: 116–117), also seem to have completely misunderstood the book: [quote]