1
/
of
1
OGB
THE ROMANTIC
THE ROMANTIC
Regular price
$0.99 USD
Regular price
Sale price
$0.99 USD
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Quantity
Couldn't load pickup availability
"The Romantic" is a study of a single character. John Roden Conway manifests himself to Charlotte Redhead, the woman who loves him. She meets him in the moment of her recoil from another relation in which a man funks and lies and repents and crawls. She sees his "spare oval face with the straight-jutting pointed chin," with "its look of being winged, lifted up, ready to start off on an adventure. Hair brushed back in two sleek dark wings. The straight slender nose, with the close upward wings of its nostrils. Under it the winged flutter of his mouth when he smiled." She knows that this winged Mercury is "miles beyond . . . the rotten things people do, the rotten things they think." She is confirmed in this opinion by his wanting her to live with him on his farm "without—that" by his assertion: "If I know a woman wants me, it makes me loathe her ... I should hate her then if she made me go to her."
They do not try to live in innocence on John's farm. Instead, the war intervenes and John takes out to the Belgian front two ambulances contributed by his father, with Charlotte, her friend Gwenny Denning, and Dr Sutton as his command. They are thrown with another ambulance corps headed by Dr. McClane, and having as its most aggressive member a Mrs Rankin. All these are added to the gallery before which John plays his part. They bear testimony unwillingly, bit by bit, to Charlotte's disillusionment. For John Conway is a congenital coward. He loves the bright face of danger as he loves Charlotte, abstractly. Contact with either is impossible to him. Inspired by these remote, ideal loves he sets forth like a hero, day after day, with Charlotte by his side, to bring away the wounded from behind the firing line, and time after time he funks, and lies, and funks again. Episode after episode unfolds to Charlotte's horror-stricken gaze the depths of John's character and the illusions in which he seeks protection, to which he sacrifices his colleagues, Charlotte herself, and the wounded men entrusted to his care. The circumstances of each event are defined with the exhaustive skill of the realist, every fact corroborated by witnesses whose testimony dovetails perfectly. To add the final touch of authority Dr. McClane is a noted psychiatrist who has seen through John at a glance, and only awaits his death to announce the theorem of which the narrative is a demonstration—that John was a degenerate, that his whole life was a struggle to get compensation. "His platonics were a glorifying of his disability. All that romancing was a gorgeous transformation of his funk. So that his very lying was a sort of truth. I mean it was part of the whole desperate effort after completion." Thus Dr. McClane. He even explains in Freudian terms certain anticipatory dreams which Charlotte had had before the war was thought of.
***
An excerpt from the beginning of the novel:
"The Romantic" is a study of a single character. John Roden Conway manifests himself to Charlotte Redhead, the woman who loves him. She meets him in the moment of her recoil from another relation in which a man funks and lies and repents and crawls. She sees his "spare oval face with the straight-jutting pointed chin," with "its look of being winged, lifted up, ready to start off on an adventure. Hair brushed back in two sleek dark wings. The straight slender nose, with the close upward wings of its nostrils. Under it the winged flutter of his mouth when he smiled." She knows that this winged Mercury is "miles beyond . . . the rotten things people do, the rotten things they think." She is confirmed in this opinion by his wanting her to live with him on his farm "without—that" by his assertion: "If I know a woman wants me, it makes me loathe her ... I should hate her then if she made me go to her."
They do not try to live in innocence on John's farm. Instead, the war intervenes and John takes out to the Belgian front two ambulances contributed by his father, with Charlotte, her friend Gwenny Denning, and Dr Sutton as his command. They are thrown with another ambulance corps headed by Dr. McClane, and having as its most aggressive member a Mrs Rankin. All these are added to the gallery before which John plays his part. They bear testimony unwillingly, bit by bit, to Charlotte's disillusionment. For John Conway is a congenital coward. He loves the bright face of danger as he loves Charlotte, abstractly. Contact with either is impossible to him. Inspired by these remote, ideal loves he sets forth like a hero, day after day, with Charlotte by his side, to bring away the wounded from behind the firing line, and time after time he funks, and lies, and funks again. Episode after episode unfolds to Charlotte's horror-stricken gaze the depths of John's character and the illusions in which he seeks protection, to which he sacrifices his colleagues, Charlotte herself, and the wounded men entrusted to his care....
They do not try to live in innocence on John's farm. Instead, the war intervenes and John takes out to the Belgian front two ambulances contributed by his father, with Charlotte, her friend Gwenny Denning, and Dr Sutton as his command. They are thrown with another ambulance corps headed by Dr. McClane, and having as its most aggressive member a Mrs Rankin. All these are added to the gallery before which John plays his part. They bear testimony unwillingly, bit by bit, to Charlotte's disillusionment. For John Conway is a congenital coward. He loves the bright face of danger as he loves Charlotte, abstractly. Contact with either is impossible to him. Inspired by these remote, ideal loves he sets forth like a hero, day after day, with Charlotte by his side, to bring away the wounded from behind the firing line, and time after time he funks, and lies, and funks again. Episode after episode unfolds to Charlotte's horror-stricken gaze the depths of John's character and the illusions in which he seeks protection, to which he sacrifices his colleagues, Charlotte herself, and the wounded men entrusted to his care. The circumstances of each event are defined with the exhaustive skill of the realist, every fact corroborated by witnesses whose testimony dovetails perfectly. To add the final touch of authority Dr. McClane is a noted psychiatrist who has seen through John at a glance, and only awaits his death to announce the theorem of which the narrative is a demonstration—that John was a degenerate, that his whole life was a struggle to get compensation. "His platonics were a glorifying of his disability. All that romancing was a gorgeous transformation of his funk. So that his very lying was a sort of truth. I mean it was part of the whole desperate effort after completion." Thus Dr. McClane. He even explains in Freudian terms certain anticipatory dreams which Charlotte had had before the war was thought of.
***
An excerpt from the beginning of the novel:
"The Romantic" is a study of a single character. John Roden Conway manifests himself to Charlotte Redhead, the woman who loves him. She meets him in the moment of her recoil from another relation in which a man funks and lies and repents and crawls. She sees his "spare oval face with the straight-jutting pointed chin," with "its look of being winged, lifted up, ready to start off on an adventure. Hair brushed back in two sleek dark wings. The straight slender nose, with the close upward wings of its nostrils. Under it the winged flutter of his mouth when he smiled." She knows that this winged Mercury is "miles beyond . . . the rotten things people do, the rotten things they think." She is confirmed in this opinion by his wanting her to live with him on his farm "without—that" by his assertion: "If I know a woman wants me, it makes me loathe her ... I should hate her then if she made me go to her."
They do not try to live in innocence on John's farm. Instead, the war intervenes and John takes out to the Belgian front two ambulances contributed by his father, with Charlotte, her friend Gwenny Denning, and Dr Sutton as his command. They are thrown with another ambulance corps headed by Dr. McClane, and having as its most aggressive member a Mrs Rankin. All these are added to the gallery before which John plays his part. They bear testimony unwillingly, bit by bit, to Charlotte's disillusionment. For John Conway is a congenital coward. He loves the bright face of danger as he loves Charlotte, abstractly. Contact with either is impossible to him. Inspired by these remote, ideal loves he sets forth like a hero, day after day, with Charlotte by his side, to bring away the wounded from behind the firing line, and time after time he funks, and lies, and funks again. Episode after episode unfolds to Charlotte's horror-stricken gaze the depths of John's character and the illusions in which he seeks protection, to which he sacrifices his colleagues, Charlotte herself, and the wounded men entrusted to his care....
Share
