This is primarily a question about life and how it’s lived, not one about literature and how it’s composed. However, literature in general, and fiction in particular, are indispensable at helping us to understand and articulate our feelings.
Evidence in Daniel Martin suggests that John Fowles explored the question above with singular dedication. He knew that “whole sight” had to go past ocular vision and external appearances and into the realm of inner realities and the psyche. He made it his challenge in this novel to find a place for every type of feeling and experience of which humans are capable.
Below is a list of many of the emotions depicted in Daniel Martin. It’s a long list, and yet it omits a great deal. Completing the list would be impossible, which is probably a good thing! The list can’t be completed partly because the novel’s emotional life is so complex and nuanced, so “below the surface.” As Daniel tells Jenny, his M.O. as a writer is to pack the meaning “in between the lines” (14). Any strict attempt to classify this novel’s emotional life, and to account for its “steeped resonances” (353), would fall prey to the very literal-mindedness and nearsightedness that the novel itself opposes.
In the novel, Fowles presents this material with seamless integration; here, I’ve broken it up for the sake of utility. I divided the list into seven general categories. The first six represent core or primary feelings—anger, fear, shame, envy, sadness, and joy. The seventh category deals with feelings in combination.
Why create such a list? Three main reasons: to entice more people to read the novel, to deepen the experience of those who have read it, and to facilitate the research of those who are studying it. What sustained me in assembling this list was a sense that Daniel Martin serves as a masterful synthesis of the varieties of human emotion, and that this synthesis deserves an index.
I’ve connected with the novel over a long enough time that putting this list together was a little like going over old diary entries. However, this “diary” is more like the diary of a civilization—an account of where modern humanity can and cannot go, and of where we’ve been, and of where we might still go.
Imagine each item here as one stitch in a vast tapestry--a tapestry encompassing a full spectrum of colors and textures. I believe this tapestry is also a work in progress: the novel is configured in such a way as to endlessly combine and recombine in each reader’s imagination. Fowles was attempting not just to capture and chronicle existing feelings but to generate new ones. As Eleanor Wymard writes, Daniel Martin reveals Fowles “absorbed in the mission of the artist to extend the range of human sensibility.”
What this novel's hero says about the writings of Hungarian critic Georg Lukács may also be said about Daniel Martin: “It was the emotional attempt to see life totally, in its essence and its phenomena; the force, the thought, the seriousness” (534).
This is from a benedictory passage near the end of the book:
It is not finally a matter of skill, of knowledge, of intellect; of good luck or bad; but of choosing and learning to feel. (672)
(Warning: there are many plot spoilers in this list!)
VARIETIES OF EMOTION IN DANIEL MARTIN
- ANGER
At age 15, Dan nurses “his terrible oedipal secret; already at the crossroads every son must pass” (9)
At Oxford, Andrew and his friend Mark show contempt toward Dan, the “effete middle-class aesthete” (25)
Dan to Jenny, on why he spends so much time paring dialogue: “I loathe actors” (32)
Jane’s confession to Dan that she “hated Nell that whole evening. I had no nice sisterly feelings at all” (61)
Dan’s cab driver curses freeways in general and the San Diego one in particular (63)
Dan stays with the Kitchener script out of a need “to validate self-contempt” (75)
Anthony believes (after Tertullian) that self-mortification is universal because it is “absurd and necessary” (75)
Dan’s hatred of his mandatory school uniform (92)
Dan is offended that Barney’s Oxford gossip-column report is so brief (!) (102)
Dan’s general dislike of critics (104)
Barney’s contempt for the U.S. and its childishness (105)
Dan and others in the film world work in a medium where (according to one Hollywood saying), “Audiences are schmucks . . . and schmucks hate brains” (107)
Caro’s anger at her ex-boyfriend Richard (120)
A “total unforgivingness” between Dan and Nell at the divorce (124)
An English “hatred of the other,” of sharing a train compartment (139)
“Agapicide” between marriage partners Dan and Nell (140)
Nell’s contempt for Dan’s film-work (170)
Hostile reviews of Dan’s play (175, 304)
Dan’s play The Victors kills a friendship as well as a playwriting career (177)
Dan: “I felt depressed, secretly angry at not having been angrier” (over Bernard’s relationship with Caro) (274)
Middle-aged men hustling each other over lunch, “in some ultimate treachery of the clerks” (275)
In one of Dan’s scripts, Robin Hood’s rage and then self-rage about the rape of a village girl (292-3)
Producer David Malevich’s “engaging venom” toward anyone who ever turned him down without good reason (296)
Anthony’s killing “stone dead” even the most innocent attempt to bring up religious matters at the dinner-table (309)
Nell’s “embittered sniff of inside knowledge” at Compton (322)
Fenwick’s assessment of ordinary English citizens’ relation to their government: “Contempt for us poor boobies who have to represent you, for democratic process, for law . . .” (333)
Dan’s dislike of Fenwick and his Conservative philosophy (336-8)
Dan’s offense at Jenny’s response to Tsankawi (351)
Dan’s memory of hating Jane over her advice to him about Caro (359)
Anthony’s genuine hatred for (and fear of) “what could not be collected, classed, precisely defined, noted down”—epitomized in a certain species of British wild orchid: “the fluid frontiers between their species seriously upset him,” and presented “a nagging flaw in his would-be highly ordered nature of things” (361)
Daniel’s rage/hatred/seething despair about his father’s ending his relationship with Nancy (401-2)
Jane: “All this useless, diffuse anger churning inside me, and knowing I just let it churn” (412)
In the “Orchard of the Blessed,” Dan’s intellectual defiance: “To hell with cultural fashion; to hell with elitist guilt; to hell with existentialist nausea . . .” (432)
Jenny’s third contribution: “Written in anger” (457), and ending in bitter defiance: “I just won’t be only something in your script. In any of your scripts. Ever again.” (472)
Dan’s subdued exasperation with finishing his Kitchener script (485)
Jane’s hatred of her mother’s cutting behavior toward Americans (519)
The bitter 1930s quarrel between Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács (534)
Dan’s strong dislike of most ancient Egyptian art (537)
A heated argument over the Vietnam War--Mitchell’s aggression about it and Marcia’s fierceness in return (538-9)
“Aswan was the return of reality with a vengeance, and Dan loathed it” (569)
Jane’s “small gift for acting” as a “curse”: “Hating being able to pretend I’m someone else. Then using what I hate to be it” (578)
Dan’s contempt for the New Cataract Hotel (as well as Miami) (585-6)
Dan’s need to punish Jane, or himself, after their lunch with Alain and the photographer (588)
Labib’s animosity toward Syria, “a place where all is crazy, crazy people” (618-624)
The Hotel Zenobia staff’s apparent resentment toward Dan and Jane as guests (626)
Jane’s having (in Dan’s estimation) “murdered something in all three of us” back at Oxford (631)
Dan’s outrage at waking up alone, and at Jane’s subsequent behavior, at Palmyra (644-50)
Dan’s growing seethe of anger for Jane’s system of valuation; with Oxbridgery (649)
During their meeting in London, Jenny’s rage at what she sees as the phoniness of Dan’s decency (664)
- FEAR
Dan at age 15 is terrified by a German Heinkel plane flying close overhead: “. . . an agony of vicious fear. The boy, who is already literary, knows he is about to die” (5)
Film director Bill’s judgment about Dan: “being a perfectionist and being scared are often the same thing” (16)
Jenny’s “self-centered terror of being challenged and disturbed. Reduced to equality” (40)
Dan’s fear of emotion and unreason in women (44)
Dan, after the call from Oxford, is “a man whose foot finds an abyss instead of a pavement” (45)
Anthony’s fear of knowing about Jane’s sexual history makes Jane fear telling him about it (58)
Dan fears Anthony’s disapproval of Nell; Anthony’s fear of Nell colors his attitude toward Jane and Dan as well (59)
Dan is “Never so frightened, before or since” at the chance of Barney Dillon barging in on him with Jane (96)
Dan and Bernard as middle-aged men “running scared . . . in a panic” (129)
Jane and Dan’s shared fear of looking back from middle age (236)
The Cockney twins’ fear of what their father would do if he was abandoned (261)
Bernard’s “Fear of death, the wasted journey . . .” (278)
Dan’s migratory behavior: “the horror of landing that drove the bird endlessly on” (293)
Dan’s “panic of fear” (at age 16) about being targeted by the bully Bill Hannacott (397)
Dan regards his father’s Christianity as “no more than the answer to fear” (504)
For ancient Egypt and the U.S. today, according to Dan, “fear of death” is couched as an “all-pervasive fear of non-freedom” (540)
The Herr Professor’s fear that a thief had sneaked in while he was working in seclusion after dark on the tomb walls in the Kobbet el Hawa cliff (560)
Jane’s fear of her real feelings during her student days at Oxford (566)
Jane fears Dan’s “different values,” his successful life, his having left Oxford many years ago--something she is just now facing up to (577)
Dan and Jane fear a difficult future for the Hooper’s marriage (584)
Dan feels “the terror of the task” of making an artistic world alone and unguided, “mediocrity in his dressing-gown” (590)
Dan begins “to fear Syria, the possibility of the same boring and dusty journeys to nowhere for nothing” (592)
Dan’s silent misgivings: “Doubt of her, doubt of himself, fear of rejection, fear of response” (597)
Dan and Jane’s anxiety during a foul flight to Beirut (612-3)
Jane’s fear that her actions will justify Dan’s leaving her (630)
Jane’s fear of love, and her tendency (in Dan’s estimation) to “streak for the horizon” (653)
Dan’s vertigo and fear in encountering the “formidable sentinel” of the Rembrandt self-portrait so soon after his parting with Jenny (672)
Dan’s father unwittingly terrified him as a boy by insisting that Christ’s eyes followed “wherever you went, whatever you did” (673)
- SHAME
Dan at 15, in Devon: “He is shy and ashamed of his own educated dialect of the tongue” (4)
At Oxford, Dan accidentally blurts out to Jane his judgment about formal engagements, and immediately catches his error (28)
Dan’s “bout of self-pity” at Jenny’s apartment prior to the phone call from Oxford (75)
Parson Martin’s “ill-concealed guilt” about stealing rare shrubs, and being “shamed into an outright lie” over the provenance of one of them (82)
Parson Martin’s conductor-style reading of broadsheets at Sunday school mortifies Dan: “How could he make such a fool of me with his stupid poem-reading?” (85)
Dan’s remorse about how he treated Aunt Millie as a child, and her forgiveness outreaching “all time and space” (89)
Jane’s self-imposed scheme of penance: she makes love to Dan in the full knowledge that she will go on to marry Anthony as a Catholic (96)
Bernard’s guilt, or pretended guilt, about cheating on his wife (128)
Dan’s “usual sequence of guilt and self-justification” over a marital infidelity (146)
Nell blames Dan “for not buying what they cannot afford” (148)
Dan and Anthony both blaming themselves over the past (181)
Anthony’s self-depreciation and self-distaste about how he’s spent his adult years (191)
Dan’s embarrassment at the prospect of spending an evening with Jane, who evidently wishes he hadn’t reappeared in her life (196)
Jane and Anthony’s shared guilt about a marriage and its longstanding failings (215)
Jane’s embarrassed smile at Dan’s offer to come visit Thorncombe (228)
Jane with Roz: a professionally unfulfilled woman’s relation to her daughter’s career success (236)
Dan’s self-blame about Nell’s behavior, and Caro’s guilt about her mother (238)
Bernard’s embarrassment over Caro’s telling Dan about their affair (239)
Dan and Bernard both rebelling against their religious upbringings: “the enduring guilt at levels deeper than logic and reason can ever purge” (274)
Dan’s nausea about the communications industry and his place in it (275)
Dan’s conscience is jabbed by his professional writing duties (295)
Jenny’s remorse about sending her “second contribution” (304)
The remnants of Jane’s Catholicism and “All the sin-and-guilt bit” (308)
Dan’s humiliating treatment by Fenwick in the after-dinner talk about politics, and the blame that Fenwick attaches to Dan for his socialist beliefs (335, 337)
At Tsankawi, Jenny guiltily covers her gathering of shards while a native-American couple passes by (354)
Jane’s remorse about advice she offered Dan many years previously (359)
At age 16, Dan’s intense chagrin about being so unwitting, and so helplessly separated from Nancy Reed’s world: “Stupid! . . . He felt his background again, intolerably” (373)
Dan’s sharp feeling of betrayal at the hands of his father and Mrs. Reed: “The shame, the humiliation!” (401)
The reproach Dan imagines emanating from his mother’s headstone, over the tears he has not shed (438, 441-2)
Dan as a “guilty” godfather to Roz (443)
During a call from Jenny, Dan is unable to ease his conscience about Jane and the trip to Egypt he has offered her (447)
Dan and Jane behaving like “chance embarrassed strangers” as they embark on ten days of travel together (487)
Jane’s unwittingly putting the Egyptian women to shame at the Assad’s dinner-party (501)
Jane’s embarrassment at Dan’s making too much of a gift (513)
Dan and Jane’s playing “Little British” with the American couple on the cruise, hiding their true feelings as if they’re ashamed of them (520)
The Nile passengers’ tacit sense of guilt as they pass native women bathers (527)
Dan’s apology to the American couple over a possible religious offense (536)
A “triple blasphemy” involved in the Edna argument between an Arab showman and an Italian tourist (551)
The Herr Professor’s sons’ blaming him over his failures during the war (556)
The Herr Professor’s former guilt about studying the past so much, and hiding from what he “did not wish to understand” (559)
Jane’s sense at Anthony’s death that she was “relegated to being a burden on other people’s consciences” (576)
Dan and Jane’s embarrassment, “like all intellectuals presented point-blank with simple faith,” at Omar’s facing Mecca and praying (579)
Dan’s growing embarrassment about maintaining caution and neutrality with Jane (587)
Jane’s remorse over implying that Dan’s values are inferior (594)
Dan in middle age: “The compromises of his life seemed to lie on him almost physically, like warts” (598)
Jane’s guilt over her responses to Dan (603, 605-6)
Dan’s stiff-faced depression, “metaphysical humiliation, the world gone black and vulgar” (613)
Guilt about having privilege in the form of culture, education, money (628-9)
Jane’s embarrassment about being confronted by what she told Caro about Dan (630)
Dan “can’t forgive” Jane’s likening love to a prison (631)
Dan’s sense that Jane is retreating to “an eternal unforgivingness, refusal to listen” (632)
Jane’s unspoken confession to Anthony after the Tarquinia night-bathe: her rekindled feelings for Dan, and her thinking that such feelings were sinful (640)
Dan and Jane reduced to what, “in their two sexes, had never forgiven and never understood the other . . . eternally irreconcilable” (648-9)
- ENVY
Jane envies Nell her physical relationship with Dan (60)
Anthony’s enhanced academic prestige sets off twinges of career jealousy for Dan (113)
Petty rivalries among fellow-journalists at Bernard’s office (121-2)
Nell’s rudeness at a party turns out to be a “first declaration of career jealousy” (141)
A sisterly rivalry between Nell and Jane (149)
Nell illogically envying a career she doesn’t actually want (153)
Nell’s envy of Jane and Anthony’s married life (155)
Nell’s “real jealousy” has to do with the age of self putting her in a cage (168)
In his letter to Dan, Anthony disavows any trace of career envy (176)
Mother-daughter envy between Jane and Roz (235-6)
Nell’s attitude toward Caro as another example of mother-daughter envy (237)
The conspicuous lack of jealousy between Miriam and Marjory: “. . . how they could share so without jealousy the grown-up toy they had found in me” (266)
Dan describing Miriam’s eyes: “They taunt, they live, and I envy with all my heart every man who has had them since” (269)
Bernard’s envy of Daniel and his intellectual lot during their Oxford days (272)
A jealous rival’s sideways compliment about a bad prime minister (275)
Dan and Bernard both envy academic life its sabbaticals (281)
Professional jealousy: Dan’s pretended jealousy of Jenny (305), and Anthony’s jealousy of the barrister Fenwick (338)
Jane to Dan: “I do envy you. Being in touch with nature and all that” (414)
Jane, who grew up “traipsing from one embassy to the next,” envies Dan his connection with Thorncombe, and Andrew and Nell their connection with Compton (439)
Jane envies the innocence of the ancient Egyptians (509)
The Nile-excursion passengers envy the simplicities of life along the river’s banks, in the same way that the denizen of an “icier, grimmer planet might look on, and envy, Earth” (527)
In a sympathetic way, Jane expresses her envy of the Herr Professor’s wife (554)
Dan envies a warbler its ability to remain on the Nile (610)
- SADNESS
Dan at 15, after the rabbit slaughter: “And his heart turns, some strange premonitory turn, a day when in an empty field he shall weep for this” (8)
The prospect of dying prematurely: “. . . dying, dying before the other wheat was ripe” (10)
The adult Dan mourns the loss of his boyhood self: “Adieu, my boyhood and my dream” (10)
Jane’s comment about “the real and bathetic future that faced them” after graduation from Oxford (95)
Dan recognizes his own symptoms in what Bernard says: ”doubts and disillusions, grasped-for apples turned to wax, dreams become ashes” (108)
Dan detects “a faint wistfulness in Jane” about his success as a professional dramatist (113)
Dan’s experience of the Etruscan tomb-walls: “nothing could be better or lovelier than this, till the end of time. It was sad, but in a noble, haunting, fertile way” (114)
After arriving in Oxford, Dan has a sharp and sudden longing for his girlfriend Jenny back in California (165)
Dan’s breakup with Nell leaves him with a sense of “major loss” about Anthony and Jane (172)
In middle age, Dan and Anthony acknowledge missing each other’s friendship over the years (181)
Jane’s response to Dan’s “defeatism” stems from her conviction that “literary melancholia so often precedes fascism” (198)
Jane breaking down and sobbing in her daughter Roz’s arms (230)
Dan’s realization of “the loneliness of each, the bedrock of the human condition” (244)
Jenny’s claim about Dan: “He has a mistress. Her name is Loss” (249)
Jenny writes about missing Dan “Every hour of every day. And night” (252)
Miriam and Marjory’s mother is “bereft” after Daniel weans them away from her (267)
Miriam and Marjory become for Dan “a lasting lesson on the limitations of my class, my education, and my kind” (268)
Dan’s malaise at Caro’s flat: “No one loves me, no one cares” (279)
Anthony’s disappointment about his children’s following Jane out of the church (308)
Dan’s “feeling of transience, unrecapturabilities, abysses” at Tsankawi (351)
Dan’s sense at Tsankawi of “the lost civilization of me” (354)
For Jenny, a descent of sadness during her last visit to Tsankawi with Dan (355)
At age 16, Dan’s sense of “atrocious letdown” to hear of Nancy Reed’s interest in Bill Hannacott: “Imminent zenith to realized nadir, all in two seconds” (373)
Dan’s incredulity about having to imagine “Thorncombe without the Reeds!” (404)
In Cairo after the Assad’s party, Dan catches a glimpse of loneliness in Jane (503)
During the Temple of Karnak visit, Dan has a rich, poetic sense of the dead around him (509-10)
Dan happens to spot Marcia Hooper secretly watching Jane--“a strange look, wistful, almost canine in its lack of envy” (538)
Marcia’s response to her infertility, and Dan’s judgment about Mitch’s “sad little faith in technology” as the panacea (540)
Jane’s sadness in hearing about the fellaheen way of life (545)
The Herr Professor’s sense of loss about his wife, and the tears he shed about what became of his fellow-Germans during WWII (554-6)
Jane’s tears at Kom Ombo: “Its all being over. And thinking of Anthony. How he would have liked it here” (564)
Dan’s silence: “That’s how men cry” (568)
Jane’s feeling that she’s wasted her life, or things she could have given it (596)
Dan says he will miss his “perfect traveling companion” (597)
Dan and Jane’s covert sense of Labib and “the sad innocence of backward countries” (618)
The things about home that Jenny has missed while living overseas (662)
About Jenny’s departure, Dan feels “bereft beyond his calculation of it” (671)
The Rembrandt self-portrait: “the plebeian simplicity of such sadness . . . the deepest inner loneliness” (672)
- JOY
Dan at 15: “But who cares, teeth deep in white cartwheel, bread and sweet ham, all life to follow . . . The boy lies on his back . . . slightly drunk, bathed in the green pond of Devon voices, his Devon and England” (4)
“My God, I believe they’re actually enjoying it”: Dan on Andrew and his crony Mark’s response to the Woman in the Reeds (25)
Dan on his time at Oxford: “It’s been the most marvelous three years of my life” (27)
Jane, on why she threw an unopened bottle of champagne in the river: “It just felt right” (30; see also 47-8, 51, 73, 201, 231, 437, 441, 575, 596, 604-5)
Jenny falling in love with Dan (or with the idea of him) (33)
A component of wickedness in Jenny’s interest in Dan: “Daddy-o wants me” (43)
Dan, on his desire for Nell and Jane: “It’s mad. But I think I’m in love with both of you” (61)
Dan is “dazzled by the gilt chimeras” of his film career: “that happiness was always having work, being in demand, belonging nowhere, the jet life, the long transatlantic phone call about nothing” (73)
Dan as “A small boy rushing in to breakfast: The Osmanthus is out! The clematis armandii! The trichodendron! (82)
Dan’s shock and joy at reading Samuel Butler (87)
Dan, after his sexual encounter with Jane: “. . . all kinds of buried feelings of inferiority toward Anthony lay mysteriously but profoundly alleviated” (98)
Dan’s unaccountable, even religious sense of happiness during the Tarquinia night-bathe, and his seeing Anthony as the brother he loved (116)
The “miracle” of Dan’s “first major success” as a playwright, and his “state of smug euphoria” about it (147)
Dan’s secret happiness at arriving in Oxford after many years’ absence: “the strange reversals of time, of personal histories . . . moments that you are glad, for once, to have survived to” (160)
The sadistic enjoyment that Dan assumes Anthony felt while writing the letter that officially ended their friendship: “He’ll have loved composing every word of that little commination” (177)
Dan’s sense of affection and rapport on meeting Anthony after their long estrangement (180)
Dan and Anthony’s reciprocal pleasure in puns and word-play (193)
The pleasure that Jane reports Anthony as having had in the chance to play “Jesus Christ” to the woman taken in adultery (i.e., herself) (215)
Dan’s cherishing a noble legend about the Oxford quartet’s joint past (216)
Dan’s “saturated, diverse” feelings as he drifts toward sleep on the night of Anthony’s death, and the God-like self-satisfaction of his unconscious (220-2)
Dan’s belated reconnection with his extended family: “this loose, warm web of clan” as a “modest secular equivalent of that nightbathe at Tarquinia so many years before” (235)
Caro’s feeling with Bernard of “realizing that someone does seem to need you” (for “non-family reasons”) (240)
Dan and Abe’s underlying affection and respect for each other, despite their outward “meanness” (248)
Jenny on Dan’s secret patriotism (251)
Dan’s recognizing Miriam and Marjory’s “delicious lack of self-consciousness” (257)
Miriam and Marjory’s close sisterly affection despite their nagging (265)
Dan’s seven or eight weeks with Miriam and Marjory: “a blend of reciprocal curiosity, affection and physical pleasure that was totally free of love” (266)
The enjoyment Dan feels at the beginning stages of a play or script, of being “the first man ever to set foot on a desert island, a new planet” (289)
Fenwick’s skilled and entertaining contributions to the Compton dinner-party (329-32)
Dan’s sense that Tsankawi validates the rest of existence, serving as a “sustained high note, unconquerable” (346)
Dan’s enjoyment of the “Englishness” of the weather (357)
Dan returning to Thorncombe after a period away: “the pleasures of an intense small world after a great diffuse one” (367)
Dan’s physical joys with Nancy Reed: “Victory! . . . the loudest cocklecockadoo of all his life” (382, et al)
Dan with Nancy, “stunned, ravished, rent with joy” (384)
Dan’s pleasure in walking and knowing (428, 433-4)
Dan’s forebodings of a rich and happy year ahead (428)
Dan’s pleasure in inclement weather, with the element of hazard involved, and the promise of “rich, green-tunneled summers” (434)
Dan’s abiding connection with Thorncombe: “in a way this attachment to a climate, a landscape, was the only decent marriage he had ever made” (434-5)
Andrew’s love for Compton (439)
Dan’s sense of curiosity, spiritual and artistic awakening, fertility (441)
Dan’s pleasure in the seasons, awakening (449)
The pleasure of experiencing playwright Ahmed Sabry’s storytelling and jokes (498-500)
Dan’s feeling about Jane as they are drive by taxi away from the Assad’s party: the “affective equivalent in the mind of erection at the loins” (503)
Dan and Jane watching a magnificent sunset together in Dan’s cabin overlooking the Nile (517)
Dan’s pleasure in quietly sharing his room with Jane while she’s occupied writing postcards, almost as if she’s forgotten he was there (533)
Dan’s falling under the spell of the Hungarian critic Georg Lukács—his being “impressed” by his writings, feeling “both his world-view and his own being as a writer enlarged and redefined,” despite not always liking the taste of its medicine (534)
Dan’s pleasure in bird-watching (542, et al)
Dan’s novel project “beginning to brew, to grow rich” (550)
Dan’s feeling, on the Nile cruise with Jane, of “daily closeness, mind, intuition, shared age and experience, the restoration of the old empathy” (565)
Jane’s sense of Dan from their student days, recalled in middle age: “That lovely innocent young man I knew at Oxford” (566)
Jane and Dan’s delight at visiting Kitchener’s Island (572-5, 593)
The last stars, the first green light, the untrammeled birdsong in the morning (610)
Dan’s appreciation of Jane’s company during the journey to Palmyra (627)
Dan’s feeling that he is at last “undergoing a flight towards something” (630)
The “strange simplicity” and “delicious shock” of intimate physical contact with another person (639)
Dan’s secret enjoyment in prolonging his love of loss a few hours more (656)
- FEELINGS IN COMBINATION
Dan at age 15, engaged in exhausting physical labor during Thorncombe harvest season: “But he likes the pain—a harvest pain, a part of the ritual; like the stiff muscles the next morning, like sleep that night, so drowning, deep and swift to come” (3)
“Ambrosia, death, sweet raspberry jam” (9)
Dan at age 47, reverting to “an unkilled adolescent in him,” in a moment combining nausea, excitement, and smugness (11)
“Late-night maundering” (15)
Jane’s surprise and horror about discovering a corpse in the reeds: “. . . her head flashes round, her mouth open, incredulous, horror-struck” (22)
As Jenny sees it, Dan’s call from Oxford leaves him like “a small boy who is frightened and excited and trying to hide both by being “mature” (35)
Jenny’s being wildly bored and lonely prior to asking Dan out (39)
Jenny, on having sex with a new man: “. . . all those funny, streaky, wobbly thoughts when you know it’s this, a new thing, a new man, where is this room, who am I, who cares, why” (42)
“Dan, I’m sorry. We’re both in a rather overwrought state” (46)
“He felt paralyzed . . . ravished by the strangeness” (62)
What it's like for Daniel to grow up with a father who tends to classify all feelings—anger, conviction, tearfulness, sullenness, excitement, boredom—as “demonstration” (79-80)
Dan’s fury at, and embarrassment about, his father: “I seethe . . . carrying misery and a large black umbrella through a perfect afternoon” (92-3)
In the early 1950s: “Over that winter something died in Jane” (112)
Dan’s shock at Caro’s confession, and his sense of foolishness at not having put the clues together (126)
Dan’s description of “that emotion-charged map of childhood and adolescence we carry around with us in later life” (136)
A look from Nell that is “both frightened and venomous—or obsessed,” and which gives Dan the feeling “that he no longer knew or understood her at all” (154)
The depression Dan undergoes in the aftermath of Andrea’s suicide (157)
Dan’s alternating between not caring and regret about the world he had cut himself off from (172)
Dan leaves Wytham feeling “deeply humiliated,” hating Jane, and yet still inexplicably wishing he had married her (174)
Anthony’s anger and pity toward Dan about his autobiographical play (176)
Dan’s absurdly double sense of estrangement from Jane (178)
Anthony’s emotional crisis in facing up to his terminal illness (182-3)
Anthony’s gratitude about a marriage despite its faults, and about being the beneficiary of what Dan and Jane sacrificed (190)
Dan’s mixture of feelings after his talk with Anthony at the hospital (196-7)
Jane’s rueful smile about getting to call Dan’s bluff (203)
Dan senses in Jane “an insecurity, almost a gauche anxiety when faced with someone from another world,” yet this coexists with her seeming to despise Dan’s world for artistic as well as political reasons (204)
The French au pair Gisèle’s amazement at seeing Jane’s English sangfroid in the face of her husband’s suicide (209)
Dan’s relief at hearing Andrew’s “ordinary reactions of shock and solicitude” about Anthony’s suicide (211)
Jane’s “ancient despair” about a longstanding bad pattern in her marriage (214)
Jane’s shrug has the effect of “killing too much delight” (218)
A Scottish priest’s distress during a social call after Anthony’s death (226)
Jane’s strain over the aftermath of Anthony’s suicide (227)
Around Jane, Roz pretends to enjoy her career less than she does (235-6)
Dan and Carol’s underlying father-daughter affection is revealed after an argument (239-41)
Dan’s strange sympathy for a nocturnal tramp, his envying the man, his being powerless to help him, and then having to smile to himself--as an “inefficient god” might do so while watching his own universe repair itself (243-5)
Jenny on Dan: “that’s truly what he is: a professional melancholiac, and enjoying every minute of it” (249)
Jenny and Mildred’s affectionate fencing (251)
Miriam’s initial blend of naïvety and suspicion (255)
The “usual happy blend of sadism and masochism” in Bernard’s marriage (272)
A columnist who has “clowned too much” over the years to have his moments of furious indignation taken very seriously (275)
Dan’s feeling “a pervasive cancer at the heart of one’s world,” but preferring it to surgical intervention (277)
Dan’s inability to forgive Barney over Caro, coupled with his suddenly feeling too old to hate him (278)
Dan’s sense of “metaphysical cuckolding” by his daughter Caro (283)
A letter from Jenny that “stopped a morning” for Dan, in the way that some reviews had done (304)
In the Mallory household, there’s “a zone of unspoken distance between male and female intelligences” (308), and an “unbearable” isolation for Anthony as the family’s only Catholic believer (309)
Paul’s brooding misery and sulkiness, and the awkwardness it creates for those around him (313-4, 316, et al)
Caro’s confusion amid the forced “universal love” at Compton (318)
Jane’s reserve and independence of feeling (319-20)
Nell’s conflicted feelings about Caro’s affair with Bernard (320-2)
Andrew’s conflicts as an estate-owner (326-8)
Fenwick’s “flash of malicious delight, hidden under a pretended ruefulness,” at Dan’s error (335)
Paul’s mixture of “aggressive defiance, professional authority, and doubt” regarding Dan’s interest in his ancient field-systems project (339)
Dan’s sympathy for Nell’s exasperation with Jane (341)
Petulance, spoilt-child resentment, and affection in Nell’s response to Jane (341)
A “kind of chiding forgiveness” of Nell toward Jane (342)
Jane’s embarrassment about Dan’s witnessing her interactions with Nell, combined with her hatred of any sympathy he shows toward it (342)
Dan’s deep and abiding admiration for Tsankawi and its ineffable beauty, combined with his disappointment about Abe, Mildred, and Jenny’s reactions to the region (343-55)
In Tsankawi, “the most pure and open of places,” Dan feels “like a man in prison” (353)
Jenny’s crying out of spite and hatred towards Dan (356)
An artificial “philadelphian” mood at the end of the Compton weekend (357)
Paul’s inability to discover another key between “being a sulk and being a bore” (358)
Dan’s irritation at Ben and Phoebe’s “continual presence and gratitude,” and their simple frame of values (366)
Ben’s grudging praise for his plants and flowers belies his deeper sense of purpose in tending them (366)
At age 16, Dan’s enjoyment and embarrassment about milking cows (374)
Dan’s bitter envy of Bill Hannacott, combined with physical humiliation at Bill’s hands, and his fury with the world (376-7)
Dan’s joy and guilt: “And the lovely guilt, the need to lie, he took singing home” (384)
Dan’s combination of shock, hope, and trepidation as he waits for Nancy (386)
Dan’s sexual anxiety and his sense of “impending sin” (386)
The misery Dan feels while waiting for Nancy, his fear of Nancy’s anger, and his growing frustration (393)
Dan and Nancy’s “fever of remorse and reawakened passion” (395)
The mixture of feelings in Dan’s response to his father’s suddenly ending his connection with Nancy Reed: “un-Christian hatred and impotent despair,” shame, humiliation, rage, agony, melancholy, and sullenness; his eventual pity for his father, and admiration for how he handled of the situation (401-2)
Dan’s meeting “many years later” with the adult Nancy: he found it “vaguely amusing” at the time, but it distresses him when he writes it down (406)
Dan likens his life to the lanes around Thorncombe: “going the long way nowhere between high hedges”; he has enjoyed the hedges, he says, but now he wants to “look over them” and get his bearings (416)
In the “Orchard of the Blessed,” Dan’s sense of happiness in an age without comedy (428)
Dan despises camp, except when he feels affection for it (446)
Dan’s mingled concern/guilt/protectiveness/fondness/loss about Jenny (447)
The component of sadness in Dan’s happiness, and his need for complexity, “endless forked roads” (450)
In Jenny’s semi-fictional account of a sexual encounter with her American co-star Steve, she writes that “my body was glad about the sex and my mind was glad about the humiliation” (463)
Dan’s sense of erotic desire while reading Jenny’s third contribution, combined with his sense of loss and dissociation (476)
Caro’s “tacit reproach” toward Dan about his prying questions; her sense of loss in relation to her peers; her feeling happy despite all the “doom and disaster” she hears at work; and her sense that this proves she’s “not very bright” (480-1)
In Cairo, Dan’s sense of rapport with Jimmy Assad’s political cynicism (489)
Conflicts of politeness between Dan and Jane as traveling companions (493)
Dan’s feeling that he is condemned, by genetic endowment and hazard of birth and career, to enjoying the evening with Ahmed Sabry (500)
A stupid woman’s smile of joy (in Sabry’s story), and the angry despair that it touches in Dan (501)
At the wall-carving of Isis and Osiris, Dan’s memory of visiting the place 20 years previously with Andrea (508)
Intimations of mortality, bringing Dan a patina of contentment: “one was dying, perhaps, but one knew more, felt more, saw more” (510)
Dan’s sense of letdown, after the enchantment of the evening, that the night and stars are now “depressing” and “monotonous” (524)
The Barge-borne Queen’s reproach toward his younger companion, and the companion’s sullenness (525)
Dan and Jane’s “heightened sense of personal past and present” during the Nile trip (526)
From Georg Lukács’ writings: angst and whether it is the determining reaction in the human condition (533-4)
Marcia and Mitchell’s boring enthusiasm about their trip to Lebanon and Syria (541)
Dan’s seeing all art as mere tomb-making, “elaborate and futile insurance against the unknown,” yet his feeling “a sense of freedom” about this (550-1)
Dan, Jane, and the Herr Professor’s distance from the cabaret night on the cruise (552-3)
The Herr Professor’s pride and regret about his sons (554), and his conflicted feelings about himself and his country over WWII (554-7)
In the Herr Professor’s “ghost story without a ghost,” his strange experience of “a broken link in time,” and his access to what he calls “the river between” (560-1)
Dan’s heightened sense of “metaphysical pressure” on the cruise, “balanced between outward enjoyment and inward anxiety . . . both calmed and unsettled” (562-3)
At Kom Ombo, Jane cries from sadness and from being “glad to be alive . . . After what seems rather a long time” (565, 575)
Dan and Jane and “this ludicrous emotional no-man’s land they had decreed between them” (567)
Dan’s sense of out-of-body disorientation at the Kobbet el Hawa cliff, of being “an idea in someone else’s mind, not his own” . . . and then “damning death and introspection” (570-2)
Dan’s “disturbing feeling of not being his own master” (579)
A “spurious” bonhomie among passengers at the end of the Nile excursion; expressions of international friendship “like infinitely post-dated checks” (584)
Dan is amused and touched by the Hooper’s excitement about his taking their suggestion about visiting Palmyra, and dislikes conceding that their opinion is valuable (584)
Dan mistrusts his “deep and growing affection” for Jane (586)
Dan’s “attack of the traditional twentieth-century nausea: the otherness of the other” (589)
Dan’s sense of having a deep feeling for art, but “no creative talent for it” (590)
Dan’s shift from resentment into self-reproach over Jane’s “sensitivity to the unsaid” (594)
Dan’s quandary over how to live the present age, to “feel deprived or feel guilty,” in “a world where the future gets more horrible to contemplate every day” (596)
The shift inside Dan during the Goldberg Variations; his feeling “the true difference between Eros and Agape” (600)
Jane’s outward role-playing covers what’s “still boiling away underneath”: “Self-hatred. Guilt. Anger. Things without name” (603)
Suicidal impulses in Jane after Peter left, and her resisting them so as not to provide “some kind of victory for Anthony” (604-5)
Dan’s desire to “long-suffer” Jane (606)
Dan’s strange conflict of feelings after his talk with Jane, like a math equation—rejection, consolation, absurdity, desire . . . and the metaphysical smile that follows, “potential being making peace with actual being” (608-9)
Dan’s “condemned man’s distress” about Jane combined with his sadness at waking up on the last morning of holidays (610)
Jane’s remorse about her contributions to the conversation on the terrace: “All I hate in my sex” (611)
In Beirut, Dan stands beside Jane at a window of couture dresses and wants to say, “I need you beyond all my verbal capacity of defining need”; instead, he plays pocket calculator, and hates Jane profoundly for this interest in gewgaws (614)
Dan’s continue malaise in Beirut: sullen, tired, excluded, unconsoled; his longing to retreat to Thorncombe to “lick wounds”; his exposure to “the guilt of the futility, the horror of existence passed so, like caged animals” (614-6)
Dan’s sardonic happiness during the ride to Palmyra: the passing scenes may be dismal, but at least they match his sour mood (619)
Dan and Jane’s surreal and increasingly bleak journey to Palmyra, and the time-warp strangeness of the Hotel Palmyra (617-626)
Retreating to the car’s warm interior after the bitterly cold and inhospitable atmosphere outside (622)
Dan’s feeling of being “a man driving through nothingness” (628)
Dan’s surprise at feeling tender even toward Jane’s obstinate habit of contradicting him (628)
Abuse of one’s gifts, and the weight of past mistakes and wrong choices (629, 631)
Despair over cross-purposes (630)
Jane’s sense that accepting Dan’s offer would be to betray him, as much as accepting another man’s offer would be to betray him (633)
Dan’s tenderness toward, and irritation at, Jane both deepen at the same time (634)
The stalemate with Jane violates Dan’s deepest sense of destiny and right dramatic development (634)
Perversity and sadness in Jane’s face, “a kind of ultimate being cornered” (635)
The pariah dog following Dan and Jane during their evening walk at Palmyra, “a soul caught between anger and despair” (637)
The men at the hotel grin as if amused to see the foreigners thwarted (637)
A complex interlacing of memories and feelings connected with Dan and Jane’s sexual re-encounter at Palmyra (638-43)
Jane’s continuing fears and scruples, contrasted with Dan’s sense that “something far more profound than hazard” willed their coming together (642)
Palmyra’s desolate immensity and appalling lifelessness (645-50)
Dan being “petrified in sullenness,” Jane “behaving like an inverted Phaedra” (649-50)
Amid the Palmyra ruins, the puppies’ whimpering expresses “an unhappiness from the beginning of existence” (650)
The puppies’ mother has an air of being “both cowed and vicious” (650)
Jane’s tears at Palmyra, her characteristic depth of feeling, her assuming that Dan “must hate” her, her being a self-described “ghastly neurotic female” (651-2)
Dan enjoys prolonging his love of loss a few hours more (656)
Dan and Jenny’s fraught meeting in north London: cross-purposes, awkwardness, bitterness, hurt, with moments of playful mockery and amused curiosity (658-71)
Dan’s misery in knowing that he cannot comfort Jenny “in the only way that might have worked” (666)
Dan and Jenny’s intimate connection is now subject to the comedown of “only reify” (666)
Dan, having sucked the poison of Jenny’s mood at the pub, is left poisoned by it himself (671)
The Rembrandt self-portrait and the feelings it elicits in Dan (671-3)
--Kelly