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When Ethel Met Sidney

I have always been interested in translations, for they can affect one nation’s view of another. Thanks to Charles Dickens, Sherlock Holmes and a weepy film called Waterloo Road, for most Chinese, London remains eternally wreathed in fog, never mind the Clean Air Acts. And translation can ensure that books long forgotten in their native place continue to thrive elsewhere.

For me, one of the most extraordinary examples of lasting success abroad and oblivion at home is the 1897 thriller The Gadfly. Written by Ethel Lillian Voynich, it achieved a respectable success in England and America but became an enormous bestseller in Russia (first published in 1898, 5 million copies sold, in 65 editions) and then throughout the Communist world. It was dramatized by George Bernard Shaw and filmed twice in Russia, the second time with a score written by Shostakovich. Fiercely anti-clerical, sometimes overly theological, it nevertheless cracks along like an Errol Flynn film.

The story begins sedately in a theological seminary in Pisa in 1833 where Arthur, a young Englishman, is sorting out Canon Montanelli’s papers. The Canon addresses Arthur as ‘Dear little one’ and puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder rather too often for this twenty-first century reader. Arthur, from a British shipping family long established in Leghorn, is a troubled soul, distressed by the recent death of his sad, widowed mother, estranged from his older stepbrothers, and wondering whether he should join the illegal political movement called Young Italy.

Arthur is also suffering from unrequited love for Jim (real name Jennifer) a childhood playmate, who has another suitor, Giovanni Bolla, a fellow-member of Young Italy. Jim is determined that violent struggle is the only way forward; Arthur is more uncertain, and his confusion between religion and politics, love and jealousy, leads him to bare his soul with dangerous candour in the confessional. Father Cardi, a slippery prelate, betrays his secrets, and various members of Young Italy are arrested. When Arthur is released, his stepbrother reveals the fact that Canon Montanelli is Arthur’s real father, which is an unwelcome discovery for Arthur but at least explains the endearments. Distraught at this news and at the fact that Jim believes he has betrayed his comrades, Arthur slips out of Leghorn and makes for South America.

Part two opens in Florence, twenty years later. Jim, who thinks that Arthur has drowned himself because she accused him of betrayal, is now a widow, but she continues her revolutio

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I have always been interested in translations, for they can affect one nation’s view of another. Thanks to Charles Dickens, Sherlock Holmes and a weepy film called Waterloo Road, for most Chinese, London remains eternally wreathed in fog, never mind the Clean Air Acts. And translation can ensure that books long forgotten in their native place continue to thrive elsewhere.

For me, one of the most extraordinary examples of lasting success abroad and oblivion at home is the 1897 thriller The Gadfly. Written by Ethel Lillian Voynich, it achieved a respectable success in England and America but became an enormous bestseller in Russia (first published in 1898, 5 million copies sold, in 65 editions) and then throughout the Communist world. It was dramatized by George Bernard Shaw and filmed twice in Russia, the second time with a score written by Shostakovich. Fiercely anti-clerical, sometimes overly theological, it nevertheless cracks along like an Errol Flynn film. The story begins sedately in a theological seminary in Pisa in 1833 where Arthur, a young Englishman, is sorting out Canon Montanelli’s papers. The Canon addresses Arthur as ‘Dear little one’ and puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder rather too often for this twenty-first century reader. Arthur, from a British shipping family long established in Leghorn, is a troubled soul, distressed by the recent death of his sad, widowed mother, estranged from his older stepbrothers, and wondering whether he should join the illegal political movement called Young Italy. Arthur is also suffering from unrequited love for Jim (real name Jennifer) a childhood playmate, who has another suitor, Giovanni Bolla, a fellow-member of Young Italy. Jim is determined that violent struggle is the only way forward; Arthur is more uncertain, and his confusion between religion and politics, love and jealousy, leads him to bare his soul with dangerous candour in the confessional. Father Cardi, a slippery prelate, betrays his secrets, and various members of Young Italy are arrested. When Arthur is released, his stepbrother reveals the fact that Canon Montanelli is Arthur’s real father, which is an unwelcome discovery for Arthur but at least explains the endearments. Distraught at this news and at the fact that Jim believes he has betrayed his comrades, Arthur slips out of Leghorn and makes for South America. Part two opens in Florence, twenty years later. Jim, who thinks that Arthur has drowned himself because she accused him of betrayal, is now a widow, but she continues her revolutionary activities as Church, State and Young Italy vie for power. All Florence is talking about a mysterious revolutionary Brazilian called Felice Rivarez, nicknamed ‘the Gadfly’, who has come to join the fight. His physical courage is legendary but his nickname derives from the sharp and witty political skits he publishes. He is rather a bundle of attributes: ‘right foot lame; left arm twisted; two fingers missing on left hand; recent sabre-cut across face; stammers’. He has arrived in Italy with a dancer called Zita whom he seems to have rescued from a brothel but who feels hard done by because he does not love her. The Gadfly’s rather disciplinarian approach to Zita is contrasted with his extremely gentle treatment of a tiny, frozen, starving child he finds in the street. As Zita doesn’t want a dirty urchin in her lodgings, he takes the infant to Jim’s house. The alert reader will by now suspect that the Gadfly is in fact Arthur, but Jim is maddeningly obtuse. She and the Gadfly have long flirtatious conversations in which he describes his sufferings in Brazil as a docker, brothel bouncer and clown. Their almost endless circling is paralleled by the Gadfly’s stalking of Canon (now Cardinal) Montanelli, who has been expiating his sins by flirting with the cause of the people. The final climax comes when the Gadfly is captured (sacrificing himself to enable his friends to escape) and Montanelli tries to prevent his execution. The Gadfly, his stammer mysteriously cured, shouts at his father,
Come out of this plague-stricken Church – come away with us into the light . . . Padre, the dawn is close upon us – will you miss your part in the sunrise? Wake up, and let us forget the horrible nightmares – wake up and we will begin our life again!
The Gadfly dies in a welter of bullets, pushing a bloodstained crucifix from him; Jim weeps buckets; and the Cardinal dies of a broken heart – ‘Aneurism is as good a word as any other’ – having dashed the Host from the altar. Knowing vaguely of its success and continuing significance in Communist China, I was delighted to acquire my first copy of The Gadfly, an English-language paperback published in Shanghai in 1986, with synopsis and notes in Chinese. It was lying on a table in the Guanghwa bookshop in Newport Place. It was a bit dog-eared and I now realize with guilt, though it is much too late to do anything about it, that the charming old shop assistant Mr Chen had probably been in the middle of reading it when I bought it. As well as its acceptable revolutionary content, the novel contains rather a lot of theology, and so notes were clearly essential for Chinese readers, though they are not always quite up to scratch. I am especially fond of the translation into Chinese of Ave Maria, Regina Coeli, which reads ‘Goodbye Maria, Queen of the Heavenly Kingdom’. I acquired a second copy in the wonderful second-hand and antiquarian bookshop in Highgate, Fisher and Sperr. It is a gaudy 1973 Pan paperback with a gun and a rose on the cover and a plug from Bertrand Russell near the end of his very long life: ‘The most exciting novel I have ever read in the English language’. One wonders if he read much fiction. Despite its cover, the Pan edition contains quite a lot of information about its author which I found extraordinary, for her life was even more unlikely than the events in her novel. Ethel Lillian Voynich was born in Cork, in 1864, the fourth daughter of George and Mary Everest Boole. George, who died in the year Ethel was born, was the son of a shoemaker and became a brilliant mathematician and logician, the creator of Boolean logic which lies behind the design of modern computers. His wife, Mary Everest (niece of the Surveyor of India after whom the mountain was named), was a woman of strongly held but eccentric views. Some suggest that her personal version of homeopathy may have hastened her husband’s early death. He arrived home soaking wet and suffering from a cold. Believing that the cure should resemble the complaint, Mary poured buckets of water over him until he developed pneumonia. Described as ‘A Teacher of Brain Liberation’, Mary supported the family by writing books on an astonishing range of subjects. They included The Forging of Passion into Power, Miss Education and Her Garden: A Short Summary of the Educational Blunders of Half a Century, Philosophy and Fun of Algebra, The Message of Psychic Science to Mothers and Nurses, an introduction to The Value of a Maimed Life and What One Might Say to a Schoolboy. Her daughter Ethel was clearly attracted to revolutionaries and in a Gothick gesture apparently wore black until the day she married, ‘to mourn the state of the world’. Significantly for her novel, one of her early heroes was the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini whom she worshipped for his ‘melancholy beauty and distinction’. She became interested in Russia and, through her friend Charlotte Wilson (mistress of Prince Kropotkin), started language lessons in London with the exiled revolutionary and assassin Stepniak (Sergei Mikhailovich Kravchinsky) who had fled Russia in 1884. Despite his low brow, bristly beard and fierce wife Fanny, he seems to have charmed many left-leaning ladies, including the noted translator of Turgenev, Constance Garnett, and her sister-in-law Olive. In 1887, Ethel left for St Petersburg where she stayed with Stepniak’s revolutionary relations and gave lessons in English and music. She returned to London two years later and in 1892 married a friend of Stepniak’s, the Polish revolutionary Wilfred Voynich. Voynich had been imprisoned for political activities in Siberia and had fled to England in 1890 where, while continuing to work underground for the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, he became a respected and successful antiquarian bookseller. Just as George Boole is now remembered for Boolean logic, so Voynich is still remembered, more than sixty years after his death, for the ‘Voynich manuscript’, otherwise known as ‘the most mysterious manuscript in the world’ and now in the Bienecke Library at Yale. Discovered by Voynich in the Jesuit College at the Villa Mondragone in 1912, the late medieval manuscript includes drawings of plants, pictures of women in ‘bathtubs connected by intricate plumbing’ and ‘tiny naked people in rubbish bins’, accompanied by a text in a script which has still not been deciphered. The Voynich marriage seems to have been a happy one and to have survived Ethel’s rumoured affair with Sidney Reilly, the ‘Ace of Spies’, who was said to possess ‘eleven passports and a wife to go with each’. Sidney Reilly was born Sigmund Georgevich Rosenblum, probably in Odessa, but he was not to become famous until 1918 when he marched into the Kremlin, claiming he had been sent by Lloyd George to find out exactly what the Bolsheviks’ aims and intentions were. (Reilly was eventually murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1925.) According to Bruce Lockhart, the British consul in Moscow, Reilly accompanied Ethel to Italy in 1895, probably on a clandestine mission for the Friends of Russian Freedom and in defiance of conventional morality, for they were not married and he was ten years younger than she. In Italy, according to the afterword in the Pan edition of The Gadfly, ‘under the Mediterranean sun and under the influence of the Roman Catholic Church which touched every facet of Italian life’, Reilly revealed some details of his early life to Ethel. He claimed that a Viennese doctor who had befriended him was in fact his real father (shades of Montanelli). He had also apparently spent some years in Brazil, working on a plantation and as a docker, a clown in the circus and a doorman in a brothel (all of which, of course, form part of Arthur/Felice Rivarez’s CV). How much of this was true is hard to say. Reilly was only about 22 when he was supposed to have confided in Ethel and it seems unlikely he could have packed in so much by then. Since he was later to claim as many identities as he had passports, it is difficult to know what, if anything, he directly contributed to The Gadfly. What is more likely is that he borrowed from the novel when telling his ‘life story’ to Bruce Lockhart in Moscow in 1918. Ethel herself claimed that Jim/Jennifer was ‘the only person in The Gadfly I took more or less from life’ and that she was based on her friend Charlotte Wilson. If Sidney Reilly really was the model for the Gadfly, his subsequent murder by the Bolsheviks, no doubt keen readers of the novel in translation, was tragically ironic. At the beginning of the First World War, Voynich moved his antiquarian book business from 68 Shaftesbury Avenue to New York, where he died in 1930. Ethel eventually joined him there. She wrote several more novels, none of which achieved the same success as The Gadfly, but no one seems to have taken much notice of her. In a country gripped by McCarthyism, her popularity in Soviet Russia and Communist China cannot have been particularly helpful to her, and presumably her royalties were frozen in Soviet bank accounts. She died in New York in 1960. From Boolean logic to the Ace of Spies and millions of Chinese wondering what on earth the Church of Rome was up to, I find the details of her life fascinating. Yet if you look in any dictionary of famous women, there is no one between Mrs Karl Marx (née Von Trotha) and Diana Vreeland. That, however, is not the end of an extraordinary story. Ethel Voynich is listed in the American National Union Catalog, where you will find a number of her works dated to the 1940s and held in the New York Public Library. These are not books but, amazingly, musical scores. They include ‘Epitaph in ballad form: cantata for male choir and orchestra: In memoriam Roger David Casement, Brixton Prison’ and ‘The Submerged City: cantata for solo baritone, mixed choir and orchestra’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 6 © Frances Wood 2005


About the contributor

Frances Wood is lucky to work in the British Library, where pursuing Ethel Voynich’s life was made easier by access to her mother’s books, her novels, articles in History Today, a Russian biography and the assistance of Chris Thomas of the Slavonic section.

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