This volume has not been easy. A few stories have been wonderful, but many have been narratively and ideologically frustrating. Today's story was perhaps the most challenging to finish. If this blog is unsuccessful at everything else, I hope, at the very least, it can provide an account of my relationship to each story.
This is the final post for the volume dedicated to "Romance." The slipperiness of that categorization has provided us with tales of fraught love, impossible dedication to the sea, and idealizations of other people. Amidst the wide range it has been hard to find a through-line
However, what I think links these tales together is a focus on the capacity of an individual to dedicate themselves to something beyond all expectations. In "The Star Spangled Manner" we learned of how Bill Emlow's negotiation of his British and American identity was used to help him find love with Lady Angela. In "The Token" Epes Calef's life was turned upside down as he struggled to come to terms with life changes. He was left to re-route his sexual desire through his desire to be on the sea. May Edginton's "The Purple and Fine Linen" detailed the devotion of a mother marked as an outcast due to a patriarchal society.
Characters have been driven by devotion and in such a pursuit, these authors have sculpted worlds where the past never full leaves. Just as the titular restaurant of "The Gilded Pheasant" carried the lost opulence of yesteryear, Overton's 2nd volume has concerned itself with the persistent stickiness of the what-has-been.
This remains true in today's story, which is most notable for the adaptation by D. W. Griffith, who turned Thomas Burke's "The Chink and the Child" (a title I will reproduce only this once) into the 1919 film Broken Blossoms, staring Richard Barthelmess and Lillian Gish.
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| Ad advertisement for Griffith's adaptation of Burke's story (1919) |
I don't have much to say. The story is loathsome.
Relying on the second person invitational style in its opening, Burke's tale follows Avery and Gautier. The reader is solicited by the narrator who fumbles through "a takeoff love and lovers" which will "sound unconvincing, a little…you know…the kind of thing that is best forgotten. Perhaps…but listen." The narrator is probably right to think it is best forgotten—I think this is a story best not read.
After these prefatory statements Burke describes the life of Battling Burrows, a welterweight boxer from East London. Burrows is celebrated throughout the neighborhood as a figure of local pride. His success in the ring is not the focus here. For Burrows is an alcoholic, and he often abuses his twelve-year-old daughter Lucy.
As Burke writes "it is indefensible to strike your manager or to throw chairs at him, if he is a good manager; but to use a dog-whip on a small child is permissible and quite as satisfying; at least, he found it so…he only whipped the children when he was drunk; and he was only drunk of eight months of the year." How do we parse this peculiar voice? Occasionally it seems that the narrator has his tongue planted in his cheek. Yet Burke is too flippant throughout the story and he fails to offer any insight regarding this scenario of abuse. Our guide is more of a tourist who is fascinated by a lurid world he is not of.
Enter the Chinese poet Chen Huan who is "tinged with the materialism of his race, and in his poor listening heart strange echoes would awake of which he himself was barely conscious." Burke is uninterested in the complicated relationship between violent sports, masculinity, abuse, misogyny, class and race.
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| A lobby card for Broken Blossoms (1919) |
Instead he pivots to tell a tale of melodrama and sympathy that relies on a racist caricatures and an unnuanced vision of London life. This is unsurprising since this story was part of a collection titled Limehouse Nights, which was took place in London's East End and Chinatown—an area that Burke had little familiarity with and drafted in his imagination. (You can read more in Anne Veronica Witchard's book: Thomas Burke's Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown).
Again: the story is vile.
The quickest of summaries: Huan adores Lucy and begins to fall in love. One day he brings Lucy to his home and showers her with flowers and songs that Burke describes as a "mangling of English." With Huan, Lucy becomes "a poem." Eventually Battling Burrows finds out, and whips her till she almost dies. When Huan discovers this, he leaves a snake for Burrows, and rescuses Lucy. At his house she dies. Wrought with sadness Huan kills himself and then Burrows is killed by the snake.
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| Thomas Burke (1886-1945) [image from The Bookman, July 1917] |
Burke's story casts Huan as an unknowing artist driven by a childlike sense of "care" and desire. This manifests itself in Burke's depiction Huan's "care" for Lucy, which takes shape in songs and flowers. But Huan is not given any sense of individuality; he is not a person. He is a carriage for poetry that oozes out of him as though he were a fantastical creature from another world. In a long passage the narrator describes him repeatedly as a "thing." That description is telling: Burke is unable to view Huan as anything other than a vessel for sympathy and patronizing emotionality.
If this collection, organized by Grant Overton, has been about individuals devoted to some cause or person, this story reflects an author devoted to creating an imagined world outside his own sensibility but within England. For Burke East London and Chinatown are exotic, defined by innocence and honor in the face of violence. And in this story anyone who is not an English man is defined by passivity, not personhood. With such a characterization Burke establishes the ultimate mission of the crown: to protect youthful white femininity.
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| Griffith went on to adapt more stories by Burke for his 1921 film Dream Street (1921) |
The story is wretched.
When Griffith adapted Burke's story Lucy became 15 years old and the American Richard Barthelmess played Huan. Released a few years after Birth of a Nation, Broken Blossoms follows Griffith's supposed shift in thought that is often noted by his work on Intolerance. Whatever sympathy is meant to be drawn for Huan, it is sympathy predicated on supplication. This template, in which characters of color are void of any complexity, is worn out. Still it is common in cinema today: we see it in movies where non-white characters die to bring forth the redemption of white innocence.
The story is terrible.
The grandiosity of the fiction in this volume has taken shape in an overbearing sense of nationalism. Burke's tale has played that out in an explicit manner.
I'm eager to move on to the next volume in Overton's collection: MYSTERY.
FIRST LINE: "It is a tale of love and lovers that they tell in the low-lit Causeway that slinks from West India Dock Road to the dark waste of waters beyond."
LAST LINE: "And he, too, was found in the morning, with Cheng Huan's love-gift coiled about his neck."
You can read story at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/limehousenights00burkgoog
You can listen to this story at Librivox: https://librivox.org/short-story-collection-vol-045-by-various/
You can watch Griffith’s Broken Blossoms at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/brokenblossoms1919
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