After months of silence, Paul finally gets a letter from the lady, in which she informs him that she has borne his son. He’s thrilled about it, and can’t believe that destiny would keep him from his son forever. I just — DESTINY is not keeping you from your son, you dumb cluck! YOUR OWN CHOICES are keeping you from your son! The kid’s mother’s OWN CHOICES are keeping you from your son! JUST MAKE BETTER CHOICES.

Regardless, she tells him that at long last they can see each other again, under a set of really byzantine circumstances with codes and special dates and secret things Paul is supposed to say and do to Dmitry and the lady’s other servant. Paul’s father, who is weirdly unperturbed by the notion that he has a grandchild in Russia being raised by at least one notably violent and terrible Russian ruler, offers to help Paul out by taxiing him out to the Mediterranean and, one must assume, funding all of his activities.

Here’s what irritates me. First of all, the lady dies. Of course. And Elinor Glyn says “And so, as ever, the woman paid the price,” which like — that would be an impactful message if this were a true story that had happened in real life. But it came out of Elinor Glyn’s brain! She chose to have the woman pay the price! She could have killed drippy Paul!

As if that’s not annoying enough, the lady doesn’t even die onscreen. When Paul shows up for the first rendezvous, her servants send him away in haste due to complications, and tell him to come back another day. He comes back, but the next thing he hears is that she’s been stabbed by her husband, who was in turn killed by her second servant, Vasili. In Russia there are apparently no consequences for bodyguards killing monarchs.

Paul is inconsolable. I am frankly inconsolable myself. At last a stabbing — that part’s good — but then nothing ever happens with Dmitry’s revolver? Why even have a revolver? Just to introduce a note of mystery? HOW DOES HE NEVER HAVE TO SHOOT THE REVOLVER? He briefly contemplates self-harm after the lady’s death, but decides against it in favor of moping for the rest of his life UNTIL he runs into a Romani widow (yes of course the book uses the slur word for Romani) and is like “wow she sucks, I don’t want to be that kind of widow,” and he finally goes to Russia and meets his kid.

The end.

Oh, Elinor Glyn. What a mess this book was, yet how happy I feel to have read one of your books at last. I pledge my troth to you here and now, upon the bloom of the least romantic-sounding flower of all time, the tuberose, which you nevertheless chose to give pride of place in this goddamn book, I shall never read another. What silliness lies in this one. How blessed am I to have consumed it.

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When I got to the end of Chapter 19, I said “Ohhhhhh shit” because my friends? The idyll (??) portion of Elinor Glyn’s masterpiece, Three Weeks, has finally ended. The drama has begun.

Because after yet another (argh) night of floral scents and uncontained passion, the Lady blows this popsicle stand. Paul is so distraught about her sudden departure that he falls into a desperate illness–brain fever! This sounds like a very real thing that real humans suffer from, and not a nonsense invented by Elinor Glyn as a convenient plot device for her extremely silly novel.

Have any of you who read crept back to life from nearly beyond the grave? Crept back to find it shorn of all that made it fair? After hours of delirium to awaken in great weakness to a sense of hideous anguish and loss—to the prospect of days of aching void and hopeless longing, to the hourly, momentary sting of remembrance of things vaster than death, more dear than life itself?

NO I HAVE NOT AND NEITHER HAS PAUL. His father comes out to England to care for him and gets the whole story out of Paul’s valet Tompkins, who I THOUGHT we were going to learn was extremely discreet, but who in fact is like “oh yeah she was real hot, she had these foreign servants, her husband’s maybe a King, idk.”

The one thing that actually really worked for me is that Paul has this little dog back in England named Pike that he’s very fond of? And he’s shown a picture of Pike to the Lady and she thought Pike was real cute? So when she leaves, she sends back a letter expressing her affection and the gift of a beautiful, fancy dog collar for Pike. That is legitimately nice. Paul’s father is not the only one who felt emotional about it.

So Paul and his father and the blabbermouth valet take a ship around the coast of Italy. The captain of it hears that Paul is grieving a failed love affair and says, quite rightly, “Damned kittle cattle!” This is my verdict of the entire book, in fact. Presented without comment in this description of how Paul occupies his days aboard ship:

For the last evenings, as the moon had grown larger, Paul had been strangely restless. It seemed as if he preferred to tire himself out with unnecessary rope-pulling.

After a long trip around the coast of Italy in which Paul does nothing but mope and mope and pull his rope, they get home for his birthday party, about which he is an absolute wet week. Allegedly, however, his time with the fascinating (debatable) Lady has turned him into a true man of the world, deeply refined and eloquent, the sort of person on whose word everyone hangs. Of course, we don’t get any evidence of this. Elinor Glyn just tells us that he gave an incredible speech to his father’s tenants, but she doesn’t quote it at all. This is a great call, because she is in no way capable of writing an inspiring holiday speech. Just, how are we supposed to believe in this? HOW CAN I TRUST YOU, ELINOR GLYN???

Okay, friends, there is one more week of Glynalonging. So far nobody has been stabbed. I await the stabbings that I SWEAR TO GOD HAD BETTER ARRIVE in the final portion of this book.

(Thanks to Alice for hosting!!)

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The book opens with this introduction for American readers:

And to all who read, I say—at least be just! and do not skip. No line is written without its having a bearing upon the next, and in its small scope helping to make the presentment of these two human beings vivid and clear.

This is my favorite thing anyone has ever said in the introduction of a book. Wow. That she feels the need to start the entire book by saying “Read the whole thing” does not — I’m going to be so honest with y’all — bode well for the book’s quality going forward. But I’ll let you know how much I am or am not compelled to skip.

And one terrible day Paul unfortunately kissed the large pink lips of Isabella as his mother entered the room.

I will draw a veil over this part of his life.

But honestly, as I started reading the book, I found it — kind of hilarious and amazing? I was expecting it not to be good but it is actually funny and engaging, and I am not being sarcastic. It’s really charming! No wonder everyone liked Elinor Glyn and didn’t want to read the Ruby Hat of Omar Kayayayayay. (This is a Music Man reference.)

Anyway, our man Paul has contracted a fondness for an inappropriate target, a red-handed girl named Isabella Waring (poor Isabella), and to prevent him from making a disastrous mistake (marriage), his mother sends him off on his Grand Tour. There he meets THE LADY. The first scene in which she appears is typically ridiculous and amazing: They’re eating at the same restaurant, and Paul just gets REALLY REALLY ANGRY that she’s….eating. Every time she gets another thing to eat, Paul’s like, Oh, another type of FOOD that she’s just going to EAT, like who does this bitch think she is sitting here in a restaurant EATING RESTAURANT FOOD? and then he rage-drinks another glass of port.

She invites him back to her place, where there is a tiger skin, and Paul is like “wow I thought her eyes were green but they are purple” which is two extremely different colors and I can draw no conclusion except that Paul is colorblind. Then when she tells him to leave her for his own good, her eyes are gray because Paul is an idiot. He’s like “I’ll never leave you! This is real!” and then he — leaves? It’s very strange. She seems clearly to have invited him to her place for SIN but then once they’re there, and she’s proposing a liaison, he immediately leaves and this appears to be what she expects. Sin must have been different in olden days.

Next thing you know, he’s broken it off with Isabella by letter and purchased a tiger skin for the lady (whose real name we still don’t know, by the way, and Paul has NOT YET ASKED). She puts on a crepe garment for lounging and writhes about on the tiger skin, and Paul’s like “yeah awright it’s time to get to the sexin” but instead she’s like “oh let’s read fairy tales together, darling.” IN LATIN. This lady. But this proves sufficient foreplay, I guess, and they bang on the tiger skin.

That concludes the first reading installment, so we can now get to chapters 7-12 of this nonsense book, which mostly consist of banging it out in various European locales. An aspect of it that I genuinely find really pleasing is this reversal of genders: Paul’s the one yearning for the favors of a mysterious older woman, and you know what happens the day after they sin on the tiger skin? She IGNORES HIM. She ignores him ALL DAY. He convinces himself that she must have meant to not ignore him, so he just stands outside her terrace in the rain waiting for her to emerge and invite him in for more tiger-skin sinning. Then the day after that she invites him up into the mountains for a tryst.

Then, um, this happens:

Its milky whiteness lit by her strange eyes—green as cats’ they seemed, and blazing with the fiercest passion of love—while twisted round his throat he felt a great strand of her splendid hair. The wildest thrill as yet his life had known then came to Paul; he clasped her in his arms with a frenzy of mad, passionate joy.

BREATH PLAY IS DANGEROUS. THIS HAS BEEN A PSA. But also, I did not know that people in olden times knew about erotic asphyxiation, and I kind of get why Hermione Gingold didn’t want her daughter reading this book. It’s kind of a dirty book! Sexytimes on tiger skins! Sexy strangling! Bestowing weird kisses upon Paul while he’s sleeping. The book actually says that. “Strange, subtle kisses, unlike the kisses of women.” I like have no idea what that means, but also, this lady needs to wake Paul up and get his consent before she goes sexing up his sleeping body.

There is but one false note to this extremely weird idyll: Her manservant, Dmitry, shows up in Paul’s room and offers him a revolver. Paul doesn’t want it because who carries revolvers around during their summer vacations? But Dmitry is weirdly insistent, so Paul agrees in the end. I’m sure this gun won’t come back to haunt us.

Next time: Chapters 13-18! I hope someone gets shot!

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