Showing posts with label Aldous Huxley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aldous Huxley. Show all posts

Tuesday 1 September 2020

A Panegyric on a Junoesque Colossus : Finishing School for Versifiers (Part 6)

                           Are you not weary of ardent ways,
                           Lure of the fallen seraphim?
                           Tell no more of enchanted days.

                           Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze
                           And you have had your will of him.
                           Are you not weary of ardent ways?

                           Above the flame the smoke of praise
                           Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
                           Tell no more of enchanted days.

                           Our broken cries and mournful lays
                           Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
                           Are you not weary of ardent ways?

                           While sacrificial hands upraise
                           The chalice flowing to the brim,
                           Tell no more of enchanted days.

                           And still you hold our longing gaze
                           With languorous grace, divine of limb.
                           Are you not weary of ardent ways?
                           Tell no more of enchanted days.

‘With languorous look and lavish limb!’ (?)

Yes, you’re right, of course, the antepenultimate line that James Joyce wrote (aged 18 years?), in his Villanelle of the Temptress, was, indeed, ‘With languorous look and lavish limb!’; an infelicity that jars, especially with calorie-counting readers expecting his aesthetic to match a more archetypal Hellenic ideal of beauty.

In other words, the Muse that young Joyce intended to invoke was, we must believe, surely not a divinity in the image of a prehistoric earth-mother-goddess with bloated hips whose over-burdened flesh of loose corpulence resembles layers of molten candle wax. Or did he mean by ‘lavish limb’ to advert to a certain ‘largeness of gesture’, which for some is held to be a defining characteristic of Irishness?

Brazen tweaks.
Whatever the case, the liberties I have taken with the verse to mitigate my own obsessive-compulsive neuroses are not excessively brazen when you consider the immaturity of the celebrated versifier and, perhaps, Joyce’s conscious intention to mock his own nascent counter-cultural revaluation since his villanelle appears in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published more than a decade later (1915), following the passage where Stephen Dedalus (James Joyce’s literary alter ego) propounds his modernist aesthetic philosophy.

His mature revisionism we must assume would have shunned such classic prosodic forms as the villanelle, as indeed such swooning fin de siècle Swinburnian accentual tics as Alliteration and the Parallel Syntax to be found in the echoes of contiguous phrases (ardent ways/enchanted days), which I have attempted to replicate in longing gaze/languorous grace.


Repeat offender.

One further transgression recorded in this Discipline Report from my Bowdler Correctional Facility should be mentioned: the reduplication of the adjectival participle -ing (sacrificing hands upraise/The chalice flowing) within the span of one sentence. For the perpetration of this ill-advised inelegance the perp has received counselling under new measures for improvement (i.e. the change from sacrificing to sacrificial is deservedly an advance towards reformation). 

It is true that Joyce’s fellow countryman, Yeats (whom he venerated), regarded the younger poet’s lyrics as somewhat clichéd and a ‘little thin’ though undoubtedly worthy in their command of poetic form.

As I have commented elsewhere, Aldous Huxley remarks in an iconoclastic vein: ‘There are slightly reckless good poets, and there are good poets who, at times, are extremely reckless . . .’ He then cites the conclusion of Yeats’s Byzantium to illustrate the ‘recklessness’ of his proposition: ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’

It follows, then, that the callow verses of Yeats’s disciple should be similarly held to account as, even, a species of kitsch. ‘And still you hold our longing gaze/With languorous look and lavish limb!’

Is this, we wonder, the moment when the gong-tormented tin-eared versifier is called out for an audacious musical effect that does not quite ‘come off’, as our idiom bluntly has it. I welcome your views . . . Oh! Is that the bell?

Well, never mind. Class dismissed.

                                                   •
See also:

All that apart.
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/09/all-that-apart.html

Joseph Conrad’s Amazonian Warrioresses
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/03/joseph-conrads-amazonian-warrioresses.html

Henry James and Conrad’s Junoesque Women
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/03/secret-sharers-henry-james-and-joseph.html

See also Re-evaluated Elizabeth Bishop (a Villanelle):
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1)
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2)

Tuesday 19 February 2013

Freakout.

I’m just completing Sybille Bedford’s thoughtful biography of Aldous Huxley (volume two) in which she moralises on the question of Huxley’s advocacy of mescalin and other mind-rinsing psychedelic drugs.
Would it — and should it — have occurred to him that the contents of The Doors of Perception might trickle within the reaches of the half-baked, the under-educated, the unstable and indeed the pre-experienced young.
The last words Aldous Huxley wrote on his writing tablet were some hours before his death:
 
LSD – Try it
intermuscular
  100 mm*
 
*100 micrograms (μg)

He died peacefully with the doctor observing ‘a marked beneficial effect’ from two injections of LSD two hours apart. 


Well, Aldous Huxley without question belonged to the world’s intellectual elite and his own quest for self-transcendence, sometimes induced by psychedelic drugs under medical supervision, may be seen as a deliberately considered extension of the researches that support his vast corpus of writings on the philosophical, cultural, sociological and aesthetic concerns of the age. BUT, Ms Bedford makes clear her own reservations as to his moral soundness when assuming the responsibilities of an influential sage :
The extent to which his writings, and example, can be held to be causative factors in today’s drug scene is difficult, perhaps impossible to tell.
I agree. Yet, though she is certainly correct in pointing out the dangers that await the pre-experienced young when they dabble in psychedelics, I do not to this day regret the fecklessness — nor, indeed, the reckless half-bakedness — of my own youthful experiences of LSD, as I explain in my introduction to Sister Morphine:

The lyric, ‘Tell me, Sister Morphine, how long have I been lying here?’ by Marianne Faithfull, gave me the title of my book and Marianne, whose troubled life as a registered heroin addict is well documented (and whom I knew briefly when we were very young), inspired one of my case histories in which I trace the psychosis of a naïve young woman tempted to experience the hallucinatory visions induced by addictive drugs. In this case the drug is LSD; the place is the Swinging London of the Sixties ... and the temptress is the narrator’s elder twin sister.

‘ “Tonite let’s make love in London,” ’ Victoria quoted, speech slurred, on my return that evening. Those liquid eyes were again distilled to needlepoint droplets of narcosis, I noticed, and her flesh lacked skin tone. 
    Her mouth, I could see, was dry, with white flecks of spittle in the corners.
    Three years before, when I was fifteen, our mother had been shocked when she learned I had accompanied Victoria (at Vix’s insistence) to hear Ginsburg recite at the Royal Albert Hall. (‘Infantile scatology,’ was Mother’s verdict.)
    Now in the darkened drawing room Victoria beckoned to me and extended her palm.
    She held a small cube wrapped in metal foil.
    ‘A sugar lump to gild the pill,’ she said tenderly.
    I recoiled but she seized my arm and pressed the object firmly into my hand.
    ‘Know what this is?’
    ‘Havent the faintest,’ I whispered fearfully. But I knew.
    ‘A tab. A dot. For dropping acid, silly,’ she said.
    She unwrapped the cube and placed it on my tongue. I tried to spit it out but she sealed my lips with her fingertips. Involuntarily I swallowed.
    ‘Tune in, dearest heart,’ she soothed, ‘turn on. I will be your guide.’

    A great languor stole over me.
    Victoria took my hand in her hot, dry clasp and we began to dance.
    She led. I followed.
    (When I was no more than five years old she told me I must call her The Miss Victoria. Whether I cared for the fact or not, she asserted, I as the younger daughter was destined indefinitely to be merely a Miss. Even then, please understand, she had conferred on me a subordinate title.)
    Marianne began to sing from the radiogram: ‘I always needed you to look out for me ... oh, baby ...’
    At first, the rubberiness of my gums from the anaesthesia I found frightening.
    Soon, however, I began to sink into an hallucinatory reverie.
    It is true that during those psychedelic hours with Victoria I learned the meaning of Ginsberg’s ‘Blake-lit Mohammedan angels’ – because, for two eternities more ancient than Chaos, I stared at a milliard of those lucent homunculi in the reticular texture of the drawing room wallpaper. Yet ... I also stared into that purgatoried place where every monster has its own multitudes.
    By looking through the fissures of the old house, I seemed to see not only the stars but to penetrate upper chambers I had never fully explored.
    At an unknown hour I found myself floating some distance above Victoria’s bed gazing into upcast and darkly oracular eyes to contemplate a voluptuary pythoness wearing my face whose every sensuous uncoiling convulsion was suspended in an aphrodisiac prolongation I, also, shared.
    Over her seraphic nakedness a swarm of furry bees hovered which slowly resolved itself into a shock of tightly crinkled hair ... the frizzy Afro hair of ...
    Toby!
    Toby lay across her – a supersexual being of extraordinary radiance and beauty hewn from an heroic age.
    Colours intensified. Light diffracted. Objects distorted and shrank.
    Somehow, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the big wardrobe seemed to acquire an enormous significance.
    Time warped.  Joss sticks were lit.
    As from the edge of a great divide I observed a distant simulacrum of my being receive the tributes of the flesh ...  he-she and he-I and I-she, all interconnected by a glowing force field which seemed to strike sparks as lips touched, and melded into a totality of incorporeal sensation.
    The bed had dematerialised, as had those affirmers of mortality, our teeth and gums.
    I learned too late all trips are braved sans gritted jaw.
    The foundations of the house had dissolved into the infinite void and our flesh seemed to be tingling with electric static as we brushed the dark velvet of deep space ... a friction which seemed to transmute that insubstantial velvet into aurorean ripples of charged silk, billowing in waves, stimulating our senses with the glancing touch of a thousand quickening fingers, until we knew ourselves as one flesh, a single skin, slick with sweat, yearning like a fierce rolling tide to break together on a nearing shore.
    Then the wave receded and – beached – we lay together, struggling for breath as though we had just swum the infernal regions’ Hellespont.
    By unspoken agreement we avoided each other’s eyes, and before our temporal lives fully reasserted themselves, I remember, we three were next sitting cross-legged  – Victoria, Toby and I – watching in wonder the slow-motion, frame-by-frame, glittering parabola of a silver snuffbox we pitched from hand to hand.
    Drug-induced synaesthesia I mused, was like a problem in grammar, where the active and the passive voices become confused and there is a difficulty in distinguishing the moment of action from the resultant state and no one knows whether they are the object of the action or the subject performing it.
    A new word for my lexicon I learned that night was ‘freakout’.
    ‘Here, take it.’
    I groaned in protest. Toby stared down at me with eyes like live coals.
    ‘Fifty milligrams of Thorazine,’ Toby persisted, ‘itll bring her down.’
    His words cooled me better than cold water.
    ‘Precious, my poor precious,’ Victoria cooed, smoothing my brow.
    I have to tell you that, even adrift in a drug-induced nirvana, the deepest love can turn to deadliest hatred. I confess to you now that the not-so-beatific emotion I brought back from the Other Side was a revived green-eyed envy towards my elder sister, Victoria ... I, the last born, was ever mamma’s darling; she was daddy’s.


 


Flashback. The Wind of Time.

Note (November 9 2015): The weather is particularly mild just now and the fragrance last night of an Elaeagnus shrub clinging to a bank above the sea reminded me of an unnameable phenomenon I believe unremarked by trippers returning from their voyage to Inner Space . . . I speak of the Wind of Time. Certainly, LSD at its most revelatory reveals a dimension where a (Cosmic?) Wind, a rushing in the ears, is experienced expressive of Time’s racing passage . . . the flow of the strongly scented breath of the Elaeagnus flowers last night revived a memory and for a moment the experience was relived . . . and again the involuntary numbing of gums and teeth (sans gritted jaw).
 
 
  


My principal theme in Sister Morphine is the sheer unpredictability of womens behaviour when conditioned by prescription drugs. For this suite of interconnected womens narratives I have refashioned case histories as fictions to delineate the effects of drug administrations on clients observed in psychiatric nursing and psychotherapy ... particularly,  the more bizarre asocial psychoses – and sometimes criminal behaviour made manifest by the multifaceted side effects of prescription drugs such as antidepressants, tranquilizers and mood stabilizers.

In Sister Morphine, fifteen women Felícia, Charlotte, Zoë, Elenore, Eveline, Miriam, Grete, Esther, Marianne, Irina, Mary, Elspeth, Theresa, Isolde and Roberta will unveil their psychoses to you ... but not until the last page do they unlock the unsuspected secret that unites their destinies.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html


Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremisCompulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, for extracts
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Thursday 14 February 2013

Pinterland. Hogs. Crabs. Parnassus. And a paucity of creative energy.

Let me be quite clear. I consider Harold Pinter a misogynistic writer who has never written a gender-affirming dramatic part for a woman (unless the part has been conceived by another more sensitive writer in the course of one of his adaptations for the screen, e.g. works by Penelope Mortimer, Robin Maugham, L.P. Hartley, et al). In my own view, Pinter positively relishes victimhood, particularly when women are on the receiving end. I also consider much of his Mockney vernacular to be positively clunky and frequently unconvincing, with speeches more often than not shaped for an actors voice (his) rather than driven by the authentic character of the East End.

As the Swedish Academy, in its Nobel citation, commented, Pinter, the chronicler of random acts of verbal and physical violence, is a writer who uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppressions closed rooms.’  This is the familiar Pinterland we recognize, with invariably a forced entry that is more thuggish-for-thuggishness’s-sake than redemptory or cathartic art. In short, the verbal menace of the rapper has been validated.


Is such nihilistic rapping nourishing to mind and spirit? I remain unconvinced. As well ask Tarantino.

B
ut it is not this particular aspect of his writings that has triggered this rather sour digression of mine. My point in raising a question mark over Pinters stagecraft is to identify a seeming dullness and dreary sameness in the very building blocks of the constructions he has fashioned as an actor/playwright.

I have no doubt that somewhere in that vast archive of his, maintained by his literary estate,
he is to be found on record defending a Pinteresque theory that grounded speech and action require no more for their emergence than the promptings of a minimalist stage set of one glass of water or the contents of a bureau drawer. Well and good, as writerly theories go, until you note the striking similarity between the opening scenes of A Night Out (1959) and The Homecoming (1964).

Why should this be worthy of our notice, you might ask. Isnt this quibbling of no account? I dont think so.  I think the dramaturgical repetitiousness I intend to expose here actually indicates a paucity of creative energy (see my observations on Elizabeth Bishop, in this regard http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/catechisms-and-cliche-fatuous-minds.html), and this deficit may also be observed in Pinters characterization of women.

I am talking here about LAY FIGURES and the delimited OUTER THRESHOLDS of an artist’s imagination. You must judge for yourself whether there are, rather obviously, lay figures in the following plays, written five years apart, and whether these figures are merely manipulated to forms that come, in the end, to resemble first year students extemporary acting exercises, of the kind favoured by their teachers,
which depend on the suggestibility of minimal props composed of humdrum domestic objects.
Have you seen my tie? Wheres my tie? A Night Out 1959. (5 seconds into opening act, a search for necktie.)
What have you done with the scissors? Wheres the scissors? The Homecoming 1964 (5 seconds into opening act, a search through drawers.)
I believe the playwright has nodded at these moments, like a liar who lacks the invention to perpetrate a new lie so falls back on an old one, daring to risk exposure*

(We should also observe that in these two instances the Rule of Chekhov’s Gun, the rule of dramatic foreshadowing, is broken. ‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise dont put it there.)

An intimate correspondent of mine shares my doubts as to Pinter’s stagecraft. Pinters claim to stylistic uniqueness, my correspondent maintains, is debatable.  The circularity of his riffs of looping, regrouping repetitious speech (in German theatre, such declamations are called arias) find its origin, my correspondent believes, in an earlier exponent, the popular dramatist and novelist, Patrick Hamilton.

Compare Pinters The Homecoming (1964) with Hamiltons Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953). If you dont concede theres a certain je-ne-sais-quoi about their mannerisms that summons up a prickly sense of déjà vu, then at least admit that Pinter has strayed out of his East End manor on to Hamiltons turf.
You and I were made for each other ...  he had said, either breathlessly or passionately (she could not tell which) after a protracted kiss ...
            In what way? she had then tried. Tell me ...
            In every way, he had said. You must know. I mean the whole hog.
            [She] had been (and still was) mystified by the exact nature of [his] Whole Hog, which, for some weeks now, had been appearing in his conversation.
            How whole was this puzzlingly allegorical animal? ...
            And so she had then braced herself to force [him] to give a much clearer picture of his own conception of his own Hog.
            When you say whole hog, she had said, what do you mean, exactly?
Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse
LENNY (to TEDDY): ... And here he is upstairs with your wife for two hours and hasnt gone the whole hog. ... What do you make of it, Joey? You satisfied? Dont tell me youre satisfied without going the whole hog?
JOEY: Ive been the whole hog plenty of times. Sometimes ... you can be happy ... and not go the whole hog. Now and again ... you can be happy ... without going any hog.
TEDDY: He had her up there for two hours and he didnt go the whole hog.
The Homecoming


I summon to the witness stand two acute observers on the deceptions of art to anatomize further, with greater skill than my own, the inauthenticity of the creative impulse. 

Here they strip the bones off two carcasses.

First up, Robert Graves, the visionary poet, attempts to demystify the quiddative conundrum of good art and bad art when defining the distinction between good poetry and fake poetry. 

‘When is a fake not a fake?’ Graves asks.
 
Answer: ‘When the lapse of time has obscured the original sources ... and when the faker is so competent ... that even the incorruptible porter at Parnassus winks and says “Pass, friend!” This sort of hermit-crab, secure in stolen armour, becomes a very terror among simple whelks.’

Next up, Aldous Huxley: ‘There are slightly reckless good poets, and there are good poets who, at times, are extremely reckless...’ He then cites the conclusion of Yeats’s Byzantium to illustrate the ‘recklessness’ of his proposition: ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’

From which we can conclude that intoxication induced by language can leave us with a headache and, in the cold light of dawn, we must be alert to the duplicity of hermit crabs in stolen armour whose secondhand speeches will ultimately be found fitting only for declamation from the lower slopes of Parnassus.

* Pinter-watchers should also note the occurrence of that actor’s prop, the glass of water, reappearing in The Homecoming (1964), having rematerialised from the set of The Servant (1963) whose screenplay is by Harold Pinter, adapted from 1948 novella by Robin Maugham. The glass ot water has an even earlier appearance in The Dumb Waiter (1957).

Thursday 20 September 2012

Great Dictators: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Barbara Cartland, Edgar Wallace and Co.

I have often thought that there must exist any number of recordings gathering dust made by those ‘great dictators’, the famous novelists over the past century or so who advanced their craft beyond dependence on stenographers by speaking directly to phonograph, dictaphone or plastic disc.

As I noted in my remarks on the Napoleonic Henry James, the ‘Master’, due to rheumatism of the wrist, relied on ‘typewriters’, as shorthand typists were called circa 1900. Similarly, Joseph Conrad.

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/fruits-sec-and-napoleon-of-over.html

How far this vivâ-voce approach to prose conditions a writer’s style is a question that exercises many academics, particularly in the case of James and his tortured parentheses, described by one contemporary critic as ‘phraseologic stress’. Discerning criticism of his times disparaged James’s overcultivation of the parenthetical exposition, suspecting its origin lay in the hesitancies of dictation, a prose manner  that compels the reader ‘to leap the five-barred gates of his parentheses in a game of verbal hide-and-seek’ to keep the writer’s meaning in sight.

In this regard, James’s shunning  of the straightforward was noted by contemporary novelist Mrs Humphry Ward:

‘Personally, I regret that, from What Maisie Knew onward, he adopted the method of dictation. A mind so teeming, and an art so flexible, were surely the better for the slight curb imposed by the physical toil of writing. I remember how and when we first discussed the pros and cons of dictation ... he was then enchanted by the endless vistas of work and achievement which the new method seemed to open out. And indeed it is plain that he produced more with it than he could have produced without it ... Still, the diffuseness and over-elaboration which were the natural snares of his astonishing gifts were encouraged rather than checked by the new method ...’

(Incidentally, Aldous Huxley was the nephew of Mrs. Humphry Ward, whom he described as his ‘ literary godmother’. ‘I used to have long talks with her about writing; she gave me no end of sound advice. She was a very sound writer herself, rolled off her plots like sections of macadamized road. She had a curious practice: every time she started work on a new novel, she read Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau.’ )

So the jury is still out, it seems, when a verdict is demanded on the merits of dictation.

The roll call of the great dictators is long (Dostoevsky, Hardy, James, Milton, Scott, Stendhal, may be mentioned, together with Barbara Cartland) and many of the names will prompt loyal readers to return to consult the texts in attempts to find the nigh invisible seam between authorial longhand and the mechanical transcription of the author’s voice or dependency on a literary amanuensis.

Under such critical scrutiny, it seems, literary works are reweighed to determine where a writer’s distinctive style remains unalloyed, and where it is debased by oratorical flourishes.

That reliance on dictation can give rise to mockery of an author is confirmed by the following anecdote:

Famously, a visitor to the home of Edgar Wallace observed him dictate a novel in the course of one weekend. It became a standing joke that if someone telephoned Edgar and was told he was writing a novel, they would promptly reply, ‘I'll wait!’

PS. I could not find a suitable photo of one of my great dictators so here is another Edgar ... Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1935 dictating one of his books.

See also:
Miss Emily Dickinson Communes with the Great Dictator Mr John Milton . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/miss-emily-dickinson-communes-with.html




Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremisCompulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)