Showing posts with label Catherine Eisner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Catherine Eisner. Show all posts

Friday 15 December 2023

Suddenly I Heard Someone Say

  The interceding voice is known to you
  from literature; a stranger’s voice who speaks
  offstage: He passed with his friendly word through
    red-brick pillars into the darkness. Texts,
  familiar as the classics, tell of
  a life’s unforeseeable salvation:
  Someone shouts. A hand grabs me by the collar 
   and I am flung from the police cordon.
    A casual comment to the universe,
  addresses no one in particular.
  Jaunty, the voice is baroquely perverse.
  I run, compelled by an animal fear.
.
  Sometimes we are so confounded that we
  do not know our own voice or whence this plea
    comes, but hear only the stranger’s decree:
  ‘You know there cannot be a voice for me.’
                                                                                                                                                                      Catherine Eisner
.

  Text composed from key lines from : 
  A Passage to India. E M Forster.
  The Pianist: One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945. Władysław Szpilman.
  Of this Time, of that Place. Lionel Trilling.
  The Pilgrim’s Progress. John Bunyan.



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 extremis. Compulsive 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)
 
 

 

Monday 16 October 2023

A Defence

Court Report
Defendant: A man I thought I knew came round the corner.

Prosecutor: Describe this man.

Defendant: He searches for work. He has a scythe on his back.

Prosecutor: You say he spoke to you? 

Defendant: ‘D’you fancy a job?’ I heard him say. Then he asked me where he could get an iron bar. I told him he could find one over by the old dock ferry on some waste ground if he wanted one.

Prosecutor: I suggest that you struck the victim six or seven savage blows with the iron bar.

Defendant: No sir. I did not. I never touched the man.

(At which, from the public gallery, Death smiled.)


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 extremis. Compulsive 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)
 

Tuesday 11 July 2023

Strewthisms : A Little Dictionary of English Exclamations and Curses as Religious Euphemisms

Extraordinarily enough, this year, I realise, marks twenty years since the
first submission of my ‘Strewthisms’ proposal to Penguin Reference Books
in the Strand. It was rejected. Rooting through a file, I stumbled across
this provisional list and was compelled (as a completist) to pick over the
bones of a forgotten unfinished project. In my own case, the historical
context is a mid-20th Century English childhood and the strictures of
devout – not to say priggish – British publishers in their avoidance
of profanities in the slang of schoolgirl heroines and schoolboy heroes
animating the pages of Girl and The Eagle comics, whose adventures were
a direct corrective to the violent American comics that had landed on our
shores as ships’ ballast to be branded a baleful influence coarsening young
minds. As I nostalgically wrote (Dispossession, 2008, Salt): ‘After so many
bitter winters of post war rationing, we’d sensed the dark clouds lifting to
herald a new dawn of bright comic books and pink bubble gum.’
Ironical,
perhaps, to remember that the Rev. Chad Varah CH CBE, co-founder of
The Eagle (wholesome comic for a new dawn of pure-minded New
Elizabethans) was more notably the founder of the Samaritans, the worlds
first crisis hotline to provide support to those contemplating suicide.

All fired
Begorrah
Begob
Bejasus
Blasted
Bloody
By Gad
By Goles
By Golly
By Jay
By Jingo
By Lakin (By Our Lady)
By Heck
Chriggle
Christopher
Christopher Columbus
Consarn
Cor Lumme
Crikey
Crimble
Crimbo
Cripes
Dadblamed
Dadblasted
Dadburned
Daddrat
Dadrot
Dagnab
Danged
Darn
Darnation
Dashed
Dern
Deuced
Dingbust
Doggone
Drat
’Eck as like
Egad
For the love of Mike
Gad
Gadzooks
Gadso
Gadswoons
Gard
Garn
Gee
Gee Whiz
Gemini (O Jesu Domini)
Glory be to Pete
Go to Ecky
Godblimey
Goldanged
Goldarn
Goldarnit
Golding
Golly
Good Christmas
Gorblimey
Gosh
Goshdarn
Have a Happy
Heck
Him Below
Holy Mackerel
Holy Smoke
I’ll be blowed
I’ll be darned
I’m dashed
Jeanie Mac!
(An expression roughly equivalent to the quite common formula
‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all the Holy Martyrs!’,
avoiding use the Lord’s name taken in vain.)

Jeese
Jeez
Jee Willikins
Jee Whiskers
Jeepers
Jeepers Creepers
Jiminy (O Jesu Domini)
Jiminy Crickets
Jings
Jumping Jehoshaphat
Kinnell
Land
Landsakes
Laws-a-me
Lawks
Lawksamussy (Lord Have Mercy)
Lor
Lordy Me
Lor Lummy
Lord Lovikins
Lumme (Lord Love Me)
Marry
Marry Come Up
Mother O’Murphy (Mother of Mercy)
My Sainted Aunt
Merry Crimble
Nobodaddy
Od saves
Od’s bobs
Od’s body
Od’s bodikins
Od’s pitikins
Od rod ’em
Od’s zounds
Oh Glory!
Old Nick
Ruddy
Sakes Alive
Snakes Alive
Save Us
’Sbobs
’Sbodikins
’Selp
’Sflesh
’Sfoot
’Slife
Strewth (God’s Truth)
Swelp
Swelpme
Swelpme Bob
Swop me Bob
Swop me Bod
Tarnation
(even ‘What in Carnation?’)
Tarnation take me
The Man Upstairs
The Ould Fella
Wouns
What the Deuce
What the Dickens
Xmas
’Zbloud
’Zblud
’Z’death
Zoodikers
Zoonters
Zounds

• 

A Moral Conundrum for Puritans:
Does a euphemism become no less a profanity when it’s translated in one’s head?
 
(And, yes, of course – for crying out loud! – this list of Strewthisms is no way near complete!)
 
PS. I grew up in the early Atomic Age when King Charles III, as a schoolboy, was heard to say ‘Blast!’ and was widely condemned by the British Press.  
 

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 extremis. Compulsive 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, 
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

 
 

 


Sunday 9 July 2023

A Ready Answer


‘One night I saw him standing naked at his bedroom window. Between his thighs hung the dark semblance of a hank of knotted rope. Later, I caught sight of him sitting on his fancied throne at the corner of the moonlit walled garden. His shoulders appeared to sag under the sheer weight of unbearable loneliness.’
Witness statement by schoolgirl Christelle Grace Temple, aet. 16,
from the Case Notes of Dr. Tibor Decuillé Cowry Ph.D., D.Sc., LL.D.,
Director, Royal Baronsgrove Institute, preparatory to the 
pre-trial Psychiatric Report on Eugene Zerah Hoffrege, aet. 19.


 
In the humdrum is the beginning of murder.
    Painfully bored, I found myself once again in the chapel robing room with my mild objections sermonised to silence.
    ‘The Ready Answer,’ the school chaplain raged, ‘of a Plausible Intriguer and Enterprising Rogue!’
    He pointed for the nth time to the absurdest of the acronyms he’d scrawled in red pen on the title page of my latest slapdash essay, an initialled comment from his crackpot system of grades that denoted, I knew, the dire mark of Beta double-minus for our Revision papers.
    He stabbed the paper with a nail-bitten forefinger.
    ‘It must have taken considerable ingenuity to produce a mark as bad as this.’
    I nodded and smiled encouragingly.
    ‘I can’t pretend to say I understand you very well.’
    ‘R.A.P.I.E.R! The Ready Answer of a Plausible Intriguer and Enterprising Rogue! My faith is a true blade that cuts through deceit!’
    Old Hopalong snorted and examined me forbiddingly over misted specs.
    ‘Qui vult decipi, decipiatur. I am not among the gullible who wish to be deceived, young man, nor shall I be deceived.’     
    The face of the Rev. H. W. F. Walmesley darkened a shade and he eased the celluloid of his dog collar.
    Tears had gathered in his failing eyes so he fumbled in his haste to retrieve a loose sheet of notepaper tucked under the first page of my essay.
    I recognised the oppressive regularity of my father’s handwriting.
    Like iron railings.
    ‘Judgement notwithstanding the verdict, this morning I had this curious letter from your father making enquiry as to whether the results of your entrance scholarship exam have been delayed. Hmmm.’
    His voice softened with a conciliatory – almost pitying – shift of tone. 
    ‘For the sake of your poor parents I suggest you break the delicate news of your defeat without delay.’
    He limped to the ambry to fetch his missal and dismissed me with a grunt.
    ‘Cut along, boy.’

That evening, secure within my mother’s abandoned henhouse, I withdrew from a dusty ledge above my dissecting benches an official-looking letter and the envelope which had enclosed it.
    Its flap hung loose.
    I’d steamed it open weeks earlier.
    I read again the satisfying words in the dim light that filtered through the ventilation shutters.
    It was formal notification of the failure of the candidate to pass his University Entrance Scholarship examinations under an early admissions scheme.
    ‘I’m tired of setting an example,’ I sighed. I was aware the muted defiance in my voice possessed a new edge of rancour. ‘I’ve deliberately flunked where I was expected to win.
    I resealed the letter in its envelope and returned it to its hiding place behind a congealed rubber glove.
    ‘I’m not at all sure that what I’ve done isn’t a chargeable offence – in the eyes of the Guv’nor,’ I murmured. ‘But at least I’ve won a brief reprieve, so ...’     I vowed to seize the precious fleeing hours!
    ‘Fugit hora! Carpe diem!’
    Until midnight I laboured to trim my best catapult for perfect balance, and to rebind the whipping cord on its grip.
    There was no hindrance to my remaining in the workshop from teatime to the small hours as the Ancient Parents were attending one of their interminable civic meetings exhorting bleeding-heart worldlings to bankroll country holidays for poor city children.
    I saw them leave by the gate, wearing their virtue for all the street to see.
    In the henhouse, the remains of my mother’s dry mash mixture packed in hempen sacks furnished a serviceable baffle for the thudding of my catapult practice.
    A half inch diameter ball-bearing or a one ounce drilled lead angler’s weight can deliver the knockout shock of a giant-killer’s sling-shot.
    After my carpeting by Old Hopalong, I’d sloped off in the lunch recess to visit Leggett Ironmongers and, just before Wednesday early closing,  Edgar Leggett the elder had served me himself.
    ‘Found a fish to play?’ he’d mumbled; his chestnut hair was not his own, neither his teeth. 
    ‘Yes,’ I’d nodded, ‘and one that will follow the bait.’

This morning, when I woke up, I thought, ‘Now there’ll be all Hell to pay!
    Not even to my mother had I confessed my self-scuppered scholarship.
    The old Memsahib and the Governor – missionaries both – formed a definite idea long ago that their pious son should follow their righteous path and, like them, serve the Lord in heathen parts. From infancy my future has been the ever-pressing subject of their pained solicitude.
    I found the Governor in our sunless front parlour, bible in hand.
    ‘My bright boy,’ he began, with a wealth of sarcasm on the adjective.
    His posture was as straight as a harp string. He was waiting for me before the dead hearth, feet planted astride on the dark parquet. A faint glimmer of daylight struggled through the half-drawn blinds.
    ‘Ahem.’ He cleared his throat the way he does as a prelude to a bawling out.
    ‘Without faith, the world will end in spiritual ... ahem ...’
    ‘Mayhem?’ I suggested.
    ‘What have you to tell me? Can it be news of that free scholarship they put you forward for?’
    ‘Yes, Father. I’ve been ploughed.’
    He was smiling to himself.
    He had known all along! A copy of The Times lay open on the sideboard.
    ‘The ways of Providence are strange, sonny. Strange to us now.’
    He clasped his hands and I could see his eyes were raised heavenwards.
    (Though my parents consider me as an object of general censure, they also regard our family as having been elected by God to know the privileges of saving grace. These canting sectarian pieties are shared by the Redemptorian League whose usage, habit, and practice consume our daily lives.)
    ‘It’s evident that you have neither the desire nor the vocation for the divine calling.’ He turned his head with a resigned glance for an instant.
    ‘Yet one cannot help feeling that a wise Providence has done all for the best.’
    To my astonishment I was then told that my hard-souled and joylessly joyous father is busily preparing for the Promised Land Upstairs. Apparently, the Great Rapture of the Second Coming is far, far more imminent than his peculiarly illuminated Redemptorians had hitherto reckoned, and Judgement Day is now practically round the corner!
    ‘When, precisely?’ I demanded.
    ‘Certainly in less time than it would take for you to earn a first class degree, my boy.’
    ‘I see. But what day will it be, exactly?’ I persisted, thinking: ‘I may have other plans.
    ‘The End of Days?’ My father’s answer rang out with rare good humour. His eyes were now fixed on a celestial distance. ‘Who knows? Today? Tomorrow? We may next meet when we rise with the Saints to greet the Lord in the air!’
    The old clock on the mantelpiece struck eight and he started.
    ‘Of one thing you may be certain.’ The Guv’nor snapped shut the Good Book with an air of finality. ‘We shall not taste death.’
    He stood in the doorway with thrown-back head and downward glance as from a pulpit and announced in organ-like tones:
    ‘This year, my boy, Holy Cross Day falls on a Sunday so the Elders are in good earnest to take our mission meeting to the Juvenile Colony and hold our Bible classes there.’
    I felt the pressure of his grip on my shoulder.
    ‘I count on your attendance. Observance is more than skin deep.’
    ‘Another praying-shop,’ I thought resentfully.

The farm settlement on the Fens is a training colony for juvenile delinquents and the Gov and the Mem are appointees of the Redemptorian League, charged to act as almoners in the disbursement of the league’s charitable funds.
    The inmates of this agrarian reform school are drawn from the lowest type of offenders, spawned by some of the most villainous families known to stalk London’s slums.
    I began to refine subtle thoughts that soon dominated my mind: ‘It would be something new and altogether exhilarating to be among young tearaways who consider it rather amusing to smash things or to steal without scruple or to reap some dim gratification in childish viciousness that finds joy in the pain of another.’ 
    My mind was beset by a curious inner turmoil.
    ‘Every reformation must have its victims,’ I brooded. ‘My thirst for blood has to be appeased. An urge over which I have no sanction.’
    I remained for some time in a state of sullen self-absorption, imagining my life degenerate into monotony, sacrificed to some futile sort of treadmill intended by my father.

The Sabbath found me trailing down the aisle, trapped in my wretched Sunday-second-best suit, keeping pace with the Gov and old Hopalong ... a poor sap doomed to hear the old trouper trumpet forth once more the Redemptorian League’s great work of moral rehabilitation and its God-given mission to reclaim every class of juvenile criminal and every den of East End undesirables from unwarrantable uncouthness.
    (Seven years ago, I – a boy soprano –  sang solo in this very chapel. Psalm Twenty-Three. The voice of a seraph. As the notes rose to sweetest perfection, I remember, I would think of fists soaked in the vinegar of Christ to toughen my resolve to live without any thought of the punishment scroll.)
    I hid myself by the choir stalls, wedged in beside two doltish farmhands.
    From my breast pocket I produced a bloodied handkerchief (Old Hopalong’s red ink has its uses!) and pressed it to my nose and lips.
    My shoulders heaved. Dry retching is a ruse that even the dimmest First Former knows will succeed when intent on cutting lessons.
    The farm-oafs, appalled, propelled me towards a staff door where, with one sickened glance at my official Redemptorian Yellow Pass, a sidesman waved me through.
    (I had, that morning, filched Mother’s almoner permit from her handbag.)
    I found myself in the exercise yard, a paved quad commanded by a guardhouse perched on a upper level like a signal box.
    A flat racing forecast from Goodwood blared from a wireless.                 Evidently, staff watchfulness markedly slackens during the hours of compulsory divine worship. 
    So I slipped through the entrance to the Laundry block, and up the stairs to the Infirmary overhead, wholly unchallenged.

The first thing I noticed was the rosary looped through the boy’s pyjama cord, and I smiled inwardly.  My raid behind enemy lines was over before it had properly begun.
    The boy-martyr I sought was the sole occupant of the sick bay.
    I removed my Bible from my pocket, inserted the Yellow Pass prominently as a book-mark, and approached.

Diagnostic Observation Schedule: Alester Baptiste, aet. 14 years.
n.b. Collective worship abstention/recommend Constructive Play (d/c)
.

    Thus was his entry on the bedside medical chart. I read rapidly. 
 
    Apparently, the boy was in disgrace. (His playtime had been d/c’, that is, ‘discontinued’.)
     I then put into execution the plan of action that had germinated in my uncurbed thoughts. Often and often I had pictured to myself what true devilment might be like, now I was to find out.
    I examined critically his dirty pudding of a face, his bizarre frizzed fair hair and the weak mouth of the simple-minded. Even so, he had perfect teeth.
    ‘Alester Baptiste?’
    ‘Who tell you my name? Yuh de bredthren fram de amshouse?’
    ‘Yes,’ I replied more or less truthfully.
    ‘Wozzup?’
    ‘I have news from the almoners. They have those funds for your release.’ I was guessing, yet his tawny eyes widened with recognition.‘We can get you out of here. Tonight.’
    ‘Inna de nigh? Yuh a jester, man!’
    ‘If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in this state-run snake pit, then listen.’
    I went to the window and pointed to the building below. It would be so easy, I explained forcibly, to climb over the roof of the refectory, drop on to the coal bunker, and slink away into the shadows of the shrubbery beside the moat.
    ‘Then cross the water in the shallows to the base of the tower, where I’ll be waiting,’ I said.
    At once he began to whimper.
    ‘Wenna de watta is dutty dey say don’t play inna it wid de running belly. In dis country I am cold too bad. It does leave me sick.’
    As evidence of this he withdrew his chamber pot from concealment under the bed.
    ‘Nonsense! We don’t have time to go into side issues, just do as I say! ’
    The lad’s intelligence was not keen enough to follow the drift of this remark so I shifted my position.
    ‘You can expect nothing here,’ I continued. ‘Nothing. It’s because you know they have nothing to give that you know you have nothing to lose.’
    ‘Dem is a no good bunch. I know dis t’ing for true.’
    He groaned heavily, and sank into his pillows.
    ‘Agreed. So it’s only right we get you out of here. And fast. Is that not so?’
    He regarded me with sudden doubt.
    ‘Wha’s agowin wid yuh?’
    ‘Are you able to keep a secret?’
    He looked at me with a vague fear in his face.
    ‘Shouldah wanna hear it?’ he wavered.
    I then explained every detail of his escape.
    ‘Tonight. Eleven o’clock.’
    ‘Eleben!’ the boy exclaimed with extraordinary brightness and emphasis. 
    ‘We must hurry,’ I urged. ‘You need to decide now.’
    ‘Eleben! Yuh pwomise dis is true?’
    ‘Don’t ask for promises,’ I rounded on him, ‘ask only for revenge. Only blood drowns the pain.’
    I glanced at my watch, then plunged my hidden scalpel into the ball of my thumb. A thin stream of blood appeared.
    The demon in me waited and would not be satisfied until I saw the boy’s end written in his own blood.
    ‘You and me. We’re brethren. We must take the Oath of Brothers-in-Blood.’
    Sight of the blood seemed to transfix him and render him as passive and tractable as a little child. He allowed me to make an incision in his right thumb.
    It is repugnant to see mixed blood, to see blood mingle with mine in two veins at once, yet to achieve my ends I concealed my distaste.
    ‘Remember, you’ve to keep this business dark,’ I reminded him.
    ‘Breathe easy, man. My blood take yuh, man. Yuh is my best fren.’
    ‘Then that is all that need be said.’
    His dark listening face, framed by the smooth whiteness of the bed sheets, made him for the minute a painting imagined by an orientalist.
    ‘Eleven o’clock,’ I repeated.
    ‘Yuh mean,’ he muttered awkwardly, ‘dat yuh soon come back?’
    As a sign of the strange kinship we had sworn to one another, I bathed my mouth in his blood.
     I washed my hands in an enamelled tin basin, and reapplied lanolin cream to the boy’s bandage.
    The boy looked up with a gleam of something very like hope in his troubled eyes.
    I had been called upon to act the part of the Tempter and he was cast perfectly as the Tempted.
    ‘You have my word,’ I smiled.

Out on the colony forecourt I stood at the ramparts and surveyed the waters of the moat. A breeze coming up from the river brought with it the odour of sedgeweed.
    The margins of the far banks were defended by barbed wire entanglements and, anyhow, as I’d warned the boy, the mud on the other side was so sticky and thick that, if he attempted to wade in at any point, the mire would be sure to swallow him up. The approach I favoured was a direct ascent of the bailey tower ruins, never mind the water’s shelving depth.
    As I strode across the causeway I could think only of the boy, and of the bond of blood which had sealed our oath and united our hands; I could think only of the debt of blood that must be honoured and consecrated to my ends.

Later, when I returned for tea, I overheard the Memsahib talking to the Guv’nor. 
    ‘It is clearly our duty to see those boys come to no moral harm.’
    She sniffed as only my parents can sniff; her own cue to yet another moralism.
    ‘None shall be forgotten; not a grain of corn shall be lost. Of that we may be sure.’

When eleven struck from the Colony stables I was much relieved somehow that it was not the sinister chimes of midnight I heard breaking the stillness of that desolate spot.
    The Moat Farm clockhouse surmounts the mews where the colony’s working horses are quartered and, despite our separation by the breadth of the moat, the shuffling of their hoofs in the straw reached my ears as I stood at the parapet of the ruined bailey I’d made my own watchtower. 
    Of other farm sounds I heard none save for a rat scurrying on the ramparts to the waste bins behind the refectory kitchens.
    The planet Venus shone like a blue lamp, a caution I ignored.
    I had been standing there for two hours thinking of how I should kill him – slowly, in my own time, as with my animal and bird specimens – talking to him all the while. Thus I stood for many golden minutes revolving the possibilities of my point of vantage and assigning my actions to it. 
    Then eleven struck and I perceived a shadow of a shadow stir below the roofline and the darkness yielded a new scurrier, which as quick as a trained monkey slid down a drainpipe to the bank of the moat.
    I heard Lester’s half-stifled gasp before he slipped into the shallows and breasted the smooth evenness of the waters towards me.
    ‘Young’un!’ I called softly.    
    ‘A-who dat?’
    ‘Keep still until I throw a line.’
    I had secured a doubled rope to the tower’s lightning rod and I swung the two lines within the boy’s grasp.
    He rubbed his slim brown hands together and grabbed the ropes.
    ‘You my bredthren, man!’ he grinned with a show of extraordinarily white teeth.
    I braced my feet against the parapet and began to belay him up, foothold by foothold, until he reached a weathered stonework shelf that capped a buttress.
    I held the ropes taut then I caught his left wrist in my grasp.
    ‘Dis is not an easy somet’ing.’
    ‘Take hold of that slab,’ I whispered. ‘You don’t have a dog’s chance unless you do as I say.’
    As his hand gripped the ledge I whisked the rope up from his snatching fingers so smartly that it struck my face like a whiplash.
    ‘My arms ache,’ he moaned. He was panting hoarsely. ‘You nah hear what I say?’
    ‘No time for tears,’ I taunted. ‘Think of it as Constructive Play.’
    I had contrived his plight to be this dreadful and uneasy posture. Over one corner of the stone ledge was crooked his left arm, which principally supported the weight of his body, while his right leg was turned up and precariously hooked over the lip of the slab.
    In all truth he was on the slab at last.

I was greatly cheered by the success of my scheme and my heart now panted with eagerness to accomplish my great purpose.
    But I resolved first to explain to him the infallibility of the Redemptorian Elect and the preordination of all that would come to pass.
    Below me, in the darkness, the whites of the boy’s eyes widened.
    ‘Yuh inna big chouble, mista! A whole heap’f chouble.’
    One warning tug of the remaining rope was threat enough to silence him.
    ‘Sound travels on still water. If you raise your voice, the Superintendent will hear.’
    I then explained that special liberty by which we Redemptorians, the Chosen and Elected Ones, are made free.
    ‘You must know, Lester, that I was chosen and elected to be saved before the world was made.’
    ‘Yuh inna a jam, man, trus’ me!’ he persisted, writhing in pain.
    Fear held him in a vice.
    I smiled sweetly. Nothing in the world delights a Redemptorian so much as consigning detractors to eternal perdition.
    So I took the boy to task for his ignorance of the great doctrine of the election of grace, and of how I had been assured of salvation by an eternal decree never to be dissolved.
    I remembered word for word the assurances of my father.
    ‘We are the Chosen Few,’ I recited, ‘covenanted by God, who will never fall away.’
    ‘Tink God a-go help you?’ His voice was half-afraid, half-reproachful.
    The boy’s snivelling remarks began to nettle me and I became irritated beyond measure until I was positively glad to give up the task of delivering the sublime truths my father had brought to light.
    So I relaxed the remaining rope to see my half-strung marionette squirm and grapple with the ledge in a moment of panic. 
    I was conscious of the sound of the tearing of some material, probably the canvas of his haversack as it fell. It rebounded off an outcrop of rock some eighty feet below.
    ‘Wha’appen to you? Wha’gawenon?’
    ‘I am going to kill you,’ I said quietly, without hurry, and my resolution rose, indignant to be quit of him.
    ‘You must be joke!’
    ‘Your last hour has arrived. You shall go your way, and I shall go mine.’
    That boy must have died a hundred times in the ten minutes I held him dangling in dread on the line. Looking down I saw his mouth gasping like a fledgling’s panting gape as he glanced sideways at the water.
    He was fighting for breath and I had the satisfaction of hearing his teeth chatter; I think he knew his end was near.
     ‘Fear is better than pain for the pleasure derived by the tormentor,’ I thought with a lighter heart. ‘To inflict great suffering and hear the cry of it and not to doubt. It is in this torment that one finds true greatne
ss.’
    He seemed grateful when I smiled. That smile I bestowed on him was like the kiss of the torturer.
    Then a beam of light shot out across the causeway and the Reformatory Superintendent blew three loud blasts on his whistle.
    Lester’s lips trembled with a premonition.
    I let go the rope and reached for my catapult.
    He clutched his last safehold in bewilderment before a more than lucky slingshot caught him a true sockeroo smack between the eyes.
    ‘Lawd have mercy pon ...
    He stopped suddenly, with a jerk, as a man stops in the narration of something which has left an ineffaceable pain in his life.
    His shirt clung wet to his back. The marks of his fingers were still wet on the ledge.
     As he fell, I remembered the thrush in our garden that had flown from the bird bath that morning.
    ‘Flying with wet wings,’ I thought.

The details of my return on the empty last bus are fragmentary and vague.
    My coat-sleeve was nearly torn off, while all the buttons of my shirt had been wrenched away while lying on the parapet.
    Otherwise I showed no sign of scratch or hurt.
    ‘You do look cold, love.’ 
    The blue-trousered conductress with henna’d hair gave me the glad eye while she poured sweet tea from a chipped thermos flask into its stainless steel cap. Behind her right ear was a tucked a thinly rolled cigarette no more substantial than a toothpick. Her voice rasped.
    ‘How about it, lovey?’ She proffered the steaming cup.
    I smiled my hard inscrutable society smile that never betrays an emotion.
    I did not trust myself so far as to speak.
    Then she probed. ‘Well, you are a night-owl.’
    ‘Flat tyre,’ I lied without hesitation. I produced my cycle clips from my jacket pocket.
    ‘‘Had a spill. Gonna to fetch my bike in the morning.’
    The tea soon brought me to myself, and, after another deep draught, I was greatly revived and felt my spirit rise again above the sphere of mortal conceptions and the bourgeoisisms of the laws of men.
    On that rapturous night I came to the belief that the more laden with transgressions the sinner tends, the more likely is the bestowal by Heaven of the mercy of eternal grace.
    And I calmed myself with the serene and indissoluble certainty that, since my salvation was divinely preordained, so also was the manner of Lester’s death.

I remembered the scene in the vestry and the words of our school chaplain. He was afflicted by a curiously lazy right eye, which causes his active eye to gleam with greater fixity on the penitents summoned before him.
    ‘I confess I am grievously displeased to see a debauchee so strayed from the path as to have wholly lost his way.’
    He had leafed through my manuscript again before sounding off.
    ‘I fear the clear light from the candle of the Lord no longer shines on your soul.’
    ‘I agree, sir,’ I answered placidly, ‘my premise is a somewhat complicated and abstruse calculation.’
 

    Judas Iscariot: How the Twelfth Man Won the Match, my casuistical entry for the Divinity Prize Essay on the set topic of Predestination and the Betrayal Paradox, draws on the laws of cricket to examine the fulfilment of prophecy. I cited a recent notable county game in which the match was saved by a left-handed substitute player no less able than his fellows. (Three left-handed catches in two innings! A county record!) Of course, Judas was reputedly a southpaw; medieval iconography invariably depicts his bag of thirty pieces of silver clutched in his left hand.
    My contention, then, had been to reveal to my schoolmasters that Judas was not the villain-of-the-piece nor unusually wicked, and the lesson we can learn from Judas’s rôle as fate-conniving instrument in the drama of the Apostolate is that out of any twelve men chosen for the advancing of an enterprise – in fact, out of any twelve men assembled on a field of play, never mind the cricket pitch – one man probably is, or will be, a Judas.

That night, I dreamt I saw a Judas tree take root and blossom in my father’s high-walled garden. In my dream the flowers were blood-red.
 
(Extract from an unpublished novel, The Boy from the High-Walled Garden.) 
Catherine Eisner © 2023 

See also:
Just Before Nine

See also:  
A Serial Killer Diarist and Unremarked Clues to John George Haigh’s Crimes
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/05/i-am-serial-killer-diarist-unremarked.html?m=0



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 extremis. Compulsive 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, 
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

 
 

Thursday 4 March 2021

Capital Murder: Emily Dickinson and the Case of the Missing Metonyms

Capital murder? Yes. In two senses. 

I refer to the notorious forgery of an Emily Dickinson poem fabricated by the homicidal fraudster and Mormon iconoclast, Mark Hofmann, whose inspired fakery – conceived to dupe academia – first surfaced in a catalogue of Fine Books and Manuscripts mailed to collectors by a major international auction house in 1997. Reportedly, the manuscript was sold for $21,000.

Left: Emily’s true pencilled script. (Circa her final decade.)
Right: Mark Hofmann’s forgery with line-breaks defined by
width of Emily Dickinson’s folded, lined, fascicle-style paper.
(Facing page, a graphologist belatedly denounces Forgery.) 

Commendable reverse-engineering? 

While commending the ‘reverse-engineered’ invention of a fellow fictionist, I find, however, I am compelled to take issue with at least three shortcomings in Hoffman’s criminal act of poetic personation. Since I am well-known as a fixated completist, I trust you’ll understand why these deficiencies in Hofmann’s attempts to replicate a venerated canonical style continue to rankle with me.
 
But first the verses. Can you spot the howlers?
 
                                        That God cannot be understood

                                        Everyone agrees

                                        We do not know His motives nor

                                        Comprehend his Deeds –

                                        Then why should I seek solace in

                                        What I cannot know?

                                        Better to play in winters sun
                                        Than to fear the Snow.

Surely everyone agreesa defining characteristic of Dickinson’s verse is the metonymic capitalisation of her motifs . . . they are the signature feature of her rhetorical devices.

So . . .  hang on! 

Blooper 1: Where’s the capitalised H’ for His deeds?Reverential capitalisation’ is a scriptural convention no devout 19th Century versifier would be without.

Blooper 2: As to the familiar capitalised Dickinsonian metonyms, where is the consistency that would balance the figuration of Life and Death as Sun and Snow?

Blooper 3: Conversely, it’s evident to me that Hofmann was naïvely overeager in his assumption that line-breaks in Emily’s manuscripts necessarily indicate capitalisation of the next line . (You can see in the example of her true hand, Left, the constraint of her notepaper width does NOT determine the capitalisation of her verses: Though the great Waters sleep, / That they are still the Deep, / We cannot doubt —

I suspect that Emily lived through a period of reappraisal as to personified nouns. I have always considered it curious that the four seasons in our language remain uncapitalised. Surely spring, when personified, takes a capital? And is feminine? (Emily sees Grass as Nature deserving of a feminine possessive determiner and pronoun . . . the Wind is a capitalised male, a metonym for God: The Wind does not require the Grass / To answer—Wherefore when He pass / She cannot keep Her place.)

By the late 19th Century, discriminatory capitalisation was a subject of fickle debate. As a certain flippant connoisseur pronounced in 1896, ‘Many are ready to talk of some crafts under the name of art, which must now be spelt with a capital letter – why it written with the capitalest of letters, I know no more than the artists.’

A criminal act of poetic personation.

With hindsight, it’s glib to claim special insights into this shabby affair of literary forgery BUT I do profoundly believe greater vigilance could have been observed on the purely textual details I’ve identified. 

Yes, the forger’s writing-paper was manufactured in Boston most probably in 1871, when Emily was in her forties. 

Yes, Emily often wrote in pencil (and, fortunately for forgers, pencil lead cannot be forensically dated).

Yes, the forger’s script replicated the hand of a poetess no longer cursive in her febrile latter years whose decline saw each character printed separately like that of a child. Nevertheless, there is a crudity in the hesitant execution that betrays the faker’s ineptitude.  (As an apparent holograph – especially the stumbled signing of her given name – the whole thing seems insincere.)

Yes and Yes, the verse itself  is an inspired enviable pastiche, despite its vague provenance.. 
 
(In fact, may I recommend the brilliant prize-winning short story, Fascicle 41 by Anna McGrail, published in 2016 in The London Magazine, which most ingeniously questions the provenance of Dickinsonian forgeries up to the point of casting doubt on the provenance of the story’s protagonists themselves.                                                          See:https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/article/fascicle-41-by-anna-mcgrail/               May I presume to recommend the reader should memorise Hofmann’s verse then read Fascicle 41, which was maybe Anna’s intention in her artful game. Unlike Hofmann’s skullduggery, her plot line is unbeatable.)
 

Em Dash. Separatrices where she drew breath.

That my immersion in Dickinsonian speculations began many, many years ago is manifest in my writing of A Room to the End of Fall (composed in my late 20s and finally published in A Bad Case, 2014, by Salt). I quote an extract to demonstrate how period diction – as Hofmann’s pastiche exemplifies – can add colour and tone to sustain a momentary verisimilitude . . . momentary, that is, until the Deconstructionists start tearing it apart.

Here is an extract from the fictional Theresa Ollivante’s fictional novel, An Auroral Stain. . . 

An Auroral Stain was conceived as a postbellum detective story and built on the fictitious premise of a private investigation by a housebound Emily Dickinson intent to solve the mystery of a serving-woman’s suspicious death, ably assisted by Maggie, her faithful Irish maid; my central conceit has the young colleen and her phobic mistress sleuthing as a sort of composite Massachusite Nancy Drew.
          In those early months, I wrote most of the core passages of An Auroral Stain.
          Was it the muffled chiming of the bells from those Irishtown churches on each street corner or the sheer drudgery of my austere day-to-day routines that I found conducive to the mapping of the febrile psyche of the Belle of Amherst and the quaint notions of her resourceful Irish maid?
          Sometimes I would hear the faint strains of a fiddle diddlydeeing and it was as if the once-hidden roots of a deep-set tree were exposed raw above ground.
          Anyhow, the brogue of those Irishtown denizens must have still been ringing in my ears when I wrote:

“A sneeze as long as Nebuchadnezzar!” Maggie scolded as she took her mistress’s wet cape and hat.                                                                                        The maid had been kneeling on the homestead veranda, whitewashing a garden bench in a curious atavistic ritual, as if to welcome a long-lost relation to a hooley.                                                                                                      She took Emily by the elbow and led her, half-fainting, to her room.            That night she attended her mistress in her delirium, hearing her call out strange imprecations: “Refuse the mediciners, damn you! Why are our people backslidden!”                                                                                              So wild and convulsed was her expression she was raving a jeremiad.         “There is no medicine against death!” she gasped. “Take heed, girl, of the promise of a man, for it will run like a crab!”                                                   “By the cross,” Maggie exclaimed, “there is fey blood i’ ye’re head! The poor darlin’s brain’s on fire and full of proclamations!”

         In my notes to my novel I encoded “Emily” as “Em Dash,” both on account of her mercurial nature and of her all-pervasive typographical separatrices that signal the places where you should catch your breath before resuming her spare end-stopped verses.

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


Hanged by a comma. 

See also: Oscar Wilde, apostrophiser of boys but not punctuation . . .  https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/10/wilde-apostrophiser-of-boys-but-not.html
David’s Lyre Music
for Jonathan

 
The greatest beauty is unenjoyed.
On fruit ungarnered from the stem
falls dew from dawns as unalloyed
as lips unkissed whose savage charm
is stainlessly uncharactered
by the corruptibility of self regard.


Notes: Visual/tactile evidence. Printed letterhead (Cobalt Blue): Cadogan
Hotel, Sloane Street. (Twice folded from size 22cm width x 17.6cm height.)
Holograph letter superscribed above left margin with: Saturday April 6/
For Charles Matthews/Ah! Lest I speak it’s
[sic] name! [Presumed date: April 1895.]
Verse: David’s Lyre Music for Jonathan. Signature: Truly yours/Oscar
Wilde.
[Note: Charles Mathews, with one ‘t’, was the third member of
Wilde’s defence counsel.] The two minor errors are plausible failings of a
cavalier orthographer. The type of urgent, flying cursive handwriting of
Wilde’s letters at the time of his trials, beseeching loans from friends, is
absent in the Cadogan Hotel Letter, suggesting that at the time of his
arrest (April 6 1895), Wilde had composed himself in contemplation of his fate.


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 extremis. Compulsive 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, 

 
. . .