Showing posts with label Conan Doyle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conan Doyle. Show all posts

Monday 11 June 2018

Grim Secrets of Room 101 . . . Is it Time to Uncover the Origin of Orwell’s Worst Fears in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

‘In your case,’ said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing
in the world happens to be rats.’ 
[Winston Smith’s] bowels seemed to 
turn to water. ‘You can’t do that!’ he 
cried out in a high cracked voice.

From time to time I like to assume the mask of a literary sleuthhound even though I am far from claiming the mantle of an academic or of a pundit. I defer to those who are the genuine article. Especially Hungarian polyglots.

As polyglot and polymath George Tabori once boasted, ‘Only a Hungarian (or a Pole [a reference to Conrad?] ) would have the arrogance to write in English . . .’

So I revere the literary works of Hungarians Tabori and Arthur Koestler, despite my inbred assumptions due to that venerable English adage which warns us that Hungarians are the only people who can enter a revolving door behind you and come out of it in front.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
written for the screen and directed by Michael Radford,
starring John Hurt as Winston Smith.

Communazi totalitarianism . . . forever stamping on a human face.

One can assume that the ideological battleground that has been Hungary over the last hundred years – lurching from imperial crownland to Nazi puppet state to Soviet satellite and thence to a national-conservative autocracy – was bound to make the Hungarian intelligentsia exceptionally quick on their feet.

Such nimble footwork in contriving to keep one step ahead of the fraudulent dogmas of Communazi totalitarianism also explains the fascination the Brothers Tabori (George Tabori and his older brother, Paul Tabori) and Koestler held for George Orwell – they moved in the same orbit and, as members of a London-based anti-fascist commentariat, theirs was a common crusade.  

But my contention is that the significant inspiriter of Orwell in his vision of the sadistic torments inflicted in Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) rather than Koestler (Darkness at Noon /otherwise Sonnenfinsternis, 1940), as often claimed, was in fact George Tabori and his Beneath the Stone the Scorpion, 1945 (otherwise Das Opfer / The Victim).

George Orwell and George Tabori 
regularly broadcast for the BBC during WW2.
(Tabori portrait by Werner Bethsold.) 

Orwell’s nightmarish dystopia prefigured by a 1947 political pamphleteer.

Though it’s true that the archives of the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin (the repository of George Tabori’s papers) contain no evidence of the Tabori-Orwell connection, by contrast, in support of my theory, we can see that Orwell’s collection of political pamphlets (catalogued as one of the last tasks performed by his secretary, Siriol Hugh Jones) contains a January 1947 pamphlet edited by George Tabori, Hungary Today: a Review of Hungarian Life and Letters; published by the Hungarian Club, 33 Pembridge Square, London W.2. (Shelfmark 1899, British Library).

Orwell’s pamphlets collection was of immense importance to him as a private data-bank in his pursuit of his journalistic career. He declared himself a pamphleteer, regarding the pamphlet as a powerful literary and political device for influencing social change. Indeed, Nineteen Eighty-Four was viewed by many critics as a satirical ‘broadside’ against inexorable oligarchical rule in the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s polemical writings. (George Orwell edited and wrote the introduction to volume I of British Pamphleteers, 1948.)

So, for Orwell, the pamphlet was one of the most active forms of provocative writing by ideologues from his turbulent times and, to judge from the contents of George Tabori’s pamphlet, published in the year of Orwell’s first drafting of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the ‘classic ideological battle-lines drawn’ across post-war Hungary, described by Tabori, shaped the nightmarish dystopia of totalitarianism prophesied by England’s maverick polemicist, whose cautionary fable was soon to send shockwaves across the world to challenge the beliefs of all political classes, west and east. 

As I hope to demonstrate, the resemblances between Orwell’s novel and the Hungarian Tabori brothers’ writings are uncanny in the observable concordance, in each case, of predictions that foretell the ruthlessness of an envisioned totalitarian regime, relentless in its attempt – regardless of the sacrifice of life, truth and freedom – to eliminate the forces of reaction from all agencies of political life. 

In essence, Tabori’s smudged, multi-graphed, typewritten pamphlet presciently warns his troubled country: ‘What are “facts”? Where does documentation end and propaganda begin?’

The Tabori Connection: Book plate in first edition
of Orwell’s Coming Up for Air from the library of 
the Hungarian émigré and author Paul Tabori
(George’s brother). The book contains a folded letter,
‘Dear Mr Tabori’, dated June 6th 1947 from the Isle
of Jura. The letter  refers to the Communist putsch
‘tightening their grip’ in Hungary and the 
resultant censorship.

1947: A mirror of a hierarchical surveillance society?

Let us look at the correlations within George Tabori’s pamphlet that suggest that Orwell saw vividly a post-war Hungary (1946-1947) as a microcosm of the hierarchical surveillance society he conceived would be the fate of Great Britain (Airstrip One) in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

So where are the coinciding points in Hungary Today [HT] that tell of political machinations that seem to have been absorbed and transmuted into the sinister intrigues of Nineteen Eighty-Four [N-E-Fby a writer possessed by the zeitgeist of January 1947?

Airstrip One: Here is an extract from a news item from page 18 [HT], entitled Reaction Strikes: Anti-Republican Conspiracy. On January 4th 1947, the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior announced: ‘State security organisations in recent weeks discovered a dangerous and wide-spread anti-republican conspiracy. The leaders of this fascist plot and its members who have been arrested . . . prepared the ground for the assumption of power by force and hoped to stage an armed military coup d’état . . . the conspiracy was directed by a “Committee of Seven” . . . Each member had clearly defined duties. . . . The special task of the military leaders was to give armed support to a so-called “Counter-Government” and put it in power . . . Since the end of 1945 this committee met secretly each week . . . To carry out special military tasks the Committee had several aircraft at their disposal. These were kept in parts ready for assembly.’  
[cf. N-E-FIn the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace . . . teams of experts are indefatigably at work . . . Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars . . . or . . .  strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship . . .’

The Inner Party (whose scapegoat is The Brotherhood, the Enemy of the People):  From page 18 [HT]: ‘To organise the the underground armed forces  the “Committee of Seven” established a so-called “Underground High Command” . . . The “Underground High Command” assumed this final form in the autumn of 1946 and issued its first communique on 1st October 1946.’ 
[cf. N-E-F‘A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be.’

The Outer Party: From page 20 [HT]: ‘. . . a class of hangers-on who had lost most of their land and flocked to the towns to make up the civil service and the army. Their dread of becoming declassé and their snobbishness prevented them from forming a stable middle-class and many of them embraced Nazism with nauseating haste . . . Apart from a small Marxist vanguard, Hungarian writers still seem to be dazed, gripped by nostalgia for the past and an almost apocalyptic dread of the future. Their predicament cannot be divorced from the general sense of shame and disintegration that characterises the bourgeoisie . . . Nostalgic attachment to the past, irrationalism, indifference, escapism and pessimism are the main . . . critique . . . particular to Central Europe and due to lack of democratic development . . .’  
[cf. N-E-F‘But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence. So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them . . . the room itself was sanctuary. It was as when Winston had gazed into the heart of the paperweight, with the feeling that it would be possible to get inside that glassy world, and that once inside it time could be arrested. Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of escape.’

The Proles: From page 20 [HT]: ‘For a long time the two progressive trends, urban and peasant, were sharply divided. The urban intelligentsia was mainly liberal, dreaming of a society on the Western pattern, it alienated itself from both the industrial workers, whom it despised, and the peasantry, whom it suspected of Fascist leanings. The peasant-intelligentsia . . . perform an important task by exploring and cataloguing the misery and sloth of the “romantic” peasant . . . a new appropriate scale of aesthetic values . . . opens the way for a sort of literary Front Populaire.”  
[cf. N-E-F‘And the Ministry [of Truth] had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes*, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.’ 


The impenetrability of ‘Deep Continent’ party-politicking. 

Well, the passages cited above are just mere glimpses of the complex ideological struggle for hearts and minds overwhelming Hungary during the agitations for reform driven by the [HT‘Left Wing Bloc’ in the period of raging inflation that defined 1946, when [HT‘. . . the cashiers and book-keepers in Hungary lost even the help of the adding machine because they did not have enough noughts.’

The impenetrability of postwar politics in Mitteleuropa when viewed by Little Englanders was borne in on me one day when the head of production for UK 20th Century Fox, Sandy Lieberson, told me that certain subject matter for movies (interwar political assassination , for example, such as the case of Walther Rathenau, or a revival of the Bergfilm genre) was classified as ‘Deep Continent’ drama— and definitely unsuitable for populist movie-making for the English-speaking world.

So it strikes me now that Orwell in setting his Nineteen Eighty-Four in an entirely English locale – in all its recognisable drabness and mundanity – very cleverly overcame the problem of ideological exegesis of his dystopian tract for unsophisticated English readers, an exegesis that included rendering much of his text in the guise of a blood and thunder penny dreadful . . . not to say, five-cent novelette, in the opinion of some critics.


The cage was nearer; it was closing in.

Which brings me to those contemporary critics of the Room 101 torture scenes who sought to write them off as ‘melodramatic’ and ‘schoolboyish’, because, far from being the oft-quoted sublimated sadism of prep school locker-room bullies (viz. Orwell’s years as pupil at St. Cyprian’s and, later, Eton), the origins of the specific torture of Winston Smith can be be found in the literary works of George Tabori and Arthur Conan Doyle, two authors evidently admired by Orwell . . . at least, that is my private reading of the following cases of inventive torture calculatedly devised by two fictionists to assault the reader’s senses . . . and the likely precursors of the horrific instrument of Winston Smith’s agonising and conclusive indoctrination.
O’Brien picked up the cage  . . . ‘You understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.’  . . .  The cage was nearer; it was closing in . . . ‘It was a common punishment in Imperial China,’ said O’Brien as didactically as ever.


He uncovered the cage. ‘It's an old Turkish custom, half-forgotten
for a long period of softness and degeneration.’ 

And so to Tabori’s Beneath the Stone the Scorpion, 1945. Plot: An English captain is captured by the German occupiers during World War II near a Slovenian village. Wehrmacht Major von Borst interrogates him to elicit his true intentions in a unresolved game of verbal jousting . . . unresolved, that is, until sadistic Intelligence Officer Hirtenberg arrives from HQ, ‘carrying ‘a small wooden cage  . . . by an iron handle’. His methods of interrogation are, as he explains to von Borst, decidedly more persuasive. The narrator is von Borst:
‘Meet Tomashek,’ he said affectionately, and uncovered the cage, ‘the cat. Tomashek is a great friend of mine although we only met a few days ago. He is one of our most able agents, in a way, Tomashek.’ He smiled proudly like a father and I leaned forward and looked at a huge, ugly tom-cat, obviously asleep. He had a long, powerful body with dark stripes and tufty, rough hair. While I was inspecting him, wondering what kind of a joke it was, the cat suddenly woke. He did not stretch or stir, just spun around in fury and hit out with his claws and emitted a queer, hoarse cry. I never heard a cat crying like that. It was almost human. He had large grey eyes that shone in wrath and a large, dripping mouth . . . ‘Don’t be afraid,’ Hirtenberg said . . . ‘Tomashek,’ explained Hirtenberg apologetically, ‘has a split personality. He is mad.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Quite mad. I mean, he is rabid . . . Tomashek helps us to make people talk,’ he added, a bit too dramatically . . . ‘It’s an old Turkish custom . . . half-forgotten for a long period of softness and degeneration. The Turks used cats widely as means of persuasion. The practice was to tie up the prisoner and then place a rabid cat in his trousers . . . It takes about an hour or so I’m told,’ he said, ‘until they work themselves to about the stomach. If they get entangled in the bowels it takes longer. They usually reappear near the navel.’ He stopped and I looked at the cat. I knew Hirtenberg was watching me. I felt slight nausea. ‘Have you made use of Tomashek before?’ I asked casually. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I will to-morrow.’
And here are our very own, very British, home-grown torments, whose extreme ingenuity we proudly owe to Arthur Conan Doyle, a writer who outrivals de Sade. (Oh. And let’s not forget that super-decadent fin de siècle title of his, A Study in Scarlet.) 
So strange was the scene before them that for an instant all three stood motionless with horror and surprise . . . It was a great vaulted chamber, brightly lit by many torches. At the farther end roared a great fire. In front of it three naked men were chained to posts in such a way that flinch as they might they could never get beyond the range of its scorching heat. Yet they were so far from it that no actual burn would be inflicted if they could but keep turning and shifting so as continually to present some fresh portion of their flesh to the flames. Hence they danced and whirled in front of the fire, tossing ceaselessly this way and that within the compass of their chains, wearied to death, their protruding tongues cracked and blackened with thirst, but unable for one instant to rest from their writhings and contortions. Even stranger was the sight at each side of the room, whence came that chorus of groans which had first struck upon the ears of Nigel and his companions. A line of great hogsheads were placed alongside the walls, and within each sat a man, his head protruding from the top. As they moved within there was a constant splashing and washing of water. The white wan faces all turned together as the door flew open, and a cry of amazement and of hope took the place of those long-drawn moans of despair. [They are rescued.] A few strong blows struck off the irons and freed the three dancers before the fire. With a husky croak of joy, they rushed across to their comrades’ water-barrels, plunged their heads in like horses, and drank and drank and drank. Then in turn the poor shivering wretches were taken out of the barrels, their skins bleached and wrinkled with long soaking . . .                                                                                                                                                                                  Sir Nigel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1905-1906)

The wickedest story ever written.

And Britishers should also pay their respects to Rudyard Kipling for his short story, Mary Postgate (1915), described by a WW1 Second Lieutenant in the Irish Guards as: The wickedest story ever written. (Oliver Baldwin, 2nd Earl Baldwin of Bewdley.) 
 
A WW1 propaganda poster claims
German nurses refuse help to wounded
British prisoners, cruelly pouring water
on the ground rather than tend to them.
(Was Kipling’s tale a coldblooded riposte?)
 

 

The Science of Fear.

I append these quotations merely to point out that continental fictionists do not have an exclusive monopoly on the creative torture of characters in search of retribution.  As Conan Doyle and his disciple, George Orwell, demonstrate, we British can make quite a good fist of it. And, surely, the greatest tribute to Orwell’s grip on the Science of Fear is to learn that the German Democratic Republic’s much-dreaded Stasi chief Erich Mielke (the GDR’s soi-disant O’Brien) managed to renumber the offices in his secret service headquarters. ‘His office was on the second floor, so all the office numbers started with “2”. Orwell was banned in the GDR, but he would have had access to it. Because he so wanted the room number to be 101, he had the entire first floor renamed the mezzanine, and so his office was Room 101.’ (Stasiland by Anna Funder, 2002.)


Laughter in the Dark.

A cannot leave this page on such a grim note. Let us hear again from our Hungarian friends as they emerge from the whirring revolving doors of the Communazi Statehouse that has ruled the minds of their compatriots these past seventy years. These are the émigrés who in their exile pilloried the ‘The Maniac’ and ‘The Devil of the Crooked Cross’.

Look. They’re being watched by an undercover agent, but undeterred they can still spare us a moment for a couple of quick-fire gags. Does it matter whether their targets are the Soviets or the Nazis . . . they are Big Brother by any other name.
A poor old Russian man enters his local police station and timidly complains to the policeman. ‘A Swiss soldier has stolen my Russian wrist-watch!’ The policeman shakes his fist in rage at the old man. ‘Grandfather. Please speak good sense! A Swiss soldier steals a Russian wrist-watch?  Surely you mean a Russian soldier has stolen your Swiss wrist-watch!’  The old man grins slyly.  ‘You said it, not me.’ 
And, finally, the elusive ‘Eureka Moment’ we’ve so very often conjectured must have occurred:
Have you heard the one about the absentminded German professor, a former student of Nietzsche, who set about his breakfast one morning with the aim to boil an egg. So he takes his wristwatch and drops it into the boiling water, holding, instead of the watch, the egg in his hand – the egg he wanted to boil. And the watch is boiled to pieces while the egg remains as raw as before. Whereupon the professor invents his Theory of the Master Race.
What time is it? Correct. The clocks are striking thirteen.

About George Tabori.

George Tabori, veteran dramatist, Brecht expert and author of The Brecht File, was intimately familiar with the theme of The Victim which foreshadows many of the moral ambiguities found in Jorge Luis BorgesDeutsches Requiem. Tabori was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1914. His father died in Auschwitz in 1944, but his mother and his brother Paul Tabori (writer and psychical researcher), managed to escape the Nazis. During the 1930s Tabori worked as a journalist. Exiled from his homeland by the Nazis, Tabori eventually landed in America and made his way to Hollywood, where he came into contact with the European exile community. He met and worked with some of the most prominent anti-fascist artists, including Heinrich and Thomas Mann. He developed film scripts for Alfred Hitchcock (I Confess, 1953) and Joseph Losey, among others – and he met Bertolt Brecht on three occasions. 


*About Paul Tabori

As to Prolekult, I can’t resist adding Paul Tabori’s very amusing account of his days in Hungary as a hack ‘galley slave’ for a publisher who believed ‘that the drabber and more humdrum human existence is, the greater the thirst for romance and escapist thrill. [He] pandered almost exclusively to the cultural needs of domestic servants: cooks, chambermaids, waitresses, charwomen — all of whom were underpaid and overworked in my country. He published fiction in instalments for them . . . he believed in wish-dreams and their vicarious fulfilment in print . . . And the standard opening, for some curious and inexplicable reason, ran something like this: “My mother was an honest washerwoman, my father a handsome sailor whom a storm swept from the deck one night in the Atlantic.” . . . We must have killings and elopings and swoonings and guilty secrets.’
Private Gallery by Paul Tabori, 1944.
(Illustrated by Biro, a fellow Budapestian in exile.)

From Paul Tabori’s Private Gallery (1944) illustrated by Biro:
‘Suicide was not punished by the country’s laws; anybody could
take his or her life — because the country was poor and lives
were worth practically nothing. The bridges over the Danube
were patrolled . . . to fish out the unfortunate divers . . . the country
had the unenviable record of possessing almost the highest
suicide rate in Europe.” [Today, the statistics for Europe appear to
be unchanged from 1944: according to WHO, Hungary follows
Lithuania and Russia in the suicide rate recorded per 100,000
inhabitants. Lithuania (28.2), Russia (19.5), Hungary third (19.1).]


For the Godfather at the Birth of Winston Smith, see Year Zero, a Thing with One Face:

For German literary antisemitism in 1944, see also
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/between-life-and-death-january-14-1944.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 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)

Sunday 3 December 2017

Verifiable Proof of Englishness: my Citizenship ‘Associative Reaction’ Test Probes an Allusive Incomplete V.R.

As a Sussex-bred child, I’m sure I never imagined that – when we used to walk along the Weald ridgeway from the little village of Streat, past Plumpton Racecourse, to East Chiltington churchyard – I’d be entering a future where memories of that splendid grandstand view of the South Downs would prompt sombre ruminations on the values of cultural identity.

As it was, any apprehensions of today’s polarising debates on what it means to be English I’m sure were far from my mind because what entranced me most was the thought that the massive sylvan hanger that clung to the escarpment above Streat was the very embodiment of the Victorian mystery fiction I nightly devoured, thanks to a number of my grandfather’s bound volumes of the Strand Magazine I had made my own.

Explain? The massive ‘V’ on the Downs above Streat was planted in 1887 to mark Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. Composed of Scotch pine, spruce, larch, beech, sycamore and lime, this living monument to a queen regnant raised by a loyal yeoman farmer required 3060 plants at a cost of 12 pounds, 10 shillings and four pence, not including 38 pounds for labour. The outside measurement of each arm is 165 yards in length.  The width of each arm is 22 yards – that time-honoured distance, the twentieth of a quarter of a mile, the length of a cricket pitch (Sussex is the birthplace of adult cricket, cited in the early 1600s). The ‘V’ is one of the most loved landmarks within the South Downs National Park.

Local legend, I recall, had it that such were the fears of ever mounting expenditure the farmer abandoned his intention to complete the V.R. (Victoria Regina) of his original scheme, and settled for the pure symmetry of a commanding ‘V’, for which a future generation of austere minimalists is profoundly grateful.


Writ large.

It’s easy to guess why I was entranced. The incomplete ‘V’ reminded me of nothing so much as that characteristic passage in the case book of Sherlock Holmes I’d read so eagerly in the Strand Magazine for 1893, published six years after the farmer’s celebrations yet sharing the impulse towards the expression of an unquestioning monarchial devotion writ large with the means closest to hand . . . saplings in the farmer’s case, and in the case of Sherlock Holmes  . . .
  
[Watson deplores Holmes’s marksmanship.] I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.
The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual
(The Strand Magazine 1893)


Yet, in my maturity, I begin to wonder whether my loyal citizenship test of Englishness does not require, after all, the further validation of an ‘Enhanced Positive Vetting’*, because I must confess my knee-high view of classic Victorian crime literature is now revealed to me to be simply the fancy of a purblind innocent who, unlike the jingoistic Holmes, hadn’t completely joined up the dots . . . . . .


Toffs as Drifters: Holmes and Raffles in the Strand.

The fog-cloaked London of the Strand Magazine’s crime fiction in the 1890s, as Sherlockians will be aware, harboured both the exploits of the private detective, Holmes, and the escapades of the notorious (yet also jingoistic) Raffles, gentleman thief, the incomparable protagonists created respectively by brothers-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle and E. W. Hornung. Yet, now with 20/20 hindsight, as I have hinted, isn’t it about time we took to task these two fictive toffs for masquerading as members of the Deserving Poor – ‘hansom cab-runners’, to be precise – to thus deny indigent workers their honest wage? 

The flippancy of their offence is all the more egregious when you consider that an unflinching social realist of the same decade, George Gissing, was also a stablemate of these feted authors at the Strand and, by contrast, had an entirely clear-eyed and empathetic view of the penniless drifters who followed cabs. A cab-runner** in those days was regarded as roughly identical with a criminal of the worst sort.  

As to the cold-blooded cynicism of Holmes and Raffles, I invite you to consider these extracts from their adventures in the guise of ‘horsey men out of work’, a subterfuge that exploited the advantages of cabmen as confidants. First, Holmes reveals to Watson his ‘amazing powers in the use of disguises’:   
‘I left the house a little after eight o’clock this morning in the character of a groom out of work. There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among horsey men. Be one of them, and you will know all that there is to know . . . I then lounged down the street . . . and lent the ostlers a hand in rubbing down their horses, and received in exchange tuppence . . . I was still balancing the matter in my mind . . .  when up the lane came a neat little landau . . . It hadn’t pulled up before she [Irene Adler] shot out of the hall door and into it. I only caught a glimpse of her at the moment, but she was a lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for . . . “The Church of St. Monica, John,” she cried, “and half a sovereign if you reach it in twenty minutes.” This was quite too good to lose, Watson. I was just balancing whether I should run for it, or whether I should perch behind her landau when a cab came through the street.’ 
A Scandal in Bohemia
(The Strand 1891) 

A cab-runner in those days was regarded as
roughly identical with a criminal of the worst sort. 

‘Whip behind!’ 

Had Sherlock Holmes perched behind Irene’s landau, we wonder, would a street urchin have cried, ‘Whip behind!’ This, after all, was the customary exposure of free rides by stowaways on horse cabs. In the event, Holmes reverted to toff, flourished half a sovereign, and followed Irene in a cab. 

The rather more athletic A. J. Raffles, on the other hand, demonstrates, an even deeper immersion in the character of a ‘cab follower’, according to faithful sidekick, Bunny Manders:   
‘But surely you get some exercise? ’ I asked; for he was leading me at a good rate through the leafy byways of Campden Hill; and his step was as springy and as light as ever.                                                                                       ‘The best exercise I ever had in my life,’ said Raffles; ‘and you would never live to guess what it is. It’s one of the reasons why I went in for this seedy kit. I follow cabs. Yes, Bunny, I turn out about dusk and meet the expresses at Euston or King’s Cross; that is, of course, I loaf outside and pick my cab, and often run my three or four miles for a bob or less.  And it not only keeps you in the very pink: if you’re good they let you carry the trunks upstairs; and I’ve taken notes from the inside of more than one commodious residence which will come in useful in the autumn.’ 
The Rest Cure
(1905) 


‘V’ for le vice anglais?

A shilling or less!  Well, before you dismiss my notion of a certain blinkered condescension on the part of celebrated toffs playing at charades with the livelihoods of a desperate underclass, please consider the intriguing fact that Oscar Wilde, Conan Doyle and Hornung were close acquaintances, and Wilde was the reviled Accused at the centre of a cause célèbre of a notoriety that saw ‘illiterate boys’ called as witnesses in a trial in which Wilde was prosecuted on charges of gross indecency, mostly procured sexual encounters with young grooms and valets. From the witness-box the court heard the nature of Wilde’s inducements to those ‘illiterate boys’ to share debauches that indulged his taste for ‘feasting with panthers’, reportedly: ‘Bring your friends; they are my friends; I will not enquire too closely whether they come from the stables or the kitchen.’ 

Does the ‘V’ of my meditation on Englishness of this sort, then, stand for le vice anglais?

In fact, the often epigrammatic wit of both Holmes and Raffles is said to be founded by their authors on the quick tongue of Wilde yet, despite this brilliance, the unconscionable exploitation of London’s underclass in the fictions of Conan Doyle and Hornung casts a dismal shadow to remind us how fin-de-siècle decadence can pervade popular literature when a prosperous middle class readership conspires in suspending disbelief. As I have pointed out elsewhere, is not A Study in in Scarlet, 1886 (the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes), a title par excellence for the Decadent Movement, never mind the Whistlerian connotations?

Conversely, George Gissing, writing in his characteristic vein of socio-cultural observation of the poor, owed much, I suspect, to the findings of that guiding spirit of his youth, the social researcher and reformer, Henry Mayhew

So I must conclude that the measure of my Englishness is now most likely reduced to this: In the case of the Holmesian Übermensch versus the Mayhevian Untermenschen whose side do I take?  The Infallible Polymath or the Ruined Boys?


Just to earn a few pence. 

There were 1.2 million poor living in extreme squalor in the London of the 1890s, with malnutrition a scourge condemning nearly 500 of London’s poorest to starve to death in the capital annually . . .  so, when I think of the Baker Street Irregulars, those ragged, hungering, lice-ridden, barefoot street urchins (‘like so many rats’) engaged for a few pence by Holmes as his snitches, I believe I know the answer: 
‘V’ = Vanquished

*For an account of the rigours of ‘Enhanced Positive Vetting’, see A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men . . .  
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html

**For a character sketch of cab-runners from George Gissing’s socio-cultural perspective, see . . . 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/a-theory-of-literary-reincarnation.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 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)





Friday 12 July 2013

I have a Rendezvous with Dread at Destination Echoville

Last night, I awoke to the thought that there is definite pattern to a number of Arabian Nights fables, a template that has been hijacked by certain 20th century hardboiled writers of fiction, and also by a fabulist whose febrile cranium must have been eggshell thin.

The classic fable derived from Scheherazade’s telling goes like this ...
Narrative: A dream or a vision compels the Dreamer or Visionary to flee to a distant city where a revelatory encounter teaches him to see himself for what he truly is, the Blessed or the Damned.  
Interpretation? Like Scheherazade’s dreamer-protagonist, you attempt to flee your ego yet there is no escape, for you have fled in your reverie to the false refuge of an Altered State – let’s call the place Echoville – where your neuroses are mirrored by a Shadow-Self whose actions challenge you to return to true Selfhood, whereupon you learn whether you’re to be punished or spared. 

The Ruined Man who Became Rich Again through a Dream.

In the Arabian Nights, this fable of Fall and Redemption is one of the simplest and, hence, the more striking, for it is straightforwardly linear (insofar as the narrative line passes through a looking-glass).
A wealthy man of Baghdad who had lost all his money, in despair, lay down to sleep and in his dream heard a voice say, ‘Verily thy fortune is in Cairo. Go thither and seek it.’ So he set out for Cairo and in that city he was mistaken for a thief, seized by the police and beaten near to death. After three days in a cell the Chief of Police sent for him, asking ‘Whence art thou?’ ‘From Baghdad,’ the prisoner replied, ‘I saw in a dream One who said to me, “Thy fortune’s in Cairo. Go thither to it.” ’ The Police Chief laughed and said, ‘Thrice have I seen in a dream One who said to me: “There is in Baghdad a house with a jetting fountain and under it a great sum of money lieth buried. Go thither and take it.” Yet I went not for I had no faith in an idle dream, which is only the foolery of sleep.’ The poor man was given money to return home by the Police Chief, whose dream of a house with jetting fountain perfectly resembled the man’s own house in Baghdad, so when the wayfarer returned to his city he at once dug underneath the fountain in his garden, and discovered a great treasure. Thus abundant fortune is given to the Blessed when the dreamer becomes the dreamt in another’s thrice seen dream.
As I admitted once in an interview with novelist Megan Taylor, ‘At present I am re-reading The Arabian Nights; the story The Ruined Man who Became Rich Again through a Dream has a theme I stole for the final chapter of Sister Morphine, but it is unlikely I’ll ever find a better theme! 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html 
Of course, Scheherazade is really the Muse of all women writers, as a Storyteller-Under-Duress. MsLexia (rather a needy and whiny title for the journal, in my own view) has published works of mine, but Scheherazade* would have been a more apposite and affirming title, don’t you think? There are elements of Scheherazade’s dilemma in Sister Morphine … the narrator, a grief-counsellor, tells her stories to ward off her own grief.’

And, no, I have never found a better plotline in The Arabian Nights than the one I chose for my Sister Morphine all that time ago.  

Las ruinas circulares of Borges

The fabulist, Jorge Luis Borges, of course has taken similar tales from The Arabian Nights to refashion his own parables, notably The Circular Ruins in which ...
Narrative: A Necromancer induces himself to dream over many years the creation of another human being, a Youth conceived as a shadow of himself, and brings him into the world to live in a parallel temple not unlike the ruined pagan temple in which he ritually sleeps. He fears the Youth, his creation, will dematerialise should knowledge dawn that the being is but a projection of the Necromancer’s own mind. But at the moment of his own extinction, the Necromancer learns that he, too, is an imagined creature, made from another’s dreams.
Interpretation? Here Echoville is a mirrored semi-ruinous circular temple in which the objectivisation of the self may be seen, yet with self-knowledge comes the dissolution of the persona, bringing with it derealisation and the self-destruction that follows when disillusion denies the suspension of disbelief that is consentient existence.
The Dreamer Dreamt by Another is a motif that appears often in the works of Borges, and one must assume that part of his meaning is this: the vividness of everyday existence can be so bright as to extinguish the complementary shadow self that could make our personalities integrated and whole, just as the ‘sun destroys the interest of what’s happening in the shade.’

As to looking-glass linearity, the epigraph for The Circular Ruins is taken from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: 
‘And if he left off dreaming about you ...’ 
It comes from the passage in which Alice is told by a Looking-Glass character that her existence is jeopardised since she is simply a character in another character’s dream ... a character who, in the context of the story, she herself is dreaming as she sleeps in ‘Oh! Such a nice dream!’

An Englishwoman should not forget that many of Borges’s stories were directly inspired by English authors: Conan Doyle’s studies in scarlet (problems solved by inductive detection sharpened by the intermediations of cocaine) and G. K. Chesterton’s brown studies (problems solved by intuitive detection aided by the intercessions of the divine).

Note: It has only just occurred to me that A Study in Scarlet, written in 1886, was really rather an avant-garde title for Conan Doyle, when one considers that James McNeill Whistler in the same year was elected president of the Society of British Artists. So really the atmosphere of Conan Doyle’s London was not quite as pea-soupy as Borges might have supposed.

Appointment in Samarra.

So, the three-pipe problem of the thrice dreamt dream as a parable of Ego and Alter Ego – when Conscious fears or desires are transmuted by Subconscious fears or desires in the Echoville of Looking-Glass-land – still concerns the dreamer when considering other specimens from this literary genre, even those from the pens of the most hard-bitten pulp fictionists.

John O’Hara’s first novel, for instance, Appointment in Samarra, begins with this epigraph:
A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Shortly, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, and she made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant’s horse, the servant flees as fast as the horse can gallop to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture. She replies, ‘That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’
Now. Should you pursue the origin of this fable you will run into a pea-souper of daunting obfuscation. Suffice to say, some scholars believe, erroneously, that the origin of novelist Somerset Maugham’s celebrated parable (quoted in his theatrical drama, Sheppey, 1933) is When Death Came to Baghdad, a ninth century Arabian Sufi story in the sage Fozayl ibn Ziyad’s so-called Hikayat-I-Naqshiyya (Stories-with-a-Design).

Let me record here: no such collection of stories is known to exist, nor does the adjective naqshiyya (from naqsh, ‘picture, drawing’) seem a likely contemporaneous construction. Nor is it possible that the sage recorded the fable since we have no surviving writings from this very early Sufi, who probably died about 803. Another problem is that this title is clearly in New Persian (i.e., in the Arabic script), which was not yet in literary use at the time of Fozayl ibn Ziyad, otherwise known as Fudail ibn Ayad or Al-Fudhayl bin Iyyadh.

This is a perfect fable, elegantly symmetrical, with a dramatic punch unequalled by most western fictionists. Yet its origin is cloaked in mystery, a condition of recognition that would have profoundly satisfied Borges.

As it is, the fable has been cited often as a parable of the powerlessness of mortals to escape their brute fate and, as to similar metaphysical resonances derived from eastern mysticism discernible in 20th Century popular American fiction, Appointment in Samarra is spoken of in the same breath as The Postman Always Rings Twice


The Postman Always Rings Twice 

This theme of the inescapability of fate finds contemporary expression in The Postman Always Rings Twice, the classic crime novel of 1934 by James M. Cain, author of Double Indemnity. In a Borgesian paradox that outrivals the master, nowhere in the novel does a postman appear, nor is one even alluded to. 

Cain, it is to be believed, had an explanation for the title saying it arose from a discussion with screenwriter Vincent Lawrence. According to Cain, Lawrence spoke of the anxiety he endured when waiting for the postman to bring news on a submitted manuscript — specifically noting that he would know when the postman had finally arrived because he always rang twice. Cain then seized upon the phrase as a title for his novel. 

In their understanding of the phrase’s significance, the ‘postman’ represents Fate, and the ‘delivery’ represents the protagonist’s own death as just retribution for murdering his lover’s husband. 

This echoes the Samarran second appointment with death, since in both cases the protagonist misses the first ‘ring’ by escaping retribution. However, Messenger Death ‘rings again’, and this time the ring is heard and Death’s Chosen are fated to die and be judged in purgatorial Echoville.

In the words of Alan Seeger (C1916) ...
I have a rendezvous with Death ...
At midnight in some flaming town ...
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

*Footnote 31.08.13 : Oh dear. Once again originality fails me, because reading a biographical sketch of Jean Cocteau I learn that Cocteau founded the magazine, Schéhérazade, with Maurice Rostand and François Bernard in 1909.

See also Strand Magazine for my further thoughts on James M. Cain’s novel and how he is held in veneration in France:



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)