Showing posts with label Roy Fuller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roy Fuller. Show all posts

Sunday 19 March 2017

‘Did someone call for a recitation?’ Finishing School for Versifiers (Part 5)

All poets, whatever they
may seem to others, die young. 
Tennessee Williams
Suddenly Last Summer.

You might say of certain literary outpourings refined by a classical education that there’s a recognisable constant observable in the writer’s cleverly wrought symmetry where a drama features the explication of a verse to parallel the plot or, correspondingly, the gestation of a poem provides impetus to the action.  

The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan springs to mind. And let us not forget Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle, One Artwhen stumblingly reciting by Cameron Diaz in the movie, In Her Shoes (2005); or even those memorable WW2 epigraphs, Johnny-head-in-air by John Pudney (heard in the film, The Way To The Stars) and The Life That I Have by Leo Marks (issued as a code-mnemonic for SOE secret agent heroine Violette Szabo and recited in the movie, Carve Her Name with Pride). 

In this overcrowded genre, the masterly poet Roy Fuller’s novel The Carnal Island (1970) should not be forgotten. I suspect Robert Graves is the model for Fuller’s fictional poet and the poetry pastiched in this (I assume) reworking of The Aspen Papers by Henry James (a doomed visit to the shrine of  venerated poet) leads me to this view. (A specimen poem, entitled In a Barn near Beugny, adds substance to this conjecture and the birth year of the poet, 1890, makes him, like Graves, a member of the Lost Generation who came of age during WWI).

The instances of this literary form are legion . . .

Poetry as a Propellant of Plot:
Deborah Kerr as Hannah and Cyril Delevanti as Nonno
in The Night of the Iguana.

Echoes of the absurd . . . The Night of the Iguana.

Take, for instance, The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams. A highly suspenseful device in the drama is the unfinished poem by Nonno, the elderly poet grandfather of Hannah, an itinerant artist, who like the washed-up Episcopal priest, the Reverend Shannon, finds herself stranded as a guest in a seedy hotel on a remote Mexican beach, where this introduction is made:

                    Revd Shannon: ‘And Gramps?’
                    Hannah: ‘He’s the world’s oldest living and practising poet . . . Do you 
                    know, he’s started a new poem. For the first time in twenty years he’s 
                    started another poem.’
                    Revd Shannon: ‘He hasn’t finished it yet?’
                    Nonno: ‘Did someone call for a recitation?’
                    Hannah: ‘No, Nonno . . . Just rest for a few moments, Nonno.’
                    Nonno‘How calmly does the olive branch* observe the sky begin to 
                    blanch, without a cry, without a prayer, with no betrayal of despair.’ 
                    (The tremulous speech trails off.)

What immediately strikes the discerning listener, however, in appreciation of Nonno’s verses, is how risibly their iambic quadrimeter resembles Lewis Carroll’s How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail, itself a parody of Isaac Watts’s didactic poems for children, How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour. 

Did Tennessee Williams nod, we wonder, when putting Nonno’s words on the ancient poet’s lips, or was the triumph of Nonno’s completion of his poem moments before his death an ironic hollow victory (by the playwright) over the pathetic fallacy? 

How differently, though, these absurd echoes of the pedagogic homily could have been resolved with the merest tweaks.

                    So calmly sure, the olive branch.

                    So calmly sure, the olive branch
                    observes the sky begin to blanch
                    without a cry, without a prayer
                    with no betrayal of despair.

                    Some time while light obscures the tree
                    the zenith of its life will be
                    gone past forever and from thence
                    a second history will commence . . .



A Metrical Duel . . . Cyrano de Bergerac.

Of course, this lietmotif of the genesis of a poem emergent from dramatic action has a recognised precursor in Cyrano de Bergerac and his celebrated metrical duel :

                    Cyrano: ‘While we fence, presto! all extempore I will compose a 
                    ballade . . . Three eight-versed couplets. . . And an envoi of four lines . . . 
                    I'll make one while we fight; and touch you at the final line . . . 
                    (the refrain) . . .  À la fin de l’envoi, je touche!


Elegiac verses evoking Nabokov’s lost homeland.


To my mind, however (within, of course, the delimited horizons of my own reading), only one poet – an incomparable master of two languages – has evoked with nigh sorcerous alchemy the process of a poem’s gestation as a parable of the eternal émigré’s homesickness of the dispossessed. 

Many critics consider Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift (1935-1937) as the masterpiece most faithful to the ‘local consciousness’ of his genius as a young man in exile on the brink of world recognition. It is also regarded as the crowning achievement of the first phase of his literary career and the virtuoso swansong of those novels he wrote in Russian.

A reimagining of Nabokov’s own life in Berlin (1922-1937), The Gift tells of a young Russian poet, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, and of his growth as an exiled writer following his family’s flight from the Bolshevik Revolution. 

I will conclude, with veneration, by quoting those supersensory passages that chart with astonishing clear-sightedness the evolution of his elegiac verses evoking his lost homeland . . . and that movingly convey the paradoxically ineffable rapture of a writer in the moment of triumphant expression.

Early Snow by
Konstantin Yakovlevich Kryzhitsky (1858-1911) 

. . . Fyodor began pacing the side-walk to the corner and back. The street was echoic and completely empty. High above it milk-white lamps were suspended, each on its own transverse wire; beneath the closest one a ghostly circle swung with the breeze across the wet asphalt. And this swinging motion, which had no apparent relation to him, with a sonorous tambourine-like sound nevertheless nudged something off the brink of his soul where that something had been resting, and now, no longer with the former distant call but reverberating loudly and close by, rang out ‘Thank you, my land, for your remotest . . .’ and immediately, on a returning wave, ‘most cruel mist my thanks are due. . . .’ And again, flying off in search of an answer: ‘. . . by you unnoticed. . . .’ He was somnambulistically talking to himself as he paced a nonexistent sidewalk; his feet were guided by local consciousness, while the principal Fyodor Konstantinovich, and in fact the only Fyodor Konstantinovich that mattered, was already peering into the next shadowy strophe, which was swinging some yards away and which was destined to resolve itself in a yet-unknown but specifically promised harmony. ‘Thank you, my land . . .’ he began again, aloud, gathering momentum afresh, but suddenly the sidewalk turned back to stone under his feet, everything around him began speaking at once, and, instantly sobered, he hurried to the door of his house, for now there was a light behind it. 
. . . 
A moment later, in bed, just as his thoughts had begun to settle down for the night and his heart to sink in the snow of slumber (he always had palpitations when falling asleep), Fyodor ventured imprudently to repeat to himself the unfinished poem—simply to enjoy it once more before the separation by sleep; but he was weak, and it was strong, twitching with avid life, so that in a moment it had conquered him, covered his skin with goose pimples, filled his head with a heavenly buzz, and so he again turned on the light, lit a cigarette, and lying supine, the sheet pulled up to his chin and his feet protruding, like Antokolski's Socrates (one toe lost to Lugano’s damp), abandoned himself to all the demands of inspiration. This was a conversation with a thousand interlocutors, only one of whom was genuine, and this genuine one must be caught and kept within hearing distance. How difficult this is, and how wonderful. . . . And in these talks between tamtambles, tamtam my spirit hardly knows. . . .             After some three hours of concentration and ardour dangerous to life, he finally cleared up the whole thing, to the last word, and decided that tomorrow he would write it down. In parting with it he tried reciting softly the good, warm, farm-fresh lines: 

                                             Thank you, my land; for your remotest 
                                             Most cruel mist my thanks are due. 
                                             By you possessed, by you unnoticed, 
                                             Unto myself I speak of you. 
                                             And in these talks between somnambules 
                                             My inmost being hardly knows 
                                             If it’s my demency that rambles 
                                             Or your own melody that grows. 

                                             Благодарю тебя, отчизна,
                                             за злую даль благодарю!
                                             Тобою полн, тобой не признан,
                                             я сам с собою говорю.
                                             И в разговоре каждой ночи
                                             сама душа не разберет,
                                             мое ль безумие бормочет,
                                             твоя ли музыка растет . . .


According to a number of critics, this poem expresses Nabokov’s own yearning for wider cultural recognition while appreciating the inestimable ‘gift’ bestowed on him by his homeland; that is: his phenomenal memory of the lost domain that was imperial Russia as refashioned and restored by the unique perceptions granted him by his native Russian identity.

*Apparently, the written version of this poem in the original play used an ‘Orange Branch’ rather than the ‘Olive Branch’ included in the movie version; thus: ‘How Calmly Does the Orange Branch’.



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)

Friday 17 February 2017

Finishing School for Versifiers, part 4: Acerbic censure (from the Saloon Bar) of that low brow poetic persona.

Well. I don’t know. More than four decades on and a voice from the Saloon Bar censures in one breath a generation of British poets for ingratiating themselves with their readers by presuming to adopt the persona of an habitué of the Public Bar.

So, in the Public Bar you’ll find Dannie AbseAl Alvarez, Jack Clemo, Tony Harrison, Ted HughesLaurie Lee, Jeff Nuttall, Ken Smith . . . Oh, and who’s that on the coveted stool nearest to the fire? Why, Stevie Smith.


WH Auden and Stevie Smith together
in an Edinburgh pub during the 1965 International Festival.

Nomen est omen.

Who has ordained this class divide? 

Take a look at The Carnal Island by poet Roy Fuller, a novel published in 1970 that records subtly shaded literary exchanges between a young poet, James, and his idol, Daniel House, a celebrated WWI poet in his declining years whose animus towards his younger rivals soon becomes apparent during a probing interview . . . when Daniel explains his belief in nomen est omen . . .  
‘John House is a more plausible name for an English poet than Daniel House. I couldn’t have thought so in 1917 or whenever it was. Or perhaps I had the idea that a poetic reputation might damage my name as a barrister. Then when they asked me about it before painting my name at the entrance to chambers, I said, “Put J. D. House”. It never struck me that I could have published under that cognomen. But later on two initials became very fashionable. Perhaps thought to be businesslike, even proletarian. These days poets call themselves Chris and Sid. Daft. Can you imagine a poet of my age called Chris? But I shouldn’t say that. Perhaps in your poetic persona you’re “Jim Ross”.’                                  ‘Absolutely not.’                                                                                                ‘Very wise.’
From my files I’ve unearthed this photo . . . can you spot the odd man out?

Forename good, two initials bad?

Monday 25 January 2016

Satirical and satyrical, extramural and intramural studies: Alexis Lykiard’s ‘Schooled For Life’.

One’s first impulse on reading Alexis Lykiard’s latest verse collection, Schooled For Life, is to adapt Wilhelm Busch’s famous dictum Ist der Ruf erst ruiniert, lebt es sich recht ungeniert and remind ourselves of its possible converse: Wird der Ruf erst mal geehrt, lebt’s sich gaenzlich ungeniert. In other words:

Once your reputation is won, 
You can live a life of fun.

For there is no doubt here that Alexis, having claimed his bardic laurels to join the pantheon, is having a great deal of fun at the expense of a number of cockshies, including settling old scores for slipper-thrashings from the missile-throwing pedagogues and catechising clergymen of his schooldays, as well as taking well-aimed pot-shots at vaunted British poets of a certain vintage and at pundits who have earned his opprobrium, not forgetting his risking lese-majesty with broadsides unleashed to singe the monarch’s kin. 


Bitingly satirical and mischievously satyrical by turns, but always classically-Attically aphoristic (Alexis’s signature grace note), these poems may be enjoyed for their allusiveness just as much as for their neatly turned wit and banter. Witness, then, his chronicling of the privations of prep school life, where the nascent poet was . . .

. . . definitively marked for life.

Marked for Life — despite, we suspect, his schoolboy essays most likely scoring Alpha Plus — was no doubt an alternative title the poet spiked for this verse collection. In fact, such a poignant phrase captures the mood of Alexis’s troubled post-war childhood of exile and assimilation, as he seeks reassurance, recording the past in B-movie monochrome; how he was:

. . . desperate to fit in, own up, and accept my fate . . .
                                          . . . Those times,
elusive yet recurrent, slow to fade away,
aren’t so disturbing to return to — younger days
of ’48, remembered rather as dark grey,
exhaustingly austere, too drab for love or hate.    

A mood he countered, we learn, by his immersion between Chapel and Corps (organ music was a sonorous bore) in eclectic reading matter, including the novels of Charles Kingsley, a boyhood taste shared by a poet of enviable metrical brilliance from an earlier generation, Roy Fuller. In fact, Fuller’s account of reading Hypatia* is to be found in his fine novel of 1959, The Ruined Boys, in which he charts lost innocence much as Alexis does here in his own verses . . . 

New troops of ruined boys fall in now, older soldiers gone . . .

and, of course, both poets appropriate the Master’s foreboding voice of 1930, Auden’s They gave the prizes to the ruined boys

Readers of Alexis’s verses have learned to be alert to such allusive ludic nudges to his confraternity of pantheonic heroes born of his omnivorous appetite for the bon mot. When he isn’t head-butting sycophantic laureates and other toadies or savaging ‘Faberized’ fellow-travelling poetasters and flâneurs, this hircine omnivore is — satyr-like — more characteristically in Dionysian pursuit of the teasing evidence of bliss or of the true life [that] goes on forgotten. (A quest for the cleansing truths he admires in fellow poet D J Enright, which prompts Alexis’s penetrating and touching tribute, Master of His Arts.)

It is due to that same omnivorousness that Alexis has absorbed the finesse of favourite precursors in his verses, we are pleased to find, particularly in a suite of poems documenting Alexis’s recollections of prison life as writer/teacher-in-residence in the 1980s, with such redolences as . . . 

. . . before this rapid cloudburst’s done
its worse, made space again for blue.  

. . . high chainlink fence. And so the shutter clicks
to recollect our borrowed time. 

In Captive Audience the observation of barracking inmates is demotically spot on: 

. . . Young dopers relish any whiff of farce . . .
. . . aware
enough to suss that Art’s 
an ancient con, a fancy caper, mere
time-displacing trick. 

These witty poems of reluctant pedagogy where roles are reversed, with pupil turned educationist or even graduating to Brit. Council bratpacker, recall to mind the night classes taught by sometime Movement poet, Laurence Lerner, whose Those girls, those girls . . .  (who imbibe a knowledge they believe to be / objective: not about themselves or me) is still remembered with fondness, an unresolved conundrum of Socratics that also calls to mind the case that the works of pedagogic poets comprise an actual genre in the classification of verse and here, in Alexis Lykiard’s Schooled For Life, there’s a respectable portion of it.

So an English education, both private and state-run — in all its incarnations and incarcerations, extramural and intramural — is Alexis’s overarching theme. Alexis’s atavistic Greekness and his relish for the niceties of English idiom are especially apparent in his first memories of school in 1946, when hors de combat on the . . .

First day at day school, 
in the Morning Break, I broke
my arm . . .

and he becomes even more the Hellenist when invalided out of school . . .

. . . as lapsed Stoic, 
my first words to the doctor
had been “I suffer”.

This canny adaptability of the chameleonic émigré — alert to local colour — is confirmed later when [following a kangaroo court in the dorm] . . .

Holding fast under duress, 
hedonist Greek, I feigned becoming Spartan

A representative example of his narrative voice is his Chaps in Chapel and its elegiac conclusion that hints at immanence when recapturing his awkward past . . .

The Truth did not belong to some religionist 
more likely to All people that on earth do dwell.’
Fate or capricious genes will dole out our few days;
The sole concern is living well. Yet idols cast their spell:
Vainly we look skyward, though shadows need no praise. 

However, this callow crisis of belief apart, it is difficult to quite see why Alexis the Dionysian maker of verses — whose flannel shorts stayed up via serpent-clasp elastic belt — dismisses the motto of his old school as obscure. (Radley: Sicut serpentes, sicut columbae. ‘Be wise as snakes and gentle as doves.’) 

Surely there is no better motto for summoning up the uneasy duality that haunts the exilic poet?

Sicut serpentes, sicut columbae.
‘. . . . I’d learned enough from books, from boys behaving badly,
The time was ripe to take my leave of privilege and Radley.’

For more musings on precocious schoolboy poets (writing in Latin and in Herodotean Greek), see:

* For the Hypatian Erotica Awards (inspired by Charles Kingsley’s novel) awarded for  High Victorian literary texts teetering on the carnal brink, see:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/hypatian-erotica-awards-high-victorian.html

Friday 29 November 2013

The Forgotten Symbol or, rather, a Non Sequitur Exposed?

Some months ago, I wrote to my loyal correspondent in the very heart of Russia – a Chekhovian scholar of great learning and intuition (whom I shall call Guru Anton Instinctsikov, to spare his blushes) –  in pursuit of answers following what I believed was my close reading of Chekhov’s short story, Ivan Matveyich (1886).

In fact, you might say that the two participants in that minor tale of Chekhov’s are reflective of our own respective rôles – on my part, an ignoramus; on his part, a polyglot encyclopaedist of lightly worn erudition – because the story concerns a professor and his feckless clerk-amanuensis, Ivan Matveyich, a naïve young man, characterised by a ‘…foolish smile which is seen only on the faces of children or very good-natured people.’

As the Man of Learning fumes, the ‘wretched boy is two or three hours late with unfailing regularity every day…’ and ‘… shows the utmost disrespect for another man’s time and work. In England such a person would not earn a farthing …’  In short, young Ivan is bored, uninterested in his clerkly duties (copying from dictation), and yearns for the innocent, sunlit country pursuits of his youth far from the snowy region the Professor inhabits. In particular, in a break from his duties, Ivan retails to the Man of Learning his schoolboy fondness for a breed of killer-spider (bihorka), a single specimen of which can conquer a hundred tarantulas in a staged fight.

So … 


Hence the three questions I posed to my Guru Anton Instinctsikov as, to my mind, in rereading this story there seemed to emerge a symbolic standoff: a case of the Common Man versus the Intelligentsia.

Was there, then, I asked my guru, a hidden political message when Ivan says: ‘In a fight one bihorka can kill a hundred tarantulas’ since Ivan is from the southern Don region and, therefore, his words might seemingly be an anti-imperialist boast? 


And thirdly, more pertinently, is Ivan’s seeming boast specifically in response to his master’s dictated words, ‘More independence is found by the forms which have not so much a political, as a social character.’

To my limited understanding, there seemed to be a thread of socialistic polemical commentary in the story that is cunningly hidden by Chekhov; after all, it is well-known that there was much coded writing at that time (the Eighties) to deceive the Censor. Coded writing is surely a constant underground stream in Russian literature (even today) and the one-against-the-many-tarantulas imagery is simply begging for socio-political interpretation.

Roy Fuller wrote a poem, Chekhov, pointing out that a person like Ivan Matveyich holds the secret key to Chekhov’s code when the important word is hidden. 

And what there was of meaning in it all
Is left entirely to the minor figures:
Aged or stupid, across the deserted stage,
They carry, like a tray, the forgotten symbol.

Lost in Translation: a False Non Sequitur.

Well, let me tell you straightaway my quest for the forgotten symbol turned out to be rather disappointing for me.

In an act of extraordinary literary supererogation, my Guru Anton Instinctsikov explained at length that Ivan’s seeming boast in response to the Man of Learning’s dictated ‘independence’ of ‘forms’ of a ‘social character’ is nothing but a failure of translation to impart the mild punning association of idiomatic Russian sparked in the wool-gathering mind of Ivan by the word, ‘form’. Instead, a non sequitur results. 

My Russian guru explains it more cogently:

To say the truth, I haven’t found a reason to consider the phrase to be a hidden political message. In the story, in the whole, Chekhov tried and achieved comic effect having made comparison between purely the scientific, markedly difficult-to-understand style of the ‘Man of Learning’ and the simple, everyday style of Ivan Matveyich. He shows that the ‘Man of Learning’ was bored with his own pseudoscientific writings and was more interested in real events from Ivan’s life. A fight of bihorka and tarantulas was just a sample of the ‘childish’ entertainment Ivan was interested in. Ivan was too simpleminded to say anything that might be an anti-imperialist boast.
    The phrase dictated by the ‘Man of Learning’ was chosen by Chekhov for two reasons. It makes an excellent specimen of idiotic profundity (in spite of Ivan’s also idiotic naivety). The second reason is the word ‘forms’. In Russian ‘forms’ and ‘uniforms’ are the same: ‘forms’. Simple Ivan was not able to understand what his master had been dictating. So, having heard the word ‘forms’, he thought his master meant students’ ‘uniforms’. The comic effect is achieved. Chekhov is laughing at socio-political philosophizing which has no real base.
A comparison of the two texts, Russian:English, my indulgent guru kindly supplies here for my edification (and yours). As may be seen my initial confusion was due to my failure in detecting the buried homonyms:


In sum, my guru confirms that, in regard to the seeming non sequitur of the introduction of the new topic, ‘uniform’, in the English translation, there is an entirely prosaic explanation in the Russian … 
‘Exactly. Straight cause-and-effect relationship. The Man of Learning says forms in the metaphysical sense, Simple Ivan hears form as students’ clothes.’
All of which is truly humbling when one attempts to contemplate the multitude of nuanced Russian texts that must escape our understanding.  I wrote to my guru with my profound thanks for his thoughtfulness: ‘Your conclusion will interest English readers of Chekhov, who have been denied this textual richness.’  (I am certain this will be found to be the case.)


Nuances Restored.

I suppose a solution to the restoration of the nuances without the non sequitur would be to write two unrelated sentences, such as: ‘More independence is found by principal forms which have not so much a political, as a social character.’ ‘Since the new Principal, the high school boys have a different uniform now.’

Maybe translators should seek more creative licence in meeting these challenges. Anyhow, such renderings, however faithful, would still not reveal the underlying purposes of the text. Guru Anton Instinctsikov additionally cautions me:

Modern literary criticism allows you to interpret things deeper than the author did himself. After all, a writer and a reader are co-creators. I don’t see political allusion in bihorka and tarantulas. You do. That’s normal. In my opinion, the story is nice, but not significant (by Chekhov’s standards). As I understand it, Chekhov didn’t value the story too much … he was not going to include it in the full collection, and did it only after readers’ requests. By the way, in the first edition of the story the ‘Man of Learning’ was a ‘quite famous Russian writer’ (whose prototype was Pyotr Boborykin), and the prototype for Ivan was Chekhov’s brother, Ivan. I agree with Roy Fuller that, stated simply, Chekhov told big things via minor ones. But Chekhov was not Saltykov-Shchedrin, nor Aesop. His minor things were rather tops of icebergs hidden in the water than symbols for expressing different things or for fooling censorship. I (personally me) am sure the bihorka and tarantulas are ‘local colour’ and not so-called Aesopian language. But why not make the story deeper than it is?
Why not, indeed? I have to confess I continue to cleave to my ‘Coded Chekhov’ theory … even after these many deliberations, it’s not so easy to let it go.

Saturday 31 August 2013

Hypatian Erotica Awards … High Victorian nominees announced!


A recent issue (24.05.13) of The Lady (founded 1885), belatedly arriving in the mails, contains the oddest intelligence. Its correspondent writes:
Hugh Betts, who works at Maggs booksellers in Berkeley Square, told me that he knows a girl currently writing a PhD on Wrists and Waists in English fiction of the 19th Century.
Thought provoking. 

In the same speculative vein, my recent blog post (here) recalling the metrical brilliance of the poet Roy Fuller
jogged my memory of reading his fine novel of 1959, The Ruined Boys*, in which he charts the lost innocence of schoolboy protagonist, Gerald Bracher, who had ‘discovered that a cupboard in a classroom senior to his own housed a collection of books...’ that, if intuitively delved into, could satisfy his secret unspoken desires.
The most unlikely books sometimes proved to contain what he was seeking and the ardour of his quest seemed to give him a fine instinct not only for the right book but for the vital part of it. So it was scarcely any surprise that turning over the pages of a brown Victorian volume of small dull print whose title–Hypatia–had vaguely held out its only promise, he found:
‘She shook herself free from her tormentors, and springing back, rose for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around – shame and indignation in those wild clear eyes, but not a stain of fear.’
 
Hypatia by Charles William Mitchell

Rereading that passage, it seems to me that this subject of teasingly half veiled erotic texts from High Victorian writers bears further enquiry, and for the ardent Geralds among us it surely deserves its own award and nominees.

As such texts invariably teeter on the carnal brink I suggest the Hypatian Erotica Awards has a ring to it, with the breathless ingénue in a state of déshabillé the customary object of literature’s wish-fulfilling male predations. Is that actually a laced bodice ripped off and cast aside at the base (left) of the painting shown, or is it Hypatia’s Alexandrian sandal?

Take this seduction scene from a fiction published in 1888 ... 
...the atmosphere was heavy with the melancholy odour of refined white blossoms such as stephanotis, tuberose, and lilies of the valley ... [She] was at his side, just a little breathless, the flowers on her dress a little crushed, and the lace rising and falling rapidly. The moment was propitious for the study of human nature, and [she] saw it in a new phase ... [he] laid his hand upon her wrist. [She] experienced a sudden sense of chilliness all over. There was an obstruction in her throat and she prayed inwardly that something might happen suddenly ... to prevent him saying more ... The music went on, and there was a vibration in the floor as of people dancing. In a dark corner of the conservatory the monotonous drip-drip of a tap imperfectly turned made itself heard. [He] had taken her hand within his fingers now.

‘... I will never,’ [she said], with dangerous calmness, ‘be bullied or frightened into loving you. Surely you know me well enough to recognize that.’
... She turned half away from him, and moved towards the door, but before she had taken two steps his arms were round her, crushing her painfully. With sudden passion he kissed her twice on the lips ... Then he released her with equal abruptness. She stood for a moment, while he looked down at her, breathing hard ; then she raised her gloved hand, and pressed back over her ear a tiny wisp of golden hair that had escaped and curled forward to her smooth cheek.
Yes. The breathlessness of the crushed breast is quite a feature of this author, fixated on
visions ‘of soft clinging silks and incomprehensible gauze.’

Incomprehensible Gauze. Mmmm. That phrase could serve as the title of a study of John Ruskin’s marriage.  

Clinging silks with close-fitting bombazine, then, seems an essential feature of stimuli in popular literature as effective rousers of sensuality in the genteel Victorian reader desirous of the vicarious thrill of the chase.
She was almost crouching at his feet — crouching gracefully in her close-fitting black dress, with the beautiful golden head bent and turned from his sorrowful eyes.
Designedly, constrictiveness of dress as the cynosure of the writer’s hot gaze intensifies the reader’s voyeuristic complicity. But is tight-bound breathlessness, or yet the glimpse of wrists and ankles, deserving of the first rank of the excitants to ignite the timid reader?

Sportsgirls.

No. In my view, at the highest ranking, I would place descriptions of the sweated brows exhibited by female athleticism. (cf. Betjeman’s sportsgirls, Joan Hunter Dunn before her ‘warm-handled racket is back in its press’ or Pam whose ‘Old Malvernian brother ... can’t stand up to’ her ‘wonderful backhand drive.’)

Consider George Gissing’s Fleet-Footed Hester (1893) for an instructive expression of this attraction:
At sixteen, Hester had a splendid physique: strangers imagined her a fine girl of nineteen or twenty. It was then she ceased running races with the lads in London Fields …
Grown to a young woman, Hester provokes a fight between two rivals for her hand
Her face was hot … Hester went off in the opposite direction, an exulting smile in her eyes … On reaching home, Hester lit her lamp — it revealed a scrubby little bedroom with an attic window — took off her hat and jacket, and deliberately lay down on the bed. She lay there for an hour or more, gazing at nothing, smiling, her lips moving as though she talked to herself. At eleven o’clock she rose, put on her hat, and once more left the house. She walked as far as the spot where the fight had taken place. It was very quiet here, and very gloomy. A policeman approached and she spoke to him.
‘P’liceman, can you tell me ’ow fur it is from ’ere to the corner of Beck Street?’ she pointed.
‘Cawn’t say exactly. Five ’undred yards, dessay.’
‘Will you toime me while I run it there and back?’
The man laughed and made a joke, but in the end he consented to time her. Hester poised herself for a moment on her right foot, then sprang forward. She flew through the darkness and flew back again.
‘Four minutes, two second,’ said the policeman. ‘Not bad, Miss!’
‘Not bad? So that’s all! Find me the girl as can do it better.’
And she ran off in high spirits.
We don’t have to spell out sublimated sexual arousal when the clues are in Hester’s restlessness, ungratified and raw. (Incidentally, the male world record-holder’s speed for the 1000 yards of 1881 was twice as fast as Hester’s speed, which was nonetheless impressive.) 

Encrypted caresses or too easily decipherable seductions?

But for a sophisticated account of a consensual heterosexual sadomasochistic pact – redolent of pheromonal exudations such as sweat and damp hair – the narrative below by an English regional fictionist (born 1867) is, for those times, unsurpassed for its novelty in founding its intense eroticism on quotidian reality, in this case the rural setting of the Derbyshire dales. A flirtation between a beautiful, much-courted village girl and a rejected suitor ...
... her flushed face bore a pleasant look of malice ... She turned and faced him defiantly.
‘I wunna!’
‘But yo’ will, for i’ll mek yo’.’ ...
It had never struck her before that he was very handsome, but as he stood there without jacket or waistcoat, and with his snowy shirt all damp with perspiration, she became convinced that there was none in the neighbourhood half so worthy of the name of man ...
She set down the basket and showed him her hands. The skin was roughened, the finger-tips were bleeding. The sight made his eyes swim ...
He came nearer and caught her in his arms.
‘I wouldna hev done et ef I hadna looved yo’.’
‘Et’s all reet ... Yo’ll be master, I reckon.’
And she kissed him, and he led her to the road.
Or take this sinister coded erotic encounter from the author of the 1888 conservatory seduction ...
He rose from his seat and deliberately crossed the room to the sofa where she had sat down, where he reclined, with one arm stretched out along the back of it towards her. In his other hand he held his riding-whip, with which he began to stroke the skirt of her dress, which reached along the floor almost to his feet ... She gave a strange little hunted glance round the room ... Then she leant forward and deliberately withdrew her dress from the touch of his whip, which was in its way a subtle caress
Yes. Coded eroticism for Victorian fictionists seems to function through dependence on ravishing detail of an almost hallucinatory Dadd-like painterly meticulousness.

This trick of the cinematic close-up, like the whip and dress-hem, can be seen in the example singled out in my recent post on Emma Bovary, Adamantine Madame.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/adamantine-madame-enamelled-emma.html 
Between the window and the hearth Emma was sewing; she wore no fichu; he could see small drops of perspiration on her bare shoulders.
Oh. Did I mention I bought my prized first English edition of Madame Bovary from Maggs of Berkeley Square? More than a quarter of a century ago.

Puzzle of the missing pizzle.

As to more decipherable seductions, even the novice literary cryptographer is quick to unriddle the cruder emblems of sexual intrigue when the determined symbolist is intent on delivering his message with a semiotic battering ram, whose impact is no less subtle than the authorial telegraph pole it evokes with which the messenger signals the callowest itch of lust.

So let me conclude with two contrasting views on literary expressions of sexual desire.

My aim has been to demonstrate how the intensely observed teasing glimpses of so-called second-rank 19th century novelists succeed in their purpose to provoke the fantasizing reader to imaginative immersion in what is, essentially, a fictive sexual adventure; whereas, by contrast, the clumsier overt symbolism of a vaunted stylist of the period tends sometimes to neuter, indeed sabotage, intended erotic effects with the reader left disengaged.

For the last word, look no further than Thomas Hardy and his Jude the Obscure (1895). Consider this famous passage:
On a sudden something smacked him sharply in the ear, and he became aware that a soft cold substance had been flung at him, and had fallen at his feet.

A glance told him what it was—a piece of flesh, the characteristic part of a barrow-pig, which the countrymen used for greasing their boots, as it was useless for any other purpose. 
‘I didn’t throw it, I tell you!’ asserted one girl to her neighbour, as if unconscious of the young man’s presence.
 ‘But you want to speak to me, I suppose?’
‘Oh yes; if you like to.’
No better than a slap in the face with a wet fish (as the saying goes), that ‘characteristic part’ of the pig considered ‘useless’ is, in fact, an overwrought symbol of clunking gaucheness, as I see it, spelling out its message in banner headlines: ‘This is a sexual pass! Wake up, Mr Libido!’ 

Extraordinarily enough, when a perfectly applicable term for this porcine boot-grease exists and is ready to hand – ‘pizzle’ – the word appears nowhere in Hardy’s text, a needless evasion that consigns the reader – this reader, at least – to feeling distinctly short-changed.

So no nominations here, then, for the Hypatian Erotica Awards that distinguished poet Roy Fuller prompted, whose own Mythological Sonnets are, conversely, rich in allusion and unforced sensuality:
Trailing great pizzles, their dun stallions
Huddled against hedges while our mares
Cavorted in the grass, black, yellow, bronze.  
‘Stallions’ and ‘bronze’ ... words destined to be spellbound by a magician of rhyme.

And since Fuller so perceptively quotes from Hypatia, in a text I have remembered for more than half a century, maybe I should conclude with its author’s true, irrepressible, High Victorian, libidinous outpourings ... the love letters that passed between Charles Kingsley and his bride-to-be, Fanny Grenfell.

It is to them that the Hypatian Erotica Awards are awarded. The judge’s verdict is final: Charles and Fanny are uncontested joint winners.


Thrilling writhings. Wandering hands. Smelling salts.

In the fourth decade of the 19th Century, the most remarkable love letters were exchanged between the young curate, Charles Kingsley, and wealthy socialite, Frances Eliza Grenfell, five years his senior, who opened their hearts to each other with an explicitness that scholars of that period rarely encounter, certainly in texts unredacted.

No bland, sentimental billing-and-cooing billets-doux
but Frances’s imaginings of ...
... delicious nightery [when they would lie in each other’s arms] and I will ask you to explain my strange feelings ...
These strange feelings of the lovelorn – agonising physical pains in her heart – caused Fanny to resort to large doses of morphine and salvolatile.

As for Charles, the floodgates of his private fantasies were unloosed without constraint ...
When you go to bed tonight, forget that you ever wore a garment, and open your lips to my kisses and spread out each limb that I may lie between your breasts at night ... Will not these thoughts [by postponing bliss] give us more perfect delight when we lie naked in each other’s arms, clasped together, toying with each other’s limbs, buried in each other’s bodies, struggling, panting, dying for the moment. Shall we not feel then, even then, that there is more in store for us, that those thrilling writhings are but dim shadows of a union which shall be perfect?
The perfect union Charles, an accomplished artist, envisioned was their hallowed lovemaking for all eternity, pinioned on orgasmic pulsing waves ... a fevered sketch of which remains: 
 
The consecrated lovemaking of Charles and Fanny,
pinioned on the pulsing waves of Eternal Orgasm.

Charles once told Fanny: ‘Your letter about bare feet almost convulsed me. I have such strange fantasies about bare feet.’ And his fetishisation of Fanny continued:
...my hands are perfumed with [your] delicious limbs, and I cannot wash off the scent, and every moment the thought comes across me of those mysterious recesses of beauty where my hands have been wandering, and my heart sinks with a sweet faintness and my blood tingles through every limb ...
The Ascent of Charles and Fanny to Eternal Sexual Bliss

The power of suggestion.

Nevertheless, Charles feared the sight of Fanny on their wedding night would unman him. Some months before their marriage he wrote:
I have been thinking over your terror at seeing me undressed, and I feel that I should have the same feeling ... until I had learnt to bear the blaze of your naked beauty.
So there it is. At last, the authentic.   

The blaze of naked beauty. 

This fierce eroticism, forged by lovers separated by the proprieties of polite society, and expressed in a series of astonishing epistolary convulsions, underscores my initial point ... effective erotic writing relies on the power of suggestion and the tingling religio-sexual experience of ‘touching the veil’ recorded by Charles Kingsley is the more ardent for its trembling – like the Song of Solomon on the brink of coherence, and for daring to breach the boundaries of scriptural agápē.

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* re. The Ruined Boys, see, also, a very fine contemporaneous novel that charts similar territories of betrayal and lost innocence in a girls’ school: The Chinese Garden (1962) by Rosemary Manning.


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See also: Sex Lessons from History Unhindered by 20/20 Hindsight