Saturday, 14 December 2024

Found! The Urtext of ‘The Plague’. Camus and Boy’s Own Paper 1936.

‘Come on, my only friend in all the world,’ said his masterful young companion, once more getting into his stride. ‘The waves are calling us to splash in the moonlight, my friend.’ 
 
With the slippers tied to his feet, the English boy followed his school-friend across the lonely downs. It was a glorious summer night after the gruelling heat of the day, and beyond the discomfort of gorse and bramble occasionally scratching his ankles, he was enjoying the adventure, not allowing himself to dwell on the fact that it was a forbidden pleasure, and might lead to unpleasant penalties. 
When at length they reached the shelving limestone cliffs leading to a sheltered cove where the school often came to bathe, he had forgotten all his fears in the present delight of a midnight swim. 
The waves were merely lapping on the shore, and the sea looked like smooth pewter under the light of the sickle moon. 
‘It’s a gorgeous idea of yours,’ he said as he flung off his dressing-gown and pyjamas, ‘but I notice you didn’t bring bathing-togs.’ 
His companion looked anxiously out over the waters. ‘There is more in this than a mere swim, my friend,’ he said slowly as he undressed. ‘All is as arranged, except your presence.’
The English boy scarcely heard his chum’s words; he was running down the beach, longing for the cooling water. 
A glorious quarter of an hour followed; the pair dived in and out of the waves like porpoises, ducked one another under the water, had races seaward, and acted as if they had no cares in the world. 
Now and again, however, an anxious look would overcast his school-friend’s face when he peered out across the night waters. 
And just once, when a strand of seaweed whipped across his back, the boy had qualms and wondered if he would be swished on his return to Cotmore Monastic School. At length the English boy, who had been first in the water, landed for a rub-down preparatory to dressing. A handkerchief was his only towel, and as he stood there and glanced at his scanty clothes waiting to be donned, he felt it must be all a dream and that no respectable Cotmorian should be there on the beach at this midnight hour.
Extract from The Midnight Flit from Cotmore Monastic School
by Sercombe Griffin
The Boy’s Own Paper October 1936
 
In reading this passage, discerning readers may experience a frisson of recognition, noting the curious similarity in mood between Griffin’s schoolboy yarn and that memorable account of a moonlit dip in Part 4 of La Peste (The Plague, 1947, Albert Camusexistential classic), for in each case a bond of male friendship is overshadowed by an unspoken menace yet the bathers are consumed by ’a strange happiness’ (plein d'un étrange bonheur) and forget all their ‘fears in the present delight of a midnight swim.’
Devant eux, la nuit était sans limites. Rieux . . . était plein d'un étrange bonheur . . . Ils se déshabillèrent. Rieux plongea le premier. Froides d'abord, les eaux lui parurent tièdes quand il remonta. Au bout de quelques brasses, il savait que la mer, ce soir-là, était tiède, de la tiédeur des mers d'automne qui reprennent à la terre la chaleur emmagasinée pendant de longs mois.
Before them, the night was boundless. Rieux . . . was full of a strange happiness . . . They [Rieux and Tarrou] undressed. Rieux dived in first. The water at first was cold then seemed warm to him when he resurfaced. After a few strokes, he knew the sea that evening was warm, with the warmth of autumn seas that repossess from the land the heat stored up for long summer months.

A phantom archetype?
The ‘present delight’ of existence can be, of course, an unsought benison granted by momentary immersion in that which is wholly phenomenological, and le bain de l’amitié  in La Peste is an episode demonstrably in high contrast with the novel’s stark exploration of free-will tested by an humanitarian tragedy in thrall to a tyranny beyond the control of the two idealists of Camus’ novel – Bernard Rieux and Jean Tarrou – under harrowing conditions interpreted by some literary critics to be analogous to the terror of the Nazi Occupation of France.

But critics may rightly question how a French novel, conceived in the early 1940s, could take as its precursor an English schoolboy adventure serialised in The Boy’s Own Paper of 1936? Too preposterous? Too improbable?

Well, readers might care to consider the fact that in 1936 (the year of the schoolboy yarn’s publication) Camus toured Austria, the Czech Republic and Silesia in the company of a close friend, high school English teacher Yves Bourgeois and his wife. It is known that Camus could read English though spoke it with less facility so the possibility remains that a copy of the Boy’s Own Paper could well have been instructive to this professeur d’Anglais, since subscriptions to Anglophone readers were worldwide. Indeed, Sercombe Griffin had his own regular subscription to the B.O.P. when he was posted to Burma in the 1900s. Later on he would write stories for the paper himself.

In short, then, are we content to know a phantom archetype of Camus’ strain of Phenomenological Existentialism existed in the decade preceding the writing of his modern myth?

If you haven’t the foggiest idea?
Certainly the contents of the Boy’s Own Paper of 1936 point towards thoughtful guidance for the growing boy as to how he must act to rediscover in the face of immanent nihility a hominid’s natural instinct towards order and meaning . . . in fact, a nursery primer of existential conduct for English schoolboys.
 
In the 1936 B.O.P. issue Camus could have read a short item, When You Get Lost, on page 13. It’s an austere unforgiving creed of self-reliance reminding the individual of the intensity of existence when under duress: ‘Of course, if you haven’t the foggiest idea where you want to go, you must expect to become a fog victim . . . When caught in a fog you tend to walk in circles; but this can be avoided if the direction is known. On a foggy day, by placing the blade of a knife in an upright position on the thumb-nail, a shadow is cast which indicated the position of the sun. This is more easily detected by means of raising the blade of the knife slightly up and down.’  
 
Fog victim as precursor of the Outsider?
And, yes, apart from these English foreshadowers of Camus’ vision we can add another significant English rival to this Nobel-prize-winning writer, praised by the Swedish Academy for his ‘famous’ novel (L’Étranger 1942), who ‘represents also the philosophical movement called Existentialism’ and whose ‘incessant affirmation of the absurdity of the human condition is no sterile negativism.’

Published a year earlier in 1941, Hangover Square, by Sussex-born novelist and dramatist Patrick Hamilton, decidedly qualifies him for candidature as the protean maker of our own groundbreaking mid-20th Century English existential classic, with the form of the genre corresponding to defining components identified by literary theorists: Nothingness (check); Anomie (check); Sociopathy (check); Absurdity (check); Paranoia (check); Colourlessness (check); and more . . .
 
Hamilton’s sociopathic antihero and killer is George Henry Bone: ‘His mind was in a mist. He had to concentrate to think, to stand properly on his legs . . .  in fact he could trace it back as far as his early boyhood . . . what he called his “dead” moods, in which he could do nothing ordinarily, think of nothing ordinarily, could not attend to his lessons.’  
 
Camus’ sociopathic antihero and killer is Meursault: ‘J’ai eu l’impression que tout devenait comme une incolore òu je trouvais le vertige . . . J’ai souvent pensé alors que si l’on m’avait fait vivre dans un tronc d’arbre sec, sans autre occupation que de regarder la fleur du ciel au-dessus de ma tête, je m’y serais peu à peu habitué.’
 
(‘I felt as if everything was becoming colourless and I found myself dizzyingly unstable . . . I often thought then that if I had been made to live in a dead tree trunk, with no other occupation than to watch the heavenly blue above my head, I would have gradually become accustomed to it.’)
 
Anomic godlessness and bitter rivalry
What’s more, the comparisons that may be made between Camus and Hamilton are even more acute when you consider both were adherents of Communism as young men, so had flirted with ideologues espousing the secularisation of society under the rigours of anomic godlessness, which undoubtedly accounts for the polemical features of both these works of fiction.

And, as a footnote to this perceived contest between claimants to the earliest prototypical novel of Phenomenological Existentialism that affirms ‘the absurdity of the human condition’, let us remind ourselves of the case of Georges Simenon who, on the announcement of Camus’ Nobel prize, was riven with bitter envy since his own novel of the same year (1942) La veuve Couderc (aka The Widow, and Ticket of Leave) was judged by many shrewd literary critics as a more profound work. The similarities are striking: an amoral antihero who kills without scruple, a drifter with nothing to lose, practically penniless, roaming aimlessly in a hostile world. A stylistic tour de force.
 
Simenon’s rage and violent response to the Nobel Committee’s oversight, on the evidence of his own superb novel, is entirely unsurprising and his resentment is to be shared.
 
Can one attempt to say more to express the sting of these injustices?

Great Scott!’ exclaimed the English explorer when he was pipped at the post by Roald Amundsen in his race to the South Pole.  
.
 
For exponents of unadorned prose see 
Nobel-prize-winners for literature here –
 
See also:
The Utility of Art as a Social Function according to Heinrich Böll
 

Foreshadowers of anomic antiheroes?




Tuesday, 10 December 2024

Found! The TRUE reason for the decline of titled privilege.

So Death Duties were NOT the undoing of landed aristocracy –

It is not generally known that Wilde, by fitting the duchesses in his comedies with epigrammic minds, contributed to the decline of the privileged class in this country  . . .

Duchesses in the ’nineties led lives of misery because Wilde had accustomed the public to believe that words of wit and even of wisdom incessantly fell from their lips, and a number of these unhappy women, almost distracted by ambition to live up to their reputation, hired impoverished and unscrupulous journalists to supply them a dozen assorted epigrams every day during the London season. The result of this subterfuge was the duchesses began to talk like leading articles, and have never since been able to hold up their heads.’

St. John Ervine,
Life and Letters
March 1935.

Monday, 2 December 2024

Wake.

                  Midday
                                  at a turn
                           in the road

                                                               a reaping machine

                              unexpectedly crosses the highway from field to field

                                                                    and halts
                                             the funeral parade. 

                                                                                  Hot, still air
                                                    is an amber to hold
                                                      dark mourners

                                                                who sit in their cars
                            and devote this unconscionable moment

                                                                                                      to enjoying

                                                                                                                   the sun.

 

See also: A visit recalled – Dame Edith Sitwell
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-visit-recalled-dame-edith-sitwell.html

See also: Variation on a Theme by Edna St. Vincent Millay
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/variation-on-theme-by-edna-st-vincent.html

See also: Premature embalmment of anti-art
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/04/dotty-premature-embalmment-of-anti-art.html

See also: Poésie trouvée, the unsought text
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/colour-blind.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/poesie-trouvee-unsought-text.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)

 

Sunday, 1 December 2024

An Elementary Sampler of the Psyche.

Superego
 Come into the garden, Maud,
 I am here at the gate alone;
 And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
 And the musk of the roses blown.  
 
Ego
I am here at the gate alone. 

Id

Maud! Into the garden! COME!

.

Contrarily, Sigmund Freud's wire-frame spectacles
were prescribed for far-sightedness so we must
assume that he saw quotidian distant phenomena
with greater ease than when studying the record of
the Ancient World up close. Freud’s prescription is
R: +5.00 -0.75 x 20 L: +7.25 -1.25 x 68
(Lenses tested by optician in 2013.)

See also: A Parallel Universe of Freudian Terms
 
See also: The Murder of a Doctrinaire Freudian by Her Analysand Nephew 

Wednesday, 27 November 2024

Vignette 4: Twenty-five words

 ‘When the taunts of my enemy repeat I am nowhere,’ replied the blinded captive, ‘such denials insist I live to affirm: “I am now here.” ’
 
A naked maiden, mouth parted in the breathlessness of desire, 
instinctively defends herself against the closing of her eyes by
probing fingers that seek to prolong her dream of her phantom lover.
(Love Blinded, 1884, by Donato Barcaglia, 1849-1930.)
 
See also Vignette 1

Monday, 25 November 2024

Monday, 18 November 2024

Deposition of a Rebel from the Cross

Since, in each case of my lantern slides this evening, the image is a species of ideological propaganda let us compare and contrast the exhibits for intended (or possibly unintended) effect. 

Exhibit 1: What do we see? The anti-englische propaganda is reproduced here from Sozialismus gegen Plutokratie ([National] Socialism vs. Plutocracy, 1940) a product of the ministry of Dr Goebbels, Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, who in his youth had considered the Catholic priesthood. Does it not resemble The Deposition of Christ from the Cross? (See Exhibit 2.)

Exhibit 1
A demonstrator is removed.
Note subliminal black armbands mourning the dead configured by the black-gloved hands of the British police officers. Inside those gloves we may imagine fists hardened in sacramental vinegar squeezed from a pugilist’s sponge.

We cannot escape the concordances that link the imagery with the conventions of devotional art that depict the Thirteenth Station of the Cross as the stark, unconscionable indignity of a man reduced to vermin to be rubbed out as Enemy of the State.

Exhibit 2
A demonstrator is removed.

The ‘Compare-and-contrast page-spread is a technique of Photojournalism stolen from the British Lilliput men’s magazine (founded 1937), which suggests a further level of propagandist subtlety, never mind the nostrums of Goebbels’s partner-in-crime, Reich Minister for Church Affairs, Hanns Kerrl, who in 1937 pronounced: ‘There has now risen a new authority as to what Christ and Christianity is. This new authority is Adolph Hitler.’

Exhibit 3
‘The Cruel Ones.’

 So . . . Wem gehört die Zukunft? Sozialismus gegen Plutokratie. (Who Owns the Future? [National] Socialism against Plutocracy.) Are the concordances I find imaginary or is there substance in my suspicions?  You can see here how page 74 (Exhibit 1) and facing page 75 (Exhibit 3) are images staged for contrast, side-by-side. So let us compare the diptych of ‘The Darling Bobbies [British policemen] lead an unemployed demonstrator away’ with its facing text of calculatedly nudge-nudge knowingness,‘The “cruel” SS helps two girls who want to see the Führer.’  The cynicism of Goebbels has the bitter taste of wine mixed with gall.

Certainly, a captive rebel – pinioned to evoke crucified limbs and hauled off to his Golgotha (‘Place of the Skull’) – can be considered to possess a sort of commonality with the ‘Death’s Head’ unit on the opposite page (their Totenkopf insignia may be discerned above their peaked caps) if we accept the birth of another myth . . . the apotheosis of their fair-headed Mädchen as goddesses destined to be the Aryan race’s progenitresses to magnify the thousand-year Reich.

Any resemblances end, however, when we compare the duty of unarmed policemen to serve British democracy – bound in law courts by oaths sworn to Almighty God – with the sacred oath of the pistol-packing praetorian guard, the dagger-wielding SS, who swore by God to render unconditional obedience to one god-like man, Adolf Hitler, the self-proclaimed Führer of the German Reich.

The contradistinction of the two cultures, as perceived by Dr Goebbels, may be examined on the double-page spread of  Exhibit 4 (pp. 18 and 19). Apparently, the combined might of the Eton and Harrow Officer Training Corps was no match for Hitler Youth on the march. (Winston Churchill was an Old Harrovian.)

Exhibit 4
 
Degenerate Art.
Yes, the sly subliminal imagery of Goebbelsian propaganda, intent on inversions of perception for the sake of the id-satisfying, sensation-seeking, cheap thrill, still remains the stock-in-trade of soi-disant shock-jock artists even today. Ironically, the Nazi Party’s 1937 exhibition of Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst), assembled to condemn ‘cultural degeneracy’, included any number of surrealists, whose founding credo also celebrated the freeing of the unconscious mind with (ostensibly) inconsequential juxterpositions of imagery devised to provoke a viscerality of response. And isn’t the visceral response of the herd the precise aim of propagandists the world over?
 
I append a centre-spread (Exhibit 5) published in my father’s rather frayed copy of Lilliput men’s magazine, a 1940 dyptych from the year of Dr Goebbels’s masterwork of parodic agitprop. 
 
Exhibit 5
 
Shellshocked chimpanzees.
Somehow, I am reminded of the words of the revered Russian WW2 photographer who was tempted to visit Berlin Zoo on May 2 1945 to view ‘. . . two dead SS men next to a cage of shellshocked chimpanzees. That might have made a picture, but I was after something bigger. I wanted the Reichstag.’

So, in event, Yevgeni Khaldei braved his way to the top of the Reichstag under fire to take the celebrated shot that made his name: the flying of the Red banner of the Hammer and Sickle over the smoking ruins of Berlin. (Maybe it’s instructive to note that Yevgeni’s first choice of subject was a surrealist incongruity that promised a self-indulgent viscerality of response, from which we might draw the conclusion that the lure of voyeuristic sensationalism is inescapably a refuge of meretricious art, yet a documentary photographer of true greatness, as a witness to a genocidal epoch, resists the cheap thrill.) 
 
Who Owns the Future? 1940
[National] Socialism against Plutocracy.
 
Sunday Best.
Yevgeny Khaldei, soviet photographer:  ‘ [In 1945] I was in Vienna.
We were closing on the square in front of the parliament. 
This senior Nazi had come with his family, all in their Sunday best.
He shot his wife and his son, but his daughter did not want to die.
So he pinned her on the bench and shot her.
Then he killed himself as we arrived.’
 
See also: Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast.

and:
Rates of Exchange: ‘Ici. Français assassinés par les Boches.’