Slaves to Seconal: Droguée Antonia/Anthony and the Fourth Man

How extraordinary to read long after the publication of my In Search of the Fourth Man (Ambit 193, 2008) that, according to Brigid Brophy, Anthony Blunt’s ‘... hospitality was multifarious but his own consumption [of alcohol when dining with him was] nil.’ 

Agreed, Blunt’s tastes were ‘austere’, as Brophy observes, but not in the matter of alcohol. Even when granted hindsight of Blunt’s public exposure as a Soviet spy (1979), Brophy misreads certain other character traits when she writes in 1986: ‘He spoke in a charming upper-class drawl that was neither an affectation nor quite an Edwardian relic, and he seemed forever on the verge of utter exhaustion.’

‘The wine is drawn, it must be drunk.’

‘Utter exhaustion?’ No wonder, when you consider that Blunt’s decades-long dependence on barbiturates (Seconal) was complicated by his alcoholism. Seconal can cause daytime drowsiness but this effect invariably worsens when the drug is taken with alcohol. Blunt would start drinking at 11 o’clock in the morning, and his alcoholism almost certainly inhibited the anaesthetic activity of his brain’s barbiturate receptor sites. These co-existing counteractions would have significantly increased the anxiety neurosis that his chronic alcohol ingestion sustained, a conflict that was manifested in the jaded, unrousable manner I describe as evident when meeting him at the Courtauld Institute.

    I heard the voice – a mellifluous modulated drawl ...  I observed Sir Anthony surreptitiously beneath lowered lashes while I pretended to examine a small maquette on his desk, an ill-carved figure he evidently used as a paperweight among his card index boxes.
    ‘One can see with half an eye it’s a fake,’ were Blunt’s first words.   
    In his own eyes, I thought, there is nothing written he allows you to read.
    They were eyes of palest Cambridge blue, set in the face, I assumed, of a jaded critic nothing could rouse.
    There were wine bottles on the table and he poured me a glass ... 
    Blunt took a sip of wine and his nose wrinkled. That acidic downcast mouth reminded me of a turbot with a lemon slice in it.
    ‘The wine is drawn, it must be drunk,’ he observed sorrowfully.      
    We were drinking a four-year-old Château Mouton Rothschild and it tasted of rotten mushrooms. The label of naked dancing Bacchantes, I later learned, was designed by a noted Surrealist painter and sculptress, which was distinctly odd since Blunt’s biographer tells us that he abhorred le Surréalisme (or ‘Superrealism’, as he referred to it) and, besides, that Bordeaux we drank that night was one of the worst vintages of the last two centuries.

As you’re no doubt aware, Brigid Brophy was married to Sir Michael Levey, Director of the National Gallery in London, so her insights into the intimate domestic arrangements of Anthony Blunt’s top floor flat at the Courtauld Institute in Portman Square are to be relished for their candour. ‘Whenever we went there, the evening was tattered by brief incursions of young men introduced by first name only, who might have been sailors or might of been students of Poussin or were very likely both.’

What then, drove Brigid Antonia Brophy to identify so completely with her host of those tattered evenings as to write a gender-bending satire in which the Anthony she knew became the Antonia of her sapphic alter ego? Answer: ‘What my imagination did, when it picked him up by the scruff of his neck, was change his sex and make him the headmistress of a finishing school for girls. Perhaps it was the hell he had imagined for himself.’

The Two Antonias.

Were any evidence needed that Brigid Brophy, that remarkable Firbankian pastichiste, was possessed of a wit of outshining intellectual brilliancy then the following passage from her girls’ school fantasia, The Finishing Touch (1963), set on the Riviera, would bear out the claim:

    Twenty-six heads bent over the school’s die-stamped paper …  At least thirteen tongue tips protruded in concentration.
     Scurrying pens on the paper made a noise like cicadas.
     Outside, as the sun rose to zenith, cicadas made a noise like scurrying pens.

Just think. Ten years earlier, aged twenty-four, she was writing schoolgirl adventure fiction in my sister’s Collins Magazine for Boys & Girls, a feat of recall that seemingly allows me to pluck ephemera out of the air yet is explained by our crammed family attic, where our childhood favourite reads still remain stowed. 

Quite by chance, a yellowed Collins Annual fell open the other day at the first page of Brophy’s Story of an Old Master and a Very Old Umbrella. It is a strangely resonant text that presents us with an unusual opportunity to observe, in a seemingly innocent text for children, nascent epigrammatic locutions stirring in those transgressive preoccupations that were to shape her idiosyncratic mature prose. The gallery she describes in the yarn, by the way, is pretty certainly the National.

     ‘But it can’t possible rain to-day,’ protested the boy, looking up at the blue sky.
     ‘Aunt Sarah,’ explained his sister, ‘is an alarmist. She probably sees our quiet visit to the gallery as a reckless adventure fraught with perils.’
     ‘I wish it were,’ her brother said gloomily. Then his spirits seemed to brighten. ‘Perhaps it will be,’ he added, and used the umbrella to hail the ’bus.

I shall not spoil the fun for those coming fresh to Brophy’s Bluntian satire, but, as she wrote in her review of Myra Breckinridge, ‘The trans-sex fantasy explodes, I suspect, at a level even deeper than the one from which it liberates the homosexual imprisoned in every heterosexual and also, of course, the heterosexual in every homosexual ...’

Not that these insights would necessarily have conditioned my own perceptions of Blunt’s character, which have been mediated latterly through my studies of graphology; studies that have revealed in his handwriting a hunted, haunted, inherently secretive man whose every pen stroke appears to express the intense anxiety and caution underlying his warped purpose.

So how close was Brophy to the truth of Blunt’s character in 1963, sixteen years before the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures was publicly exposed as a Soviet spy reporting to his masters in the Soviet Intelligence service, the NKVD? Let us, then, examine common features of resemblance in The Finishing Touch where the traits of francophone headmistress Antonia Mount and francophone institute director Anthony Blunt coincide.

Alcohol.

‘My dear ... It’s a night, perhaps, for Chartreuse?’
‘Yellow or green?’ ...
‘...put out both, my dear, if you would ... I am a person,’ said Antonia,‘who all her long life has been unable to decide whether she prefers green or yellow Chartreuse.’

...

Antonia poured a glass of madeira from a decanter strangely stoppered.

Bilingualism.

Non, elle me ferait une scène, Antonia thought, hating, above all things in life, scenes ... I am tired. I am, even, old … I am—utterly—excédée.

Exhaustion.

‘Have you,’ Antonia exhaustedly enquired, ‘had another parcel of instructions from the Palace?’
‘I have, my dear. Such impossible things they seem to require. Their mind seems to run on lavatories.’
‘What,’ asked Antonia, ‘from the Keeper of the Privy this and the Privy that, can one expect ...?’

Fondness for English sailors.

O dreadful, dreadful tropical kit, the white socks long and the white trousers short ... [a] uniform one would expect to see directing the traffic from a white tub in Morocco ... And yet ... there was ... A charm, even, in the absurd uniform, in revealing the knees (could they be made to blush?). Pleasure could be derived from these northern complexions (so easily blushing for one thing) which took so ruddily to southern sun ...

And finally, and devastatingly, here is virtually an entire chapter from Brophy that spookily (in 1963) foresees a future of denied honours (Antonia Mount’s fictive Damehood thwarted, and Anthony Blunt’s very real knighthood stripped from him) ... and, moreover, daringly touches upon the BIG SECRET that MI5 had kept the lid on for more than a decade ...

Treason and Communism.

(Opening paragraph of Chapter XI)
    ‘I say. get me some background on this [Antonia] Mount woman, will you?
    ‘Right. I’ll look through the files. You’ll have to tap the old boy network.’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘Find out if she’s that kind of woman.’
    ‘Right you are. If she’s a communist, you mean?’
    ‘No, no, no, no, no’ (agacé).

 ‘Beneath Brophy‘s sparkling and perfumed prose lay deeper rococo corruption.’ 

Sir Peter Stothard (introduction to 2013 reissue of The Finishing Touch).

Blunt’s zigzagging signature is composed of lots of sharp points, so he is likely to have been waspish in his comments. The sharp angle on the A shows hardness and probing.  This seems to be rather resentful writing, there are lots of sharp angles, which means that he possibly took things personally and saw slights where none was intended. And note, also, his arrow-shaped flourish is pointing Leftward.
Evidently, there was strong need in the signatory to see his name much sharpened, and his signature gives the whetted edge to what was hereditarily Blunt.

(From In Search of the Fourth Man, 2008, Ambit 193.)

For further remarks recording Blunt’s views on Social Realism in art, see . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/sussex-exodus-of-altisonant-frogs.html
and also some reflections on Anthony Blunt’s psychometric profile from Intelligence sources:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.html
and also more of Brigid Brophy’s penetrating insights may be read in the footnote to:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/06/maimed-hero-frankenstein-exhumed-tragic.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)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html  

and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

The Humbert in the Park: More Palimpsestic Wordplay? (Part 2.)

I have no doubt they’ll be many who’ll regard a niggling footnote to that schoolroom classic, The Hunchback in the Park (1941), as the depths of bad taste in Dylan Thomas’s centennial year.

Sorry. Profoundly sorry. But it’s that very centenary that’s prompted my rereading of Kensington Gardens in War-Time (1939-1940) by Humbert Wolfe to be again struck (after more than thirty years) by the significant concordances one can draw between the earlier poem sequence and Thomas’s published poem revised in the year that followed (1941) from a tentative outline first sketched in 1932. 

The English, who as a rule disdain ungovernable emotion stirred when the red mist is behind the eyes, are wary of the hwyl of portentous sonorities. (For instance, ‘the heydays of his eyes’ in Fern Hill is more soggy journalese than fresh coinage, in my view, and has a slackness that diminishes tauter lines.) On balance, we English cleave towards Miltonic cut glass in diction.

That same native wariness I confess must have bothered me three decades ago for I find in my copy of Kensington Gardens in War-Time certain pencilled underlinings that point to eerie correlations in Thomas’s later text with the power to disturb me even today. 

Lest we forget, it should be remarked that both poems were completed in the foreshadowing of Britain’s Darkest Hour, so a mood of national crisis – quickened by martial energy – unsurprisingly pervades (in varying degrees) the texture of both works, with neither shrinking from the light cast by the ‘perverted science’ of Nazism.

Unthinkable traducement? Not so! Because it is my belief that these sorrowing war-time poems by Wolfe (his last, for he died in January 1940) and the Hunchback by Thomas share a common thread and, more than that, an affinity with the victims of Hitler’s genocidal policies ... Juden, Kommunisten, Behinderte ... the Handicapped.

Examination of the post-1940 additions and enhancements to Thomas’s Hunchback draft from his 1932 Notebook (first composed when he was aged eighteen) demonstrate uncanny similarities of figurations, which derive it is my belief from harrowing Press reports of the oppressed Untermenschen when refracted through the lens of imagist poets who had come to regard the urban Park as a sinister microcosm of Europe at war.

Dylan Thomas’s Significant Afterthoughts.

Note : the lines by Thomas quoted below are post-1940 additions (i.e. added after the publication of Kensington Gardens in War-Time).

Page 4 (Kensington Gardens 1940) : ‘The ships that sail/the Round Pond are ..
Line 10 (Hunchback 1941) :  In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship

Page 10 (Kensington Gardens 1940) : … and Sealyhams/tugging their leads/until they nearly/strangle.
Lines 11/12 (Hunchback 1941) : Slept at night in a dog kennel/But nobody chained him up.

Pages 19 and 24 (Kensington Gardens 1940) : Between the oak-tree and the elm … the power/to make the ash/a single flower,
Lines 32/33 (Hunchback 1941) : Made … a woman figure without fault/Straight as a young elm

There are other figurations of a similar concordance too numerous to cite here in this modest conspectus.

Yet, to me, the most ominous affinities between these two works, separated by a year in composition (re. Thomas’s amendments) are to be found on page 14 of Kensington Gardens in War-Time where Wolfe, a Jew by birth, points to an émigré, a woman seated in the park, to make explicit the transformation of gardens from pleasure grounds into a place of torment for the Untermenschen ...

Nobody thought the
worse of her …
although she sat
all day and read
a German paper,
where it said …
how they killed her
children in the dark
corner of a Berlin
Park.

Compare, then, lines 21 and 22 of Hunchback in the Park 1941 …

[Boys] Laughing when he shook his paper
Hunchbacked in mockery

In my opinion, in any scholarly consideration of Dylan Thomas’s beefed up adjustments to a poem drafted a decade earlier, the Zeitgeist swirling above London in 1941 is not fully reckoned with.  Thomas’s introduction of martial elements (‘the groves were blue with sailors’) and images of captivity (‘After the locks and chains’) were never present in his original draft, although Wolfe makes plain, in countless examples of new ways of seeing, that the familiar urban landscape of the park is to be regarded as a potential prison, or martial compound threatened by enemy occupation or evacuation (‘All along the Broad Walk/listen how the soldiers talk’).   

Palimpsestic precursor?

I darkly suspect there is an unconscious absorption of many of Wolfe’s themes into the rejigged Hunchback of 1941. For Thomas, these emanate from a prescient cycle of poems composed by a dying Jew (albeit a naturalised Englishman and convert to the Church of England). In Wolfe’s foresight so early in WW2, sensible to the shock waves of the Holocaust when many were deaf to the warnings, he resembles a fellow assimilated Jew, Brian Howard, a precocious poet, who foresaw, long before most of his contemporaries, the dangers of fascism and was one of the first to denounce Hitler’s Nazism as organised barbarism of the vilest kind.

As Wolfe writes on the final page of his Kensington Gardens in War-Time, his beloved park in the blackout closes its gates on a requiem for lost innocence …

Here, for example, is a Park
clearly intended for the dark.

This foreboding mood with its inevitable rhyme-scheme is irresistible … and one that Thomas was to discover only AFTER Wolfe’s Kensington Gardens in War-Time had been published.   

Footnote 16 October 2014

I forgot to mention that, according to a recent correspondent of mine, Thomas wrote a pastiche of a Humbert Wolfe poem in his comic novel The Death of the King’s Canary (written circa 1940), which certainly is additional evidence that Thomas was intimately acquainted with Wolfe’s work. Further examination of Thomas’s correspondence also reveals that in 1933, in a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, he wrote, ‘. . . I have the collected poems of Manley Hopkins, Stephen Crane, Yeats, de la Mare, Osbert Sitwell, Wilfred Owen, W. H. Auden, & T. S. Eliot; volumes of poetry by Aldous Huxley, Sacheverell & Edith Sitwell,  Edna St. Vincent Millay, D. H. Lawrence, Humbert Wolfe . . .

Albertine Einstein Defies Helen Dunmore to Defend the Pluperfect.

Albertine Einstein, the virtuoso Time Traveller, celebrated for dancing effortlessly through Temporal Grammar, was astonished to read a denunciation of the Pluperfect tense by novelist Helen Dunmore ... a tense regarded by Helen as a form of writing too difficult to grasp for fragile novice scribblers cursed with the infirmitas feminei sexus.  

Albertine is versatile. Teleportation through the tenses is her medium. Even now she IS foreseeing that moment in the future when she WILL BE moved to recall with a shudder the occasion a decade earlier when she WAS first struck by Helen’s indefensible attack on what is possibly the temporal hoofer’s most practical narrative tense. 

Where?  When?

Quick fix for wannabe chickliterati.

Winter/Spring 2004 issue of MsLexia* magazine, page 40, Interview with Helen Dunmore. If this misnamed ‘Magazine for Women Who Write’ ever endorsed its own notion that women are pathologically disadvantaged by gender ‘from becoming successful authors’, then Helen Dunmore’s renunciation of the Pluperfect as too mystifying for Women-of-Very-Little-Brain and, in consequence, redundant, must take the cake. 

I write this with regret, and with a sense of betrayal, since two of my published contributions were singled out for generous notice (MsLexia supplements edited by Kate Clancy and Sara Maitland). Nevertheless, here is Helen’s let-out clause for the wannabe chickliterati she evidently dismisses as feeble-minded:

Helen Dunmore [explains the MsLexia interviewer] ... finds the present tense very useful for writing history. ‘You can move around in time very well from the starting point … the present tense allows you to maintain that sense of uncertainty.’ And, as the interviewer remarks, ‘It also allows you to write flashback without the clumsy “had had”s of the pluperfect.’  The Dunmore Method is then reaffirmed: ‘Use the present tense and first person if possible.’

The promulgation of this quick-fix childish formula for writing texts with the intention of their being categorised as adult literature strikes one as a stunt of jaw-dropping effrontery. 

Write in the permanent present tense?  Such a style, Albertine believes, is like being trapped inside the amnesiac’s Eternal Sunlight of the Spotless Mind with no syntactical mechanism for reverie. 

‘The Screaming “Hadhads” is a condition many writers fear,’ laughs Albertine, ’but I have never suffered from it. It’s a myth! I just don’t buy it. I never bought it. And I will not be buying it in the future.’

And, anyhow, Albertine asks, is mastering the Pluperfect so impossibly daunting?

The Gnomic Present Endures Alongside the Othered Past.

Albertine says, ‘As you know, in movies there is the weirdest rarely used device of a Double Flashback, where one Flashback dissolves to yet another Flashback earlier in time. My pondering this peculiarity prompted me to write to three eminent professional grammarians with two specimens of the pluperfect to ask them if the extracts set off any alarm bells.’

Albertine wrote:

Here are two examples of pluperfect-type expressions of narrative recalled from the past in the past tense.

Helen, who would very much have liked to know who the masked chorusgirl was who was running away so fast, said nothing. [Correct?]

Helen, who would very much have liked to have known who the masked chorusgirl was who was running away so fast, said nothing. [Incorrect?]

Do you think, please, the correct example is slowly becoming defunct in favour of the more longwinded incorrect version?

Results? 

Guru-Grammarian-Gamma writes:

No opinion about what might be becoming defunct.  But I think I would say both versions are grammatically correct, and they have very subtly distinct meanings.

Guru-Grammarian-Beta writes:

I agree with Guru-Gamma. A Subtle difference in meaning. From which time aspect is each sentence uttered is the question; no comment on ‘defunct’ or not, both are still viable.

Guru-Grammarian-Alpha writes: 

I suspect the two versions will continue to co-exist – just as the gnomic present (Galileo believed that the earth revolves around the sun) endures alongside the past (Galileo believed that the earth revolved around the sun).

‘So there we have it,’ Albertine grins slyly. ‘Guru-Alpha asserts that this paradox of temporality, then, can be applied to the Pluperfect, and the correctitude of the two examples can prevail in a co-existent state. However, your closer reading of Guru-Beta will reveal this grammarian to be closest to the truth!’

A bell rang three times backstage. The orchestra struck up an overture. ‘Excuse me!’ Albertine flexed her virtuosic toes to ease any tenseness. ‘That’s my cue!’ Then the Dancer to the Music of Time was gone.

*For my views on MsLexia’s sickly, self-pitying title, see: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/i-have-rendezvous-with-dread-at.html