A Roundelay for Archducal Dylan.

I wonder whether you’ve noticed that the centenary next June (28 June 1914) of the cataclysmic death of an archduke (Franz Ferdinand of Austria) will be concurrent with the centennial of the birth of another notable honouree of an arch dukedom, namely Dylan Thomas*, Duke of Gweno … an arch ennoblement indeed.

But by whom so archly ennobled? If you have not heard of the King of Redonda, then I should explain it is an invention of M. P. Shiel (1865-1947), celebrated author of The Purple Cloud, a landmark of early British dystopian science fiction.

According to the current pretender to the Redondan throne, eminent Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marías, Redonda [is]:

… a minuscule island in the Antilles of which, at the age of fifteen, Shiel himself (a native of the neighbouring and much larger island of Montserrat) had been crowned king in a festive naval ceremony in 1880, at the express desire of the previous monarch, his father, a local Methodist preacher who was also a shipowner and had bought the island years before, though no one knows from whom, given that its only inhabitants at the time were the boobies that populated it and a dozen men who gathered the birds’ excrement to make guano.

It was within the gift of the past kings of Redonda, Marías affirms, to make ‘…dukes or admirals of various writers who were his friends or whom he admired…’, a patronage that included the elevation of Dylan Thomas to Duke of Gweno in 1947 (he proclaimed his fealty in drunken doggerel), a lineage of patronage that extends up to the present day, with a number of contemporary literary luminaries receiving preferment to aristocratic titles from King Xavier, Marías himself. 

An Awful Solitude. A Vagrant King.

But this minuscule account of mine of a minuscule micronation (named Redonda by Columbus for its roundness) is no more than a prelude, I confess, to a minor footnote I wish to add to the Redondan myth, which Shielian scholars may have overlooked; I cannot be sure.

I can be sure, though, of the fact that from my great-uncle I inherited a number of his bound volumes of the Strand Magazine, which in my childhood I read avidly for the Sherlock Holmes stories first published there in the 1890s, read also by my great-uncle when in his early teens at the time of publication. (His wife, my great-aunt, is presently in good health at the venerable age of one-hundred-and-seven).

So that is how, in my own early teens, I stumbled across a remote island resembling Redonda ... The Eagle’s Crag, described by M P Shiel in Volume 8, published in 1894.

Written when Shiel was 29 years old, it’s a more romantic conception of Redonda, I think. Significantly, Shiel also mentions in this story an ‘old Babylonish king, wet with the dew of Heaven’.  He means Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 5:21). I note that The Great King: The Madness of Nebuchadnezzar was a story of his published seventeen years later in 1911. So it was a leitmotif of a vagrant king he sustained well into the 20th Century.

So is this fictional isle of 1894 an evocation of Shiel’s island kingdom? Judge for yourself from this extract from The Eagle’s Crag: 

… the Eagle's Crag ! This rock stands some miles from the mainland. The old fishermen of Liguria and Etruria in the palmy days of the Roman Republic called it Rupes Aquilina, because of the curious configuration of the summit, which resembles an eagle’s head and beak. And the old name still clings to it. lt rises in awful solitude sheer out of the sea to a height of near two thousand feet. It is shaped somewhat like one half of a cone slit down the middle – quite flat on one side, the other forming a convex surface. On the convex side, the south, not only is life possible, but a few poor men and women actually exist there. This south side has a regular steep incline upward to the very summit, and a bold and skilful climber may even reach the top; but once there, the brain grows dizzy to look down, on the north side, on a smooth wall of rock, falling away from the feet, not perpendicularly, but with a marked inward slant. Those who have so climbed and looked down, by stretching far out over the flat eagle’s beak, will tell you that it is a sight full of terror, making the heart sick. In all this wall of rock there is one break, and only one – a horizontal ledge, three feet broad, which runs right across it at a height of rather more than three-quarters of the rock’s height from the bottom. Quite near the end of the beak on that side a few shrubs grow.

In my personal view, this description is a psychical projection of the island Shiel once knew in his youth, transplanted by a fictionist to the coastal waters of the Ligurian Sea, some way offshore from the province of La Spezia.  

The illustration in the Strand of 1894 by A. Pearse perfectly captures the sombre mood of the vertiginous cliffs that rise on Rodonda’s leeward flank.

The Last Man and Woman in the World.

That the influence of Shiel’s last-man-last-woman fantasy, The Purple Cloud (admired by H. P. Lovecraft), continues to pervade the works of 21st Century writers of fiction is evidenced by my own barely perceptible nod to its meta-ethical survivalist message in my fiction, Lovesong in Invisible Ink, published in Listen Close to Me (2011, Salt), in which the narrator relates key episodes from her on-off love affair with Vivian, an army intelligence officer:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

About this time, Vivian was sent by the Rhine Army on a language course at the Intelligence School at Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps and then transferred to the Special Weapons Training Centre in the same town, in the shadow of Kofelberg’s crags, to learn how to fight in an atomic war.
    ‘How strange to think,’ Vivian once remarked, ‘that, as we rode the perilous cable cars high above Oberammergau, below us my fellow pupils were playing air-to-ground atomic war games.’
    He’d then paused and mused awhile and said, not so inconsequentially: ‘Of course, directly after the war, the Oberammergau passion play was still unregenerate religious bigotry. The crowds were still shouting the Jews were accursed, with blood on their hands and on the hands of their children’s children. Rather small beer, y’know,’ he drawled, ‘in the scale of things, when you’re in your host’s backyard learning how to attack the enemy with tactical atomic weapons for the total annihilation of entire continents.’
    Vivian’s unique meta-ethical viewpoint had been demonstrated to me very memorably at the height of the Cold War.
    We’d been sailing the Solent in his ketch off Cowes one July when, in the blink of an eye, Portsmouth’s naval dockyard exploded in a vast mushroom cloud that grew rapidly into a gigantic pillar of rolling white smoke, and small shards of metal and wood rained down on us.
    I truly thought World War Three had broken out.
    ‘Well,’ Vivian murmured imperturbably at the helm, turning his back on this apocalyptic vision to examine the glowing tip of his cigar, ‘when the balloon goes up I believe it’s incumbent on the last man and woman in the world to mate.’ 
    Then the ash of his cigar broke and fell, and he trimmed the sails and lashed the tiller to a course he’d set for Deauville.
    So we sailed calmly on; he the new Adam and I the new Eve, and we did not leave that tiny double berth forecabin until hours later when the skyline had darkened and the horizon was quite empty.
    We sensed the sea rather than saw it. Gazing into the firmament, we lay on the deck in each other’s arms, and lost all sense of time as slowly the sky seemed to draw us up into it; and so we drifted out in a state of drowsy contemplation towards morning.
    Only much later did Vivian learn that eight ammunition barges at the Royal Naval Armament Depot had been blown up by saboteurs.

That last (factual) ‘reveal’ only goes to point up the methodological maxim I have adopted as a fictionist: A dutiful writer of suspense does not invent; a dutiful writer of suspense just makes surprising connections.

*Hit-or-Miss Scattergun Methodology a Wasteful Virtue.

My earlier postings on Dylan Thomas make clear, I trust, my high regard for his true lyric tongue, a god-given free-flowing crystal fount that few poets – in their youth – can lay claim to. 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-humbert-in-park-more-palimpsestic.html 
However, his ‘free verse’ methodology as an eighteen-year-old poet is considered suspect by perhaps the greatest scholar of his work, Professor Ralph Maud, who quotes Thomas's advice to a schoolfellow:

Why not, for a change, fire off round after round of ammunition from any old gun you can get hold of. You'll miss hundreds of times, but you’re bound to get a bull’s eye a lot of times, too. You'll find the hit-or-miss, the writing with no plot, technique will help you considerably in loosening your mind and in getting rid of those stifling memories which may, unless you are careful, get in the way of your literary progress. (February 1933.)

As Professor Maud cautions the impulsive, who may be inclined to emulate this method, ‘There is no other time when he seems more to have exhibited this kind of wasteful virtue, to have obeyed his instinct to “write, write, regardless of everything.” ’

Retail Therapy: Navigating Uncharted Oxford Street with Opium Eaters.

So rarely these days do I visit London, or travel on the Tube, that I am unable to admit to the hypersensitive alienation effect said to be experienced by the mimosa-like sentient plant forms that invariably populate the dramatis personae of Iris Murdoch’s novels. 

(As has been asserted by any number of her devotees, many of London’s tube stations become, for Murdoch, distinct characters in her novels, ‘… each unique, the sinister brightness of Charing Cross, the mysterious gloom of Regent’s Park, the dereliction of Mornington Crescent, the futuristic melancholy of Moorgate, the monumental ironwork of Liverpool Street …’ not forgetting the art nouveau and the Baroque features that distinguish Gloucester Road and the Barbican.)

No.

The psychological distancing of the alienated ‘Undergrounder’, described by Iris Murdoch in her fiction, does not trouble me, though I do truly empathise with the now fashionable notion of literary psychogeography of which she is a more than proficient practitioner.

No. My proficiency is not of such a high order, because any psychogeographical musings that may consume me on my infrequent visits to the linen department of Selfridges in London’s Oxford Street are solely coloured by my memory of Thomas De Quincey’s recollections of the months he spent from 1802 to 1803 roaming that great thoroughfare as a homeless runaway … specifically, the following psychogeographical passage in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater that concerns his teenage friend, the prostitute Ann. 

The Great Mediterranean of Oxford Street.

Yes. The tearful parting at Great Titchfield Street of seventeen-year-old Thomas from Ann (friendless, homeless, and about fifteen years of age) succeeds in warping my consciousness as soon as I emerge from the tube at Oxford Circus:

‘… when I kissed her at our final farewell, she put her arms about my neck, and wept, without speaking a word. I hoped to return in a week at furthest, and I agreed with her that on the fifth night from that, and every night afterwards, she should wait for me, at six o'clock, near the bottom of Great Titchfield Street, which had been our customary haven, as it were, of rendezvous, to prevent our missing each other in the great Mediterranean of Oxford Street.

So there you have it … the great Mediterranean of Oxford Street … the dream region that I simply cannot resist navigating according to my own private homing instinct with, as you can see, Bond Street located in the hinterland of Tunisia, Selfridges somewhere between the Gibralta of Marble Arch and the Marseilles of Portman Square, while Fitzrovia occupies the Balkans ... and my favourite watering hole, the Red Bar at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane, is refuge from the Atlantic swells of Hyde Park as it extends a welcome from Tangiers through Casablanca to Marrakesh.

Needless to add, the omphalos – the navel of Oxford Street, Oxford Circus – must be Crete.

 

(Note June 2023: Debenhams of Oxford Street sadly closed in May 2021. Debenhams was founded seven years before De Quincey’s birth.)

The Ghost of Orphan Ann.

Of course, we can estimate the cost of a prostitute in 1803 because De Quincey gave Ann about twenty-one shillings to tide her over for a week … so two or three shillings may well have been her rate.

This sum may be compared with the two English pounds that made the regular payment to a prostitute in post-WW2 London. I know this fact because a literary acquaintance of mine (he died in 1990) was ordered by his commanding officer during his military service to run a brothel for the ranks.

‘What about the officers?’ he asked.
‘Don’t be impertinent,’ his superior rasped, ‘the officers must fend for themselves.’

To warm his basement seraglio my amateur hustler bought Valor oil stoves at Berwick Market in Soho. And he was successful in this enterprise, he told me, until Soho’s Sicilian mob shut the joint down. The mob threatened a young woman. ‘The poor kid drew a finger like a flick-knife down her cheek,’ he told me, ‘the threat was very real. In those days the mob had sewn up the prostitution racket.’

His account quickened my curiosity. When I last examined the statistics I found that between 50 percent and 75 percent of the 5,000 women in prostitution in London are illegal immigrants, most of whom are from eastern Europe.

In my informant’s day in the desperate aftermath of a world war there were, amazingly, 20,000 women of the streets. How many of them, I wonder, resembled De Quincey’s Ann, one of ‘many women in that unfortunate condition’ for whom prostitution was the only way to earn a wage.

We should not, however, impute to De Quincey any motive other than that of brotherly charity and friendship in his relations with Ann. That De Quincey suffered in near penury as a vagabond in London is a matter of record and we must believe him when he states ‘…that in the existing state of my purse, my connection with such women could not have been an impure one.’

His loyalty to the orphan Ann is beyond question:

I sought her daily, and waited for her every night, so long as I stayed in London, at the corner of Titchfield Street.  I inquired for her of every one who was likely to know her, and during the last hours of my stay in London I put into activity every means of tracing her that my knowledge of London suggested and the limited extent of my power made possible … But to this hour I have never heard a syllable about her.

Maybe, late one night soon, my dear Psychogeographer,  as you pass along the northern shores of the Great Mediterranean of Oxford Street, you’ll glimpse a pale visitant keeping vigil at the corner of Great Titchfield Street, waiting, waiting … she waits in vain.

Sternstunden, Toxic Pacts and the Silent Woman’s Tryst of Blood

A star-hour! A Sternstunde! Extraordinary though it may seem, on a rare trip to London to the sales, in the flurry of my alighting from a black cab I found myself clutching a stout notebook written in a stranger’s hand, an object unknown to me.

A double take and then realization dawned ... evidently an earlier fare had mislaid the thing on the passenger seat. I was mildly intrigued. So, a little later, in retreat from the tireless hordes, I snatched a moment to examine my find over coffee as – hidden from me – my short-lived star-hour was drowned by the chatter of the sixth floor cafeteria above Peter Jones’s, all unaware of the notebook’s fate-bound worth. 

Its closely packed pages revealed much and little ... little of the identity of the note-taker (a draft letter to a correspondent was signed ‘Stella’) yet much about her literary preoccupations, both prosaic and strophic.  But there was no clue as to a home address other than a New York state zip code (Rosedale) and a single scribbled telephone number, which proved to be that of the American Women’s Club in South Kensington.

What an agony for a writer its loss must be, I thought with true fellow feeling.  So at once I resolved the lost property would be restored to its rightful owner, care of her ex-pats hunkered down in the Old Brompton Road.

Meanwhile, I confess, I took illicit delight in rummaging through the private contents of another’s mind ...  a city-smart Algonquinian mind rich with pert allusivenesses that recalled the works of Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman or, even, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

It seems invidious of me to place Stella Rosedale in this wise-cracking metropolitan company – New Yorkers all, nonetheless – but I can’t resist quoting one draft lyric of hers (uncorrected on the page, so probably unpolished) that chimes with my present pre-festivities mood ...

Drop a Dress Size and Make Things Happen.

She slips the shackles of Time and sighs;

locks tears and wristwatch in a secret drawer;

casts off the freight of lips and eyes,

dispenses nite cream from a rejuvenescent jar.

Stripped of the last apparel of her power,

she folds up hunger in her dream-wear closet.

Naked on scales she can outstare her mirror;

but does she lie when she says: ‘I am happier to lose it.’

How uncompromisingly true!

Yet, notwithstanding the genuine bite of a number of these snappy little squibs of hers – no doubt casually thrown-off – I was drawn more to Stella’s drafts for what appeared a major work-in-progress, the libretto for a Met opera, no less. And the subject? When I read her title, Mayerling: Tryst of Blood, my hands shook ... so stunned was I by a choice of subject so nearly a shadow my own fixations.

Death Without a Witness?

Were you to read a key segment from my fiction, Honeymoon Without Maps (Salt, 2008, Sister Morphine) you might just begin to understand the tingling tremor that ran through me. 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html 

So here is an extract. As her husband, Howard, sleeps, the narrator, Esther, discovers that he has jotted down, with criminal intent, a reference to the notorious Mayerling death-wish, and it ...

... led me to recall the sordid suicide pact between Crown Prince Rudolf Habsburg and the beautiful young Baroness Mary [Marie] Vetsera at the Mayerling hunting lodge.
    Apropos of which, I was in the first night audience at Covent Garden, when the ballet Mayerling had its world premier, and I remember reading then about the doomed, depression-prone Rudolf. And had not that drug-addled rake, according to his biographers, exhibited a pathological fear of living alone? And was that not why the poor booby also feared death alone ... too afraid to die without a witness?
    Mayerling! As if shaken awake by that shock of recognition, I considered the coincidences with new insights.
    Of course, it was the fate of the baroness, full of life and aged a mere seventeen – half Rudolf’s age – to be the ‘chosen one’, his Companion-in-Death, in the adulterous prince’s insane plan to attain self-deliverance ... except he allegedly shot her first before he shot himself.
    Howard and Rudolf.
    So alike in base motives.
    I can compare these two men for I feel I knew them both.
    I could so clearly understand the psychology of Howard ... his primitive fear ... how essential it was for him to know that he had a secure exit if he needed one.
    ...
    Still, I do recall he once wrote a disputatious letter to a national newspaper, some years ago, citing the philosopher ‘K’ as a lifelong advocate of euthanasia, and refuting claims that the wife of ‘K’ was an unwilling partner in their suicide pact. (In her suicide note, Howard quoted with emphasis, she wrote: ‘I cannot live without him, despite certain inner resources.’)
    ‘Hogwash! Tommy rot!’ Howard had shouted when he’d read another correspondent’s counterclaim on the letters page hinting at foul play.

And how had Stella Rosedale resolved the characterisation of Rudolf’s similar criminal narcissism? Rather well, I thought, riffling through her pages, to judge from this promising start to an aria:

Rudolph:
My shadow casts a stain.
The sun foretells Golgotha’s slain.
Stars glitter through their tears
for you and me . . . Marie . . . Marie
dicers, vinegar, spears . . . Gethsemane. 

Yes. Blustering quasi-religious self-justification for the crime of bullying an impressionable woman much younger than himself to take her own life because the booby was ‘... too afraid to die without a witness.’

The Silent Woman.

How odd they are, then, these threads and connections. And it’s particularly odd to think that the coinage of the term for star-hours of destiny (Sternstunden) – pivotal turning-points in human life – may be found in the writings of Austrian cosmopolite, Stefan Zweig, one of my favourite fictionists, who himself committed suicide in a pact with a wife half his age, Lotte, then aged 33 years and in good health.
 

Critically, formatively, according to Zweig’s first wife, Friderike, the ‘uncurbed, unrestrained vitality’ of his ‘extremely self-willed’ mother was invariably an unwelcome distraction from his writerly pursuits, and ‘undiminished even in old age, often caused much suffering to her son.’ And referring to Lotte, Stefan’s second wife and ‘Companion-in-Death’, Friderike writes, ‘... Stefan always longed for the “Silent Woman” – the title of the opera libretto, after Ben Jonson, that he wrote for Richard Strauss [Die schweigsame Frau] – his mother’s opposite. The silent, devoted Lotte so tragically fulfilled this idealized conception during his last years!’

Which raises the question – too grave for me to answer here – as to who is the proponent and instigator of a suicide pact? The man or the woman? And who insists it is followed through?

The same question has arisen in the case, mentioned, of philosopher ‘K’, the penologist, whose identity you will guess from the double suicide he carried through in his Knightsbridge home with his wife, twenty-two years his junior, and in good health.

The hallucinatory clarity of certain details observed in these two notable twin-deaths clings to my mind: the bottle of Salutaris mineral water mentioned by an observer of Stefan Zweig’s death scene (shades of Marienbad, his mother’s favourite spa) ... the fact that Stefan left his pencils well sharpened ... and the jar of honey (I can guess its purpose) that stood on the Alice-like occasional table (‘DRINK ME’) in the sitting-room of ‘K’ and his wife . . . and their suicide notes that also lay there addressed ‘To Whom it May Concern’.

No, this sinister question of the dominant party in a double suicide is too complex to examine here (‘sadomasochistic’ tendencies are more than hinted at in the case of ‘K’), so I await with keen anticipation the completed libretti of Stella Rosedale’s Mayerling: Tryst of Blood.

My Note to Stella Rosedale.

I have written a little apology to Stella for rifling through her most intimate thoughts. All the same, I have been emboldened to express my admiration for her Mayerling libretto drafts, expressing my own high regard for those two librettists of superlative skill, Myfanwy Piper (for Britten’s The Turn of the Screw) and lyricist Lillian Hellman (not forgetting James Agee, for Bernstein’s Candide). I do so hope we become better acquainted.

I do not mention the purpose of the jar of honey.  Nor do I mention the pioneering great-aunt of my family, one of the first accredited female pharmacists in England, who meticulously planned her own suicide.  Her very effective recipe is a closely guarded family secret.

Her last words in her suicide note were these: 

Dearest Best Beloved.

It is time for the candle to be snuffed out.

My Love to you All.

So you see, in answer to the bloodless question, so glibly and so frequently asked by psycho-medicos, ‘Have you ever had suicidal thoughts?’ my answer, willing-unwilling, would have to be, ‘Yes.’

●

Postscript (28.02.23) Amok.

I almost persuaded an Academy-award-nominated film director to adapt Zweig’s Amok as a psychological drama of obsession. He thought it unfilmable. Much later, in 1993, Amok appeared as a French movie starring Fanny Ardent.

Photo: The remains of a copy of the book by Stefan Zweig, the novel Amok (1922), partially burned during the Bücherverbrennungen (the Nazi book burnings) promoted by National Socialists during the 1930s.

 

●

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  

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.

Thought Police: A Message from the Secret Cellars of the Missing.

It is with a sense of profound relief that, after a hiatus of several decades due to irresolvable public disclosure constraints, I can report that my contribution to that sub-genre of confessional writings termed Lazarine Literature* – otherwise known as prison literature – is now complete.  Its title?  A Room to the End of Fall. 

 

A Room to the End of Fall.

When my notice heralding the narrative of novelist Theresa Ollivante’s disappearance was first published (see the chapter, Thought Police, page 414 of Sister Morphine published by Salt in 2008) ...
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html 
... the announcement concluded that:

‘... when, even the Press have so far failed to uncover clues to solve the mystery of her disappearance, tantalisingly, the publication of a full account of her astonishing story must be delayed until the next edition of this work [Sister Morphine].’
            This earlier commentary observed that, frustratingly, the occasion of Theresa’s disappearance, corroborated by a number of witnesses, had been more closely documented and reported more faithfully than the bizarre circumstances of her discovery.
            In Thought Police there is a sketch of the scene outside Theresa’s city apartment house, the day before her disappearance, that gave rise to the narrative’s working title. A police patrol car halts beside her as she stands immobile in an unseasonal flurry of snow, dressed in a thin housecoat, staring fixedly at a drain cover where the snowfall had melted in a perfect dish-shaped concavity.
            The cops are friendly and polite.
            They had merely put to her one question: ‘Something on your mind, maybe?’
           ‘No. It’s nothing,’ she answers dryly with a false smile. ‘Unless, perhaps, you’re a deputation from the Thought Police.’
            A day later she vanishes without a trace to reemerge half a decade later.
            In Thought Police in 2008 there are quoted a few key passages from her diary into which she had copied extracts from Chekhov’s sinister cautionary tale, The Bet, whose unnamed young hero has himself incarcerated voluntarily for fifteen years in a well-stocked library – in solitary confinement – to win a bet of two million roubles wagered by a banker.
            ‘The prisoner (writes Theresa), in four years, amazingly, reads over six hundred volumes and when, after fifteen years of confinement in which he imbibes the world’s classics, he emerges into daylight, his appearance is almost spectral. His face is yellow, his cheeks are hollow, his hair is streaked with silver, and no one can believe that he is only forty! He is a skeleton with the skin drawn tight over his bones and long matted curls like ... like, well, like my own, if I’m honest. But what does the prisoner declare upon his release that I would not myself assert were I to meet that hateful unconscionable banker!?
            ‘ “Your books have given me wisdom. All man’s unresting thought from the ages is compressed into the small compass of my brain. I know that I am wiser than all of you. And I despise your books, as I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage ... as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor ...” ’

            Theresa evidently empathised strongly with Chekhov’s disillusioned bookish captive, but she herself denied at the time a Freudo-Marxist view of alienation to explain her own anomie and other related neurotica. Her attempt at a conclusive account of her ordeal of abduction and imprisonment and of her remarkable escape are now compressed within the quire of pages that contains her narrative, A Room to the End of Fall.
            But, despite her valiant efforts, she hesitantly draws our attention to the paradox that arises from her attempts to synthesize the estimated two million words she wrote in those years of isolation, a period not dissimilar to the length of incarceration suffered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp during WWII by the son of the Norwegian polar explorer Nansen.
            The published diary of Nansen fils runs to 600 pages yet his bulky edited volume, recording in detail those years of daily witness to unimaginable horrors, amounts to only one-third of the original manuscript.
            Like the wartime diarist, Theresa has found the task of distillation is more time consuming than the task of composition. As she says, despairingly, ‘It’s as though I have all the concordances to the Bible and Shakespeare but not the Works themselves.’

Secret cellars: sinister cases of abduction and imprisonment.

Since those decades-long, repeated draftings of A Room to the End of Fall (there is even a variant screenplay, The Chute), three notorious cases of abduction and imprisonment of young women have come to light. A schoolgirl, abducted aged 10 in 1998, and imprisoned in a secret cellar for more than eight years, until her escape in 2006. The case of an 18-year-old daughter, held prisoner by her father in a locked windowless dungeon in the basement area of her family home, and emerging to freedom in 2008 after 24 years of captivity. And as recently as May this year, the escape from captivity of three kidnapped women held prisoner for up to decade or more in complete subjugation and restraint only yards from the freedom of a suburban American street. 
            The prevalence of this crime is explored by the Austrian Nobel-prize-winner, Elfriede Jelinek**, in her searing essay of 2008, Im Verlassenen (The Forsaken Place), in which she analyses the phallocentric base motives that drive the abductors, while at the same time virulently indicting her fellow countrymen, ‘Austria is a small world in which the greater one holds its rehearsals.’
            In essence, her argument is an attack on the droit de seigneur assumed by the patriarchal male, and the notion of rights of possession, to the extent of an immurement of one’s love-object in an oubliette with no bars between which the abductee can glimpse the sky. ‘No bars, no iron rods exist here. It isn’t even possible to see through something, through which one could take a look, to see no world.’
            ‘Keine Stäbe, keine Gitterstäbe hier vorhanden. Es ist also nicht einmal möglich, zwischen etwas, durch das man hindurchschauen kann, auch keine Welt zu sehen.’ 
            The irony here, of course, is Jelinek’s conscious re-echoing of Rilke’s The Panther:

... it can take in nothing more.

He feels as though a thousand bars existed,

and no more world beyond them than before.

            Irony? Well, I’ve always considered it a supreme paradox that this cultivator of heightened sensibilities should, upon fathering a daughter, have given up the infant to her grandparents to dedicate himself to the pursuit of his art ... in other words, leaving the child in a ‘forsaken place’, the oubliette of the patriarchal heart. 
            Crocodile tears.

Elfriede Jelinek                                        Horst Bienek

The Abduction of a Bluestocking by a Bluebeard?

Well, here is an opportunity to categorically state that the sinister ‘forsaken place’ of A Room to the End of Fall is not the setting for the abduction of a bluestocking by a Bluebeard ... however, Theresa Ollivante’s ‘forsaken place’, like the isolation cell of protagonists in certain German folkloric precursors – Cellar-boy Kaspar Hauser, Rumpelstilzchen, Rapunzel, et al. – is, nevertheless, so fiendishly sealed off from humanity that my captive is doomed, as Chekhov puts it, to spend the years of ‘... captivity under the strictest supervision ... [the captive] should not be free to cross the threshold ... to see human beings, to hear the human voice, or to receive letters and newspapers.’

            Only Germans, I may add, in contrast to a Russian’s choice of a library for incarceration, have the apt maxim for such furtive concealment.

Eine Leiche im Keller haben.

(To have a corpse in the basement.)

            For, as Chekhov measuredly remarks, in The Bet in 1888 ...

The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral, but if

I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life,

I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

 *As I remarked in an earlier post, a kinsman of mine, Horst Bienek (1930-1990), is author of Die Zelle (The Cell, 1968), which is derives from his own imprisonment by the Soviets and relates a prisoner’s struggle for mental and physical survival in the face of solitary confinement, sickness, torture, and an uncertain fate.  A first person narrative and a classic of prison literature, Die Zelle uses stream of consciousness to agonizing effect. The truly excellent English translation is by Ursula Mahlendorf, who describes the work as an example of Lazarine Literature, a term attributed to French poet, Jean Cayrol, interned in Gusen concentation camp in 1943. The figure of Lazarus appears many times in Cayrol's work. Having escaped death himself, Cayrol was fascinated and inspired by the story of Lazarus who returns from the dead.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/immured-mustard-field-found.html 

**It is indeed curious, to me at least, that Jelinek’s English publisher (Serpent’s Tail) was my own, insofar as it published one of my earliest works of fiction, The Cheated Eye (1998). 

●

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

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