Graham Greene: Furtive Mind of the Man on the Clapham Omnibus

The blind spot that is the ‘beam in the eye’ for the self-referential literary egoists I belabour in my previous post
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/secret-sharers-henry-james-and-joseph.html
stirs a memory of a similar misapprehension that clouded the mind of another venerated man of letters . . . Graham Greene.

For it is Greene, as film critic, who was to make an otherwise routine gangster movie memorable (Marked Woman, 1937, starring Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart) by describing the city crime scene as ‘feudal’. This nod to the medieval simply arose from Greene’s mishearing of Bogart’s tough-guy plosives, for what the actor actually said was: ‘It’s futile’. Famously, Greene’s review persisted in comparing US Tammany Hall politicians with the robber barons of the Middle Ages.

A Tale of Two Palaces.

A year later, 1938, Pinkie and Rose in Greene’s Brighton Rock (each, ironically, personifying la vie en rose) owe their skewed existence, it seems to me, as much to the gangster movies he viewed under his category of ‘entertainments’ as to films from the Réalisme Poétique movement that characterised French movie-making in the prewar years . . . specifically Vigo’s L’Atalante. An avid cinéast, Greene’s enthusiasm for French cinema is well documented.

So . . . Brighton Rock (a.k.a Young Scarface 1947) and L’Atalante (1934)? What’s the connexion? Well, I have a theory that the unusual denouements of these films are enacted in a shared setting . . . a palatial record booth.

Palace 1 (1937): Here is the Palace Chansons in Paris where Juliette (Dita Parlo) listens through earphones to Le Chant des Mariniers, the evocative disque she has selected from the jukebox to recall her husband, Jean (Jean Dasté), the barge captain she’s abandoned    . . . an impromptu avowal of love.

In the record parlour
. . . Et si le temps nous dure il faut bien qu’on endure . . .

Palace 2 (1947): Here are Scarface Pinkie and Rose on Brighton’s Palace Pier . . . in the booth, Pinkie (Richard Attenborough) is cutting his poisonous disc for Rose (Carol Marsh) . . . a rant of hate into the speaker.

He put in sixpence, and, speaking in a low voice for fear it might carry beyond the box, he gave his message to be graven on vulcanite: ‘God damn you, you little bitch, why can’t you go home for ever and let me be?’

God damn you, you little bitch . . .

Furtive don’t-get-mad-get-even revenge tales.

Mmm. That is where, I guess, the resemblance to Réalisme Poétique ends, because gratuitous nastiness is a mean streak running like a vein of irredeemable evil through Brighton Rock that is absent in Vigo’s erotic, yet amiable, confections of love’s young dream . . . it’s also a mean-spiritedness that runs through any number of Greene’s furtive don’t-get-mad-get-even revenge tales that are so ungenerous in humanity they make one’s skin crawl.

I am thinking here of The Destructors of 1954 (schoolboys gratuitously destroy a house that has survived the Blitz), yet, more particularly, I’m thinking of The Innocent of 1937 (worldly man takes young floozy to the town of his early childhood for one-night-stand and rediscovers evidence that his childhood passion for a little girl was far from the pure infatuation he has idealised from his infancy)  . . . here he finds a hidden note he wrote, aged seven, to his sweetheart . . .

Then the best I could think of was to write some passionate message and slip it into a hole (it was extraordinary how I began to remember everything) in the woodwork of the gate. I had once told her about the hole, and sooner or later I was sure she would put in her fingers and find the message. I wondered what the message could have been. One wasn’t able to express much, I thought, in those days; but because the expression was inadequate, it didn’t mean that the pain was shallower than what one sometimes suffered now. I remembered how for days I had felt in the hole and always found the message there . . . As I went out of the gate I looked to see if the hole existed. It was there. I put in my finger, and, in its safe shelter from the seasons and the years, the scrap of paper rested yet. I pulled it out and opened it. Then I struck a match, a tiny glow of heat in the mist and dark. It was a shock to see by its diminutive flame a picture of crude obscenity. There could be no mistake; there were my initials below the childish, inaccurate sketch of a man and woman . . . . I didn’t recognize it; it might have been drawn by a dirty minded stranger on a lavatory wall.

Incidentally, the discovery decades later of a sordid revelatory letter is a sub-plot of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (see Greene’s Blue Film and Barnes’s fiction, below).

Billets-doux and dog collars.

It seems to me that this story of The Innocent is the product of an unpleasantly embittered mind, since it is documented that Greene regularly consorted with prostitutes in all the years of a marriage that was never annulled; a marriage in which dewy-eyed billets-doux during the honeymoon period had been a significant feature. He married in 1927. The couple’s little dog, Pekoe, would carry love notes attached to its collar back and forth between the newly-weds in the blissful early days of a marriage that would decline into the permanent estrangement born of a serially unfaithful, resentful husband and unpaternal father. This desecration of a child’s note retrieved from an Edenic dawn, then, can be interpreted in an entirely new light. There is something gauche, something perverted, something damaged and darkly sniggering in its literary contrivance. Please draw your own conclusions.

Blue movies/French films.

Yes. The man in the grubby mackintosh on the Clapham omnibus is a Greeneish figure we readily recognise, for Clapham Common (Greene’s home turf until his house was shattered in the Blitz) has the kind of lewd connotations that are also recognisable in his fiction . . .  and the risible Common remains, even today, a notorious site for sexual rendezvous that can induce ‘a moment of madness.’ As novelist Julian Symons – who was brought up in a huge mansion on the Common – once reminisced, it was during the Thirties when a single man was fortunate to cross Clapham Common at night without emerging on the other side pursued by a wife and pram. To me, that anecdote sets the tone for much of Greene’s early fiction . . . sinister schoolboyish sexual broodings passed off as the mature reflections of a much travelled man with a taste for low dives and sly depravity. (For descriptions of the Common at its seediest, the reader should look no further than The End of the Affair, which evokes Greene’s house at 14 Clapham Common Northside, whose bombing was the book’s inspiration.)

Yet, despite the bleak misanthropy of sexual couplings without sentiment that defines the moral vacuum sensed in much of the Greene canon, the author’s tropes are all-pervasive in the work of younger English novelists, seduced by the cynical game of reducing humanity to a history of squashed flies. 

Greeneist cinéastes should perhaps consider how his short story, The Blue Film (1954) appears to be a major influence on Julian Barnes’s Before She Met Me (1982), the bitter tale of retro-jealousy, in which, significantly, a Graham obsessively investigates his second wife’s former love affairs . . . she is a B-List film actress. (Graham is a rather stiff and stuffy name for the protagonist and is an unlikely choice for a literary creation, in my own view, if the Greeneish significance of The Blue Film wasn’t intended. In addition, doesn’t his surname, Hendrick, recall the seducer, Maurice Bendrix, in The End of the Affair?)

Can you spot the resemblances? The Blue Film is a tale of a jaded married couple on a tedious holiday in Siam in the early 1950s. From this Greene text we also gain a new understanding of the label, ‘French films’.

Carter left the hotel and walked up towards the New Road. A boy hung at his side and said, ‘Young girl?’
    ‘I’ve got a woman of my own,’ Carter said gloomily.
    ‘Boy?’
    ‘No, thanks.’
    ‘French films?’
    Carter paused. ‘How much?’
    They stood and haggled awhile at the corner of the drab street. What with the taxi, the guide, the films, it was going to cost the best part of eight pounds, but it was worth it, Carter thought, if it closed her mouth forever from demanding ‘Spots.’ He went back to fetch Mrs. Carter.

In the picturehouse Mr. and Mrs. Carter view a ‘French film’. (‘The screen was about the size of a folio volume’). After the first blue film, watched as they ‘sat in mutual embarrassment’, the second is more promising. ‘The actors were young: there was some charm and excitement in the picture.’ 

The girl knelt on the bed and held the youth around the waist — she couldn't have been more than twenty. No; he made a calculation: twenty-one.
   ‘We’ll stay,’ Mrs. Carter said. ‘We’ve paid.’ She laid a dry hot hand on his knee.
   ‘I’m sure we could find a better place than this.’
   ‘No.’
   The young man lay on his back and the girl for a moment left him. Briefly, as though by accident, he looked at the camera. Mrs. Carter’s hand shook on his knee. ‘Good God,’ she said, ‘it’s you.’

Compare, then, Before She Met Me for a simple plot inversion. Here is Graham’s first encounter with his onscreen wife in a cinema . . . on celluloid, the movie detective with a limp investigates a burglarizing crime wave . . .

The damaged detective at once started opening all the doors of the flat. In the bedroom he found Graham’s wife. She was wearing dark glasses and reading a book; the sheets were chastely swaddled round her breasts, but the implications of the rumpled bed were clear. No wonder the film received an A certificate.
   As the hero suddenly recognized an apparently well-known beauty queen, and as Graham recognized his viciously peroxided wife, she said, in a voice deep enough to be dubbed, ‘I don’t want any publicity.’
   Graham let out a violent chuckle . . .

Later . . .

And that was when the sneering dreams began. The dreams which were so strong, and so contemptuous, that they strode carelessly across the barrier of consciousness.
    The first one came the night after he’d dropped in at the N.F.T. [National Film Theatre] to check up on his wife’s adultery with Buck Skelton. The pudgy, stetsoned, middle-rank American star had once been shipped to London, on a tame producer’s whim, to play the part of special marshal from Arizona unexpectedly seconded to Scotland Yard . . . a comedy-thriller, now being revived in a season called ‘The Clash of Genres’, included a brief scene where Ann, playing a cloakroom girl . . .

Later still, in bed with Ann, Graham’s obsession-driven accusations lead to . . .

‘You played the cloakroom girl who takes the hero’s stetson and says, “My, we don’t normally get such big ones in here”.’
    ‘I said that?’ Ann was interested, as well as relieved. She also felt a stab of indignation at the misplaced accusation. If he thinks I might have fucked Skelton, who wouldn’t he suspect? For once, Ann decided to let Graham wait for his reassurance.

And so on . . . especially Greeneish are Graham’s visits to obscure London cinemas to view low-budget forgettable films his wife had sleazy seductress parts in. I’ll conclude by affirming that Before She Met Me is a drama set in Greeneland – a film-within-a-film – crazily perfect for movie adaptation. Why the hesitation? Julian Barnes says he has ‘never written a screenplay of BSMM’ so the field is wide open.

The Cancer Rule for Adultery

Incidentally, the Graham of Barnes’s novel won’t heed his pal Jack’s laddish advice on practising adultery: the Cancer Rule: ‘If they don’t ask; you don’t tell them.’ 

At one point, Graham’s retroactive jealousy even begins to tarnish his choice of holiday destination, until second wife Ann explodes: ‘We’re trying to find a country where I haven’t fucked someone.’

Both of Barnes’s pithy utterances could equally speak for the conduct of Graham Greene’s own fiction and life as an inveterate traveller and philanderer, and might even explain the extraordinary range of global itineraries followed by this evasive, peculiarly conflicted man.

●

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

Secret-Sharers . . . Henry James and Joseph Conrad’s Junoesque Women

Since my last post, it has been pointed out to me by a Jamesian scholar that Henry James shared Joseph Conrad’s tendency to fixate on exceedingly tall heroines; certainly, the beautiful Julia of James’s The Tragic Muse must be of a height approaching that of Małgorzata Dydek, reportedly the tallest professional female basketball player in the world (7 ft 2 ins.). Appropriately, given Conrad’s own nation of origin, Małgorzata was born in Warsaw.

See my last post:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/joseph-conrads-amazonian-warrioresses.html

Joseph Conrad and Henry James by Max Beerbohm

My correspondent points out that, at a lunch in London in February 1897, James and Conrad probably discussed the theme of Conrad’s The Return, since Conrad began writing the text shortly after their meeting and its style is not only characteristically Jamesian but, in the emergence of a Junoesque woman, the textual patterning very closely resembles that of the ‘Master’ in The Tragic Muse.

. . . There, however, he [Nick] stayed her, bending over her while she
sobbed, unspeakably gentle with her.
   ‘. . . What do you accuse me of doing?’ Her tears were already over.
   ‘Of making me yours; of being so precious, Julia, so exactly what a man wants, as it seems to me. I didn’t know you could,’ he went on, smiling down at her. ‘I didn’t—no, I didn’t.’
   ‘It’s what I say—that you've always hated me.’
   ‘I’ll make it up to you!’
   She leaned on the doorway with her forehead against the lintel. ‘You don’t even deny it.’                                           [Henry James. The Tragic Muse 1889]

The Secret-Sharers

This text of James’s was published, then, nearly a decade before the publication of Conrad’s The Return in 1898. As Conrad wrote, in affirmation of his admiration for James (Henry James: An Appreciation), he was bowled over by ‘the magnitude of Mr Henry James’s work.’ Evidently, it was work studied by the younger man assiduously. 
 
So we can surmise that their secret obsession for giantesses was shared not only from their first meeting in the winter of 1897 but even earlier and, certainly, until James’s death in 1916.

The Beam in the Eye

Seriously, though, surely Conrad read James’s The Aspern Papers in 1888? And, no doubt, read the following, wholly Pateresque, passage in Chapter Five. Though Walter Pater and, more particularly, John Ruskin, would have known that in no known universe do the twin columns of the Piazza San Marco resemble lintels. Or had James downed too many cocktails at Florian’s?

The wonderful church, with its low domes and bristling embroideries, the mystery of its mosaic and sculpture, looking ghostly in the tempered gloom, and the sea breeze passed between the twin columns of the Piazzetta, the lintels of a door no longer guarded, as gently as if a rich curtain were swaying there.                                  [Henry James’s The Aspern Papers 1888]

Paterism is all very well as an aesthetic measure but it’s no use looking upon beauty if you considerest not the lintel-beam that is in thine own eye.  

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

 

Pedantry Corner 

Since this post, seven years have passed, yet the persistence of this ‘lintel’ misnomer puzzling the literary world has reappeared, see my letter published in London’s Private Eye last Wednesday (April 31 2021):

 

Joseph Conrad’s Amazonian Warrioresses in the Sex War . . . . . . sans Stovepipe Hats

A recent feature in a magazine, a profile of that infinitely subtle actress, Isabelle Huppert, prompted me to reread Joseph Conrad’s The Return, on whose drama of marital hellishness  – a kind of Huis Clos for La Belle Époque – the French movie Gabrielle (2005) is based. Huppert is Gabrielle, trapped in the stifling claustrophobia of a marriage that turns out to be a sham. It is a remarkable performance. As a warrioress in the Sex War, Huppert is even cooler and more understated in her dominance of the male than in her tyranny as Erika, her notorious rôle in The Piano Teacher, the movie based on Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel of the same name.  

The elephant in the room.

Extraordinarily, the literary nuances of Conrad’s dense text are adapted to the screen with remarkable fidelity save in one particular, hitherto unremarked, yet which in a real sense is the elephant in the room.  For instance, take this description by the husband of the brow-beaten, put-upon wife, Mrs. Alvan Hervey:

The girl was healthy, tall, fair, and in his opinion was well connected, well educated and intelligent. She was also intensely bored with her home where, as if packed in a tight box, her individuality — of which she was very conscious — had no play. She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head.

So we gather she is tall, moreover, of significant height, if those comparisons to a grenadier and an obelisk are to be believed. However, it is not until several paragraphs later that we learn of the phenomenal gigantism with which Mrs Hervey is afflicted.

The door-handle rattled under her groping hand as though she had been trying to get out of some dark place.
   ‘No—stay!’ he cried.
   She heard him faintly. He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door.          She swayed as if dazed. There was less than a second of suspense while they both felt as if poised on the very edge of moral annihilation . . .

He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door?

Any self-respecting textualist must take account of the import of these passages, while the student of contextualisation cannot ignore the fact that, in Victorian England, the heights of the standard interior door frame from sill to lintel were 6ft 8in and 7ft, and exterior doors were of greater heights to accommodate stovepipe hats.

This giantism in Conrad’s fictional women can be read in a number of texts, where it begins to assume the aspect of a fixation. Take this passage from his tale, Gaspar Ruiz.

The daughter, in rough threadbare clothing, and her white haggard face half hidden by a coarse manta, stood leaning against the lintel of the door.

Elephantine women.

From an intimate memoir (Ford Madox Ford’s Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, 1924), we learn that . . .

He was small rather than large in height; very broad in the shoulder and long in the arm; dark in complexion with black hair and a clipped black beard.

So has this author’s identifiable physical squatness nurtured, one wonders, in this particular case, a predilection for elephantine women so extreme (see movie, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, 1958) that a preeminent literary imagination suffers their forbidding bulk to dominate its fictive projections, enslaved in a sort of love-hate submission?

Well, this is a question only Conradian experts of profoundest scholarship can answer.
 
As it is, we must continue to wonder at Joseph Conrad’s inclination before the camera to strike the Amazonian pose of the disaffected trapped spouse he so vividly describes in The Return . . .  here he is, leaning against his trellis porch, a characteristic attitude of the Amazonian when desperately cornered in marriage. . . or is he, as it were, a captive, no different from the heroine of his bitter tale, in a sticky predicament attempting to propel himself from the marital threshold to get free of a jamb . . . or is his plight that of a seafaring author who has relinquished his helm to the pilot . . . a woefully inattentive editor.

See my next post for the curious origins of Conrad’s Amazonian fixation . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/secret-sharers-henry-james-and-joseph.html

Sussex Exodus of Altisonant Rats: Schoolboy’s Mock-Heroic Epic

That art is non-utile is a self-conscious truism voiced oftenest by post-Marxian cynics. 

As Oscar Wilde, a socialist manqué, makes clear: All art is quite useless. 

This banality is no more absurdly pointed up than in the verses of a lofty poet who compares himself with his father digging the family cabbage patch – a spade wielded with evident utility – yet who claims a special dispensation for his own artist’s pen . . . ‘I’ll dig with it.’ (Pause for involuntary cringe.)

Anthony Blunt – tarnished knight of the realm, professed communist, and Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures – was unequivocal when a young man in expressing his utopian sympathy for the cultural worthiness of Social Realism: ‘The culture of the revolution will be evolved by the proletariat to produce its own culture . . . If an art is not contributing to the common good, it is bad art.’ 

So, by Blunt’s measure, even the Queen’s Poet Laureate should cleave to utilitarian art . . . notwithstanding it’s a demand unmet by a recent incumbent in the opinion of those republican readers who’ve submitted the laureate verses of Ted Hughes to closer scrutiny. Although, of that versification, the finest – the beautiful Little Salmon Hymn – is a witty act of lese-majesty since the licensed poet-jester cheekily commands his empress* to collude in acceptance of his metaphors as givens: ‘Say the constellations are flocks. And the sea-dawns, collecting colour, give it, the sea-spray the spectrum.’ [My italics.]

So any success in our tracking down utilitarian verse is likely to be somewhat limited, particularly as the poetry of knee-jerk imperialism is an overglutted market. (‘Who, or why, or which, or what, is the Akond of Swat?’ An example of lese-majesty in verse of the grosser sort, since the Principality of Swat is surely owed more than the glib doggerel of a melancholic syphilitic artist from the West, if one agrees that such smirking, unthinking condescension merits a reciprocal reductio ad absurdum.)  

After all, Maxim Gorky had a city named after him so at least one utilitarian writer can claim to have changed the landscape with the stroke of his pen, an act that was matched by only one rival . . . an autocrat . . . Tsar Nicholas I, who reputedly took his own sword as a ruler and astonished his surveyor by drawing a perfectly straight line on a map to ordain the path of the railroad between St Petersburg and Moscow. ‘Voilà votre chemin de fer!’ he decreed.

A utilitarian schoolboy poet . . . the necessity for literary invention.

Is art necessary? Well, for an enterprising Sussex schoolboy in 1812, aged fifteen, the facility to dash off classical Latin verse, as an accomplishment no different to boxing or riding to hounds, could earn him the valuable privileges of a ‘Senior’ promoted to a higher class. Indeed, in the memoir that follows, the narrator confesses, ‘I had such an object in view’, with the additional motive of earning a ‘higher mark’ that would win him a half holiday on a Friday. 

This utilitarianism in youthful art, which knowingly converts scholarly diligence into social advancement, explains, I believe, how a child can be father of the man who’s destined to outgrow a too facile creativity**. For there is a certain dilettantish class of patrician that disowns in adulthood the tyro dauber and dabbler he once was, and whose haughty defence is, ‘Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.’

Very small beer indeed.

Though it is surprisingly the case that the juvenile poetic facility described in the memoir you are about to read is later dismissed as journeyman work by its author, this dismissal must be understood in a scale of things beyond most people’s reckoning . . . for the author is destined to become the 19th century’s preeminent uniformitarian geologist, and one of the first who dared to believe that the world is older than 300 million years, so, for him, in the perspective of cosmological aeons, such poetical considerations as metaphorical ‘givens’ at Her Majesty's pleasure would seem to be very small beer indeed.
 

A memoir of schooldays by Sir Charles Lyell Kt FRS.

At the end of the first year arrived . . . what was called ‘the speaking,’ when certain boys recited verses written by themselves, those in the first two classes; and the rest different Greek, Latin. and English passages. The rehearsal first began, at which every boy had to exhibit, and then ten were selected to perform before the public. I obtained one of the places for reciting English, and was accordingly gifted with a prize, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ of which I was very proud. Every year afterwards I received invariably a prize for speaking, until high enough to carry off the prizes for Latin and English original composition. My inventive talents were not quick, but to have any is so rare a qualification, that it is sure to obtain a boy at our great schools (and afterwards as an author) some distinction.

Irregular versification. 

I had a livelier sense than most of the boys of the beauty of English poetry, Milton, Thomson, and Gray being my favourites; and even Virgil and Ovid gave me some real pleasure, and I knew the most poetic passages in them. I was much taken with Scott’s ‘Lady of the Lake’ on holidays, when I had risen to the second class, and presumed, when the prize was given on ‘Local Attachment’ in English verse (it being an understood thing that the metre was to be the usual ten-syllabic rhyme), to venture on writing it in the versification of Scott’s ‘Lady of the Lake.’ The verses were the only ones out of the first class which had any originality in them, or poetry, so the Doctor [the headmaster] was puzzled what to do. The innovation was a bold one : my excuse was that he had not given out a precise metre; on which he determined that this case was not to serve as a precedent, that in future the classical English metre was to be adopted, but mine was to have the prize, being eight-syllabic and irregular, and not in couplets.

When in the second class, I wrote a Latin copy of verses (a weekly exercise required of all) on the fight between the land-rats and the water-rats, suggested by reading Homer’s battle of the frogs and mice – a mock-heroic. Dr. Bayley had just drained a pond much infested by water-rats, which was on one side of our playground, and they used to forage on not only our cakes and bread and cheese in the night, but literally on our clothes and books. I am sure that from the date of this early achievement to the present hour I have never thought of this copy of verses; but I can recall with pleasure the incident, and it convinces me that I must very early have felt a pleasure not usual among boys of about sixteen in exerting my inventive powers voluntarily. 

Migration to sewer.

The plot was begun with a consultation of water-rats, to each of whom altisonant [high-sounding] Greek names were given, after the plan of Homer — cake-stealer, gin-dreader, book-eater, ditch-lover, &c. The king began by describing a dream in which the water-prophet covered with slimy reeds appeared to him, foretelling that the delicious expanse of sweet-scented mud would soon dry up, and foreboding woes. Part of the warning was copied or paraphrased from the Sybil’s song to the Trojans in the ‘Æneid’ of what should happen when they reached Italy. The dream and warning, taken, I suppose, from Agamemnon’s to the Grecian chiefs, being communicated, the others entered into the debate what they should do, and it was agreed that, as the fates had decreed the drying up of the waters, they should migrate to a neighbouring sewer, and should destroy the house-rats, who consumed so much provender in the schoolroom, and who had usurped their rights.

One passage, in which a chief was described as a great map-eater, and having at one meal consumed Africa, Europe, Asia, America. and the Ocean, was admired as good specimen of pompous description of mighty deeds, on the first entrance of a hero in an epic poem. The verses ran to thirty-eight, and when done, there was great discussion whether I should dare show up such a thing. It was thought, however, a wondrous feat, till the second master, Mr. Ayling, a youth of nineteen, who heard of it, said, ‘I dare say it’s all nonsense and bad Latin.’ I was requested, in vindication, to let him see it before it went up to Dr. Bayley. To justify his own anticipation, he cut it up as much as he could, pointing out all the grammatical errors and one false quantity. Though he thus made many think light of it, and checked my growing vanity not a little, it of course had the effect of my correcting the lines, and rewriting a copy.

Literary ambitions quenched.

Dr. Bayley, when he saw it, was much surprised at the correctness of the Latin, and struck, more than he chose to admit to us, with the invention displayed in the whole thing. He told the class that it was such good Latin that I deserved great credit, but he did not wish them or me to send him up more mock-heroics. From this time I took it into my head that I should one day do great things in a literary way, but my ambition was quenched afterwards, by failing in carrying off any prize at Oxford.

A frog, depicted on the Archaic silver staters of Serifos (circa 530 BC).

More probings into the contradictions in the life of Sir Anthony Blunt may be read here:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html

*Note (May 24 2023): It’s been brought to my attention that ex-Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion (Ted Hughes’s successor), remembers Queen Elizabeth II telling him: ‘Ted Hughes and my mother did see quite a bit of each other. Actually, I’d like to have a poet laureate who paid attention to me . . .’ Reportedly, King Charles III is ‘a much keener reader of poetry than she was.’

**It should be added that the English belletrist, Geoffrey Madan (who won the most prestigious scholarship to Eton in 1907), earned a day’s holiday for the whole school by the excellence of his account of Eton written in Herodotean Greek.

●

The Hexameter Challenge

Shortly before Christmas 2017 I hit upon a notion that the Sussex Exodus of Altisonant Rats might yet still be restored in spirit for the amusement of a later generation of budding Latinists. So, ever the completist (as I have admitted elsewhere), I tasked a number of Latin scholars around the world to re-imagine the achievement of the teenage Charles Lyell with their own versions of the opening verses from the boy’s mock-heroic epic.

On a whim, the actualisation of the Latin hexameter was prompted by an English couplet — of my own devising — composed of roughly hexametric dactylic lines. Yet, despite it comprising six metrical units, you’ll observe it’s lacking, in its sixth foot, the prescribed anceps of ideally two syllables.  

Oh woe the day that saw our Realm of Ooze undone, for Zeus a Drought has wrought                     to goad us rend old Foes: Tribes of the Netherworld whose Blood our Grudge long sought.

Nevertheless, I believed it conveyed the gist of young Charles’s intentions of 1812. What followed my ‘Hexameter Challenge’ was an extended period of instruction during which it was explained to me, in my innocence, that Latin hexameter — insofar as metre can be recognised by appearance — does not resemble the identifiable patterns of syllabic stress and intonation of classical prosodists composing in English, i.e. effectively five dactyls followed by the prescribed anceps of ideally two syllables:

dum-ditty | dum-ditty | dum-ditty | dum-ditty | dum-ditty| dum-dum 

Contrastingly, we learn, Latin hexameter permits any of the first four dactyls (one long syllable followed by two short syllables) of a line to be replaced with a spondee (two long or stressed syllables). However, the fifth foot is nearly always a dactyl, with the sixth foot an anceps, i.e., either a long-long (— —) or long-short (— ^). To accord with the art of recitation, the anceps is always treated as long to fill out the line.

Honours Board

The winning entry fulfilled admirably the specification to retrieve a schoolboy’s composition from over two centuries of oblivion. 

             Vae tibi dire dies! Nostrum ex uligine constans
             Imperium periit, nam Juppiter arida fecit
             Flumina ut antiquos stimulemur diripere hostes.
             Tartareas gentes quarum petiere cruorem
             Crimine nostra diu praecordia laesa doloso.

             Woe to thee, dreadful day! Our empire of swampyness 
             has perished, for Jupiter has made the flowings dry 
             so that we should be goaded into tearing ancient enemies asunder, 
             underworld peoples whose gore our innards have
             sought for a long time, affronted by a deceitful misdeed.

Using d for dactyl and s for spondee you'll see the first five feet of each line conform to the metrical rules described above, with the fifth foot, in each case, a dactyl in accordance with the fixed harmony of hexametric Latin verse.

             d d s s d
             d d s d d
             d s d s d
             d s s d d
             d d s d d

In this delightful Latin rendering we can recognise many familiar words, some still serviceable for flourishes of a more florid character in English prose: dire = fearful; cruor = gore; uliginous = slimy marshyness; arid flume = dried up channel; hostiles = enemies; perished empire, etc., so there is much that is pleasing to the uninitiated.

Regrettably, for purely etymological reasons (which many may consider irrationally idiosyncratic), a phrase from a rival submission to meet the Hexameter Challenge did not ‘make the final cut’ as we say . . . ‘tum periit Unctum regnum cunctum ariditate’. A worthy runner-up, but I preferred the uliginous characterisation of mud to its unctuosity! 

So, sorry, close but no cigar!

●

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

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

I have mentioned here and there, somewhat tangentially, the dilemma of my German-born father, accused by his sister in a fierce letter from Berlin (November 17, 1929) of becoming a stereotypical arch-Englishman (Stock-Engländer).
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/we-are-all-vermin-now.html 

Inevitably, these emotional complexities were compounded by the outbreak of war in 1939, though by that date (September 3 1939) my father had been in the Territorials for more than a year. As I have also intimated, his rôle during the war in the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF (General Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) was concerned with the military intelligence to be derived from the closest scrutiny of captured enemy documents, the specialism of the G-2 Documents Section . . . ephemera such as identification papers, Promotions Lists, Casualty Reports, Soldbücher (see below), Travel Orders, photos, notebooks, and captured enemy letters, generally seized unopened at a Feldpost.

The judicious release to the Allied press of enemy propaganda of the vilest sort was also part of his duties. I have, locked away in my plan-chest, a black museum of the most monstrous anti-Semitic propaganda imaginable, a collection my father amassed at G-2.

I have mentioned also that my father was an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials. No doubt the documents in the files I now possess relate to the trials of those war criminals. Certainly, my father retained signed orders from the most notorious of the accused, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel. Here are their signatures . . .

Out of the blue,  late last year,  my sister dropped by with a number of additional documents relating to my father . . . in particular,  a most illuminating (albeit rather stilted) letter to his former peacetime employers in London written from Paris, exactly two months after the liberation of the city . . .

Speer & Hitler, Paris, June 1940 (Keitel, left, Bormann, right)

October 31st 1944
G-2 Division
SHAEF

. . . As you may have gathered from the envelope I am now overseas. Colossal strides have been made if one recalls some of the milestones of the war since that memorable day when we Territorials quite suddenly had to break off in the middle of what ever we happened to be doing and rush to man our respective posts as soldiers.

The Battle of Britain with which most of us are only too familiar; the exploits in Africa where the enemy despite crafty leadership was outwitted and in the end successfully routed; the heroic defence of Stalingrad and the gigantic offensives launched by Russia, with their implications for the subsequent course of the war and on Allied strategy; the first major assault on the European mainland in Italy resulting in the capitulation of the first Axis power; the overwhelming success of the long awaited invasion of the Continent on the heavily defended coast of France; the liberation of peoples from the yoke of oppression. Now, at last, the Allies have set foot on German soil. What a formidable record!

It would be imprudent to hazard a guess when it will all be over; however, judging by the stiffening of resistance, due, no doubt, both to coercion and the diabolical exploitation of every conceivable morale-bolstering device in the vain attempt to frustrate what must be a foregone conclusion, it may mean to a great extent razing down to the ground the domain of a sadly misguided people until the erstwhile mighty Nazi stronghold has been completely crumbled. While not forgetting the task in hand is far from completed one cannot escape the thought that all of this will have been accomplished not without a price which must never be forgotten by those who through Providence may be permitted to return. Upon them in particular will devolve the onerous responsibility effectively to contribute – by steering well clear of such extremes as political apathy and Chauvinism – to the shaping of a new world era from which the spectre of war will be banished for all times.

Nightmare scenes of destruction.  

It has been my privilege to see many of the historic places in Normandy where not so very long ago fierce battles raged, such as Bayeux, Caen, Carentan, Évreux, Isigny, Lisieux, etc, and to share to some extent in the rejoicing of a people who have once again regained their freedom. If one happens to venture along some French streets, it is touching to be surrounded by children who in their innocence seek to express gratitude for something of which they are only dimly conscious by eagerly seizing your hand and muttering ‘Merci’ or even ‘Thank You’. Not without a feeling of awe does one cross bridges still crudely labelled with names which have gone down into history. The ferocity of the contest is brought home to the onlooker by scenes of destruction and devastation unlikely to occur even in a nightmare. Yet amid these ruins courageous people still dwell and go about their daily business. To heighten the incongruity these places are gaily bedecked with flags, bunting and signs expressing thanks and a welcome to the liberators. While travelling along the open roads one may encounter numerous disabled or burnt-out tanks lined up alongside, and frequent concentrations of craters testify to the strafing of a convoy; moreover, many fragments of wrecked planes clearly showing Swastika markings may be discerned in the fields as one drives by, and now and again a new cemetery symmetrically laid out with countless uniform crosses.

Faded flowers and chips in the masonry.  

Last, but by no means least I, have been to that historic bone of contention named Versailles and to the mecca of the Americans: PARIS. From the fashion point of view, I am bound to remark that the female of the species still goes around extremely well dressed despite sartorial shortages of different kinds and I am confounded more often than not by the monstrous headgear which appears to be in vogue at the moment. When I think that only fairly recently I was still in my own home, especially on that day when General de Gaulle entered Paris, listening to the excited commentator describing the dramatic entry into Notre Dame, it is certainly thrilling to be able to write and say one has been there and, among other places, in the Place de la Concorde where signs of the barricades and chips in the masonry continue to tell their story. In fact, other visible evidence of the former Occupation has not yet been completely effaced either. Countless German inscriptions on buildings, signs and even on big posters may still be seen. A more tragic note was struck when in a lonely street on a fence I observed a piece of cardboard recording in crude handwriting that on a certain date some Frenchmen had been assassinated on that spot by the ‘Boches’. No more and no less, except for a bunch of faded flowers still wrapped in paper dangling from a piece of string surmounting the sign.

Flourishing black market.  

Apart from the congested travel on the ‘Metro’ and on a few isolated ’bus services, life in the great capital seems to be fairly normal so far as I can judge. The cafés and a good many places of entertainment appear to be in full swing. People are manifestly pleased with the change liberation has brought them, and many a harrowing tale has been related to me of sufferings and privations which had formerly to be contended with. Prices in the shops are exceedingly high compared with ours, especially at the present rate of exchange. It may perhaps be attributed to the flourishing state of black market activities and possibly still to the earlier rate of exchange fixed by the Germans, which I understand was approximately 16–24 francs to 1 Reichemark, thus enabling them to buy up as much as they cared  At the arbitrary rate of francs 10 = shilling 1/-, or £ = frs 200, Allied policy obviously wishes to discourage military personnel from making purchases in order not to deprive the indigenous population of their rightful commodities. In this connection I must relate an incident which I shall always remember.

Lost appetite.

On the occasion of a visit to Paris after a strenuous morning sightseeing the inner man asserted himself with particular vehemence. Not realising the prevailing conditions and carrying on my person the equivalent of approximately £2 I had no compunction in entering what seemed to be a restaurant of modern pretensions. I partook of a most enjoyable meal and just regretted the absence of potatoes with my main dish only to find that they were served afterwards as a separate course! A Frenchman sitting nearby who had consumed much along the same lines as I, had meanwhile finished and asked for the bill. He took out his wallet and to my ever-growing astonishment counted out a vast number of notes which I saw were of Francs 100 denomination. My appetite thereupon dwindled rapidly and I must confess to feelings of great trepidation when with a shaky voice I eventually mustered sufficient courage to demand l’addition. To my surprise the waitress summoned the proprietress who came to my table and harangued me in a pretty little speech to the effect that I was the first soldier of the Anglo-American forces to enter her restaurant and that in no circumstances would she accept payment from me. I was utterly dumbfounded for the moment and after muttering not too emphatic expressions of reluctance to accept her offer I managed to say that I respected her sentiments and would she in the circumstances do me the honour to accept a packet of cigarettes which I knew were at a premium in Paris. With faint protestations she too decided to acquiesce whereupon with a sensation of great relief I sallied forth into the street, leaving with great magnanimity a tip equivalent to 5 shillings in our currency representing but a tiny fraction of what my meal should have cost me! 

Stand-in Germans.  

[Real names suppressed.] It with a sense of deep gratitude at being able, if only in trifling measure, to reciprocate the firm’s tangible goodwill to the militant members of staff that I now come to report on my visit to the Paris branch office. I had hoped to be the first British representative of the firm to cross their threshold since the Occupation, but I learned that I had been forestalled by a Major ‘J’ whom I cannot place. The only ‘J’ I knew was taken prisoner at beginning of the war. The Major ‘J’ in question is supposed to be a very able linguist and though this applies also to the young man I knew, there is still a discrepancy of age as I understand Major ‘J’ is about 50. When I paid my first visit to the Rue Rodier I made the acquaintance of a Monsieur ‘M’, whom I assume to be the manager, and in the absence of both M. Rosenberg and Mr ‘H’, he was good enough to answer the various questions I raised in the course of quite a long conversation . . . During the occupation the firm was in the charge of two Germans in all, one at a time over different periods, who supervised the business. They were supposed to have been very capable, extremely correct in their dealings, and drew only a nominal salary of frs 2,000 per month. 

Anti-Semitic measures enforced. 

Naturally, I enquired after M. Rosenberg and I was told that he had been in during the morning and was not expected to return that day. It was not possible to reach him on the ’phone as this was still cut off as a result of the anti-Semitic measures enforced during the Occupation. Mr ‘H’, I was given to understand, had been interned in Vittel [concentration camp in the Vosges department,  where US or British citizens were interned] and had only returned the night before. Monsieur ‘M’ managed to get through to him on the ’phone eventually and I was invited to call on him at his home. There I also met Mrs ‘H’ and we all had tea together. I must say that for his age he look remarkably well and fit and really showed no signs on the ordeal he had just been through. As I happened to be among the first to see him, even before he had been able to see M. Rosenberg, there was nothing much he could say beyond express his intention to look up his contacts.  

A true Frenchman. 

Meanwhile, it has been my good fortune to pay another visit to Paris and this time I managed to see both M. Rosenberg and Mr ‘H’. M. Rosenberg was very charming indeed and I was profoundly moved by his dignified composure when I consider the infinite mental anguish and physical suffering it has been his lot to endure. Though I gather from Monsieur ‘M’ that he has aged considerably, his bearing was agile and his speech lacks none of the sparkle and animation associated with a true Frenchman. He expressed his satisfaction so far as business matters were concerned and regarded it as a major miracle to be able to report that the firm had lost no money despite having been under German control for so many years.
[END of my father’s Letter extracts.]

A booby-trapped piano. 

The routed enemy knew about human weakness, my father told me, particularly how liberating troops would eagerly go after for souvenirs. It was these items that the retreating Germans booby-trapped in France . . . he said you should never pick up helmets, rifles, thermos flasks or cameras left behind in enemy billets, because these could trigger trip-wires connected to igniting devices intended to dynamite souvenir hunters to shreds.  

Resist the fatal impulse to pry, he was warned. Igniting devices could be left in the piano, the closet, the stove, the icebox, behind pictures, beneath dishes and flower bowls or even in a chamber pot underneath the bed . . . or . . .
  

Mid Sussex Times, August 9 1944.

As I have recorded elsewhere, my father was a gifted pianist who studied in Vienna and the Institute of Musical Art, New York. We can imagine, then – in that Paris autumn of 1944 – how his strong desire to run his fingers once again over the keyboard of a splendid grand piano, the centrepiece of a fashionable salon lately abandoned by German officers, was almost his undoing,  . . . had he pressed one piano-key, he told me, he could have tripped the enemy’s surprise package and blown his outfit into kingdom come.

In my writings, my sketches of my father as a pianist are rare, but here, below, is a quotation that describes his postwar manner, which was undoubtedly conditioned by his struggle to resolve the crisis of a divided identity, which would in the late 1940s lead to a troubled crack-up. At that time, specialists had concluded that the confusion associated with my father’s disrupted identity was the result of psychological stresses underlying his bilingualism. That there was a higher incidence of mental disturbances among polyglots, the shrinks claimed, was evidence of the trauma of assimilation.

In my opinion it is actually more difficult to run into bar 210 of Valse in A-flat Opus 42 where the waltz ‘stumbles’ than emerge from it – one runs the risk of sounding as if one has simply walked into a wall, rather than suspending the breath for a moment – hence, this artifice of ineptitude is not easy to achieve and, even though Chopin intended to simulate a clumsy dancer’s imbalance before her lost rhythm is regained, the player’s assumed clumsiness must be diligently practiced over and over again.
     So, creating this suspension requires exceptional finesse in timing and shades of dynamics and balance, which, to my way of thinking, is the more difficult task.
     In my father’s case, alas, the task was performed never with consummate success, as though the passage was a nagging regret and he had to return again and again to pick a sore.  (Father would tune his piano himself by feeding a reference note into an oscilloscope an army pal of his had once used for reading radar; he’d then retune the fifths until they were slightly flat. Those dancing waveforms on a monitor screen, as I told the doctors, I always associate with Chopin’s waltzes.) 

This extract is from the episode, Dispossession, in my Sister Morphine (Salt 2008) . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html 

For a tragedy of true alienation, see also my The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K at the South Bank Poetry Library. . .
http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=9440