Catherine Eisner: 2014

Saturday, 6 December 2014

No Poetic Makeweights, Thank You, Pastry Cooks Excepted . . . . . . . or Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2).

When is a metrical makeweight ever acceptable to a poet?

Padding? Never!

Tennyson’s Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white, for example, is not by the merest jot weighted with such dud ballast.

Tennyson does not stumble at his envoi by interpolating a school-marmish stage direction:

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom (Write it!) lost in me.

I ask this question because for some time now I have striven to reconcile my admiration for Elizabeth Bishop’s much-lauded villanelle, One Art, with certain misgivings, which I expressed in an earlier post: ‘Do other readers share my doubts when considering the concluding lines of the final quatrain?’

the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Even the charm of Cameron Diaz when stumblingly reciting the piece in the movie, In Her Shoes (2005), cannot redeem the parenthetical padding of that clumsy antepenultimate metrical foot, which to me always seems as though it’s been desperately shoe-horned into a fit unsuited to it. Metrically, it seems like – as we English say in the demotic – like a cop out.

Pastry wrappers. ‘It’s all poetry is good for.’

I can think of only one poet whose makeweights have been indulged by his followers. I am thinking of ‘the pastry-cook of poets,’ Ragueneau in Cyrano de Bergerac, whose brioche pastries were shaped as lyres since they additionally gained worth by the burden of his verses. You may remember that those who consumed his confections (bardic cavaliers who numbered Cyrano in their company), whose poems were regarded as currency, saw their screeds cut up for paper bags by Ragueneau’s wife in her perpetual war to defeat Orpheus by punishing the Bacchantes.

As Mme Ragueneau says, ‘It’s all poetry is good for.’

Yes. It’s one of the very few cases of utilitarianism in the history of poetry, apart from that other witty confection, Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis (Fence/Gate/Stile), created by Britain’s supreme exponent of la poésie concrète, the poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, for his garden of contemplation in South Lanarkshire.

The Incredibly Obvious Manoeuvre.

But, you know, it is my belief that the stumbling closing line that so vexes the reader of Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art could have been fixed so very easily because the secret mechanism for perfecting the verse was hidden from her all along in her antepenultimate line:

I shan't have lied. It’s evident

Since the structure of a villanelle is surely to reconfigure the poem’s principle elements to extract new and surprising nuances (from such words as ‘evident’ and ‘intent’, say, which provide the secondary rhyme), then it should follow that, when the poetic metre is implacably trochee and suggestive of a revaluation of evidential experience viewed in maturity, the perfect trochaic component – far from being a superfluous padding out (Write it!) – should noticeably possess for the final inevitable clincher the inherent potential to practically write itself.

In short, it is possible that a poet can be blind to the compelling dynamics of her own invention even while those dynamics are seen to operate with an irresistible momentum within the closed system that is a poem’s argument.

As a gifted cryptologist declares in my recent post of November 16: ‘The correct solution can often be found hidden in plain sight . . . in this kind of business, we learn to recognise the Incredibly Obvious Manoeuvre.’

In other words, even the most proficient magician can miss a trick.

So, in my view, the answer to the One Art problem has been embedded in the verses all the time, intrinsic to the text. And, therefore, the poem’s conclusion – defined by its own special impetus – should/could more directly read:

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like evident disaster.

Well. Free of independent thought, driven only by the propulsive energy of the unique devices the poet had set in motion in her masterly verses, that’s what I would have done . . . had I been in her shoes.

Cameron Diaz
In Her Shoes

Dare the critic enter the bear pit? See

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/09/all-that-apart.html

Monday, 1 December 2014

Two Untimely Deaths Foreshadow Aristotelian Dramatic Irony

Definition: Dramatic Irony.

A plot device in which apprehension of events or motives is the god-like privilege of the audience but not within the grasp of characters in the play who may, indeed, never survive the action of the drama to achieve such self-knowledge.

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It is not for me to glibly remind ourselves of how tragic events in our national life adhere to Aristotelian definitions of classic drama conducive to the terror and pity essential for the cathartic experience Aristotle prescribes to purge our congested emotions.

No. On this occasion I simply juxtapose two news reports separated by a century and half and ask you, the reader, to decide how dramatic irony could be more convincingly wrought by even the most exulted of dramatists in the laurelled pantheon of Ancient Greece.

In other words – with decidedly no disrespect intended to the bereft, please believe me – I earnestly propose that in the denouements of these human tragedies the cosmic dramatist clearly demonstrates, once again, a Supreme Ironist’s uncontested ascendency.

2014: November 27, Australia. Australian star cricketer, Phillip Hughes, aged 25, dies after he is struck on the side of the head by a cricket ball. Hughes died as a result of a vertebral artery dissection, which caused a ‘massive bleed’ on the brain, according to doctors. Doctors describe the condition he died from as ‘incredibly rare’ and ‘very freakish’, suggesting that only a hundred cases of vertebral artery dissection had ever been reported.
Hughes was struck on the top of the neck by a short-pitched delivery while playing for South Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground on November 25th. He died at nearby St Vincent’s hospital two days later never having regained consciousness.

2014: November 30, Jerusalem. Former Israeli cricket star Hillel Oscar dies after he is hit by the ball while refereeing a cricket match in the coastal city of Ashdod. The umpire, Oscar, 55, the former national team captain, was taken to hospital unconscious but doctors were unable to save his life.
The incident came a few days after 25-year-old Australian cricketer Phillip Hughes died after being hit at the base of the neck by a ball. His death was a very rare instance of cricket players dying on the field.
One of the players stated that the Ashdod incident happened when a batsman struck a ball with tremendous power and it rebounded off the stumps and hit Oscar, who was umpiring the game.
‘The ball flew in the direction of the umpire with great force, struck the wicket and hit him in the face,’ the player said.
Oscar was not wearing a protective helmet, the player added. Umpires in cricket do not wear such helmets, since the likelihood of injury is regarded as extremely low.

The teams in the Ashdod game had held a minute’s silence in honour of Phillip Hughes before their ill-fated game.

1856: December 24, Edinburgh.
The eminent geologist, folklorist and evangelical Christian, Hugh Miller, is found by a servant lying half dressed, lifeless on the floor, his feet upon the study rug, and his chest pierced with the ball of his revolver pistol, which is found lying in the bath that stands close by.
He had earlier taken his bath but unfortunately his natural and peculiar repugnance to physic had induced him to leave untaken the medicine prescribed him for the night terrors by which he was pursued. The deadly bullet had perforated the left lung, grazed the heart, cut through the pulmonary artery at its root, and lodged in the rib in the right side. Death must have been instantaneous.

1856: December 26, Edinburgh.
A post-mortem examination is made of the body of Hugh Miller, whose death from a pistol had been reported on Christmas Eve. The Report of the Post Mortem Examination under the authority of the Procurator-Fiscal states:

We hereby certify, on soul and conscience, that we have this day examined the body of Mr. Hugh Miller . . . The cause of death we found to be a pistol-shot through the left side of the chest; and this, we are satisfied, was inflicted by his own hand. From the diseased appearances found in the brain, taken in connection with the history of the case, we have no doubt that the act was suicidal under the impulse of insanity.

Signed

James Miller, W.T. Gairdner, A.H. Balfour, A.M. Edwards.

1856: December 27, Edinburgh. Another tragedy in connection with Hugh Miller’s fate is at the same time disclosed. After the judicial and medical inquiry, Professor Miller (no relation) takes the pistol to the gunsmith – from whom it had been purchased by Mr Miller in July, 1855 – in order to ascertain how many shots had been fired and how many were still in the chamber.
In the master’s absence, the foreman, Thomas Leslie, an old and experienced workman, receives the pistol from Professor Miller but, unfortunately, instead of taking off the chamber, he looks into the muzzle, holding the hammer with his fingers while he turned the chamber round to count the charges. The hammer slips from his fingers, strikes the cap, and the charge in the barrel explodes.
It is reported that Professor Miller exclaimed, ‘That’s a narrow escape.’ Unhappily, it was not so, for, as the smoke cleared away, he saw the gunsmith’s head gradually droop, and his body then fall lifeless on the floor. The charge had entered his right eye, and penetrated the brain. Thomas Leslie was a steady, trustworthy man, and had been 25 years in employment as a gunsmith. He left a widow and a family of eight children.
It was established that Hugh Miller had bought the six-shot revolving chamber pistol, size of ball ninety-two to the pound, from the firm of Messrs. Alexander Thomson & Son, gunmakers. A few days after, he called and said he thought it a little stiff in its workings, and had it made to revolve more readily. The pistol had not been seen by Thomson since then; but in his absence Professor Miller called at the firm and asked Mr Thomson’s foreman how many of the six shots had been fired. He added, ‘Mind, it is loaded.'
The foreman, instead of removing the breech or chamber to examine it, had incautiously turned the pistol entire towards his own person, and lifting up the hammer with his fingers, while he counted the remaining loaded chambers, he must have disengaged his fingers while the pistol was turned to his own head. It exploded, and the ball lodging in the angle of his right eye, he fell back a lifeless corpse.
The pistol was a bolted one, which meant it could be carried loaded with perfect safety. Having been wet internally, rust may have stopped the action of the bolt. The pistol had remained for several hours in the bath where Hugh Miller had dropped it. This may have accounted for the apparent incaution of Mr Thomson’s foreman.

Thomas Leslie was buried in Grange Cemetery on the same day as Hugh Miller.

Monday, 13 October 2014

A Master of Horror Outspooked . . . Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness

It was a Friday of a famous landslide election victory, I remember, and the clamour of doltish triumphalism in our street continued to oppress me until the arrival of an airmail letter franked San Francisco June 1983 proved a welcome diversion to lighten my sombre mood.

The letter was brief. After thanking me for my aerogramme of the previous month, my correspondent concluded:

As I have written elsewhere, there is no solace in the professed wisdom maturity confers when we are powerless to challenge the paranatural forces that taunt our moribund sonorities, never mind that they issue as Divine Incantations from the poeta laureatus of Friscan Bohemia. And yes. Your photostat of the Sterling Corrigenda momentarily induced, I candidly admit, a mild attack of the jitters when I saw the amendment your revisionist specter had ‘ordaineth’. But are They not all-wise, all-knowing? Yours respectfully Fritz Leiber

The Dark Arts of Megapolisomancy.

To the letter was appended a postscript:

P.S. It’s the stalest of clichés but ‘There are some things the human mind is not meant to know.’

That I had received a letter from the West Coast doyen of Modern Horror fiction, Fritz Leiber, was remarkable in itself, as I had no doubt that his fan mail was copious and a burdensome duty more honoured in the breach than in the observance, but to have succeeded in unnerving the fictive conjurer of the dark arts of Megapolisomancy was to be regarded, I congratulated myself, as a palpable hit.

My own letter, some four weeks earlier, had indeed been fan mail of a sort for I had praised his celebrated metafiction, Our Lady of Darkness (1977), for the chilling verisimilitude of its evocation of the San Francisco of the Seventies, and declared how my admiration was unreserved for his skilful inter-braiding of the lives of notable Californian Gothic Romantics, particularly that triumvirate of West Coast Bohemianism, the heirs of Poe . . . Ambrose Bierce, Clark Ashton Smith, and George Sterling, whose life had ended in a particularly ‘nasty death’ (as Leiber writes in Our Lady), a self-administered vial of cyanide, which the poet had carried in his pocket for the exigent occasion of the quietus he cooly foretold.

Of the San Franciscan poet George Sterling I had more to relate, for in my letter I had been eager to share the strange intelligence that I, too, possessed a mystic book, not unlike the one Leiber describes in the pages of his Our Lady, and one I believed, moreover, to be ruled equally by the tyrannous elemental entities that pursued so malevolently the self-referential protagonist of Fritz’s novel, a writer named Franz who resides in the author’s own crumbling apartment overlooking Corona Heights, the vortex of the paramental forces emanating from San Francisco’s city-organism to be awakened by adepts of Megapolisomancy, the science of megapolitan prognostication codified by the occultist Thibaut de Castries.

And the name of my own mystic book?

And by whose cyanide-directed hand is the dedication written? And, further, what can be learned from the identity of the dedicatee?

Dear Clark

A few more rhymes from your fellow {Bohemian poet and friend

George Sterling

San Francisco

April 12th 1911

That George Sterling, celebrated in California as one of America’s greatest poets, was an intimate friend of the younger poet Clark Ashton Smith is well documented, and I hazard a guess that this copy of The House of Orchids and Other Poems (San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1911) was his first gift to his young protégé. They first met in 1911. (At five shillings, it must have been bought long before my bookseller converted his stock to the British decimalisation of currency in 1971.) It is significant that, a year after their first meeting, Sterling assisted Clark in the publishing of the nineteen-year-old poet’s The Star-Treader and Other Poems under the imprint of his own San Franciscan publisher (A.M. Robertson, November 1912), with one reviewer hailing Smith as ‘the Keats of the Pacific’.

How extraordinary to think I now hold in my hands a book possessed by (in both senses of the phrase) Clark Ashton Smith, a fabulist who was in his turn mentor to Fritz Leiber and venerated by him, together with his other hero, H. P. Lovecraft, as the greater of the pantheon of Weird Tales Magazine luminaries.

Forbidden Knowledge

On Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos as he conceived it I need not dwell, as believers in this malignant primal entity and its shape-shifting emissaries will not need reminding that Clark Ashton Smith, a key member of the Lovecraft Circle, also wrote his own Cthulhu Mythos tales, inspired by Lovecraft, in which he, too, is preoccupied with the lurking malevolence of a cosmogony of avenging entities in perpetual conflict with anti-Dionysian humankind whose overweaning destructive machinations they are hellbent on defeating to see us humbled as slaves to Their will . . . our minds denied the mystic knowledge that is in Their gift alone.

So to understand my uncontainable eagerness to share the contents of this literary relic with the author of Our Lady of Darkness I must remind you of a key passage of Leiber’s from Chapter Three of Our Lady, which describes a private journal of arcane jottings supposedly written by Clark Ashton Smith.

As you can see, it’s not a regular book at all but a journal of blank rice-paper pages, as thin as onionskin but more opaque, bound in ribbed silk that was tea rose, I’d say, before it faded. The entries, in violet ink with a fine-point fountain pen, I'd guess, hardly go a quarter of the way through. The rest of the pages are blank.

Later in Chapter Twenty-One, Clark’s mysterious journal unexpectedly yields up its secrets . . .

[He] examined each page minutely with fingers and eyes before he turned it. He said conversationally, ‘Clark did think of San Francisco as a modern Rome, you know, both cities with their seven hills. From Auburn he’d seen George Sterling and the rest living as if all life were a Roman holiday . . . ‘Hello, what's this?’ His fingernails were gently teasing at the edge of a page. ‘It's clear you're not a bibliophile, dear Franz . . . There!’ With the ghostliest of cracklings the page came apart into two, revealing writing hidden between. He reported, ‘It's black as new – India ink, for certain – but done very lightly so as not to groove the paper in the slightest. Then a few tiny drops of gum arabic, not enough to wrinkle, and hey presto! – it's hidden quite neatly . . .’

And the content of the secret writings exposed? A malediction from a magus . . . for Franz (alias Fritz Leiber) was ‘. . . looking at last at de Castries’s own handwriting, so neatly drawn and yet so crabbed for all that.’ He silently reads the following:

A CURSE upon Master Clark Ashton Smith and all his heirs . . . false fleeting agent of my old enemies. Upon him the Long Death, the paramental agony!

A Cosmic Wind?

The chill shiver that ran through me when I first read that passage was only surpassed by my shudder of apprehension at the occurrence of an exceedingly strange turn of events when, as I explained in my first letter to Fritz Leiber . . .

. . . in the late evening of Thursday 28th April an unexpected breeze sprang up and before I could close my study window a strong draught swept my copy of The House of Orchids from the shelf above my desk, where it landed, spread open at the page preceding the antepenultimate verses of Sterling’s re-imagining of a prophetic Forty-Third Chapter of Job, yet with his verses now marred by unexplained Corrigenda, as the enclosed photostat discloses.

. . . Know that I am the Lord,

Who ordaineth His truth as a darkness, and

the dust as stars that conceive ;

Who teaches fear with an arrow, and bitter

enterprise to thy young men of war ;

An astonishing feature of this discovery, as I made clear to Fritz Leiber in my letter penned the following day, was the fact that the foreboding phenomenological Darkness to which his Our Lady of Darkness had alluded should appear so mysteriously on page 137 to muzzle the vatic utterances of George Sterling, the Spiritual Guide who had hailed the ‘accursed’ Clark Ashton Smith as his successor.

Let me be clear, Clark’s presentation copy of The House of Orchids I had read many, many times, and I’d had many, many opportunities to examine its pages. Other than the end papers inside the front cover scrawled with Sterling’s inscription to ‘fellow Bohemian’ Clark, the remaining pages to my certain recollection were entirely unmarked . . . by not a blot nor a spot was any page disfigured. I’d swear to it.

‘And even more alarming, this morning,’ I went on, in my letter the next day to Leiber, was . . .

. . . to learn from news reports that yesterday, on the very day these ominous interlinear annotations appeared, heralded by a cosmic wind (?), in San Francisco Bay the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise ran aground on a sandbar, as you’re undoubtedly aware, and remained stranded for five hours only half a mile from the pier. Can we assume, then, that the ‘arrows’ of Sterling’s redacted text refer to the vessel’s huge armoury of anti-missile weapons and the ‘young men of war’ to the thousands of American servicemen onboard?

How to Alter the Future.

Only lately (my having just moved house and, in consequence, my having unearthed a mountain of forgotten correspondence) has my/Clark’s copy of The House of Orchids resurfaced.

It has set me thinking. Hard.

Surely, my reasoning tells me, the fact of this near-miss US naval disaster is more than consonant with the crazed Thibaut de Castries’s megapolisomantic theory of the occult science of mega-cities, particularly the principle that due to the cumulative power of ever-accreting megapolises, a megapolisomancer can manipulate a city’s paramental forces to predict and alter the future. A theory, moreover, that finds its origin in the dark energies believed by Leiber to be amassing at the locus of emanation that is the monster-like antenna tower rising from the Heights above the Bay Area of San Francisco.

This being so, my reasoning continues, those five hours of the grounding of USS Enterprise off San Francisco in April 1983 are of the profoundest significance. And we must ask ourselves by what degree of potency the Dark Arts can be measured when the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier – and the world’s largest – is very likely to have super-augmented the powerhouse of elemental megapolitan energies incarnated in the city of San Francisco on that fateful April day.

With the propulsive power of eight Westinghouse onboard nuclear reactors fuelled by enriched uranium, pulsing out 280,000 shaft horsepower, the USS Enterprise as a facilitator of megapolisomantic auguries is a proposition, I believe, not without validity.

However, I cannot escape the knowledge that, according to my correspondent Fritz Leiber, the intention of Thibaut de Castries while in the throes his psychosis was to deploy megapolisomancy for the annihilation of his former acolyte. (Except Clark actually died peacefully in his sleep on August 1961, aged 68.)

All the same, I do pray most fervently that the Curse of de Castries shall not by association fall on me.

George Sterling Fritz Leiber Clark Ashton Smith

(1869 - 1926) (1910 - 1992) (1893 - 1961)

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

Thursday, 28 August 2014

The Audit of Fame 1: Prodigal Son Vincent Van Gogh

Let me declare at once that I claim first dibs on the title, The Audit of Fame, as it may be found set in stone on page 313 of my Sister Morphine (Salt, 2008), where my embittered, disinherited heroine identifies a practice in art history indistinguishable from vanity publishing . . . in other words, her Portrait of the Artist as a Remittance Man (in this case, Boy, her spoilt-rotten younger brother).
See: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

I don’t think the general public is aware that art for art’s sake is a privileged pursuit often underwritten by family trust funds or that, immediately after the Second Great War, art was considered a gentleman’s profession very like the practice of publishing, and infested with remittance men. The Audit of Fame remains a book that begs to be written by an aesthetical chartered accountant. I repeat, had not Mother progressively sold off parcels of land from my father’s estate — including Wilkes’s prized vegetable plot — Boy would not have had the wherewithal to mount his one-man exhibitions, nor would he have garnered that minor entry in the current guides to British artists, under ‘H’ (my maiden name is the sole inheritance we share).

Dispossession.

Such an audit of artists would, without doubt, include Degas, whose aristocratic kinsfolk owned banks with branches in Paris, Naples and New Orleans. Edgar, himself, was born on bank premises at the Paris branch of the Banque de Naples, which his father managed. Nor should our audit ignore Toulouse-Lautrec, the scion of aristocratic wealth, and the possessor of an allowance and studio in Montmartre, by the grace of his parents, the Comte and Comtesse de Toulouse-Lautrec. Cézanne, too, was the son of a wealthy banker and granted an allowance to study art in Paris. In 1886, at the age of 47, he inherited his father's wealth and became financially independent.

The Squandering Prodigal of Yellow.

However, the shabby task of running a post hoc slide-rule over the loose change of 19th Century trustafarians is not my intention here.

No. Not here. My fiduciary duty on this occasion is confined to the ledger account of that archetypal remittance man, Vincent van Gogh.

And, since Van Gogh’s socialist sympathies are nowhere more evident than in his depictions of indigent saboted peasantry, my interest, you might say, is one of purely Marxian economics defined by the true cost of labour, for it recently struck me, just as a scientific hypothesis, to compare the daily wage of the said saboted peasant with the profligacy of van Gogh’s impetuous smorgasbords of impasto pigments – value-costed by oil paint per square centimetre of canvas.

The correlation yields a result that is somehow unsurprising, given my lifelong ascetic disdain for van Gogh’s technique of squandering gobbets of oil paint straight from the tube.

The coverage I’ve calculated is derived from a typical Vincentian wheat field’s massy yellow, which approximates to 1,400 square centimetres. Hence, in my estimation, allowing for wastage, some two and half double tubes of couleurs fines pour les arts were likely consumed, with each tube (retail) representing a manual worker’s average daily wage.

For additional fascinating insights I am indebted to the diligence of Brian Dudley Barrett whose 2008 dissertation, North Sea artists’ colonies, 1880-1920, contains an excellent account of the mounting costs faced by followers of the fashion for plein-air painting.

Typically, for early pleinairists of the 19th Century, ‘a medium-sized canvas (125 x 80 cm.) took approximately 100 francs worth of paint . . . In the 1895 Lefranc catalogue prices for tube oil-paints average approximately two francs for a size number 6, c.60 ml. ... It is worth noting that Lefranc’s size 13 tube, their largest, at over 15 cm. long and 3.5 cm in diameter, c.200 ml., cost ﬁve francs each, one of which alone was approximately equivalent to an average labourer’s daily pay.’ Or, indeed, the cost of a day’s food for his family. [Five francs was a Parisian’s daily wage, one suspects; in the provinces, 3 francs per diem rate was more likely. In context, the price of a prostitute was also typically 3 francs.]

Agreed, these are sketchy figures. Yet, by contrast, Vincent van Gogh’s tube oil-paint consumption is well documented.

A Docket for the Quartermaster.

In early April, 1888, Vincent writes from Arles to his brother, Theo, itemising his

. . . order for paints; if you order them at Tasset’s and L’Hôte, Rue Fontaine, it would be a good thing – since they know me – to tell them that I expect a discount equal to at least the cost of carriage, which I will willingly pay; they need not pay the carriage, we pay for it here, but the discount in that case should be 20%. If they agree to that – and I'm inclined to think they will – they can supply me with paints until further notice, and that you mean a big order for them.

So a ‘big order’, then, to his brother who was, in effect, his quartermaster; an order that included ten Double Tubes of Chrome Yellow No. 2 (cf. Goupil’s grades) and ten Doubles of the Jaune Citron he adored. Even with the wholesale discount Vincent demanded, just the cost of these items alone would have fed a worker’s family for a month.

The magnitude of ‘Vincent’s Account’ with his indulgent brother may be judged by the cost to Theo of painting materials in the period June 1889-July 1890, listing 901.80 francs for materials supplied by the firm of Tasset & L’Hôte, and 381.25 francs for Tanguy.

Total: 1,283 francs.

Estimates suggest that Theo spent an average of around 100 francs a month on Vincent; that is some 15 percent of his annual income on his brother’s remittances.

So I return to the problem of Marxian aesthetics, as hypothesised by a callow Anthony Blunt long before the Iron Curtain had clanged down to crush the beliefs of fellow-travellers in the West who harboured a utopian sympathy for Social Realism. When a young man, Blunt cleaved to a vision of Art’s future under Communism that was unequivocal: ‘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.’ [Cf. Footnote 2, below.]

See
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html

Stakhanovist Artistic Licence?

Mmm. The proletariat would have its own culture, eh? Stakhanovist masterworks to stand witness to the Dignity of Labour? Tell that to Mademoiselle Sans Sabots of Arles, who must scythe a hectare of wheat per day for less than the price of the yellow vermicelli squirted by the town’s wanton dauber, never mind that the sunstruck remittance man’s confounded easel is planted in the path of her reaping blade.

Yet, if a recognised exemplar of Western Art is the attempted transmutation of the haecceity of wheatfields into the vermiculations of a Vincentian yellow-encrusted canvas, then, by contrast, the Marxian aesthetic, to my mind, was never more powerfully expressed than in the inspired stroke that transubstantiated a Russian Orthodox church into a hungering people’s Grain Store. As Social Realism at its most potent and most emblematic, it surely then outclasses any of the conceptualist vapidities that the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern has lately foisted on our Intelligentsiya.

Soviet Grain Store. 1930s.

Footnote 1 (December 13 2014)

Of course, were not Conceptualism a discredited art, a more sober reading of the 1930s Soviet Grain Store is to consider the 30,000,000 deaths accounted by the Patriotic War and Stalinist Purges as represented by seeds of grain. By my estimation – if each death were expressed as a seed of grain – then some eighteen sacks of grain would memorialise the tragedy of those lives lost.

Footnote 2 (January 6 2018)

In his prophetic satire of England’s Galsworthian leisured classes, W. Somerset Maugham (Christmas Holiday, 1939) describes the views of a young Cambridge-educated communistic firebrand and admirer of the iron fist of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder and Director of the Cheka. The political tyro claims: ‘Art! It’s an amusing diversion for the idle rich! Our world, the world we live in, has no time for such nonsense . . . I know what you would have thought; you would have thought it gave a beauty, a meaning to existence; you would have thought it was a solace to the weary and heavy-laden and an inspiration to the nobler and fuller life. Balls! We may want art again in the future, but it won’t be your art, it’ll be the art of the people.’

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For more observations concerning the artistic legacy of M & Mme Anon, see . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/mr-and-mrs-anon.html

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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

Monday, 4 August 2014

For those who would a war declare . . .

August 1 1914

                         For those who would a war declare 

                             we flung our hats up in the air,

                         fall where they may, without a care,

                        then fought like dogs for hats to wear.

Declaration of war greeted by jubilant hats in Berlin, August 1 1914.

Three days later, on August 4th 1914, Great Britain declared war on Germany, a reciprocal decision that saw the start of World War One, claiming over 16 million lives and 20 million casualties.

Friday, 1 August 2014

The Irreconcilable Sententiousness of Libertine Old Masters . . .

In the collected works of Anton Chekhov the short story, Imeniny (The Name-Day Party), is often singled out as a remarkably faithful portrait of a pregnant woman: the highs and lows of a loyal, sensitive wife betrayed by a heedless, self-regarding husband.

However . . . never mind that this tale has been described by Chekhovian scholars as a most profound ‘tour de force’ for his account of the psychopathology of the late stages of the third trimester – the discomfort, the hypersensitivity, the gravid leadenness – we should first remember that Dr. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a male clinician and even his talent for empathetic vraisemblance had obvious boundaries.

On the other hand, his profound empathy cannot be doubted in the shadow-twin of this story, Pripadok (An Attack of Nerves), both published in the same year . . . significantly, Year Zero, as defined by Nietzsche’s Umwerthung aller Werthe (Revaluation of All Values) of 1888.

Compare the two. It’s a striking contrast, as though one story has prompted the other. In the former, the fallow connubial bed cannot excuse the stirrings of infidelity in a swaggering indifferent husband; in the latter, a virginal young law student, Vassilyev, reluctantly on a night’s carouse with two comrades intent on inducting him into the ‘pleasures’ of brothels, experiences a moral crisis, and asks: ‘Is the debauching of prostitutes not a crime? Is it not as great an evil as slave-owning, rape or murder?’

With strict adherence to his anti-pedagogic method, Chekhov follows his own advice and asked the questions without seeking answers to them: his stories thence characteristically become exercises in propositional logic strewn with premises but deficient of any conclusions.

In my novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, I seek mischievously to correct this tendency towards moral ambivalence with the syllogistic reasoning of my conflicted antihero sometimes pursued to unwelcome logical proofs that appear axiomatic, see
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-long-lost-novel.html

Tchékhov paid the ferriage for the rivercrossing and the survey party embarked, stumbling in the unearthly stealing polar dusk.
‘There is no hurry,’ Anton remarked breezily, as the ferryman took his arm. ‘Charon waits for all!’
A putrid smell arose as the waves sucked at the stern ; for the river had been turbulent in recent months and, as it flowed along, like a ferocious animal, it gnawed and ate away the fast-ice clutching the banks.
Small chunks of ice rapped on the hull. Shuddering as the northerly shook him by the throat, Anton clenched the forward-rail and searched the midafternoon murk for a closing shore.
(‘Finita la commedia!’ his heart cried, ‘and end this burdensome daylong travail.’)
A wreath entwined with withered leaves of laurel was sucked by on the swirling current. A melancholy syllogism occurred to him :

Man is composed of 60% water ;

water strives to seek its own level ;

60% of a man’s soul desires to plunge at once over the side of a ferry boat.

Also, for more probings into this field of enquiry, see the contradictions hitherto unremarked in the ‘classic prose’ of an eminent English syllogistic rationalist at this link:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012_04_01_archive.html

Do As I Say. Not As I Do.

So lately I’ve found Chekhov’s abbreviated propositional method has grown tiresome and his ‘classic prose’ is now seen, to my jaundiced eye, to express a sort of inverted sententiousness.

I invite you, therefore, to examine closely the following passage from Chekhov’s An Attack of Nerves and the additional quotations that follow; with the challenge that you, too, reader-of-literary-old-masters, should consider a revaluation of values.

[Vassilyev thought] ‘. . . What is the use of their humanity, their medicine, their painting? The science, art, and lofty sentiments of these soul-destroyers remind me of [the two] brigands [who] murdered a beggar in a forest . . . After murdering a man, they came out of the forest in the firm conviction that they were [still observing a holy fast]. In the same way [these student comrades], after buying women, go their way imagining that they are artists and men of science. . . .’
‘Listen!’ he said sharply and angrily. ‘Why do you come here? Is it possible you don't understand how horrible it is? Your medical books tell you that every one of these women dies prematurely of consumption or something; art tells you that morally they are dead even earlier. Every one of them dies because she has in her time to entertain five hundred men on an average, let us say. Each one of them is killed by five hundred men. You are among those five hundred! If each of you in the course of your lives visits [brothels] two hundred and fifty times, it follows that one woman is killed for every two of you! Can’t you understand that? Isn't it horrible to murder, two of you, three of you, five of you, a foolish, hungry woman! . . .’

Two years earlier (1886), one should recall, Chekhov wrote a cautionary letter to his brother Nikolai reprimanding him for his pleasure-seeking in Moscow’s lower depths, counselling him to become a more cultured person since he had within him the talent to be at ease in the company of ‘educated people . . . Talent has brought you into such a circle, you belong to it, but … you are drawn away from it, and you vacillate between cultured people and [drinking cronies] . . .’ Anton implores Nikolai to ‘smash the vodka bottle . . .’

Anton continues to moralise with self-referential gravity on the duties of a cultured artist.

They seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct . . . What they want in a woman is not a bed-fellow … They want especially, if they are artists, freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for motherhood . . . For they want mens sana in corpore sano.

Mens sana in corpore sano? Did Anton Chekhov truly believe that for a supreme artist the ennobling of the sexual instinct was an attainable ideal? Certainly, the innumerable amatory adventures – including his own – of so many old masters do not bear close scrutiny in support of his proposition.

Chekhov’s Formula for Extrapolating the Mortality of Fallen Women.

According to a Los Angeles Times reviewer, Georges Simenon created a scandale à la mode by telling two different interviewers that from age 13 he had slept with 10,000 women, of whom 8,000 were prostitutes. By applying Chekhov’s equation, we can calculate that Simenon, the master of homicidal psychopathology, had himself, before his death aged 86, killed at least sixteen women.

 Chekhov expresses his computation thus: ‘If each of you in the course of your lives visits [brothels] two hundred and fifty times, it follows that one woman is killed for every two of you!’

On this sensitive matter, a Chekhov aficionado states in the London Guardian daily of 1 March 2013:

It starts in 1873, when the teenage Chekhov visited a brothel in his home town of Taganrog and continues until 1898 when his relationship with the actress Olga Knipper began . . . The picture that emerges is of a man who, over the course of a couple of decades, enjoyed at least two-dozen love affairs of varying intensity – some extremely passionate, some casual, some lasting many years, and some that were clearly going on simultaneously – and who, it’s also clear from his letters, continued to be a regular visitor to brothels in Russia and elsewhere in Europe.

I am reminded of this confraternity of literary men consecrated to unswerving faith in the undemanding tenets of their irreconcilable sententiousness when I attended a wedding recently and heard from the altar, at the bridegroom’s request, a recitation of Siempre (‘Always’) by Pablo Neruda.

I am not jealous

of what came before me.

Come with a man

on your shoulders,

come with a hundred men in your hair,

come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,

This boast invites a challenge, coming as it does from an arch philanderer and from a husband who in pursuit of other women abandoned an inconvenient wife and their ailing infant daughter, a choice of moral worth little different from that of Rainer Maria Rilke whose daughter was similarly abandoned before the age of one.

More than this, these proponents of doublethink, propagating their creed of irreconcilable sententiousness, appear to give little thought to the consequences of their libertinage.

As it is, 125 years have elapsed since Chekhov first posited his theory of venereal disease in terms of quantifiable culpability, and medical research into its incidence and prevention has advanced apace. Nevertheless, screening in Great Britain in the last decade suggests that as many as one in 10 sexually active men has the sexually transmitted infection Chlamydia without knowing it. The figures are in line with similar studies of sexually active young women, which indicate that one in 10 also has the infection without knowing it.

‘Man Wants Woman! Every Man Wants a Woman! So Natural!’

Possibly One in 10 has the infection without knowing it. It would follow, then, that with the level of promiscuity that Neruda embraces in his magnanimous welcome to the 1,100 lovers of the Love-of-His-Life (‘Bring them all to where I am waiting for you . . .’) over one hundred of them, and undoubtedly his inamorata, will be infected.

Cervical smear showing Chlamydia trachomatis in the vacuoles.

Mens sana in corpore sano? To return to first principles and the irreconcilability of sententiousness attendant on the licentiousness of old masters. Question. Were the nostrums Dr Chekhov prescribed for the world swallowed merely by his adulatory readers and never dispensed to the great man himself?

Even today, controversy rages in Yalta concerning rumours of Chekhov’s predilection for prostitutes.

In the November 22 1997 edition of the London Guardian can be read an account of an argument between a Yalta sanatorium doctor, Dr Yuri Zinenko and his wife, Valentina, a neurosurgeon: ‘Nyet! Nyet! Prostitut! Of course he visited prostitutes! Man wants Woman! Every man wants a woman! So natural!’

From a medical standpoint, the surgeon’s husband believed that Dr Chekhov’s degeneration through tuberculosis would not have stopped him: ‘His consumption was the most severe kind, but this can just make a tubercular patient more active.’

A cordon sanitaire, therefore, is better drawn over this sensitive matter, when even medico-compatriots can’t agree, aside from their separate views, as husband or wife.

Come with a hundred men in your hair,
Come with a thousand men between your breasts.
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[January 19 2024] The Local Government Association for England and Wales reveals that their latest analysis reports that two thirds of council areas surveyed had seen rates of gonorrhoea and syphilis increase since 2017, with 36 per cent of local authority areas also reporting significant increases in detections of chlamydia.

A Moral Undrawn.

No moral can be drawn from these musings, obviously. That would be most un-Chekhovian.

And yet . . . many devotees have commented that in his care for others Chekhov neglected to cure himself, a point made in a sly authorial backhanded observation by a character in Nabokov’s novel The Gift: ‘I wouldn’t have been treated by Dr Chekhov for anything in the world.’

Prostitutes soliciting in Moscow in the late Twentieth Century.

and A Bad Case (2015)

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