Sunday 19 March 2017

‘Did someone call for a recitation?’ Finishing School for Versifiers (Part 5)

All poets, whatever they
may seem to others, die young. 
Tennessee Williams
Suddenly Last Summer.

You might say of certain literary outpourings refined by a classical education that there’s a recognisable constant observable in the writer’s cleverly wrought symmetry where a drama features the explication of a verse to parallel the plot or, correspondingly, the gestation of a poem provides impetus to the action.  

The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan springs to mind. And let us not forget Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle, One Artwhen stumblingly reciting by Cameron Diaz in the movie, In Her Shoes (2005); or even those memorable WW2 epigraphs, Johnny-head-in-air by John Pudney (heard in the film, The Way To The Stars) and The Life That I Have by Leo Marks (issued as a code-mnemonic for SOE secret agent heroine Violette Szabo and recited in the movie, Carve Her Name with Pride). 

In this overcrowded genre, the masterly poet Roy Fuller’s novel The Carnal Island (1970) should not be forgotten. I suspect Robert Graves is the model for Fuller’s fictional poet and the poetry pastiched in this (I assume) reworking of The Aspen Papers by Henry James (a doomed visit to the shrine of  venerated poet) leads me to this view. (A specimen poem, entitled In a Barn near Beugny, adds substance to this conjecture and the birth year of the poet, 1890, makes him, like Graves, a member of the Lost Generation who came of age during WWI).

The instances of this literary form are legion . . .

Poetry as a Propellant of Plot:
Deborah Kerr as Hannah and Cyril Delevanti as Nonno
in The Night of the Iguana.

Echoes of the absurd . . . The Night of the Iguana.

Take, for instance, The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams. A highly suspenseful device in the drama is the unfinished poem by Nonno, the elderly poet grandfather of Hannah, an itinerant artist, who like the washed-up Episcopal priest, the Reverend Shannon, finds herself stranded as a guest in a seedy hotel on a remote Mexican beach, where this introduction is made:

                    Revd Shannon: ‘And Gramps?’
                    Hannah: ‘He’s the world’s oldest living and practising poet . . . Do you 
                    know, he’s started a new poem. For the first time in twenty years he’s 
                    started another poem.’
                    Revd Shannon: ‘He hasn’t finished it yet?’
                    Nonno: ‘Did someone call for a recitation?’
                    Hannah: ‘No, Nonno . . . Just rest for a few moments, Nonno.’
                    Nonno‘How calmly does the olive branch* observe the sky begin to 
                    blanch, without a cry, without a prayer, with no betrayal of despair.’ 
                    (The tremulous speech trails off.)

What immediately strikes the discerning listener, however, in appreciation of Nonno’s verses, is how risibly their iambic quadrimeter resembles Lewis Carroll’s How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail, itself a parody of Isaac Watts’s didactic poems for children, How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour. 

Did Tennessee Williams nod, we wonder, when putting Nonno’s words on the ancient poet’s lips, or was the triumph of Nonno’s completion of his poem moments before his death an ironic hollow victory (by the playwright) over the pathetic fallacy? 

How differently, though, these absurd echoes of the pedagogic homily could have been resolved with the merest tweaks.

                    So calmly sure, the olive branch.

                    So calmly sure, the olive branch
                    observes the sky begin to blanch
                    without a cry, without a prayer
                    with no betrayal of despair.

                    Some time while light obscures the tree
                    the zenith of its life will be
                    gone past forever and from thence
                    a second history will commence . . .



A Metrical Duel . . . Cyrano de Bergerac.

Of course, this lietmotif of the genesis of a poem emergent from dramatic action has a recognised precursor in Cyrano de Bergerac and his celebrated metrical duel :

                    Cyrano: ‘While we fence, presto! all extempore I will compose a 
                    ballade . . . Three eight-versed couplets. . . And an envoi of four lines . . . 
                    I'll make one while we fight; and touch you at the final line . . . 
                    (the refrain) . . .  À la fin de l’envoi, je touche!


Elegiac verses evoking Nabokov’s lost homeland.


To my mind, however (within, of course, the delimited horizons of my own reading), only one poet – an incomparable master of two languages – has evoked with nigh sorcerous alchemy the process of a poem’s gestation as a parable of the eternal émigré’s homesickness of the dispossessed. 

Many critics consider Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift (1935-1937) as the masterpiece most faithful to the ‘local consciousness’ of his genius as a young man in exile on the brink of world recognition. It is also regarded as the crowning achievement of the first phase of his literary career and the virtuoso swansong of those novels he wrote in Russian.

A reimagining of Nabokov’s own life in Berlin (1922-1937), The Gift tells of a young Russian poet, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, and of his growth as an exiled writer following his family’s flight from the Bolshevik Revolution. 

I will conclude, with veneration, by quoting those supersensory passages that chart with astonishing clear-sightedness the evolution of his elegiac verses evoking his lost homeland . . . and that movingly convey the paradoxically ineffable rapture of a writer in the moment of triumphant expression.

Early Snow by
Konstantin Yakovlevich Kryzhitsky (1858-1911) 

. . . Fyodor began pacing the side-walk to the corner and back. The street was echoic and completely empty. High above it milk-white lamps were suspended, each on its own transverse wire; beneath the closest one a ghostly circle swung with the breeze across the wet asphalt. And this swinging motion, which had no apparent relation to him, with a sonorous tambourine-like sound nevertheless nudged something off the brink of his soul where that something had been resting, and now, no longer with the former distant call but reverberating loudly and close by, rang out ‘Thank you, my land, for your remotest . . .’ and immediately, on a returning wave, ‘most cruel mist my thanks are due. . . .’ And again, flying off in search of an answer: ‘. . . by you unnoticed. . . .’ He was somnambulistically talking to himself as he paced a nonexistent sidewalk; his feet were guided by local consciousness, while the principal Fyodor Konstantinovich, and in fact the only Fyodor Konstantinovich that mattered, was already peering into the next shadowy strophe, which was swinging some yards away and which was destined to resolve itself in a yet-unknown but specifically promised harmony. ‘Thank you, my land . . .’ he began again, aloud, gathering momentum afresh, but suddenly the sidewalk turned back to stone under his feet, everything around him began speaking at once, and, instantly sobered, he hurried to the door of his house, for now there was a light behind it. 
. . . 
A moment later, in bed, just as his thoughts had begun to settle down for the night and his heart to sink in the snow of slumber (he always had palpitations when falling asleep), Fyodor ventured imprudently to repeat to himself the unfinished poem—simply to enjoy it once more before the separation by sleep; but he was weak, and it was strong, twitching with avid life, so that in a moment it had conquered him, covered his skin with goose pimples, filled his head with a heavenly buzz, and so he again turned on the light, lit a cigarette, and lying supine, the sheet pulled up to his chin and his feet protruding, like Antokolski's Socrates (one toe lost to Lugano’s damp), abandoned himself to all the demands of inspiration. This was a conversation with a thousand interlocutors, only one of whom was genuine, and this genuine one must be caught and kept within hearing distance. How difficult this is, and how wonderful. . . . And in these talks between tamtambles, tamtam my spirit hardly knows. . . .             After some three hours of concentration and ardour dangerous to life, he finally cleared up the whole thing, to the last word, and decided that tomorrow he would write it down. In parting with it he tried reciting softly the good, warm, farm-fresh lines: 

                                             Thank you, my land; for your remotest 
                                             Most cruel mist my thanks are due. 
                                             By you possessed, by you unnoticed, 
                                             Unto myself I speak of you. 
                                             And in these talks between somnambules 
                                             My inmost being hardly knows 
                                             If it’s my demency that rambles 
                                             Or your own melody that grows. 

                                             Благодарю тебя, отчизна,
                                             за злую даль благодарю!
                                             Тобою полн, тобой не признан,
                                             я сам с собою говорю.
                                             И в разговоре каждой ночи
                                             сама душа не разберет,
                                             мое ль безумие бормочет,
                                             твоя ли музыка растет . . .


According to a number of critics, this poem expresses Nabokov’s own yearning for wider cultural recognition while appreciating the inestimable ‘gift’ bestowed on him by his homeland; that is: his phenomenal memory of the lost domain that was imperial Russia as refashioned and restored by the unique perceptions granted him by his native Russian identity.

*Apparently, the written version of this poem in the original play used an ‘Orange Branch’ rather than the ‘Olive Branch’ included in the movie version; thus: ‘How Calmly Does the Orange Branch’.



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)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Friday 17 March 2017

Cold War Paranoia: the Real Thing . . . a Poisoned Brick Thrown from an Upper Window

As you may be aware from my occasional despatches from Stoneburgh Military Academy – the elite alma mater for generations of British Intelligence operatives – I have documented in a number of communiqués the insider’s view of our Applied Behavioural Science and Psychological Operations unit, PsyOps, and its analyses of notable Cold War players of the Great Game.
       Insights, for instance, into the politico-criminalistics of two legendary Cold War subversives, the profiling of MI6 double agent George Blake and the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, may be read here . . .  
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.html
Cold War grandstanding:
Soviet ballistic missile paraded in Red Square, Moscow.

Lessons learned from ideological grandstanding by Cold War warriors.

Agreed, Stoneburgh’s preoccupations with its established I.n.t.C.l.e.a.r. Intelligence Clearance criteria for the integrity of trainees entering the Service would seem, at first glance, to suggest a narrow academic purview that precludes the wider socio-cultural landscape. 
       That this is not so, you may be sure, is due to the perceptive application of Predictive Investigative Psychology techniques by the IOC (Intelligence Operations Courseand its close observance of the socio-cultural context when examining the lessons the ideological grandstanding by Cold War warriors can teach us.
       As I have shown, in the Blake/Blunt profiling, it is through the behavioural patterns of both active counter-espionage operatives and those rogue agents suborned and bribed by foreign powers, that the fatal inherited weaknesses by which agents can be compromised are exposed . . . for it is in the subject’s childhood – well, particularly in childhood – that extreme ideological beliefs are found to germinate and, with them, ideological paranoia.
Professor Weissener (Stoneburgh Military Academy’s lecturer on politico-criminalistics), June 2015: ‘It is my belief that deeply embedded ideology from a subject’s formative years can be awakened (or, in today’s terms, ‘radicalised’) by the very real hostile intent of enemy powers, so the greatest vigilance must be maintained to identify telltale signs or detect unguarded disclosures.’
       And lest you imagine that Cold War Childhood Paranoia is a state of mind beyond the reach of my empathic identification, may I tell you that, five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was witness to an episode in the New York City borough of Queens that induced in me an authentic prickly sense of doom, revealed to me by a child’s-eye view of imminent annihilation falling from the sky.


‘Kids down the block say they wanna kill all the bad guys.’

In my view, then, those days of Cold War paranoia are not beyond retrieval.
       Which brings me to that day I set out with little Nathan for Corona Park, the day his mother was taken by his father to Mount Sinai hospital for her annual physical. Both second generation Polish-Americans, she was a store detective in the city and his father was the boss of a maintenance crew for Manhattan’s wooden water towers.
       So timid six-year-old Nathan was used to inclining his earnest bespectacled old-man’s face to study the New York skyline; an elevated inquisitiveness came naturally to him.
       ‘Them kids down the block.’ His small hand tightened in my clasp and he nodded in the direction of the apartment house on the corner of our avenue. ‘Real mean kids.’ He pointed to a third floor window and balcony. ‘Say they wanna kill all the bad guys.’
       ‘How’re they going to do that?’ I asked with a smile. (The two boys who lived on the third floor – Lee and Frankie – I knew to be aged seven and nine.) 
       Nathan pointed to the upper window.
       ‘Got stuff up there to be throwed down on the bad guys. Th’other day Frankie says as how he’s gonna fix ’em. The bad guys. Says as how them guys are gonna get throwed down on them eighteen hunnerd poisoned bricks.’


‘Weapons of mass destruction . . . satellites, celestial bodies, outer space.’

It follows, then, that I shall ask a not irrelevant quick question. Have you heard of the 1967 Titicut Follies (directed by Frederick Wiseman and filmed by John Marshall), a documentary masterpiece about the patient-inmates of Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Bridgewater, MA?
       Yes. A documentary film completed fifty years ago.
       Nineteen Sixty-Seven. A year I have cause to remember.
       1967. Churchill’s state funeral. Coffin borne on gun carriage. Muffled drums.
       1967. Communist China explodes its second atomic bomb.
       1967. The Vietnam War enters its twelfth year.
       1967. U.S. troop levels reach 463,000 with 16,000 combat deaths to date. 
       1967. Chinese shoot down two U.S. fighter-bombers outside Vietnam’s border. 
       1967. Massive pro-war and anti-war demonstrations in New York. 
       1967. The United States and the Soviet Union sign the Treaty on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. This agreement bans weapons of mass destruction from orbiting satellites, celestial bodies, or outer space.

‘Stockpiling nuclear weapons is like kids with toys.’

Theatre of Cold War Paranoia.

The extended soliloquies of the inmates (some Vietnam vets) in the Bridgewater Hospital exercise yard are Pure Theatre, that is, the Theatre of Cold War Paranoia . . . a crazed exuberance of prophets and the possessed.
       The ex-vet seer Borges (above right) pronounces: 
‘America is a female part of the earthworld and she’s sex crazy. Her sexiness brings on wars like the sperm that is ejected by man; it’s by a woman in her own body. It has the same influence. But this is a gigantic pattern . . . stockpiling nuclear weapons is like kids with toys, they figure they got to start playing with those toys . . . They’re no good. They’re Judases. They’re money-changers. I’ll tell you one thing. Even Pope Paul is not without sin. Believe in him and the cardinals! I say he’s unworthy of being the pope of the world and I announce that the rightful pope is now Archbishop Fulton Sheen and the other one, Cardinal Spellman, so help me God. I, Borges, say so !’
      ‘Stockpiling nuclear weapons is like kids with toys.’ 
      As six-year-old Nathan predicted in the same year: ‘Got stuff up there to be throwed down on the bad guys.’

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. 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
(where the counterespionage operations of Stoneburgh may be read in Red Coffee)
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
(In the latter two volumes, Stoneburgh operatives feature in Lovesong in Invisible InkListen Close to Me and Inducement)
see also extracts from the Stoneburgh Files here:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/oreville-spy-campus-introduction-to.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html
and for more insights on 
Anthony Blunt
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html

Monday 6 March 2017

Year Zero ‘A Thing with One Face’ : Prescient Words of the Godfather Who Foresaw the Birth of Winston Smith.

To my mind, in literary terms, there are two epochs that begin with Year Zero

The first Year Zero I have mentioned a number of times in these posts – 1888 – defined by Nietzsche’s Umwerthung aller Werthe (Revaluation of All Values).

But rereading the October–December 1944 issue of Penguin New Writing I stumbled on a date whose similarly reduplicative digits reminded me that George Orwell had predicted Year Zero to be almost certainly 1944 for the Revaluation of All Values for a Generation  . . . for the citation refer to Chapter One of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Winston’s first entry in his diary . . . 
April 4th, 1984.                                                                                                     He [Winston Smith] sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
So for Winston, the Epoch of The Last Man in Europe (being the dystopian novel’s original title) commenced no earlier than 1944.

How prescient, then, of Louis MacNeice to publish his Prayer before birth in that same year (in Penguin New Writing four years before the drafting of Nineteen Eighty-Four), almost you would think as a godfatherly charm against O’Brien’s vision of totalitarian tyranny : If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’

The precursors of Winston’s future plight in Big Brother’s dystopia are truly remarkable . . . the threats to ‘freeze my humanity . . . . dragoon me into a lethal automaton’ . . . rats, truth drugs, and the ‘wise lies’ of propaganda . . .   and the lure of the elusive pastures of the Golden Country . . . and the menacing Man Who Thinks He is God . . .  

Prayer before birth

                             I am not yet born ; O hear me.
                             Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
                                   club-footed ghoul come near me.

                             I am not yet born ; console me.
                             I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
                                   with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
                                         on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

                             I am not yet born ; provide me
                             With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
                                   to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
                                          in the back of my mind to guide me.

                             I am not yet born ; forgive me
                             For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
                                  when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
                                        my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
                                             my life when they murder by means of my
                                                   hands, my death when they live me.

                             I am not yet born ; rehearse me
                             In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
                                  old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
                                       frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
                                             waves call me to folly and the desert calls
                                                  me to doom and the beggar refuses
                                                         my gift and my children curse me.

                             I am not yet born ; O hear me,
                             Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
                                   come near me.

                             I am not yet born ; O fill me
                             With strength against those who would freeze my
                                   humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
                                        would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
                                              one face, a thing, and against all those
                                                   who would dissipate my entirety, would
                                                          blow me like thistledown hither and
                                                               thither or hither and thither
                                                                   like water held in the
                                                                         hands would spill me.

                             Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
                             Otherwise kill me. 
    Louis MacNeice                             
(1944)                             

Let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.