Priapus and a Dessication of Oxford Dons: Blake, Blunt and Hockney Eviscerated in the Master’s Lodge.

Four months after les événements in Paris, when attending a marketing meeting for the Autumn List of a venerable publishing house, I was witness to a curious donnish hauteur and disdain when the names of William Blake, Anthony Blunt and David Hockney surfaced. It was an education – of sorts – that was to prepare me for my meeting the following week with Sir Anthony at the Courtauld Institute in Portman Square. 
My boss, the directress of publicity, had simply thrust into my hands a proof copy of 
Sir Anthony Blunt’s Guernica fresh off the press. 
‘Tony marked the item last night,’ Barbara instructed me distractedly, ‘but somehow I’ve lost the page. Simply ask him to confirm again the plate he wants for the publicity fliers.’    

I observed Sir Anthony surreptitiously beneath lowered

lashes while I pretended to examine a small maquette

on his desk, an ill-carved figure he evidently used as a 

paperweight among his card index boxes.

   ‘One can see with half an eye it’s a fake,’ were Blunt’s

first words. In his own eyes, I thought, there is nothing

written he allows you to read.

   ‘Truth be told I no longer remember,’ Blunt countered

wearily, as though the phrase was well-honed, when I 

asked him to identify the Picasso plate for his book’s 

publicity flyer. He denied any knowledge of his earlier

choice and chose a different page . . . a preparatory 

drawing for Guernica, a curious winged creature that, 

as Blunt states in his monograph, flies out of a wound in 

the flank of a tormented horse, and ‘symbolises the soul 

of the horse, which leaves it at the moment of death.’ 

On the previous Monday we’d taken the packed rush-hour Varsity Pullman from Paddington to the press at Oxford. Barbara and I had dined elbow-to-elbow with week-ending dons from the metropolis in a vintage breakfast-buffet car. 
A querulous don had stabbed his Times crossword with his fish-knife and quavered, ‘Male newlyweds are separated in Scottish islands, eight letters?’
‘He-brides,’ my sophisticated companion replied instantly and I thought then that I’d never measure up to the adaptive wit of Barbara. (I learned, years later, that her own marital status was something of a ‘lavender marriage’.)
The dining car had a special brown and cream livery of faded elegance, I remember, with furnishings the colour of Oxford marmalade. Our hair when we arrived had smelled of roasted coffee, burnt toast and smoked kippers.
A desiccation of fusty-dusty dons! 
For, when later that same morning we attended a marketing meeting convened by our own editorial board of dons in their Master’s Lodge, we’d found ourselves again seated among a dozen ill-assorted ancient chairs similarly crammed into a book-strewn brown study. 
The subfusc milieu of the Courtauld Institute I feared would be no different. The driest wits seem to sit at High Table or inhabit Senior Common Rooms.
In short, the most remarkable thing about Oxford dons I’d discovered at that time was, alike, they all struck me as quite studiously unremarkable. 
Theirs was the slow, measured speech of the hind-sighted.
Each seemed to compete to be an Everyman, taking pride in speech of studied simplicity, the raw stuff of common idiom from which they’d refine their epigrammatic sallies.
‘They do say you go into hospital with one thing and come out with another,’ mused a wizened don, idly flipping the pages of a new Vade-Mecum of Treatments for Pathological Conditions.
‘Duck shove it,’ said another brusquely, consigning an unpublished manuscript to obscurity.
The meeting concluded with a discussion to decide the merits of a learned treatise on ceremonial banqueting in the Quattrocento.
‘Is it illustrated?’ a don asked, examining the prospectus through half-moon bi-focals.
‘Regrettably, not,’ Barbara answered.
‘Dear me,’ the don observed peevishly, ‘then how are we to serve a good dinner without any plates?’
And then – at that precise moment – Anthony Blunt’s incisive new study of Picasso’s Guernica surfaced in error to the top of the stack.
‘Mmm. Alas, poor Tony,’ the elder of the discussants murmured with a strange little moue of discontent. 
Sage heads nodded. And there was a knowingness in the general mutterings of reproach when the senior don added: 
‘He makes new friends as readily as he abandons old ones.’
So I fully expected my imminent encounter with Sir Anthony Blunt* – a former Cambridge don, after all – to be likewise as dry and donnishly waggish.

•

As I remember it, the meeting dispersed as was customary into smaller clusters of dons – within reach of the Master’s table stacked with the latest proof copies – to continue their refined skirmishing, with scarcely sheathed claws now clasping glasses of dry sherry.
Two of the discussants, I noticed, were idly examining Volume Two of The Oxford Illustrated Old Testament**, and they had paused at the Book of Nehemiah in whose ink-fresh pages a number of mischievously phallic towers reared skywards in David Hockney’s faux naïf rebuilding of Jerusalem. 
‘Somewhat priapic and prochronistic, wouldn’t you say?’ The professor of the Quattrocento pursed his lips (an unconscious medievalism that belied his urbanity).
‘Jejunity and iconoclasm of the feebler sort, I agree,’ his companion conceded with a 
yawn, pointing to the protrusive membrum seminale they evidently perceived on the 
offending page. ‘Mind you, Blake, I believe, was not averse to . . .’ ’
‘. . . Smuggling priapic classicism into his works? Blake’s Four Zoas Series, you mean?  
Yes. I suppose, put like that, young Hockney’s in good company when regarding phalli as
compositional elements worthy of a callow jeu d’esprit. But the Old Testament? Is it
entirely proper under the imprimatur of a University Press? Unseemly? I wonder.’

William Blake’s personal iconography of the phallus: 
sketch by Blake from his Vala manuscript for
the Four Zoas Series, one of the uncompleted
prophetic books he began in 1797. 

  The professor of the Quattrocento paused for his sherry to further reflect. Then he brightened and continued:
‘Well, maybe Hockney’s not so wide of the mark, after all. I know of at least one King of Judah whose wife worshipped at the shrine of Priapus. Although, according to Hockney, Nehemiah must have had second sight, because that particular Jerusalemite king ruled four hundred years later and – even that being so – the dome is more than a trifle . . . er . . .’
‘. . . Coptic?’
At which point in this rivalrous Oxford brains trust, I was rescued from more bafflement as I’d spotted Barbara slyly pointing to her dinky ritzy wrist watch, and we dashed for our London train.

Edited extracts from 

In Search of the Fourth Man, an Enquiry into Betrayal,

Part III, Catherine Eisner’s A Bad Case (Published by Salt, 2015)

* For more insights concerning Anthony Blunt, see Slaves to Seconal: Droguée Antonia/Anthony and the Fourth Man

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

** The multi-volume edition of The Oxford Illustrated Old Testament was published by Oxford University Press in 1968 and contained David Hockney’s illustrations for the Book of Nehemiah.

Drawing by David Hockney for
the Book of Nehemiah (page 483)
The Oxford Illustrated Old Testament
(OUP 1968)

•

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