Catherine Eisner: 2023

Sunday, 31 December 2023

Her Left Shoe . . . E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Terrible Projectile of Semiotics

New Year’s Eve 2023

‘Darkness had no effect upon my fancy . . .’ wrote Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, no doubt recalling the month in which she first drafted her Promethean fable whose ‘Abhorred monster!’ she had created in June 1816, the Year Without a Summer; or as her literary confrère, Lord Byron, described it in the bleak conclusion to his vatic, epoch-defining blank verse: ‘Darkness . . . was the Universe.’

The Birthplace of Frankenstein’s Monster? A short carriage drive from the heart of Geneva, Switzerland.

In 1816, following the thunderous volcantic eruption of Mount Tabora in the East Indies, the Northern Hemisphere was consumed by a sulphurous fog so dense that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. It was a time of famine, doubt and fear. ‘All was black. The brows of men by the despairing light wore an unearthly aspect . . .’

That darkness, too, had been shared by the Prussian fabulist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, himself a writer of transgressive grotesqueries, of fantastical humanoid automatons ‘endued with animation’, a sinister unhealthy preoccupation in the view of those stuffy contemporaries of his who branded him an ‘Outsider’ of a ‘lurid hue’, resistant to the intellectual gravitas expected of popular writers as proselytisers for a Greater Germany.

(Incidentally, the unfortunate Victor Frankenstein, a Genevese, would have been heartened and spared his traumatic guilt from his nights in Bavarian charnel-houses had he known that some 200 years later – this December 2023 – the ‘Greater Europe’ of the European Union agreed the proposed Regulation for the harvesting of Substances of Human Origin intended for human application.)

‘Wound Fever’ and Forbidden Light . . .

and a Beast named Blasphemy.

So . . . significantly, in 1816, Mary Shelley and Ernst Hoffmann, each a communicant with the spirit of the new Age of Galvanism, were neighbouring Romantics dwelling in Continental Europe and divided only by a distance no greater than London to John O’ Groats. Hence, over Berlin’s literary salons where the polymathic Hoffmann was feted, and over the shores of Lake Geneva at the Villa Diodati where the Shelley/Byron coterie wrote, too, in Gothic script, there swirled morbid broodings on the outer reaches of metaphysics, adrift in the poisoned upper air, as if strangely convoluted sunless plants had grown twisted and found sustenance searching for forbidden light.

Beneath this overcast gloom, then, which presided in 1816, it is perhaps no coincidence that Hoffmann’s own nightmarish fable of uncanny anthropomorphisation, written in the same year, finds an echo in the despair of Mary’s monster: ‘The fever of my blood did not allow me to be visited by peaceful dreams.’

For in Hoffmann’ Nutcracker (Berlin 1816) we find another profoundly troubled Mary – the child Marie – who like the author of Frankenstein is also prey to an ‘acute mental vision’ of a monster . . . in this case, the seven-headed Mouse King, more terrifying than the beast named Blasphemy (cf. Revelation 13.1 ‘And I saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads.’)

Freudians, of course, no doubt have discovered a bonanaza of interpretations in Hoffmann’s Nussknacker und Mäusekönig, a box of delights that includes – surely voyeuristically? – the unfettered fevered imaginings of atavistic threat and the blood of young girls. Certainly, at whatever dark level of Hoffmann’s forty-year-old consciousness, there is some fixation that’s impenetrably troubling.

Atavistic threat and the blood of young girls? Well, of all the enigmatic dramas enacted in Hoffmann’s disconcerting Kinderfabel, one plot twist still retains its power to surprise us in the tale’s transformation from the printed page of 1816 to Tchaikovsky’s celebrated ballet-féerie of 1892, even now performed in centres of culture throughout the world. (Our traditional Christmas ballet season in London is incomplete without it).

Consider Act 1 of the ballet, which closes with the Battle to defeat the Mouse King when Marie (Clara in the ballet) famously defends her Nutcracker from attack and – mirroring the action of the book . . . she reacts without thought. For the febrile girl of the Nussknacker could not ‘contain herself anymore . . . so grabbed her left shoe, without being clearly aware of what she was doing, and threw it at the King.’ (The original narrative in French, is faithfully rendered: ‘Et, en même temps, d’un mouvement instinctif, sans se rendre compte de ce qu’elle faisait, Marie détacha son soulier de son pied, et, de toutes ses forces, elle le jeta au milieu de la mêlée, et cela si adroitement, que le terrible projectile atteignit le roi des souris . . .’)

I cast out my shoe.

A shoe as missile? It is a symbol of submission as long-established as the Old Testament, see Psalm 60:8, ‘Over Edom will I cast out my shoe.’ See also Joshua 10:24: ‘Come near, put your feet upon the necks of these kings.’ In both instances, the phrase conveys a meaning of The Downtrodden, a people brought to subjection by a shoe.

However, in Hoffmann’s fable, the young heroine’s defeat of the Mouse King’s is shortlived, even, one might suspect, she is moralistically punished for her daring. For, in the melee she crashes backwards into a glass cabinet of toys and . . . ‘At that moment . . . Marie felt an even sharper pain in her left arm than before and sank to the ground, unconscious.’

When she awakes, she is told, ‘Nutcracker was lying on your bleeding arm and not far from you was your left shoe.’ A little later, a surgeon arrives and ‘He felt Mary’s pulse and she heard that there was talk of a wound fever.’

Surely it is not too fanciful for us to perceive Mary’s shattered display case and its scattered dolls and resultant blood as emblematic of shattered childish illusions?

I believe these authorial contrivances, from the culminating scene of Act 1, to be profoundly symbolic . . . for surely the young girl’s ‘Wundfieber’ (wound fever) is a sickly metaphor for her menarche?

In this belief I would not be alone in evoking the pale consumptive heroines of the early 19th Century, a literary device that may be found even earlier in Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, perhaps continental Europe’s most celebrated novel of the decadent aestheticisation of tuberculer maidenhood spiritualised by disease. (NB: the setting of Julie is Geneva).

This fascination with blood is observable too in a 19th Century fashion cultivated by calculating women who positively sought to look tubercular – the ‘flattering malady’– whereby a courtesan would not only entice her male devotees by seeming to suffer from a phthisic cough but would dissimulate the blood in her sputum by pricking her gums with a pin.

(In this connection, it should be remarked that Hoffmann’s Nutcracker found its first translator in Alexandre Dumas père, the version in French that Tchaikovsky set to music for his ballet. The son of Dumas, Alexandre Dumas fils, of course, wrote that classic tale of love and consumption, La Dame aux Camélias, and, in this case, the clunking menstrual metaphor may be seen in the red camellias signposted by literature’s consumptive heroine nonpareil.)

Downtrodden . . . a footnote . . .

the perseveration of a ‘terrible projectile’ . . .

The following instances from myth and remembered times warn us that the shoe is a projectile to be genuinely feared . . . the ultimate defiant put-down, pancultural in meaning, when actions speak louder than words, and one’s antagonists must learn they are worthy only of subjection in the dirt under one’s heel.

The basest insult that can never be unsaid.

Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi hurled his shoes at

United States president George W Bush on 14 December 2008

in protest against Occupation. Shoes are considered

exceptionally unclean in the Arab World.

Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of

the Soviet Union, allegedly banged his shoe on his delegate-desk

in protest at a speech by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong

at UN General Assembly in New York City on 12 October 1960.

Norse god Vídar, son of Odin, famed for killing the wolf Fenrir

by crushing the monster’s lower jaw with his great shoe and

grabbing its upper jaw in one hand to tear its mouth apart.

See also Fragment: Hoffmann’s Pictogram 1821

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2023/10/fragment-hoffmanns-pictogram-1821.html

See also Maimed Hero: Frankenstein Exhumed . . . Tragic Monster in Nelson’s Own Image? https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/06/

•

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

Friday, 15 December 2023

Suddenly I Heard Someone Say

The interceding voice is known to you
from literature; a stranger’s voice who speaks
offstage: He passed with his friendly word through

red-brick pillars into the darkness. Texts,
familiar as the classics, tell of
a life’s unforeseeable salvation:
Someone shouts. A hand grabs me by the collar

and I am flung from the police cordon.

A casual comment to the universe,
addresses no one in particular.
Jaunty, the voice is baroquely perverse.
I run, compelled by an animal fear.

Sometimes we are so confounded that we
do not know our own voice or whence this plea

comes, but hear only the stranger’s decree:

‘You know there cannot be a voice for me.’

Catherine Eisner

Text composed from key lines from :

A Passage to India. E M Forster.

The Pianist: One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945. Władysław Szpilman.

Of this Time, of that Place. Lionel Trilling.

The Pilgrim’s Progress. John Bunyan.

•

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

Friday, 27 October 2023

Fragment: Hoffmann’s Pictogram 1821

I suppose it’s not really so surprising to stumble upon a textual novelty such as Hoffmann’s, as early as 1821 previsioning Oulipian ‘constrained writing’, when Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was published only sixty years earlier as our English precursor for tricks of ludic composition.

See also, Her Left Shoe: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Terrible Projectile of Semiotics . . .

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/01/her-left-shoe-terrible-projectile.html

Monday, 16 October 2023

A Defence

Court Report

•

Defendant: A man I thought I knew came round the corner.

Prosecutor: Describe this man.

Defendant: He searches for work. He has a scythe on his back.

Prosecutor: You say he spoke to you?

Defendant: ‘D’you fancy a job?’ I heard him say. Then he asked me where he could get an iron bar. I told him he could find one over by the old dock ferry on some waste ground if he wanted one.

Prosecutor: I suggest that you struck the victim six or seven savage blows with the iron bar.

Defendant: No sir. I did not. I never touched the man.

(At which, from the public gallery, Death smiled.)

•

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

Friday, 8 September 2023

Tyro Poets? Eton v Marlborough? (Finishing School for Versifiers, Pt.7.) Juvenilia

Breathes there a man with soul so dead

Who was not, in the Thirties, Red?

(G. Moor, New Statesmen, 1956.)

‘A lyric tongue and jaded Weltanschauung
should be the glamour of young gentlemen.’

(Catherine Eisner, 2023.)

It struck me the other day, just as a sort of prosodic hypothesis, that two tyro poets with brilliant minds – near contemporaries and destined for notoriety in the British press – should surely have composed some specimens of juvenilia showing promise in their 1920s schooldays, since, in each case respectively, their mentors were poets – Edith Sitwell and poet-in-the-making Louis MacNeice.

The schoolboys? Brian Howard and Anthony Blunt.
Schools? Eton (BH), Marlborough (AB).
Schoolfriends? Harold Acton (BH), Louis MacNiece (AB).
Poetic milieu? Edith Sitwell (BH), John Betjeman (AB).
Universities? Oxford (BH), Cambridge (AB).

Anthony Blunt Brian Howard

In short, two aesthetes of their time – whose schooldays were devoted to the callow pursuit of attitudes – would later demonstrate there was substantially more to their avant-garde posturing than larking about as pasticheurs.

Of course, in all fairness, the early vocation of Blunt, a maths wizard, was never that of a poet yet the sensitivities of a poet were nurtured by his compeer, fellow Marlburian MacNeice, who encouraged him to make this rare attempt, never to be repeated . . .

Specimen extract. (By Blunt, age 17, Marlborough.)

The harsh green outline of the downs

Tight as a bow string

Strikes a discord in the sky.

This edge of the abyss
Is fixed immutable
Beyond the power of time
Or God . . .

By contrast, for young Brian Howard his acute self-awareness and self-deprecation granted powers of shrewd discrimination to a boy, who – at age 13 – could write to his mother that he feared he’d been cursed with a ‘fraudulent imagination’, an opinion at odds with his earliest mentor, Edith Sitwell, who was in awe of his precocity: ‘I see more remarkable talent and promise in your work than of any other poet under twenty . . .’ (with the exception of her brother Sacheverell, she adds, of course). Brian was discovered by Edith when he was sixteen, at which age he records he won the Junior Long Jump at Eton.

Specimen extracts. (By Howard, age 16, Eton.)

. . . the green ocean . . . the green ocean . . . like a towel-horse
painted in half . . . paperbags are significant
of the futility of the kosmos when they bob up and down . . .
yes, dripping, dripping and the sensations of sticking
plaster that won’t come off . . .
it’s Verdi (throttled with light lager) . . . like acrid little chopped
up canary wings, falling down in jerks and bursts and jangles out of
a blue-gilt sky . . . they trip along the long parallels of
dry, biscuity planking . . .

Immortal lines. ‘Four lips make a mouth.’

These imagistic aspirational pseudo-Sitwellian lines composed at Eton are from Brian’s Expression of Sea and Beach from the Pier Buffet and are precursors of his poem in the anthology, Oxford Poetry 1924 (co-edited by Harold Acton), which contains the not so inconsequential biscuity line:

(I wish I was back home in Philadelphia).

Why did the small queens run so hurriedly

just because I play Satie on my musical box

a little furtive music like the rubbing together of biscuits . . .

And, of course, we are not alone in adoring the outré conversational chords of Satie so it is unsurprising that these 1924 poems (dismissed by Brian as ‘that bad derivative thing’) should appeal to Satie-lovers, and were considered ‘immortal lines’ by Betjeman, who cited them as ‘immortal’ for not only the biscuity acoustics of their vers libre music but also for Brian’s sensual phrase, ‘Four lips make a mouth . . .’

In my own view, there can be no doubt that Brian Howard, a schoolboy precociously drawn to the ‘Imagist’ vision, exhibited authentic synæsthesia . . . as of a (juvenile) alien Kosmonaut’s first encounter with the phenomena of our planet when assigned to a desperate search for sublime correlatives to match those of Worldlings.

Elementary utilitarianism denies adjectival fripperies.

A plutocratic pursuit by latent Leftists or Paper Marxists?

Of course, essentially, poetry in England at that time was a plutocratic pursuit since only the privately educated elect had the leisure of their privilege to garnish the utilitarian nouns of the People with the choicest of adjectival conceits packed in hampers sent from Fortnum’s. The Proles as poets – if there were such – perforce travelled light, sans adjectival fripperies, denied the luxury of excess baggage by the exigency of their voyaging in steerage.

Despite their dedicated posturing as champions of Ars Longa, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War certainly could be said to have chivvied those two schoolboy pals, Blunt and MacNeice, briefly into becoming more than bystanders in a Rebellium Brevis, during which they both affected to be Communist-leaning sympathisers.

An affectation? When Blunt was asked by an interviewer whether he had gone to Spain in 1936 for political reasons, Blunt admitted, ‘I went to see the pictures, dear boy! The Prado is a Mecca for art historians . . . Oh, I was only a paper Marxist!’ Even his companion on that trip, Louis MacNeice, conceded: ‘In the long run a poet must choose between being politically ineffectual and poetically false.’ MacNeice later wrote that he never shared the idealistic impulse of many of his fellow writers and friends to be a Communist, ‘I joined them . . . in their hatred of the status quo.’ It’s true that, recalling Marlborough in their final year, Blunt also confessed his political naivety: ‘Politics was simply a subject never discussed at all, and what happened to be going on at that time in Europe was no concern of ours. Inflation in Germany merely meant that one could get an incredibly cheap holiday!’

The First Englishman to Foresee the Nazi Horror.

For Brian Howard, however, whose boyhood in high society was lived uneasily outside the unspoken English Jewish Pale (mid-20th Century, for instance, the ‘No Jews’ policy in many of London’s gentlemen’s clubs was well known), there had been an early introduction at Eton to not-so-subtle degrees of anti-Semitism from his schoolfellows.

He was allowed no quarter in defence of his family name. ‘How is the Duke of Norfolk today?’ his classmates would taunt. He inveighed against his father – a fashionable art dealer — who, at birth, had presented him ‘. . . with an obviously false and pretentious name – not even adding the slight support of deed of poll.’ Shaped by such an upbringing, then, his precocious awareness of global political events fomenting the persecution of the Jews was matched only by his astonishingly mature assimilation of the most extreme avant-gardist cultural developments of the interwar years.

And unsurprising, therefore, that the exotic Howard – tormented by doubt as to his Jewish identity – was, according to Erika Mann, ‘. . . probably the first Englishman to recognise the full immensity of the Nazi peril and to foresee, with shuddering horror, what was to come.’

(In 1939, Brian wrote in a poem published in June of Britain’s anguished apprehension under the shadow of the ‘Phoney War’: ‘. . . fingers crack like the prophecy of shooting.’ Indeed, a prophetic line.)

Two years earlier, when a shooting war broke out in Spain, with Nazi Germany taking sides against the Republican government, Brian Howard was to the fore in condemning espousers of the Fascist cause. Paradoxically, he found himself set against the Imagist hero whose ‘unsurpassable technique and poetic vision’ he had venerated in his schooldays. Ezra Pound wrote of the Civil War: ‘Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.’

Brian Howard wrote: ‘A people, nearly half of whom has been denied the opportunity to learn to read, is struggling for bread, liberty and life against the most unscrupulous and reactionary plutocracy left in existence . . . With all my anger and love, I am for the People of Republican Spain.’

Don’t call me comrade.

It is of course wholly simplistic to remind ourselves with 20/20 hindsight that, for the many fervent British anti-Fascists of the Thirties, it took the fatal aberration of a dewy-eyed idealism in the face of merciless dictatorships to finally convince them to ally themselves to Communism as the only acceptable countervailing champion of the People . . . a conversion to be regretted in disillusion soon enough. Moscow show trials and Stalin’s purges would irrevocably change their minds.

In this sense, it’s intriguingly significant that in 1936 W. H. Auden (who never joined the Communist Party despite complex social views apparent in his Thirties political writings) changed ‘Comrades’ to ‘Brothers’ in his poem of 1932, Comrades Who When the Sirens Roar.

Да здравствует сталинская конституция!
Long Live the Stalinist Constitution!

The trajectory of Blunt’s beliefs was to meet that same disillusion. Recruited by the NKVD just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was swept up in the groundswell of anti-Fascism that had driven his contemporaries to support the Republican cause. (One’s enemy’s enemies are one’s friends.) Yet, as a young Cambridge don of cold-eyed didacticism, it’s more likely the superior role of ideologue tempted him to a decisive step further to take sides beyond the boundaries of Western Europe and sign up to the Soviet utopian dream, enlisted, however, more as a talent-spotter of Cambridge leftists from among promising undergraduates disposed to be suborned . . . fledgling spies destined for the heart of the British Establishment.

Blunt at that time (early 1937) played the canniest game of poker insofar as his Russian handlers never permitted him to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

Red propaganda laid on a bit too thick?

(Plus ça change . . . today, UK academics turn a blind eye to the increasing ideological threats posed by Chinese influence implicit in our universities’ acceptance of the ‘soft power’ that defines faculty funding issuing from autocratic strategists in Beijing. Students in fields of research such as advanced materials or quantum mechanics, or artificial intelligence or biotech, are particularly vulnerable to approaches by agents of hostile states.)

And as for High Treason and the betrayal of Britain by pinning his colours to the cause of the Soviet Union, Blunt answered, ‘We did not think of ourselves as working for Russia. We were working for the Comintern.’ Or to put it another way, is this the lofty intellectual’s claim to being an internationalist, to be ranked with Einstein, say, as a citizen of the world?

Incurable nostalgists.

But I digress, so let us quickly return to my modest attempt to correlate the parallel paths taken by a Marlburian Cantabrigian (Blunt) and Etonian Oxonian (Howard) towards our arrival at a cultural sensibility that can satisfy a 21st Century notion of a moralistic poetising aesthete, if such there be. In other words, ‘How does a writer, precipitated into a moral fog, remain forensically honest?’ (The term, ‘forensically honest’ was applied to a contemporary poet in my hearing the other day.)

For the answer, perhaps we should seek our True Oracle and Champion Skewerer of Communism – George Orwell. A dedicated polemicist and, indeed, a collector of polemical pamphlets, Orwell was also an unwitting pasticheur . . .

See Rural Bard or Faltering Palimpsestic Balladeer? https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/05/

When Orwell wrote the concluding couplet of an unfinished poem, the refrain must have persisted like an earworm from his days residing in Southwold, Suffolk . . .

When good King Edward ruled the land
And I was a chubby boy.

Imitative (unwittingly?) of a celebrated early nineteenth century Suffolk versifier, Orwell’s poem reveals the incurable nostalgist who hankers for the belle époque certainties of his youth. As his biographer spells out, ‘He was, indeed, a revolutionary in love with the Edwardian era.’

Can the same be said, then, of Blunt and Howard, two cultural rebels yet, in reality, both cleaving to dreams of a ‘Golden Country’ (cf. Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four) while seismic political convulsions would somehow leave them unscathed?

See Prescient Words of Godfather Who Foresaw Birth of Winston Smith.

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/03/year-zero-thing-with-one-face-prescient.html

Did Blunt, who had endangered the lives of one hundred and seventy-five thousand Allied servicemen, by betraying the secret of the D-Day landings to his Soviet masters, truly believe that he would return to a liberated Paris, cultural capital of the world, where the cognoscenti who had survived the Occupation would prostrate themselves at his feet? Indeed, did Blunt believe too that Paris was the eternal pleasure-dome of the fevered imaginings of Germany’s occupying troops, a belief expressed by Ernst Jünger – writer and decorated Wehrmacht captain and uninvited boulevardier of pillaged Parisian streets – in his denigratory observation, ‘One realises that the city was founded on the altar of Venus.’

Yes. One suspects Blunt shared the view of the Wehrmacht ‘tourists in uniform’ and, for him, Paris would always remain, as for Jünger, the cerebral sensualist’s first destination for intellectual R & R.

In Search of the Fourth Man by Catherine Eisner was published
in the literary journal, Ambit, issue 193, Summer 2008.
Particular reference is made to the avant-gardist photomonteur,
Helmut Herzfeld, a committed Communist, whose 1938 photo-
montage memorialising the victims of Guernica outstrips in its
passion the abstruse figurations of fellow-Communist, Picasso.

Commie-Tsars . . . Self-Elective Illiterate Minion-Dominions.

But then Blunt had convinced himself that he was serving the Comintern and not the Kremlin, hadn’t he? Never mind that even before the Occupation of Paris in 1940, Stalin had set his mind to ‘arming the people’ of France, with draft instructions from the Comintern to the French Communist Party, dated 11 June, providing for the creation of a ‘popular militia’*. It was proposed that French Communists living in Moscow be sent back to France ‘in order to raise up the people against the bourgeois traitors.’

Perhaps Blunt, the Francophile and distinguished francophone, truly did believe la France éternelle and her cultural treasures would somehow survive her defeat for cherishment by world citizens under the benign patronage of the Comintern. (A new interpretation, perhaps, of what the Nazis derided as Kulturbolschewismus?)

Is that what Blunt truly wanted? Or had he a liking to be ruled by the Commi-czars of a self-elective illiterate minion-dominion such as the Rumania of Ceaușescu? Orwellian motto: ‘Ignorance is Strength.’

Der neue Wilhelminismus. The Answer?

Englands und Deutschlands akute Nostalgie? The coronation of Charles III earlier this year brought to mind the writings of the conservative monarchist, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, an anglophile, whose Diary of a Man in Despair (Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten: Zeugnis einer inneren Emigration) describes the rise from a shabby ‘Furnished Room’ of ‘The-Man-with-the-Forelock’ and the domination of the Masses by a cabal of Industrialists and suborned generals from the early 1930s to the diarist’s summary execution by pistol shot (Genickschuss) in Dachau in 1945.

He writes: ‘Nationalism: a state of mind in which you do not love your own country as much as you hate somebody else’s.’

Reck concluded that to reconcile his own ethos to some semblance of civic rectitude required a return to Wilhelminism (Wilhelminismus) as the guarantee of peace when confronted with revolution of any stripe (Communism or National Socialism). He refers, of course, to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor and King of Prussia, forced to abdicate at the end of WWI.

What a pity, then, we have missed our own chance to live under Wilhelminism now Charles III has the throne. Maybe his heir, our Prince William, could remedy this omission as a salve to the troubled American Collective Unconscious. Prince William is, after all, named as America’s most popular public figure ahead of Trump and Zelensky. Perhaps William could assure world peace in the guise of the Count of Nassau, and by assuming this stirring title accorded one of his ancestors, King William III of England, he’ll return to rule the Amerikaanse Hollanders in New York and any other province or state eager to welcome him, as though the events of 1776 had all been a dreadful mistake.

For another patrician anglophile’s social remedy, compare

the Di Lampedusa Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di_Lampedusa_strategy

It’s clear to me that those conflicted nostalgists, Blunt and Howard, would have found this monarchical parlour trick an agreeable expedient, each of them absolved of an overburdened conscience . . . Brian Howard’s guilt that his modest oeuvre had not been truly iconoclastic enough and that he’d be remembered merely as an unfulfilled worldling . . . Anthony Blunt’s guilt that by the rigidity of his ideological posture he had denied the legacy of his nationhood, the gravest of too many broken taboos whose ultimate sanction was a sentence of ignominy. . . to be stripped of his knighthood and removed as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

The icy cerebrality of Blunt’s nature from his earliest undergraduate days can be measured by the occasion when the elite Cambridge debating society, the Apostles, met to vote on the question ‘Must art come from the heart?’ Both Blunt and Wittgenstein voted. Both were Trinity men. Both were mathematicians. One was a philosopher. One would be a spy. Blunt voted ‘No;’ Wittgenstein ‘Yes’. Needless to spell it out. Humanities versus Maths. Thought versus feeling. Blunt’s was the bloodless ideologue’s answer.

Yet, in the end, both Blunt and Howard slipped back – more or less resignedly – into the formalisms of the English culture that had bred them. Ideological Nimbys. Yes, revolution is all very well, but Not In My Back Yard. And looking back, doubtless Brian questioned whether his trail-blazing had truly been so far ahead of the ancien régime.

Brian Howard, a self-confessed failure, would still hold fast to the haughty manner defined by his penchant for classical axiomatic epigrams he’d striven to polish in his undergraduate years. Characteristically, Brian, a cocaine addict and a tuft-hunting colossal snob who toadied up to peers of the realm attending Oxford, had the ironic motto, ‘Put your trust in the Lords’ blazoned on a banner strung across his undergraduate rooms. Where, then, is the spirit of the 1937 barricades and of his championing of the ‘People of the Republic’ in his jaded oft-quoted remark, ‘Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life.’ Did his witticism refer to the thirty-somethings of all Spanish peasantry?

In such a stratified society, did the coteries of Blunt and Howard ever collide? When the Communist ‘recruiter’ of Blunt, his close friend Guy Burgess, escaped to the USSR, a newspaper manhunt was launched, and by the strangest of coincidences, which made world headlines, it was Brian Howard, while partying in Asolo in Italy, who was mistaken for the missing Cambridge spy. One posturing, flamboyant Englishman is much like any other, one supposes, in the eyes of our detractors on the Continent.

And for Blunt in retreat maybe there was escape too; escape into the gentlemanly preoccupations of the quondam don, where could be found the consolations of his last great fixation: the convoluted brilliant mind of mathematician Francesco Borromini, the 17th Century architect of Roman Baroque . . . a fixation directed with ‘maniacal concentration’, we learn.

We can only guess and wonder at the attraction held by those complex Borrominian geometries that are seen to blur sharply-demarcated boundaries through transformational interpenetrations, charged with the power to resolve, say, the intersection of two opposing planes into a miraculously invisible conjunction.

Mmm . . . yes, we can only guess at why such geometric ambiguities held such an attraction for Blunt.

A compulsion to study a great architect who can neatly resolve two opposing planes at an imperceptible conjunction?

How emblematic of a man who could with such ease switch ideological hobby horses mid-stream, as it were, and serve simultaneously as a spy for Communist Russia and as a loyal liegeman of HM The Queen. Arise Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO, knight of the realm and Keeper of the Crown’s Pictures . . . a liegeman who throughout his service during WW2 in MI5 passed over a thousand classified secret documents to his Soviet handlers, arduously memorised or copied under intense pressure and the constant threat of exposure.

For Blunt it was a moral imperative for which he would be harshly judged. It is a dilemma that faces any moralist seeking the strait gate and the single narrow path: How does one remain ‘forensically honest’? (But there is no path though the woods.)

As the Germans say, Du kannst nicht auf zwei Hochzeiten gleichzeitig tanzen. You can’t dance at two weddings at the same time.

Post-modern or Post-ironic Bobos?

Did I almost forget? In my notional prosodic contest between a Marlburian Cantabrigian and Etonian Oxonian, I conclude that Oxford won – thumpingly – by a length at Chiswick Bridge.

Today, in our self-referential postmodern world, one wonders whether Anthony Blunt, the Francophile, would have welcomed a France ruled by the cultural Comintern he foresaw. Probably. That’s because postmodernism – for Blunt – would be seen to have achieved the desired bloodless cultural shift by a new army of ideological warriors; warriors led by the cynical propagandising voice of a siren-like La Desapasionada he too would have undoubtedly followed.

France has a name for them, as you no doubt know: ‘Bobos’ . . . bourgeois-bohemians who are reactionaries at heart. The postmodernist writer Laurent Binet seems to believe in their creed of Po-Mo Oulipian fatuities. His ineffable unquestioning smugness is astonishing:

‘It is obviously impossible that I—son of a Jewish mother and a Communist father, brought up on the republican values of the most progressive French petite bourgeoisie and immersed through my literary studies in the humanism of Montaigne and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Surrealist revolution and the Existentialist worldview—could ever be tempted to “sympathize” with anything to do with Nazism, in any shape or form.’

HHhH by Laurent Binet, 2013.

No. An adherent of Nazism? No. Never. But the French would no more abandon their communistic societal underpinning than they would enter Le Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris without a horse. And how intriguing to les Alliés Binet’s despatch must be for those still among us who liberated the land of les cocos.

For more Po-Mo Bobo fatuities, see Michael Haneke’s Amour and reflections on the dilatoriness of Paris’s plumbers:

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2015/08/michael-hanekes-amour-throwing-wrench.html

Last word

Or to be fair, should, perhaps, the last word on these thorny questions be that of a KGB officer from the Third Department of the USSR’s Foreign Directorate whose terse verdict on the convolutions of our well-bred disingenuous Cambridge spies was to dismiss them as: ‘Ideological shit.’

So very Oulipian . . . so very self-referential . . . so very

Borrominian those geometries of the mind that are

seen to blur sharply-demarcated boundaries through

transformational interpenetrations, charged with the

power to resolve the intersection of two opposing lines

of thinking into a miraculously ambivalent conjunction.

Oh. Hang on! Orwell had a term for it.

Doublethink: the act of simultaneously accepting

two mutually contradictory meanings as correct.

Doublethink: ‘The Mutability of the Past.’

The sources for these Oxbridge character studies can found in definitive biographies researched by two remarkable women, with each writer sensitively intuitive and diligently scholarly in tracing every passage of the lives of these extraordinary subjects . . .

Brian Howard: Portrait of a failure (1968) by Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster.

Anthony Blunt: His Lives (2001) by Miranda Carter.

See also a glimpse of the proto-Bright-Young-Thing of the 1920s, here,

From an Unswept Floor . . .

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/05/walnut-from-unswept-floor.html

See also another intimate view of Anthony Blunt, here.

Slaves to Seconal: Droguée Antonia/Anthony and the Fourth Man . . . https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html

*Afterthought: The success of ‘popular militias’ as an ideology was sustained long ago, of course, by the Gun Lobby of the USA, France’s hallowed friend of Liberty. There’s even a statue devoted to her. See Ellis Island 1902

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/03/ellis-island-1902.html

•

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