A Theory of Literary Reincarnation : George Gissing and Patrick Hamilton. More Palimpsestic Texts? (Part 4.)

Two minds with a single thought could almost be the definition of my theory of literary reincarnation, particularly when the inspiriting spark of a disciple’s conception occurs in the same year of his master’s death. 
           This was the case surely for the begetting of English novelist-playwright Patrick Hamilton, who existed in the first trimester of foetal growth when the spirit of George Gissing descended on him (according to arcane Catherinian divinations) following Gissing’s death in December 1903. 
           The transmigration of a literary soul? Well, before you dismiss such a notion, why not compare two – not dissimilar – texts from these writers, published half a century apart. Both are written in their characteristic vein of Mayhevian socio-cultural observation of the poor (though Hamilton’s empathic concern for the half-world of the underclass, admittedly, owes more to Marx than Mayhew).

A cab-runner in those days was roughly identical
with a criminal of the worst sort.

The cab was piled with luggage, and within sat a young matron, her cheeks fresh as the meadows she had quitted but a few hours ago. Long Bill, lurking on the limits of the railway station, caught a significant nod from the cabdriver, and at once started in pursuit.
            Long Bill was not very tall, but had limbs so excessively slender, and so meagre a trunk, that his acquaintances naturally thought of him in terms of length. When unoccupied, which was generally the case, he let his arms hang straight, and close to his sides, as though trying to occupy as little room in the world as possible. He walked on his toes, rather quickly, and almost without a bend of the knee; his back was straight, and the collar of his filthy coat always turned up, to shield the scraggy, collarless neck. Observe him in motion at a distance, and you were reminded of a red Indian on the trail. Catch sight of him suddenly close at hand, and his sliding, furtive carriage made you anxious about your pockets or watch-guard. By his own account, Bill was nineteen years old, but he had the wizened face of senility: his hairless cheeks hollow over tooth-gaps, his nose mere cartilage, his small eyes a-blink, yet eager as those of a hungry animal.
            For more than a mile he ran along by the laden cab, and seemingly without much effort: when it drew up in front of a comfortable house, Bill sprang to the door of the vehicle.
            ‘You’ll let a pore young feller help with the luggage, lydy? I’ve ran all the w’y from Victoria.’
            He panted his mendicant humility, and with a grimy paw shook drops from a scarce visible forehead. The fair young matron regarded him with pained, compassionate look.
            ‘You have run all the way from Victoria? Certainly you may help; of course you may!’
             She alighted, entered the house, and stood there in the hall watching Long Bill as, with feverish energy, he assisted a servant to transfer trunks and parcels. Relatives pressed about the lady, but she could not give them due attention.
             ‘Look at that poor creature. He has followed my cab all the way from Victoria, just to earn a few pence! Oh, these things are too dreadful!’  

[Later, the cab-runner  is revealed to be a consumptive] . . . who lay helpless by the roadside. ‘Severe hæmorrhage from the lungs,’ said a doctor.’ 

Transplanted by George Gissing
(Stories and Sketches 1898). 

Mr. Downes’ father had also been connected with Brighton Station — but not in any official capacity. Mr. Downes’ father had worn no uniform — he had worn rags, and he had not worn shoes. He was not allowed on to the platforms : instead of this he hung about the horse-cabs outside the Station.
             When a train of any importance came into the Station, Mr. Downes’ father would eagerly watch these cabs as they were loaded with luggage by the uniformed porters, and, with a discrimination learned from long experience, would choose a cab, which he would follow, running, to its destination. He did this because he hoped that when it reached its destination, wherever that might be, he might be permitted to help with the unloading of the luggage, and be given a copper for doing so.
             Mr. Downes senior — who was, by the way, a consumptive — was not obliged to move at a great speed while his cab was moving along thoroughfares in which the traffic was thick, but when the emptier streets or roads were reached he had to run like mad. And, if he was unlucky, he had to run like this for a matter of three or four miles.
             Was the hopeful Mr. Downes senior, at the end of the pursuit, rewarded with the copper he had sought?
            The answer is that nine times out of ten he was not. On the contrary he was ordinarily threatened and shooed away with the greatest violence. Policemen were mentioned menacingly, and, if one happened to be present, used.
             In extenuation of this cruelty on the part of the users of the cabs it should be mentioned that the consumptive Mr. Downes senior, small as he was, at the end of his run presented an appalling sight — a frightening sight. The users of the cabs were frightened, and did what they did largely in panic. It must also be remembered that the man was looked upon as a beggar, and a beggar in those days was roughly identical with a criminal of the worst sort.

The West Pier by Patrick Hamilton
(First published 1951). 

A lineage to continue each predecessor’s unfinished work.

Since my teens, I confess, I have continued to believe the points of resemblance in these two troubled literary lives to be convincingly evidential: A shared veneration of Dickens* as the classic exemplar to emulate in their fictions? Check. A shared reckless callow infatuation with young prostitutes? Check. A shared literary taste for the milieu of seedy boarding houses, paying guests, and shabby hotels that reflects the desperate lives of London’s rootless masses? Check.

The same combination of sociocultural grit and nacreous sentiment? Check.

But the question remains. Did the mantle of Dickens fall on Gissing in the same manner as the mantle of Gissing on Hamilton? Gissing was twelve years old when Dickens died but that blip in chronology, in my own view, does not discount a belief in the transmigration of literary souls, since the lineage of the Dalai Lama, for example, owes its survival to the reincarnation of the Sage in boys as young as eight, recognised as the Chosen to continue each reincarnated predecessor’s unfinished work. 

However, these conjectures aside, maybe the shared motif of the broken winded Have Nots carrying the baggage of the Haves has moral weight . . . the moral weight of a cautionary tale . . .

. . . and points to the dangers for any writer who is fated to be a colporteur of another man’s tracts**.

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See, also,  A Girl Alone : Scenario of a Screenplay in Homage to George Gissing. A Treatment in Sixty Scenes from Four Acts of a Screenplay prompted by the stories of George Gissing (freely adapted from, notably, A Daughter of the Lodge and The House of Cobwebs). 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/a-girl-alone-scenario-of-screenplay-in.html

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* There is, indeed, a spiritual connection with Dickens of some significance concerning Hamilton’s death (in 1962). Hamilton, the Dickens devotee, died aged fifty-eight, and geranium petals from a wreath (‘Patrick’s favourite flower’) were scattered on his coffin. Charles Dickens also died in his fifty-eighth year, entombed in Westminster Abbey, with his coffin covered with his favourite flower, scarlet geraniums.
See:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/no-geraniums-wrong-wreath-for-dickenss.html

** 04.11.2017 : Have I been unfair to Hamilton’s memory? Is my theory in ashes? You must judge the merits of the case for I learned only today of a memoir by Patrick’s brother Bruce in which he states, ‘It was years afterwards that he told me how once he had been coming from Brighton Station with Mummie in a “fly” [cab]. She must have been returning from some visit, because there was luggage. And, all the way from the station to Number Three, the cab was pursued by a “runner”; one of those pitiful creatures, unemployed and unemployable, who sought a subsistence by chasing after horse-drawn cabs in the hope of earning a few pence by helping with luggage at the end of the journey. Patrick, sitting with his back to the cabman, watched the man in fascinated horror; but I am sorry to have to tell that Mummie ordered him away peremptorily on reaching home, without giving him a halfpenny. Patrick was appalled. He was never to forget the poor fellow’s sweating face, laboured breath, and consumptive look. It was perhaps his introduction to the world’s suffering.’

Englishness and its Disproof of Theory of Reincarnation.

[Selina] ‘I don’t want to be a spirit and return to the earth as someone else. I could never like anyone else enough for that.’ 
[Lavinia] ‘And we are irritated by other people. Suppose we were irritated by the people we were! As we never are it seems to disprove the theory.’

Ivy Compton-Burnett

The Mighty and Their Fall (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

 

 

Literary Car Wrecks: Causality in Two Curious Cases of Gynæphobia and Beetlemania

Denton Welch                             Patrick Hamilton

Can one inciting incident in a feted writer’s life warp his emotional responses such that they tend towards misogyny or, as critically, towards mechanophobia? 

Well, yes. If the causal agent in the causal chain is a careless motor car driver and the writer suffers a near-fatal collision and, moreover, the motor car driver is a woman or a drunk, or both.

In the early 1930s two writers met such a misfortune, playwright and novelist, Patrick Hamilton, and artist and pseudoautobiographical novelist, Denton Welch, a misfortune that left both men emotionally and bodily scarred, their imaginations tormented by the reality of shattered self-image, dashed hopes and impaired physical integrity. 

In January 1932, while out for a walk in Earl’s Court, Hamilton was hit by a motor car steered by a drunk driver, and dragged through the street. Hamilton suffered severe facial disfigurement and injuries to his limbs, which were to leave him profoundly self-conscious, lamed and insecure. This event hastened the heavy drinking that would end in the chronic melancholic alcoholism that destroyed him before he reached old age.

Three years after Hamilton’s catastrophe, on June 9th, 1935, a Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend, Welch – aged twenty – was also hit by a motor car. A careless woman driver. He was thrown from his bicycle. His spine was fractured and he never fully recovered from the injury, enduring recurring, agonising pain, from which he would suffer until his early death, at the age of thirty-three.

Burroughsian sticky white milk oozing from wounded trees?

William Burroughs was not alone in admiring the literary art that sprang from Denton’s precocious pen, perforce held by an invalid’s hand . . . Edith Sitwell and EM Forster were early fans. It’s easy to see why.
 
But Burroughsian? Certainly, the sensuality of Denton’s descriptions and hallucinatory tight focus on surface texture recall exhibits brought back from LSD trips by explorers of inner space; q.v. an hallucinatory drug-induced freakout I can vouchsafe is the real article; see http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/freakout.html

Consider this self portrait, after Denton bathes in a river, for instance. (I have rendered the passage from In Youth is Pleasure in the first person.)

At last I dragged myself out and lay down on the bank in the sun. I took off my coat and looked with interest at the Greek sculpture effect which had been caused by my thin wet shirt clinging to my ribs and pectoral muscles. I admired myself. My body looked stronger and bigger, half revealed through folds of clammy cotton. My nipples showed like little icicle points, or tiny mountains on a wide rolling plain.

It’s true. Cut-ups from The Naked Lunch are not dissimilar from glittering fragments a thieving magpie might snatch from Welch’s solipsistic observational art. And choice phrases of his would not seem out of place in drug-fuelled chronicles from the Summer of Love had they been penned some three decades later.

Yet, regrettably, in Welch’s epicene effusions we cannot escape from noticing a peculiar gaucherie that pervades the bildungsroman exuberances; a preciosity overcome by jejunity.  A specific fixation emerges, as a bi-product of arrested development that is the necessary concomitant of invalidism in youth, as these passages from Maiden Voyage (1943) and In Youth is Pleasure (1944) demonstrate. More worryingly, they are hyperphobic in their intensity:

I did not like to see the rubber trees bleeding their milk into little tins strapped to their trunks. It made me remember a nightmare.
    I once found myself in a narrow, squalid street where people jostled me and threw their filth into the gutters. Suddenly I came upon a woman lying on the pavement, her head propped against a wall. She was crying hopelessly and whining and groaning through her tears.

    As I looked down my eyes focused on a great steel hat-pin. A shock of horror ran through me. The hat-pin pierced her left breast, the head and point appearing on each side of the globe of flesh. At her slightest movement milk spurted from the wounds, splashing her clothes and falling on her skin in white bubbles. I passed on, too dazed to think until I had reached the end of the road.
 
    Now in the rubber plantation at Singapore I remembered this dream again. I turned away from the sticky white milk oozing into the cups from the wounded trees. I waited in the car for the others, and when they had seen enough we drove over the red roads to the hotel where we were going to have lunch.

. . .

At the far end of the cave a low passage seemed to lead still deeper into the heart of the rock. Orvil went up and stood staring into the narrow tunnel. Tremors passed through him. He gulped, and gave a small involuntary skip of excitement. He began to walk down the tunnel as delicately as if great danger waited for him at the other end. Gently he turned the handle of another, much smaller door, then blazed his torch into the darkness beyond. 
    At first he did not take in fully what he saw. There, just opposite him, lying on a carved stone couch against the wall, were Charles and Aphra. Aphra’s dress had slipped down and one of her full breasts lay outside, cushioned on the folds of midnight velvet. Charles had his lips to the large coral nipple. He lay utterly relaxed against Aphra, his arms stretched out above his head to encircle her neck. Their eyes were shut; they seemed wonderfully peaceful and oblivious. 
    But it was only for a moment that Orvil saw them like this. The next instant Aphra sat up and blinked her eyes in fear and surprise. Her hand darted to her dress. Charles turned savagely and shook back his hair. He was about to spring to his feet.
    This brought Orvil to his senses. He flicked off the torch at once, then turned and ran.

. . .

He slowed down to a gentle pace and reconstructed the extraordinary scene in the inner grotto. Again he saw Charles and Aphra lying together on the stone couch. He blamed Aphra severely for not finding someone better to lie with – some very fine man . . .
    Suddenly the extraordinary idea came to him that Aphra had been feeding Charles, pretending that he was her baby. Once having imagined this, Orvil could not rid his mind of the grotesque picture. It hung before his eyes, growing and fading, and growing again. He saw Charles’s lips and Aphra’s breasts swelling and diminishing, like rubber objects first filled with air and then deflated. He saw jets of milk, and fountains pouring down.
    As usual, when any thought gnawed at him, he shook his head violently; but nothing changed. The frightening vignette, like something seen through a keyhole, still hung in the air.

. . . 

[Later, swimming . . .] As she came up gasping and spluttering, her eyes shut, Orvil saw the greenish shadowed valley between her big white breasts. The sight shocked him. He thought of Aphra in the grotto. He saw a hairless white camel in the desert. He was riding on its back, between the humps. They were not really humps but Constance’s breasts, or miniature volcanoes with holes at the top, out of which poured clouds of milky-white smoke, and sometimes long, thin, shivering tongues of fire. . . .

Incurable gynæphobia, indeed. Yet to me, more poignantly, the following lush, painterly recollection (from Maiden Voyage) contains a subliminal heartache, an elegiac hankering for the carefree days of able-bodied youth, a youth snatched from him on that inauspicious day in 1935, as he bicycled ‘. . . along a straight wide road, keeping close to the kerb, not looking behind or bothering about the traffic at all . . .’ and rode ‘. . . into a great cloud of agony and sickness.’ (A Voice Through a Cloud.)

Blue napkins, blue china and deep blue glass made me half expect blue food. But the caviare, from Siberia, was as black and glistening and as like oiled ball-bearings as ever.

The pathos of this description can perhaps be appreciated most only by an inveterate bicyclist of Denton’s generation whose dedicated maintenance routines included regular oil-baths for bearings-assemblies such as a bike’s axle hubs and steering column.   

As to the homoerotic subtext detected in Welch’s overwrought themes, I record here an extract from a keynote episode, composed in the sensuous prose for which he is justly celebrated (When I Was Thirteen, 1944). 

I kept very still, and he tied it [the neck-tie] tightly and rapidly with his hands. He gave the bows a little expert jerk and pat. His eyes had a very concentrated, almost crossed look and I felt him breathing down on my face. All down the front our bodies touched featherily; little points of warmth came together. The hard boiled shirts were warmed dinner-plates.

(Incidentally, when as a teenager I attended Brighton General Hospital as an outpatient, the brown-coated porter, who would wheel in the tea-urn trolley before the nurses’ shift began, happened to be Eric Oliver, the lover of Denton Welch and executor of his literary estate; Eric was regarded as quite a colourful character by the nurses.) 

In rereading Welch’s fictionalised autobiographical writings, I am struck by a singular thought: In Denton, semi-paralysed in arrested adolescence, have we found the Ur-Holden Caulfield, do you suppose? Just consider the thematic similarities: the menacing locker-room rituals of exclusive private schools (Repton versus Pencey Prep); the running away from crass schoolboy bullying as a callow act of rebellion; the encounters with red-light low-life; the hypersensitivity to ‘phoneyness’ . . . I could go on.

Certainly, British English literature can claim Denton as a precursor of the WASP adolescent sensibility – never mind that some questionable writings of his remain fey and effete – and, for many admirers, his candour will be lauded as the authentic voice of teenage angst and, it must be added, lauded as the more authentic for its being rendered in a voice that never broke.

Hamilton’s Beetlemania – the Land of Coleoptera.

Another Sitwell patron/littérateur figures in the parallel lives of Welch and Hamilton, insofar as Osbert Sitwell, the brother of poetess Edith, was Patrick’s pal, and a baronet who never concealed his curiosity for the mores of Patrick’s early family life observed from the upper middle class gentility of a terraced mansion in Hove.

That life, as has been well-documented, was darkened by the oppressive shadow of the chronic alcoholism that consumed Patrick’s tyrannical father, a serial adulterer and a fraud.

Patrick, too, fell prey to heavy drinking, a dependency that became more problematic following the injuries he received in 1932 . . . a traumatic event that damned him to a lifelong hatred of the motor car and coloured his writings in the years that followed.

His motor accident first appeared in his work after he added a mindless, drunken hit-and-run episode to his novel, The Siege of Pleasure, before its late 1932 publication (the middle segment of his trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, 1935). A reworking of this episode on the perils of driving under the influence may be discovered in his radio play, To the Public Danger, in which a fickle girl rejects her boyfriend for a drunken high-speed car-ride with a rogue heedless of the threat to life.

Thereafter, the obsessive nature of his hatred can be tracked through key extracts from his novels; particularly, Hangover Square, and the sociopathic heartlessness of Peter the Fascist, in a passage that blends a love of heavy drinking and a Marxist loathing of Fascism with a disgust for the motorist:

He [George Harvey Bone] sat there, smoking and drinking with them, and not saying a word. He knew they would be reconciled. He knew they all loved Chamberlain and fascism and Hitler, and that they would be reconciled. Finally they became maudlin . . .
   ‘Well, I think I’m right,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve been to jail for it, anyway!’ And he laughed in his nasty, moustachy way . . .
    ‘I have been in jail twice, to be precise,’ said Peter, lighting another cigarette, and suddenly employing a large, pompous professorial tone. ‘On one occasion for socking a certain left-winger a precise and well deserved sock in the middle of his solar plexus, and on the other for a minor spot of homicide with a motor-car . . . ’

Not surprisingly, then, it is to Patrick Hamilton we owe perhaps the most famous passage in English literature to prophesy the Age of the Car.

It is found in Hamilton’s ‘Ralph Gorse Trilogy’ whose fleeing conman-killer protagonist drives unconsciously ‘. . . not into the middle of England – but into the middle of the Land of Coleoptera (the rather sinister name for beetles used by serious students of insects).’   

The concluding chapter of Hamilton’s novel (Part II of his trilogy) has been described as a new Book of Revelations and itemises, with the biblical sonorities of a seer, a roll-call of all marques from the grievous plague of automobiles that covers the face of the whole earth, so that the land is darkened  . . .

. . . There were large, stately, black beetles – small, red, dashing (almost flying) beetles – and medium-sized grey, blue, white, brown, yellow, green, orange, cream, maroon, and black, black, black and again black-beetles.
. . . And in such swarms they still got into frantic muddles and obstructed each other – Ford arguing with Hillman, Alfa-Romeo with Bentley, Swift with Sunbeam, Talbot with Wolseley, Alvis with Buick, Cadillac with Fiat, Essex with Chrysler, Hispano-Suiza with Citroën, Austin with Bean, Daimler with Hupmobile, Lagonda with Lincoln, Morris-Cowley with Humber, Morris-Oxford with Studebaker, Vauxhall with Triumph, Standard with Riley, Packard with Singer, Rover with Bugatti, Star with Beardmore, Rolls Royce with Armstrong Siddeley, and Peugot with Invicta – to say nothing of obscure conflicts between the Amilcar, Ansaldo, Arrol-Aster, Ascot, Ballot, Beverley Barnes, Brocklebank, Calthorpe, Charron, Chevrolet, Delage, Delahaye, Erskine, Excelsior, Franklin, Frazer Nash, Gillett, Gwynne, Hotchkiss, Hudson, Imperia, Italia, Jordan, Jowett, Lanchester, Lancia, Marmon, Mercedes, Opel, Overland-Whippet, Panhard-Levassor, Peerless, Renault, Rhode, Salmson, Stutz, Trojan, Turner, Unic, Vermorel, Vulcan, Waverley and Willys-Knight.
. . . In this nightmare of Coleoptera only two sorts of beetle retained any dignity or charm. These – the lumbering Omnibus and Lorry – were very large, very helpful and for the most part smooth-tempered. 
. . . (All the other beetles had begun to kill men, women and children at a furiously increasing pace – practically at random.)

‘Practically at random.’ It was the soulless randomness of their injuries, the pointlessness, the mechanised stupidity of the modern world that places lethal machines in the hands of the feckless, that Patrick Hamilton and Denton Welch never forgave.

•

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

Pinterland. Hogs. Crabs. Parnassus. And a paucity of creative energy.

Let me be quite clear. I consider Harold Pinter a misogynistic writer who has never written a gender-affirming dramatic part for a woman (unless the part has been conceived by another more sensitive writer in the course of one of his adaptations for the screen, e.g. works by Penelope Mortimer, Robin Maugham, L.P. Hartley, et al). In my own view, Pinter positively relishes victimhood, particularly when women are on the receiving end. I also consider much of his Mockney vernacular to be positively clunky and frequently unconvincing, with speeches more often than not shaped for an actor’s voice (his) rather than driven by the authentic character of the East End.

As the Swedish Academy, in its Nobel citation, commented, Pinter, the chronicler of random acts of verbal and physical violence, is a writer who ‘uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.’  This is the familiar Pinterland we recognize, with invariably a forced entry that is more thuggish-for-thuggishness’s-sake than redemptory or cathartic art. In short, the verbal menace of the rapper has been validated.

Is such nihilistic rapping nourishing to mind and spirit? I remain unconvinced. As well ask Tarantino.

But it is not this particular aspect of his writings that has triggered this rather sour digression of mine. My point in raising a question mark over Pinter’s stagecraft is to identify a seeming dullness and dreary sameness in the very building blocks of the constructions he has fashioned as an actor/playwright.

I have no doubt that somewhere in that vast archive of his, maintained by his literary estate, he is to be found on record defending a Pinteresque theory that grounded speech and action require no more for their emergence than the promptings of a minimalist stage set of one glass of water or the contents of a bureau drawer. Well and good, as writerly theories go, until you note the striking similarity between the opening scenes of A Night Out (1959) and The Homecoming (1964).

Why should this be worthy of our notice, you might ask. Isn’t this quibbling of no account? I don’t think so.  I think the dramaturgical repetitiousness I intend to expose here actually indicates a paucity of creative energy (see my observations on Elizabeth Bishop, in this regard http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/catechisms-and-cliche-fatuous-minds.html), and this deficit may also be observed in Pinter’s characterization of women.

I am talking here about LAY FIGURES and the delimited OUTER THRESHOLDS of an artist’s imagination. You must judge for yourself whether there are, rather obviously, lay figures in the following plays, written five years apart, and whether these figures are merely manipulated to forms that come, in the end, to resemble first year students’ extemporary acting exercises, of the kind favoured by their teachers, which depend on the suggestibility of minimal props composed of humdrum domestic objects.

‘Have you seen my tie? Where’s my tie?’ A Night Out 1959. (5 seconds into opening act, a search for necktie.)

‘What have you done with the scissors? Where’s the scissors?’ The Homecoming 1964 (5 seconds into opening act, a search through drawers.)

I believe the playwright has nodded at these moments, like a liar who lacks the invention to perpetrate a new lie so falls back on an old one, daring to risk exposure*. 

(We should also observe that in these two instances the Rule of Chekhov’s Gun, the rule of dramatic foreshadowing, is broken. ‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.’)

An intimate correspondent of mine shares my doubts as to Pinter’s stagecraft. Pinter’s claim to stylistic uniqueness, my correspondent maintains, is debatable.  The circularity of his riffs of looping, regrouping repetitious speech (in German theatre, such declamations are called arias) find its origin, my correspondent believes, in an earlier exponent, the popular dramatist and novelist, Patrick Hamilton.

Compare Pinter’s The Homecoming (1964) with Hamilton’s Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953). If you don’t concede there’s a certain je-ne-sais-quoi about their mannerisms that summons up a prickly sense of déjà vu, then at least admit that Pinter has strayed out of his East End manor on to Hamilton’s turf.

‘You and I were made for each other ...’  he had said, either breathlessly or passionately (she could not tell which) after a protracted kiss ...
            ‘In what way?’ she had then tried. ‘Tell me ...’
            ‘In every way,’ he had said. ‘You must know. I mean the whole hog.’
            [She] had been (and still was) mystified by the exact nature of [his] Whole Hog, which, for some weeks now, had been appearing in his conversation.
            How whole was this puzzlingly allegorical animal? ...
            And so she had then braced herself to force [him] to give a much clearer picture of his own conception of his own Hog.
            ‘When you say “whole” hog,’ she had said, ‘what do you mean, exactly?’

Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse

LENNY (to TEDDY): ... And here he is upstairs with your wife for two hours and hasn’t gone the whole hog. ... What do you make of it, Joey? You satisfied? Don’t tell me you’re satisfied without going the whole hog?
JOEY: I’ve been the whole hog plenty of times. Sometimes ... you can be happy ... and not go the whole hog. Now and again ... you can be happy ... without going any hog.
TEDDY: He had her up there for two hours and he didn’t go the whole hog.

The Homecoming

I summon to the witness stand two acute observers on the deceptions of art to anatomize further, with greater skill than my own, the inauthenticity of the creative impulse. 

Here they strip the bones off two carcasses.

First up, Robert Graves, the visionary poet, attempts to demystify the quiddative conundrum of good art and bad art when defining the distinction between good poetry and fake poetry. 

‘When is a fake not a fake?’ Graves asks.
 

Answer: ‘When the lapse of time has obscured the original sources ... and when the faker is so competent ... that even the incorruptible porter at Parnassus winks and says “Pass, friend!” This sort of hermit-crab, secure in stolen armour, becomes a very terror among simple whelks.’

Next up, Aldous Huxley: ‘There are slightly reckless good poets, and there are good poets who, at times, are extremely reckless...’ He then cites the conclusion of Yeats’s Byzantium to illustrate the ‘recklessness’ of his proposition: ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’

From which we can conclude that intoxication induced by language can leave us with a headache and, in the cold light of dawn, we must be alert to the duplicity of hermit crabs in stolen armour whose secondhand speeches will ultimately be found fitting only for declamation from the lower slopes of Parnassus.

* Pinter-watchers should also note the occurrence of that actor’s prop, the glass of water, reappearing in The Homecoming (1964), having rematerialised from the set of The Servant (1963) whose screenplay is by Harold Pinter, adapted from 1948 novella by Robin Maugham. The glass ot water has an even earlier appearance in The Dumb Waiter (1957).