Ancient Greece has Elegant Variations for the Beast with Two Backs.

Since that which Helen did and ended Troy . . .*

Apart from drawing on the limitless resources of a first class scholar-brain, poet Robert Graves in his Greek Myths (1955) is a master of the the Elegant Variation (i.e. the ‘practice of never using the same word twice in the same sentence or passage,’ according to Fowler), in this instance the reluctance of Graves’s poetic impulse to repeat the verbing of the act of coitus. Yet it’s a unique effect achieved by him in blunt worldly English prose. And in his poetry, too, these characteristic soldierly conceits in plainest English may be observed and relished. 

 

A typical bravura performance is Graves’s cautionary verse, Down, Wanton, Down! where he writes, ‘Love may be blind, but Love at least / Knows what is man and what mere beast . . . ’  There’s no cheap innuendo but the wit of a would-be lover laying siege to his intended and ‘. . . sworn to reach / The ravelin and effect a breach . . .’

 

A shaving mirror Heracles.

These examples of Graves’s poetic facility are as inventive as the seducer Zeus’s metamorphosing deceptions. Zeus, libidinous son of a Titan, and husband to his sister, Hera, is a shape-shifting lover to innumerable ensnared victims with whom he ‘consorts’. And, of course, we may imagine Graves’s identification with Olympian gods and heroes is the more intense for his resemblance to Heracles, son of Zeus and legendary lover,  for surely the similarity did not escape his notice each time he regarded his own flattened nose in his shaving mirror (‘Crookedly broken nose – low tackling caused it . . .’) 

 

Heracles . . . bellicose warrior with flattened nose.

 

Fifty nights of Herculean bed-hopping.

Doubtless, the resemblance did not end at Graves’s nose. Graves’s identification with the legendary Heracles/Hercules can be measured by the zest with which the poet relates Hercules’s Thirteenth Labour: ‘Heracles lodged at Thespiaie for fifty nights running.’ Thespius, king of Thespiae, ‘. . . had fifty daughters’ [and] ‘fearing that they might make unsuitable matches, he determined that every one of them should have a child by Heracles . . . Some say, however, that he enjoyed them all in a single night . . . ’

 

(Note: Lest the charge of flippancy be levelled against me for these musings on the fate of women at the hands of those who return triumphant from the martial field, please refer to the Soviet Weekly for January 17 1946 and certain testimonies from demobilised soldiers returning from the Manchzhurskaya Strategicheskaya Nastupatelnaya Operaciya (Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation) of the previous year. https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/09/correction-notice-soviet-weekly-january.html

 

So, for your interest, here then are itemised the robust demotic verbing Robert Graves (a venerated WW1 combatant) deploys in his Myths, though it’s entirely possible there are other not dissimilar usages in his masterly and soldierly despatches of salacious goings-on reported from the Heights of Olympus I have regrettably overlooked.

bed with

bedded

begot on her

caught at last and got with child

[with whom] he companied 

couple with

courted by

covered her

do as he pleased with her

enjoyed each other

tried to force her

[woman is] no more than an inert furrow

[in which] the husbandsman plants his seed

[with whom] he lay for nine nights

lay together

forced her to lie with him

forcibly married

mounted

on whom he begot

outrage her

taken to wife

took his pleasure (cf. verb pleasure)

touched her to some purpose

trod her triumphantly (Zeus in guise of swan)

ravished her

violated her

violent love made to her

had his will of 

yielded to embraces

 

 

*Sonnet VI (Fatal Interview, sonnet sequence 1931) by Edna St. Vincent Millay. 

Post scriptum August 4 2024 : The obituary appeared this month of the Surrealist artist/magician/wildman, Salford-born Tony Shiels, who once exhibited in St Ives a work called The Two-Backed Beast constructed from a piano strapped to a harmonium, which he doused with turpentine and set alight . . . at once a simile and a metaphor for consummation, if my reading of his vision is correct.

 

 

A simile is a deceived appearance . . . The House that looks like Hitler.

The putrefaction of the perfect rhyme

That marries Blood and Lime with Mud and Time.

Long, long ago, I read for the first time, Adorno’s minatory dictum: ‘Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch’ (‘To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ Culture Criticism and Society, 1949.)

            It struck me then that such an absolutist Death Sentence on Art would have been staunchly repudiated by the persecuted who went to their deaths believing the lyric voice to be unquenchable, and the pen mightier than the sword.

            In my own view, Adorno’s injunction – though noble in intention – is actually a kind of distorted echo of those gloating Nazi voices and their ideological refrain: ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.’
            Certainly, such an injunction would have unfairly denied a voice to a poet as profound as Karen Gershon, a Kindertransport refugee.

A simile is a deceived appearance.

For self-evident reasons, Swansea’s 

House that looks like Hitler

does not appear on this page.

All the same, over the years I have remained alert to those writers who despoil race memory by their absurd theatrics of  ‘immersion’, in the manner of method actors. As I have written elsewhere, one should be cautious – not say downright denunciatory – of certain solipsistic postwar poets who exhibit a maudlin notionality of identification with Holocaust victims that devalues the scale of human suffering . . . 

To my mind, the ludicrousness of Dickinson’s Empress of Calvary was exceeded only by the pallid self-pity of Plath’s Lady Lazarus. Anyhow, I preferred the verses of Karen Gershon, a poetess who in my own view eclipsed Plath in gravitas, insofar as Gershon was in actuality a Jewess and had no need for maudlin notionality. (From A Room to the End of Fall, 2015, in A Bad Case.)

Yet the ill-advised posturings of Sylvia Plath are defended by Zadie Smith in her 2008 Kafka essay, in which she writes, ‘For there is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish Question (“What have I in common with Jews?”) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. Sylvia Plath hinted at this: “I think I may well be a Jew.” ’  

For further observations on the fatuities in Zadie Smith’s arguments as to the supposed Ghettoization of English identity (she was evidently not raised as a morning-faced New Elizabethan), see: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/we-are-all-vermin-now.html

Appearances deceive.
So, as you can recognise from my uncompromising critical stance, my grievance with certain poets is their often specious transmutation of familial angst into Judaical diasporic victimhood à la Plath. 
            Accordingly, when I came to write The House that looks like Hitler I was very careful to forewarn the editor of my misgivings. I wrote:

Germanness and cultural dispossession take many forms, and Jewishness is not the only conduit to a continuing sense of betrayal because appearances deceive, which is the poem’s subject, of course. A simile is a deceived appearance.

Welsh Incident.
However, any anxious reservations I had about the subject were, in the event, mitigated by the thought that the poem had practically written itself, arising as it had, from a media frenzy that had seen the wondrous Animation of the Inanimate, an event no less astonishing, were the tabloids to be believed, than the Miracle when the Sun was Seen to Dance, observed by one hundred thousand Portuguese believers in Fátima in 1917.

•

The elderly owner of an unassuming end-of-terrace house in Swansea has been left bewildered by his home becoming a global media sensation after its resemblance to the Nazi dictator was noted by a passer-by whose photograph gained instant press coverage across the UK and around the world. News item March 2011.

The House that looks like Hitler

                                The corollaries by which we measure 

                                pleasure torment us with War's aftermath;
                                yellow stars by order of the Führer
                                drowned every time we take a bubble bath.

                                How slyly patterns in the carpet hide 
                                swastikas to desecrate our languor.
                                Piano wires to Mendelssohn are tied; 
                                guilt talcums feet with thoughts of falanga.

  
                                The scraps uneaten on your laden plate,
                                the glass abandoned that nobody drank.
                                Each lunch hour summons the hunger-racked fate 

                                of Judentransport, of silent Anne Frank.

                                The mundane taints our haunted lineage.

                                Pyjamas strung up washdays upside down,

                                black bread and soup are slaves to vision's cage:

                                from mirrors stare the eyes of Eva Braun.

                                Today's phenomena are marvellous,

                                yet each lame rhyme or tortured simile

                                is captive to a truth made ruinous

                                by liars out-deceived: Arbeit Macht Frei.                         

                                                                                               Catherine Eisner

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
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).