An Émigré Childhood. Opus 42. Southern England 1942.

          There was a time when skies made shadows of

          those great wings that cursed our house a midday dark,               where echoes hid a mute Heil Ludendorff!

          and La Vie Parisienne by Offenbach.

          Always the notes of Chopin’s Waltz impend. 

          Father playing, but never to the end. 

 

The dancer stumbles.

A minute later I lifted the lid to the keyboard and adjusted my piano stool.

            I have since read that seers believe that to dream of playing a piano is a favourable omen and means the discovery of something of great value in a surprising place; so I resolved to realise my dream of the night before.

            I experienced a feeling of equipoise I had not known since I last rode Dinah ... a balanced seat, hands-free, independent of the reins.

            In my opinion it is actually more difficult to run into bar 210 of Valse in A-flat Opus 42 where the waltz ‘stumbles’ than emerge from it – one runs the risk of sounding as if one has simply walked into a wall, rather than suspending the breath for a moment – hence, this artifice of ineptitude is not easy to achieve and, even though Chopin intended to simulate a clumsy dancer’s imbalance before her lost rhythm is regained, the player’s assumed clumsiness must be diligently practiced over and over again.

            So, creating this suspension requires exceptional finesse in timing and shades of dynamics and balance, which, to my way of thinking, is the more difficult task.

            In my father’s case, alas, the task was performed never with consummate success, as though the passage was a nagging regret and he had to return again and again to pick a sore.  (Father would tune his piano himself by feeding a reference note into an oscilloscope an army pal of his had once used for reading radar; he’d then retune the fifths until they were slightly flat. Those dancing waveforms on a monitor screen, as I told the doctors, I always associate with Chopin’s waltzes.)

            For my own part, my effortless arpeggiation on the evening I returned from Boy’s funeral, and my faultless span at bar 255 – which had once made such demands on the extensive stretch of my Father’s left hand – meant I rode the home-straight cooly through the flurry of that passionate coda, and reached the winning post at last, luckily without a fall ... until pent up grief all at once welled up and burst my heart.

Extract from Dispossession       

Part 11 of Sister Morphine (Salt 2008)       

 

 

For particularly recherché (even prophetic) examples of la poésie concrète likewise revealng my father’s ‘deep continent’ brand of polymathy, see The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K. and . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/04/circo-perfuso-fato-sanguinis.html
 

The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K are exhibited at the Arts Council Poetry Collection website administered by the Poetry Library at Royal Festival Hall in London’s Southbank Centre . . .

http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/recordbfb6.html?id=9440 

The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K 

(1902-1939)

A Memoir of a Numeromaniacal Futurist

    

 

Arbour. Amour. Affaire de Coeur . . . Saboteur.

At the farther end of our garden, behind the boxwood maze, there was a bower with

honeysuckle and other creeping plants overlooking the tennis court. That evening I sat with Douglas on the swing-seat within the trellised shadows of 

the arbour. Douglas had been singles champion at our village club.   

  Boy, my kid brother, knew perfectly well how I first met Douglas, from that 
auspicious day I returned home from a match with a tennis ball I’d mistaken for my own.
  Douglas had written his name on it in indelible ink: DE SHERRARD (the ‘E’ stood for Eric, I was to learn eventually, of course, but at first I’d been willing to believe the ‘de’ was the nobiliary particle, because Douglas was such a perfect gentleman). I have the ball still. 
  The fringes of our fingers were touching. I felt an electrical charge passing between us.

  A crescent moon rocked gently in the cradle of a pine crest.
  Above us, in the twilight, hung yellow roses so brilliant that for a moment I’d almost mistaken them for lanterns. Beyond the rhododendrons, the chalk lines of the tennis court glowed in the dusk, and I glimpsed a pair of bats dipping low over the net.
  I nestled on Douglas’s shoulder as he talked of warring Dayak tribesmen.
  ‘When drums speak out, laws hold their tongues,’ he said gravely, puffing on his pipe.
  ‘In a remote place of flies and midges men don’t need permission to smoke,’ he added thoughtfully in parenthesis, striking another match.
  Suddenly I felt Douglas’s shoulders stiffen and he slowly reached down and I saw his hand close on a large windfall apple, which with a lightning move he hurled into the darkness.
  There was a yelp of pain from the shrubbery and Boy emerged.
  ‘Listen, chummy,’ Douglas drawled, ‘there’s a difference between staring and being stark blind.’
  Douglas was a crack shot with a sporting rifle; he could shoot the eye out of a mosquito, or so he claimed. And he also said he slept with his eyes open like a hare. 
  ‘What do you want here?’ Boy asked in a shrill quavering voice.
  ‘Your sister,’ Douglas boomed. 
  ‘No one wants to marry a quaint old thing in a poke bonnet,’ Boy sneered. ‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘Mummy says she would not let a daughter of hers marry a Roman Candle.’
  It was true. Mother and Boy had got up a whispering campaign against me when they had learned Douglas was a Roman Catholic. 
  Boy ran off up the path, shouting, ‘She’s got it bad, Mummy! She’s got it bad!’
  ‘Sawn off little runt,’ I heard Douglas mutter.
  ‘What did you expect?’ my brother grinned evilly, when the next evening my new beau arrived looking glum. ‘Rosaries all the way?’

Dispossession, pages 292 and 293, Sister Morphine (2008)

•

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