The Audit of Fame 1: Prodigal Son Vincent Van Gogh

Let me declare at once that I claim first dibs on the title, The Audit of Fame, as it may be found set in stone on page 313 of my Sister Morphine (Salt, 2008), where my embittered, disinherited heroine identifies a practice in art history indistinguishable from vanity publishing  . . . in other words, her Portrait of the Artist as a Remittance Man (in this case, Boy, her spoilt-rotten younger brother).
See: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

I don’t think the general public is aware that art for art’s sake is a privileged pursuit often underwritten by family trust funds or that, immediately after the Second Great War, art was considered a gentleman’s profession very like the practice of publishing, and infested with remittance men.                                                                                            The Audit of Fame remains a book that begs to be written by an aesthetical chartered accountant. I repeat, had not Mother progressively sold off parcels of land from my father’s estate — including Wilkes’s prized vegetable plot — Boy would not have had the wherewithal to mount his one-man exhibitions, nor would he have garnered that minor entry in the current guides to British artists, under ‘H’ (my maiden name is the sole inheritance we share).

                Dispossession.

Such an audit of artists would, without doubt, include Degas, whose aristocratic kinsfolk owned banks with branches in Paris, Naples and New Orleans. Edgar, himself, was born on bank premises at the Paris branch of the Banque de Naples, which his father managed. Nor should our audit ignore Toulouse-Lautrec, the scion of aristocratic wealth, and the possessor of an allowance and studio in Montmartre, by the grace of his parents, the Comte and Comtesse de Toulouse-Lautrec. Cézanne, too, was the son of a wealthy banker and granted an allowance to study art in Paris. In 1886, at the age of 47, he inherited his father's wealth and became financially independent.

The Squandering Prodigal of Yellow.

However, the shabby task of running a post hoc slide-rule over the loose change of 19th Century trustafarians is not my intention here. 

No. Not here. My fiduciary duty on this occasion is confined to the ledger account of that archetypal remittance man, Vincent van Gogh.

And, since Van Gogh’s socialist sympathies are nowhere more evident than in his depictions of indigent saboted peasantry, my interest, you might say, is one of purely Marxian economics defined by the true cost of labour, for it recently struck me, just as a scientific hypothesis, to compare the daily wage of the said saboted peasant with the profligacy of van Gogh’s impetuous smorgasbords of impasto pigments – value-costed by oil paint per square centimetre of canvas. 

The correlation yields a result that is somehow unsurprising, given my lifelong ascetic disdain for van Gogh’s technique of squandering gobbets of oil paint straight from the tube.

The coverage I’ve calculated is derived from a typical Vincentian wheat field’s massy yellow, which approximates to 1,400 square centimetres. Hence, in my estimation, allowing for wastage, some two and half double tubes of couleurs fines pour les arts were likely consumed, with each tube (retail) representing a manual worker’s average daily wage. 

For additional fascinating insights I am indebted to the diligence of Brian Dudley Barrett whose 2008 dissertation, North Sea artists’ colonies, 1880-1920, contains an excellent account of the mounting costs faced by followers of the fashion for plein-air painting.

Typically, for early pleinairists of the 19th Century, ‘a medium-sized canvas (125 x 80 cm.) took approximately 100 francs worth of paint . . . In the 1895 Lefranc catalogue prices for tube oil-paints average approximately two francs for a size number 6, c.60 ml. ... It is worth noting that Lefranc’s size 13 tube, their largest, at over 15 cm. long and 3.5 cm in diameter, c.200 ml., cost five francs each, one of which alone was approximately equivalent to an average labourer’s daily pay.’ Or, indeed, the cost of a day’s food for his family. [Five francs was a Parisian’s daily wage, one suspects; in the provinces, 3 francs per diem rate was more likely. In context, the price of a prostitute was also typically 3 francs.]

Agreed, these are sketchy figures. Yet, by contrast, Vincent van Gogh’s tube oil-paint consumption is well documented.

A Docket for the Quartermaster.

In early April, 1888, Vincent writes from Arles to his brother, Theo, itemising his 

. . . order for paints; if you order them at Tasset’s and L’Hôte, Rue Fontaine, it would be a good thing – since they know me – to tell them that I expect a discount equal to at least the cost of carriage, which I will willingly pay; they need not pay the carriage, we pay for it here, but the discount in that case should be 20%. If they agree to that – and I'm inclined to think they will – they can supply me with paints until further notice, and that you mean a big order for them.

So a ‘big order’, then, to his brother who was, in effect, his quartermaster; an order that included ten Double Tubes of Chrome Yellow No. 2 (cf. Goupil’s grades) and ten Doubles of the Jaune Citron he adored. Even with the wholesale discount Vincent demanded, just the cost of these items alone would have fed a worker’s family for a month.

The magnitude of ‘Vincent’s Account’ with his indulgent brother may be judged by the cost to Theo of painting materials in the period June 1889-July 1890, listing 901.80 francs for materials supplied by the firm of Tasset & L’Hôte, and 381.25 francs for Tanguy. 

Total: 1,283 francs.

Estimates suggest that Theo spent an average of around 100 francs a month on Vincent; that is some 15 percent of his annual income on his brother’s remittances.

So I return to the problem of Marxian aesthetics, as hypothesised by a callow Anthony Blunt long before the Iron Curtain had clanged down to crush the beliefs of fellow-travellers in the West who harboured a utopian sympathy for Social Realism. When a young man, Blunt cleaved to a vision of Art’s future under Communism that was unequivocal: ‘The culture of the revolution will be evolved by the proletariat to produce its own culture ... If an art is not contributing to the common good, it is bad art.’  [Cf. Footnote 2, below.]

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

Stakhanovist Artistic Licence?

Mmm. The proletariat would have its own culture, eh?  Stakhanovist masterworks to stand witness to the Dignity of Labour? Tell that to Mademoiselle Sans Sabots of Arles, who must scythe a hectare of wheat per day for less than the price of the yellow vermicelli squirted by the town’s wanton dauber, never mind that the sunstruck remittance man’s confounded easel is planted in the path of her reaping blade.

Yet, if a recognised exemplar of Western Art is the attempted transmutation of the haecceity of wheatfields into the vermiculations of a Vincentian yellow-encrusted canvas, then, by contrast, the Marxian aesthetic, to my mind, was never more powerfully expressed than in the inspired stroke that transubstantiated a Russian Orthodox church into a hungering people’s Grain Store. As Social Realism at its most potent and most emblematic, it surely then outclasses any of the conceptualist vapidities that the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern has lately foisted on our Intelligentsiya.

Soviet Grain Store. 1930s.

Footnote 1 (December 13 2014)

Of course, were not Conceptualism a discredited art, a more sober reading of the 1930s Soviet Grain Store is to consider the 30,000,000 deaths accounted by the Patriotic War and Stalinist Purges as represented by seeds of grain. By my estimation – if each death were expressed as a seed of grain – then some eighteen sacks of grain would memorialise the tragedy of those lives lost.

Footnote 2 (January 6 2018)

In his prophetic satire of England’s Galsworthian leisured classes, W. Somerset Maugham (Christmas Holiday, 1939) describes the views of a young Cambridge-educated communistic firebrand and admirer of the iron fist of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder and Director of the Cheka. The political tyro claims: ‘Art! It’s an amusing diversion for the idle rich! Our world, the world we live in, has no time for such nonsense . . . I know what you would have thought; you would have thought it gave a beauty, a meaning to existence; you would have thought it was a solace to the weary and heavy-laden and an inspiration to the nobler and fuller life. Balls! We may want art again in the future, but it won’t be your art, it’ll be the art of the people.’    

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For more observations concerning the artistic legacy of M & Mme Anon, see . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/mr-and-mrs-anon.html

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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  

Sternstunden, Toxic Pacts and the Silent Woman’s Tryst of Blood

A star-hour! A Sternstunde! Extraordinary though it may seem, on a rare trip to London to the sales, in the flurry of my alighting from a black cab I found myself clutching a stout notebook written in a stranger’s hand, an object unknown to me.

A double take and then realization dawned ... evidently an earlier fare had mislaid the thing on the passenger seat. I was mildly intrigued. So, a little later, in retreat from the tireless hordes, I snatched a moment to examine my find over coffee as – hidden from me – my short-lived star-hour was drowned by the chatter of the sixth floor cafeteria above Peter Jones’s, all unaware of the notebook’s fate-bound worth. 

Its closely packed pages revealed much and little ... little of the identity of the note-taker (a draft letter to a correspondent was signed ‘Stella’) yet much about her literary preoccupations, both prosaic and strophic.  But there was no clue as to a home address other than a New York state zip code (Rosedale) and a single scribbled telephone number, which proved to be that of the American Women’s Club in South Kensington.

What an agony for a writer its loss must be, I thought with true fellow feeling.  So at once I resolved the lost property would be restored to its rightful owner, care of her ex-pats hunkered down in the Old Brompton Road.

Meanwhile, I confess, I took illicit delight in rummaging through the private contents of another’s mind ...  a city-smart Algonquinian mind rich with pert allusivenesses that recalled the works of Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman or, even, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

It seems invidious of me to place Stella Rosedale in this wise-cracking metropolitan company – New Yorkers all, nonetheless – but I can’t resist quoting one draft lyric of hers (uncorrected on the page, so probably unpolished) that chimes with my present pre-festivities mood ...

Drop a Dress Size and Make Things Happen.

She slips the shackles of Time and sighs;

locks tears and wristwatch in a secret drawer;

casts off the freight of lips and eyes,

dispenses nite cream from a rejuvenescent jar.

Stripped of the last apparel of her power,

she folds up hunger in her dream-wear closet.

Naked on scales she can outstare her mirror;

but does she lie when she says: ‘I am happier to lose it.’

How uncompromisingly true!

Yet, notwithstanding the genuine bite of a number of these snappy little squibs of hers – no doubt casually thrown-off – I was drawn more to Stella’s drafts for what appeared a major work-in-progress, the libretto for a Met opera, no less. And the subject? When I read her title, Mayerling: Tryst of Blood, my hands shook ... so stunned was I by a choice of subject so nearly a shadow my own fixations.

Death Without a Witness?

Were you to read a key segment from my fiction, Honeymoon Without Maps (Salt, 2008, Sister Morphine) you might just begin to understand the tingling tremor that ran through me. 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html 

So here is an extract. As her husband, Howard, sleeps, the narrator, Esther, discovers that he has jotted down, with criminal intent, a reference to the notorious Mayerling death-wish, and it ...

... led me to recall the sordid suicide pact between Crown Prince Rudolf Habsburg and the beautiful young Baroness Mary [Marie] Vetsera at the Mayerling hunting lodge.
    Apropos of which, I was in the first night audience at Covent Garden, when the ballet Mayerling had its world premier, and I remember reading then about the doomed, depression-prone Rudolf. And had not that drug-addled rake, according to his biographers, exhibited a pathological fear of living alone? And was that not why the poor booby also feared death alone ... too afraid to die without a witness?
    Mayerling! As if shaken awake by that shock of recognition, I considered the coincidences with new insights.
    Of course, it was the fate of the baroness, full of life and aged a mere seventeen – half Rudolf’s age – to be the ‘chosen one’, his Companion-in-Death, in the adulterous prince’s insane plan to attain self-deliverance ... except he allegedly shot her first before he shot himself.
    Howard and Rudolf.
    So alike in base motives.
    I can compare these two men for I feel I knew them both.
    I could so clearly understand the psychology of Howard ... his primitive fear ... how essential it was for him to know that he had a secure exit if he needed one.
    ...
    Still, I do recall he once wrote a disputatious letter to a national newspaper, some years ago, citing the philosopher ‘K’ as a lifelong advocate of euthanasia, and refuting claims that the wife of ‘K’ was an unwilling partner in their suicide pact. (In her suicide note, Howard quoted with emphasis, she wrote: ‘I cannot live without him, despite certain inner resources.’)
    ‘Hogwash! Tommy rot!’ Howard had shouted when he’d read another correspondent’s counterclaim on the letters page hinting at foul play.

And how had Stella Rosedale resolved the characterisation of Rudolf’s similar criminal narcissism? Rather well, I thought, riffling through her pages, to judge from this promising start to an aria:

Rudolph:
My shadow casts a stain.
The sun foretells Golgotha’s slain.
Stars glitter through their tears
for you and me . . . Marie . . . Marie
dicers, vinegar, spears . . . Gethsemane. 

Yes. Blustering quasi-religious self-justification for the crime of bullying an impressionable woman much younger than himself to take her own life because the booby was ‘... too afraid to die without a witness.’

The Silent Woman.

How odd they are, then, these threads and connections. And it’s particularly odd to think that the coinage of the term for star-hours of destiny (Sternstunden) – pivotal turning-points in human life – may be found in the writings of Austrian cosmopolite, Stefan Zweig, one of my favourite fictionists, who himself committed suicide in a pact with a wife half his age, Lotte, then aged 33 years and in good health.
 

Critically, formatively, according to Zweig’s first wife, Friderike, the ‘uncurbed, unrestrained vitality’ of his ‘extremely self-willed’ mother was invariably an unwelcome distraction from his writerly pursuits, and ‘undiminished even in old age, often caused much suffering to her son.’ And referring to Lotte, Stefan’s second wife and ‘Companion-in-Death’, Friderike writes, ‘... Stefan always longed for the “Silent Woman” – the title of the opera libretto, after Ben Jonson, that he wrote for Richard Strauss [Die schweigsame Frau] – his mother’s opposite. The silent, devoted Lotte so tragically fulfilled this idealized conception during his last years!’

Which raises the question – too grave for me to answer here – as to who is the proponent and instigator of a suicide pact? The man or the woman? And who insists it is followed through?

The same question has arisen in the case, mentioned, of philosopher ‘K’, the penologist, whose identity you will guess from the double suicide he carried through in his Knightsbridge home with his wife, twenty-two years his junior, and in good health.

The hallucinatory clarity of certain details observed in these two notable twin-deaths clings to my mind: the bottle of Salutaris mineral water mentioned by an observer of Stefan Zweig’s death scene (shades of Marienbad, his mother’s favourite spa) ... the fact that Stefan left his pencils well sharpened ... and the jar of honey (I can guess its purpose) that stood on the Alice-like occasional table (‘DRINK ME’) in the sitting-room of ‘K’ and his wife . . . and their suicide notes that also lay there addressed ‘To Whom it May Concern’.

No, this sinister question of the dominant party in a double suicide is too complex to examine here (‘sadomasochistic’ tendencies are more than hinted at in the case of ‘K’), so I await with keen anticipation the completed libretti of Stella Rosedale’s Mayerling: Tryst of Blood.

My Note to Stella Rosedale.

I have written a little apology to Stella for rifling through her most intimate thoughts. All the same, I have been emboldened to express my admiration for her Mayerling libretto drafts, expressing my own high regard for those two librettists of superlative skill, Myfanwy Piper (for Britten’s The Turn of the Screw) and lyricist Lillian Hellman (not forgetting James Agee, for Bernstein’s Candide). I do so hope we become better acquainted.

I do not mention the purpose of the jar of honey.  Nor do I mention the pioneering great-aunt of my family, one of the first accredited female pharmacists in England, who meticulously planned her own suicide.  Her very effective recipe is a closely guarded family secret.

Her last words in her suicide note were these: 

Dearest Best Beloved.

It is time for the candle to be snuffed out.

My Love to you All.

So you see, in answer to the bloodless question, so glibly and so frequently asked by psycho-medicos, ‘Have you ever had suicidal thoughts?’ my answer, willing-unwilling, would have to be, ‘Yes.’

●

Postscript (28.02.23) Amok.

I almost persuaded an Academy-award-nominated film director to adapt Zweig’s Amok as a psychological drama of obsession. He thought it unfilmable. Much later, in 1993, Amok appeared as a French movie starring Fanny Ardent.

Photo: The remains of a copy of the book by Stefan Zweig, the novel Amok (1922), partially burned during the Bücherverbrennungen (the Nazi book burnings) promoted by National Socialists during the 1930s.

 

●

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  

Albertine Einstein Defies Helen Dunmore to Defend the Pluperfect.

Albertine Einstein, the virtuoso Time Traveller, celebrated for dancing effortlessly through Temporal Grammar, was astonished to read a denunciation of the Pluperfect tense by novelist Helen Dunmore ... a tense regarded by Helen as a form of writing too difficult to grasp for fragile novice scribblers cursed with the infirmitas feminei sexus.  

Albertine is versatile. Teleportation through the tenses is her medium. Even now she IS foreseeing that moment in the future when she WILL BE moved to recall with a shudder the occasion a decade earlier when she WAS first struck by Helen’s indefensible attack on what is possibly the temporal hoofer’s most practical narrative tense. 

Where?  When?

Quick fix for wannabe chickliterati.

Winter/Spring 2004 issue of MsLexia* magazine, page 40, Interview with Helen Dunmore. If this misnamed ‘Magazine for Women Who Write’ ever endorsed its own notion that women are pathologically disadvantaged by gender ‘from becoming successful authors’, then Helen Dunmore’s renunciation of the Pluperfect as too mystifying for Women-of-Very-Little-Brain and, in consequence, redundant, must take the cake. 

I write this with regret, and with a sense of betrayal, since two of my published contributions were singled out for generous notice (MsLexia supplements edited by Kate Clancy and Sara Maitland). Nevertheless, here is Helen’s let-out clause for the wannabe chickliterati she evidently dismisses as feeble-minded:

Helen Dunmore [explains the MsLexia interviewer] ... finds the present tense very useful for writing history. ‘You can move around in time very well from the starting point … the present tense allows you to maintain that sense of uncertainty.’ And, as the interviewer remarks, ‘It also allows you to write flashback without the clumsy “had had”s of the pluperfect.’  The Dunmore Method is then reaffirmed: ‘Use the present tense and first person if possible.’

The promulgation of this quick-fix childish formula for writing texts with the intention of their being categorised as adult literature strikes one as a stunt of jaw-dropping effrontery. 

Write in the permanent present tense?  Such a style, Albertine believes, is like being trapped inside the amnesiac’s Eternal Sunlight of the Spotless Mind with no syntactical mechanism for reverie. 

‘The Screaming “Hadhads” is a condition many writers fear,’ laughs Albertine, ’but I have never suffered from it. It’s a myth! I just don’t buy it. I never bought it. And I will not be buying it in the future.’

And, anyhow, Albertine asks, is mastering the Pluperfect so impossibly daunting?

The Gnomic Present Endures Alongside the Othered Past.

Albertine says, ‘As you know, in movies there is the weirdest rarely used device of a Double Flashback, where one Flashback dissolves to yet another Flashback earlier in time. My pondering this peculiarity prompted me to write to three eminent professional grammarians with two specimens of the pluperfect to ask them if the extracts set off any alarm bells.’

Albertine wrote:

Here are two examples of pluperfect-type expressions of narrative recalled from the past in the past tense.

Helen, who would very much have liked to know who the masked chorusgirl was who was running away so fast, said nothing. [Correct?]

Helen, who would very much have liked to have known who the masked chorusgirl was who was running away so fast, said nothing. [Incorrect?]

Do you think, please, the correct example is slowly becoming defunct in favour of the more longwinded incorrect version?

Results? 

Guru-Grammarian-Gamma writes:

No opinion about what might be becoming defunct.  But I think I would say both versions are grammatically correct, and they have very subtly distinct meanings.

Guru-Grammarian-Beta writes:

I agree with Guru-Gamma. A Subtle difference in meaning. From which time aspect is each sentence uttered is the question; no comment on ‘defunct’ or not, both are still viable.

Guru-Grammarian-Alpha writes: 

I suspect the two versions will continue to co-exist – just as the gnomic present (Galileo believed that the earth revolves around the sun) endures alongside the past (Galileo believed that the earth revolved around the sun).

‘So there we have it,’ Albertine grins slyly. ‘Guru-Alpha asserts that this paradox of temporality, then, can be applied to the Pluperfect, and the correctitude of the two examples can prevail in a co-existent state. However, your closer reading of Guru-Beta will reveal this grammarian to be closest to the truth!’

A bell rang three times backstage. The orchestra struck up an overture. ‘Excuse me!’ Albertine flexed her virtuosic toes to ease any tenseness. ‘That’s my cue!’ Then the Dancer to the Music of Time was gone.

*For my views on MsLexia’s sickly, self-pitying title, see: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/i-have-rendezvous-with-dread-at.html 

Cold Comfort Conjugation in my Darkest Sussex

It’s a tarrible gurt noration (terrible great travesty) told abroad that a dusty parody of the rural novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), deserves its popularity as a vaunted classic of English comic fiction, when the distinguished prototype from which Stella Gibbons derives her satire (Sussex Gorse, 1916, by Sheila Kaye-Smith) is a fine novel in its own right, and unjustly neglected.

Sheila Kaye-Smith, 1923,
by
Robert John Swan (1888-1980)
The pose in the picture is said to be based
on Titian’s A Man with a Quilted Sleeve. 

As I wrote to a Professor of Modern English Literature in California, whose Intensive Writing Course on The Fictions of the Sexes includes Cold Comfort Farm:

I’d be very interested to know whether any critique of this novel in your tutorials ever includes the acknowledgement that the writer Gibbons satirises (Sheila Kaye-Smith) was a very fine chronicler of Sussex dialect and rural life, and her novel, Sussex Gorse, is a moving work of literature, true to the character of Sussex farming stock. I was brought up for some years on a Sussex farm so I can vouch for the fidelity to customs and dialect of Kaye-Smith’s writings. You may find the dialect impenetrable in Kaye-Smith BUT another point to consider is that Sussex dialect is very similar to US Southern rural speech with pronouns ‘his’n’ and ‘her’n’, for example, while Sussex has exported many other grammatical features to the States.

I am invariably admiring of the open-mindedness of academics, and the professor truly did not disappoint me in his prompt response:

Thank-you for that excellent reference. I am tracking down copies of Sheila Kaye-Smith’s work for our University Library, and will read her for the next time I teach Cold Comfort Farm.

My mother, poultrykeeper on East Sussex farm 1930s.

Of course, for American dialectologists, these grammatical niceties present an ever-widening, ever more complex vista of the diaspora of those inheritors of our rural English tongue.

I am not an American dialectologist but I can observe with certainty that Zane Grey and his fellow practitioners of classic Western fiction, including Colonel William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill), correctly conjugate their possessive pronouns:

‘Keep back ... you snake! Or I’ll put out one of them slinky eyes of your’n!’

‘I felt as how ef yer was a good set of fellers you wouldn’t mind havin’ another true rifle and arm with your’n, for this is an all-fired dirty Injin country, you know.’*

Yet the odd thing is that I would not again have been reminded of my early interest in Sussex dialect – an interest that had all but faded from my mind – had not a certain ‘award-winning’ literary composition been cited to me as a superlative example of the common speech of Sussexers, when analysis of the text revealed at once in the tenth line a solecistic howler that no Sussex child – let alone an acclaimed scholar of our county’s provincialisms – would have inflicted on the ear of her elders. And the contentious phrase?

Gaffer stands in the yard and counts ourn hogs an’ lambs.

Ourn? No! Our hogs an’ lambs. (I imagine the prize for that literary composition was awarded by metropolitan critics.)

As the Rev. W.D. Parish, Vicar of Selmeston, writes, in his Dictionary of Sussex Dialect (1875):

The possessive pronoun is thus conjugated in Sussex,

Mine, thine, hisn [his own] or hern.

Ourn, yourn, theirn.

[Mine, thine, his, hers, ours, yours, theirs.]

To aid our parsing, the Rev. Parish gives us any number of specimen utterances.

That new lean-to of yourn is a poor temporary thing.

Robbuts! Ah, I layyou never see such aplaace for robbuts as what ourn is! 

These strict observances of grammatical rules cannot be neglected, in my view, when attempting to faithfully reproduce Sussex rural speech heard within living memory.

In my own fiction, Sister Morphine (2008), I remember, the speech of Wilkes, a Sussex farmworker, employs two possessive pronouns (the episode, Dispossession), both observant of rules that neither Buffalo Bill nor Zane Grey contravene ... so if they didn’t breach them why should we?

Yore ma sez as how the babe is her’n.

As you can just possibly begin to imagine, my brother’s birth was a fearful page in the record my existence.

    I can remember Boy in his pram, a peevish elf in a pointed woollen hat. That elfin cap concealed a skull elongated by a forceps birth, as though he had been delivered by coal tongs.

    Coincidentally, Grasper the sheepdog was struck dead six months later in an altogether less violent thunder storm; a bolt aimed true and found the brass tag that honoured his name; a medal struck by lightning, you might say.

    Mention of that sheepdog recalls a variant account of my brother’s nativity story, a kind of parallel creation myth that relates the genesis of the Young Lord and Master. As it also concerns myself it bears retelling.

•

A lamb, you know, can be born with eyes of a different colour and, in ancient times, shepherds believed such a lamb had two different sires. In fact, a lamb characterised by this phenomenon is one of my earliest memories.

    When I was going on seven, on the way to the lambing sheds one spring morning, Wilkes, the farmhand, pointed out a tawny-eyed ram, then, in the pens, he showed me lambs with brown eyes and, later, a sickly lamb with blue eyes suckling on a ewe. Disowned, in a corner, on shaky legs, stood an even sicklier lamb with an eye of each colour.

    ‘ ’Minds me of the time tha’ brother of yourn come into this world ’cause, true enough, he were born in a barn.’

    ‘In a barn?’ I exclaimed in wonderment.

    ‘Ain’t you never heard tell of the birth of yore brother? T’was full moon and light as day. Heard this hollarin’ an’ fancied diddikoy folk mostlike must of took the wrong turnin’ into the yard. So afore it’s light I got the lantern an’, begger me, I wouldn’t of belieft it if I hadn’t sin it wi’ my own eyes, a diddikoy babe bawlin’ in the cowhouse! An’ no sign o’ the mite’s mother.’

    ‘No!’

     ‘On my word. Next thing I knowed, yore ma comes hurryin’ outen the gate in her nightgown so I arsts her if summat’s wrong.  Then the mistruss took on summat terrible – sez the diddikoys are allus up to tricks – sez they’ll take away a mort of things as they’ve no call to have. She set up such a din, cryin’ and sobbin’, sayin’ as how the brat’ll be tarrible difficult to rear on account o’ it bein’ a child o’ the gyppos.’

    ‘A gypsy’s child! No!’

    ‘Then yore ma ketches holt o’ the babe an’ laid it on a silk idydown. “They’ll be a bout o’ trouble wi’ tha’ boy, shouldn’t wonder,” sez I, but yore ma jest gives it a sup o’ milk, an’ a crust to bite on, an’ sez as how the babe is her’n.’   

    He rubbed his nose reflectively.

    ‘An’ nobody didn’t tek it away from yore ma agin, ’cause nobody didn’t know the mistruss had bin cheated by the diddikoys. Same as a cuckoo, surely.  Jest ’sposin’ a cuckoo come along and turned out all them blue eggs and laid a speckly brown ’un.’

Sturdy double negative.

You’ll note that I refrain from discussing the double negative here (‘nobody didn’t know’), which is such a feature of Sussex rural speech, no different from American ruralisms.

‘Eleven hundred hides stole from my camp,’ replied the grizzled hunter, ‘an’ ain’t never heerd of them since, let alone seein’ hide or hair.’  Zane Grey  

As H. L. Mencken remarks in his The American Language, (1921): ‘Syntactically, perhaps the chief characteristic of vulgar American is its sturdy fidelity to the double negative.’

Well, I don’t see nothing wrong in that.

NOTE: See Epitaph for an Anti-Hero (previous post) ‘... you don’t value nothing. You don’t respect nothing.’

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/anti-antihero-heroine-takes-heat-to.html 

Postscript April 13 2015

One other thought about the title, Cold Comfort: Please be aware that Cold Harbour farms and place names abound in England, particularly Sussex.

It is a Saxon place name, meaning a refuge from the cold.

The Cold Harbours or Coldharbours are all in the vicinity of one or other of the great Neolithic or Roman roads, and were originally the remains of partially destroyed Roman or Romano-British dwellings, or settlements. Travellers used them as being more or less secure places in which to spend a night. As the places became known, traders gathered there to distribute goods and do business, and eventually the places once more became villages, but retained the old generic name.

So the title is also a play on a familiar Sussex place name, in my own view. 

* Shades of King Solomon’s Mines. Allan Quatermain to his hunting party on their mission to Kukuanaland: ‘I may say that I like you and believe that we shall come up well to the yoke together.’

Freakout.

I’m just completing Sybille Bedford’s thoughtful biography of Aldous Huxley (volume two) in which she moralises on the question of Huxley’s advocacy of mescalin and other mind-rinsing psychedelic drugs.

Would it — and should it — have occurred to him that the contents of The Doors of Perception might trickle within the reaches of the half-baked, the under-educated, the unstable and indeed the pre-experienced young.

The last words Aldous Huxley wrote on his writing tablet were some hours before his death:
 

LSD – Try it

intermuscular

  100 mm*

 

*100 micrograms (μg)

He died peacefully with the doctor observing ‘a marked beneficial effect’ from two injections of LSD two hours apart. 

Well, Aldous Huxley without question belonged to the world’s intellectual elite and his own quest for self-transcendence, sometimes induced by psychedelic drugs under medical supervision, may be seen as a deliberately considered extension of the researches that support his vast corpus of writings on the philosophical, cultural, sociological and aesthetic concerns of the age. BUT, Ms Bedford makes clear her own reservations as to his moral soundness when assuming the responsibilities of an influential sage :

The extent to which his writings, and example, can be held to be causative factors in today’s drug scene is difficult, perhaps impossible to tell.

I agree. Yet, though she is certainly correct in pointing out the dangers that await the pre-experienced young when they dabble in psychedelics, I do not to this day regret the fecklessness — nor, indeed, the reckless half-bakedness — of my own youthful experiences of LSD, as I explain in my introduction to Sister Morphine:

The lyric, ‘Tell me, Sister Morphine, how long have I been lying here?’ by Marianne Faithfull, gave me the title of my book and Marianne, whose troubled life as a registered heroin addict is well documented (and whom I knew briefly when we were very young), inspired one of my case histories in which I trace the psychosis of a naïve young woman tempted to experience the hallucinatory visions induced by addictive drugs. In this case the drug is LSD; the place is the Swinging London of the Sixties ... and the temptress is the narrator’s elder twin sister.

‘ “Tonite let’s make love in London,” ’ Victoria quoted, speech slurred, on my return that evening. Those liquid eyes were again distilled to needlepoint droplets of narcosis, I noticed, and her flesh lacked skin tone. 
    Her mouth, I could see, was dry, with white flecks of spittle in the corners.
    Three years before, when I was fifteen, our mother had been shocked when she learned I had accompanied Victoria (at Vix’s insistence) to hear Ginsburg recite at the Royal Albert Hall. (‘Infantile scatology,’ was Mother’s verdict.)
    Now in the darkened drawing room Victoria beckoned to me and extended her palm.
    She held a small cube wrapped in metal foil.
    ‘A sugar lump to gild the pill,’ she said tenderly.
    I recoiled but she seized my arm and pressed the object firmly into my hand.
    ‘Know what this is?’
    ‘Haven’t the faintest,’ I whispered fearfully. But I knew.
    ‘A tab. A dot. For dropping acid, silly,’ she said.
    She unwrapped the cube and placed it on my tongue. I tried to spit it out but she sealed my lips with her fingertips. Involuntarily I swallowed.
    ‘Tune in, dearest heart,’ she soothed, ‘turn on. I will be your guide.’
    A great languor stole over me.
    Victoria took my hand in her hot, dry clasp and we began to dance.
    She led. I followed.
    (When I was no more than five years old she told me I must call her The Miss Victoria. Whether I cared for the fact or not, she asserted, I as the younger daughter was destined indefinitely to be merely a Miss. Even then, please understand, she had conferred on me a subordinate title.)
    Marianne began to sing from the radiogram: ‘I always needed you to look out for me ... oh, baby ...’
    At first, the rubberiness of my gums from the anaesthesia I found frightening.
    Soon, however, I began to sink into an hallucinatory reverie.
    It is true that during those psychedelic hours with Victoria I learned the meaning of Ginsberg’s ‘Blake-lit Mohammedan angels’ – because, for two eternities more ancient than Chaos, I stared at a milliard of those lucent homunculi in the reticular texture of the drawing room wallpaper. Yet ... I also stared into that purgatoried place where every monster has its own multitudes.
    By looking through the fissures of the old house, I seemed to see not only the stars but to penetrate upper chambers I had never fully explored.
    At an unknown hour I found myself floating some distance above Victoria’s bed gazing into upcast and darkly oracular eyes to contemplate a voluptuary pythoness wearing my face whose every sensuous uncoiling convulsion was suspended in an aphrodisiac prolongation I, also, shared.
    Over her seraphic nakedness a swarm of furry bees hovered which slowly resolved itself into a shock of tightly crinkled hair ... the frizzy Afro hair of ...
    Toby!
    Toby lay across her – a supersexual being of extraordinary radiance and beauty hewn from an heroic age.
    Colours intensified. Light diffracted. Objects distorted and shrank.
    Somehow, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the big wardrobe seemed to acquire an enormous significance.
    Time warped.  Joss sticks were lit.
    As from the edge of a great divide I observed a distant simulacrum of my being receive the tributes of the flesh ...  he-she and he-I and I-she, all interconnected by a glowing force field which seemed to strike sparks as lips touched, and melded into a totality of incorporeal sensation.
    The bed had dematerialised, as had those affirmers of mortality, our teeth and gums.
    I learned too late all trips are braved sans gritted jaw.
    The foundations of the house had dissolved into the infinite void and our flesh seemed to be tingling with electric static as we brushed the dark velvet of deep space ... a friction which seemed to transmute that insubstantial velvet into aurorean ripples of charged silk, billowing in waves, stimulating our senses with the glancing touch of a thousand quickening fingers, until we knew ourselves as one flesh, a single skin, slick with sweat, yearning like a fierce rolling tide to break together on a nearing shore.
    Then the wave receded and – beached – we lay together, struggling for breath as though we had just swum the infernal regions’ Hellespont.
    By unspoken agreement we avoided each other’s eyes, and before our temporal lives fully reasserted themselves, I remember, we three were next sitting cross-legged  – Victoria, Toby and I – watching in wonder the slow-motion, frame-by-frame, glittering parabola of a silver snuffbox we pitched from hand to hand.
    Drug-induced synaesthesia I mused, was like a problem in grammar, where the active and the passive voices become confused and there is a difficulty in distinguishing the moment of action from the resultant state and no one knows whether they are the object of the action or the subject performing it.
    A new word for my lexicon I learned that night was ‘freakout’.
    ‘Here, take it.’
    I groaned in protest. Toby stared down at me with eyes like live coals.
    ‘Fifty milligrams of Thorazine,’ Toby persisted, ‘it’ll bring her down.’
    His words cooled me better than cold water.
    ‘Precious, my poor precious,’ Victoria cooed, smoothing my brow.
    I have to tell you that, even adrift in a drug-induced nirvana, the deepest love can turn to deadliest hatred. I confess to you now that the not-so-beatific emotion I brought back from the Other Side was a revived green-eyed envy towards my elder sister, Victoria ... I, the last born, was ever mamma’s darling; she was daddy’s.

 ●

Flashback. The Wind of Time.

Note (November 9 2015): The weather is particularly mild just now and the fragrance last night of an Elaeagnus shrub clinging to a bank above the sea reminded me of an unnameable phenomenon I believe unremarked by trippers returning from their voyage to Inner Space . . . I speak of the Wind of Time. Certainly, LSD at its most revelatory reveals a dimension where a (Cosmic?) Wind, a rushing in the ears, is experienced expressive of Time’s racing passage . . . the flow of the strongly scented breath of the Elaeagnus flowers last night revived a memory and for a moment the experience was relived . . . and again the involuntary numbing of gums and teeth (sans gritted jaw).

 

●

 

  

●

My principal theme in ‘Sister Morphine’ is the sheer unpredictability of women’s behaviour when conditioned by prescription drugs. For this suite of interconnected women’s narratives I have refashioned case histories as fictions to delineate the effects of drug administrations on clients observed in psychiatric nursing and psychotherapy ... particularly,  the more bizarre asocial psychoses – and sometimes criminal behaviour – made manifest by the multifaceted side effects of prescription drugs such as antidepressants, tranquilizers and mood stabilizers.

In ‘Sister Morphine’, fifteen women – Felícia, Charlotte, Zoë, Elenore, Eveline, Miriam, Grete, Esther, Marianne, Irina, Mary, Elspeth, Theresa, Isolde and Roberta – will unveil their psychoses to you ... but not until the last page do they unlock the unsuspected secret that unites their destinies.

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

●

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, for extracts
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