Verifiable Proof of Englishness: my Citizenship ‘Associative Reaction’ Test Probes an Allusive Incomplete V.R.

As a Sussex-bred child, I’m sure I never imagined that – when we used to walk along the Weald ridgeway from the little village of Streat, past Plumpton Racecourse, to East Chiltington churchyard – I’d be entering a future where memories of that splendid grandstand view of the South Downs would prompt sombre ruminations on the values of cultural identity.

As it was, any apprehensions of today’s polarising debates on what it means to be English I’m sure were far from my mind because what entranced me most was the thought that the massive sylvan hanger that clung to the escarpment above Streat was the very embodiment of the Victorian mystery fiction I nightly devoured, thanks to a number of my grandfather’s bound volumes of the Strand Magazine I had made my own.

Explain? The massive ‘V’ on the Downs above Streat was planted in 1887 to mark Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. Composed of Scotch pine, spruce, larch, beech, sycamore and lime, this living monument to a queen regnant raised by a loyal yeoman farmer required 3060 plants at a cost of 12 pounds, 10 shillings and four pence, not including 38 pounds for labour. The outside measurement of each arm is 165 yards in length.  The width of each arm is 22 yards – that time-honoured distance, the twentieth of a quarter of a mile, the length of a cricket pitch (Sussex is the birthplace of adult cricket, cited in the early 1600s). The ‘V’ is one of the most loved landmarks within the South Downs National Park.

Local legend, I recall, had it that such were the fears of ever mounting expenditure the farmer abandoned his intention to complete the V.R. (Victoria Regina) of his original scheme, and settled for the pure symmetry of a commanding ‘V’, for which a future generation of austere minimalists is profoundly grateful.

Writ large.

It’s easy to guess why I was entranced. The incomplete ‘V’ reminded me of nothing so much as that characteristic passage in the case book of Sherlock Holmes I’d read so eagerly in the Strand Magazine for 1893, published six years after the farmer’s celebrations yet sharing the impulse towards the expression of an unquestioning monarchial devotion writ large with the means closest to hand . . . saplings in the farmer’s case, and in the case of Sherlock Holmes  . . .
  

[Watson deplores Holmes’s marksmanship.] I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.

The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual

(The Strand Magazine 1893)

Yet, in my maturity, I begin to wonder whether my loyal citizenship test of Englishness does not require, after all, the further validation of an ‘Enhanced Positive Vetting’*, because I must confess my knee-high view of classic Victorian crime literature is now revealed to me to be simply the fancy of a purblind innocent who, unlike the jingoistic Holmes, hadn’t completely joined up the dots . . . . . .

Toffs as Drifters: Holmes and Raffles in the Strand.

The fog-cloaked London of the Strand Magazine’s crime fiction in the 1890s, as Sherlockians will be aware, harboured both the exploits of the private detective, Holmes, and the escapades of the notorious (yet also jingoistic) Raffles, gentleman thief, the incomparable protagonists created respectively by brothers-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle and E. W. Hornung. Yet, now with 20/20 hindsight, as I have hinted, isn’t it about time we took to task these two fictive toffs for masquerading as members of the Deserving Poor – ‘hansom cab-runners’, to be precise – to thus deny indigent workers their honest wage? 

The flippancy of their offence is all the more egregious when you consider that an unflinching social realist of the same decade, George Gissing, was also a stablemate of these feted authors at the Strand and, by contrast, had an entirely clear-eyed and empathetic view of the penniless drifters who followed cabs. A cab-runner** in those days was regarded as roughly identical with a criminal of the worst sort.  

As to the cold-blooded cynicism of Holmes and Raffles, I invite you to consider these extracts from their adventures in the guise of ‘horsey men out of work’, a subterfuge that exploited the advantages of cabmen as confidants. First, Holmes reveals to Watson his ‘amazing powers in the use of disguises’:   

‘I left the house a little after eight o’clock this morning in the character of a groom out of work. There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among horsey men. Be one of them, and you will know all that there is to know . . . I then lounged down the street . . . and lent the ostlers a hand in rubbing down their horses, and received in exchange tuppence . . . I was still balancing the matter in my mind . . .  when up the lane came a neat little landau . . . It hadn’t pulled up before she [Irene Adler] shot out of the hall door and into it. I only caught a glimpse of her at the moment, but she was a lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for . . . “The Church of St. Monica, John,” she cried, “and half a sovereign if you reach it in twenty minutes.” This was quite too good to lose, Watson. I was just balancing whether I should run for it, or whether I should perch behind her landau when a cab came through the street.’ 

A Scandal in Bohemia
(The Strand 1891) 

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

‘Whip behind!’ 

Had Sherlock Holmes perched behind Irene’s landau, we wonder, would a street urchin have cried, ‘Whip behind!’ This, after all, was the customary exposure of free rides by stowaways on horse cabs. In the event, Holmes reverted to toff, flourished half a sovereign, and followed Irene in a cab. 

The rather more athletic A. J. Raffles, on the other hand, demonstrates, an even deeper immersion in the character of a ‘cab follower’, according to faithful sidekick, Bunny Manders:   

‘But surely you get some exercise? ’ I asked; for he was leading me at a good rate through the leafy byways of Campden Hill; and his step was as springy and as light as ever.                                                                                       ‘The best exercise I ever had in my life,’ said Raffles; ‘and you would never live to guess what it is. It’s one of the reasons why I went in for this seedy kit. I follow cabs. Yes, Bunny, I turn out about dusk and meet the expresses at Euston or King’s Cross; that is, of course, I loaf outside and pick my cab, and often run my three or four miles for a bob or less.  And it not only keeps you in the very pink: if you’re good they let you carry the trunks upstairs; and I’ve taken notes from the inside of more than one commodious residence which will come in useful in the autumn.’ 

The Rest Cure
(1905) 

‘V’ for le vice anglais?

A shilling or less!  Well, before you dismiss my notion of a certain blinkered condescension on the part of celebrated toffs playing at charades with the livelihoods of a desperate underclass, please consider the intriguing fact that Oscar Wilde, Conan Doyle and Hornung were close acquaintances, and Wilde was the reviled Accused at the centre of a cause célèbre of a notoriety that saw ‘illiterate boys’ called as witnesses in a trial in which Wilde was prosecuted on charges of gross indecency, mostly procured sexual encounters with young grooms and valets. From the witness-box the court heard the nature of Wilde’s inducements to those ‘illiterate boys’ to share debauches that indulged his taste for ‘feasting with panthers’, reportedly: ‘Bring your friends; they are my friends; I will not enquire too closely whether they come from the stables or the kitchen.’ 

Does the ‘V’ of my meditation on Englishness of this sort, then, stand for le vice anglais?

In fact, the often epigrammatic wit of both Holmes and Raffles is said to be founded by their authors on the quick tongue of Wilde yet, despite this brilliance, the unconscionable exploitation of London’s underclass in the fictions of Conan Doyle and Hornung casts a dismal shadow to remind us how fin-de-siècle decadence can pervade popular literature when a prosperous middle class readership conspires in suspending disbelief. As I have pointed out elsewhere, is not A Study in in Scarlet, 1886 (the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes), a title par excellence for the Decadent Movement, never mind the Whistlerian connotations?

Conversely, George Gissing, writing in his characteristic vein of socio-cultural observation of the poor, owed much, I suspect, to the findings of that guiding spirit of his youth, the social researcher and reformer, Henry Mayhew. 

So I must conclude that the measure of my Englishness is now most likely reduced to this: In the case of the Holmesian Übermensch versus the Mayhevian Untermenschen whose side do I take?  The Infallible Polymath or the Ruined Boys?

Just to earn a few pence. 

There were 1.2 million poor living in extreme squalor in the London of the 1890s, with malnutrition a scourge condemning nearly 500 of London’s poorest to starve to death in the capital annually . . .  so, when I think of the Baker Street Irregulars, those ragged, hungering, lice-ridden, barefoot street urchins (‘like so many rats’) engaged for a few pence by Holmes as his snitches, I believe I know the answer: 

‘V’ = Vanquished

•

*For an account of the rigours of ‘Enhanced Positive Vetting’, see A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men . . .  
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html

**For a character sketch of cab-runners from George Gissing’s socio-cultural perspective, see . . . 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/a-theory-of-literary-reincarnation.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, 

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

A Roundelay for Archducal Dylan.

I wonder whether you’ve noticed that the centenary next June (28 June 1914) of the cataclysmic death of an archduke (Franz Ferdinand of Austria) will be concurrent with the centennial of the birth of another notable honouree of an arch dukedom, namely Dylan Thomas*, Duke of Gweno … an arch ennoblement indeed.

But by whom so archly ennobled? If you have not heard of the King of Redonda, then I should explain it is an invention of M. P. Shiel (1865-1947), celebrated author of The Purple Cloud, a landmark of early British dystopian science fiction.

According to the current pretender to the Redondan throne, eminent Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marías, Redonda [is]:

… a minuscule island in the Antilles of which, at the age of fifteen, Shiel himself (a native of the neighbouring and much larger island of Montserrat) had been crowned king in a festive naval ceremony in 1880, at the express desire of the previous monarch, his father, a local Methodist preacher who was also a shipowner and had bought the island years before, though no one knows from whom, given that its only inhabitants at the time were the boobies that populated it and a dozen men who gathered the birds’ excrement to make guano.

It was within the gift of the past kings of Redonda, Marías affirms, to make ‘…dukes or admirals of various writers who were his friends or whom he admired…’, a patronage that included the elevation of Dylan Thomas to Duke of Gweno in 1947 (he proclaimed his fealty in drunken doggerel), a lineage of patronage that extends up to the present day, with a number of contemporary literary luminaries receiving preferment to aristocratic titles from King Xavier, Marías himself. 

An Awful Solitude. A Vagrant King.

But this minuscule account of mine of a minuscule micronation (named Redonda by Columbus for its roundness) is no more than a prelude, I confess, to a minor footnote I wish to add to the Redondan myth, which Shielian scholars may have overlooked; I cannot be sure.

I can be sure, though, of the fact that from my great-uncle I inherited a number of his bound volumes of the Strand Magazine, which in my childhood I read avidly for the Sherlock Holmes stories first published there in the 1890s, read also by my great-uncle when in his early teens at the time of publication. (His wife, my great-aunt, is presently in good health at the venerable age of one-hundred-and-seven).

So that is how, in my own early teens, I stumbled across a remote island resembling Redonda ... The Eagle’s Crag, described by M P Shiel in Volume 8, published in 1894.

Written when Shiel was 29 years old, it’s a more romantic conception of Redonda, I think. Significantly, Shiel also mentions in this story an ‘old Babylonish king, wet with the dew of Heaven’.  He means Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 5:21). I note that The Great King: The Madness of Nebuchadnezzar was a story of his published seventeen years later in 1911. So it was a leitmotif of a vagrant king he sustained well into the 20th Century.

So is this fictional isle of 1894 an evocation of Shiel’s island kingdom? Judge for yourself from this extract from The Eagle’s Crag: 

… the Eagle's Crag ! This rock stands some miles from the mainland. The old fishermen of Liguria and Etruria in the palmy days of the Roman Republic called it Rupes Aquilina, because of the curious configuration of the summit, which resembles an eagle’s head and beak. And the old name still clings to it. lt rises in awful solitude sheer out of the sea to a height of near two thousand feet. It is shaped somewhat like one half of a cone slit down the middle – quite flat on one side, the other forming a convex surface. On the convex side, the south, not only is life possible, but a few poor men and women actually exist there. This south side has a regular steep incline upward to the very summit, and a bold and skilful climber may even reach the top; but once there, the brain grows dizzy to look down, on the north side, on a smooth wall of rock, falling away from the feet, not perpendicularly, but with a marked inward slant. Those who have so climbed and looked down, by stretching far out over the flat eagle’s beak, will tell you that it is a sight full of terror, making the heart sick. In all this wall of rock there is one break, and only one – a horizontal ledge, three feet broad, which runs right across it at a height of rather more than three-quarters of the rock’s height from the bottom. Quite near the end of the beak on that side a few shrubs grow.

In my personal view, this description is a psychical projection of the island Shiel once knew in his youth, transplanted by a fictionist to the coastal waters of the Ligurian Sea, some way offshore from the province of La Spezia.  

The illustration in the Strand of 1894 by A. Pearse perfectly captures the sombre mood of the vertiginous cliffs that rise on Rodonda’s leeward flank.

The Last Man and Woman in the World.

That the influence of Shiel’s last-man-last-woman fantasy, The Purple Cloud (admired by H. P. Lovecraft), continues to pervade the works of 21st Century writers of fiction is evidenced by my own barely perceptible nod to its meta-ethical survivalist message in my fiction, Lovesong in Invisible Ink, published in Listen Close to Me (2011, Salt), in which the narrator relates key episodes from her on-off love affair with Vivian, an army intelligence officer:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

About this time, Vivian was sent by the Rhine Army on a language course at the Intelligence School at Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps and then transferred to the Special Weapons Training Centre in the same town, in the shadow of Kofelberg’s crags, to learn how to fight in an atomic war.
    ‘How strange to think,’ Vivian once remarked, ‘that, as we rode the perilous cable cars high above Oberammergau, below us my fellow pupils were playing air-to-ground atomic war games.’
    He’d then paused and mused awhile and said, not so inconsequentially: ‘Of course, directly after the war, the Oberammergau passion play was still unregenerate religious bigotry. The crowds were still shouting the Jews were accursed, with blood on their hands and on the hands of their children’s children. Rather small beer, y’know,’ he drawled, ‘in the scale of things, when you’re in your host’s backyard learning how to attack the enemy with tactical atomic weapons for the total annihilation of entire continents.’
    Vivian’s unique meta-ethical viewpoint had been demonstrated to me very memorably at the height of the Cold War.
    We’d been sailing the Solent in his ketch off Cowes one July when, in the blink of an eye, Portsmouth’s naval dockyard exploded in a vast mushroom cloud that grew rapidly into a gigantic pillar of rolling white smoke, and small shards of metal and wood rained down on us.
    I truly thought World War Three had broken out.
    ‘Well,’ Vivian murmured imperturbably at the helm, turning his back on this apocalyptic vision to examine the glowing tip of his cigar, ‘when the balloon goes up I believe it’s incumbent on the last man and woman in the world to mate.’ 
    Then the ash of his cigar broke and fell, and he trimmed the sails and lashed the tiller to a course he’d set for Deauville.
    So we sailed calmly on; he the new Adam and I the new Eve, and we did not leave that tiny double berth forecabin until hours later when the skyline had darkened and the horizon was quite empty.
    We sensed the sea rather than saw it. Gazing into the firmament, we lay on the deck in each other’s arms, and lost all sense of time as slowly the sky seemed to draw us up into it; and so we drifted out in a state of drowsy contemplation towards morning.
    Only much later did Vivian learn that eight ammunition barges at the Royal Naval Armament Depot had been blown up by saboteurs.

That last (factual) ‘reveal’ only goes to point up the methodological maxim I have adopted as a fictionist: A dutiful writer of suspense does not invent; a dutiful writer of suspense just makes surprising connections.

*Hit-or-Miss Scattergun Methodology a Wasteful Virtue.

My earlier postings on Dylan Thomas make clear, I trust, my high regard for his true lyric tongue, a god-given free-flowing crystal fount that few poets – in their youth – can lay claim to. 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-humbert-in-park-more-palimpsestic.html 
However, his ‘free verse’ methodology as an eighteen-year-old poet is considered suspect by perhaps the greatest scholar of his work, Professor Ralph Maud, who quotes Thomas's advice to a schoolfellow:

Why not, for a change, fire off round after round of ammunition from any old gun you can get hold of. You'll miss hundreds of times, but you’re bound to get a bull’s eye a lot of times, too. You'll find the hit-or-miss, the writing with no plot, technique will help you considerably in loosening your mind and in getting rid of those stifling memories which may, unless you are careful, get in the way of your literary progress. (February 1933.)

As Professor Maud cautions the impulsive, who may be inclined to emulate this method, ‘There is no other time when he seems more to have exhibited this kind of wasteful virtue, to have obeyed his instinct to “write, write, regardless of everything.” ’