‘Carol’ . . . In the Heat of the Moment and Other Febrile Automata

How curious to read that the genesis of Carol (the current acclaimed movie adapted from the famously transgressive novel, The Price of Salt, 1952) is to be found in a fever induced by chicken pox, the symptomatic high temperature under which Patricia Highsmith plotted her synopsis of a story that soon ‘flowed from the end of my pen as if from nowhere,’ as she later wrote.

Patricia Highsmith

Works That Write Themselves.

From which flows another curious thought because this distinguished American novelist prompts a memory of her eminent compatriot, William James, Doctor of Medicine (1870) and psychologist (and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience) who so subtly observed, ‘For aught we know to the contrary, 103 or 104 degrees Fahrenheit might be a much more favourable temperature for truths to geminate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees.’

How true. In the feverish heat of the moment certainly a number of great works of the imagination have been brought forth. One thinks also of Sir Walter Scott who, in 1819, under the influence of laudanum wrote The Bride of Lammermoor and claimed afterwards, on reading the proofs, that he did not recognise a single character, incident or conversation found in the book. 

Detektiv ‘Zherebets’ Houyhnhnmkin.

My as-yet-unpublished novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, was written in the same mood of involuntary volition, and similarly transcribed from an undisputed source. Englished in the spirit of the original, the often bawdy text makes great play of the young doctor’s febrile condition, his senses betrayed by a dangerous rise in body temperature akin to that of the rectal temperature of a horse having just undergone routine exercise:

Anton reflected that perhaps, after all, he had overlooked his affinity with horses; certainly, as the forenoon approached, his temperature was again rising to meet that of an average healthy horse which, if he were not mistaken, was some two degrees higher than that intermittent phenomenon, his own normal body heat.                                                                 He had hæmorrhaged again only the month past – profoundly from his right lung – practically a shtoff of disembogued blood pouring over his beard.                                                                                                                           He had recently in the mornings become aware of his unnaturally low temperature on rising, his excessive fatigue and his progressive failure of appetite. Yet now, as afternoon approached, his temperature had risen (a febrile state exceeding 40 degrees Celsius) and pulse quickened to over a hundred beats per minute. Under his jacket, sweat trickled from his armpit.  Profuse axillary sweating embarrassed him and he feared his condition smelt.                                                                                                               As for his excessive body heat, the ætiology of the cauma and desudation he knew intimately; long ago the prognosis had held that his compensatory emphysema would grow worse by remedy, and any remissions he could expect in the variations associated with the chronicity of his disease were now complicated by his intestinal catarrh, caused by a change in the water.     

In a grim diversion to displace the pain, Tchékhov feverishly imagined the very real prospect of his personal physician, D-r Klebnikov, surviving him to compose a waspish clinical footnote to his obituary for the edification of his medical colleagues: 

‘Manifestly, the observation has not been made in hagiographical writing on Tchékhov that the symptomatological signs of his two conditions – pulmonary tuberculosis and acute morphinism – were inextricably combined and compounded.  The co-existing conditions were presented, for example, in feelings of tremendous heat and sensations of terrifying cold, particularly during periods of withdrawal from the opiate. The giddiness to which Tchékhov on occasion referred could well have been a mild case of cinchonism brought about by an overdose of quinine, which, in the absence of an informed dual diagnosis, was not identified.  His meconeuropathia was further complicated by hyperæsthesiæ  induced by mood-elevating morphine derivatives.’

Tchékhov’s eyes are not closed to the truth of his opiate dependancy. In characteristically rueful condemnation of his elevated temperature,  Tchékhov at his lowest ebb begins to style himself Detektiv Zherebets [‘Stallion’] Houyhnhnmkin, evidently a bitter self-lacerating commentary on his drug-impaired virility. (If Tchékhov in this passage of D-r Tchékhov Detektiv assumes the sardonical appellation, ‘Stallion’ or ‘Stud’, then we must assume the reference recalls those envious jottings in his published literary notebook : ‘A vet. belongs to the stallion class of people.’ )

Fate Knocks at the Door.

And in the same opiate-induced fever, of course, Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan, a poem revealed to him as fully conceived, requiring merely its automatic transcription, until – at Line 54 – the notorious Person From Porlock arrived to knock on the door and break the spell.

This fateful distraction from the sublime oneiric prosody granted a dope-fiend reminds me of my good friend, The Great Poet, who wrote to tell me he had altered his will . . .

Have been making some small adjustments to my Will, and have added that you are to have first crack at my poetry books. [He was at Westminster School and won the Gumbleton Prize for English Verse.] No big deal [he added] but you might find something of interest, but not yet a while hopefully.

I wrote at once to record my appreciation . . .

I am genuinely flattered, but in my present mood I fear I shall predecease you. Should this not be the case, however, I shall make every effort to seek out your forwarding address and have your books sent on to you.                You will have a forwarding address, won’t you?                                               In Ghana it is believed that a person who dies prematurely can appear in a distant town and continue their life there.                                              Saman twén-twén the Ghanaians call them. Custom asserts that the ‘Dead-but-Leaving-People’ can be met only by someone who has not heard of their death.                                                                                                       So an accommodation address in Porlock might be the thing.                        This explains why so many people swear they saw X ‘only the other day’ and learn to their horror that X died some months before.                            Why is life made so mysterious when the explanations are really very simple? I shall be in Porlock if I predecease you.                                                       Should you lose your memory then we can meet there because you will not remember you heard of my death.                                                                  It is possible, though, that a poet even with a seriously impaired memory will remember that fateful person from Porlock . . .

It was on these terms that we agreed to meet in the Afterlife, an agreement, I may add, sealed during the worst bout of flu I’ve ever endured in my life, when I was in the throes of a high fever and running a barely tolerable temperature practically off the scale at 103°F.  

The tragedy is that my dear poet friend predeceased me, as he predicted.

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For excerpts from my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, see
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/d-r-tchekhov-skirmish-with-wolves-and.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dead-wife-new-hat-femme-morte-chapeau.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/inductive-detection.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/winter-rules-and-le-diable-boiteux.html

This long lost crime novel by Chekhov (he, himself, referred to such a work in progress in 1888) charts the misadventures of morphia-addict D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, as he investigates the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison. In a contest between the animistic pagan beliefs of a Cheremissian shaman-medicineman and his own psychopathological insights as a graduate doctor, Tchékhov, weakened by tubercular fevers and drug dependency, succeeds in solving the case and saving the life of a young prostitute, Mariya. 

For the origins of this text see my previous posting, D-r  Tchékhov, Detektiv.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/10/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-long-lost-novel.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. 

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

Banalistes Monumentales . . . the Jadedness of Unmasking Precursors.

Was Philip Larkin an avant-gardist who anticipated Jeff Koons*, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein and other Banalistes Monumentales of the Supersize School of Art ? 

I ask because Larkin’s artistic sensibility, insofar as his dreams were on a neo-Speerist scale, certainly predates the mindset of the American pop pioneers.

Do not these lines of Larkin’s from 1954 outrival them? And, indeed, outrival any of the installations boasted by today’s conceptualists . . . not forgetting those Scale-Up showmen Hirst and Christo.

. . . I should raise in the east

A glass of water

Where any-angled light

Would congregate endlessly.

‘Bigging Up’ is Better?

Anyhow, the idea of spectacular giantism – in both the literary and visual arts – has been so long established as to prompt the question, ‘Why aren’t more Banalistes Monumentales discouraged from stale emulation?’

William James’s famous axiom, ‘The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook’, is negated when proponents of today’s visual arts insist it is we who should be overlooked by banishing us to a sort of cultural Easter Island made arid by artists who throw up spectaculars of such magnitude that they dwarf those Easter Islanders who would much rather swim to the mainland and resume human scale.

And if, as I believe, art has become a heavyweight contest then the trend towards giantism in banal art objects, as a tame commentary on Western Consumerism, cannot be resisted when certain galeristes measure the open volume of their exhibiting space against that of a Turbine Hall.

     Oldenburg                                                 Hirst           

Megalophobia Revisited.

Jonathan Swift lampooned the idea that ‘Bigger is Better’ in his Voyage to Brobdingnag.

As Lemuel Gulliver reminds his readers in his Travels, an esteemed Brobdingnagian historian believed that it was ‘very reasonable to think, not only that the species of men were originally much larger, but also that there must have been giants in former ages; which, as it is asserted by history and tradition, so it has been confirmed by huge bones and skulls, casually dug up in several parts of the kingdom, far exceeding the common dwindled race of men in our days.’

That sojourn in the midst of a race of Giants is found troubling by the ‘dwindled’ Lemuel: a clean white handkerchief for his bed-sheet is all very well, but he complains it is ‘larger and coarser than the mainsail of a man-of-war.’ Even a giantess’s thimble filled with liquor is cumbersome. To be pelted by hailstones the size of tennis-balls was to be ‘so bruised from head to foot that [he] could not go abroad in ten days.’ 

And the daunting realities of a Fay Wray, say, contrarily magnified to the stature of Mount Rushmore are the substance of some of the ribalder – more scatological – passages of Swiftian satire.

The [Brobdingnagian King’s] maids of honour often invited [me] to their apartments . . . on purpose to have the pleasure of seeing and touching me. They would often strip me naked from top to toe, and lay me at full length in their bosoms . . . That which gave me most uneasiness among these maids of honour . . . was, to see them use me without any manner of ceremony, like a creature who had no sort of consequence: for they would strip themselves to the skin, and put on their smocks in my presence . . . directly before their naked bodies, which I am sure to me was very far from being a tempting sight, or from giving me any other emotions than those of horror and disgust: their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured, when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher [dinner platter], and hairs hanging from it thicker than packthreads, to say nothing farther concerning the rest of their persons. Neither did they at all scruple, while I was by, to discharge what they had drank, to the quantity of at least two hogsheads, in a vessel that held above three tuns. The handsomest among these maids of honour, a pleasant, frolicsome girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her nipples, with many other tricks, wherein the reader will excuse me for not being over particular.

For Gulliver, the idea of humankind viewed through a ‘magnifying glass’ is repugnant, an aversion manifested in almost phobic intensity when he’s confronted by a Brobdingnagian nursing mother.  

I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious reader an idea of its bulk, shape, and colour.  It stood prominent six feet, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference.  The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug, so varied with spots, pimples, and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous . . .

And as to post-mortem phenomena when considering condemned Brobdingnagians:

One day, a young gentleman . . . came and pressed [us] to see an execution. It was of a man, who had murdered one of that gentleman’s intimate acquaintance . . . although I abhorred such kind of spectacles, yet my curiosity tempted me to see something that I thought must be extraordinary. The malefactor was fixed in a chair upon a scaffold erected for that purpose, and his head cut off at one blow, with a sword of about forty feet long. The veins and arteries spouted up such a prodigious quantity of blood, and so high in the air, that the great jet d’eau at Versailles was not equal to it for the time it lasted: and the head, when it fell on the scaffold floor, gave such a bounce as made me start, although I was at least half an English mile distant. 

Eyeless in Scarf’s Grasp.

Philip Larkin was haunted by the voice of Thomas Hardy, more than by Auden’s or Yeats’s. So it’s not surprising to find in Hardy’s verse the profounder realities of Giantism that Larkin sought to express when he considered in what form he would raise his monumental votive totem were he ‘called in to construct’ an animistic set of beliefs. The poets shared atheistic tendencies. (Compare Larkin’s Churchgoing with A Plaint to Man by Hardy who asserts that the ‘fact of life’ is to have ‘dependence placed on the human heart’s resource alone [with] visioned help unsought, unknown.’)

At a bygone Western country fair

I saw a giant led by a dwarf

With a red string like a long thin scarf;

How much he was the stronger there 

The giant seemed unaware. 

And then I saw that the giant was blind,

And the dwarf a shrewd-eyed little thing; 

The giant, mild, timid, obeyed the string

As if he had no independent mind,

Or will of any kind.

As Melanie Hosking Williams perceptively remarks in The Thomas Hardy Journal (Volume IX, No.1), mythical Giantism and the likely subject of the poem, the giant Joseph Sewell, should be considered in the purely Hardyesque terms of eschewing sentiment in any appeal of the objective correlative . . .

It is likely that Joseph Sewell’s blindness and early death were precipitated not by typhus fever, as was conjectured at the time, but were a direct result of his condition. Gigantism, the development to abnormally large size from excessive growth of the long bones accompanied by muscular weakness and sexual impotence, is usually caused by overactivity of the pituitary gland before normal ossification (the laying down of bone) is complete. Gigantism is much rarer than its counterpart condition, acromegaly (a chronic pituitary disease of adult life that is characterised by a gradual and permanent enlargement of the flat bones, such as the lower jaw, and of the hands and feet, abdominal organs, nose, lips and tongue). One may postulate that Sewell was rendered more compliant to the string, ‘The giant, mild, timid, obeyed the string’ and to his role as an exhibit, by the muscular weakness which made a sham of his giant stature. His blindness, fits and early death were almost certainly the results of the increasing pressure caused by a pituitary tumour (which in modern times would be arrested by surgical intervention), or by cerebrovascular disease. Sufferers may expect a range of symptoms including visual disturbances, carpel tunnel syndrome and headaches. There is a significantly high mortality in both sexes, in males from malignancy, respiratory, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease and in females from cerebrovascular disease.

Contemporary accounts record Joseph was attended by a Somerset dwarf named Farnham when he exhibited himself, being ‘publicly shewn as a curiosity’. He died on July 5th 1829, aged 24 years. The national and provincial press, including the Taunton Courier of July 1829, recorded the notable death . . . 

The funeral was recorded thus . . 

A Somersetshire dwarf named Farnham, only 37 inches high, followed the caravan as chief mourner at the funeral. The contrasted stature of this individual, with that of Sewell, when alive, presented a curious spectacle, and rendered the conjoint exhibition exceedingly attractive to spectators. The deceased was seven feet four inches high, and weighed 37 stones or 518lbs. His friend, the dwarf, weighed 68lbs only. Sewell’s dress required five yards of broad cloth for his coat, five yards of cloth and lining for his waistcoat, seven yards of patent cord for his trousers, his shoes were 14½ inches long, and 6½ inches wide.

As Melanie observes, ‘Thomas Hardy recorded many incidents in his notebooks, poems and stories which bore witness to individual tragedies and social circumstances of his day . . . It is likely, however, that this tragic sight [the giant exhibited at a bygone country fair] was not within Hardy’s personal experience, but was recounted to him, perhaps by a relative such as his grandmother, and written as if he had witnessed it himself.’ 

Nevertheless, Hardy seized on the image of a ‘dwindled’ giant as emblematic of the powerlessness of even a Gargantua when his plight is such that he is ‘like one Fate bade it must be so, whether he wished or no’. Was Hardy thinking of Shelley’s Ozymandias?

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Eeyore Raises a Glass.

So a strong sense of momento mori is seen to attend the poets in these three cases, colouring their mood in their contemplation of the imperfect colossi – both figurative and real – they choose to apostrophise in their verses . . .  Shelley, Hardy, Larkin were all unsustained by the certainty of faith and these chosen correlatives of theirs – water-glass, fairground giant, monolithic despot  – we may assume are to be taken as corresponding, in varying degrees, to their iconoclastic response to submissive determinism.

Unlike the Banalistes Monumentales, whose facile artefacts are no more than consumer commodities fatuously scaled up with a pantograph, the poeticised devices of the iconoclasts actually prompt active thought. Hardy regarded the meek, blind giant, whose shoes were the size of marrows, as ‘the sorriest of pantomimes’, the sorriest he had ever seen or ‘may see yet’.

By contrast, bland meaninglessness is the signature dish of the Banalistes Monumentales, as flavourless as a pre-packed slice of pasteurised burger cheese. 

Therefore, I continue to salute the astringent wit of a double-dyed English pessimist such as Larkin who could yet half-believe that an endlessly congregating multifaceted light from the east could signify something like succour for those who live in doubt of their souls.

Yet, regrettably, even in his characteristically Eeyore-like dolefulness, he does not tell us . . . cannot tell us . . . if the glass he raises in the east is half empty or half-full. 

See also Les Activistes de la Cause Anti-Brexit – Banalistes Monumentales revisited:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/les-activistes-de-la-cause-anti-brexit.html

* Footnote October 29 2014

As British cultural critic Stephen Bayley wrote last week of Koons, ‘Kitsch is the corpse that’s left when anger leaves art.’