I found my old diary the other day from the time I was living with my Aunt Lilian at Jay Mews SW7 behind the Royal College of Art and attending classes there. I was nineteen at the time.
There was a thin sheet of blue airmail paper tucked between two pages where a diary entry (my birthday) caught my attention. I squirmed and involuntarily, I admit, my face reddened:
February 5. Today he sent me the absurdest sonnet! How ravishingly sweet. Rather cheeky though. To go so far as to mention my nun-like brow and seraphic form and confer on me a dainty idiotic sainthood! And that disturbing primitive sketch of his! A caricaturist manqué! All because L had insisted on a dusk-to-dawn curfew more dismal than Thomas Gray’s! How he chafed at that indignity, poor boy.
Did he think I was Turandot’s Principessa in her chaste room watching the stars tremble with love and hope! Ah! Che tremano d’amore e di speranza.
Of course, I remembered X in every detail and understood all too well the fervour of those callow sentiments he’d impressed on this tissue-thin airmail of his, now so faded after all these years. X was twenty-one when I knew him, and a month before this diary entry, at the turn of the year, he’d been posted to Tanga and then to Dar to learn freight forwarding before completing his Unilever management programme with a stint on a Tanzanian Tea estate in Mufindi (so his airmail concluded).
Boy Trouble.
Aunt Lilian had been the first to diagnose my pallid restlessness when she’d returned unexpectedly and caught me mooning about her morning (mourning?) room when I was supposed to be attending a class. ‘Boy trouble,’ she asserted briskly and she spoke truer than she knew. As I’d earlier remarked in my diary:
I’ve always regarded myself as a blank page whose history has yet to be written so, as a fledgling critic ever in search of her subtext [I was studying Critical and Historical Art Studies], I’m aware that no one can read between the lines when the lines simply aren’t there. That is, when the interlinear commentary wilfully transposes No for Yes.
X in particular had reckoned an unfair advantage could be had from persistence in his mistaken belief that my unassuming youth was, like white paper, disposed to take any impression.
X was an adept at applying emotional pressure.
That first impulsive boyfriend of mine I’d privately labelled Briareus. I was studying Greek mythology at the time. Briareus was one the hundred-handed ones – the Hekatonkheires – whose appearance at birth was so disconcerting it was pushed back into its mother’s womb.
But later that evening, on the day of the airmail’s arrival,
I now observe I must have added, with the fickleness of callous
youth, a footnote:
Tilly called for me at six to drag me off to another of her Private Views in Cork Street. I told her I simply wasn’t in the mood. [In Tilly’s ‘private view’, the fashionable galleries of London’s art dealers provided a hunting ground for green young men of distinct promise as to their wealth and eligibility. ‘Cabbages’, she called them.] ‘But that’s where I met X!’ I protested. ‘Autres petits choux! There’s every chance I’ll meet another X.’ ‘Rather! I should say!’ Tilly effused. I could see she was falling over herself to go. So I went.
As I wrote in that teenage diary of mine in my final entry
concerning my feelings for X:
Something has always seemed to me amiss in the bounty of the gods. Someone always has to be punished. But that sonnet? Not half bad for the five-finger exercise of a mope-eyed Briareus!
My Heart’s Jewel
To Her Most Imperial Sovereign Highness
on Her Nineteenth Birthday
Behold how chaste the Eyes that conquered mine.
Tyrants yield to Virtue’s shielded glances.
White Soul unspecked by Sins Incarnadine,
Still Beauty grants her Beast forbearances
To worship at the Shrine of None-So-Pure,
Whose nun-like Brow vies with the Cherubim
To limn with rarest Grace the Face demure.
Thus Seraph doth make manifest a hymn.
Seraphic Form, of wingèd hosts a Dream
Ascendant! Sun and Moon alone contest
Thy Brilliance! Thou only canst redeem
The Brute Heart Black on which thy Name is pressed.
Cleave Sovereign Highness only to my heart,
Eternity shall ne’er tear us apart!
A Thousand-Year-Long Quest
I once read that there are over 6 million amateur poets in the UK, about tenth of the population. Certainly, historically, the love poem was a customary discipline that exercised the lovesick when inditing the outpourings of their ardent breasts for the beguiling of their intended . . . and pomes were probably ten-a-penny if bought bespoke.
As for haikus as a form, it seems to me that the English schoolgirl, who walked off with the Tokyo prize last year (out of more than 18,000 English-language entries), would have been better served composing a sonnet of sonnets or a villanelle for her musicality to be truly tested by her own culture . . .
Freshly mown grass
clinging to my shoes
my muddled thoughts
In my own view the search for the perfect haiku is a bit like a thousand-year-long quest to make a perfect martini and, perversely, when at last someone says it’s perfect you can’t bring yourself to agree.
Still. Of course, I do not withhold my warmest plaudits for the (irregular) Haiku Winner, fourteen-year-old Gracie Starkey of Wycliffe College in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire. Well done, indeed!
Mmm. ‘Muddled thoughts.’ I cannot deny that my nineteen-year-old self would have recognised intimately your fourteen-year-old secret travails.
See, also, Haikus in Homage to John Clare:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/02/three-haikus-in-homage-to-john-clare.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)
