Anti-Antihero Heroine takes Heat to Hail Fritz Lang and Emily Post.

Am I alone in thinking (I suspect I am) that émigré Fritz Lang is perpetrating a European sophisticate’s grotesque caricature of American table manners and rudimentary cuisine in his The Big Heat (1953)?

For I believe high satire defines the scene of supper-time exchanges between police sergeant Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) and wife, Katie (Jocelyn Brando, sister of Marlon), with Lang — none-too-subtly — guying suburban domestic rituals performed in dinettes from coast to coast where Everyman is king; a demoticised king whose gun is always toted, and whose castle’s ever moated by a homesteader’s white picket fence.

No salad. A baked potato, a massive wedge of steak 
with bottled brown sauce and canned beer.

Consider the sly interplay between consumables as fast food is dished out from a diner-style menu of fried steak, baked potato, cigarettes and canned beer. What, we ask, would New Yorker Emily Post, la grande prêtresse des bonnes manières, have made of it.

It’s a long overdue question, so — after precisely sixty years of agonising — why not allow the simple folk of Hicksville their own agony-aunt-column to quiz her?

Hicksville: Is it not egregiously impolite for Bannion to smoke a cigarette in his wife’s kitchen and, moreover, while nibbling a bread-stick, to perch his smouldering butt-end at the edge of the countertop on which their food is prepared?
Emily Post: Smoking like a furnace in most polite circles is to be abhorred. Nor should one talk with one’s mouth either full of food or barricaded with tobacco. On the other hand, the Hicksville wife should not make a display of intolerance, or she had better take the first train back home, since she is likely to find New York very, very lonely.  

Hicksville: Is it not equally impolite for Bannion to tuck into his steak, plunging his knife into his baked potato before his wife is seated at the supper table?
Emily Post: The bolting of meals is to be deplored. No one should begin eating until everyone is seated. The knife must never be used to scoop baked potato out of the skin, or to butter potato ... butter for baked potatoes is taken on the tip of the fork shovel fashion, laid on the potato, and then pressed down and mixed with the prongs held points curved up.

Hicksville: Bannion’s wife, Katie, carves her husband’s steak on the supper table. Is this correct form?
Emily Post: A certain type of man always likes to carve, and such a one does. Carving on the table was once considered an art necessary to every gentleman.

Hicksville: Appallingly, Bannion brings two beer cans from the fridge to place on the table; the implication being that they will remain there. Surely this is a solecism of a very ugly character?
Emily Post: In proper serving of cold drinks of all sorts, even where a quantity of bottles, pitchers and glasses need space, everything should be brought on a tray. A cloth must always be first placed on the table, before putting down the tray. The tray may be a massive silver one that requires a footman with strong arms to lift it, or it may be of Sheffield or merely of effectively lacquered tin. 

Hicksville: The absence of vegetables or salad is troubling. Surely a meal composed of a baked potato and a massive wedge of steak with bottled brown sauce (high in carbohydrates and cholesterol) cannot be considered wholly nutritious?
Emily Post: Steak and broiled chicken are fairly practical since neither needs gravy, condiment, or sauce — especially if you have a divided vegetable dish so that two vegetables can be passed at the same time.

Rebel cop as New York anti-hero.

Emily Post may have held inflexible views on table place settings and dining etiquette (‘...the diner must never be allowed to hold his fork emigrant fashion, perpendicularly clutched in the clenched fist, and to saw across the food at its base with his knife...’) but she was also aware that the younger New Yorkers of her day were as a breed fiercely independent of their elders. (Incidentally, we may reasonably assume The Big Heat has New York as its setting because Bannion’s wife talks of ‘Jersey mosquitoes’ attacking on all sides.) 

Yet, all the same, I believe Emily Post would have applauded Fritz Lang’s satire (she was in her 81st year when The Big Heat was premiered and New York’s cinemagoers first saw rogue cop Bannion bolt fast food any old how, then turn in his badge to prowl the mean streets on a payback mission to bring down the gangland syndicate that murdered his cigarette-and-beer-sharing post-Postian proto-feminist wife). 

As Emily Post concedes, the generation of young males growing to manhood in the first half of the twentieth century, ‘… don’t care enough … to live up to the conventions of “manners” that old-fashioned hostesses demand. And as these “rebels” are invariably the most attractive and the most eligible youths, it has become almost an issue; a hostess must in many cases either invite none but older people and the few young girls and men whose mothers have left cards for them, or ignore convention and invite the rebels.’

The Emily Post Eligibility Test for New York’s ‘attractive’ rebels.

Emily Post lived just long enough to greet the 1960s, so she was no stranger to the rising class of Rebel Hero emerging from Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York whose alumni include those classic antiheroes, James Dean, Paul Newman and the kid brother of rogue cop Bannion’s screen wife, Marlon Brando.

But hang on! 

What our Hicksville country cousins eagerly desire to know, surely, is: would Emily Post have recognised the Strasberg rebel’s attractive onscreen persona as fundamentally the biddable notional firebrand who will eventually be welcomed by the Quality to dance the cotillion at Lucy Wellborn’s débutante ball? 

Hicksville: Consider The Wild One (1953), released in the same year as The Big Heat. Is biker gang leader Johnny Strabler (Marlon Brando) rebelling against anything of socio-political significance other than those forces that oppose his narcissism? 
Emily Post: Exhibitions of anger, fear, hatred, embarrassment, ardor or hilarity, are all bad form in public. And bad form is merely an action which ‘jars’ the sensibilities of others. 

What are you rebelling against, Johnny?’

‘Whaddaya got?’

Hicksville: Would you censure the Method school of acting, which, despite its emphasis on theatrical honesty and total immersion in the character’s emotional state, is often associated with actors who have never overcome a tendency to mumble? Take, for example, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), whose risible angst finds its causative agent in the trauma of witnessing his father’s emasculation by frilly apron.
Emily Post: In all monosyllabic replies a child must not say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ or ‘What?’ ... Any number of busy men scarcely know their children at all, and have not even stopped to realise that they seldom or never talk to them, never exert themselves to be sympathetic with them, or in the slightest degree to influence them. To growl ‘Mornin’,’ or ‘Don’t, Johnny,’ ... is very, very far from being ‘an influence’ on your children’s morals, minds or manners.

‘What are you rebelling against, son?’

‘Undiagnosed Frilly Apron Complex, Daddy.’

Hicksville: Would you consider an incident of public disorder, drunkenness, and fatuous vandalism the impressive act of a Rebel Hero? One recalls the opening scene of Cool Hand Luke (1967) in which beer-swigging Paul Newman beheads parking meters with a pipe-cutter.  
Emily Post: An older man addicted to the use of too much alcohol, need not be discussed, since he ceases to be asked to the houses of ladies. A gentleman may be in his shirt sleeves actually, but he never gets into shirt sleeves mentally — he has no inclination to. All thoroughbred people are considerate of the feelings of others no matter what the station of the others may be. 

‘What we have here is a failure to communicate.’

Hicksville: Perhaps you could direct us to your own Emily Post Method for overcoming inarticulateness and achieving an expressive persona that is distinguished by simplicity and a grounded honesty of utterance.  
Emily Post: Simplicity of speech and manners means language in its purest, most limpid form, and manners of such perfection that they do not suggest ‘manner’ at all. Unconsciousness of self is not so much unselfishness as it is the mental ability to extinguish all thought of one’s self — exactly as one turns out the light. Simplicity is like it, in that it also has a quality of self-effacement, but it really means a love of the essential and of directness. Simple people put no trimmings on their phrases, nor on their manners.

Epitaph for an Antihero.

Hicksville: It’s time to extend a big thank you, Emily Post, for reminding us of your god-fearing forebears who evidently tempered your discrimination in matters of speech, morals and, indeed, table manners. Our citing of Paul Newman as Rebel Everyman reminds us also of his earlier movie, Hud (1963), and the almost Old Testament judgement on the eponymous antihero pronounced by his high principled father. ‘That’s the shame of it ... ’cause you don’t value nothing. You don’t respect nothing. You keep no check on your appetites. You live just for yourself and that makes you not fit to live with.’ Indeed, an Epitaph for an Antihero. 
Emily Post: Occasionally too, there appears in Best Society a provincial in whose conversation is perceptibly the influence of much reading of the Bible. Such are seldom if ever stilted or pompous or long-worded, but are invariably distinguished for the simplicity and dignity of their English.

‘You gonna get your mouth around that?’
‘Gonna try’

Template for a True Antihero.

Let me confess it. My jaundiced view of the American Antihero derives from my first encounter with a gun-toter in New York City in 1968, the decade in which Emily Post died (1872-1960). The occasion was a thanksgiving dinner and, after the grace was said, my table companion turned to the Limey and removed from his waistband his NYPD .38 special as a cue to laud the rights he enjoyed to bear arms, being essential, he insisted, for the security of a ‘free State’.  That was his thanksgiving.

In the sixties, some 50 percent of New York households boasted a handgun, yet, regrettably, Emily Post had not prepared me with the correct form to manage this encounter, so I nodded vigorously and passed the cranberry sauce with a sickly grin. Actually, Emily Post reserves her advice on the politesse of gun ownership to a few words. Despite the askance glances of wife and valet, a gentleman customarily resolves that ‘every evening is spent in cleaning guns’, and she adds the admonition that the gentleman’s son should be ‘taught by his father or a guide — at all events, some one — how and how not to hold a gun ...’

Anyhow, any discontent with the shortcomings of the American Antihero – whose whining consumerist anomie is exhibited here, specifically, the rebel’s want of a heartfelt grown-up cause, an infantilism that Emily Post presciently identified in the ‘younger fashionables in New York’ almost a century ago – is predicated on literary conditioning that takes as its template the searing heroics of a REAL Old World vigilante (executed March 20 1540, Berlin) ... Michael Kohlhaas, as envisioned by that master of German Letters, Heinrich von Kleist, in his classic eponymous Revanche-Geschichte. (It decidedly does NOT concern the antics of a drunken saddo, such as the ‘hero’ aforementioned.)

My adulation is boundless, as was Kafka’s, for this existential antihero without peer ... a charismatic rebel WITH an exhilarating, soul-blazing cause.

●

Post-Postian Postscript

I should not allow this opportunity to pass, in reflecting on American mores observed by cinema-goers of my mother’s generation, without a flashback to her consternation at witnessing Marlon Brando as the sheriff in The Chase (1966) polishing his toe-caps with his boots on, his foot braced on the arm of his living room chair. It was a solecism incomprehensible in its magnitude. Incidentally, The Chase, was one of only two films in which Jocelyn Brando appeared in a supporting role with her celebrated brother; the other was The Ugly American (1963).

Incidentally, my mother pointed out, much later, that Carly Simon, a New Yorker, appeared to be exposing a supreme breach of good manners in her celebrated lyrics. You’re So Vain: ‘No respectable man would walk into a party still wearing his hat, would they?’

Boot polish! Marlon Brando and Robert Duvall in The Chase 

●

Post-Brexit Footnote 08.07.2016 : A correspondent takes issue with me to question whether there exists a truly sustaining belief in the survival of high toned etiquette in Britain today, considering it a false ‘preciosity’ to suggest that somehow American table manners are a ‘burlesque’ of an enduring English correctitude. Well, I am pleased to reassure my correspondent that back-sliding in the Best Behaviour department is not wholly restricted to diners in the States, and there are back-slidden malefactors to be found in the very best High Society in England, particularly, it seems, among the Ruling Class at Westminster. Consider the scandal whipped up by the newspapers in 1996 when Conservative junior minister David Heathcoat-Amory resigned on a point of principle (a pre-Brexit protest at the over-regulation imposed by the European Union and the Tories’ ambivalence in rejection of a single European currency). 

On his announcement of his resignation, the UK press published a photo of a milk bottle on his breakfast table. This was regarded as a glaring solecism for a toff* by some. ‘Can any person who permits a milk bottle on his table be considered for high office?’ the newspapers reported. (Source: Confessions of a Eurosceptic by David Heathcoat-Amory, 2012.)

*For more revisionist views on English toffs, see:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/12/verifiable-proof-of-englishness-my.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

Hypatian Erotica Awards … High Victorian nominees announced!

A recent issue (24.05.13) of The Lady (founded 1885), belatedly arriving in the mails, contains the oddest intelligence. Its correspondent writes:

Hugh Betts, who works at Maggs booksellers in Berkeley Square, told me that he knows a girl currently writing a PhD on Wrists and Waists in English fiction of the 19th Century.

Thought provoking. 

In the same speculative vein, my recent blog post (here) recalling the metrical brilliance of the poet Roy Fuller

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/by-grand-satyr-stanzas-i-sat-down-and.html

jogged my memory of reading his fine novel of 1959, The Ruined Boys*, in which he charts the lost innocence of schoolboy protagonist, Gerald Bracher, who had ‘discovered that a cupboard in a classroom senior to his own housed a collection of books...’ that, if intuitively delved into, could satisfy his secret unspoken desires.

The most unlikely books sometimes proved to contain what he was seeking and the ardour of his quest seemed to give him a fine instinct not only for the right book but for the vital part of it. So it was scarcely any surprise that turning over the pages of a brown Victorian volume of small dull print whose title–Hypatia–had vaguely held out its only promise, he found:

‘She shook herself free from her tormentors, and springing back, rose for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around – shame and indignation in those wild clear eyes, but not a stain of fear.’

 

Hypatia by Charles William Mitchell

Rereading that passage, it seems to me that this subject of teasingly half veiled erotic texts from High Victorian writers bears further enquiry, and for the ardent Geralds among us it surely deserves its own award and nominees.

As such texts invariably teeter on the carnal brink I suggest the Hypatian Erotica Awards has a ring to it, with the breathless ingénue in a state of déshabillé the customary object of literature’s wish-fulfilling male predations. Is that actually a laced bodice ripped off and cast aside at the base (left) of the painting shown, or is it Hypatia’s Alexandrian sandal?

Take this seduction scene from a fiction published in 1888 ... 

...the atmosphere was heavy with the melancholy odour of refined white blossoms such as stephanotis, tuberose, and lilies of the valley ... [She] was at his side, just a little breathless, the flowers on her dress a little crushed, and the lace rising and falling rapidly. The moment was propitious for the study of human nature, and [she] saw it in a new phase ... [he] laid his hand upon her wrist. [She] experienced a sudden sense of chilliness all over. There was an obstruction in her throat and she prayed inwardly that something might happen suddenly ... to prevent him saying more ... The music went on, and there was a vibration in the floor as of people dancing. In a dark corner of the conservatory the monotonous drip-drip of a tap imperfectly turned made itself heard. [He] had taken her hand within his fingers now.

‘... I will never,’ [she said], with dangerous calmness, ‘be bullied or frightened into loving you. Surely you know me well enough to recognize that.’

... She turned half away from him, and moved towards the door, but before she had taken two steps his arms were round her, crushing her painfully. With sudden passion he kissed her twice on the lips ... Then he released her with equal abruptness. She stood for a moment, while he looked down at her, breathing hard ; then she raised her gloved hand, and pressed back over her ear a tiny wisp of golden hair that had escaped and curled forward to her smooth cheek.

Yes. The breathlessness of the crushed breast is quite a feature of this author, fixated on

visions ‘of soft clinging silks and incomprehensible gauze.’

Incomprehensible Gauze. Mmmm. That phrase could serve as the title of a study of John Ruskin’s marriage.  

Clinging silks with close-fitting bombazine, then, seems an essential feature of stimuli in popular literature as effective rousers of sensuality in the genteel Victorian reader desirous of the vicarious thrill of the chase.

She was almost crouching at his feet — crouching gracefully in her close-fitting black dress, with the beautiful golden head bent and turned from his sorrowful eyes.

Designedly, constrictiveness of dress as the cynosure of the writer’s hot gaze intensifies the reader’s voyeuristic complicity. But is tight-bound breathlessness, or yet the glimpse of wrists and ankles, deserving of the first rank of the excitants to ignite the timid reader?

Sportsgirls.

No. In my view, at the highest ranking, I would place descriptions of the sweated brows exhibited by female athleticism. (cf. Betjeman’s sportsgirls, Joan Hunter Dunn before her ‘warm-handled racket is back in its press’ or Pam whose ‘Old Malvernian brother ... can’t stand up to’ her ‘wonderful backhand drive.’)

Consider George Gissing’s Fleet-Footed Hester (1893) for an instructive expression of this attraction:

At sixteen, Hester had a splendid physique: strangers imagined her a fine girl of nineteen or twenty. It was then she ceased running races with the lads in London Fields …

Grown to a young woman, Hester provokes a fight between two rivals for her hand

Her face was hot … Hester went off in the opposite direction, an exulting smile in her eyes … On reaching home, Hester lit her lamp — it revealed a scrubby little bedroom with an attic window — took off her hat and jacket, and deliberately lay down on the bed. She lay there for an hour or more, gazing at nothing, smiling, her lips moving as though she talked to herself. At eleven o’clock she rose, put on her hat, and once more left the house. She walked as far as the spot where the fight had taken place. It was very quiet here, and very gloomy. A policeman approached and she spoke to him.
‘P’liceman, can you tell me ’ow fur it is from ’ere to the corner of Beck Street?’ she pointed.
‘Cawn’t say exactly. Five ’undred yards, dessay.’
‘Will you toime me while I run it there and back?’
The man laughed and made a joke, but in the end he consented to time her. Hester poised herself for a moment on her right foot, then sprang forward. She flew through the darkness and flew back again.
‘Four minutes, two second,’ said the policeman. ‘Not bad, Miss!’
‘Not bad? So that’s all! Find me the girl as can do it better.’
And she ran off in high spirits.

We don’t have to spell out sublimated sexual arousal when the clues are in Hester’s restlessness, ungratified and raw. (Incidentally, the male world record-holder’s speed for the 1000 yards of 1881 was twice as fast as Hester’s speed, which was nonetheless impressive.) 

Encrypted caresses or too easily decipherable seductions?

But for a sophisticated account of a consensual heterosexual sadomasochistic pact – redolent of pheromonal exudations such as sweat and damp hair – the narrative below by an English regional fictionist (born 1867) is, for those times, unsurpassed for its novelty in founding its intense eroticism on quotidian reality, in this case the rural setting of the Derbyshire dales. A flirtation between a beautiful, much-courted village girl and a rejected suitor ...

... her flushed face bore a pleasant look of malice ... She turned and faced him defiantly.
‘I wunna!’
‘But yo’ will, for i’ll mek yo’.’ ...
It had never struck her before that he was very handsome, but as he stood there without jacket or waistcoat, and with his snowy shirt all damp with perspiration, she became convinced that there was none in the neighbourhood half so worthy of the name of man ...

She set down the basket and showed him her hands. The skin was roughened, the finger-tips were bleeding. The sight made his eyes swim ...
He came nearer and caught her in his arms.
‘I wouldna hev done et ef I hadna looved yo’.’
‘Et’s all reet ... Yo’ll be master, I reckon.’
And she kissed him, and he led her to the road.

Or take this sinister coded erotic encounter from the author of the 1888 conservatory seduction ...

He rose from his seat and deliberately crossed the room to the sofa where she had sat down, where he reclined, with one arm stretched out along the back of it towards her. In his other hand he held his riding-whip, with which he began to stroke the skirt of her dress, which reached along the floor almost to his feet ... She gave a strange little hunted glance round the room ... Then she leant forward and deliberately withdrew her dress from the touch of his whip, which was in its way a subtle caress. 

Yes. Coded eroticism for Victorian fictionists seems to function through dependence on ravishing detail of an almost hallucinatory Dadd-like painterly meticulousness.

This trick of the cinematic close-up, like the whip and dress-hem, can be seen in the example singled out in my recent post on Emma Bovary, Adamantine Madame.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/adamantine-madame-enamelled-emma.html 

Between the window and the hearth Emma was sewing; she wore no fichu; he could see small drops of perspiration on her bare shoulders.

Oh. Did I mention I bought my prized first English edition of Madame Bovary from Maggs of Berkeley Square? More than a quarter of a century ago.

Puzzle of the missing pizzle.

As to more decipherable seductions, even the novice literary cryptographer is quick to unriddle the cruder emblems of sexual intrigue when the determined symbolist is intent on delivering his message with a semiotic battering ram, whose impact is no less subtle than the authorial telegraph pole it evokes with which the messenger signals the callowest itch of lust.

So let me conclude with two contrasting views on literary expressions of sexual desire.

My aim has been to demonstrate how the intensely observed teasing glimpses of so-called second-rank 19th century novelists succeed in their purpose to provoke the fantasizing reader to imaginative immersion in what is, essentially, a fictive sexual adventure; whereas, by contrast, the clumsier overt symbolism of a vaunted stylist of the period tends sometimes to neuter, indeed sabotage, intended erotic effects with the reader left disengaged.

For the last word, look no further than Thomas Hardy and his Jude the Obscure (1895). Consider this famous passage:

On a sudden something smacked him sharply in the ear, and he became aware that a soft cold substance had been flung at him, and had fallen at his feet.

A glance told him what it was—a piece of flesh, the characteristic part of a barrow-pig, which the countrymen used for greasing their boots, as it was useless for any other purpose. 

‘I didn’t throw it, I tell you!’ asserted one girl to her neighbour, as if unconscious of the young man’s presence.

 ‘But you want to speak to me, I suppose?’

‘Oh yes; if you like to.’

No better than a slap in the face with a wet fish (as the saying goes), that ‘characteristic part’ of the pig considered ‘useless’ is, in fact, an overwrought symbol of clunking gaucheness, as I see it, spelling out its message in banner headlines: ‘This is a sexual pass! Wake up, Mr Libido!’ 

Extraordinarily enough, when a perfectly applicable term for this porcine boot-grease exists and is ready to hand – ‘pizzle’ – the word appears nowhere in Hardy’s text, a needless evasion that consigns the reader – this reader, at least – to feeling distinctly short-changed.

So no nominations here, then, for the Hypatian Erotica Awards that distinguished poet Roy Fuller prompted, whose own Mythological Sonnets are, conversely, rich in allusion and unforced sensuality:

Trailing great pizzles, their dun stallions
Huddled against hedges while our mares
Cavorted in the grass, black, yellow, bronze.  

‘Stallions’ and ‘bronze’ ... words destined to be spellbound by a magician of rhyme.

And since Fuller so perceptively quotes from Hypatia, in a text I have remembered for more than half a century, maybe I should conclude with its author’s true, irrepressible, High Victorian, libidinous outpourings ... the love letters that passed between Charles Kingsley and his bride-to-be, Fanny Grenfell.

It is to them that the Hypatian Erotica Awards are awarded. The judge’s verdict is final: Charles and Fanny are uncontested joint winners.

Thrilling writhings. Wandering hands. Smelling salts.

In the fourth decade of the 19th Century, the most remarkable love letters were exchanged between the young curate, Charles Kingsley, and wealthy socialite, Frances Eliza Grenfell, five years his senior, who opened their hearts to each other with an explicitness that scholars of that period rarely encounter, certainly in texts unredacted.

No bland, sentimental billing-and-cooing billets-doux but Frances’s imaginings of ...

... delicious nightery [when they would lie in each other’s arms] and I will ask you to explain my strange feelings ...

These strange feelings of the lovelorn – agonising physical pains in her heart – caused Fanny to resort to large doses of morphine and salvolatile.

As for Charles, the floodgates of his private fantasies were unloosed without constraint ...

When you go to bed tonight, forget that you ever wore a garment, and open your lips to my kisses and spread out each limb that I may lie between your breasts at night ... Will not these thoughts [by postponing bliss] give us more perfect delight when we lie naked in each other’s arms, clasped together, toying with each other’s limbs, buried in each other’s bodies, struggling, panting, dying for the moment. Shall we not feel then, even then, that there is more in store for us, that those thrilling writhings are but dim shadows of a union which shall be perfect?

The perfect union Charles, an accomplished artist, envisioned was their hallowed lovemaking for all eternity, pinioned on orgasmic pulsing waves ... a fevered sketch of which remains: 
 

The consecrated lovemaking of Charles and Fanny,
pinioned on the pulsing waves of Eternal Orgasm.

Charles once told Fanny: ‘Your letter about bare feet almost convulsed me. I have such strange fantasies about bare feet.’ And his fetishisation of Fanny continued:

...my hands are perfumed with [your] delicious limbs, and I cannot wash off the scent, and every moment the thought comes across me of those mysterious recesses of beauty where my hands have been wandering, and my heart sinks with a sweet faintness and my blood tingles through every limb ...

The Ascent of Charles and Fanny to Eternal Sexual Bliss

The power of suggestion.

Nevertheless, Charles feared the sight of Fanny on their wedding night would unman him. Some months before their marriage he wrote:

I have been thinking over your terror at seeing me undressed, and I feel that I should have the same feeling ... until I had learnt to bear the blaze of your naked beauty.

So there it is. At last, the authentic.   

The blaze of naked beauty. 

This fierce eroticism, forged by lovers separated by the proprieties of polite society, and expressed in a series of astonishing epistolary convulsions, underscores my initial point ... effective erotic writing relies on the power of suggestion and the tingling religio-sexual experience of ‘touching the veil’ recorded by Charles Kingsley is the more ardent for its trembling – like the Song of Solomon – on the brink of coherence, and for daring to breach the boundaries of scriptural agápē.

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* re. The Ruined Boys, see, also, a very fine contemporaneous novel that charts similar territories of betrayal and lost innocence in a girls’ school: The Chinese Garden (1962) by Rosemary Manning.

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See also: Sex Lessons from History Unhindered by 20/20 Hindsight

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/sex-lessons-from-literature-unhindered.html

Running-Away-Fund: 21st Century Good Housekeeping by Deception

Here’s a moral problem of modern mores that has recently come to my attention.

Call me old-fashioned but I’m at present dumbstruck by a September 2006 issue of Good Housekeeping (doctor’s waiting room) in which their Problems Page discusses women’s housekeeping, and whether a husband or Significant Other can be trusted to provide for a stay-at-home mother of a child.

The step-by-step advice given to the reader, on the assumption she does not work since she is rearing an infant, is that ...

1: She should discuss with her Significant Other a household budget that is falsely ‘weighted’ by 20 percent; 

2: She should negotiate with her Significant Other the proposed budget less 10 percent to gain credence; 

3: She should salt away the 10 percent budget surplus and her Child Benefit as ‘running-away-money’.

The conclusion is that, whatever the ethics of how the surplus housekeeping is obtained (and Good Housekeeping’s agony aunt recommends base deception), all women should have secret ‘running-away-money’ ... the advice column concludes with the example of a woman long married who had amassed a secret ‘running-away-fund’ of £57,000 from her housekeeping... (?)

Well. Here’s a case of modern morals for debate, and one that raises many questions about the sanctity of marriage and the case for mutual trust.

As I wrote in my most recent fiction for Ambit (issue 212, Darkly, More is Seen): 

Soon I had my escape route mapped out in the same meticulous detail with which my Significant Other would pack his emergency grab-bag for a transatlantic yacht race in the event of sinking.
   An abandon-ship-bag!
   Let me affirm here and now, in the strongest terms, that, for a moonlight flit, ‘Every Housewife Should Have One!’
   Hereunder, then, allow me to itemise the contents of an essential panic-bag all survivalists should pack in readiness for the old heaveho.
   Your grab-bag should contain: Nightdress, Toothbrush, Underwear, Passport, Identity Card, Credit Card, Prescribed Medication, Basic Toiletries, Facial Tissues (Mansize), and Foldable Raincoat and Galoshes.
   Forget your house-keys and address book; you won’t be needing them again. Similarly, for the completest disappearing act, of course, you will not need a distress call nor rescue flares for your life-raft.

Well. When it comes down to it, fiction is pure escapism, of course, yet I trust my escapism outside fiction does not have to depend on the housekeeping budget being squirrelled away in an abandon-ship-panic-bag ... on balance, if I’m heading for a shipwreck I’d rather remain onboard and rearrange the deckchairs to avoid seeing the rocks ... and, for the moment, that steamer lounger on the sun deck has a distinct appeal.

Moonlight Flit by George Cruikshank (detail)

    

Maugham Lite … 1931 Flash Fiction Sans Worst Bits (To be Continued)

Brian Bray, just down from Oxford has spent all his money and is out of a job. All that is left to him is his love for Felicity Mansell, a ten-shilling note and unbounded optimism. Felicity’s parents will not let her become engaged to Brian, but she promises that she will wait for him.
    One day, Brian meets Mr. Wellesley, a partner of the firm of Wellesley and Milligan, Eastern merchants and shippers. He takes a fancy to Brian and gives him a job with his firm out East.
    Brian arrives in Rangoon where he is met by Mr. Dupont, a future colleague, who takes him to have a drink at the Silver Grill. There, Mr. Dupont points out a half-caste girl, Norah.
    Brian then goes on to the Chummery, where he meets Mr. Royard, Mr. Mountjoy and Mr. Milligan and his daughter, Mary.
    Royard falls ill and Brian takes over the books; he discovers that Dupont is, in secret, owing the firm hundreds of rupees. He is dismissed and, after he has gone, Brian goes to break the news to Norah, who is heart-broken.
    The same evening, he is introduced by Major Healdingham to Helen O’Connor, Lord Kildare’s only daughter. He goes to dinner with her and her father the next day and, on his return to the Chummery, finds a police inspector waiting for him. The inspector tells him that Norah has committed suicide and, as a letter from him was found at her home, suggests that he may know something about it. Brian denies this and Lord Kildare backs him up at the inquest next day, having overheard Brian break the news of Dupont’s sudden departure to Norah at the Thursday Club.
    Brian meets Helen again that night. He offers her a cigarette as they sit waiting for her father. And as he flicks the case open, a snapshot of Felicity falls out.
    ‘What a pretty kid,’ Helen remarks casually. ‘Is it your sister?’

Brian said: ‘I never had any sisters. That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’
    Leaning back beside Helen, he told her about Felicity. He did not find it easy to talk of her.
    Helen held the snapshot in her hand, and smiled at it, her eyebrows raised.
    ‘What a child. And how pretty. Like a sprig of apple blossom. So this is your first love?’
    ‘My first and only love,’ he said.
    She gave him back the picture without comment. All that evening she was so gentle and dignified, and behaved so beautifully, although amongst the guests there were at least two people she disliked cordially, that her father wondered anxiously whether she was quite well. Brian went home that night in the best of spirits, feeling he had made a wonderful friend. 
    And he sat up late, writing with the greatest lightheartedness to Felicity, and told her the whole story of Norah, with certain omissions, because one longed to spare Felicity all the worst bits of life.

----- 

Well, I thought, turning the page of my mother’s Miss Modern magazine of February 1931 (Special Fiction Number, price 6d), this is a tale of estimable brevity ... and what a bitterly sarcastic sting to its tale.
    Then I noticed the shift from present tense to past tense, and the significant gap in the text across which the time travelling reader must leap.
    Then it dawned on me! How foolish I’d been. That first column was really just a NOW READ ON style of résumé to assist readers to catch up with the beginning of the tale published in the previous issue!
    Oh! I was disappointed. I truly thought I had stumbled across the earliest specimen of women’s flash fiction. Of course, on the next page the tale continued for a further nine columns, ending with ...

(To be continued) 

My thoughts turned to the authoress. Was she a recognised authority on the Far East? From the context, it would seem so. And so it proved.
    Dorothy Black (1890-1977) turns out to be Dorothy MacLeish, a British writer of over 100 romance novels and several short stories from 1916 to 1974 under her maiden name Dorothy Black and as Peter Delius. Because of her husband’s job, she moved to Rangoon, Burma, where she started to publish fiction. In Burma she raised her children, using this setting and India as inspiration for many of her novels. 
    In 1934 she published anonymously Letters of an Indian Judge to an English Gentlewoman, a significant account of British colonial racism, still being reprinted into the late twentieth century.  
    So the fates of outsider Norah and the disgraced Dupont gain deeper resonances when we consider that this serialised romance, billed as the ‘glamour of the East’, was actually an offshoot of  a serious anthropo-sociological study (albeit dressed up as fiction) from a writer clearly warranting more critical notice than that she commanded as vice-president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association.
    However, I am certain that Dorothy must have been supremely content to write at last an anti-romance, without omissions, designed calculatedly not to spare readers of the exotic, such as her Felicity, the worst bits of life.

By Grand Satyr Stanzas I Sat Down and Read.

That Alexis Lykiard, in his rousing new poetry collection, Getting On, name-checks tragic lovers George Barker and Elizabeth Smart (The Biters Bit) is a not wholly unintended evocation of a general mood, it seems to me, when considering the whole complex web of personal thematic strands that are braided to make this book of verses that often chart his perplexing amours.

As to the combative yet tender personas of the poet, there are many. Take his streetfighter stance. One starts to think of the cojones of Norman Mailer or Vernon Scannell, both professional bruisers with LOVE tattooed on their knuckles when the gloves were off. As to the sophistication of the refined demotic, other eminent comparators spring to mind: Roy Fuller (‘confused senescence’ definitely has Fullerian resonances from his late manner), likewise Gavin Ewart at his most pithy, or Thomas Blackburn, say, at his arctic iciest, or, indeed, the cruel mockery of Edward Pygge (and his sister Edwina) in their many guises as scourges of the literati.

So Alexis’s own gold standard for a poem is as challenging as any the dedicated connoisseur might encounter, even among the ‘Faberized’ poets disdained so pitilessly on page 72. (‘Tall story man or Thirties schoolboy-pretender.’ You supply the rhyming couplet.) It’s an altogether daunting benchmark, then, he has set himself. Because I notice Alexis turns to Empson to define his model for vitality in the ‘singing line’ of economic yet memorable verse: ‘…narrative, wit, musicality …’ all of which he exhibits in poems of considerable range and ambition. Yet, despite the caustic social observation, the biting satire, the skewering of media show-offs and the ‘brilliant frauds’ of the so-called fine-art market of our times, I personally cleave to those poems where musicality and thought are yoked together in felicitous counterpoints. And here one is reminded of the masterly crisp lyrics James Agee composed for Candide … Oh! Where was Lykiard in Leonard Bernstein’s hour of greatest need! 

I mention Agee and Empson as models for the diction of almost Nietzschean aphoristic compression that can turn humdrum matter into highest carat gems. Well, certainly Lykiard is their match. Neat specimens of his dry wit? ‘So life turns, page by page,/Toward whatever solution will mark the end of age.’ ‘John Addington Symonds … this handsome scholarly invert/became fully aware how for him and s-/ome others, the male form of Sin hurt.’ ‘All/that was valued formerly seems vain pretence./Those joys barely recalled, the rites of innocence/in gathered lust, prime juice desired and felt,/pale by stark contrast with the card that age has dealt.’

But don’t let me take this poet at his own worth, because he suggests his poems are to be measured by poets whose eminence is beyond question: ‘With Roy Fuller, Enright, Empson, could they rally to attack/our increasing stacks of balderdash, this century’s bric-à-brac?/Should we ignore, or acknowledge, a ghostly shadow on blue plaque?/Are true, irascible talents required to keep Poets on track?’ 

Well, these masters are, alas, no longer with us to judge Getting On, yet I am sure their praise would have been unstinting. I am certain, too, they would have relished this antepenultimate Age of Man … the age so aptly expressed by Picasso when he etched himself as an ancient satyriatic monkey contemplating his naked muse. And take special note, too, of Lykiard’s Poets Cornered segment of this collection; the venom he reserves for certain overweening versifiers among us is in so many cases wholly deserved. 

When the invective hits the fan Alexis takes no prisoners. For readers with strong stomachs and a taste for Rabelaisian scatology there is a groaning table of pungent scurrility here.

To be sure Lykiard invites you to share a bitter, self-lacerating mood of the tempo di profanazione – the time of desecration described by Moravia in his late novel, La vita interiore – but it’s also an exhilarating mood of ‘irascible’ mischievousness, heedless of any comebacks. In other words, the anecdotage of a randy goatage … but here with the wit, brio and the raw honesty of essaying to recall ‘those rites of innocence in gathered lust’, which, as Alexis proves, have not yet faded from view and sense but can be restored by the vitality and sparkling intelligence of his verse.



GETTING ON
Poems by Alexis Lykiard
£9.99
ISBN: 978 1 907356 46 9
Shoestring Press
http://www.shoestring-press.com/2012/04/getting-on/

Home thoughts from abroad ... not thought twice over.

Enduring once more my weekly traitements thalassothérapeutiques at the hydro, I discovered a fellow-victim to be an Englishwoman and to distract ourselves from our watery exertions we fell to talking of our shared nostalgia for the birdsong of England.

I said I was fond of the stonechat's distinctive cry as it reminded me of Sussex road menders and my home county’s knappers of flint.

The blackbird was my bathing companion’s favourite from her schooldays she declared, then she quoted : 

The nightingale has a lyre of gold,     
    The lark’s is a clarion call,     
And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute,     
    But I love him best of all.     

 
The verse was new to me so I murmured, ‘How lovely!’ or some such vapidity but actually I was thinking, ‘But that’s torn it! Didn’t I compose a similar phrase years ago!’

That horrible feeling of déjà vu chilled me more than the thought of the wretched plunge-bath cure I’d next undergo.

So once I returned to my study I referred to my drafts. And there it was! ‘The muted woodwind of pigeons.’ From my text of The Captain’s Runner, my reminiscences of Sussex, seen through the eyes of a seven-year old keeper of rabbits:

The mist still hung above the hummocks of sour cooch grass in the wildernesses which bordered the stream. It was along these banks that the village children went wildfaring for food plants.
    From the other side of a coppice resounded the muted woodwind of pigeons.
    The path was familiar to them and led through plantains to a clearing where a variety of rabbit greens congregated in abundant supply. Along a hedgerow grew the leaves of coltsfoot, dandelion, clover, vetches, yarrow, sow thistle and that astringent tonic, shepherd’s purse; and, nearer the marshy margin of the stream, hogweed and clumps of hazel flourished.  The leaves of oak, elm and maple also abounded.

Oh, the relief. Thanks goodness not every writer sings the same song twice over.

See my thoughts on palimpsestic writings here ...
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/lure-of-list-doomed-excavations-of-ur.html