Immured mustard field. Found.

Last night, reading for the first time that classic of prison literature, Die Zelle, by a distant kinsman of mine, Horst Bienek, I stumbled upon a specimen of poésie trouvée no less poignant than any love poem composed by Neruda, yet this was a prose fragment (my line-breaks as original punctuation, page 54), and all the more powerful in its intensity for being written out of four years of confinement in a Siberian forced labour camp ... a vibrant memory for the prisoner that persists to shimmer in the dark.

The Field of Mustard

We lie down in a field of mustard,

the yellow blossoms sway before our eyes,

we look at each other,

we do not say anything,

I bend over her,

once I push my tongue between her teeth,

she draws back,

I write my wishes on her face with my breath,

she answers me with her breath,

for a long time we talk with one another

in a language no one speaks ;

next evening I wait for her,

she does not come.

Horst Bienek (1930-1990). Distinguished award-winning German novelist and poet. He was a student of Bertolt Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble. In 1951, he was arrested on political grounds by the NKVD and sentenced by a Soviet military tribunal to twenty-five years of forced labour in the notorious Vorkuta, a gulag. He was released due to an amnesty in 1955. His first novel, Die Zelle (The Cell, 1968, filmed under his own direction in 1972), focuses on a prisoner who, in the isolation of his cell, fights for mental and physical survival in the face of sickness, torture, and an uncertain fate. A first person narrative, it uses stream of consciousness to agonizing effect. The truly excellent English translation is by Ursula Mahlendorf.

For more found poems see: 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/poesie-trouvee-unsought-text.html

and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/way-of-seeing-ronald-searle.html 
 

Sex Lessons from Literature Unhindered by 20/20 Hindsight.

Sometime late in 2007 there was a call for learned papers on the aesthetics and putative authorship (thought to be Oscar Wilde) of Teleny, or, The Reverse of the Medal, the notorious, salacious, homoerotic novel, first published in London in 1893.

I made my response clear. ‘It might be instructive for me to write a short essay quoting contemporary women in an attempt to interpret their likely contemporary response to the subject matter of Teleny. I would be objective in my writing in every respect, and NOT exhibit 20/20 feminist hindsight.’ In the event, this proposal met with a deafening silence and I moved on to other concerns.

It was only today that I revisited my notes for filing and realized that I had fleetingly touched upon this theme in an essay of mine, a year earlier, in Strange Attractor literary journal (2006), Contra-Genesis: Unusual Cases of Extra-uterine Gestation and Post Mortem Extra-genital Conception. 
http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/journal-three/ 

These torturously imagined permutations for achieving extracorporeal or adventitious conception recall that notorious novel of homosexuality, Teleny, written in 1893 and attributed to Oscar Wilde, in which the hero, Teleny, impregnates a young countess while visualising the face of his male lover, and nine months afterwards the ‘fine boy’ which issues from the act resembles the lover ... a treacherous male fantasy of the grossest sort, in the opinion of most women readers I should imagine. 

I remember well the thrust of my intended remarks for the 2007 Teleny Symposium because my notes tell me my sources were cited from feminists (male and female) who were of age in 1893. My intuition was simply to attempt a composite contemporaneous view of female sexual desire from glimpses and glints and glimmers sometimes disclosed by psychoanalytical fiction writers of the time. I use the word ‘fiction’ advisedly in the case of the Austrian child psychoanalyst Hermine Hug von Hugenstein, who was 22 years old when Teleny was published.

See also, Hermine Hug von Hugenstein, the Murder of a Doctrinaire Freudian:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-murder-of-doctrinaire-freudian-by.html

Hermine Hug von Hugenstein

Hermine’s Diary of a Halfgrown Girl (believed by many to be a work of fiction rather than an authentic document edited by her) charts the puberty of the diarist from ages eleven to fourteen-and-a-half in a record unmatched, according to Freud in his Introduction, by any chronicle formerly written since it enables ‘... us to see so clearly into the soul of a young girl ... during the years of puberal development.’

Sexual Heat.

Under one of my note-headings, Sexual Heat, I quote the following from the young diarist, Rita, in her her twelfth year. She is observing her teacher on whom she has a crush:

When he strokes his beard I become quite hot and cold with ecstasy. And the way he lifts up his coattails as he sits down. It’s lovely, I do want to kiss him. Hella and I take turns to put our penholder on his desk so that he can hallow it with his hand as he writes. Afterwards in the arithmetic lesson when I write with it, I keep looking at Hella and she looks back at me and we both know what the other is thinking of.  

The symbolism of dip-pen and pen-holder and the excitement stimulated by these objects need not be dwelt on here, other than to observe that the secret sexual life of adolescent girls in the late 19th century, as expressed by contemporaneous women, must be sought in such almost imperceptible textual glimmers.

Similarly, for mydriatic response to stimulus (pupil dilation) as an index to sexual arousal, see Rita’s diary entry for the same year, observing a schoolboy admirer:

When he says that his eyes grow dark, quite black, although his eyes are really grey and they get very large. Especially in the evening when we say goodbye, it frightens me. I'm always dreaming of him. 

And as to dreams, the celebrated diary of Mariya Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva, Russian feminist writer, painter and sculptor (she died from tuberculosis in her twenty-fourth year in 1884, in Paris), reveals the turmoil of her early adolescence (1873):

I had a horrible dream last night ... I saw the sun growing bigger and covering nearly half the heavens, but it emitted neither light nor heat ... then half of it was covered by a cloud. We all cried out, ‘The sun is standing still!’ ... Then the sun began to turn round like two wheels one within the other ... the bright sun was covered at intervals by a cloud as round as itself ... What is the meaning of this dream?

The Burden of Secret Knowledge.

The vividness of her recall, as a young late 19th Century woman recording her disturbed psychical state, suggests to me a mind and emotions responsive to profound impressions yet whose stimuli remain almost wholly uncomprehended. As Freud writes, in the Introduction to Rita’s diary, ‘Above all, we are shown how the mystery of the sexual life first presses itself vaguely on the attention, and then takes entire possession of the growing intelligence, so that the child suffers under the load of secret knowledge ...’

The child, then, of this period, shoulders a burden of secret knowledge that is all the more burdensome for being beyond her complete understanding. 

Proto-feminist novelist George Gissing rams home this point in his novel Denzil Quarrier, published in 1892, the year before Teleny. Here is another glinting facet from the past, as headstrong twenty-three-year-old Serena, a young woman of independent means, seated on a piano-stool, defies her mother, who with purple face insists her daughter should refrain from reading a French novel. As to French novel-writing, in her family’s view, ‘One and all are drenched in impurity!’ The bosom of Serena’s mother heaves ‘like a troubled sea.’ Serena protests:

‘You had rather have me play than read that book? That shows how little you understand of either. This is an immoral piece of music! If you knew what it meant you would scream in horror. It is immoral, and I am going to practise it day after day.’

We might guess the musical piece, like the novel Serena is reading, was composed by a Frenchman. As a character of Gissing’s remarks in Denzil Quarrier, ‘[I read] No English [novels], unless I am in need of an emetic.’ That Teleny has fin de siècle Paris as its setting, and reeks of the Aesthetic Movement in highest Decadent style and swooning mood, recalls a cultivar from the same hothouse, Salomé, written in French by Wilde two years earlier. As for the piano composition, was it by César Franck or one of his franckistes one wonders, since they wrote immersed in the Romantic Catholicism that claimed their contemporary, Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose novel, À Rebours, was the ‘poisonous French novel’ that corrupted Wilde’s Dorian Gray, published in 1890, three years before Teleny.

A Short-Lived Joy.

That brilliant satire on the Decadence, Autobiography of a Boy by G. S. Street, published appropriately in the year following Teleny, 1894, is very clear as to the responses by young women to the posturings of male aesthetes. Each chapter pillories most aspects of Pateresque aestheticism ...  Medievalism, Utopiaism, Grecophilia, Romantic Catholicism, etc.

This passage from Street I suspect reflects contemporary women’s general view of the Decadent Manner and is in its effect, because of this, more Wodehousian than Wildean ...

One or two ambitions he [the aspiring Aesthete] did, however, confide to his intimates.  He desired to be regarded as a man to whom no chaste woman should be allowed to speak, an aim he would mention wistfully, in a manner inexpressibly touching, for he never achieved it.  I did indeed persuade a friend of his and mine to cut him in the park one crowded afternoon; but his joy, which was as unrestrained as his proud nature permitted, was short-lived, for she was cruelly forgetful, and asked him to dinner the next day.

It was these tiny details, gleaned from reading so many of the books listed by William Gaunt in the bibliography for his Aesthetic Adventure (read when I was sixteen), that I intended to assemble into a simulacrum of a young Englishwoman’s psyche as it might have responded to subconsciously perceived sexual stimuli at the end of the 19th Century.
 
At the time of the 2007 Teleny Symposium, my researches for my appreciation of a feminocentric view of Teleny had delved further back into the theme of an Englishwoman’s quest for, and response to, sexual knowledge in the latter part of the 19th Century ... particularly the period 1870s to the 1890s.  The sexual repression that I researched is very evident in this quotation, for example, which describes how an ‘undergraduette’ is thwarted when she enquires at her University bookshop for a copy of Tennyson’s Idylls of a King:

The bookseller had pursed his lips in refusal when I requested the Idylls:  ‘We never have had any poetical effusions on our shelves, and we don’t think we shall begin now.’  My innocent enquiry had been treated as though it were a cause of offence to the severest censors of the University’s morals and manners.

Before I conclude this very modest conspectus on An Englishwoman’s Perceptions of Homoerotica in the Late Nineteenth Century, I would like to note that this literary genre’s suppression was, according to my sources, apparently due directly to an Englishwoman’s interdict. It should be remembered that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the well-known prostitute and great propagator of pornography ‘Mary Wilson’ — whom a contemporary called ‘the reviver of erotic literature in the present century’ — strictly forbade the description of homosexual love in any of the erotic fiction and poetry she published.

Were I a Man.

In The Voluptuarian Cabinet Mary Wilson wrote:

It is much to be regretted, that some of the very best French works should be deformed by passages descriptive of Socratic love but it is still more to be lamented that such ideas should ever be transferred into our language. I speak not merely the feelings of a woman upon the subject, for were I a man, I should consider it highly criminal to propagate doctrines, the adoption of which is attended with such horrible consequences. Let us have all kinds of orthodox [copulation] but not heterodox fashions.

Personally, I see a stark contrast between the homoerotic wish-fulfilment evidenced in Teleny and the dreams and fantasies that I believe absorbed the minds of cultivated late 19th century Englishwomen. The glimpses and glints and glimmers I’ve identified by way of illustrating the female psyche of those times all seem to configure a composite mind for this sorority appreciative of realism in their amours in contrast to the perfumed phantasmagoria firing the blood of the aesthetic brotherhood. 

The Separate Room, the Inviolable Retreat.

Two final glimpses of this feminine realism can be observed in the writings of novelist Ethelind Colburn Mayne (aged 28 years in 1893, and the first translator of Freud into English) and the pioneer of Birth Control, Marie Stopes, herself entering puberty in 1893, when Teleny was first published.

In Married Love Marie Stopes writes: 

Now it may enchant a man once — perhaps even twice — or at long intervals – to watch his goddess screw her hair into a tight and unbecoming knot and soap her ears. But it is is inherently too unlovely a proceeding to retain indefinite enchantment ... A married woman’s body and soul should be essentially her own, and that can only be so if she has an inviolable retreat.

In a key feminist text, Colburn Mayne, in her short story The Separate Room, makes clear the reasons for the underlying discontent of her tragic heroine, Marion (an autobiographical fiction that connects us directly to the world of the Yellow Book and its aesthetes, since she was a member of its editorial team). Marion, who’s forced by circumstance to share a bedroom with her mother, confronts her on the same vexed question of Stopes’s ‘inviolable retreat’.

‘Shall I tell you what I was crying about? It was about never being alone. I’m going to ask the doctor to order me a separate bedroom. The extra-quarter’s salary will pay for it. It will do me more good than any other change.’

I think, on reflection, that had I truly written a paper for the Teleny Symposium I would have reminded the aesthetes that the educated Englishwoman in the late nineteenth century was essentially a domestic creature, societised to cultural norms, for whom there was little space allotted, either for intellectual or political freedom or, moreover, for nourishing sleep, and that febrile sexual reveries of the kind productive of Teleny would have been denied her ... unless — improbable outcome — they were written under duress by a bluestocking at the mercy of a Bluebeard as though she were some sort of latterday Scheherazade.

  

See also, the Hypatian Erotica Awards – High Victorian Nominees Announced!
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/hypatian-erotica-awards-high-victorian.html

Escape Chute: An Unexpected Loophole to Enfranchisement

The daughter of a maid, like the wife of a bachelor, is well taught. 

This old English saying about illegitimacy (and common law) could serve as a motto for A Stranger in Blood, my mid-Victorian period story from my Sister Morphine collection, which was inspired by the unconventional heroines found in the fictions of George Gissing, the nineteenth-century novelist and supporter of female emancipation. See...
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/respectable-log-rolling.html 

Its theme centres on an often disregarded loophole in English law – an escape chute, if you will – concerning the Age of Majority as it applies under the reformed 1872 Bastardy Laws.  Hitherto unexplored implications of this Law – certain exemptions from the legal age of majority, venia aetatis (an age indulged by agreement) in their effect — prompted, in addition, the writing of A Stranger in Blood. Nor did this legislation change significantly in the first half of the 20th Century, since the 1872 Law served as the basis of dealing with the financial management of illegitimate children for a further 85 years, until 1957.

My story was devised for publication in 2004, the year of the 160th and 170th Anniversaries of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and its controversial ‘Bastardy Clause’ (that children up to 16 years old should be the sole responsibility of the mother), and of the Act’s further amendment in 1844.  The 1834 Act caused an outcry and in 1844 the Law was changed so that a mother could apply for maintenance from the father. In 1872 the Bastardy Laws were reformed to make the putative father equally liable for the support of the illegitimate child until the age of 16.  

2004 was also the 20th Anniversary of the Age of Majority Bill (Dáil Éireann of the Republic of Ireland 1984) which entitled the Act to reduce full voting age from 21 years to 18 years. The reduction of Age of Majority from 21 to 18 is codified in The Family Law Reform Act 1969, for England and Wales ; the Age of Majority (Scotland) Act 1969 ; and the Age of Majority Act (Northern Ireland) 1969; under this Act, earlier marriage (under 18) also defined the attainment of full age.

Women must have their wills while they live,
because they make none when they die.

This second English saying also served as an epigraph to a sub-plot in my story dealing with the future of a wife and her fortune before the Married Women’s Property Act was passed in 1882.

Feminist issues such as these were explored by George Gissing in his fictions, and my own text was a kind of homage to those short stories and novels of his that questioned the inequalities endured by all thinking women in Victorian society.

Gissing was also a keen-eyed observer of the niceties of class distinctions, and, should you ever read my A Stranger in Blood,  you’ll note that the two leading players in this story are intended as two sides of the same coin – a double-headed coin, as it were – an ego and an alter ego, whose contrasting highborn and lowborn social ranks reflect Gissing’s own preoccupations with class differences between feminist militants in their struggle for self-determination.

In this connexion, it’s appropriate that Gissing drew inspiration for some of his fictional feminists from the celebrated French anarcho-feminist firebrand, Louise Michel, who was herself illegitimate and the daughter of a serving maid.

Similarly, my narrative is dedicated to the memory of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, herself illegitimate, and a founder of Girton College, Cambridge, 1869, (authoress of Reasons for the Enfranchisement of Women, 1867, and Acting Mistress of Girton, 1872). She was a notable campaigner for Women’s Property rights and in 1854 she published her Brief Summary of the Laws of England concerning Women, which was an influential document for campaigners in their securing the Act of 1882.

Memo : A must-read for all George Gissing aficionados is Professor Pierre Coustillas’s magisterial The Heroic Life of George Gissing.

See also . . . A Girl Alone: Scenario of a Screenplay in Homage to George Gissing.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/a-girl-alone-scenario-of-screenplay-in.html

 

See also . . . The Grievous Worries of Gissingites. https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-grievous-worries-of-gissingites-you.html

Nonplatonic Cosmodemonic Histrionics . . . and an oxymoronic Feminist Bigamist . . .

After the rather sophomoric observation I recorded in my preceding post, see ladies’ bikes http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/desperately-platonic-fens.html
I thought I’d redress the balance with an altogether unplatonic mount, namely one that recalls the Western Union Telegraph Company, a.k.a. the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, Henry Miller’s employer in his Tropic of Capricorn... unplatonic because I can’t remember, frankly, any relationship in the Anaïs Nin-Henry Miller axis that was not full blooded carnality, including Nin’s (alleged) seduction by her own father.

Please stifle that yawn. We are perfectly aware your palate is too jaded to recognise any new piquancy but should you ever be seeking in a desultory sort of way a rôle model for that rare oxymoron, a feminist bigamist, the name of Anaïs Nin will satisfy that want.

 

Curiously, one learns, an unlikely friend and admirer of Henry Miller in Paris was the iconoclast George Orwell . . . see my Grim Secrets of Room 101 . . . 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/06/grim-secrets-of-room-101-is-it-time-to.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

Desperately Platonic Fens

I am reminded by my last post of a remark made by a female abhorrer of the Norfolk Fens: ‘Such desperately platonic scenery, strictly no interesting protuberances.’ 

Norfolk Fens 1909

Put Your Arms Around Me ... Romances with a Reluctant Arsonist

Some ten years ago a packet of private papers came into my hands, evidently the letters and sapphic-platonic love poems of a Suffragette from the Nineteen Twenties, and, moreover, the private thoughts of a former hunger-striker not infrequently imprisoned in English jails that included Holloway, with protests of conscience behind bars that took her to the point of fever and unconsciousness.

According to contemporaries, she was a reluctant arsonist. In Christabel Pankhurst’s severe view, this poetess lacked the incendiary passion to put the bastions of male privilege to the torch so Christabel dismissed her from her activist role in 1913. In the view of many sister Suffragettes who defended her, however, this poetess had real backbone, neither approving of stone throwing nor of running away.

So these poignant effusions are remarkable less for their direct action politics and more for their direct expressions of love in response to the tender loyalty of their dedicatees.

What is extraordinary is the fact that she lived just long enough to see the 50th Anniversary of Votes for Women in 1968, the year of Les Événements in Paris, as her newspaper clippings reveal. And, despite Mrs Pankhurst’s daughter’s censures, she no doubt accepted the invitation (found among her papers) from the Suffragette Fellowship to attend Emmeline Pankhurst’s Birthday celebrations in Room A at the House of Commons on July 15th, 3.30 to 5.30 pm, tickets 6/6d.  According to my modest researches the reluctant arsonist died the following year in 1969, in her ninth decade.

In the packet of memorabilia I have a postcard of her arrest after a demonstration in Trafalgar Square against the prohibition of Free Speech, a testament to her stature in the Movement and her fortitude, for she is a powerless lone woman escorted by some ten policemen, mounted and on foot. The postcard’s caption is an ironic commentary on her plight.

The postcard and leaflet both feature a photograph of the Suffragette, a lone figure surrounded by an all-male posse of mounted and foot police. The postcard caption reads:
LONDON LIFE. ARREST OF A MILITANT SUFFRAGETTE.
“Hustle them in and bustle them in,
Scoop up the shriekin’ mob.
Who says that ‘Justice’ is goin’ to win
When ‘The Law’ takes up the job?” 

The delicate poignancy of the reluctant firebrand’s verses is all the more intense when we consider Society’s other repressive interdicts against women, in its condign inhibiting of female homosexuality. 

The nature of those yearnings is evidenced here, in this heartfelt epigraph to her final, life-closing love affair.
 

You’re not my first love –
I loved before we met.
You are my last love –
The dearest, sweetest best –
My heart has shed its outer leaves –
I give you all the rest.

If we seek to get close to these intense secret passions from those first decades of the twentieth century we should look no further than that women’s liberationist of schoolgirl literature, Angela Brazil (1868-1947).

Her sapphic-platonic sentiments, shared I have no doubt by our Reluctant Arsonist from a similar generation, may be found in this passage, for instance, from The Luckiest Girl in the School. Winona is the schoolgirl heroine.
 
Winona walked across the room, hesitated for a moment but did not venture to follow her. Almost automatically she took up the book which Aunt Harriet had been reading. It was a little volume of extracts, and one had been marked with a pencilled cross:

Put your arms around me —

There, like that:

I want a little petting

At life's setting,

For ’tis harder to be brave

When feeble age comes creeping,

And finds me weeping,

Dear ones gone.

Just a little petting

At life’s setting:

For I'm old, alone and tired,

And my long life’s work is done.

The tears rushed to Winona’s eyes. Did Aunt Harriet really feel like that? Oh, why could she not go and comfort her? She turned impulsively into the garden. The slow steps were coming back up the paved walk. She would have given worlds to walk up to her aunt and fling her arms round her, but the old sense of shyness and reserve held her back. Miss Beach was passing along the border, her dress brushing the flowers as she went by. It would surely be easy to join her, and at least to take her arm! Easy? No! She had never done such a thing in her life with her aunt. A peck of a kiss was the only mark of affection that they had hitherto exchanged. Winona looked and longed to express her sympathy, but the invisible barrier seemed strong as ever. Aunt Harriet turned aside and went towards the kitchen. The opportunity was lost.

The hem of Aunt Harriet’s dress brushed the flowers as she passed but it was an opportunity lost.  

Was not this the heart’s fate of so many sapphic-platonic women from the Lost Generation? 

Textistence

When I was a very small child I truly believed that my storybooks issued out of the æther, and I was grievously disappointed when I learned they sprang from a human agency. That particular knowledge debased the currency for me, for I had thought texts had an existence of their own. Ever since I have striven to reproduce that innocent faith in the omniscience of the text as a work of nature.

Textistence. A term that I never wrote.

See:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/poesie-trouvee-unsought-text.html