Since Death these days is on everyone’s lips,
we pledge ourselves to His buyers’ market;
a mortal spark will trade a loss, perhaps,
for the spoils of everlasting darkness.
Tuesday, 8 August 2017
Wednesday, 19 July 2017
A simile is a deceived appearance . . . The House that looks like Hitler.
The putrefaction of the perfect rhyme
That marries Blood and Lime with Mud and Time.
Long, long ago, I read for the first time, Adorno’s minatory dictum: ‘Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch’ (‘To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ Culture Criticism and Society, 1949.)
It struck me then that such an absolutist Death Sentence on Art would have been staunchly repudiated by the persecuted who went to their deaths believing the lyric voice to be unquenchable, and the pen mightier than the sword.
In my own view, Adorno’s injunction – though noble in intention – is actually a kind of distorted echo of those gloating Nazi voices and their ideological refrain: ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.’
Certainly, such an injunction would have unfairly denied a voice to a poet as profound as Karen Gershon, a Kindertransport refugee.
A simile is a deceived appearance.
For self-evident reasons, Swansea’s
House that looks like Hitler
does not appear on this page.
All the same, over the years I have remained alert to those writers who despoil race memory by their absurd theatrics of ‘immersion’, in the manner of method actors. As I have written elsewhere, one should be cautious – not say downright denunciatory – of certain solipsistic postwar poets who exhibit a maudlin notionality of identification with Holocaust victims that devalues the scale of human suffering . . .
To my mind, the ludicrousness of Dickinson’s Empress of Calvary was exceeded only by the pallid self-pity of Plath’s Lady Lazarus. Anyhow, I preferred the verses of Karen Gershon, a poetess who in my own view eclipsed Plath in gravitas, insofar as Gershon was in actuality a Jewess and had no need for maudlin notionality. (From A Room to the End of Fall, 2015, in A Bad Case.)
Yet the ill-advised posturings of Sylvia Plath are defended by Zadie Smith in her 2008 Kafka essay, in which she writes, ‘For there is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish Question (“What have I in common with Jews?”) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. Sylvia Plath hinted at this: “I think I may well be a Jew.” ’
For further observations on the fatuities in Zadie Smith’s arguments as to the supposed Ghettoization of English identity (she was evidently not raised as a morning-faced New Elizabethan), see: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/we-are-all-vermin-now.html
Appearances deceive.
So, as you can recognise from my uncompromising critical stance, my grievance with certain poets is their often specious transmutation of familial angst into Judaical diasporic victimhood à la Plath.
Accordingly, when I came to write The House that looks like Hitler I was very careful to forewarn the editor of my misgivings. I wrote:
Germanness and cultural dispossession take many forms, and Jewishness is not the only conduit to a continuing sense of betrayal because appearances deceive, which is the poem’s subject, of course. A simile is a deceived appearance.
Welsh Incident.
However, any anxious reservations I had about the subject were, in the event, mitigated by the thought that the poem had practically written itself, arising as it had, from a media frenzy that had seen the wondrous Animation of the Inanimate, an event no less astonishing, were the tabloids to be believed, than the Miracle when the Sun was Seen to Dance, observed by one hundred thousand Portuguese believers in Fátima in 1917.
•
The elderly owner of an unassuming end-of-terrace house in Swansea has been left bewildered by his home becoming a global media sensation after its resemblance to the Nazi dictator was noted by a passer-by whose photograph gained instant press coverage across the UK and around the world. News item March 2011.
The House that looks like Hitler
The corollaries by which we measure
pleasure torment us with War's aftermath;
yellow stars by order of the Führer
drowned every time we take a bubble bath.
How slyly patterns in the carpet hide
swastikas to desecrate our languor.
Piano wires to Mendelssohn are tied;
guilt talcums feet with thoughts of falanga.
The scraps uneaten on your laden plate,
the glass abandoned that nobody drank.
Each lunch hour summons the hunger-racked fate
of Judentransport, of silent Anne Frank.
The mundane taints our haunted lineage.
Pyjamas strung up washdays upside down,
black bread and soup are slaves to vision's cage:
from mirrors stare the eyes of Eva Braun.
Today's phenomena are marvellous,
yet each lame rhyme or tortured simile
is captive to a truth made ruinous
by liars out-deceived: Arbeit Macht Frei.
Catherine Eisner
•
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)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
The putrefaction of the perfect rhyme
That marries Blood and Lime with Mud and Time.
Certainly, such an injunction would have unfairly denied a voice to a poet as profound as Karen Gershon, a Kindertransport refugee.
A simile is a deceived appearance.
For self-evident reasons, Swansea’s
House that looks like Hitler
does not appear on this page.
To my mind, the ludicrousness of Dickinson’s Empress of Calvary was exceeded only by the pallid self-pity of Plath’s Lady Lazarus. Anyhow, I preferred the verses of Karen Gershon, a poetess who in my own view eclipsed Plath in gravitas, insofar as Gershon was in actuality a Jewess and had no need for maudlin notionality. (From A Room to the End of Fall, 2015, in A Bad Case.)
Yet the ill-advised posturings of Sylvia Plath are defended by Zadie Smith in her 2008 Kafka essay, in which she writes, ‘For there is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish Question (“What have I in common with Jews?”) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. Sylvia Plath hinted at this: “I think I may well be a Jew.” ’
For further observations on the fatuities in Zadie Smith’s arguments as to the supposed Ghettoization of English identity (she was evidently not raised as a morning-faced New Elizabethan), see: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/we-are-all-vermin-now.html
Appearances deceive.
So, as you can recognise from my uncompromising critical stance, my grievance with certain poets is their often specious transmutation of familial angst into Judaical diasporic victimhood à la Plath.
Accordingly, when I came to write The House that looks like Hitler I was very careful to forewarn the editor of my misgivings. I wrote:
Germanness and cultural dispossession take many forms, and Jewishness is not the only conduit to a continuing sense of betrayal because appearances deceive, which is the poem’s subject, of course. A simile is a deceived appearance.
Welsh Incident.
However, any anxious reservations I had about the subject were, in the event, mitigated by the thought that the poem had practically written itself, arising as it had, from a media frenzy that had seen the wondrous Animation of the Inanimate, an event no less astonishing, were the tabloids to be believed, than the Miracle when the Sun was Seen to Dance, observed by one hundred thousand Portuguese believers in Fátima in 1917.
•
The elderly owner of an unassuming end-of-terrace house in Swansea has been left bewildered by his home becoming a global media sensation after its resemblance to the Nazi dictator was noted by a passer-by whose photograph gained instant press coverage across the UK and around the world. News item March 2011.
The corollaries by which we measure
pleasure torment us with War's aftermath;
yellow stars by order of the Führer
drowned every time we take a bubble bath.
How slyly patterns in the carpet hide
swastikas to desecrate our languor.
Piano wires to Mendelssohn are tied;
guilt talcums feet with thoughts of falanga.
yellow stars by order of the Führer
drowned every time we take a bubble bath.
How slyly patterns in the carpet hide
swastikas to desecrate our languor.
Piano wires to Mendelssohn are tied;
guilt talcums feet with thoughts of falanga.
The scraps uneaten on your laden plate,
the glass abandoned that nobody drank.
Each lunch hour summons the hunger-racked fate
of Judentransport, of silent Anne Frank.
The mundane taints our haunted lineage.
Pyjamas strung up washdays upside down,
black bread and soup are slaves to vision's cage:
from mirrors stare the eyes of Eva Braun.
Today's phenomena are marvellous,
yet each lame rhyme or tortured simile
is captive to a truth made ruinous
by liars out-deceived: Arbeit Macht Frei.
•
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)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
Monday, 17 July 2017
A Visit to the Pushkin Club . . . destination 46 Ladbroke Grove W11
Of course, her first emotion, when she learned her husband was living with his Russian interpreter, was utter relief. No longer was he to be found brooding in his garden room, amber decanter glinting by his side, wearing that wintry smile whenever their eyes met.
Then new feelings of resentment seized her. Looking from her study window to his room below, she could see, under the lattice of the glass roof, her husband’s whorled crown of dark shaggy hair – thinning in the centre, she noticed – where he had slumped forward, beard on chest, feigning sleep. Playing possum was invariably his ruse when unwelcome questions remained unanswered. And those he had answered had been matters-of-fact, cursorily conveyed with his face turned from her.
He had said no more than that he was living in his unleased town flat with a young woman named Nadezhda. He called her Nadia, a Russian from Saratov who had never visited the West before. He said she was unworldly, and in the city she was endangered by a childlike inexperience. At heart, he said, she was an unsophisticated, provincial girl who was prey to primitive superstitions. Without too much thought he had bestowed on her his protection.
‘All that you imagine is probably true,’ Leon had said. Beyond that he would say nothing more.
She slammed the window and saw his eyelids flicker. So be it, she decided, if he chose to retreat behind a carapace of calculated indifference, then she would contrive her manner to be no different from his – yet, she vowed, before the week was ended it would be her intention to unbeard a lifetime of manifold deceptions.
The evening was cool so the out-of-season dark wool cape she threw over her shoulders granted her a plausible concealment to melt into the dusk. Thus seven-o’clock saw Miriam striding after two distant linked shadows as they crossed Leinster Square. This quarter of London was familiar to Miriam and she found no difficulty in keeping pace with the couple as they turned the corner of the Westbourne terraces and entered Ladbroke Grove.
She halted and drew back at the gateway of a peeling townhouse set in a neglected garden. A doorbell sounded and Miriam heard a gutteral murmur in Russian as her husband and his paramour were admitted by a hulking grizzled usher.
When the door closed Miriam inspected the illuminated bell escutcheon. ‘The Pushkin Club.’
Standing in an angle of the garden, in a quadrant of shade, Miriam found she could observe – through a slit in the shutters – the company of discussants within.
There was much laughter and clapping when an actor wearing side-whiskers and an old, worn frock coat darted between the chairs and stood before the window.
‘A monologue in one act by Anton Pav’lich Chekhov,’ he announced in a heavily accented, corncrake rasp. There was scattered applause. The mock lecture commenced.
Leon’s hand, she saw, was resting on Nadia’s thigh, but when the actor came to the passage where the deranged hen-pecked soi-disant lecturer wrings his hands and rails across the footlights (‘ ... my wife runs a boarding school. Well, not exactly a boarding school, but something in the nature of one. My wife doesn’t give parties and never has anyone to dinner. She’s a very stingy, bad-tempered, shrewish kind of lady, so no-one ever comes to see us. If only I could run away from that stupid, petty, spiteful harridan of a wife who’s made my life a torment ...’) Miriam saw her husband reach out and grip his mistress’s knee. Nadia, however, did not smile.
Crossing the lobby, Miriam’s husband laid his hand on Nadia’s shoulder and gave a coarse laugh.
‘In the right hands it could be hilarious,’ Leon said, and snickered once more.
Nadia disengaged his hand as she opened the door.
‘Tell me, Lvyonok,’ said Nadia, inconsequentially, pronouncing the words thickened, as though her teeth were grinding on ice, ‘who is that Amerikanetz whose name sounds like a sneeze?’ They closed the outside door before Miriam heard Leon’s answer.
From the garden room below Miriam heard Leon’s discreet, suppressed sneeze. The sound grated. The truth was that the frequent muffled explosions did, indeed, sound remarkably like Kissinger! and, in time, the apprehension as one waited for the next convulsion began to attack one’s nerves.
•
On the telephone she could hear Laurence riffling the pages, then he quoted, ‘She was carrying some of those repulsive flowers,’ and crowed in recognition. ‘It’s an ugly colour,’ he read, ‘that’s because it’s Russki semiotics for an unfaithful woman, it’s central to the text, don’t you see?’ Then she heard a carillon of mordant laughter. ‘Forgive the emotional histrionicism, but I warned Leon ...’ But Miriam hung up.
•
She had taken her secateurs and gone straightaway into the garden. First the Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and plumes of Golden Rod, then the yellowish Lilies (Enchantment), and finally she chose the yellow Aster ; not the species plant but the low-bred cultivars that had strayed to the kitchen door – the Asterasters – for these she considered the most fitting tribute of all from the philosophaster, poetaster and cinéaster she knew herself to be.
Then new feelings of resentment seized her. Looking from her study window to his room below, she could see, under the lattice of the glass roof, her husband’s whorled crown of dark shaggy hair – thinning in the centre, she noticed – where he had slumped forward, beard on chest, feigning sleep. Playing possum was invariably his ruse when unwelcome questions remained unanswered. And those he had answered had been matters-of-fact, cursorily conveyed with his face turned from her.
He had said no more than that he was living in his unleased town flat with a young woman named Nadezhda. He called her Nadia, a Russian from Saratov who had never visited the West before. He said she was unworldly, and in the city she was endangered by a childlike inexperience. At heart, he said, she was an unsophisticated, provincial girl who was prey to primitive superstitions. Without too much thought he had bestowed on her his protection.
‘All that you imagine is probably true,’ Leon had said. Beyond that he would say nothing more.
She slammed the window and saw his eyelids flicker. So be it, she decided, if he chose to retreat behind a carapace of calculated indifference, then she would contrive her manner to be no different from his – yet, she vowed, before the week was ended it would be her intention to unbeard a lifetime of manifold deceptions.
 |
| Under the heading of Russian mentalität, Miriam wrote, Izlivat dushu – ‘pouring out of the soul; the mingling of two lovers’ souls, for example’; Stradanyie – ‘mental suffering due to unrequited love or coarseness of lover or spouse’; Toska – ‘melancholy homesickness’; Grekh – ‘a sense of sin only removed when sinner reaches a state of highly emotional repentance’; and, finally, Tyomniye sili – ‘dark or sinister, evil forces’; the latter she thrice underlined. |
•
The evening was cool so the out-of-season dark wool cape she threw over her shoulders granted her a plausible concealment to melt into the dusk. Thus seven-o’clock saw Miriam striding after two distant linked shadows as they crossed Leinster Square. This quarter of London was familiar to Miriam and she found no difficulty in keeping pace with the couple as they turned the corner of the Westbourne terraces and entered Ladbroke Grove.
She halted and drew back at the gateway of a peeling townhouse set in a neglected garden. A doorbell sounded and Miriam heard a gutteral murmur in Russian as her husband and his paramour were admitted by a hulking grizzled usher.
When the door closed Miriam inspected the illuminated bell escutcheon. ‘The Pushkin Club.’
Standing in an angle of the garden, in a quadrant of shade, Miriam found she could observe – through a slit in the shutters – the company of discussants within.
This is what she saw. A fine, high-ceilinged drawing room with flaking lemon coloured plaster. (She thought: ‘ “Lemon Peel” - wasn’t that the title of an unwritten sketch by Chekhov?’ It was.) There was a large copper samovar on the sidetable and a framed photograph of Osip Mandelstam. A frayed electrical flex holding a shaded bulb was suspended from the ceiling’s crumbling plaster rose.
Sub rosa, in front of the vast library stacks which formed the far wall, a half circle of ill-assorted chairs had been drawn up to face the window. A row of émigrés with expectant faces drank tea from unmatched china teacups which appeared to be the only items they’d saved from their country houses before their decadent burzhuaznyi drawing rooms were converted by the Bolsheviks into grain stores. There was much laughter and clapping when an actor wearing side-whiskers and an old, worn frock coat darted between the chairs and stood before the window.
‘A monologue in one act by Anton Pav’lich Chekhov,’ he announced in a heavily accented, corncrake rasp. There was scattered applause. The mock lecture commenced.
Leon’s hand, she saw, was resting on Nadia’s thigh, but when the actor came to the passage where the deranged hen-pecked soi-disant lecturer wrings his hands and rails across the footlights (‘ ... my wife runs a boarding school. Well, not exactly a boarding school, but something in the nature of one. My wife doesn’t give parties and never has anyone to dinner. She’s a very stingy, bad-tempered, shrewish kind of lady, so no-one ever comes to see us. If only I could run away from that stupid, petty, spiteful harridan of a wife who’s made my life a torment ...’) Miriam saw her husband reach out and grip his mistress’s knee. Nadia, however, did not smile.
•
‘In the right hands it could be hilarious,’ Leon said, and snickered once more.
Nadia disengaged his hand as she opened the door.
‘Tell me, Lvyonok,’ said Nadia, inconsequentially, pronouncing the words thickened, as though her teeth were grinding on ice, ‘who is that Amerikanetz whose name sounds like a sneeze?’ They closed the outside door before Miriam heard Leon’s answer.
•
•
•
Extracts from The Cheated Eye,
Part Six of Sister Morphine by
Catherine Eisner (2008)
See The Girl on the Number 52 Omnibus . . . destination Ladbroke Grove . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/the-girl-on-number-fifty-two-omnibus.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)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
Sunday, 9 July 2017
The Girl on the Number Fifty-Two Omnibus . . . Between Stops . . .
Between stops
she thought :
Were it so simple that I could pause here
comma
( at this convex mirror )
where my gaze is
comma
I’d hope
to study the immediate glitter of its parenthesis
comma
were it so simple that I could stop
comma
See A Visit to the Pushkin Club . . . destination Ladbroke Grove W11:
 |
|
See A Visit to the Pushkin Club . . . destination Ladbroke Grove W11:
See also, poésie trouvée, the unsought text:
and
Thursday, 6 July 2017
Resemblant Lineaments of Kindred Birth . . . a Study of Asexual Twinlife.
What marvel then if thus their features wore
Resemblant lineaments of kindred birth?
— Robert Southey
‘She has sex, but no particular gender.’
— Marlene Dietrich on Greta Garbo
 |
| (Detail.) A sixteen-year-old girl contemplates herself uncomprehendingly in front of a dressing table mirror. Adolescence (1932), a mezzotint by Gerald Leslie Brockhurst RA, caused a scandal when first shown. The artist was forty-two when the print was made, and the sitter was a life model with whom he began an affair when she was only fifteen about four years earlier. |
Listen Close to Me (an extract)
‘The term, normal,’ my father asserted, ‘so far as physical signs may be seen, is purely a relative one.’
In his view it was more shameful to be morally neutered than for a girl to lack the grosser anatomical features of sexual dimorphism.
For, embarrassingly, it was my fate, when I was fourteen, to exhibit none of the distinguishing attractions shared by other girls of my age.
Reed-thin, flat-chested, lanky, and hopelessly wooden, I was aware I was less than graceful; yet more painful to me than this compromised girliness was my problematic asexuality.
‘She isn’t too bright in the dating department,’ I once overheard an ex-classmate say to her best friend, less than a year after we’d parted at our school-leaving dance.
The remark was answered by the vilest giggle.
‘Nor in the desirable man department either!’
Some moments passed before I fully apprehended they were not talking about our local Departmental store, and I shuddered as I realised the true perilousness of my position.
For I began to see that asexuals like myself are caught in the never-ending crossfire of the Sex War, destined to be stranded, paralysed with dread, stark in the middle of No Man’s Land with nowhere to hide.
Truly, I thought, asexuality must be very like bearing the mark of an hereditary disease if schoolgirls could so easily guess at it.
A Tragedy of Errors.
You should know I am the younger of consobrinal twins, a strange kinship between cousins which I have no doubt anthropologists have categorised as a particular dynastic blood class.
Let me tell you frankly, my cousin Vernon and I bear a disturbing resemblance to each other and, since our births, our strange twinship has been furthered by an upbringing indistinguishable from that of siblings.
 |
| For my Case History, Listen Close to Me, the physical appearance of Vernon and that of his first cousin, the narrator, summoned up a memory of the movie star, Montgomery Clift, and his twin sister, Roberta, who as children were inseparable. It is recorded that both children expressed fears of loss of identity, common to twins, and ‘experienced moments of uncertainty’ as to which twin they were sexually. Even when aged forty, the actor is said to have asked his personal physician, ‘Did I start off as a girl in Ma’s womb?’ |
•
‘How does that grab you?’
The pretty blonde girl of sixteen who kissed me forcibly on the lips I’d never encountered until that moment. She gave me no opportunity to protest.
It was as if two calf livers, slaughter-warm, had been pressed to my mouth.
The occasion was a clandestine bottle party in a derelict house to celebrate my pseudo-twin-brother’s seventeenth birthday.
I’d retreated from the candle-lit revelry of his school-pals to an upper room so she must have followed my shadow up the stairs.
Cornered in a musty recess, I’d heard a far door open and the rustle of her skirt had announced her determined approach. Yet the weak shaft of moonlight on the landing that illuminated the dusty floor must have been too dim for any certain recognition of my silhouette.
But she seemed to have no hesitation. She was quite natural and very deliberate. She appeared to know quite well what she wanted as she approached me, her eyes glittering with eager communicativeness.
She closed the inner door, turning the key behind her, then crossed the room and took me in her arms, with a powerful lock of possession, as if there were no question about it; as if she knew the market value of her attractiveness.
The kiss was as spontaneous and natural as my rejection of it.
There was an involuntary contraction of her little pale fingers and we drew apart. We faced each other for an instant, and she re-examined me with a franker admiration than could be decently tolerated.
‘Tomorrow night,’ she whispered, before she darted away. Her kiss tasted of sweet cider. ‘Seven o’clock. The Vault.’
It was a page of my life I would have wished to tear out completely.
•
Next evening, heavy with misgivings, I approached the so-called Vault; actually, it’s a collapsed limestone sarcophagus on the very edge of the vast burial mound that is Stoneburgh cemetery. It’s a solitary nook with every surface scrawled over or carved with penknives. The sunken lid of the monument forms a seat from which one has a wide view of the unending gloomy fens.
The girl with fair hair had arrived early; she was hunched with her elbows resting on the parapet, looking indifferently into the distance over the floodplain, where white smoke rose lazily from a marshman’s bonfire.
‘If I were a man I would bash your filthy mug,’ she wept, when I tried to explain the misunderstanding sparked by my peculiar twinship with Vernon.
She could not understand why, perversely, I’d envied my cousin’s sleek, closely-cropped head, or why, the previous week, I’d visited his barber and repeated his demand. (Vernon was, at that time, in regular training as a dedicated long distance runner, and he was convinced his military cut was an aid to streamlining his performance.)
The girl’s glance took in my meek, downcast appearance and her manner turned from a slow anger to a look amounting to furious contempt.
‘Freak!’ she suddenly shrieked. ‘I will grow up thinking I have been out with a girl!’ Then she burst out brokenly, ‘I’ll believe my first serious date was with a girl! You make me wish I’d never met you or your cousin!’
She advanced in an access of rage and, without warning, slapped my face.
‘I wouldn’t have kissed him if I’d thought Vernon was a girl,’ she added confusedly, and ran off into the shadows.
For more concerning consobrinal twins and monochorionic identical twins, see . . .
•
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)
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)
and A Bad Case (2015)
Sunday, 2 July 2017
The Skinner Principle . . . the seminal SP5 Case Study identifying a Homicidal Sociopathic Personality in Childhood.
Le fantôme du crime à travers ma raison y rôde . . .
(The ghost of crime prowls across my reason . . .)
Maurice Rollinat, Les Névroses (1883).
From the Publisher’s Announcement for Listen Close to Me (2011) : An eighteen-year-old governess becomes a suspect in a notorious case of serial murder and begins to harbour suspicions about the budding sociopath in her charge, a sinister nine-year-old boy [extract below]. These are tales that probe the intimate lives and crimes of unreliable narrators to prompt disturbing confidences told in voices from the sidelines that we wouldn’t normally hear.
. . . A meticulous recorder of behaviour, pitch-perfect on accents and the faultlines between class, sex and age, Eisner imbues each account with an unsettling verisimilitude that reaches its peak in “An Unreined Mind”. An 18-year-old governess struggles to comprehend her nine-year-old charge . . . on an isolated country estate . . . When a series of murders begins, the governess falls under suspicion . . . Eisner shows the workings of a highly original mind.
(Review by Cathi Unsworth in The Guardian. 14.02.2012)
‘Extraordinary writing. Mesmeric reading.
(Ambit magazine commends An Unreined Mind.)
From the Publisher’s Announcement for Listen Close to Me (2011) : An eighteen-year-old governess becomes a suspect in a notorious case of serial murder and begins to harbour suspicions about the budding sociopath in her charge, a sinister nine-year-old boy [extract below]. These are tales that probe the intimate lives and crimes of unreliable narrators to prompt disturbing confidences told in voices from the sidelines that we wouldn’t normally hear.
. . . A meticulous recorder of behaviour, pitch-perfect on accents and the faultlines between class, sex and age, Eisner imbues each account with an unsettling verisimilitude that reaches its peak in “An Unreined Mind”. An 18-year-old governess struggles to comprehend her nine-year-old charge . . . on an isolated country estate . . . When a series of murders begins, the governess falls under suspicion . . . Eisner shows the workings of a highly original mind.
(Review by Cathi Unsworth in The Guardian. 14.02.2012)‘Extraordinary writing. Mesmeric reading.
(Ambit magazine commends An Unreined Mind.)
An Unreined Mind
Seeing him again after all these years, as he was led out of the Crown courtroom after the verdict, flanked by an armed police escort, I was somehow neither surprised by his notoriety nor amazed by my own prophecy fulfilled.Because, after all, hadn’t his own governess murmured to herself with a shudder, when Skinner was no more than nine years old, ‘Well, that settles his place in history!’ as the boy perched on the wall of his reclusive animals’ graveyard and owlishly watched the hay rick burn while his squealing mice suffocated in their cages.
‘If it’s nae ane thing efter anither wi’ tha’ wickit wee daftie,’ the housekeeper squawked, wildly beckoning to me before the wind could carry the smoke and smuts to descend on her washing line.
Not that Nessie could hear those caged death throes from the haystack. She was stone deaf, and her plangent speech was oddly intonated.
‘Uch! Tha’ wretchit Pish-a-Bed cannae be dealt wi’!’ she screeched, pointing to indissoluble traces of yellowish stains on one draw-sheet.
I helped her fold the batch of single flannelette sheets the boy had brought back from boarding school; each one carried a woven name-tape:
H. L. Skinner.
Looking down at us from that distant grave-mound, the boy was now half hidden behind the iron-fenced enclosure, hands clutched upon railings, insolently sucking a sweet.
‘A’wa wi’ ye!’ Nessie screeched, and brandished a raw fist. ‘Back tae the stank ye wis spawned in! Behind bars! That’s whaur ye belong!’
Nessie Macmurtagher had a way of menacing those she scorned by bestowing snide epithets according to some ancient Borders custom. For example, Haskull Lauchlan Skinner, the bed-wetting young ‘maister’ and only son of the ‘Big Hoose’, she disparaged as ‘tha’ sleekit Wee Skullie’, and – willing-unwilling – within that household ‘Skullie’ was the name the boy answered to.
Of course, whenever criminologists cite Skinner’s name, those gruesome serial killings over three decades will always come to mind; a notoriety that will be forever associated with the Skinner Principle (SP5), the five well-known signifiers of homicidal sociopathy which even today socio-psychologists still consider to be the essential ‘quintad’ for identifying in children first-rank personality disorders predictive of future criminal behaviour.
‘Cruikit weans oot o’ thair raison!’
For Nessie Macmurtagher, such wilful children were unmistakable. And any child so labelled – in her own maledictory words – was likely to be possessed by ‘a demon soul blacker than the Earl of Hell’s waistkit.’
As you’re no doubt aware, these components of the SP5 homicidal sociopathic personality consist of Enuresis (bedwetting), Pyromania (firesetting), Zoosadism (torturing pets and small animals), Necromania (a morbid attraction to dead bodies), and Zootomy (dissection of animal cadavers).
‘Well, that settles his place in history!’ I whispered to myself for, indeed, it was I who was that hired governess or, rather, since at that time I was myself little more than twice the boy’s age, it would be truthfuller to describe the eighteen-year-old factotum who drifted into Skinner’s warped childhood at that critical moment in his life as a sort of immature Universal Aunt.
•
‘We’re straying into tiger country!’ I once heard my father burst out in agitation, furiously shaking his News Chronicle on reading of some fresh ill-fated imperialist adventure in gunboat diplomacy.For me, aged eighteen in that year of my awakening, tiger country was the young plantation of silver birches, and the crooked path that led to Skullie’s lair.
Skullie had promised to perform the office of burial in his animals’ graveyard [the dog, Sweetles, cherished pet of the lady companion to Skullie’s mother, had been discovered mysteriously poisoned] but , on my circuit of the boy’s haunts, I’d found the grave was empty save for the dead starling sealed in a film of ice.
But, now, as I approached the boy’s hideout, hooded in its cloak of snow, I heard Skullie’s raised voice, hoarse and strange, reciting a mysterious, rhythmic incantation:
‘The-more-there-is-of-mine! (Thwack!) The-less-there-is-of-yours! (Thwack!)
A muffled sound like pummelled flesh – a thrashing and flaying – followed by laboured breathing reached me from the other side of the trees.
Then the breathing ceased. I heard the crisp sound of footsteps on the snow.
I felt hidden eyes resting on me and shuddered.
The precise nature of the boy’s ghoulish hobbies was a forbidden subject between us, for I knew he regarded me as a trespasser. This tongue of ground, defined on three sides by the margins of a brook, and the farm’s water gardens and withy-beds, was the boy’s own secret territory . . . his own peculiar realm over which he ruled as autocrat and bandit chief.
Those penetrating odours from his den still assail my memory and sicken me in the throat, so unhealthy was the place. And, never mind the stench, his workbench was too low and rendered a healthy sitting position impossible, so he would tend to hunch over his microscope or laboratory scales.
But more than this, his specimen tables, soiled gauze swabs and other impedimenta checked my advance so I paused no further than the threshold.
‘It’s dead enough,’ Skullie said without looking up. His features were unaltered by any sign of emotion.
‘I broke its neck. Didn’t you hear it go?’
His shirtfront was stained, and he was bowed over the corpse of Sweetles, a set of brass knuckle-dusters on his hands. The hair on various parts of the dog’s head, trunk and legs had been shaved off, and on these spots heavy blows were being inflicted with a pounding from both fists.
In life, Sweetles had resembled a hairy caterpillar. Now the corpse suggested a hardened pupal case empty of all memories of doggy existence.
Skullie glanced up and I looked everywhere but at the face opposite me, avoiding those unfathomable eyes, even though he did not appear to be looking anywhere in particular. All the same, I drew back from those eyes, as if I were about to push open the door to a stranger’s room and feared what I’d find there.
‘Maybe it’s not conclusive proof,’ he drawled, in imitation of his father’s suave barristerial address, ‘but it’s a . . .’
‘. . . helluva lot more than a hazardous guess.’
The fact that I’d remembered word-for-word this catchphrase of the major’s I think momentarily shook him.
‘It doesn’t keep the same colour for ten minutes together,’ he complained, pointing to the welts and contusions on Sweetles’ exposed pink flesh.
‘I dare say you are right,’ I said with a break in my voice. I’m not an imaginative person, nor am I highly strung, but at that moment I felt his words presaged the darkness of a calamity. I swallowed down my anger as best as I could. ‘Keep your temper,’ Skullie warned, as though he’d taken me for a scullery-maid come to clean his dissecting-room.
He was wearing a Norfolk jacket cut in a novel fashion to afford more pockets. From one of these he withdrew an open cut-throat razor and commenced to slice an upheld sheet of paper into strips to demonstrate the keenness of the blade.
His scowl gave place to a grin or, at least, an expression that passed for one.
‘An old stage dodge,’ he laughed, and pressed the ball of his thumb into the blade. ‘See? As blunt as a hammer. Our new English master showed us the trick for The Merchant of Venice. All you need is Nessie’s rice paper.’
Nothing seemed difficult to that strong-willed boy; it was as though he’d donated his emotions to someone else in exchange for a bag of sweets.
As I turned away, I saw out of the tail of my eye that he had stooped again to his grisly task and, above the stripped cadaver, was now poised a highly polished wooden truncheon.
‘My uncle was a Special Constable in the General Strike,’ the boy smiled with grim zest. ‘He cracked not a few heads in his time.’
I had seen him assume that blank zombie-like appearance, and observed his bloodless disregard for sentiment, some months earlier at half-term.
Those vague leaden eyes had worn the same absorbed expression when studying the indwelling properties of crystalline structures in his microscope, or when I had surprised him in an experiment with a tin of Epsom Salts, feeding a little gobbet of pork fat on the end of a fishing line to a family of ducks until the incontinent flock was threaded together like beads on a string.
And, once, when I’d accompanied Skullie on an outing to a museum of taxidermy, those same reflective eyes had taken a fascinated interest, to an unnatural degree, in a bird with two heads. I had thought then that the freakish bird was like some malign projection of the boy’s state of mind.
However, the weeks of ever-shortening days had ended, I thought, and, mercifully, there’d be no alternative to this devilment but the lad’s return to school.
•
Then the poisoned pen letters started to arrive again.
Dora had given a little half-pitying, half-contemptuous jerk of the head when she’d shown me this second letter the previous August:
Dora had given a little half-pitying, half-contemptuous jerk of the head when she’d shown me this second letter the previous August:
•
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)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
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