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 

In Two Minds: Poe’s Palimpsestic Wordplay.

I was flattered recently when my Russian correspondent, an eminent authority on Edgar Allan Poe, consulted me on a thorny textual question of interpretation:

‘Can you explain the meaning of the word “grosser” in the final phrase of Poe’s The Man of the Crowd? “The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the Hortulus Animæ, and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen.’ ” Does it mean simply bigger or thicker or worse or viler?’

Having consulted the authorities, I wrote: ‘I agree with the Poe commentator’ (Columbia University, New York) who writes on the nature of evil examined in The Man in the Crowd thus: 

‘In its wicked aspect, then, the heart of the world (for it is odd to think that the world has more than one heart - a worst, a better, etc.) is a bigger, fatter book than a devotional primer intended to instruct gentle readers in the cultivation of character (and gardens). God has mercifully arranged it so that the bigger book is illegible.’

In short, I wrote, to my Russian correspondent, ‘In this context, grosser DOES NOT mean eviller or more disgusting but refers to the greater cubic volume of the worst heart of the world if imagined as a book and compared with the Hortulus Animæ. ( The Little Garden of the Soul being a slenderer book concerning the cultivation of morals.)’

But a day later I had second thoughts. Forty years before Poe, in 1802, Walter Scott writes in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border:

 ‘But the Peris [fairies] hover in the balmy clouds, live in the colours of the rainbow, and as the exquisite purity of their nature rejects all nourishment grosser than the odours of flowers, they subsist by inhaling the fragrance of the jessamine and rose.’ 

It seems to me, Scott uses GROSSER to suggest that if the quiddity of a thing is somehow denser than the thing it resembles it is a corrupt version of that thing. So, to the Peris, the scent of wood sap would be grosser, even if it is actually pleasant to us.

So, after all, I thought, perhaps the Russian interpretation was almost correct. The worst heart in the world, regarded as a book, is a corrupt version of a book of Devotional Readings to Cultivate the Soul. But it does not mean that Poe has made a mistake and regarded the Hortulus Animae as a disgusting book. Poe seems to be saying that the worst heart of the world is a profaner version of the sacred Hortulus Animae.

Yet still I was unsatisfied with this reasoning, and felt compelled to examine the question in greater detail:

IMPORTANT NOTE AS TO COMPARISON OF MEANINGS IN EARLY 19TH CENTURY ENGLISH.
GROSSER = MORE INTENSE IN ITS EFFECT (OR CONCENTRATED IN ITS EFFECT).
GROSS WEIGHT = COMPLETE, INCLUSIVE WEIGHT.

The example I gave from Walter Scott demonstrates a writer can compare VERY REFINED DEGREES of grossness, which if greater, induce disgust.

SCOTT 1802 : Nourishment grosser than the odours of flowers.
[ So the lovely smell of moss or ferns is grosser or MORE INTENSE IN ITS EFFECT; therefore disgusting, IN RELATIVE TERMS. ]
POE 1840 : The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the spiritually moral book cited.
[ So the worst heart in the world is a book MORE INTENSE IN ITS EFFECT than this spiritually moral book. ]

A gross perfume could be described as TOO HIGHLY CONCENTRATED and TOO INTENSE. A gross spiritual tract is the gross (inclusive, complete) weight of thought and meditation on the soul. A grosser book is MORE INTENSE IN ITS EFFECT, so disgusting, IN RELATIVE TERMS.

Hence:

The worst heart of the world is a book more intense in its effect than the Hortulus Animae, and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that er lasst sich nicht lesen. [ The book/person does not permit itself/himself to be read. ]

My dissatisfaction with these unresolved niceties led me to approach Columbia University’s Poe specialist for a final ruling; an approach that prompted this subtle commentary: 

‘The English in use in Poe’s day, and Poe’s use, carries all the senses of grosser as denser, bigger, more massive.  “Fat” carries all of that for contemporary American English native speakers (it's an idiomatic expression over here, and I was giving a talk to US English speakers).  I’d be concerned about using “more intense in its effect” as the translation guideline for Poe’s “grosser.” 

‘The book is even bigger than standard guides for the cultivation of virtue.  Poe thinks that this will be necessarily true.  The thought is that a catalog of the abuses of good in human life grows more quickly than the catalog of goods, because each new good produced opens indefinitely many opportunities for its own misuse.  I have no idea how to translate THAT image into a claim about the book of the bad heart having AN effect.  It is the dynamic growth of that book that makes it impossible to complete the catalog of evils, and the dynamic growth of that book that makes it impossible to read.  Flatly—a book that rewrites itself and enlarges itself every time human ingenuity opens a new kind of good in human life cannot be read in part because it cannot ever be a completed book.  It is as though it was an organism rather than a text (which is part of why we get the wrong article in the German phrase). [This remark refers to er, relating to a man, in comparison with es, relating to a thing.]

‘Poe's theological background came from serious engagement with the sermons of Jonathan Edwards and a kind of atmospheric Eastern Seaboard US Calvinism more generally.

‘So I'd go with “denser” rather than “more intense in its effect”—that gets you closer to the sense that a single good can be abused in indefinitely many ways, and that each new leaf in the good book introduces the possibility of MANY new leaves in the bad.’

Well, I am truly grateful to – and humbled by – my correspondents’ erudition, yet feel that overall I have observed what I would call the ‘Palimpsestic effect’ whereby one meaning in a later century over-writes the meaning in an earlier.  Take the word, ‘egregious’, and consider how it has shifted from ‘outstandingly good’ to ‘outstandingly wicked’ and now it’s shifting back again, if I am not mistaken.

Last word. Here is my great-uncle’s illustration to Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. 

A tailpiece, you might say, to The Facts in the Case of Poe’s Palimpsestic Wordplay.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

 

Freakout.

I’m just completing Sybille Bedford’s thoughtful biography of Aldous Huxley (volume two) in which she moralises on the question of Huxley’s advocacy of mescalin and other mind-rinsing psychedelic drugs.

Would it — and should it — have occurred to him that the contents of The Doors of Perception might trickle within the reaches of the half-baked, the under-educated, the unstable and indeed the pre-experienced young.

The last words Aldous Huxley wrote on his writing tablet were some hours before his death:
 

LSD – Try it

intermuscular

  100 mm*

 

*100 micrograms (μg)

He died peacefully with the doctor observing ‘a marked beneficial effect’ from two injections of LSD two hours apart. 

Well, Aldous Huxley without question belonged to the world’s intellectual elite and his own quest for self-transcendence, sometimes induced by psychedelic drugs under medical supervision, may be seen as a deliberately considered extension of the researches that support his vast corpus of writings on the philosophical, cultural, sociological and aesthetic concerns of the age. BUT, Ms Bedford makes clear her own reservations as to his moral soundness when assuming the responsibilities of an influential sage :

The extent to which his writings, and example, can be held to be causative factors in today’s drug scene is difficult, perhaps impossible to tell.

I agree. Yet, though she is certainly correct in pointing out the dangers that await the pre-experienced young when they dabble in psychedelics, I do not to this day regret the fecklessness — nor, indeed, the reckless half-bakedness — of my own youthful experiences of LSD, as I explain in my introduction to Sister Morphine:

The lyric, ‘Tell me, Sister Morphine, how long have I been lying here?’ by Marianne Faithfull, gave me the title of my book and Marianne, whose troubled life as a registered heroin addict is well documented (and whom I knew briefly when we were very young), inspired one of my case histories in which I trace the psychosis of a naïve young woman tempted to experience the hallucinatory visions induced by addictive drugs. In this case the drug is LSD; the place is the Swinging London of the Sixties ... and the temptress is the narrator’s elder twin sister.

‘ “Tonite let’s make love in London,” ’ Victoria quoted, speech slurred, on my return that evening. Those liquid eyes were again distilled to needlepoint droplets of narcosis, I noticed, and her flesh lacked skin tone. 
    Her mouth, I could see, was dry, with white flecks of spittle in the corners.
    Three years before, when I was fifteen, our mother had been shocked when she learned I had accompanied Victoria (at Vix’s insistence) to hear Ginsburg recite at the Royal Albert Hall. (‘Infantile scatology,’ was Mother’s verdict.)
    Now in the darkened drawing room Victoria beckoned to me and extended her palm.
    She held a small cube wrapped in metal foil.
    ‘A sugar lump to gild the pill,’ she said tenderly.
    I recoiled but she seized my arm and pressed the object firmly into my hand.
    ‘Know what this is?’
    ‘Haven’t the faintest,’ I whispered fearfully. But I knew.
    ‘A tab. A dot. For dropping acid, silly,’ she said.
    She unwrapped the cube and placed it on my tongue. I tried to spit it out but she sealed my lips with her fingertips. Involuntarily I swallowed.
    ‘Tune in, dearest heart,’ she soothed, ‘turn on. I will be your guide.’
    A great languor stole over me.
    Victoria took my hand in her hot, dry clasp and we began to dance.
    She led. I followed.
    (When I was no more than five years old she told me I must call her The Miss Victoria. Whether I cared for the fact or not, she asserted, I as the younger daughter was destined indefinitely to be merely a Miss. Even then, please understand, she had conferred on me a subordinate title.)
    Marianne began to sing from the radiogram: ‘I always needed you to look out for me ... oh, baby ...’
    At first, the rubberiness of my gums from the anaesthesia I found frightening.
    Soon, however, I began to sink into an hallucinatory reverie.
    It is true that during those psychedelic hours with Victoria I learned the meaning of Ginsberg’s ‘Blake-lit Mohammedan angels’ – because, for two eternities more ancient than Chaos, I stared at a milliard of those lucent homunculi in the reticular texture of the drawing room wallpaper. Yet ... I also stared into that purgatoried place where every monster has its own multitudes.
    By looking through the fissures of the old house, I seemed to see not only the stars but to penetrate upper chambers I had never fully explored.
    At an unknown hour I found myself floating some distance above Victoria’s bed gazing into upcast and darkly oracular eyes to contemplate a voluptuary pythoness wearing my face whose every sensuous uncoiling convulsion was suspended in an aphrodisiac prolongation I, also, shared.
    Over her seraphic nakedness a swarm of furry bees hovered which slowly resolved itself into a shock of tightly crinkled hair ... the frizzy Afro hair of ...
    Toby!
    Toby lay across her – a supersexual being of extraordinary radiance and beauty hewn from an heroic age.
    Colours intensified. Light diffracted. Objects distorted and shrank.
    I sensed the breath of a Cosmic Wind.
    Somehow, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the big wardrobe seemed to acquire an enormous significance.
    Time warped.  Joss sticks were lit.
    As from the edge of a great divide I observed a distant simulacrum of my being receive the tributes of the flesh ...  he-she and he-I and I-she, all interconnected by a glowing force field which seemed to strike sparks as lips touched, and melded into a totality of incorporeal sensation.
    The bed had dematerialised, as had those affirmers of mortality, our teeth and gums.
    I learned too late all trips are braved sans gritted jaw.
    The foundations of the house had dissolved into the infinite void and our flesh seemed to be tingling with electric static as we brushed the dark velvet of deep space ... a friction which seemed to transmute that insubstantial velvet into aurorean ripples of charged silk, billowing in waves, stimulating our senses with the glancing touch of a thousand quickening fingers, until we knew ourselves as one flesh, a single skin, slick with sweat, yearning like a fierce rolling tide to break together on a nearing shore.
    Then the wave receded and – beached – we lay together, struggling for breath as though we had just swum the infernal regions’ Hellespont.
    By unspoken agreement we avoided each other’s eyes, and before our temporal lives fully reasserted themselves, I remember, we three were next sitting cross-legged  – Victoria, Toby and I – watching in wonder the slow-motion, frame-by-frame, glittering parabola of a silver snuffbox we pitched from hand to hand.
    Drug-induced synaesthesia I mused, was like a problem in grammar, where the active and the passive voices become confused and there is a difficulty in distinguishing the moment of action from the resultant state and no one knows whether they are the object of the action or the subject performing it.
    A new word for my lexicon I learned that night was ‘freakout’.
    ‘Here, take it.’
    I groaned in protest. Toby stared down at me with eyes like live coals.
    ‘Fifty milligrams of Thorazine,’ Toby persisted, ‘it’ll bring her down.’
    His words cooled me better than cold water.
    ‘Precious, my poor precious,’ Victoria cooed, smoothing my brow.
    I have to tell you that, even adrift in a drug-induced nirvana, the deepest love can turn to deadliest hatred. I confess to you now that the not-so-beatific emotion I brought back from the Other Side was a revived green-eyed envy towards my elder sister, Victoria ... I, the last born, was ever mamma’s darling; she was daddy’s.

 ●

Flashback. The Wind of Time.

Note (November 9 2015): The weather is particularly mild just now and the fragrance last night of an Elaeagnus shrub clinging to a bank above the sea reminded me of an unnameable phenomenon I believe unremarked by trippers returning from their voyage to Inner Space . . . I speak of the Wind of Time. Certainly, LSD at its most revelatory reveals a dimension where a (Cosmic?) Wind, a rushing in the ears, is experienced expressive of Time’s racing passage . . . the flow of the strongly scented breath of the Elaeagnus flowers last night revived a memory and for a moment the experience was relived . . . and again the involuntary numbing of gums and teeth (sans gritted jaw).

 

●

 

Appended January 30 2025.

Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull (29 December 1946 to 30 January 2025) 

May our earnest solemn plea be that your restless inspiriting spirit may now find rest and revelation.

 

  

●

My principal theme in ‘Sister Morphine’ is the sheer unpredictability of women’s behaviour when conditioned by prescription drugs. For this suite of interconnected women’s narratives I have refashioned case histories as fictions to delineate the effects of drug administrations on clients observed in psychiatric nursing and psychotherapy ... particularly,  the more bizarre asocial psychoses – and sometimes criminal behaviour – made manifest by the multifaceted side effects of prescription drugs such as antidepressants, tranquilizers and mood stabilizers.

In ‘Sister Morphine’, fifteen women – Felícia, Charlotte, Zoë, Elenore, Eveline, Miriam, Grete, Esther, Marianne, Irina, Mary, Elspeth, Theresa, Isolde and Roberta – will unveil their psychoses to you ... but not until the last page do they unlock the unsuspected secret that unites their destinies.

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.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, for extracts
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

Adamantine Madame. Enamelled Emma.

My last post raises the question of Nobel prize-winners with feet of clay boosted to stand on the adamantine shoulders of giants. http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/pinterland-hogs-crabs-parnassus-and.html

Adamantine. 

Now that descriptor, I confess, is suggested by a remark made by novelist and Francophile Julian Barnes at the Hay Festival Cartagena de Indias last month, reminding us of his ever-intensifying veneration for Flaubert.

For myself, I continue to read him, and I find that I do read the books differently, still. I go back the most often to Madame Bovary, and I still find, in its adamantine perfection, that there are new things to discover, things I had not noticed before.

A remark which makes me wonder whether Julian Barnes is aware of the subtle workings of his subconscious, which have led him to well-nigh an élégance palindromique in his choice of adjective.

Indeed, an adamantine Madame.

The fact that this palindromic effect is subliminally perceived at the threshold of our awareness might be taken as further evidence, should we need it, of the magic Flaubert continues to exert on us each time we return to him.

I was reminded of an interview conducted by novelist Megan Taylor in 2009, where my own veneration for Madame Bovary is given full rein http://www.megantaylor.info/2009/02/an-interview-with-catherine-eisner/:

Also I am re-reading ‘Madame Bovary’ in the first (and brilliant) English Edition translated by Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor ( I have an original copy; it cost me £250 even twenty-five years ago!). How’s this for an image from Flaubert: ‘The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace …’ However, I suspect Flaubert may have been chiding the indolent Emma for neglecting to have her chimney swept!

Perhaps I should have mentioned, too, those sticky unwashed cider glasses...

Some flies on the table were crawling up the glasses that had been used, and buzzing as they drowned themselves in the dregs of the cider. The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace, and touched with blue the cold cinders. Between the window and the hearth Emma was sewing; she wore no fichu; he could see small drops of perspiration on her bare shoulders.

Of course, Julian Barnes has famously remarked that the colour of Emma’s eyes is puzzlingly changeable throughout the novel.

Seen thus closely, her eyes looked to him enlarged, especially when, on rousing, she opened and shut them rapidly many times; black in shade on waking, dark blue in broad daylight, they were like layers of different colours, and darker in the background, grew paler towards the surface of the enamel.

... la surface de l’émail.

Yes, I can see the character of Emma there in her eyes. Her superficiality. Enamelled Emma.

That the DNA of Madame Bovary remains still to be unthreaded is the measure of the adamantine integrity of this complex masterpiece. That is why we should be very cautious indeed as to whom, in any age, we should single out to wear the laurel crown for honour as supreme Man (or Woman) of Letters... Flaubert set the bar so high, at such a rarefied altitude, that none but authentic titans can command a pedestal worthy of comparison.   

Pinterland. Hogs. Crabs. Parnassus. And a paucity of creative energy.

Let me be quite clear. I consider Harold Pinter a misogynistic writer who has never written a gender-affirming dramatic part for a woman (unless the part has been conceived by another more sensitive writer in the course of one of his adaptations for the screen, e.g. works by Penelope Mortimer, Robin Maugham, L.P. Hartley, et al). In my own view, Pinter positively relishes victimhood, particularly when women are on the receiving end. I also consider much of his Mockney vernacular to be positively clunky and frequently unconvincing, with speeches more often than not shaped for an actor’s voice (his) rather than driven by the authentic character of the East End.

As the Swedish Academy, in its Nobel citation, commented, Pinter, the chronicler of random acts of verbal and physical violence, is a writer who ‘uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.’  This is the familiar Pinterland we recognize, with invariably a forced entry that is more thuggish-for-thuggishness’s-sake than redemptory or cathartic art. In short, the verbal menace of the rapper has been validated.

Is such nihilistic rapping nourishing to mind and spirit? I remain unconvinced. As well ask Tarantino.

But it is not this particular aspect of his writings that has triggered this rather sour digression of mine. My point in raising a question mark over Pinter’s stagecraft is to identify a seeming dullness and dreary sameness in the very building blocks of the constructions he has fashioned as an actor/playwright.

I have no doubt that somewhere in that vast archive of his, maintained by his literary estate, he is to be found on record defending a Pinteresque theory that grounded speech and action require no more for their emergence than the promptings of a minimalist stage set of one glass of water or the contents of a bureau drawer. Well and good, as writerly theories go, until you note the striking similarity between the opening scenes of A Night Out (1959) and The Homecoming (1964).

Why should this be worthy of our notice, you might ask. Isn’t this quibbling of no account? I don’t think so.  I think the dramaturgical repetitiousness I intend to expose here actually indicates a paucity of creative energy (see my observations on Elizabeth Bishop, in this regard http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/catechisms-and-cliche-fatuous-minds.html), and this deficit may also be observed in Pinter’s characterization of women.

I am talking here about LAY FIGURES and the delimited OUTER THRESHOLDS of an artist’s imagination. You must judge for yourself whether there are, rather obviously, lay figures in the following plays, written five years apart, and whether these figures are merely manipulated to forms that come, in the end, to resemble first year students’ extemporary acting exercises, of the kind favoured by their teachers, which depend on the suggestibility of minimal props composed of humdrum domestic objects.

‘Have you seen my tie? Where’s my tie?’ A Night Out 1959. (5 seconds into opening act, a search for necktie.)

‘What have you done with the scissors? Where’s the scissors?’ The Homecoming 1964 (5 seconds into opening act, a search through drawers.)

I believe the playwright has nodded at these moments, like a liar who lacks the invention to perpetrate a new lie so falls back on an old one, daring to risk exposure*. 

(We should also observe that in these two instances the Rule of Chekhov’s Gun, the rule of dramatic foreshadowing, is broken. ‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.’)

An intimate correspondent of mine shares my doubts as to Pinter’s stagecraft. Pinter’s claim to stylistic uniqueness, my correspondent maintains, is debatable.  The circularity of his riffs of looping, regrouping repetitious speech (in German theatre, such declamations are called arias) find its origin, my correspondent believes, in an earlier exponent, the popular dramatist and novelist, Patrick Hamilton.

Compare Pinter’s The Homecoming (1964) with Hamilton’s Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953). If you don’t concede there’s a certain je-ne-sais-quoi about their mannerisms that summons up a prickly sense of déjà vu, then at least admit that Pinter has strayed out of his East End manor on to Hamilton’s turf.

‘You and I were made for each other ...’  he had said, either breathlessly or passionately (she could not tell which) after a protracted kiss ...
            ‘In what way?’ she had then tried. ‘Tell me ...’
            ‘In every way,’ he had said. ‘You must know. I mean the whole hog.’
            [She] had been (and still was) mystified by the exact nature of [his] Whole Hog, which, for some weeks now, had been appearing in his conversation.
            How whole was this puzzlingly allegorical animal? ...
            And so she had then braced herself to force [him] to give a much clearer picture of his own conception of his own Hog.
            ‘When you say “whole” hog,’ she had said, ‘what do you mean, exactly?’

Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse

LENNY (to TEDDY): ... And here he is upstairs with your wife for two hours and hasn’t gone the whole hog. ... What do you make of it, Joey? You satisfied? Don’t tell me you’re satisfied without going the whole hog?
JOEY: I’ve been the whole hog plenty of times. Sometimes ... you can be happy ... and not go the whole hog. Now and again ... you can be happy ... without going any hog.
TEDDY: He had her up there for two hours and he didn’t go the whole hog.

The Homecoming

I summon to the witness stand two acute observers on the deceptions of art to anatomize further, with greater skill than my own, the inauthenticity of the creative impulse. 

Here they strip the bones off two carcasses.

First up, Robert Graves, the visionary poet, attempts to demystify the quiddative conundrum of good art and bad art when defining the distinction between good poetry and fake poetry. 

‘When is a fake not a fake?’ Graves asks.
 

Answer: ‘When the lapse of time has obscured the original sources ... and when the faker is so competent ... that even the incorruptible porter at Parnassus winks and says “Pass, friend!” This sort of hermit-crab, secure in stolen armour, becomes a very terror among simple whelks.’

Next up, Aldous Huxley: ‘There are slightly reckless good poets, and there are good poets who, at times, are extremely reckless...’ He then cites the conclusion of Yeats’s Byzantium to illustrate the ‘recklessness’ of his proposition: ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’

From which we can conclude that intoxication induced by language can leave us with a headache and, in the cold light of dawn, we must be alert to the duplicity of hermit crabs in stolen armour whose secondhand speeches will ultimately be found fitting only for declamation from the lower slopes of Parnassus.

* Pinter-watchers should also note the occurrence of that actor’s prop, the glass of water, reappearing in The Homecoming (1964), having rematerialised from the set of The Servant (1963) whose screenplay is by Harold Pinter, adapted from 1948 novella by Robin Maugham. The glass ot water has an even earlier appearance in The Dumb Waiter (1957).