Thought Police: A Message from the Secret Cellars of the Missing.

It is with a sense of profound relief that, after a hiatus of several decades due to irresolvable public disclosure constraints, I can report that my contribution to that sub-genre of confessional writings termed Lazarine Literature* – otherwise known as prison literature – is now complete.  Its title?  A Room to the End of Fall. 

 

A Room to the End of Fall.

When my notice heralding the narrative of novelist Theresa Ollivante’s disappearance was first published (see the chapter, Thought Police, page 414 of Sister Morphine published by Salt in 2008) ...
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html 
... the announcement concluded that:

‘... when, even the Press have so far failed to uncover clues to solve the mystery of her disappearance, tantalisingly, the publication of a full account of her astonishing story must be delayed until the next edition of this work [Sister Morphine].’
            This earlier commentary observed that, frustratingly, the occasion of Theresa’s disappearance, corroborated by a number of witnesses, had been more closely documented and reported more faithfully than the bizarre circumstances of her discovery.
            In Thought Police there is a sketch of the scene outside Theresa’s city apartment house, the day before her disappearance, that gave rise to the narrative’s working title. A police patrol car halts beside her as she stands immobile in an unseasonal flurry of snow, dressed in a thin housecoat, staring fixedly at a drain cover where the snowfall had melted in a perfect dish-shaped concavity.
            The cops are friendly and polite.
            They had merely put to her one question: ‘Something on your mind, maybe?’
           ‘No. It’s nothing,’ she answers dryly with a false smile. ‘Unless, perhaps, you’re a deputation from the Thought Police.’
            A day later she vanishes without a trace to reemerge half a decade later.
            In Thought Police in 2008 there are quoted a few key passages from her diary into which she had copied extracts from Chekhov’s sinister cautionary tale, The Bet, whose unnamed young hero has himself incarcerated voluntarily for fifteen years in a well-stocked library – in solitary confinement – to win a bet of two million roubles wagered by a banker.
            ‘The prisoner (writes Theresa), in four years, amazingly, reads over six hundred volumes and when, after fifteen years of confinement in which he imbibes the world’s classics, he emerges into daylight, his appearance is almost spectral. His face is yellow, his cheeks are hollow, his hair is streaked with silver, and no one can believe that he is only forty! He is a skeleton with the skin drawn tight over his bones and long matted curls like ... like, well, like my own, if I’m honest. But what does the prisoner declare upon his release that I would not myself assert were I to meet that hateful unconscionable banker!?
            ‘ “Your books have given me wisdom. All man’s unresting thought from the ages is compressed into the small compass of my brain. I know that I am wiser than all of you. And I despise your books, as I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage ... as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor ...” ’

            Theresa evidently empathised strongly with Chekhov’s disillusioned bookish captive, but she herself denied at the time a Freudo-Marxist view of alienation to explain her own anomie and other related neurotica. Her attempt at a conclusive account of her ordeal of abduction and imprisonment and of her remarkable escape are now compressed within the quire of pages that contains her narrative, A Room to the End of Fall.
            But, despite her valiant efforts, she hesitantly draws our attention to the paradox that arises from her attempts to synthesize the estimated two million words she wrote in those years of isolation, a period not dissimilar to the length of incarceration suffered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp during WWII by the son of the Norwegian polar explorer Nansen.
            The published diary of Nansen fils runs to 600 pages yet his bulky edited volume, recording in detail those years of daily witness to unimaginable horrors, amounts to only one-third of the original manuscript.
            Like the wartime diarist, Theresa has found the task of distillation is more time consuming than the task of composition. As she says, despairingly, ‘It’s as though I have all the concordances to the Bible and Shakespeare but not the Works themselves.’

Secret cellars: sinister cases of abduction and imprisonment.

Since those decades-long, repeated draftings of A Room to the End of Fall (there is even a variant screenplay, The Chute), three notorious cases of abduction and imprisonment of young women have come to light. A schoolgirl, abducted aged 10 in 1998, and imprisoned in a secret cellar for more than eight years, until her escape in 2006. The case of an 18-year-old daughter, held prisoner by her father in a locked windowless dungeon in the basement area of her family home, and emerging to freedom in 2008 after 24 years of captivity. And as recently as May this year, the escape from captivity of three kidnapped women held prisoner for up to decade or more in complete subjugation and restraint only yards from the freedom of a suburban American street. 
            The prevalence of this crime is explored by the Austrian Nobel-prize-winner, Elfriede Jelinek**, in her searing essay of 2008, Im Verlassenen (The Forsaken Place), in which she analyses the phallocentric base motives that drive the abductors, while at the same time virulently indicting her fellow countrymen, ‘Austria is a small world in which the greater one holds its rehearsals.’
            In essence, her argument is an attack on the droit de seigneur assumed by the patriarchal male, and the notion of rights of possession, to the extent of an immurement of one’s love-object in an oubliette with no bars between which the abductee can glimpse the sky. ‘No bars, no iron rods exist here. It isn’t even possible to see through something, through which one could take a look, to see no world.’
            ‘Keine Stäbe, keine Gitterstäbe hier vorhanden. Es ist also nicht einmal möglich, zwischen etwas, durch das man hindurchschauen kann, auch keine Welt zu sehen.’ 
            The irony here, of course, is Jelinek’s conscious re-echoing of Rilke’s The Panther:

... it can take in nothing more.

He feels as though a thousand bars existed,

and no more world beyond them than before.

            Irony? Well, I’ve always considered it a supreme paradox that this cultivator of heightened sensibilities should, upon fathering a daughter, have given up the infant to her grandparents to dedicate himself to the pursuit of his art ... in other words, leaving the child in a ‘forsaken place’, the oubliette of the patriarchal heart. 
            Crocodile tears.

Elfriede Jelinek                                        Horst Bienek

The Abduction of a Bluestocking by a Bluebeard?

Well, here is an opportunity to categorically state that the sinister ‘forsaken place’ of A Room to the End of Fall is not the setting for the abduction of a bluestocking by a Bluebeard ... however, Theresa Ollivante’s ‘forsaken place’, like the isolation cell of protagonists in certain German folkloric precursors – Cellar-boy Kaspar Hauser, Rumpelstilzchen, Rapunzel, et al. – is, nevertheless, so fiendishly sealed off from humanity that my captive is doomed, as Chekhov puts it, to spend the years of ‘... captivity under the strictest supervision ... [the captive] should not be free to cross the threshold ... to see human beings, to hear the human voice, or to receive letters and newspapers.’

            Only Germans, I may add, in contrast to a Russian’s choice of a library for incarceration, have the apt maxim for such furtive concealment.

Eine Leiche im Keller haben.

(To have a corpse in the basement.)

            For, as Chekhov measuredly remarks, in The Bet in 1888 ...

The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral, but if

I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life,

I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

 *As I remarked in an earlier post, a kinsman of mine, Horst Bienek (1930-1990), is author of Die Zelle (The Cell, 1968), which is derives from his own imprisonment by the Soviets and relates a prisoner’s struggle for mental and physical survival in the face of solitary confinement, sickness, torture, and an uncertain fate.  A first person narrative and a classic of prison literature, Die Zelle uses stream of consciousness to agonizing effect. The truly excellent English translation is by Ursula Mahlendorf, who describes the work as an example of Lazarine Literature, a term attributed to French poet, Jean Cayrol, interned in Gusen concentation camp in 1943. The figure of Lazarus appears many times in Cayrol's work. Having escaped death himself, Cayrol was fascinated and inspired by the story of Lazarus who returns from the dead.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/immured-mustard-field-found.html 

**It is indeed curious, to me at least, that Jelinek’s English publisher (Serpent’s Tail) was my own, insofar as it published one of my earliest works of fiction, The Cheated Eye (1998). 

●

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

Slaves to Seconal: Droguée Antonia/Anthony and the Fourth Man

How extraordinary to read long after the publication of my In Search of the Fourth Man (Ambit 193, 2008) that, according to Brigid Brophy, Anthony Blunt’s ‘... hospitality was multifarious but his own consumption [of alcohol when dining with him was] nil.’ 

Agreed, Blunt’s tastes were ‘austere’, as Brophy observes, but not in the matter of alcohol. Even when granted hindsight of Blunt’s public exposure as a Soviet spy (1979), Brophy misreads certain other character traits when she writes in 1986: ‘He spoke in a charming upper-class drawl that was neither an affectation nor quite an Edwardian relic, and he seemed forever on the verge of utter exhaustion.’

‘The wine is drawn, it must be drunk.’

‘Utter exhaustion?’ No wonder, when you consider that Blunt’s decades-long dependence on barbiturates (Seconal) was complicated by his alcoholism. Seconal can cause daytime drowsiness but this effect invariably worsens when the drug is taken with alcohol. Blunt would start drinking at 11 o’clock in the morning, and his alcoholism almost certainly inhibited the anaesthetic activity of his brain’s barbiturate receptor sites. These co-existing counteractions would have significantly increased the anxiety neurosis that his chronic alcohol ingestion sustained, a conflict that was manifested in the jaded, unrousable manner I describe as evident when meeting him at the Courtauld Institute.

    I heard the voice – a mellifluous modulated drawl ...  I observed Sir Anthony surreptitiously beneath lowered lashes while I pretended to examine a small maquette on his desk, an ill-carved figure he evidently used as a paperweight among his card index boxes.
    ‘One can see with half an eye it’s a fake,’ were Blunt’s first words.   
    In his own eyes, I thought, there is nothing written he allows you to read.
    They were eyes of palest Cambridge blue, set in the face, I assumed, of a jaded critic nothing could rouse.
    There were wine bottles on the table and he poured me a glass ... 
    Blunt took a sip of wine and his nose wrinkled. That acidic downcast mouth reminded me of a turbot with a lemon slice in it.
    ‘The wine is drawn, it must be drunk,’ he observed sorrowfully.      
    We were drinking a four-year-old Château Mouton Rothschild and it tasted of rotten mushrooms. The label of naked dancing Bacchantes, I later learned, was designed by a noted Surrealist painter and sculptress, which was distinctly odd since Blunt’s biographer tells us that he abhorred le Surréalisme (or ‘Superrealism’, as he referred to it) and, besides, that Bordeaux we drank that night was one of the worst vintages of the last two centuries.

As you’re no doubt aware, Brigid Brophy was married to Sir Michael Levey, Director of the National Gallery in London, so her insights into the intimate domestic arrangements of Anthony Blunt’s top floor flat at the Courtauld Institute in Portman Square are to be relished for their candour. ‘Whenever we went there, the evening was tattered by brief incursions of young men introduced by first name only, who might have been sailors or might of been students of Poussin or were very likely both.’

What then, drove Brigid Antonia Brophy to identify so completely with her host of those tattered evenings as to write a gender-bending satire in which the Anthony she knew became the Antonia of her sapphic alter ego? Answer: ‘What my imagination did, when it picked him up by the scruff of his neck, was change his sex and make him the headmistress of a finishing school for girls. Perhaps it was the hell he had imagined for himself.’

The Two Antonias.

Were any evidence needed that Brigid Brophy, that remarkable Firbankian pastichiste, was possessed of a wit of outshining intellectual brilliancy then the following passage from her girls’ school fantasia, The Finishing Touch (1963), set on the Riviera, would bear out the claim:

    Twenty-six heads bent over the school’s die-stamped paper …  At least thirteen tongue tips protruded in concentration.
     Scurrying pens on the paper made a noise like cicadas.
     Outside, as the sun rose to zenith, cicadas made a noise like scurrying pens.

Just think. Ten years earlier, aged twenty-four, she was writing schoolgirl adventure fiction in my sister’s Collins Magazine for Boys & Girls, a feat of recall that seemingly allows me to pluck ephemera out of the air yet is explained by our crammed family attic, where our childhood favourite reads still remain stowed. 

Quite by chance, a yellowed Collins Annual fell open the other day at the first page of Brophy’s Story of an Old Master and a Very Old Umbrella. It is a strangely resonant text that presents us with an unusual opportunity to observe, in a seemingly innocent text for children, nascent epigrammatic locutions stirring in those transgressive preoccupations that were to shape her idiosyncratic mature prose. The gallery she describes in the yarn, by the way, is pretty certainly the National.

     ‘But it can’t possible rain to-day,’ protested the boy, looking up at the blue sky.
     ‘Aunt Sarah,’ explained his sister, ‘is an alarmist. She probably sees our quiet visit to the gallery as a reckless adventure fraught with perils.’
     ‘I wish it were,’ her brother said gloomily. Then his spirits seemed to brighten. ‘Perhaps it will be,’ he added, and used the umbrella to hail the ’bus.

I shall not spoil the fun for those coming fresh to Brophy’s Bluntian satire, but, as she wrote in her review of Myra Breckinridge, ‘The trans-sex fantasy explodes, I suspect, at a level even deeper than the one from which it liberates the homosexual imprisoned in every heterosexual and also, of course, the heterosexual in every homosexual ...’

Not that these insights would necessarily have conditioned my own perceptions of Blunt’s character, which have been mediated latterly through my studies of graphology; studies that have revealed in his handwriting a hunted, haunted, inherently secretive man whose every pen stroke appears to express the intense anxiety and caution underlying his warped purpose.

So how close was Brophy to the truth of Blunt’s character in 1963, sixteen years before the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures was publicly exposed as a Soviet spy reporting to his masters in the Soviet Intelligence service, the NKVD? Let us, then, examine common features of resemblance in The Finishing Touch where the traits of francophone headmistress Antonia Mount and francophone institute director Anthony Blunt coincide.

Alcohol.

‘My dear ... It’s a night, perhaps, for Chartreuse?’
‘Yellow or green?’ ...
‘...put out both, my dear, if you would ... I am a person,’ said Antonia,‘who all her long life has been unable to decide whether she prefers green or yellow Chartreuse.’

...

Antonia poured a glass of madeira from a decanter strangely stoppered.

Bilingualism.

Non, elle me ferait une scène, Antonia thought, hating, above all things in life, scenes ... I am tired. I am, even, old … I am—utterly—excédée.

Exhaustion.

‘Have you,’ Antonia exhaustedly enquired, ‘had another parcel of instructions from the Palace?’
‘I have, my dear. Such impossible things they seem to require. Their mind seems to run on lavatories.’
‘What,’ asked Antonia, ‘from the Keeper of the Privy this and the Privy that, can one expect ...?’

Fondness for English sailors.

O dreadful, dreadful tropical kit, the white socks long and the white trousers short ... [a] uniform one would expect to see directing the traffic from a white tub in Morocco ... And yet ... there was ... A charm, even, in the absurd uniform, in revealing the knees (could they be made to blush?). Pleasure could be derived from these northern complexions (so easily blushing for one thing) which took so ruddily to southern sun ...

And finally, and devastatingly, here is virtually an entire chapter from Brophy that spookily (in 1963) foresees a future of denied honours (Antonia Mount’s fictive Damehood thwarted, and Anthony Blunt’s very real knighthood stripped from him) ... and, moreover, daringly touches upon the BIG SECRET that MI5 had kept the lid on for more than a decade ...

Treason and Communism.

(Opening paragraph of Chapter XI)
    ‘I say. get me some background on this [Antonia] Mount woman, will you?
    ‘Right. I’ll look through the files. You’ll have to tap the old boy network.’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘Find out if she’s that kind of woman.’
    ‘Right you are. If she’s a communist, you mean?’
    ‘No, no, no, no, no’ (agacé).

 ‘Beneath Brophy‘s sparkling and perfumed prose lay deeper rococo corruption.’ 

Sir Peter Stothard (introduction to 2013 reissue of The Finishing Touch).

Blunt’s zigzagging signature is composed of lots of sharp points, so he is likely to have been waspish in his comments. The sharp angle on the A shows hardness and probing.  This seems to be rather resentful writing, there are lots of sharp angles, which means that he possibly took things personally and saw slights where none was intended. And note, also, his arrow-shaped flourish is pointing Leftward.
Evidently, there was strong need in the signatory to see his name much sharpened, and his signature gives the whetted edge to what was hereditarily Blunt.

(From In Search of the Fourth Man, 2008, Ambit 193.)

For further remarks recording Blunt’s views on Social Realism in art, see . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/sussex-exodus-of-altisonant-frogs.html
and also some reflections on Anthony Blunt’s psychometric profile from Intelligence sources:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.html
and also more of Brigid Brophy’s penetrating insights may be read in the footnote to:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/06/maimed-hero-frankenstein-exhumed-tragic.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

The Humbert in the Park: More Palimpsestic Wordplay? (Part 2.)

I have no doubt they’ll be many who’ll regard a niggling footnote to that schoolroom classic, The Hunchback in the Park (1941), as the depths of bad taste in Dylan Thomas’s centennial year.

Sorry. Profoundly sorry. But it’s that very centenary that’s prompted my rereading of Kensington Gardens in War-Time (1939-1940) by Humbert Wolfe to be again struck (after more than thirty years) by the significant concordances one can draw between the earlier poem sequence and Thomas’s published poem revised in the year that followed (1941) from a tentative outline first sketched in 1932. 

The English, who as a rule disdain ungovernable emotion stirred when the red mist is behind the eyes, are wary of the hwyl of portentous sonorities. (For instance, ‘the heydays of his eyes’ in Fern Hill is more soggy journalese than fresh coinage, in my view, and has a slackness that diminishes tauter lines.) On balance, we English cleave towards Miltonic cut glass in diction.

That same native wariness I confess must have bothered me three decades ago for I find in my copy of Kensington Gardens in War-Time certain pencilled underlinings that point to eerie correlations in Thomas’s later text with the power to disturb me even today. 

Lest we forget, it should be remarked that both poems were completed in the foreshadowing of Britain’s Darkest Hour, so a mood of national crisis – quickened by martial energy – unsurprisingly pervades (in varying degrees) the texture of both works, with neither shrinking from the light cast by the ‘perverted science’ of Nazism.

Unthinkable traducement? Not so! Because it is my belief that these sorrowing war-time poems by Wolfe (his last, for he died in January 1940) and the Hunchback by Thomas share a common thread and, more than that, an affinity with the victims of Hitler’s genocidal policies ... Juden, Kommunisten, Behinderte ... the Handicapped.

Examination of the post-1940 additions and enhancements to Thomas’s Hunchback draft from his 1932 Notebook (first composed when he was aged eighteen) demonstrate uncanny similarities of figurations, which derive it is my belief from harrowing Press reports of the oppressed Untermenschen when refracted through the lens of imagist poets who had come to regard the urban Park as a sinister microcosm of Europe at war.

Dylan Thomas’s Significant Afterthoughts.

Note : the lines by Thomas quoted below are post-1940 additions (i.e. added after the publication of Kensington Gardens in War-Time).

Page 4 (Kensington Gardens 1940) : ‘The ships that sail/the Round Pond are ..
Line 10 (Hunchback 1941) :  In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship

Page 10 (Kensington Gardens 1940) : … and Sealyhams/tugging their leads/until they nearly/strangle.
Lines 11/12 (Hunchback 1941) : Slept at night in a dog kennel/But nobody chained him up.

Pages 19 and 24 (Kensington Gardens 1940) : Between the oak-tree and the elm … the power/to make the ash/a single flower,
Lines 32/33 (Hunchback 1941) : Made … a woman figure without fault/Straight as a young elm

There are other figurations of a similar concordance too numerous to cite here in this modest conspectus.

Yet, to me, the most ominous affinities between these two works, separated by a year in composition (re. Thomas’s amendments) are to be found on page 14 of Kensington Gardens in War-Time where Wolfe, a Jew by birth, points to an émigré, a woman seated in the park, to make explicit the transformation of gardens from pleasure grounds into a place of torment for the Untermenschen ...

Nobody thought the
worse of her …
although she sat
all day and read
a German paper,
where it said …
how they killed her
children in the dark
corner of a Berlin
Park.

Compare, then, lines 21 and 22 of Hunchback in the Park 1941 …

[Boys] Laughing when he shook his paper
Hunchbacked in mockery

In my opinion, in any scholarly consideration of Dylan Thomas’s beefed up adjustments to a poem drafted a decade earlier, the Zeitgeist swirling above London in 1941 is not fully reckoned with.  Thomas’s introduction of martial elements (‘the groves were blue with sailors’) and images of captivity (‘After the locks and chains’) were never present in his original draft, although Wolfe makes plain, in countless examples of new ways of seeing, that the familiar urban landscape of the park is to be regarded as a potential prison, or martial compound threatened by enemy occupation or evacuation (‘All along the Broad Walk/listen how the soldiers talk’).   

Palimpsestic precursor?

I darkly suspect there is an unconscious absorption of many of Wolfe’s themes into the rejigged Hunchback of 1941. For Thomas, these emanate from a prescient cycle of poems composed by a dying Jew (albeit a naturalised Englishman and convert to the Church of England). In Wolfe’s foresight so early in WW2, sensible to the shock waves of the Holocaust when many were deaf to the warnings, he resembles a fellow assimilated Jew, Brian Howard, a precocious poet, who foresaw, long before most of his contemporaries, the dangers of fascism and was one of the first to denounce Hitler’s Nazism as organised barbarism of the vilest kind.

As Wolfe writes on the final page of his Kensington Gardens in War-Time, his beloved park in the blackout closes its gates on a requiem for lost innocence …

Here, for example, is a Park
clearly intended for the dark.

This foreboding mood with its inevitable rhyme-scheme is irresistible … and one that Thomas was to discover only AFTER Wolfe’s Kensington Gardens in War-Time had been published.   

Footnote 16 October 2014

I forgot to mention that, according to a recent correspondent of mine, Thomas wrote a pastiche of a Humbert Wolfe poem in his comic novel The Death of the King’s Canary (written circa 1940), which certainly is additional evidence that Thomas was intimately acquainted with Wolfe’s work. Further examination of Thomas’s correspondence also reveals that in 1933, in a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, he wrote, ‘. . . I have the collected poems of Manley Hopkins, Stephen Crane, Yeats, de la Mare, Osbert Sitwell, Wilfred Owen, W. H. Auden, & T. S. Eliot; volumes of poetry by Aldous Huxley, Sacheverell & Edith Sitwell,  Edna St. Vincent Millay, D. H. Lawrence, Humbert Wolfe . . .

Albertine Einstein Defies Helen Dunmore to Defend the Pluperfect.

Albertine Einstein, the virtuoso Time Traveller, celebrated for dancing effortlessly through Temporal Grammar, was astonished to read a denunciation of the Pluperfect tense by novelist Helen Dunmore ... a tense regarded by Helen as a form of writing too difficult to grasp for fragile novice scribblers cursed with the infirmitas feminei sexus.  

Albertine is versatile. Teleportation through the tenses is her medium. Even now she IS foreseeing that moment in the future when she WILL BE moved to recall with a shudder the occasion a decade earlier when she WAS first struck by Helen’s indefensible attack on what is possibly the temporal hoofer’s most practical narrative tense. 

Where?  When?

Quick fix for wannabe chickliterati.

Winter/Spring 2004 issue of MsLexia* magazine, page 40, Interview with Helen Dunmore. If this misnamed ‘Magazine for Women Who Write’ ever endorsed its own notion that women are pathologically disadvantaged by gender ‘from becoming successful authors’, then Helen Dunmore’s renunciation of the Pluperfect as too mystifying for Women-of-Very-Little-Brain and, in consequence, redundant, must take the cake. 

I write this with regret, and with a sense of betrayal, since two of my published contributions were singled out for generous notice (MsLexia supplements edited by Kate Clancy and Sara Maitland). Nevertheless, here is Helen’s let-out clause for the wannabe chickliterati she evidently dismisses as feeble-minded:

Helen Dunmore [explains the MsLexia interviewer] ... finds the present tense very useful for writing history. ‘You can move around in time very well from the starting point … the present tense allows you to maintain that sense of uncertainty.’ And, as the interviewer remarks, ‘It also allows you to write flashback without the clumsy “had had”s of the pluperfect.’  The Dunmore Method is then reaffirmed: ‘Use the present tense and first person if possible.’

The promulgation of this quick-fix childish formula for writing texts with the intention of their being categorised as adult literature strikes one as a stunt of jaw-dropping effrontery. 

Write in the permanent present tense?  Such a style, Albertine believes, is like being trapped inside the amnesiac’s Eternal Sunlight of the Spotless Mind with no syntactical mechanism for reverie. 

‘The Screaming “Hadhads” is a condition many writers fear,’ laughs Albertine, ’but I have never suffered from it. It’s a myth! I just don’t buy it. I never bought it. And I will not be buying it in the future.’

And, anyhow, Albertine asks, is mastering the Pluperfect so impossibly daunting?

The Gnomic Present Endures Alongside the Othered Past.

Albertine says, ‘As you know, in movies there is the weirdest rarely used device of a Double Flashback, where one Flashback dissolves to yet another Flashback earlier in time. My pondering this peculiarity prompted me to write to three eminent professional grammarians with two specimens of the pluperfect to ask them if the extracts set off any alarm bells.’

Albertine wrote:

Here are two examples of pluperfect-type expressions of narrative recalled from the past in the past tense.

Helen, who would very much have liked to know who the masked chorusgirl was who was running away so fast, said nothing. [Correct?]

Helen, who would very much have liked to have known who the masked chorusgirl was who was running away so fast, said nothing. [Incorrect?]

Do you think, please, the correct example is slowly becoming defunct in favour of the more longwinded incorrect version?

Results? 

Guru-Grammarian-Gamma writes:

No opinion about what might be becoming defunct.  But I think I would say both versions are grammatically correct, and they have very subtly distinct meanings.

Guru-Grammarian-Beta writes:

I agree with Guru-Gamma. A Subtle difference in meaning. From which time aspect is each sentence uttered is the question; no comment on ‘defunct’ or not, both are still viable.

Guru-Grammarian-Alpha writes: 

I suspect the two versions will continue to co-exist – just as the gnomic present (Galileo believed that the earth revolves around the sun) endures alongside the past (Galileo believed that the earth revolved around the sun).

‘So there we have it,’ Albertine grins slyly. ‘Guru-Alpha asserts that this paradox of temporality, then, can be applied to the Pluperfect, and the correctitude of the two examples can prevail in a co-existent state. However, your closer reading of Guru-Beta will reveal this grammarian to be closest to the truth!’

A bell rang three times backstage. The orchestra struck up an overture. ‘Excuse me!’ Albertine flexed her virtuosic toes to ease any tenseness. ‘That’s my cue!’ Then the Dancer to the Music of Time was gone.

*For my views on MsLexia’s sickly, self-pitying title, see: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/i-have-rendezvous-with-dread-at.html 

Cold Comfort Conjugation in my Darkest Sussex

It’s a tarrible gurt noration (terrible great travesty) told abroad that a dusty parody of the rural novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), deserves its popularity as a vaunted classic of English comic fiction, when the distinguished prototype from which Stella Gibbons derives her satire (Sussex Gorse, 1916, by Sheila Kaye-Smith) is a fine novel in its own right, and unjustly neglected.

Sheila Kaye-Smith, 1923,
by
Robert John Swan (1888-1980)
The pose in the picture is said to be based
on Titian’s A Man with a Quilted Sleeve. 

As I wrote to a Professor of Modern English Literature in California, whose Intensive Writing Course on The Fictions of the Sexes includes Cold Comfort Farm:

I’d be very interested to know whether any critique of this novel in your tutorials ever includes the acknowledgement that the writer Gibbons satirises (Sheila Kaye-Smith) was a very fine chronicler of Sussex dialect and rural life, and her novel, Sussex Gorse, is a moving work of literature, true to the character of Sussex farming stock. I was brought up for some years on a Sussex farm so I can vouch for the fidelity to customs and dialect of Kaye-Smith’s writings. You may find the dialect impenetrable in Kaye-Smith BUT another point to consider is that Sussex dialect is very similar to US Southern rural speech with pronouns ‘his’n’ and ‘her’n’, for example, while Sussex has exported many other grammatical features to the States.

I am invariably admiring of the open-mindedness of academics, and the professor truly did not disappoint me in his prompt response:

Thank-you for that excellent reference. I am tracking down copies of Sheila Kaye-Smith’s work for our University Library, and will read her for the next time I teach Cold Comfort Farm.

My mother, poultrykeeper on East Sussex farm 1930s.

Of course, for American dialectologists, these grammatical niceties present an ever-widening, ever more complex vista of the diaspora of those inheritors of our rural English tongue.

I am not an American dialectologist but I can observe with certainty that Zane Grey and his fellow practitioners of classic Western fiction, including Colonel William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill), correctly conjugate their possessive pronouns:

‘Keep back ... you snake! Or I’ll put out one of them slinky eyes of your’n!’

‘I felt as how ef yer was a good set of fellers you wouldn’t mind havin’ another true rifle and arm with your’n, for this is an all-fired dirty Injin country, you know.’*

Yet the odd thing is that I would not again have been reminded of my early interest in Sussex dialect – an interest that had all but faded from my mind – had not a certain ‘award-winning’ literary composition been cited to me as a superlative example of the common speech of Sussexers, when analysis of the text revealed at once in the tenth line a solecistic howler that no Sussex child – let alone an acclaimed scholar of our county’s provincialisms – would have inflicted on the ear of her elders. And the contentious phrase?

Gaffer stands in the yard and counts ourn hogs an’ lambs.

Ourn? No! Our hogs an’ lambs. (I imagine the prize for that literary composition was awarded by metropolitan critics.)

As the Rev. W.D. Parish, Vicar of Selmeston, writes, in his Dictionary of Sussex Dialect (1875):

The possessive pronoun is thus conjugated in Sussex,

Mine, thine, hisn [his own] or hern.

Ourn, yourn, theirn.

[Mine, thine, his, hers, ours, yours, theirs.]

To aid our parsing, the Rev. Parish gives us any number of specimen utterances.

That new lean-to of yourn is a poor temporary thing.

Robbuts! Ah, I layyou never see such aplaace for robbuts as what ourn is! 

These strict observances of grammatical rules cannot be neglected, in my view, when attempting to faithfully reproduce Sussex rural speech heard within living memory.

In my own fiction, Sister Morphine (2008), I remember, the speech of Wilkes, a Sussex farmworker, employs two possessive pronouns (the episode, Dispossession), both observant of rules that neither Buffalo Bill nor Zane Grey contravene ... so if they didn’t breach them why should we?

Yore ma sez as how the babe is her’n.

As you can just possibly begin to imagine, my brother’s birth was a fearful page in the record my existence.

    I can remember Boy in his pram, a peevish elf in a pointed woollen hat. That elfin cap concealed a skull elongated by a forceps birth, as though he had been delivered by coal tongs.

    Coincidentally, Grasper the sheepdog was struck dead six months later in an altogether less violent thunder storm; a bolt aimed true and found the brass tag that honoured his name; a medal struck by lightning, you might say.

    Mention of that sheepdog recalls a variant account of my brother’s nativity story, a kind of parallel creation myth that relates the genesis of the Young Lord and Master. As it also concerns myself it bears retelling.

•

A lamb, you know, can be born with eyes of a different colour and, in ancient times, shepherds believed such a lamb had two different sires. In fact, a lamb characterised by this phenomenon is one of my earliest memories.

    When I was going on seven, on the way to the lambing sheds one spring morning, Wilkes, the farmhand, pointed out a tawny-eyed ram, then, in the pens, he showed me lambs with brown eyes and, later, a sickly lamb with blue eyes suckling on a ewe. Disowned, in a corner, on shaky legs, stood an even sicklier lamb with an eye of each colour.

    ‘ ’Minds me of the time tha’ brother of yourn come into this world ’cause, true enough, he were born in a barn.’

    ‘In a barn?’ I exclaimed in wonderment.

    ‘Ain’t you never heard tell of the birth of yore brother? T’was full moon and light as day. Heard this hollarin’ an’ fancied diddikoy folk mostlike must of took the wrong turnin’ into the yard. So afore it’s light I got the lantern an’, begger me, I wouldn’t of belieft it if I hadn’t sin it wi’ my own eyes, a diddikoy babe bawlin’ in the cowhouse! An’ no sign o’ the mite’s mother.’

    ‘No!’

     ‘On my word. Next thing I knowed, yore ma comes hurryin’ outen the gate in her nightgown so I arsts her if summat’s wrong.  Then the mistruss took on summat terrible – sez the diddikoys are allus up to tricks – sez they’ll take away a mort of things as they’ve no call to have. She set up such a din, cryin’ and sobbin’, sayin’ as how the brat’ll be tarrible difficult to rear on account o’ it bein’ a child o’ the gyppos.’

    ‘A gypsy’s child! No!’

    ‘Then yore ma ketches holt o’ the babe an’ laid it on a silk idydown. “They’ll be a bout o’ trouble wi’ tha’ boy, shouldn’t wonder,” sez I, but yore ma jest gives it a sup o’ milk, an’ a crust to bite on, an’ sez as how the babe is her’n.’   

    He rubbed his nose reflectively.

    ‘An’ nobody didn’t tek it away from yore ma agin, ’cause nobody didn’t know the mistruss had bin cheated by the diddikoys. Same as a cuckoo, surely.  Jest ’sposin’ a cuckoo come along and turned out all them blue eggs and laid a speckly brown ’un.’

Sturdy double negative.

You’ll note that I refrain from discussing the double negative here (‘nobody didn’t know’), which is such a feature of Sussex rural speech, no different from American ruralisms.

‘Eleven hundred hides stole from my camp,’ replied the grizzled hunter, ‘an’ ain’t never heerd of them since, let alone seein’ hide or hair.’  Zane Grey  

As H. L. Mencken remarks in his The American Language, (1921): ‘Syntactically, perhaps the chief characteristic of vulgar American is its sturdy fidelity to the double negative.’

Well, I don’t see nothing wrong in that.

NOTE: See Epitaph for an Anti-Hero (previous post) ‘... you don’t value nothing. You don’t respect nothing.’

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/anti-antihero-heroine-takes-heat-to.html 

Postscript April 13 2015

One other thought about the title, Cold Comfort: Please be aware that Cold Harbour farms and place names abound in England, particularly Sussex.

It is a Saxon place name, meaning a refuge from the cold.

The Cold Harbours or Coldharbours are all in the vicinity of one or other of the great Neolithic or Roman roads, and were originally the remains of partially destroyed Roman or Romano-British dwellings, or settlements. Travellers used them as being more or less secure places in which to spend a night. As the places became known, traders gathered there to distribute goods and do business, and eventually the places once more became villages, but retained the old generic name.

So the title is also a play on a familiar Sussex place name, in my own view. 

* Shades of King Solomon’s Mines. Allan Quatermain to his hunting party on their mission to Kukuanaland: ‘I may say that I like you and believe that we shall come up well to the yoke together.’