‘Khar-r-r-kai! Khar-r-r-kai! Khar-r-r-kai! Khaos!’ Chekhov’s talking raven.

News promoted by a recent BBC wildlife documentary claiming that the Corvus genus of the Corvidæ family – crows and ravens – boasts the most intelligent creatures to be found anywhere in the animal kingdom – both in the lab and in the wild – jolted a memory . . . and I recalled the penultimate chapter of my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, in which a talking raven’s prophecies awaken in the writer atavistic instincts that defy his own psychopathological insights as a graduate doctor and draw him closer to the animistic pagan beliefs of a Cheremissian shaman-medicineman.

In the following passage, D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, having investigated the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison, mounts up to observe the burial party.

An Unwreathed Burial.

Huge flickering shadows danced like elusive spirits over the Prince’s shroud.
    The cadets, Kulikov and Toichina, handed their torches to the ritual torch-bearer, and mounted as one. On their backs were strapped entrenching tools.
    In the moonlight, their horses had a silver sheen, a pale metallic bloom.
    Snow began to fall. 
    Old Ivanishche plunged his spurs into his steed and, with a persuasive word, tugged at the traces.
    The sledge went burrowing through the storm carrying its grisly load.
    Tchékhov shrugged, thumbed in the direction of the old feldsher and, in a husky solemn voice which veiled his drollery, said to the General : ‘Over the grand panslavic plain roams a race of mischievous men.’
    From the General a half groan was followed by a horse laugh.
    Now and again the moon showed through the snow clouds gathering above the forest.
    Where the lower track descended to the exercise grounds the burial duty sheered away through the gap in the boundary fence.
    Kulikov raised his hands smartly to his cap.  Neither prince nor plebeian, he played his part well, without gaucherie – with natural grace – a dash of the Oriental in the uniform of the Occident, patrolling the pregnable western wall of his Tsar’s empire.
    Under the hood, in the shadows of the grey cloak, the cavernous grin of Old Vańuška widened and yawned like Death himself.
    ‘I saw Death mounted on horseback and did not draw back,’ breathed Anton pensively, his words turning to ice.
    Ivanishche stabbed his finger at the dead body.
    ‘A kucher daresn’t stop when he’s harnessed to a soul.’ He larraped the shaft-horse and the attendant cadets galloped after at a fast lick favoured by a following wind like two outriders of the gale.
    ‘Death gleans men, one after another,’  Anton thought, ‘it knows its business.’
    The watching figure paused until the riders vanished, moved by an impulse to chase their strange journeying to the last post.    
    Some things were to be seen but once in the great game, he brooded, and it was worthwhile seeing them, even if life were the shorter for it.
    Anton kept well into the shadows of the trees fringing the side of the path.
    Ahead of him he could hear Ivanishche singing in a cracked voice a chant du cosaque composed by the hard-drinking Cossack leader Davidoff at the time of Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow.

Half a kopeck for the master,
Silver on the horse’s feet,
Good oats for the charger fleet ;
A crust for you – you’ll ride the faster.

   (‘A crust,’ mused Anton. Now Ivanishche was out of earshot of the Camp, the Tcheremis apostate must be referring to his humiliating, enforced vow of allegiance to the Tsar. Anton knew that any unbelievers among the new conscripts were forced at gunpoint to eat bread from the blade-tip of the adjutant’s sword, and repeat : ‘Thank you for bread and salt ... Spasibo za khleb da sol.’)
    Their massy shadow like a rolling black ball bowled along the length of the duelling pitch at which point the cantering hacks were swallowed by the greater shadow of the vast forest.
    They were moving at a break-neck pace, high-tailing it through the trees, Kulikov running a short hair second. The only way Anton could distinguish them in the darkness was the fact that the rump of Ivanishche’s horse had a white patch, and that the entrenching tool by his side glinted at a certain angle.
    So much ice had become attached to the hoofs of Old Roarer, that the unfortunate creature seemed to be walking on stilts, no two of which were the same length, and, to make matters worse, Anton had almost lost all feeling in his own extremities due to the intense cold.  He should have liked to walk on foot to restore his circulation but he could not for he feared losing the party among the trees.
    Soon the éskort emerged on to open ground, a vast snowy plain of infinite desolation, and the shadow of a ridge appeared on which could be seen the dark outlines of the tumuli which marked the site of the ancient burial grounds.
    At the foot of the rise was an abandoned fortalice, the forpost of the garrison’s western defences and, since the cholera epidemic, unoccupied save for crows and ravens.
    A raven, rousant, perched on one of the isolation huts took wing.
    (During those cholera months, a scene had presented itself, the General had said, which few minds could conceive or pens depict. ‘The ghastly countenances of those poor fellows presented a dismal sight, their sunken eyes ever darting after you, beseeching assistance.’ Ivanishche had worked like a madman, unthinking of the danger, administering relief by pouring water over the livid bodies of soldiers labouring under the pangs of premature dissolution, their faces dewed with the cold and clammy damp of death. In the final days, only Ivanishche had summoned the courage to remain beside the pallets of his charges, as they died in agony, and only Ivanishche had walked alive from that dreadful place.)
    When Tchékhov neared the crown of the ridge he saw the stars had ceased their pulsing and shone steadily on a slope of scattered graves.
    A huge mass of rock projected on the north eastern face.
    Drawing closer to the cemetery, and shielded by a kurgan barrow which broke the skyline, Anton was able to observe the gravediggers about their tasks, as the old feldsher dismounted from the rusty roan and unloaded his grim cargo.
    ‘Lay ’im on them big stones,’ Kulikov was instructed by his mentor.
    Anton heard a crunt from a cudgel as the feldsher smashed the ice, then Old Ivanishche, raised his axe to cleave the frozen soil for the grave.
    Anton could distinguish the Tcheremis graves from the rest, as their plots lay feet-first to the southeast with their headstones to northwest.
    In that Golgotha there were skulls of all sizes. The unconsecrated plots lay between the cholera cemetery and the Jewish burial ground, the furthermost from the town, where the collapsed sarcophagi – with their indecipherable pseudo-Hebraic inscriptions memorialising long departed hakams – had fallen into the vaults beneath, until the exilic graves had become, Anton mused, like ‘...tombs even of themselves’, recalling Goethe’s essay in a schoolbook, printed more than half a century earlier.
    On the ground, outside the cholera victims’ enclosure, a sleigh in which the soldiers’ corpses had been carried, and pieces of wood remaining from the boards used to make the coffins, had been left to rot (for they were not burnt according to superstition lest the faces of the corpses became blistered).
    The Tcheremis burial ground – their sacred šügarla - was a forlorn bare place without any fenced reshetka ; and in place of the Christian krestel – the grave cross – was a mensur of undressed rock.
    Evidently, the Tcheremis yüzo had chosen the grave site with care.
    By the light of the carriage lamp on the sleigh the men quickly broke the ice-lens beneath the surface snow, and penetrated the softer strata of an interpermafrost talik which lay unfrozen below.
    Judging from the burial tailings from the dig, which appeared to steam, a thermal spring flowed through the ice core at this point.
    The Prince was buried unwreathed.
    Tchékhov overheard Old Vańuška’s muttered explanation to Kulikov : ‘Khadoško keäš.’*
    Anton murmured : ‘Just as I shall lie alone in my grave so shall I live alone.’
    There was no ceremony ; no Mass of Requiem ; simply the cries of a raven.
    ‘Khar-r-r-kai! Khar-r-r-kai! Khar-r-r-kai! K-k-kopai awk-up, k-k-koldan! O-o-rrt, khr-r-romoi, khor-r-roniat kr-r-raplenogo kor-r-rju kovar-r-rnogo kr-r-rasavtsa-fr-r-ranta! Sokr-r-rushenniy! Pokar-r-ranniy! Jar-r-r-r - Kor-r-rak, kur-r-rier kar-r-ry. k-kar-r-rkayu kr-r-rah i Khaos!’
    Ivanishche laughed, inexplicably,† as the shaman put the Prince to bed with a shovel at last, buried with his teeth upward, facing southeast.
    ‘Quork!’‡ the raven cried.
    Anton observed Old Ivanishche toss a crust on to the burial mound, and place an abundant supply of cooked leavings on the grave to discourage the return to the barracks of the famished spirit of the departed.
    ‘R-r-a-ab!’§ the raven jeered, seizing one of the offerings.
    ‘Ra-ab!’ yelled Ivanishche in the same malevolent voice and shook his fist.
    When Anton turned the mare and piloted her towards the railhead, the last glimpse of Ivanishche he was destined to carry with him was of the Tcheremis warlock spitting thrice into the pit to sanctify the new-made grave.
    The mare seemed to know the way and they passed beyond the dissenter’s tombstones where rude wreaths hung upon little pine crosses.
    An upspringing breeze caught a garland and cast it over the edge of a bluff which, as he advanced, to Anton’s surprise, was revealed to be carved by the upper reaches of the river.
    Below, beside a log chute, were the wreaths of the departed, clinging to a spit of ice thick enough to bear a railway train.
    A dark wreath, encircled with a saw-edge of ice, detached itself and began to drift downstream.
    ‘Such a beginning, such an end.’
    Anton’s words were stopped by a ruckling cough, and he shuddered, thinking of the youth’s eternal sleep, his mouth full of mould, reduced to adipocere in a pit.
    He shivered.
    Fresh horns of ice several inches thick had formed on the nose of the mare and he urged her forward.
    He had no wish to remain a moment longer at this dismal spot and dwell upon his own end ; his heart suddenly leapt with a passion and he gripped the harness fiercely, shaken by the knowledge that he had no other mortal wish than the desire to probe life ever deeper, to live it to the full, to race the whole gamut of experiences, follies, loves, and sacrifices, to squeeze the orange dry, and then to die quite young, having gone the full compass, the needle pointing home.

                      ______________________________________________

*    To die by one’s own hand is ‘to die out of grace’ (Tcheremiss).
†    On the contrary, quite explicable, when compared with Tchékhov’s transliterated raven cries. (See Glossary below. ) The cries resemble in Russian : ‘Spit! Spit! Spit! Dig your trench, O Wizard! Look there, Lame One! There is buried the treacherous beau-galant, blighted with sores! Failed! Punished! I, Korak, messenger of retribution, prophesy failure and Chaos!’ 
‡    ‘Korka’ means ‘Crust of bread’.
§    The cry resembles ‘Rab’, meaning ‘Slave’. 

Glossary of Raven Speech

Tchékhov’s study of ravens is documented at length in his private writings, a product, perhaps, of his bird-hunting youth and his visits to the Taganrog bird market as a child. The caging of wild songbirds is a Russian custom which Tchékhov was never to abandon, and his deepest affection was reserved for the family Corvidæ – indeed, his affinity with ravens extends further ; like Tchékhov they share a gift for mimicry and may live over forty years. (Tchékhov was to die in his forty-fourth year.)
    Significantly, a talking raven is mentioned in Tchékhov’s story, After the Theatre, 1892, and, in this same year, to satisfy his reawakening animism, he acquired a tame crow, ‘Karkasha’ and a raven, ‘Voron Voronovich’.
    Cheremisian and Russian raven legends are recorded in his notebooks :

The onomatoeic ‘Kh'er’ correlates closely with the stem present in most  European words for ‘raven’. Greek = korax. Tcheremis = korak.  Old Icelandic = krakr, &c. That magical powers are attributed to the raven Old Vańuška had learned from Mari folklore, particularly, I suspect, the fable of the resurrection of a dismembered corpse. The Mari people believe strongly that a raven digs a hole in the ground to find the source of the Water of Life ; that is why the raven lives so long. If a man’s limbs are severed the Tcheremis sends a raven with a bowl to bring back the Water of Life to make the man whole again. Is this why Vańuška feared the powers of the raven? It is the custom of the Tcheremis to wash themselves on Easter eve, ‘before the raven washes himself’, that is why the Mari people retire to bed early.  They wish to use the Water of Life before the raven reaches it.  When there is a drought the Tcheremisians make Raven’s kasha so the ravens bring them rain. The cult of the all-seeing raven, I believe, will never die. To possess ‘raven’s knowledge’ is to be truly wise.

    Following this passage, on the next page, Tchékhov notes the ability of his caged raven to imitate human calls and even, the barking of a dog.  ‘The raven, after he was caught, I saw had been clearly separated from a distraught mate who distantly mimicked her captive partner’s idiosyncratic alarm calls with astonishing exactitude to prompt a response and locate her beloved.
     ‘The complete transliteration of a Russian raven’s speech is a task which I regard with the greatest gravity. I trust I will be granted time on earth to complete my research and to publish the prophetic utterances I have brought to light which I dare not breathe to a soul until I have exhausted every effort to establish contact with these supranatural beings, and succeed in knowing their ways with the same facility as Vańuška.’

                               Transliterated Sound      Resembles (Russian)      
                                                                     Awk!      oko (eye)
                                                               Awk-up!      okop (trench)
                                              Ggaagga-ggaagga!     Garotting
                                                                    Kaah!      See “Kar-kat!”
                                                         Kakoy krah!      kakoi (what, which, how)
                                                                 Kak-to!      kak-to (one day, somehow)
                                                                Kar-kat!      karkat (to hawk up phlegm)
                                                                      Kaw!      khor (chorus)
                                                                Kee-aw!      kur'er (messenger)
                                                                Ko-pick!      kopeyka (kopeck = penny)
                                                                      Kow!      -
                                                                     Krah!      krak (financial crash ; bankruptcy ; failure)
                                                                   Kraap!      krap (specks or marks made by    
                                                                                      card-sharper on deck of cards)
                                                                      Krrk!      krik (cry, shout)
                                                                   Kuork!      korka (crust of bread, poverty)
                                                                    Kuort!      kort (court) kurit' (smoke)
                                                                   Kurort!      kurort (spa)
                                                           Ku-uk-kuk!      kukovat (to “cuckoo” ; to drag out 
                                                                                       a lonely existence)
                                                             Kvvar-kat!      kvakat (to croak, to prophecy ill)
                                                          Kwulkulkul!      –
                                                                          Ky!      kii (cue)
                                                          Nakh-rrnm!      Nigynam (Tcheremis = ‘Nevermore’)
                                                                     Nuhk!      Nyukh (scent)
                                                                     O-ort!      Vo't (There! Now! There is!)
                                                                Prurrhk!      prok (use, benefit)
                                                                   Rhaap!      rab (slave)
                                                                    Rührr!      –
                          Spror-spree-spruck-spor-per-
                                                rhick-rhür-rhuck!      –
                                                       Tuktu-tavani!      –
                                                     Whoo-oo-woo!      –

For a further extract from the manuscripts of D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, see also Dead Wife, New Hat at 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dead-wife-new-hat-femme-morte-chapeau.html 
and D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv. A long lost novel . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-long-lost-novel.html 
and Inductive Detection . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/inductive-detection.html 
and Winter Rules . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/winter-rules-and-le-diable-boiteux.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 (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

A Roundelay for Archducal Dylan.

I wonder whether you’ve noticed that the centenary next June (28 June 1914) of the cataclysmic death of an archduke (Franz Ferdinand of Austria) will be concurrent with the centennial of the birth of another notable honouree of an arch dukedom, namely Dylan Thomas*, Duke of Gweno … an arch ennoblement indeed.

But by whom so archly ennobled? If you have not heard of the King of Redonda, then I should explain it is an invention of M. P. Shiel (1865-1947), celebrated author of The Purple Cloud, a landmark of early British dystopian science fiction.

According to the current pretender to the Redondan throne, eminent Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marías, Redonda [is]:

… a minuscule island in the Antilles of which, at the age of fifteen, Shiel himself (a native of the neighbouring and much larger island of Montserrat) had been crowned king in a festive naval ceremony in 1880, at the express desire of the previous monarch, his father, a local Methodist preacher who was also a shipowner and had bought the island years before, though no one knows from whom, given that its only inhabitants at the time were the boobies that populated it and a dozen men who gathered the birds’ excrement to make guano.

It was within the gift of the past kings of Redonda, Marías affirms, to make ‘…dukes or admirals of various writers who were his friends or whom he admired…’, a patronage that included the elevation of Dylan Thomas to Duke of Gweno in 1947 (he proclaimed his fealty in drunken doggerel), a lineage of patronage that extends up to the present day, with a number of contemporary literary luminaries receiving preferment to aristocratic titles from King Xavier, Marías himself. 

An Awful Solitude. A Vagrant King.

But this minuscule account of mine of a minuscule micronation (named Redonda by Columbus for its roundness) is no more than a prelude, I confess, to a minor footnote I wish to add to the Redondan myth, which Shielian scholars may have overlooked; I cannot be sure.

I can be sure, though, of the fact that from my great-uncle I inherited a number of his bound volumes of the Strand Magazine, which in my childhood I read avidly for the Sherlock Holmes stories first published there in the 1890s, read also by my great-uncle when in his early teens at the time of publication. (His wife, my great-aunt, is presently in good health at the venerable age of one-hundred-and-seven).

So that is how, in my own early teens, I stumbled across a remote island resembling Redonda ... The Eagle’s Crag, described by M P Shiel in Volume 8, published in 1894.

Written when Shiel was 29 years old, it’s a more romantic conception of Redonda, I think. Significantly, Shiel also mentions in this story an ‘old Babylonish king, wet with the dew of Heaven’.  He means Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 5:21). I note that The Great King: The Madness of Nebuchadnezzar was a story of his published seventeen years later in 1911. So it was a leitmotif of a vagrant king he sustained well into the 20th Century.

So is this fictional isle of 1894 an evocation of Shiel’s island kingdom? Judge for yourself from this extract from The Eagle’s Crag: 

… the Eagle's Crag ! This rock stands some miles from the mainland. The old fishermen of Liguria and Etruria in the palmy days of the Roman Republic called it Rupes Aquilina, because of the curious configuration of the summit, which resembles an eagle’s head and beak. And the old name still clings to it. lt rises in awful solitude sheer out of the sea to a height of near two thousand feet. It is shaped somewhat like one half of a cone slit down the middle – quite flat on one side, the other forming a convex surface. On the convex side, the south, not only is life possible, but a few poor men and women actually exist there. This south side has a regular steep incline upward to the very summit, and a bold and skilful climber may even reach the top; but once there, the brain grows dizzy to look down, on the north side, on a smooth wall of rock, falling away from the feet, not perpendicularly, but with a marked inward slant. Those who have so climbed and looked down, by stretching far out over the flat eagle’s beak, will tell you that it is a sight full of terror, making the heart sick. In all this wall of rock there is one break, and only one – a horizontal ledge, three feet broad, which runs right across it at a height of rather more than three-quarters of the rock’s height from the bottom. Quite near the end of the beak on that side a few shrubs grow.

In my personal view, this description is a psychical projection of the island Shiel once knew in his youth, transplanted by a fictionist to the coastal waters of the Ligurian Sea, some way offshore from the province of La Spezia.  

The illustration in the Strand of 1894 by A. Pearse perfectly captures the sombre mood of the vertiginous cliffs that rise on Rodonda’s leeward flank.

The Last Man and Woman in the World.

That the influence of Shiel’s last-man-last-woman fantasy, The Purple Cloud (admired by H. P. Lovecraft), continues to pervade the works of 21st Century writers of fiction is evidenced by my own barely perceptible nod to its meta-ethical survivalist message in my fiction, Lovesong in Invisible Ink, published in Listen Close to Me (2011, Salt), in which the narrator relates key episodes from her on-off love affair with Vivian, an army intelligence officer:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

About this time, Vivian was sent by the Rhine Army on a language course at the Intelligence School at Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps and then transferred to the Special Weapons Training Centre in the same town, in the shadow of Kofelberg’s crags, to learn how to fight in an atomic war.
    ‘How strange to think,’ Vivian once remarked, ‘that, as we rode the perilous cable cars high above Oberammergau, below us my fellow pupils were playing air-to-ground atomic war games.’
    He’d then paused and mused awhile and said, not so inconsequentially: ‘Of course, directly after the war, the Oberammergau passion play was still unregenerate religious bigotry. The crowds were still shouting the Jews were accursed, with blood on their hands and on the hands of their children’s children. Rather small beer, y’know,’ he drawled, ‘in the scale of things, when you’re in your host’s backyard learning how to attack the enemy with tactical atomic weapons for the total annihilation of entire continents.’
    Vivian’s unique meta-ethical viewpoint had been demonstrated to me very memorably at the height of the Cold War.
    We’d been sailing the Solent in his ketch off Cowes one July when, in the blink of an eye, Portsmouth’s naval dockyard exploded in a vast mushroom cloud that grew rapidly into a gigantic pillar of rolling white smoke, and small shards of metal and wood rained down on us.
    I truly thought World War Three had broken out.
    ‘Well,’ Vivian murmured imperturbably at the helm, turning his back on this apocalyptic vision to examine the glowing tip of his cigar, ‘when the balloon goes up I believe it’s incumbent on the last man and woman in the world to mate.’ 
    Then the ash of his cigar broke and fell, and he trimmed the sails and lashed the tiller to a course he’d set for Deauville.
    So we sailed calmly on; he the new Adam and I the new Eve, and we did not leave that tiny double berth forecabin until hours later when the skyline had darkened and the horizon was quite empty.
    We sensed the sea rather than saw it. Gazing into the firmament, we lay on the deck in each other’s arms, and lost all sense of time as slowly the sky seemed to draw us up into it; and so we drifted out in a state of drowsy contemplation towards morning.
    Only much later did Vivian learn that eight ammunition barges at the Royal Naval Armament Depot had been blown up by saboteurs.

That last (factual) ‘reveal’ only goes to point up the methodological maxim I have adopted as a fictionist: A dutiful writer of suspense does not invent; a dutiful writer of suspense just makes surprising connections.

*Hit-or-Miss Scattergun Methodology a Wasteful Virtue.

My earlier postings on Dylan Thomas make clear, I trust, my high regard for his true lyric tongue, a god-given free-flowing crystal fount that few poets – in their youth – can lay claim to. 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-humbert-in-park-more-palimpsestic.html 
However, his ‘free verse’ methodology as an eighteen-year-old poet is considered suspect by perhaps the greatest scholar of his work, Professor Ralph Maud, who quotes Thomas's advice to a schoolfellow:

Why not, for a change, fire off round after round of ammunition from any old gun you can get hold of. You'll miss hundreds of times, but you’re bound to get a bull’s eye a lot of times, too. You'll find the hit-or-miss, the writing with no plot, technique will help you considerably in loosening your mind and in getting rid of those stifling memories which may, unless you are careful, get in the way of your literary progress. (February 1933.)

As Professor Maud cautions the impulsive, who may be inclined to emulate this method, ‘There is no other time when he seems more to have exhibited this kind of wasteful virtue, to have obeyed his instinct to “write, write, regardless of everything.” ’

Retail Therapy: Navigating Uncharted Oxford Street with Opium Eaters.

So rarely these days do I visit London, or travel on the Tube, that I am unable to admit to the hypersensitive alienation effect said to be experienced by the mimosa-like sentient plant forms that invariably populate the dramatis personae of Iris Murdoch’s novels. 

(As has been asserted by any number of her devotees, many of London’s tube stations become, for Murdoch, distinct characters in her novels, ‘… each unique, the sinister brightness of Charing Cross, the mysterious gloom of Regent’s Park, the dereliction of Mornington Crescent, the futuristic melancholy of Moorgate, the monumental ironwork of Liverpool Street …’ not forgetting the art nouveau and the Baroque features that distinguish Gloucester Road and the Barbican.)

No.

The psychological distancing of the alienated ‘Undergrounder’, described by Iris Murdoch in her fiction, does not trouble me, though I do truly empathise with the now fashionable notion of literary psychogeography of which she is a more than proficient practitioner.

No. My proficiency is not of such a high order, because any psychogeographical musings that may consume me on my infrequent visits to the linen department of Selfridges in London’s Oxford Street are solely coloured by my memory of Thomas De Quincey’s recollections of the months he spent from 1802 to 1803 roaming that great thoroughfare as a homeless runaway … specifically, the following psychogeographical passage in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater that concerns his teenage friend, the prostitute Ann. 

The Great Mediterranean of Oxford Street.

Yes. The tearful parting at Great Titchfield Street of seventeen-year-old Thomas from Ann (friendless, homeless, and about fifteen years of age) succeeds in warping my consciousness as soon as I emerge from the tube at Oxford Circus:

‘… when I kissed her at our final farewell, she put her arms about my neck, and wept, without speaking a word. I hoped to return in a week at furthest, and I agreed with her that on the fifth night from that, and every night afterwards, she should wait for me, at six o'clock, near the bottom of Great Titchfield Street, which had been our customary haven, as it were, of rendezvous, to prevent our missing each other in the great Mediterranean of Oxford Street.

So there you have it … the great Mediterranean of Oxford Street … the dream region that I simply cannot resist navigating according to my own private homing instinct with, as you can see, Bond Street located in the hinterland of Tunisia, Selfridges somewhere between the Gibralta of Marble Arch and the Marseilles of Portman Square, while Fitzrovia occupies the Balkans ... and my favourite watering hole, the Red Bar at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane, is refuge from the Atlantic swells of Hyde Park as it extends a welcome from Tangiers through Casablanca to Marrakesh.

Needless to add, the omphalos – the navel of Oxford Street, Oxford Circus – must be Crete.

 

(Note June 2023: Debenhams of Oxford Street sadly closed in May 2021. Debenhams was founded seven years before De Quincey’s birth.)

The Ghost of Orphan Ann.

Of course, we can estimate the cost of a prostitute in 1803 because De Quincey gave Ann about twenty-one shillings to tide her over for a week … so two or three shillings may well have been her rate.

This sum may be compared with the two English pounds that made the regular payment to a prostitute in post-WW2 London. I know this fact because a literary acquaintance of mine (he died in 1990) was ordered by his commanding officer during his military service to run a brothel for the ranks.

‘What about the officers?’ he asked.
‘Don’t be impertinent,’ his superior rasped, ‘the officers must fend for themselves.’

To warm his basement seraglio my amateur hustler bought Valor oil stoves at Berwick Market in Soho. And he was successful in this enterprise, he told me, until Soho’s Sicilian mob shut the joint down. The mob threatened a young woman. ‘The poor kid drew a finger like a flick-knife down her cheek,’ he told me, ‘the threat was very real. In those days the mob had sewn up the prostitution racket.’

His account quickened my curiosity. When I last examined the statistics I found that between 50 percent and 75 percent of the 5,000 women in prostitution in London are illegal immigrants, most of whom are from eastern Europe.

In my informant’s day in the desperate aftermath of a world war there were, amazingly, 20,000 women of the streets. How many of them, I wonder, resembled De Quincey’s Ann, one of ‘many women in that unfortunate condition’ for whom prostitution was the only way to earn a wage.

We should not, however, impute to De Quincey any motive other than that of brotherly charity and friendship in his relations with Ann. That De Quincey suffered in near penury as a vagabond in London is a matter of record and we must believe him when he states ‘…that in the existing state of my purse, my connection with such women could not have been an impure one.’

His loyalty to the orphan Ann is beyond question:

I sought her daily, and waited for her every night, so long as I stayed in London, at the corner of Titchfield Street.  I inquired for her of every one who was likely to know her, and during the last hours of my stay in London I put into activity every means of tracing her that my knowledge of London suggested and the limited extent of my power made possible … But to this hour I have never heard a syllable about her.

Maybe, late one night soon, my dear Psychogeographer,  as you pass along the northern shores of the Great Mediterranean of Oxford Street, you’ll glimpse a pale visitant keeping vigil at the corner of Great Titchfield Street, waiting, waiting … she waits in vain.

Sternstunden, Toxic Pacts and the Silent Woman’s Tryst of Blood

A star-hour! A Sternstunde! Extraordinary though it may seem, on a rare trip to London to the sales, in the flurry of my alighting from a black cab I found myself clutching a stout notebook written in a stranger’s hand, an object unknown to me.

A double take and then realization dawned ... evidently an earlier fare had mislaid the thing on the passenger seat. I was mildly intrigued. So, a little later, in retreat from the tireless hordes, I snatched a moment to examine my find over coffee as – hidden from me – my short-lived star-hour was drowned by the chatter of the sixth floor cafeteria above Peter Jones’s, all unaware of the notebook’s fate-bound worth. 

Its closely packed pages revealed much and little ... little of the identity of the note-taker (a draft letter to a correspondent was signed ‘Stella’) yet much about her literary preoccupations, both prosaic and strophic.  But there was no clue as to a home address other than a New York state zip code (Rosedale) and a single scribbled telephone number, which proved to be that of the American Women’s Club in South Kensington.

What an agony for a writer its loss must be, I thought with true fellow feeling.  So at once I resolved the lost property would be restored to its rightful owner, care of her ex-pats hunkered down in the Old Brompton Road.

Meanwhile, I confess, I took illicit delight in rummaging through the private contents of another’s mind ...  a city-smart Algonquinian mind rich with pert allusivenesses that recalled the works of Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman or, even, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

It seems invidious of me to place Stella Rosedale in this wise-cracking metropolitan company – New Yorkers all, nonetheless – but I can’t resist quoting one draft lyric of hers (uncorrected on the page, so probably unpolished) that chimes with my present pre-festivities mood ...

Drop a Dress Size and Make Things Happen.

She slips the shackles of Time and sighs;

locks tears and wristwatch in a secret drawer;

casts off the freight of lips and eyes,

dispenses nite cream from a rejuvenescent jar.

Stripped of the last apparel of her power,

she folds up hunger in her dream-wear closet.

Naked on scales she can outstare her mirror;

but does she lie when she says: ‘I am happier to lose it.’

How uncompromisingly true!

Yet, notwithstanding the genuine bite of a number of these snappy little squibs of hers – no doubt casually thrown-off – I was drawn more to Stella’s drafts for what appeared a major work-in-progress, the libretto for a Met opera, no less. And the subject? When I read her title, Mayerling: Tryst of Blood, my hands shook ... so stunned was I by a choice of subject so nearly a shadow my own fixations.

Death Without a Witness?

Were you to read a key segment from my fiction, Honeymoon Without Maps (Salt, 2008, Sister Morphine) you might just begin to understand the tingling tremor that ran through me. 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html 

So here is an extract. As her husband, Howard, sleeps, the narrator, Esther, discovers that he has jotted down, with criminal intent, a reference to the notorious Mayerling death-wish, and it ...

... led me to recall the sordid suicide pact between Crown Prince Rudolf Habsburg and the beautiful young Baroness Mary [Marie] Vetsera at the Mayerling hunting lodge.
    Apropos of which, I was in the first night audience at Covent Garden, when the ballet Mayerling had its world premier, and I remember reading then about the doomed, depression-prone Rudolf. And had not that drug-addled rake, according to his biographers, exhibited a pathological fear of living alone? And was that not why the poor booby also feared death alone ... too afraid to die without a witness?
    Mayerling! As if shaken awake by that shock of recognition, I considered the coincidences with new insights.
    Of course, it was the fate of the baroness, full of life and aged a mere seventeen – half Rudolf’s age – to be the ‘chosen one’, his Companion-in-Death, in the adulterous prince’s insane plan to attain self-deliverance ... except he allegedly shot her first before he shot himself.
    Howard and Rudolf.
    So alike in base motives.
    I can compare these two men for I feel I knew them both.
    I could so clearly understand the psychology of Howard ... his primitive fear ... how essential it was for him to know that he had a secure exit if he needed one.
    ...
    Still, I do recall he once wrote a disputatious letter to a national newspaper, some years ago, citing the philosopher ‘K’ as a lifelong advocate of euthanasia, and refuting claims that the wife of ‘K’ was an unwilling partner in their suicide pact. (In her suicide note, Howard quoted with emphasis, she wrote: ‘I cannot live without him, despite certain inner resources.’)
    ‘Hogwash! Tommy rot!’ Howard had shouted when he’d read another correspondent’s counterclaim on the letters page hinting at foul play.

And how had Stella Rosedale resolved the characterisation of Rudolf’s similar criminal narcissism? Rather well, I thought, riffling through her pages, to judge from this promising start to an aria:

Rudolph:
My shadow casts a stain.
The sun foretells Golgotha’s slain.
Stars glitter through their tears
for you and me . . . Marie . . . Marie
dicers, vinegar, spears . . . Gethsemane. 

Yes. Blustering quasi-religious self-justification for the crime of bullying an impressionable woman much younger than himself to take her own life because the booby was ‘... too afraid to die without a witness.’

The Silent Woman.

How odd they are, then, these threads and connections. And it’s particularly odd to think that the coinage of the term for star-hours of destiny (Sternstunden) – pivotal turning-points in human life – may be found in the writings of Austrian cosmopolite, Stefan Zweig, one of my favourite fictionists, who himself committed suicide in a pact with a wife half his age, Lotte, then aged 33 years and in good health.
 

Critically, formatively, according to Zweig’s first wife, Friderike, the ‘uncurbed, unrestrained vitality’ of his ‘extremely self-willed’ mother was invariably an unwelcome distraction from his writerly pursuits, and ‘undiminished even in old age, often caused much suffering to her son.’ And referring to Lotte, Stefan’s second wife and ‘Companion-in-Death’, Friderike writes, ‘... Stefan always longed for the “Silent Woman” – the title of the opera libretto, after Ben Jonson, that he wrote for Richard Strauss [Die schweigsame Frau] – his mother’s opposite. The silent, devoted Lotte so tragically fulfilled this idealized conception during his last years!’

Which raises the question – too grave for me to answer here – as to who is the proponent and instigator of a suicide pact? The man or the woman? And who insists it is followed through?

The same question has arisen in the case, mentioned, of philosopher ‘K’, the penologist, whose identity you will guess from the double suicide he carried through in his Knightsbridge home with his wife, twenty-two years his junior, and in good health.

The hallucinatory clarity of certain details observed in these two notable twin-deaths clings to my mind: the bottle of Salutaris mineral water mentioned by an observer of Stefan Zweig’s death scene (shades of Marienbad, his mother’s favourite spa) ... the fact that Stefan left his pencils well sharpened ... and the jar of honey (I can guess its purpose) that stood on the Alice-like occasional table (‘DRINK ME’) in the sitting-room of ‘K’ and his wife . . . and their suicide notes that also lay there addressed ‘To Whom it May Concern’.

No, this sinister question of the dominant party in a double suicide is too complex to examine here (‘sadomasochistic’ tendencies are more than hinted at in the case of ‘K’), so I await with keen anticipation the completed libretti of Stella Rosedale’s Mayerling: Tryst of Blood.

My Note to Stella Rosedale.

I have written a little apology to Stella for rifling through her most intimate thoughts. All the same, I have been emboldened to express my admiration for her Mayerling libretto drafts, expressing my own high regard for those two librettists of superlative skill, Myfanwy Piper (for Britten’s The Turn of the Screw) and lyricist Lillian Hellman (not forgetting James Agee, for Bernstein’s Candide). I do so hope we become better acquainted.

I do not mention the purpose of the jar of honey.  Nor do I mention the pioneering great-aunt of my family, one of the first accredited female pharmacists in England, who meticulously planned her own suicide.  Her very effective recipe is a closely guarded family secret.

Her last words in her suicide note were these: 

Dearest Best Beloved.

It is time for the candle to be snuffed out.

My Love to you All.

So you see, in answer to the bloodless question, so glibly and so frequently asked by psycho-medicos, ‘Have you ever had suicidal thoughts?’ my answer, willing-unwilling, would have to be, ‘Yes.’

●

Postscript (28.02.23) Amok.

I almost persuaded an Academy-award-nominated film director to adapt Zweig’s Amok as a psychological drama of obsession. He thought it unfilmable. Much later, in 1993, Amok appeared as a French movie starring Fanny Ardent.

Photo: The remains of a copy of the book by Stefan Zweig, the novel Amok (1922), partially burned during the Bücherverbrennungen (the Nazi book burnings) promoted by National Socialists during the 1930s.

 

●

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