Sussex Exodus of Altisonant Rats: Schoolboy’s Mock-Heroic Epic

That art is non-utile is a self-conscious truism voiced oftenest by post-Marxian cynics. 

As Oscar Wilde, a socialist manqué, makes clear: All art is quite useless. 

This banality is no more absurdly pointed up than in the verses of a lofty poet who compares himself with his father digging the family cabbage patch – a spade wielded with evident utility – yet who claims a special dispensation for his own artist’s pen . . . ‘I’ll dig with it.’ (Pause for involuntary cringe.)

Anthony Blunt – tarnished knight of the realm, professed communist, and Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures – was unequivocal when a young man in expressing his utopian sympathy for the cultural worthiness of Social Realism: ‘The culture of the revolution will be evolved by the proletariat to produce its own culture . . . If an art is not contributing to the common good, it is bad art.’ 

So, by Blunt’s measure, even the Queen’s Poet Laureate should cleave to utilitarian art . . . notwithstanding it’s a demand unmet by a recent incumbent in the opinion of those republican readers who’ve submitted the laureate verses of Ted Hughes to closer scrutiny. Although, of that versification, the finest – the beautiful Little Salmon Hymn – is a witty act of lese-majesty since the licensed poet-jester cheekily commands his empress* to collude in acceptance of his metaphors as givens: ‘Say the constellations are flocks. And the sea-dawns, collecting colour, give it, the sea-spray the spectrum.’ [My italics.]

So any success in our tracking down utilitarian verse is likely to be somewhat limited, particularly as the poetry of knee-jerk imperialism is an overglutted market. (‘Who, or why, or which, or what, is the Akond of Swat?’ An example of lese-majesty in verse of the grosser sort, since the Principality of Swat is surely owed more than the glib doggerel of a melancholic syphilitic artist from the West, if one agrees that such smirking, unthinking condescension merits a reciprocal reductio ad absurdum.)  

After all, Maxim Gorky had a city named after him so at least one utilitarian writer can claim to have changed the landscape with the stroke of his pen, an act that was matched by only one rival . . . an autocrat . . . Tsar Nicholas I, who reputedly took his own sword as a ruler and astonished his surveyor by drawing a perfectly straight line on a map to ordain the path of the railroad between St Petersburg and Moscow. ‘Voilà votre chemin de fer!’ he decreed.

A utilitarian schoolboy poet . . . the necessity for literary invention.

Is art necessary? Well, for an enterprising Sussex schoolboy in 1812, aged fifteen, the facility to dash off classical Latin verse, as an accomplishment no different to boxing or riding to hounds, could earn him the valuable privileges of a ‘Senior’ promoted to a higher class. Indeed, in the memoir that follows, the narrator confesses, ‘I had such an object in view’, with the additional motive of earning a ‘higher mark’ that would win him a half holiday on a Friday. 

This utilitarianism in youthful art, which knowingly converts scholarly diligence into social advancement, explains, I believe, how a child can be father of the man who’s destined to outgrow a too facile creativity**. For there is a certain dilettantish class of patrician that disowns in adulthood the tyro dauber and dabbler he once was, and whose haughty defence is, ‘Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.’

Very small beer indeed.

Though it is surprisingly the case that the juvenile poetic facility described in the memoir you are about to read is later dismissed as journeyman work by its author, this dismissal must be understood in a scale of things beyond most people’s reckoning . . . for the author is destined to become the 19th century’s preeminent uniformitarian geologist, and one of the first who dared to believe that the world is older than 300 million years, so, for him, in the perspective of cosmological aeons, such poetical considerations as metaphorical ‘givens’ at Her Majesty's pleasure would seem to be very small beer indeed.
 

A memoir of schooldays by Sir Charles Lyell Kt FRS.

At the end of the first year arrived . . . what was called ‘the speaking,’ when certain boys recited verses written by themselves, those in the first two classes; and the rest different Greek, Latin. and English passages. The rehearsal first began, at which every boy had to exhibit, and then ten were selected to perform before the public. I obtained one of the places for reciting English, and was accordingly gifted with a prize, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ of which I was very proud. Every year afterwards I received invariably a prize for speaking, until high enough to carry off the prizes for Latin and English original composition. My inventive talents were not quick, but to have any is so rare a qualification, that it is sure to obtain a boy at our great schools (and afterwards as an author) some distinction.

Irregular versification. 

I had a livelier sense than most of the boys of the beauty of English poetry, Milton, Thomson, and Gray being my favourites; and even Virgil and Ovid gave me some real pleasure, and I knew the most poetic passages in them. I was much taken with Scott’s ‘Lady of the Lake’ on holidays, when I had risen to the second class, and presumed, when the prize was given on ‘Local Attachment’ in English verse (it being an understood thing that the metre was to be the usual ten-syllabic rhyme), to venture on writing it in the versification of Scott’s ‘Lady of the Lake.’ The verses were the only ones out of the first class which had any originality in them, or poetry, so the Doctor [the headmaster] was puzzled what to do. The innovation was a bold one : my excuse was that he had not given out a precise metre; on which he determined that this case was not to serve as a precedent, that in future the classical English metre was to be adopted, but mine was to have the prize, being eight-syllabic and irregular, and not in couplets.

When in the second class, I wrote a Latin copy of verses (a weekly exercise required of all) on the fight between the land-rats and the water-rats, suggested by reading Homer’s battle of the frogs and mice – a mock-heroic. Dr. Bayley had just drained a pond much infested by water-rats, which was on one side of our playground, and they used to forage on not only our cakes and bread and cheese in the night, but literally on our clothes and books. I am sure that from the date of this early achievement to the present hour I have never thought of this copy of verses; but I can recall with pleasure the incident, and it convinces me that I must very early have felt a pleasure not usual among boys of about sixteen in exerting my inventive powers voluntarily. 

Migration to sewer.

The plot was begun with a consultation of water-rats, to each of whom altisonant [high-sounding] Greek names were given, after the plan of Homer — cake-stealer, gin-dreader, book-eater, ditch-lover, &c. The king began by describing a dream in which the water-prophet covered with slimy reeds appeared to him, foretelling that the delicious expanse of sweet-scented mud would soon dry up, and foreboding woes. Part of the warning was copied or paraphrased from the Sybil’s song to the Trojans in the ‘Æneid’ of what should happen when they reached Italy. The dream and warning, taken, I suppose, from Agamemnon’s to the Grecian chiefs, being communicated, the others entered into the debate what they should do, and it was agreed that, as the fates had decreed the drying up of the waters, they should migrate to a neighbouring sewer, and should destroy the house-rats, who consumed so much provender in the schoolroom, and who had usurped their rights.

One passage, in which a chief was described as a great map-eater, and having at one meal consumed Africa, Europe, Asia, America. and the Ocean, was admired as good specimen of pompous description of mighty deeds, on the first entrance of a hero in an epic poem. The verses ran to thirty-eight, and when done, there was great discussion whether I should dare show up such a thing. It was thought, however, a wondrous feat, till the second master, Mr. Ayling, a youth of nineteen, who heard of it, said, ‘I dare say it’s all nonsense and bad Latin.’ I was requested, in vindication, to let him see it before it went up to Dr. Bayley. To justify his own anticipation, he cut it up as much as he could, pointing out all the grammatical errors and one false quantity. Though he thus made many think light of it, and checked my growing vanity not a little, it of course had the effect of my correcting the lines, and rewriting a copy.

Literary ambitions quenched.

Dr. Bayley, when he saw it, was much surprised at the correctness of the Latin, and struck, more than he chose to admit to us, with the invention displayed in the whole thing. He told the class that it was such good Latin that I deserved great credit, but he did not wish them or me to send him up more mock-heroics. From this time I took it into my head that I should one day do great things in a literary way, but my ambition was quenched afterwards, by failing in carrying off any prize at Oxford.

A frog, depicted on the Archaic silver staters of Serifos (circa 530 BC).

More probings into the contradictions in the life of Sir Anthony Blunt may be read here:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html

*Note (May 24 2023): It’s been brought to my attention that ex-Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion (Ted Hughes’s successor), remembers Queen Elizabeth II telling him: ‘Ted Hughes and my mother did see quite a bit of each other. Actually, I’d like to have a poet laureate who paid attention to me . . .’ Reportedly, King Charles III is ‘a much keener reader of poetry than she was.’

**It should be added that the English belletrist, Geoffrey Madan (who won the most prestigious scholarship to Eton in 1907), earned a day’s holiday for the whole school by the excellence of his account of Eton written in Herodotean Greek.

●

The Hexameter Challenge

Shortly before Christmas 2017 I hit upon a notion that the Sussex Exodus of Altisonant Rats might yet still be restored in spirit for the amusement of a later generation of budding Latinists. So, ever the completist (as I have admitted elsewhere), I tasked a number of Latin scholars around the world to re-imagine the achievement of the teenage Charles Lyell with their own versions of the opening verses from the boy’s mock-heroic epic.

On a whim, the actualisation of the Latin hexameter was prompted by an English couplet — of my own devising — composed of roughly hexametric dactylic lines. Yet, despite it comprising six metrical units, you’ll observe it’s lacking, in its sixth foot, the prescribed anceps of ideally two syllables.  

Oh woe the day that saw our Realm of Ooze undone, for Zeus a Drought has wrought                     to goad us rend old Foes: Tribes of the Netherworld whose Blood our Grudge long sought.

Nevertheless, I believed it conveyed the gist of young Charles’s intentions of 1812. What followed my ‘Hexameter Challenge’ was an extended period of instruction during which it was explained to me, in my innocence, that Latin hexameter — insofar as metre can be recognised by appearance — does not resemble the identifiable patterns of syllabic stress and intonation of classical prosodists composing in English, i.e. effectively five dactyls followed by the prescribed anceps of ideally two syllables:

dum-ditty | dum-ditty | dum-ditty | dum-ditty | dum-ditty| dum-dum 

Contrastingly, we learn, Latin hexameter permits any of the first four dactyls (one long syllable followed by two short syllables) of a line to be replaced with a spondee (two long or stressed syllables). However, the fifth foot is nearly always a dactyl, with the sixth foot an anceps, i.e., either a long-long (— —) or long-short (— ^). To accord with the art of recitation, the anceps is always treated as long to fill out the line.

Honours Board

The winning entry fulfilled admirably the specification to retrieve a schoolboy’s composition from over two centuries of oblivion. 

             Vae tibi dire dies! Nostrum ex uligine constans
             Imperium periit, nam Juppiter arida fecit
             Flumina ut antiquos stimulemur diripere hostes.
             Tartareas gentes quarum petiere cruorem
             Crimine nostra diu praecordia laesa doloso.

             Woe to thee, dreadful day! Our empire of swampyness 
             has perished, for Jupiter has made the flowings dry 
             so that we should be goaded into tearing ancient enemies asunder, 
             underworld peoples whose gore our innards have
             sought for a long time, affronted by a deceitful misdeed.

Using d for dactyl and s for spondee you'll see the first five feet of each line conform to the metrical rules described above, with the fifth foot, in each case, a dactyl in accordance with the fixed harmony of hexametric Latin verse.

             d d s s d
             d d s d d
             d s d s d
             d s s d d
             d d s d d

In this delightful Latin rendering we can recognise many familiar words, some still serviceable for flourishes of a more florid character in English prose: dire = fearful; cruor = gore; uliginous = slimy marshyness; arid flume = dried up channel; hostiles = enemies; perished empire, etc., so there is much that is pleasing to the uninitiated.

Regrettably, for purely etymological reasons (which many may consider irrationally idiosyncratic), a phrase from a rival submission to meet the Hexameter Challenge did not ‘make the final cut’ as we say . . . ‘tum periit Unctum regnum cunctum ariditate’. A worthy runner-up, but I preferred the uliginous characterisation of mud to its unctuosity! 

So, sorry, close but no cigar!

●

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

Rates of Exchange: ‘Ici. Français assassinés par les Boches.’

I have mentioned here and there, somewhat tangentially, the dilemma of my German-born father, accused by his sister in a fierce letter from Berlin (November 17, 1929) of becoming a stereotypical arch-Englishman (Stock-Engländer).
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/we-are-all-vermin-now.html 

Inevitably, these emotional complexities were compounded by the outbreak of war in 1939, though by that date (September 3 1939) my father had been in the Territorials for more than a year. As I have also intimated, his rôle during the war in the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF (General Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) was concerned with the military intelligence to be derived from the closest scrutiny of captured enemy documents, the specialism of the G-2 Documents Section . . . ephemera such as identification papers, Promotions Lists, Casualty Reports, Soldbücher (see below), Travel Orders, photos, notebooks, and captured enemy letters, generally seized unopened at a Feldpost.

The judicious release to the Allied press of enemy propaganda of the vilest sort was also part of his duties. I have, locked away in my plan-chest, a black museum of the most monstrous anti-Semitic propaganda imaginable, a collection my father amassed at G-2.

I have mentioned also that my father was an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials. No doubt the documents in the files I now possess relate to the trials of those war criminals. Certainly, my father retained signed orders from the most notorious of the accused, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel. Here are their signatures . . .

Out of the blue,  late last year,  my sister dropped by with a number of additional documents relating to my father . . . in particular,  a most illuminating (albeit rather stilted) letter to his former peacetime employers in London written from Paris, exactly two months after the liberation of the city . . .

Speer & Hitler, Paris, June 1940 (Keitel, left, Bormann, right)

October 31st 1944
G-2 Division
SHAEF

. . . As you may have gathered from the envelope I am now overseas. Colossal strides have been made if one recalls some of the milestones of the war since that memorable day when we Territorials quite suddenly had to break off in the middle of what ever we happened to be doing and rush to man our respective posts as soldiers.

The Battle of Britain with which most of us are only too familiar; the exploits in Africa where the enemy despite crafty leadership was outwitted and in the end successfully routed; the heroic defence of Stalingrad and the gigantic offensives launched by Russia, with their implications for the subsequent course of the war and on Allied strategy; the first major assault on the European mainland in Italy resulting in the capitulation of the first Axis power; the overwhelming success of the long awaited invasion of the Continent on the heavily defended coast of France; the liberation of peoples from the yoke of oppression. Now, at last, the Allies have set foot on German soil. What a formidable record!

It would be imprudent to hazard a guess when it will all be over; however, judging by the stiffening of resistance, due, no doubt, both to coercion and the diabolical exploitation of every conceivable morale-bolstering device in the vain attempt to frustrate what must be a foregone conclusion, it may mean to a great extent razing down to the ground the domain of a sadly misguided people until the erstwhile mighty Nazi stronghold has been completely crumbled. While not forgetting the task in hand is far from completed one cannot escape the thought that all of this will have been accomplished not without a price which must never be forgotten by those who through Providence may be permitted to return. Upon them in particular will devolve the onerous responsibility effectively to contribute – by steering well clear of such extremes as political apathy and Chauvinism – to the shaping of a new world era from which the spectre of war will be banished for all times.

Nightmare scenes of destruction.  

It has been my privilege to see many of the historic places in Normandy where not so very long ago fierce battles raged, such as Bayeux, Caen, Carentan, Évreux, Isigny, Lisieux, etc, and to share to some extent in the rejoicing of a people who have once again regained their freedom. If one happens to venture along some French streets, it is touching to be surrounded by children who in their innocence seek to express gratitude for something of which they are only dimly conscious by eagerly seizing your hand and muttering ‘Merci’ or even ‘Thank You’. Not without a feeling of awe does one cross bridges still crudely labelled with names which have gone down into history. The ferocity of the contest is brought home to the onlooker by scenes of destruction and devastation unlikely to occur even in a nightmare. Yet amid these ruins courageous people still dwell and go about their daily business. To heighten the incongruity these places are gaily bedecked with flags, bunting and signs expressing thanks and a welcome to the liberators. While travelling along the open roads one may encounter numerous disabled or burnt-out tanks lined up alongside, and frequent concentrations of craters testify to the strafing of a convoy; moreover, many fragments of wrecked planes clearly showing Swastika markings may be discerned in the fields as one drives by, and now and again a new cemetery symmetrically laid out with countless uniform crosses.

Faded flowers and chips in the masonry.  

Last, but by no means least I, have been to that historic bone of contention named Versailles and to the mecca of the Americans: PARIS. From the fashion point of view, I am bound to remark that the female of the species still goes around extremely well dressed despite sartorial shortages of different kinds and I am confounded more often than not by the monstrous headgear which appears to be in vogue at the moment. When I think that only fairly recently I was still in my own home, especially on that day when General de Gaulle entered Paris, listening to the excited commentator describing the dramatic entry into Notre Dame, it is certainly thrilling to be able to write and say one has been there and, among other places, in the Place de la Concorde where signs of the barricades and chips in the masonry continue to tell their story. In fact, other visible evidence of the former Occupation has not yet been completely effaced either. Countless German inscriptions on buildings, signs and even on big posters may still be seen. A more tragic note was struck when in a lonely street on a fence I observed a piece of cardboard recording in crude handwriting that on a certain date some Frenchmen had been assassinated on that spot by the ‘Boches’. No more and no less, except for a bunch of faded flowers still wrapped in paper dangling from a piece of string surmounting the sign.

Flourishing black market.  

Apart from the congested travel on the ‘Metro’ and on a few isolated ’bus services, life in the great capital seems to be fairly normal so far as I can judge. The cafés and a good many places of entertainment appear to be in full swing. People are manifestly pleased with the change liberation has brought them, and many a harrowing tale has been related to me of sufferings and privations which had formerly to be contended with. Prices in the shops are exceedingly high compared with ours, especially at the present rate of exchange. It may perhaps be attributed to the flourishing state of black market activities and possibly still to the earlier rate of exchange fixed by the Germans, which I understand was approximately 16–24 francs to 1 Reichemark, thus enabling them to buy up as much as they cared  At the arbitrary rate of francs 10 = shilling 1/-, or £ = frs 200, Allied policy obviously wishes to discourage military personnel from making purchases in order not to deprive the indigenous population of their rightful commodities. In this connection I must relate an incident which I shall always remember.

Lost appetite.

On the occasion of a visit to Paris after a strenuous morning sightseeing the inner man asserted himself with particular vehemence. Not realising the prevailing conditions and carrying on my person the equivalent of approximately £2 I had no compunction in entering what seemed to be a restaurant of modern pretensions. I partook of a most enjoyable meal and just regretted the absence of potatoes with my main dish only to find that they were served afterwards as a separate course! A Frenchman sitting nearby who had consumed much along the same lines as I, had meanwhile finished and asked for the bill. He took out his wallet and to my ever-growing astonishment counted out a vast number of notes which I saw were of Francs 100 denomination. My appetite thereupon dwindled rapidly and I must confess to feelings of great trepidation when with a shaky voice I eventually mustered sufficient courage to demand l’addition. To my surprise the waitress summoned the proprietress who came to my table and harangued me in a pretty little speech to the effect that I was the first soldier of the Anglo-American forces to enter her restaurant and that in no circumstances would she accept payment from me. I was utterly dumbfounded for the moment and after muttering not too emphatic expressions of reluctance to accept her offer I managed to say that I respected her sentiments and would she in the circumstances do me the honour to accept a packet of cigarettes which I knew were at a premium in Paris. With faint protestations she too decided to acquiesce whereupon with a sensation of great relief I sallied forth into the street, leaving with great magnanimity a tip equivalent to 5 shillings in our currency representing but a tiny fraction of what my meal should have cost me! 

Stand-in Germans.  

[Real names suppressed.] It with a sense of deep gratitude at being able, if only in trifling measure, to reciprocate the firm’s tangible goodwill to the militant members of staff that I now come to report on my visit to the Paris branch office. I had hoped to be the first British representative of the firm to cross their threshold since the Occupation, but I learned that I had been forestalled by a Major ‘J’ whom I cannot place. The only ‘J’ I knew was taken prisoner at beginning of the war. The Major ‘J’ in question is supposed to be a very able linguist and though this applies also to the young man I knew, there is still a discrepancy of age as I understand Major ‘J’ is about 50. When I paid my first visit to the Rue Rodier I made the acquaintance of a Monsieur ‘M’, whom I assume to be the manager, and in the absence of both M. Rosenberg and Mr ‘H’, he was good enough to answer the various questions I raised in the course of quite a long conversation . . . During the occupation the firm was in the charge of two Germans in all, one at a time over different periods, who supervised the business. They were supposed to have been very capable, extremely correct in their dealings, and drew only a nominal salary of frs 2,000 per month. 

Anti-Semitic measures enforced. 

Naturally, I enquired after M. Rosenberg and I was told that he had been in during the morning and was not expected to return that day. It was not possible to reach him on the ’phone as this was still cut off as a result of the anti-Semitic measures enforced during the Occupation. Mr ‘H’, I was given to understand, had been interned in Vittel [concentration camp in the Vosges department,  where US or British citizens were interned] and had only returned the night before. Monsieur ‘M’ managed to get through to him on the ’phone eventually and I was invited to call on him at his home. There I also met Mrs ‘H’ and we all had tea together. I must say that for his age he look remarkably well and fit and really showed no signs on the ordeal he had just been through. As I happened to be among the first to see him, even before he had been able to see M. Rosenberg, there was nothing much he could say beyond express his intention to look up his contacts.  

A true Frenchman. 

Meanwhile, it has been my good fortune to pay another visit to Paris and this time I managed to see both M. Rosenberg and Mr ‘H’. M. Rosenberg was very charming indeed and I was profoundly moved by his dignified composure when I consider the infinite mental anguish and physical suffering it has been his lot to endure. Though I gather from Monsieur ‘M’ that he has aged considerably, his bearing was agile and his speech lacks none of the sparkle and animation associated with a true Frenchman. He expressed his satisfaction so far as business matters were concerned and regarded it as a major miracle to be able to report that the firm had lost no money despite having been under German control for so many years.
[END of my father’s Letter extracts.]

A booby-trapped piano. 

The routed enemy knew about human weakness, my father told me, particularly how liberating troops would eagerly go after for souvenirs. It was these items that the retreating Germans booby-trapped in France . . . he said you should never pick up helmets, rifles, thermos flasks or cameras left behind in enemy billets, because these could trigger trip-wires connected to igniting devices intended to dynamite souvenir hunters to shreds.  

Resist the fatal impulse to pry, he was warned. Igniting devices could be left in the piano, the closet, the stove, the icebox, behind pictures, beneath dishes and flower bowls or even in a chamber pot underneath the bed . . . or . . .
  

Mid Sussex Times, August 9 1944.

As I have recorded elsewhere, my father was a gifted pianist who studied in Vienna and the Institute of Musical Art, New York. We can imagine, then – in that Paris autumn of 1944 – how his strong desire to run his fingers once again over the keyboard of a splendid grand piano, the centrepiece of a fashionable salon lately abandoned by German officers, was almost his undoing,  . . . had he pressed one piano-key, he told me, he could have tripped the enemy’s surprise package and blown his outfit into kingdom come.

In my writings, my sketches of my father as a pianist are rare, but here, below, is a quotation that describes his postwar manner, which was undoubtedly conditioned by his struggle to resolve the crisis of a divided identity, which would in the late 1940s lead to a troubled crack-up. At that time, specialists had concluded that the confusion associated with my father’s disrupted identity was the result of psychological stresses underlying his bilingualism. That there was a higher incidence of mental disturbances among polyglots, the shrinks claimed, was evidence of the trauma of assimilation.

In my opinion it is actually more difficult to run into bar 210 of Valse in A-flat Opus 42 where the waltz ‘stumbles’ than emerge from it – one runs the risk of sounding as if one has simply walked into a wall, rather than suspending the breath for a moment – hence, this artifice of ineptitude is not easy to achieve and, even though Chopin intended to simulate a clumsy dancer’s imbalance before her lost rhythm is regained, the player’s assumed clumsiness must be diligently practiced over and over again.
     So, creating this suspension requires exceptional finesse in timing and shades of dynamics and balance, which, to my way of thinking, is the more difficult task.
     In my father’s case, alas, the task was performed never with consummate success, as though the passage was a nagging regret and he had to return again and again to pick a sore.  (Father would tune his piano himself by feeding a reference note into an oscilloscope an army pal of his had once used for reading radar; he’d then retune the fifths until they were slightly flat. Those dancing waveforms on a monitor screen, as I told the doctors, I always associate with Chopin’s waltzes.) 

This extract is from the episode, Dispossession, in my Sister Morphine (Salt 2008) . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html 

For a tragedy of true alienation, see also my The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K at the South Bank Poetry Library. . .
http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=9440

Literary Car Wrecks: Causality in Two Curious Cases of Gynæphobia and Beetlemania

Denton Welch                             Patrick Hamilton

Can one inciting incident in a feted writer’s life warp his emotional responses such that they tend towards misogyny or, as critically, towards mechanophobia? 

Well, yes. If the causal agent in the causal chain is a careless motor car driver and the writer suffers a near-fatal collision and, moreover, the motor car driver is a woman or a drunk, or both.

In the early 1930s two writers met such a misfortune, playwright and novelist, Patrick Hamilton, and artist and pseudoautobiographical novelist, Denton Welch, a misfortune that left both men emotionally and bodily scarred, their imaginations tormented by the reality of shattered self-image, dashed hopes and impaired physical integrity. 

In January 1932, while out for a walk in Earl’s Court, Hamilton was hit by a motor car steered by a drunk driver, and dragged through the street. Hamilton suffered severe facial disfigurement and injuries to his limbs, which were to leave him profoundly self-conscious, lamed and insecure. This event hastened the heavy drinking that would end in the chronic melancholic alcoholism that destroyed him before he reached old age.

Three years after Hamilton’s catastrophe, on June 9th, 1935, a Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend, Welch – aged twenty – was also hit by a motor car. A careless woman driver. He was thrown from his bicycle. His spine was fractured and he never fully recovered from the injury, enduring recurring, agonising pain, from which he would suffer until his early death, at the age of thirty-three.

Burroughsian sticky white milk oozing from wounded trees?

William Burroughs was not alone in admiring the literary art that sprang from Denton’s precocious pen, perforce held by an invalid’s hand . . . Edith Sitwell and EM Forster were early fans. It’s easy to see why.
 
But Burroughsian? Certainly, the sensuality of Denton’s descriptions and hallucinatory tight focus on surface texture recall exhibits brought back from LSD trips by explorers of inner space; q.v. an hallucinatory drug-induced freakout I can vouchsafe is the real article; see http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/freakout.html

Consider this self portrait, after Denton bathes in a river, for instance. (I have rendered the passage from In Youth is Pleasure in the first person.)

At last I dragged myself out and lay down on the bank in the sun. I took off my coat and looked with interest at the Greek sculpture effect which had been caused by my thin wet shirt clinging to my ribs and pectoral muscles. I admired myself. My body looked stronger and bigger, half revealed through folds of clammy cotton. My nipples showed like little icicle points, or tiny mountains on a wide rolling plain.

It’s true. Cut-ups from The Naked Lunch are not dissimilar from glittering fragments a thieving magpie might snatch from Welch’s solipsistic observational art. And choice phrases of his would not seem out of place in drug-fuelled chronicles from the Summer of Love had they been penned some three decades later.

Yet, regrettably, in Welch’s epicene effusions we cannot escape from noticing a peculiar gaucherie that pervades the bildungsroman exuberances; a preciosity overcome by jejunity.  A specific fixation emerges, as a bi-product of arrested development that is the necessary concomitant of invalidism in youth, as these passages from Maiden Voyage (1943) and In Youth is Pleasure (1944) demonstrate. More worryingly, they are hyperphobic in their intensity:

I did not like to see the rubber trees bleeding their milk into little tins strapped to their trunks. It made me remember a nightmare.
    I once found myself in a narrow, squalid street where people jostled me and threw their filth into the gutters. Suddenly I came upon a woman lying on the pavement, her head propped against a wall. She was crying hopelessly and whining and groaning through her tears.

    As I looked down my eyes focused on a great steel hat-pin. A shock of horror ran through me. The hat-pin pierced her left breast, the head and point appearing on each side of the globe of flesh. At her slightest movement milk spurted from the wounds, splashing her clothes and falling on her skin in white bubbles. I passed on, too dazed to think until I had reached the end of the road.
 
    Now in the rubber plantation at Singapore I remembered this dream again. I turned away from the sticky white milk oozing into the cups from the wounded trees. I waited in the car for the others, and when they had seen enough we drove over the red roads to the hotel where we were going to have lunch.

. . .

At the far end of the cave a low passage seemed to lead still deeper into the heart of the rock. Orvil went up and stood staring into the narrow tunnel. Tremors passed through him. He gulped, and gave a small involuntary skip of excitement. He began to walk down the tunnel as delicately as if great danger waited for him at the other end. Gently he turned the handle of another, much smaller door, then blazed his torch into the darkness beyond. 
    At first he did not take in fully what he saw. There, just opposite him, lying on a carved stone couch against the wall, were Charles and Aphra. Aphra’s dress had slipped down and one of her full breasts lay outside, cushioned on the folds of midnight velvet. Charles had his lips to the large coral nipple. He lay utterly relaxed against Aphra, his arms stretched out above his head to encircle her neck. Their eyes were shut; they seemed wonderfully peaceful and oblivious. 
    But it was only for a moment that Orvil saw them like this. The next instant Aphra sat up and blinked her eyes in fear and surprise. Her hand darted to her dress. Charles turned savagely and shook back his hair. He was about to spring to his feet.
    This brought Orvil to his senses. He flicked off the torch at once, then turned and ran.

. . .

He slowed down to a gentle pace and reconstructed the extraordinary scene in the inner grotto. Again he saw Charles and Aphra lying together on the stone couch. He blamed Aphra severely for not finding someone better to lie with – some very fine man . . .
    Suddenly the extraordinary idea came to him that Aphra had been feeding Charles, pretending that he was her baby. Once having imagined this, Orvil could not rid his mind of the grotesque picture. It hung before his eyes, growing and fading, and growing again. He saw Charles’s lips and Aphra’s breasts swelling and diminishing, like rubber objects first filled with air and then deflated. He saw jets of milk, and fountains pouring down.
    As usual, when any thought gnawed at him, he shook his head violently; but nothing changed. The frightening vignette, like something seen through a keyhole, still hung in the air.

. . . 

[Later, swimming . . .] As she came up gasping and spluttering, her eyes shut, Orvil saw the greenish shadowed valley between her big white breasts. The sight shocked him. He thought of Aphra in the grotto. He saw a hairless white camel in the desert. He was riding on its back, between the humps. They were not really humps but Constance’s breasts, or miniature volcanoes with holes at the top, out of which poured clouds of milky-white smoke, and sometimes long, thin, shivering tongues of fire. . . .

Incurable gynæphobia, indeed. Yet to me, more poignantly, the following lush, painterly recollection (from Maiden Voyage) contains a subliminal heartache, an elegiac hankering for the carefree days of able-bodied youth, a youth snatched from him on that inauspicious day in 1935, as he bicycled ‘. . . along a straight wide road, keeping close to the kerb, not looking behind or bothering about the traffic at all . . .’ and rode ‘. . . into a great cloud of agony and sickness.’ (A Voice Through a Cloud.)

Blue napkins, blue china and deep blue glass made me half expect blue food. But the caviare, from Siberia, was as black and glistening and as like oiled ball-bearings as ever.

The pathos of this description can perhaps be appreciated most only by an inveterate bicyclist of Denton’s generation whose dedicated maintenance routines included regular oil-baths for bearings-assemblies such as a bike’s axle hubs and steering column.   

As to the homoerotic subtext detected in Welch’s overwrought themes, I record here an extract from a keynote episode, composed in the sensuous prose for which he is justly celebrated (When I Was Thirteen, 1944). 

I kept very still, and he tied it [the neck-tie] tightly and rapidly with his hands. He gave the bows a little expert jerk and pat. His eyes had a very concentrated, almost crossed look and I felt him breathing down on my face. All down the front our bodies touched featherily; little points of warmth came together. The hard boiled shirts were warmed dinner-plates.

(Incidentally, when as a teenager I attended Brighton General Hospital as an outpatient, the brown-coated porter, who would wheel in the tea-urn trolley before the nurses’ shift began, happened to be Eric Oliver, the lover of Denton Welch and executor of his literary estate; Eric was regarded as quite a colourful character by the nurses.) 

In rereading Welch’s fictionalised autobiographical writings, I am struck by a singular thought: In Denton, semi-paralysed in arrested adolescence, have we found the Ur-Holden Caulfield, do you suppose? Just consider the thematic similarities: the menacing locker-room rituals of exclusive private schools (Repton versus Pencey Prep); the running away from crass schoolboy bullying as a callow act of rebellion; the encounters with red-light low-life; the hypersensitivity to ‘phoneyness’ . . . I could go on.

Certainly, British English literature can claim Denton as a precursor of the WASP adolescent sensibility – never mind that some questionable writings of his remain fey and effete – and, for many admirers, his candour will be lauded as the authentic voice of teenage angst and, it must be added, lauded as the more authentic for its being rendered in a voice that never broke.

Hamilton’s Beetlemania – the Land of Coleoptera.

Another Sitwell patron/littérateur figures in the parallel lives of Welch and Hamilton, insofar as Osbert Sitwell, the brother of poetess Edith, was Patrick’s pal, and a baronet who never concealed his curiosity for the mores of Patrick’s early family life observed from the upper middle class gentility of a terraced mansion in Hove.

That life, as has been well-documented, was darkened by the oppressive shadow of the chronic alcoholism that consumed Patrick’s tyrannical father, a serial adulterer and a fraud.

Patrick, too, fell prey to heavy drinking, a dependency that became more problematic following the injuries he received in 1932 . . . a traumatic event that damned him to a lifelong hatred of the motor car and coloured his writings in the years that followed.

His motor accident first appeared in his work after he added a mindless, drunken hit-and-run episode to his novel, The Siege of Pleasure, before its late 1932 publication (the middle segment of his trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, 1935). A reworking of this episode on the perils of driving under the influence may be discovered in his radio play, To the Public Danger, in which a fickle girl rejects her boyfriend for a drunken high-speed car-ride with a rogue heedless of the threat to life.

Thereafter, the obsessive nature of his hatred can be tracked through key extracts from his novels; particularly, Hangover Square, and the sociopathic heartlessness of Peter the Fascist, in a passage that blends a love of heavy drinking and a Marxist loathing of Fascism with a disgust for the motorist:

He [George Harvey Bone] sat there, smoking and drinking with them, and not saying a word. He knew they would be reconciled. He knew they all loved Chamberlain and fascism and Hitler, and that they would be reconciled. Finally they became maudlin . . .
   ‘Well, I think I’m right,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve been to jail for it, anyway!’ And he laughed in his nasty, moustachy way . . .
    ‘I have been in jail twice, to be precise,’ said Peter, lighting another cigarette, and suddenly employing a large, pompous professorial tone. ‘On one occasion for socking a certain left-winger a precise and well deserved sock in the middle of his solar plexus, and on the other for a minor spot of homicide with a motor-car . . . ’

Not surprisingly, then, it is to Patrick Hamilton we owe perhaps the most famous passage in English literature to prophesy the Age of the Car.

It is found in Hamilton’s ‘Ralph Gorse Trilogy’ whose fleeing conman-killer protagonist drives unconsciously ‘. . . not into the middle of England – but into the middle of the Land of Coleoptera (the rather sinister name for beetles used by serious students of insects).’   

The concluding chapter of Hamilton’s novel (Part II of his trilogy) has been described as a new Book of Revelations and itemises, with the biblical sonorities of a seer, a roll-call of all marques from the grievous plague of automobiles that covers the face of the whole earth, so that the land is darkened  . . .

. . . There were large, stately, black beetles – small, red, dashing (almost flying) beetles – and medium-sized grey, blue, white, brown, yellow, green, orange, cream, maroon, and black, black, black and again black-beetles.
. . . And in such swarms they still got into frantic muddles and obstructed each other – Ford arguing with Hillman, Alfa-Romeo with Bentley, Swift with Sunbeam, Talbot with Wolseley, Alvis with Buick, Cadillac with Fiat, Essex with Chrysler, Hispano-Suiza with Citroën, Austin with Bean, Daimler with Hupmobile, Lagonda with Lincoln, Morris-Cowley with Humber, Morris-Oxford with Studebaker, Vauxhall with Triumph, Standard with Riley, Packard with Singer, Rover with Bugatti, Star with Beardmore, Rolls Royce with Armstrong Siddeley, and Peugot with Invicta – to say nothing of obscure conflicts between the Amilcar, Ansaldo, Arrol-Aster, Ascot, Ballot, Beverley Barnes, Brocklebank, Calthorpe, Charron, Chevrolet, Delage, Delahaye, Erskine, Excelsior, Franklin, Frazer Nash, Gillett, Gwynne, Hotchkiss, Hudson, Imperia, Italia, Jordan, Jowett, Lanchester, Lancia, Marmon, Mercedes, Opel, Overland-Whippet, Panhard-Levassor, Peerless, Renault, Rhode, Salmson, Stutz, Trojan, Turner, Unic, Vermorel, Vulcan, Waverley and Willys-Knight.
. . . In this nightmare of Coleoptera only two sorts of beetle retained any dignity or charm. These – the lumbering Omnibus and Lorry – were very large, very helpful and for the most part smooth-tempered. 
. . . (All the other beetles had begun to kill men, women and children at a furiously increasing pace – practically at random.)

‘Practically at random.’ It was the soulless randomness of their injuries, the pointlessness, the mechanised stupidity of the modern world that places lethal machines in the hands of the feckless, that Patrick Hamilton and Denton Welch never forgave.

•

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