A Master of Horror Outspooked . . . Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness

It was a Friday of a famous landslide election victory, I remember, and the clamour of doltish triumphalism in our street continued to oppress me until the arrival of an airmail letter franked San Francisco June 1983 proved a welcome diversion to lighten my sombre mood.

The letter was brief. After thanking me for my aerogramme of the previous month, my correspondent concluded:

As I have written elsewhere, there is no solace in the professed wisdom maturity confers when we are powerless to challenge the paranatural forces that taunt our moribund sonorities, never mind that they issue as Divine Incantations from the poeta laureatus of Friscan Bohemia. And yes. Your photostat of the Sterling Corrigenda momentarily induced, I candidly admit, a mild attack of the jitters when I saw the amendment your revisionist specter had ‘ordaineth’. But are They not all-wise, all-knowing?                                                                  Yours respectfully                                                                                                     Fritz Leiber

The Dark Arts of Megapolisomancy.

To the letter was appended a postscript:

P.S. It’s the stalest of clichés but ‘There are some things the human mind is not meant to know.’ 

That I had received a letter from the West Coast doyen of Modern Horror fiction, Fritz Leiber, was remarkable in itself, as I had no doubt that his fan mail was copious and a burdensome duty more honoured in the breach than in the observance, but to have succeeded in unnerving the fictive conjurer of the dark arts of Megapolisomancy was to be regarded, I congratulated myself, as a palpable hit.

My own letter, some four weeks earlier, had indeed been fan mail of a sort for I had praised his celebrated metafiction, Our Lady of Darkness (1977), for the chilling verisimilitude of its evocation of the San Francisco of the Seventies, and declared how my admiration was unreserved for his skilful inter-braiding of the lives of notable Californian Gothic Romantics, particularly that triumvirate of West Coast Bohemianism, the heirs of Poe . . .  Ambrose Bierce, Clark Ashton Smith, and George Sterling, whose life had ended in a particularly ‘nasty death’ (as Leiber writes in Our Lady), a self-administered vial of cyanide, which the poet had carried in his pocket for the exigent occasion of the quietus he cooly foretold. 
   

Of the San Franciscan poet George Sterling I had more to relate, for in my letter I had been eager to share the strange intelligence that I, too, possessed a mystic book, not unlike the one Leiber describes in the pages of his Our Lady, and one I believed, moreover, to be ruled equally by the tyrannous elemental entities that pursued so malevolently the self-referential protagonist of Fritz’s novel, a writer named Franz who resides in the author’s own crumbling apartment overlooking Corona Heights, the vortex of the paramental forces emanating from San Francisco’s city-organism to be awakened by adepts of Megapolisomancy, the science of megapolitan prognostication codified by the occultist Thibaut de Castries.

And the name of my own mystic book?

And by whose cyanide-directed hand is the dedication written? And, further, what can be learned from the identity of the dedicatee?

                

                   Dear Clark

A few more rhymes from your fellow {Bohemian poet and friend

George Sterling

San Francisco 

April 12th 1911

That George Sterling, celebrated in California as one of America’s greatest poets, was an intimate friend of the younger poet Clark Ashton Smith is well documented, and I hazard a guess that this copy of The House of Orchids and Other Poems (San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1911) was his first gift to his young protégé. They first met in 1911. (At five shillings, it must have been bought long before my bookseller converted his stock to the British decimalisation of currency in 1971.) It is significant that, a year after their first meeting, Sterling assisted Clark in the publishing of the nineteen-year-old poet’s The Star-Treader and Other Poems under the imprint of his own San Franciscan publisher (A.M. Robertson, November 1912), with one reviewer hailing Smith as ‘the Keats of the Pacific’. 

How extraordinary to think I now hold in my hands a book possessed by (in both senses of the phrase) Clark Ashton Smith, a fabulist who was in his turn mentor to Fritz Leiber and venerated by him, together with his other hero, H. P. Lovecraft, as the greater of the pantheon of Weird Tales Magazine luminaries. 

Forbidden Knowledge

On Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos as he conceived it I need not dwell, as believers in this malignant primal entity and its shape-shifting emissaries will not need reminding that Clark Ashton Smith, a key member of the Lovecraft Circle, also wrote his own Cthulhu Mythos tales, inspired by Lovecraft, in which he, too, is preoccupied with the lurking malevolence of a cosmogony of avenging entities in perpetual conflict with anti-Dionysian humankind whose overweaning destructive machinations they are hellbent on defeating to see us humbled as slaves to Their will . . . our minds denied the mystic knowledge that is in Their gift alone.   

So to understand my uncontainable eagerness to share the contents of this literary relic with the author of Our Lady of Darkness I must remind you of a key passage of Leiber’s from Chapter Three of Our Lady, which describes a private journal of arcane jottings supposedly written by Clark Ashton Smith.

As you can see, it’s not a regular book at all but a journal of blank rice-paper pages, as thin as onionskin but more opaque, bound in ribbed silk that was tea rose, I’d say, before it faded. The entries, in violet ink with a fine-point fountain pen, I'd guess, hardly go a quarter of the way through. The rest of the pages are blank. 

Later in Chapter Twenty-One, Clark’s mysterious journal unexpectedly yields up its secrets . . .

[He] examined each page minutely with fingers and eyes before he turned it.                                                                                                                          He said conversationally, ‘Clark did think of San Francisco as a modern Rome, you know, both cities with their seven hills. From Auburn he’d seen George Sterling and the rest living as if all life were a Roman holiday . . .                                                                                                                        ‘Hello, what's this?’                                                                                                   His fingernails were gently teasing at the edge of a page.                                 ‘It's clear you're not a bibliophile, dear Franz . . . There!’                                With the ghostliest of cracklings the page came apart into two, revealing writing hidden between.                                                                               He reported, ‘It's black as new – India ink, for certain – but done very lightly so as not to groove the paper in the slightest. Then a few tiny drops of gum arabic, not enough to wrinkle, and hey presto! – it's hidden quite neatly . . .’

And the content of the secret writings exposed? A malediction from a magus . . . for Franz (alias Fritz Leiber) was ‘. . . looking at last at de Castries’s own handwriting, so neatly drawn and yet so crabbed for all that.’ He silently reads the following:

A CURSE upon Master Clark Ashton Smith and all his heirs . . . false fleeting agent of my old enemies. Upon him the Long Death, the paramental agony! 

A Cosmic Wind?

The chill shiver that ran through me when I first read that passage was only surpassed by my shudder of apprehension at the occurrence of an exceedingly strange turn of events when, as I explained in my first letter to Fritz Leiber . . .

. . . in the late evening of Thursday 28th April an unexpected breeze sprang up and before I could close my study window a strong draught swept my copy of The House of Orchids from the shelf above my desk, where it landed, spread open at the page preceding the antepenultimate verses of Sterling’s re-imagining of a prophetic Forty-Third Chapter of Job, yet with his verses now marred by unexplained Corrigenda, as the enclosed photostat discloses.

. . . Know that I am the Lord,

Who ordaineth His truth as a darkness, and

the dust as stars that conceive ;

Who teaches fear with an arrow, and bitter

enterprise to thy young men of war ;

An astonishing feature of this discovery, as I made clear to Fritz Leiber in my letter penned the following day, was the fact that the foreboding phenomenological Darkness to which his Our Lady of Darkness had alluded should appear so mysteriously on page 137 to muzzle the vatic utterances of George Sterling, the Spiritual Guide who had hailed the ‘accursed’ Clark Ashton Smith as his successor. 

Let me be clear, Clark’s presentation copy of The House of Orchids I had read many, many times, and I’d had many, many opportunities to examine its pages. Other than the end papers inside the front cover scrawled with Sterling’s inscription to ‘fellow Bohemian’ Clark, the remaining pages to my certain recollection were entirely unmarked . . . by not a blot nor a spot was any page disfigured. I’d swear to it.

‘And even more alarming, this morning,’ I went on, in my letter the next day to Leiber, was . . . 

. . . to learn from news reports that yesterday, on the very day these ominous interlinear annotations appeared, heralded by a cosmic wind (?), in San Francisco Bay the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise ran aground on a sandbar, as you’re undoubtedly aware, and remained stranded for five hours only half a mile from the pier. Can we assume, then, that the ‘arrows’ of Sterling’s redacted text refer to the vessel’s huge armoury of anti-missile weapons and the ‘young men of war’ to the thousands of American servicemen onboard?

How to Alter the Future.

Only lately (my having just moved house and, in consequence, my having unearthed a mountain of forgotten correspondence) has my/Clark’s copy of The House of Orchids resurfaced. 

It has set me thinking. Hard.

Surely, my reasoning tells me, the fact of this near-miss US naval disaster is more than consonant with the crazed Thibaut de Castries’s megapolisomantic theory of the occult science of mega-cities, particularly the principle that due to the cumulative power of ever-accreting megapolises, a megapolisomancer can manipulate a city’s paramental forces to predict and alter the future. A theory, moreover, that finds its origin in the dark energies believed by Leiber to be amassing at the locus of emanation that is the monster-like antenna tower rising from the Heights above the Bay Area of San Francisco. 

This being so, my reasoning continues, those five hours of the grounding of USS Enterprise off San Francisco in April 1983 are of the profoundest significance. And we must ask ourselves by what degree of potency the Dark Arts can be measured when the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier – and the world’s largest – is very likely to have super-augmented the powerhouse of elemental megapolitan energies incarnated in the city of San Francisco on that fateful April day. 

With the propulsive power of eight Westinghouse onboard nuclear reactors fuelled by enriched uranium, pulsing out 280,000 shaft horsepower, the USS Enterprise as a facilitator of megapolisomantic auguries is a proposition, I believe, not without validity.

However, I cannot escape the knowledge that, according to my correspondent Fritz Leiber, the intention of Thibaut de Castries while in the throes his psychosis was to deploy megapolisomancy for the annihilation of his former acolyte. (Except Clark actually died peacefully in his sleep on August 1961, aged 68.) 

All the same, I do pray most fervently that the Curse of de Castries shall not by association fall on me.

George Sterling                        Fritz Leiber                        Clark Ashton Smith

             (1869 - 1926)                        (1910 - 1992)                            (1893 - 1961)

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)

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

The Audit of Fame 1: Prodigal Son Vincent Van Gogh

Let me declare at once that I claim first dibs on the title, The Audit of Fame, as it may be found set in stone on page 313 of my Sister Morphine (Salt, 2008), where my embittered, disinherited heroine identifies a practice in art history indistinguishable from vanity publishing  . . . in other words, her Portrait of the Artist as a Remittance Man (in this case, Boy, her spoilt-rotten younger brother).
See: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

I don’t think the general public is aware that art for art’s sake is a privileged pursuit often underwritten by family trust funds or that, immediately after the Second Great War, art was considered a gentleman’s profession very like the practice of publishing, and infested with remittance men.                                                                                            The Audit of Fame remains a book that begs to be written by an aesthetical chartered accountant. I repeat, had not Mother progressively sold off parcels of land from my father’s estate — including Wilkes’s prized vegetable plot — Boy would not have had the wherewithal to mount his one-man exhibitions, nor would he have garnered that minor entry in the current guides to British artists, under ‘H’ (my maiden name is the sole inheritance we share).

                Dispossession.

Such an audit of artists would, without doubt, include Degas, whose aristocratic kinsfolk owned banks with branches in Paris, Naples and New Orleans. Edgar, himself, was born on bank premises at the Paris branch of the Banque de Naples, which his father managed. Nor should our audit ignore Toulouse-Lautrec, the scion of aristocratic wealth, and the possessor of an allowance and studio in Montmartre, by the grace of his parents, the Comte and Comtesse de Toulouse-Lautrec. Cézanne, too, was the son of a wealthy banker and granted an allowance to study art in Paris. In 1886, at the age of 47, he inherited his father's wealth and became financially independent.

The Squandering Prodigal of Yellow.

However, the shabby task of running a post hoc slide-rule over the loose change of 19th Century trustafarians is not my intention here. 

No. Not here. My fiduciary duty on this occasion is confined to the ledger account of that archetypal remittance man, Vincent van Gogh.

And, since Van Gogh’s socialist sympathies are nowhere more evident than in his depictions of indigent saboted peasantry, my interest, you might say, is one of purely Marxian economics defined by the true cost of labour, for it recently struck me, just as a scientific hypothesis, to compare the daily wage of the said saboted peasant with the profligacy of van Gogh’s impetuous smorgasbords of impasto pigments – value-costed by oil paint per square centimetre of canvas. 

The correlation yields a result that is somehow unsurprising, given my lifelong ascetic disdain for van Gogh’s technique of squandering gobbets of oil paint straight from the tube.

The coverage I’ve calculated is derived from a typical Vincentian wheat field’s massy yellow, which approximates to 1,400 square centimetres. Hence, in my estimation, allowing for wastage, some two and half double tubes of couleurs fines pour les arts were likely consumed, with each tube (retail) representing a manual worker’s average daily wage. 

For additional fascinating insights I am indebted to the diligence of Brian Dudley Barrett whose 2008 dissertation, North Sea artists’ colonies, 1880-1920, contains an excellent account of the mounting costs faced by followers of the fashion for plein-air painting.

Typically, for early pleinairists of the 19th Century, ‘a medium-sized canvas (125 x 80 cm.) took approximately 100 francs worth of paint . . . In the 1895 Lefranc catalogue prices for tube oil-paints average approximately two francs for a size number 6, c.60 ml. ... It is worth noting that Lefranc’s size 13 tube, their largest, at over 15 cm. long and 3.5 cm in diameter, c.200 ml., cost five francs each, one of which alone was approximately equivalent to an average labourer’s daily pay.’ Or, indeed, the cost of a day’s food for his family. [Five francs was a Parisian’s daily wage, one suspects; in the provinces, 3 francs per diem rate was more likely. In context, the price of a prostitute was also typically 3 francs.]

Agreed, these are sketchy figures. Yet, by contrast, Vincent van Gogh’s tube oil-paint consumption is well documented.

A Docket for the Quartermaster.

In early April, 1888, Vincent writes from Arles to his brother, Theo, itemising his 

. . . order for paints; if you order them at Tasset’s and L’Hôte, Rue Fontaine, it would be a good thing – since they know me – to tell them that I expect a discount equal to at least the cost of carriage, which I will willingly pay; they need not pay the carriage, we pay for it here, but the discount in that case should be 20%. If they agree to that – and I'm inclined to think they will – they can supply me with paints until further notice, and that you mean a big order for them.

So a ‘big order’, then, to his brother who was, in effect, his quartermaster; an order that included ten Double Tubes of Chrome Yellow No. 2 (cf. Goupil’s grades) and ten Doubles of the Jaune Citron he adored. Even with the wholesale discount Vincent demanded, just the cost of these items alone would have fed a worker’s family for a month.

The magnitude of ‘Vincent’s Account’ with his indulgent brother may be judged by the cost to Theo of painting materials in the period June 1889-July 1890, listing 901.80 francs for materials supplied by the firm of Tasset & L’Hôte, and 381.25 francs for Tanguy. 

Total: 1,283 francs.

Estimates suggest that Theo spent an average of around 100 francs a month on Vincent; that is some 15 percent of his annual income on his brother’s remittances.

So I return to the problem of Marxian aesthetics, as hypothesised by a callow Anthony Blunt long before the Iron Curtain had clanged down to crush the beliefs of fellow-travellers in the West who harboured a utopian sympathy for Social Realism. When a young man, Blunt cleaved to a vision of Art’s future under Communism that was unequivocal: ‘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.’  [Cf. Footnote 2, below.]

See
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html

Stakhanovist Artistic Licence?

Mmm. The proletariat would have its own culture, eh?  Stakhanovist masterworks to stand witness to the Dignity of Labour? Tell that to Mademoiselle Sans Sabots of Arles, who must scythe a hectare of wheat per day for less than the price of the yellow vermicelli squirted by the town’s wanton dauber, never mind that the sunstruck remittance man’s confounded easel is planted in the path of her reaping blade.

Yet, if a recognised exemplar of Western Art is the attempted transmutation of the haecceity of wheatfields into the vermiculations of a Vincentian yellow-encrusted canvas, then, by contrast, the Marxian aesthetic, to my mind, was never more powerfully expressed than in the inspired stroke that transubstantiated a Russian Orthodox church into a hungering people’s Grain Store. As Social Realism at its most potent and most emblematic, it surely then outclasses any of the conceptualist vapidities that the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern has lately foisted on our Intelligentsiya.

Soviet Grain Store. 1930s.

Footnote 1 (December 13 2014)

Of course, were not Conceptualism a discredited art, a more sober reading of the 1930s Soviet Grain Store is to consider the 30,000,000 deaths accounted by the Patriotic War and Stalinist Purges as represented by seeds of grain. By my estimation – if each death were expressed as a seed of grain – then some eighteen sacks of grain would memorialise the tragedy of those lives lost.

Footnote 2 (January 6 2018)

In his prophetic satire of England’s Galsworthian leisured classes, W. Somerset Maugham (Christmas Holiday, 1939) describes the views of a young Cambridge-educated communistic firebrand and admirer of the iron fist of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder and Director of the Cheka. The political tyro claims: ‘Art! It’s an amusing diversion for the idle rich! Our world, the world we live in, has no time for such nonsense . . . I know what you would have thought; you would have thought it gave a beauty, a meaning to existence; you would have thought it was a solace to the weary and heavy-laden and an inspiration to the nobler and fuller life. Balls! We may want art again in the future, but it won’t be your art, it’ll be the art of the people.’    

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For more observations concerning the artistic legacy of M & Mme Anon, see . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/mr-and-mrs-anon.html

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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  

For those who would a war declare . . .

August 1 1914 

                         For those who would a war declare


                             we flung our hats up in the air,

                         fall where they may, without a care, 

                        then fought like dogs for hats to wear. 

Declaration of war greeted by jubilant hats in Berlin, August 1 1914.

Three days later, on August 4th 1914, Great Britain declared war on Germany, a reciprocal decision that saw the start of World War One, claiming over 16 million lives and 20 million casualties. 

The Irreconcilable Sententiousness of Libertine Old Masters . . .

In the collected works of Anton Chekhov the short story, Imeniny (The Name-Day Party), is often singled out as a remarkably faithful portrait of a pregnant woman: the highs and lows of a loyal, sensitive wife betrayed by a heedless, self-regarding husband.

However . . . never mind that this tale has been described by Chekhovian scholars as a most profound ‘tour de force’ for his account of the psychopathology of the late stages of the third trimester – the discomfort, the hypersensitivity, the gravid leadenness – we should first remember that Dr. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a male clinician and even his talent for empathetic vraisemblance had obvious boundaries.

On the other hand, his profound empathy cannot be doubted in the shadow-twin of this story, Pripadok (An Attack of Nerves), both published in the same year . . . significantly, Year Zero, as defined by Nietzsche’s Umwerthung aller Werthe (Revaluation of All Values) of 1888.

Compare the two. It’s a striking contrast, as though one story has prompted the other. In the former, the fallow connubial bed cannot excuse the stirrings of infidelity in a swaggering indifferent husband; in the latter, a virginal young law student, Vassilyev, reluctantly on a night’s carouse with two comrades intent on inducting him into the ‘pleasures’ of brothels, experiences a moral crisis, and asks: ‘Is the debauching of prostitutes not a crime? Is it not as great an evil as slave-owning, rape or murder?’  

With strict adherence to his anti-pedagogic method, Chekhov follows his own advice and asked the questions without seeking answers to them: his stories thence characteristically become exercises in propositional logic strewn with premises but deficient of any conclusions.

In my novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, I seek mischievously  to correct this tendency towards moral ambivalence with the syllogistic reasoning of my conflicted antihero sometimes pursued to unwelcome logical proofs that appear axiomatic, see
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-long-lost-novel.html

Tchékhov paid the ferriage for the rivercrossing and the survey party embarked, stumbling in the unearthly stealing polar dusk.
   ‘There is no hurry,’ Anton remarked breezily, as the ferryman took his arm. ‘Charon waits for all!’
   A putrid smell arose as the waves sucked at the stern ; for the river had been turbulent in recent months and, as it flowed along, like a ferocious animal, it gnawed and ate away the fast-ice clutching the banks.
   Small chunks of ice rapped on the hull. Shuddering as the northerly shook him by the throat, Anton clenched the forward-rail and searched the midafternoon murk for a closing shore.
   (‘Finita la commedia!’ his heart cried, ‘and end this burdensome daylong travail.’)
   A wreath entwined with withered leaves of laurel was sucked by on the swirling current. A melancholy syllogism occurred to him :

Man is composed of 60% water ;

water strives to seek its own level ; 

60% of a man’s soul desires to plunge at once over the side of a ferry boat.

Also, for more probings into this field of enquiry, see the contradictions hitherto unremarked in the ‘classic prose’ of an eminent English syllogistic rationalist at this link:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012_04_01_archive.html

Do As I Say. Not As I Do.

So lately I’ve found Chekhov’s abbreviated propositional method has grown tiresome and his ‘classic prose’ is now seen, to my jaundiced eye, to express a sort of inverted sententiousness.

I invite you, therefore, to examine closely the following passage from Chekhov’s An Attack of Nerves and the additional quotations that follow; with the challenge that you, too, reader-of-literary-old-masters, should consider a revaluation of values.

[Vassilyev thought] ‘. . . What is the use of their humanity, their medicine, their painting? The science, art, and lofty sentiments of these soul-destroyers remind me of [the two] brigands [who] murdered a beggar in a forest . . . After murdering a man, they came out of the forest in the firm conviction that they were [still observing a holy fast]. In the same way [these student comrades], after buying women, go their way imagining that they are artists and men of science. . . .’ 
    ‘Listen!’ he said sharply and angrily. ‘Why do you come here? Is it possible you don't understand how horrible it is? Your medical books tell you that every one of these women dies prematurely of consumption or something; art tells you that morally they are dead even earlier. Every one of them dies because she has in her time to entertain five hundred men on an average, let us say. Each one of them is killed by five hundred men. You are among those five hundred! If each of you in the course of your lives visits [brothels] two hundred and fifty times, it follows that one woman is killed for every two of you! Can’t you understand that? Isn't it horrible to murder, two of you, three of you, five of you, a foolish, hungry woman! . . .’ 

Two years earlier (1886), one should recall, Chekhov wrote a cautionary letter to his brother Nikolai reprimanding him for his pleasure-seeking in Moscow’s lower depths, counselling him to become a more cultured person since he had within him the talent to be at ease in the company of ‘educated people . . . Talent has brought you into such a circle, you belong to it, but … you are drawn away from it, and you vacillate between cultured people and [drinking cronies] . . .’ Anton implores Nikolai to ‘smash the vodka bottle . . .’

Anton continues to moralise with self-referential gravity on the duties of a cultured artist.

They seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct . . . What they want in a woman is not a bed-fellow … They want especially, if they are artists, freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for motherhood . . .  For they want mens sana in corpore sano.

Mens sana in corpore sano? Did Anton Chekhov truly believe that for a supreme artist the ennobling of the sexual instinct was an attainable ideal? Certainly, the innumerable amatory adventures – including his own – of so many old masters do not bear close scrutiny in support of his proposition.

Chekhov’s Formula for Extrapolating the Mortality of Fallen Women. 

According to a Los Angeles Times reviewer, Georges Simenon created a scandale à la mode by telling two different interviewers that from age 13 he had slept with 10,000 women, of whom 8,000 were prostitutes. By applying Chekhov’s equation, we can calculate that Simenon, the master of homicidal psychopathology, had himself, before his death aged 86, killed at least sixteen women.


Chekhov expresses his computation thus: ‘If each of you in the course of your lives visits [brothels] two hundred and fifty times, it follows that one woman is killed for every two of you!’

On this sensitive matter, a Chekhov aficionado states in the London Guardian daily of 1 March 2013: 

It starts in 1873, when the teenage Chekhov visited a brothel in his home town of Taganrog and continues until 1898 when his relationship with the actress Olga Knipper began . . . The picture that emerges is of a man who, over the course of a couple of decades, enjoyed at least two-dozen love affairs of varying intensity – some extremely passionate, some casual, some lasting many years, and some that were clearly going on simultaneously – and who, it’s also clear from his letters, continued to be a regular visitor to brothels in Russia and elsewhere in Europe.

I am reminded of this confraternity of literary men consecrated to unswerving faith in the undemanding tenets of their irreconcilable sententiousness when I attended a wedding recently and heard from the altar, at the bridegroom’s request, a recitation of Siempre (‘Always’) by Pablo Neruda.

I am not jealous

of what came before me.

Come with a man

on your shoulders,

come with a hundred men in your hair,

come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,

This boast invites a challenge, coming as it does from an arch philanderer and from a husband who in pursuit of other women abandoned an inconvenient wife and their ailing infant daughter, a choice of moral worth little different from that of Rainer Maria Rilke whose daughter was similarly abandoned before the age of one.

More than this, these proponents of doublethink, propagating their creed of irreconcilable sententiousness, appear to give little thought to the consequences of their libertinage.

As it is, 125 years have elapsed since Chekhov first posited his theory of venereal disease in terms of quantifiable culpability, and medical research into its incidence and prevention has advanced apace. Nevertheless, screening in Great Britain in the last decade suggests that as many as one in 10 sexually active men has the sexually transmitted infection Chlamydia without knowing it. The figures are in line with similar studies of sexually active young women, which indicate that one in 10 also has the infection without knowing it. 

‘Man Wants Woman! Every Man Wants a Woman! So Natural!’

Possibly One in 10 has the infection without knowing it. It would follow, then, that with the level of promiscuity that Neruda embraces in his magnanimous welcome to the 1,100 lovers of the Love-of-His-Life (‘Bring them all to where I am waiting for you . . .’) over one hundred of them, and undoubtedly his inamorata, will be infected.

Cervical smear showing Chlamydia trachomatis in the vacuoles. 

Mens sana in corpore sano? To return to first principles and the irreconcilability of sententiousness attendant on the licentiousness of old masters. Question. Were the nostrums Dr Chekhov prescribed for the world swallowed merely by his adulatory readers and never dispensed to the great man himself?

Even today, controversy rages in Yalta concerning rumours of Chekhov’s predilection for prostitutes. 

In the November 22 1997 edition of the London Guardian can be read an account of an argument between a Yalta sanatorium doctor, Dr Yuri Zinenko and his wife, Valentina, a neurosurgeon: ‘Nyet! Nyet! Prostitut! Of course he visited prostitutes! Man wants Woman! Every man wants a woman! So natural!’

From a medical standpoint, the surgeon’s husband believed that Dr Chekhov’s degeneration through tuberculosis would not have stopped him: ‘His consumption was the most severe kind, but this can just make a tubercular patient more active.’

A cordon sanitaire, therefore, is better drawn over this sensitive matter, when even medico-compatriots can’t agree, aside from their separate views, as husband or wife. 

Come with a hundred men in your hair,
Come with a thousand men between your breasts.
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A Moral Undrawn.

No moral can be drawn from these musings, obviously. That would be most un-Chekhovian. 

And yet . . . many devotees have commented that in his care for others Chekhov neglected to cure himself, a point made in a sly authorial backhanded observation by a character in Nabokov’s novel The Gift: ‘I wouldn’t have been treated by Dr Chekhov for anything in the world.’

Prostitutes soliciting in Moscow in the late Twentieth Century.

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

Banalistes Monumentales . . . the Jadedness of Unmasking Precursors.

Was Philip Larkin an avant-gardist who anticipated Jeff Koons*, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein and other Banalistes Monumentales of the Supersize School of Art ? 

I ask because Larkin’s artistic sensibility, insofar as his dreams were on a neo-Speerist scale, certainly predates the mindset of the American pop pioneers.

Do not these lines of Larkin’s from 1954 outrival them? And, indeed, outrival any of the installations boasted by today’s conceptualists . . . not forgetting those Scale-Up showmen Hirst and Christo.

. . . I should raise in the east

A glass of water

Where any-angled light

Would congregate endlessly.

‘Bigging Up’ is Better?

Anyhow, the idea of spectacular giantism – in both the literary and visual arts – has been so long established as to prompt the question, ‘Why aren’t more Banalistes Monumentales discouraged from stale emulation?’

William James’s famous axiom, ‘The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook’, is negated when proponents of today’s visual arts insist it is we who should be overlooked by banishing us to a sort of cultural Easter Island made arid by artists who throw up spectaculars of such magnitude that they dwarf those Easter Islanders who would much rather swim to the mainland and resume human scale.

And if, as I believe, art has become a heavyweight contest then the trend towards giantism in banal art objects, as a tame commentary on Western Consumerism, cannot be resisted when certain galeristes measure the open volume of their exhibiting space against that of a Turbine Hall.

     Oldenburg                                                 Hirst           

Megalophobia Revisited.

Jonathan Swift lampooned the idea that ‘Bigger is Better’ in his Voyage to Brobdingnag.

As Lemuel Gulliver reminds his readers in his Travels, an esteemed Brobdingnagian historian believed that it was ‘very reasonable to think, not only that the species of men were originally much larger, but also that there must have been giants in former ages; which, as it is asserted by history and tradition, so it has been confirmed by huge bones and skulls, casually dug up in several parts of the kingdom, far exceeding the common dwindled race of men in our days.’

That sojourn in the midst of a race of Giants is found troubling by the ‘dwindled’ Lemuel: a clean white handkerchief for his bed-sheet is all very well, but he complains it is ‘larger and coarser than the mainsail of a man-of-war.’ Even a giantess’s thimble filled with liquor is cumbersome. To be pelted by hailstones the size of tennis-balls was to be ‘so bruised from head to foot that [he] could not go abroad in ten days.’ 

And the daunting realities of a Fay Wray, say, contrarily magnified to the stature of Mount Rushmore are the substance of some of the ribalder – more scatological – passages of Swiftian satire.

The [Brobdingnagian King’s] maids of honour often invited [me] to their apartments . . . on purpose to have the pleasure of seeing and touching me. They would often strip me naked from top to toe, and lay me at full length in their bosoms . . . That which gave me most uneasiness among these maids of honour . . . was, to see them use me without any manner of ceremony, like a creature who had no sort of consequence: for they would strip themselves to the skin, and put on their smocks in my presence . . . directly before their naked bodies, which I am sure to me was very far from being a tempting sight, or from giving me any other emotions than those of horror and disgust: their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured, when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher [dinner platter], and hairs hanging from it thicker than packthreads, to say nothing farther concerning the rest of their persons. Neither did they at all scruple, while I was by, to discharge what they had drank, to the quantity of at least two hogsheads, in a vessel that held above three tuns. The handsomest among these maids of honour, a pleasant, frolicsome girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her nipples, with many other tricks, wherein the reader will excuse me for not being over particular.

For Gulliver, the idea of humankind viewed through a ‘magnifying glass’ is repugnant, an aversion manifested in almost phobic intensity when he’s confronted by a Brobdingnagian nursing mother.  

I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious reader an idea of its bulk, shape, and colour.  It stood prominent six feet, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference.  The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug, so varied with spots, pimples, and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous . . .

And as to post-mortem phenomena when considering condemned Brobdingnagians:

One day, a young gentleman . . . came and pressed [us] to see an execution. It was of a man, who had murdered one of that gentleman’s intimate acquaintance . . . although I abhorred such kind of spectacles, yet my curiosity tempted me to see something that I thought must be extraordinary. The malefactor was fixed in a chair upon a scaffold erected for that purpose, and his head cut off at one blow, with a sword of about forty feet long. The veins and arteries spouted up such a prodigious quantity of blood, and so high in the air, that the great jet d’eau at Versailles was not equal to it for the time it lasted: and the head, when it fell on the scaffold floor, gave such a bounce as made me start, although I was at least half an English mile distant. 

Eyeless in Scarf’s Grasp.

Philip Larkin was haunted by the voice of Thomas Hardy, more than by Auden’s or Yeats’s. So it’s not surprising to find in Hardy’s verse the profounder realities of Giantism that Larkin sought to express when he considered in what form he would raise his monumental votive totem were he ‘called in to construct’ an animistic set of beliefs. The poets shared atheistic tendencies. (Compare Larkin’s Churchgoing with A Plaint to Man by Hardy who asserts that the ‘fact of life’ is to have ‘dependence placed on the human heart’s resource alone [with] visioned help unsought, unknown.’)

At a bygone Western country fair

I saw a giant led by a dwarf

With a red string like a long thin scarf;

How much he was the stronger there 

The giant seemed unaware. 

And then I saw that the giant was blind,

And the dwarf a shrewd-eyed little thing; 

The giant, mild, timid, obeyed the string

As if he had no independent mind,

Or will of any kind.

As Melanie Hosking Williams perceptively remarks in The Thomas Hardy Journal (Volume IX, No.1), mythical Giantism and the likely subject of the poem, the giant Joseph Sewell, should be considered in the purely Hardyesque terms of eschewing sentiment in any appeal of the objective correlative . . .

It is likely that Joseph Sewell’s blindness and early death were precipitated not by typhus fever, as was conjectured at the time, but were a direct result of his condition. Gigantism, the development to abnormally large size from excessive growth of the long bones accompanied by muscular weakness and sexual impotence, is usually caused by overactivity of the pituitary gland before normal ossification (the laying down of bone) is complete. Gigantism is much rarer than its counterpart condition, acromegaly (a chronic pituitary disease of adult life that is characterised by a gradual and permanent enlargement of the flat bones, such as the lower jaw, and of the hands and feet, abdominal organs, nose, lips and tongue). One may postulate that Sewell was rendered more compliant to the string, ‘The giant, mild, timid, obeyed the string’ and to his role as an exhibit, by the muscular weakness which made a sham of his giant stature. His blindness, fits and early death were almost certainly the results of the increasing pressure caused by a pituitary tumour (which in modern times would be arrested by surgical intervention), or by cerebrovascular disease. Sufferers may expect a range of symptoms including visual disturbances, carpel tunnel syndrome and headaches. There is a significantly high mortality in both sexes, in males from malignancy, respiratory, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease and in females from cerebrovascular disease.

Contemporary accounts record Joseph was attended by a Somerset dwarf named Farnham when he exhibited himself, being ‘publicly shewn as a curiosity’. He died on July 5th 1829, aged 24 years. The national and provincial press, including the Taunton Courier of July 1829, recorded the notable death . . . 

The funeral was recorded thus . . 

A Somersetshire dwarf named Farnham, only 37 inches high, followed the caravan as chief mourner at the funeral. The contrasted stature of this individual, with that of Sewell, when alive, presented a curious spectacle, and rendered the conjoint exhibition exceedingly attractive to spectators. The deceased was seven feet four inches high, and weighed 37 stones or 518lbs. His friend, the dwarf, weighed 68lbs only. Sewell’s dress required five yards of broad cloth for his coat, five yards of cloth and lining for his waistcoat, seven yards of patent cord for his trousers, his shoes were 14½ inches long, and 6½ inches wide.

As Melanie observes, ‘Thomas Hardy recorded many incidents in his notebooks, poems and stories which bore witness to individual tragedies and social circumstances of his day . . . It is likely, however, that this tragic sight [the giant exhibited at a bygone country fair] was not within Hardy’s personal experience, but was recounted to him, perhaps by a relative such as his grandmother, and written as if he had witnessed it himself.’ 

Nevertheless, Hardy seized on the image of a ‘dwindled’ giant as emblematic of the powerlessness of even a Gargantua when his plight is such that he is ‘like one Fate bade it must be so, whether he wished or no’. Was Hardy thinking of Shelley’s Ozymandias?

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Eeyore Raises a Glass.

So a strong sense of momento mori is seen to attend the poets in these three cases, colouring their mood in their contemplation of the imperfect colossi – both figurative and real – they choose to apostrophise in their verses . . .  Shelley, Hardy, Larkin were all unsustained by the certainty of faith and these chosen correlatives of theirs – water-glass, fairground giant, monolithic despot  – we may assume are to be taken as corresponding, in varying degrees, to their iconoclastic response to submissive determinism.

Unlike the Banalistes Monumentales, whose facile artefacts are no more than consumer commodities fatuously scaled up with a pantograph, the poeticised devices of the iconoclasts actually prompt active thought. Hardy regarded the meek, blind giant, whose shoes were the size of marrows, as ‘the sorriest of pantomimes’, the sorriest he had ever seen or ‘may see yet’.

By contrast, bland meaninglessness is the signature dish of the Banalistes Monumentales, as flavourless as a pre-packed slice of pasteurised burger cheese. 

Therefore, I continue to salute the astringent wit of a double-dyed English pessimist such as Larkin who could yet half-believe that an endlessly congregating multifaceted light from the east could signify something like succour for those who live in doubt of their souls.

Yet, regrettably, even in his characteristically Eeyore-like dolefulness, he does not tell us . . . cannot tell us . . . if the glass he raises in the east is half empty or half-full. 

See also Les Activistes de la Cause Anti-Brexit – Banalistes Monumentales revisited:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/les-activistes-de-la-cause-anti-brexit.html

* Footnote October 29 2014

As British cultural critic Stephen Bayley wrote last week of Koons, ‘Kitsch is the corpse that’s left when anger leaves art.’