D-r Tchékhov: A Skirmish with Wolves and the Last of an English Racketeer.

As various extracts from my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, have lately suggested, a thread of healthy self-iconoclasm may be discerned in the narrative, see
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/dead-wife-new-hat-femme-morte-chapeau.html
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/inductive-detection.html

The transcription, then, and restoration of a long lost crime novel by Chekhov (he, himself, referred to such a work in progress in 1888) has been transgressive, revisionist and, admittedly, really rather fun.

That ‘Mestur Godam’, the loathsome English engineer 
Alfred Wellbeloved, exerted his authority over the garrison 
was plain to see in the assignment of his very own batman.

Scatological profanities

However, the handwriting of the manuscript is not wholly in Chekhov’s own distinctive pen-script, but in other hands . . . those of his siblings. My introduction to the text attempts a modest exegesis : 

Whether “A Text-book Case” (the manuscript’s working title) and the appended papers are a jeu d’esprit concocted by Tchékhov and his younger brother, Mikhail (Misha), to amuse his two headstrong older siblings, Aleksandr (Sasha) and Nicholai (Kolya), and further elaborated by Misha, must remain for scholars a matter of debate. Clearly, traces of three of Tchékhov’s brothers can be found in this text : in the scatological profanities on pages 229 & 243 can be heard the bitter tongue of Sasha in his cups ; the “pubic scribble” on page 129 is the work of the fledgling artist, Kolya, as, too, the “bugs and weeds” studies and the horrified face drawn in crayon on pages 58 and 212, respectively ; the parody of Ouida* on page 180 is clearly an exercise in style by his favoured kid brother, Misha, who was a translator of this authoress’s work. A censorious fourth hand, of course, is also busying itself (apart from Tchékhov’s) ; that hand belonging to his sister, Marya (Masha), the keeper of his conscience. 

Nevertheless, D-r Tchékhov’s painfully raw account of his detective work in his mission to unmask ‘Mestur Godam’, a corrupt English engineer, remains for the most part unbowdlerised. 

Mr Wellbeloved was a specimen of ruddy-faced foreigner as untrustworthy as any Anton had ever met.  After all, he would often reflect, was not the English Iscariot who betrayed the Dekabristi also possessed of that bifshtek complexion which set apart the perfidious sons of Albion. (Tchékhov had always resented the fact that the spy ennobled by Tsar Nicholas I for exposing the 1825 Decembrist revolutionaries’ plot was another damned Englishman.) The speech of Mr Wellbeloved tended to project from his dexter profile where his good right eye could hold sway, and shield from view the sinister facial blotch of portwine-stained bubukles that damned the malar flesh below his curdled left eye. There was no doubt that Mr Wellbeloved had his rotten side. Topped by his ice-capped brown derby and enveloped in vast sorrel-coloured furs which encased a jacket of waterproof tweed, Mr Wellbeloved wore more and more the aspect of a hairy beetle – a crooked zhuchilo – at once afflicted with a bolter’s eye and armed with a viperous sting.

So, here, having identified Anton’s antagonist, I publish for the first time three extracts from the novel, which charts how the English engineer single-handedly bribed and blackmailed a remote northern garrison into submission. And be warned. Tchékhov’s eventual showdown with ‘Mestur Godam’ is not without ‘scatological profanities’. 

Explanatory note: Morphia-addict, D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, investigates the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison. Despite succumbing to tubercular fevers, Tchékhov – in a contest between the animistic pagan beliefs of a shaman-medicineman and his own psychopathological insights as a graduate doctor – succeeds in solving the case.

At the General’s insistence, Tchékhov is appointed locum medical officer at the garrison. (Now read on . . . ) 

The English Ramp

Anton shifted his position in D-r Pitchinienko’s chair and stretched his legs. The sinews of his ham-strings felt drawn out like hammer wire. 
  Vańuška paused, sniffed, winked, then continued his report.
  According to Vanka, the most flagrant instance of fraud was rumoured to have been perpetrated by Wellbeloved when the existing trunk line, which connected the garrison’s railhead, had required re-ballasting “two winters since” due to falls of earth and subsidences of the track from heavy freight.
   The Englishman’s ramp had been the simple ploy to make his embankment of snow instead of earth, so that when the thaw came, by which time he had been paid, the track subsided two arshines throughout the length of his section. 
  He had escaped censure by specifying rails weighing one and a half poods to the arshine which he knew contractually could never be met by the railroadmen who were forced to make reparations to the Government account. Wellbeloved had known from the first that the contractors’ rail-steel was too light for the heavy engines and rolling stock of the state military traffic and would buckle or spread under successive loads.
  Vanka wrinked his nose as at a bad smell. 
  Of course, the contractors were never out of pocket. In the end, the Government purse paid for errors commissioned in the name of the State. He had seen with his own eyes the railway contractors’ deceptions. 
  The dodge was well known at the railhead.  
  When the government inspectors called on stock-taking visits, by the device of altering with white paint the numbers on the freight-wagons and sending them on ahead from the marshalling yards, the railwaymen made sure many of the trucks were counted twice or oftener and thus answered to the annual audit.
  Even today, Vańuška went on, the steel-rail (manufactured, Anton noted without comment, apparently at the mill which had so outraged the General when they first met) was too light to bear the reserves of water which were carried in tubs on bowser-trucks along the line. 
  Of late, one of Wellbeloved’s official commissions was to connect the Garrison’s water supply to a water-column at the loco’s refuelling-stop. 
  Since the track skirted close to the homes of the town-fathers, the work was delayed whilst Inzheneer Wellbeloved linked covertly, for a private fee, the well-connected merchants – the powerful kupetshestvo – to the public mains.

The Sanitation Inspector’s Report

On secondment at the behest of a Special Commission for State Hygiene to write a Report on Concessions granted by the Emperor of All the Russias, a reluctant Sanitation Inspector — the commandeered D-r Tchékhov (clasping a half-completed field pocket-book whose provisional title An Investigation into the Mineral Spring at ... trailed off beneath his arm) — stood on an incline above a river to observe the site for a new Water Works.  
  He was chilled to the marrow and aware his numbed toes no longer responded inside his cracked, down-at-heel boots. They were now wet as a latrine from squelching, ankle-deep, in churned snow.  
  His socks reminded him of a sopping wet, mucilaginous handkerchief on which a lingering patient has unremittingly blown his nose in the throes of acute naso-sinusitis.   
  His face was peaked ; clenched as a fist with the cold. With trembling blue fingers, he chose a fresh page and strove to write in the headlong running hand he reserved for draft copies : 

“The location is free from inundations, and in every respect well situated for this purpose or other manufactory in its vicinage, the Town being at an elevation some 25 sazhens above the level of the river. At present the Town is imperfectly supplied with water from a well (worked by machinery) situated about 4 versts outside the municipal boundary. The need to supply potable water to some 10,000 souls, the population of the Garrison and the surrounding Town, amounting to 3½ vedros per head, per diem, has prompted a proposal to convey water into the Town from a river some 12 versts distant. As the water is at times troubled (becoming clouded after a North wind) beds will have to be formed on the river banks for filtering it.” 

  Pointing to the plan, Mr. Alfred Wellbeloved (a wall-eyed English engineer with a vicious temper and “crooked face” — his enemies had branded him “Krivomordy” — who, to judge from his black-loam stomach, loved nothing better than sausages and sauerkraut) observed that the small additional source — a mineral spring streaming from the side of a hill — was conveniently located near the proposed site to yield a further 50 vedros per minute. 
  From the inset street map Tchékhov learned that three fountains were to be erected in different parts of the town, a scheme, Mr Wellbeloved murmured shiftily, now abandoned by the Town Authorities who had rejected the fontany in favour of more drinking troughs.
  Turning the page, Tchékhov made, in rough, a rapid calculation of revenue:

   Sale of Water Barrels (25 vedros capacity) to the Carriers 
   (1000 x 10 kopecks per barrel
   replenished once per diem) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36,500
   Drinking Troughs for Oxen
   (200,000 pairs at 2 kopecks per draught) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4,000
   40 odd Houses supplied with 18,000 vedros per annum  
   (say 16 roubles per mensum) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8,000
                                                                                                    -------
   Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Roubles (Silver) 48,500
   Deduct contractors’ Working Expenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10,000

   Net Profit . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Roubles (Silver) 38,500

Query. Anton hazarded that somewhere buried within this silvern total and the contractor’s profit were some hefty sweeteners. 
  But where to bung the boodle? He tried hard to imagine a bribe to an engineer (a crammed rendrock dynamite cartridge, void of kieselguhr, tamped with one-hundred-rouble notes?) and thought of Wellbeloved’s cold wall eye, blank to the palmgreasing of the bribe-takers from the local zemstvo who sat on the Board of Health.  
     Sensing perhaps a judgement in Anton’s prolonged silence, Mr Wellbeloved began to bluster as he folded the map and protested that the plan had been much trimmed by an authority higher than his own and that his personal advocacy of a system of adits for the water’s lodgement – as a countermeasure against frost-heave had been over-ruled.

Concluding chapter . . .

Pursued by Wolves

Ahead of him a white curtain had descended and the effort to distinguish on the horizon where earth ended and sky began soon became futile.
  The clouds multiplied into snowheads. Bursts of wind-borne leaves bombarded him like a rafale; a sure sign a whiteout blizzard was in the offing.
  Accordingly, with a chuck of the bridle, he pushed on at his ancient mount’s topmost speed, steady and perseverant despite her great age.
  Save for the furious barking of the village dogs, there was a deathlike stillness in the sombre and sleeping settlements through which the horseman passed and not one light showed.
  He passed the log pyramids of outlying homesteads, thatched with moss, their impoverished soil enclosed by broken fences and guttered with frozen boundary dykes, until, at length, he drew near to a hamlet straddling a lane leading to the marshalling yards.
  The neighbourhood well was not unlike the empty socket of a gigantic candlestick, with its broad sheets of ice spread all around it; and the ropes of frozen waterdrops strung over the stone slabs at its rim gleamed in the moonlight like the drippings from melted candle-wax.
  Beside the well, in the shadow of a tarred shingled housing which gave entrance to a donkey-engine shed, the greased spindle from a rack-and-pinion gearing-wheel protruded. 
  The words of his own Sanitation Report suddenly leapt before his mind’s eye, and he remembered the English surveyor’s audit, and its dismissal, as of little account, of the “...water from a well worked by machinery situated about 4 versts outside the municipal boundary”. 
  “Goddam!” A voice detonated with a roar like a mortar.
  Inside one of the hutments a dog whimpered in pain.
  On the frosty air wafted the aroma of the finest Turkish tobacco.
  An Akhisar sigara.
  D-r Tchékhov stared intently into the darkness and discerned the knife-slit of a lighted shutter.
  Inside the cabin, the excrescence — the sarkoma — that was the waterworks engineer, Alfred Wellbeloved, the un-beloved anglichanin, could be seen, seated, drinking spirits with the water carrier-men; the bribers and the bribed, in a conclave he had summoned to drive his subtle trade.
  “God damn his angliiskii soul!” 
  The words sprang from Anton’s lips of their own volition.
  The door was flung open and Wellbeloved appeared, fists clenched, his beefy, hairy bared arms thrust through his overalls — a poddevku, a sleeveless overcoat worn by coachmen and peasants.
  He glanced over his shoulder at the burmister and his men, and drawled in his drunkeness: “Gentlemen, I have the honour to introduce you to Saint Snivelling Bleeding-Heart-Holier-Than-Thou, in person.”
  In his look there was something simultaneously blank and insolent, like the eye of a greyhound as it chases a hare.
  He stood aside, and snarled :  “Loose the dogs on the interferin’ young cub!  Teach the fellow some manners!”
  The dogs were as near wolves as dogs can be; white, with more hair than the brutes that guarded the Camp.  
  They circled, slavering; their paws were so large they looked as if they were wearing galoshes.
  The wise old mare immediately plunged, breast-deep, into the drifts which flanked the track, a ruse which so maddened the albinic pack that they began to lope in circles, howling in frustration.
  “Otyebis! Vonyuchiy bzdum-kastrat!” Wellbeloved bawled. “Fuck off home! You preachifying mealy-mouthed half-hung cripple!  Otyebis! Pizdorvanets huyeviy! Fuck off! You lousy fucker!” 
  D-r Tchékhov called our cheerfully: “Uyobivay! Zasranets yobaniy!” He turned in the saddle and shouted as lustily as his feeble lungs allowed. “Fuck away! Fucking shitarse! Chtob tebya, govnjuka, vsiu zhizn v zhopu dryuchili!” He essayed a crisp salute. “And may you, shitarse, be fucked all your life in the arse!” 
  Very soon the Scylla-like yelps of the dogs pursued him no more, and he heard only the savage laughter of Wellbeloved ringing in his ears.
  A musket shot ripped a hole in the air above his right shoulder.
  What an idiot he’d been! 
  How imprudent to taunt the evil fellow, and risk his neck to satisfy his own dull, priggish conscience! 
  He had acted from sheer vindictiveness, and with a viciousness no different from the engineer’s in order to vent his rancour.
  In three days, life in the garrison had robbed him of all self respect, and brought him to the utter degradation of institutional mindlessness, consumed, like the common soldiers, by a crude and bitter resentment.
  Around him he saw only darkness, barbarity, monotony and the dumb, brutish indifference of callous men stripped of all humanity.
  A melancholy whistle sounded like a chamade of defeat.
  In the far distance, a railway engine laboured on a curve, and then the railway lights came into view over the brow of a hill, and a high column of grey smoke and sparks shifted fretfully hither and thither, trapped in the cutting between the forest trees.
  As though at a familiar signal, the mare whickered and broke into a risyu — a military trot at a brisk, even pace towards the flaring funnel. 
  Below them, a long goods train passed, pulled by two panting engines that belched shafts of crimson flame from their funnels, respiring like the high blowers who filled the rear ranks for draught service alongside Old Roarer.
  Soon, the double yolk of a yellow approach-signal shimmered in a glair of mist.**
  In another moment Anton had reached the track and crossed the line to enter the station yard.
  He patted the mare’s neck, smoothing a mane caparisoned by snow and, in places, standing in frozen quiffs.  Her flanks were streaked with frozen sweat.
  “She’s a regular sweetlin’,” he said to the waiting groom.
  He swung out his leg and dismounted smoothly, like a well-turned period.

----------

*Misha’s Ouidan Pastiche

Tchékhov tried hard to imagine how an interview with a suborned Prince might be conducted by the Deputy-Commissioner of the Internal Agency in the Secret Chancellery :

The Prince was led through a secret jib door. He retained a confused recollection of gigantic sentries, glittering officers, grave-looking ushers and other officials ; noble staircases and halls ; paintings, statues, tapestry and gilding ; then, following his guide, he entered a large apartment, at one end of which sat a man whose nod could seal the fate of millions upon millions of his fellow-creatures.
      “Good morning, my dear sir. Take a chair. I’m delighted you’re punctual ; I can see that you’re a military man.  I asked you to look me up so that we might resume our conversation of the other day.   I think I shall be able to make you a definite proposal.”
       His visitor’s eyes brightened.  The deputy-commissioner leant back in his chair and reflected for a moment.
       “To come to the point, I have an assignment for you.  If you care to take it up, I can promise you an appointment to General Staff.”
       The young man listened with amazement.
       “You don’t mean it!” he exclaimed, evidently overjoyed.
       “Yes, I do,” said the deputy softly, soothing the air with his palm.  “Listen to me.  Of course, you move in good society.  I know you do.  Well, I may say we have certain investigations to make in those circles.  Absolutely secret investigations.  Among the very best families.  I will give you their names.  Always providing you agree.”
       The Prince had visibly paled. 
       “Pardon me, commissioner, ya pro'testuyu,” the young noble ventured hesitantly, “but I am sorry to say I can’t do that.”
       “Why not?”
       “I can’t very well play spy in my own crowd!”
       “My dear fellow,” said the deputy-commissioner sententiously, “what a word to use!  There is no question of playing the spy.  Your service in this matter is to the Emperor alone. Are you not worthy of His trust?”
      The Prince was stirred and stood up. The deputat, too, rose ; but with impatience.
       “None of my people can take one step into a drawing room without being known for what they are.  Our flatfoots wouldn’t have the entrée.  Well, what is your answer : yes or no? Your future is assured if you say yes.”
      The Prince’s eyes shone with quickening zeal. 
      “If it’s a question of  collaring traitors, I’m your man.” Etcetera, etcetera, in æternum.

The quest for the truth of the Prince’s spy-masters was maddening, but Tchékhov felt himself to be drawing close.

** D-r Tchékhov’s train-spotting credentials seem to have been impeccable, see:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/03/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-problems-of.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

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

No Poetic Makeweights, Thank You, Pastry Cooks Excepted . . . . . . . or Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2).

When is a metrical makeweight ever acceptable to a poet?

Padding? Never!

Tennyson’s Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white, for example, is not by the merest jot weighted with such dud ballast.

Tennyson does not stumble at his envoi by interpolating a school-marmish stage direction:

            So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
            Into my bosom (Write it!) lost in me. 

I ask this question because for some time now I have striven to reconcile my admiration for Elizabeth Bishop’s much-lauded villanelle, One Art, with certain misgivings, which I expressed in an earlier post: ‘Do other readers share my doubts when considering the concluding lines of the final quatrain?’

           the art of losing’s not too hard to master
           though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Even the charm of Cameron Diaz when stumblingly reciting the piece in the movie, In Her Shoes (2005), cannot redeem the parenthetical padding of that clumsy antepenultimate metrical foot, which to me always seems as though it’s been desperately shoe-horned into a fit unsuited to it. Metrically, it seems like – as we English say in the demotic – like a cop out. 

Pastry wrappers. ‘It’s all poetry is good for.’

I can think of only one poet whose makeweights have been indulged by his followers. I am thinking of ‘the pastry-cook of poets,’ Ragueneau in Cyrano de Bergerac, whose brioche pastries were shaped as lyres since they additionally gained worth by the burden of his verses. You may remember that those who consumed his confections (bardic cavaliers who numbered Cyrano in their company), whose poems were regarded as currency, saw their screeds cut up for paper bags by Ragueneau’s wife in her perpetual war to defeat Orpheus by punishing the Bacchantes. 

As Mme Ragueneau says, ‘It’s all poetry is good for.’

Yes. It’s one of the very few cases of utilitarianism in the history of poetry, apart from that other witty confection, Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis (Fence/Gate/Stile), created by Britain’s supreme exponent of la poésie concrète, the poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, for his garden of contemplation in South Lanarkshire. 

The Incredibly Obvious Manoeuvre.

But, you know, it is my belief that the stumbling closing line that so vexes the reader of Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art could have been fixed so very easily because the secret mechanism for perfecting the verse was hidden from her all along in her antepenultimate line:

I shan't have lied. It’s evident

Since the structure of a villanelle is surely to reconfigure the poem’s principle elements to extract new and surprising nuances (from such words as ‘evident’ and ‘intent’, say, which provide the secondary rhyme), then it should follow that, when the poetic metre is implacably trochee and suggestive of a revaluation of evidential experience viewed in maturity, the perfect trochaic component – far from being a superfluous padding out (Write it!) – should noticeably possess for the final inevitable clincher the inherent potential to practically write itself. 

In short, it is possible that a poet can be blind to the compelling dynamics of her own invention even while those dynamics are seen to operate with an irresistible momentum within the closed system that is a poem’s argument.  

As a gifted cryptologist declares in my recent post of November 16: ‘The correct solution can often be found hidden in plain sight . . . in this kind of business, we learn to recognise the Incredibly Obvious Manoeuvre.’  

In other words, even the most proficient magician can miss a trick.

So, in my view, the answer to the One Art problem has been embedded in the verses all the time, intrinsic to the text. And, therefore, the poem’s conclusion – defined by its own special impetus –  should/could more directly read:

            Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture 
            I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
            the art of losing’s not too hard to master
            though it may look like evident disaster.

Well. Free of independent thought, driven only by the propulsive energy of the unique devices the poet had set in motion in her masterly verses, that’s what I would have done . . . had I been in her shoes.

Cameron Diaz
In Her Shoes

Dare the critic enter the bear pit? See 

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/09/all-that-apart.html 

 

See also 

Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1) 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/catechisms-and-cliche-fatuous-minds.html

Finishing School for Versifiers (part 3) 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/finishing-school-for-versifiers-part-3.html
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 4) 
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/03/did-someone-call-for-recitation.html

Two Untimely Deaths Foreshadow Aristotelian Dramatic Irony

Definition: Dramatic Irony.

A plot device in which apprehension of events or motives is the god-like privilege of the audience but not within the grasp of characters in the play who may, indeed, never survive the action of the drama to achieve such self-knowledge. 

----------------------

It is not for me to glibly remind ourselves of how tragic events in our national life adhere to Aristotelian definitions of classic drama conducive to the terror and pity essential for the cathartic experience Aristotle prescribes to purge our congested emotions.

No. On this occasion I simply juxtapose two news reports separated by a century and half and ask you, the reader, to decide how dramatic irony could be more convincingly wrought by even the most exulted of dramatists in the laurelled pantheon of Ancient Greece.

In other words – with decidedly no disrespect intended to the bereft, please believe me – I earnestly propose that in the denouements of these human tragedies the cosmic dramatist clearly demonstrates, once again, a Supreme Ironist’s uncontested ascendency.

2014: November 27, Australia. Australian star cricketer, Phillip Hughes, aged 25, dies after he is struck on the side of the head by a cricket ball. Hughes died as a result of a vertebral artery dissection, which caused a ‘massive bleed’ on the brain, according to doctors. Doctors describe the condition he died from as ‘incredibly rare’ and ‘very freakish’, suggesting that only a hundred cases of vertebral artery dissection had ever been reported.
      Hughes was struck on the top of the neck by a short-pitched delivery while playing for South Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground on November 25th. He died at nearby St Vincent’s hospital two days later never having regained consciousness. 

2014: November 30, Jerusalem. Former Israeli cricket star Hillel Oscar dies after he is hit by the ball while refereeing a cricket match in the coastal city of Ashdod. The umpire, Oscar, 55, the former national team captain, was taken to hospital unconscious but doctors were unable to save his life.
      The incident came a few days after 25-year-old Australian cricketer Phillip Hughes died after being hit at the base of the neck by a ball. His death was a very rare instance of cricket players dying on the field. 
      One of the players stated that the Ashdod incident happened when a batsman struck a ball with tremendous power and it rebounded off the stumps and hit Oscar, who was umpiring the game.   
      ‘The ball flew in the direction of the umpire with great force, struck the wicket and hit him in the face,’ the player said.
      Oscar was not wearing a protective helmet, the player added. Umpires in cricket do not wear such helmets, since the likelihood of injury is regarded as extremely low.

The teams in the Ashdod game had held a minute’s silence in honour of Phillip Hughes before their ill-fated game.


1856: December 24, Edinburgh.  
The eminent geologist, folklorist and evangelical Christian, Hugh Miller, is found by a servant lying half dressed, lifeless on the floor, his feet upon the study rug, and his chest pierced with the ball of his revolver pistol, which is found lying in the bath that stands close by. 
      He had earlier taken his bath but unfortunately his natural and peculiar repugnance to physic had induced him to leave untaken the medicine prescribed him for the night terrors by which he was pursued. The deadly bullet had perforated the left lung, grazed the heart, cut through the pulmonary artery at its root, and lodged in the rib in the right side. Death must have been instantaneous. 

1856: December 26, Edinburgh.  
A post-mortem examination is made of the body of Hugh Miller, whose death from a pistol had been reported on Christmas Eve. The Report of the Post Mortem Examination under the authority of the Procurator-Fiscal states:

We hereby certify, on soul and conscience, that we have this day examined the body of Mr. Hugh Miller . . . The cause of death we found to be a pistol-shot through the left side of the chest; and this, we are satisfied, was inflicted by his own hand. From the diseased appearances found in the brain, taken in connection with the history of the case, we have no doubt that the act was suicidal under the impulse of insanity.

Signed 

James Miller,  W.T. Gairdner,  A.H. Balfour,  A.M. Edwards.

1856: December 27, Edinburgh.  Another tragedy in connection with Hugh Miller’s fate is at the same time disclosed. After the judicial and medical inquiry, Professor Miller (no relation) takes the pistol to the gunsmith – from whom it had been purchased by Mr Miller in July, 1855 – in order to ascertain how many shots had been fired and how many were still in the chamber. 
     In the master’s absence, the foreman, Thomas Leslie, an old and experienced workman, receives the pistol from Professor Miller but, unfortunately, instead of taking off the chamber, he looks into the muzzle, holding the hammer with his fingers while he turned the chamber round to count the charges. The hammer slips from his fingers, strikes the cap, and the charge in the barrel explodes. 
     It is reported that Professor Miller exclaimed, ‘That’s a narrow escape.’ Unhappily, it was not so, for, as the smoke cleared away, he saw the gunsmith’s head gradually droop, and his body then fall lifeless on the floor. The charge had entered his right eye, and penetrated the brain. Thomas Leslie was a steady, trustworthy man, and had been 25 years in employment as a gunsmith. He left a widow and a family of eight children.
     It was established that Hugh Miller had bought the six-shot revolving chamber pistol, size of ball ninety-two to the pound, from the firm of Messrs. Alexander Thomson & Son, gunmakers. A few days after, he called and said he thought it a little stiff in its workings, and had it made to revolve more readily. The pistol had not been seen by Thomson since then; but in his absence Professor Miller called at the firm and asked Mr Thomson’s foreman how many of the six shots had been fired. He added, ‘Mind, it is loaded.' 
    The foreman, instead of removing the breech or chamber to examine it, had incautiously turned the pistol entire towards his own person, and lifting up the hammer with his fingers, while he counted the remaining loaded chambers, he must have disengaged his fingers while the pistol was turned to his own head. It exploded, and the ball lodging in the angle of his right eye, he fell back a lifeless corpse. 
    The pistol was a bolted one, which meant it could be carried loaded with perfect safety. Having been wet internally, rust may have stopped the action of the bolt. The pistol had remained for several hours in the bath where Hugh Miller had dropped it. This may have accounted for the apparent incaution of Mr Thomson’s foreman.

Thomas Leslie was buried in Grange Cemetery on the same day as Hugh Miller.

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