Catherine Eisner

Friday, 10 July 2015

A BAD CASE and Other Adventures of Disturbed Minds

http://www.saltpublishing.com/products/a-bad-case-9781844719624

From Publisher’s Announcement

What links Clorinda to the mysterious disappearance of her new friend Theresa, in broad daylight, on the streets of New York? What is the true relationship between high-born, nine-year-old Elise von Alpenberg and her sinister guardian, Kepler von Thul? Why does young Marthe’s uneasy interview with the notorious spy, Anthony Blunt, stir up suspicions of complicity against her boss, the Establishment socialite Barbara Ely? And who is the true Fourth Man? And what connects Barbara to Constance Bryde, an unfaithful wife enmeshed in the cat-and-mouse surveillance operations of a divorce solicitor’s enquiry agent? Or how will jilted mistress, Rhona, deliver a long-overdue comeuppance to her Significant Other, the supercilious on-screen Talking Head? And who, you may well wonder, is the next doomed subject of portraitist Deverell-Hewells’s murderous thoughts? And, finally, can Nina discreetly maintain the façade that hides the eternal triangle of her complicated lovelife? These questions and more are answered in Eisner’s third series of mordant case histories intimately documenting bizarre dramas triggered by the subclinical dependencies of disturbed minds.

Published this year

Pages : 244pp

Format : Paperback

Trim Size : 203 x 127mm

Publisher : Salt Publishing (21 Jan. 2015)

Language : English

ISBN-10 : 1844719626

ISBN-13 : 978-1844719624

From Publisher’s Clippings File for Catherine Eisner’s Fiction

A meticulous recorder of behaviour, pitch-perfect on accents and the faultlines between class, sex and age, Eisner imbues each account with an unsettling verisimilitude that reaches its peak in ‘An Unreined Mind’.

Cathi Unsworth The Guardian

Eisner’s collection is subtitled, Hidden Lives of Love, Madness, Murder, Loss and Deception, and while the sense of madness and loss is amplified by the book’s extraordinary and disturbing cover, there is also a tremendous sense of fun here. The title story is the last testament of its asexual narrator. It’s a odd story, full of strange characters and erotic imagery: the narrator’s husband refers to her as his ‘long noodle’, and poor Uncle Irving’s body has to be identified by dental records – all that is left of him is his toupee. The stories in this collection are dark and the characters are ‘driven by bizarre and sometimes criminal compulsions.’

Carys Bray Postnatal Confession

I’ve long been an admirer of Catherine Eisner’s piquant and highly original fictions in the literary journal, ‘Ambit’, and of her singularly rich pictorial and sensuous prose. Here at last she is given a very much broader canvas for her character studies of women at the end of their tether, though it’s the minute detail of their dysfunctional, drug-dependant (and even criminal) lives I admire so much.

Johanna Behrendt Editor

Eisner herself intrigues me almost as much as her work. This is because she is profoundly knowledgeable in so many different fields: she understands the pop scene of the 1960s; she obviously knows a lot about the publishing industry; she exhibits more than a passing acquaintance with a wide range of ‘mind-altering substances’; she is erudite, although she wears her learning lightly, pronouncing telling mots justes upon the giants (and some of the minnows) of Western civilisation’s authors, artists and musicians across many centuries; she understands Latin and several European languages besides English; she has an acute ear for dialect (in A Bad Case, southern Irish, especially) as well as the varying cadences of speech that derive from differences in social standing; and, if she has not lived among the British aristocracy, she has clearly had opportunities to observe it at first hand. Wow!

Christina James Crime Novelist

Eisner has mastered the twist in the tale and her stories cascade vividly into derangement.
Cameron Woodhead The Age

. . . a genuinely unsettling voice, at once comic, intelligent and slightly, scarily deranged . . . a true technical triumph.
Kate Clanchy MsLexia

Erotic . . . enthralling . . . very pictorial . . . very original.
Neville Marten Ink

Extracts from Narrative (Pages 145 – 196 A Bad Case)

In the humdrum is the beginning of murder.

Since breakfast, by slow degrees, a dark cloud had descended upon my consciousness, assuming a quality of sinister significance to which I was compelled to give thought.

I shivered, and at last conceded that an acute and homicidal hatred, with all the cunning of actual lunacy, now exercised an absolute mastery over my will.

I removed my fountain-pen from the breast pocket of my medical white coat and marked an X on the breakfast tablecloth beneath an offensively large bread crumb.

Just then I did not wish to be reminded of my marriage to Ingrid but once the idea had gripped my mind no steps I took could shake it off.

For mad I most certainly was that morning of the abandoned breadcrumb.

Once the grotesque problem of murder began to dominate my thoughts, it haunted me like a presence, and temptation grew apace.

The descent into Hell is easy.

Do I need to describe my wife when an artist greater than myself has captured her essence . . . It’s a living likeness! For long ago she had reached that moment in the passage of a woman’s life when, as it is said, the mirror no longer returns the expected consoling reflection and, therefore, must be turned to the wall.

Royal Portraitist Prof. Anthony Deverell-Hewells

Now You See It, Now You Don’t.

•

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

Tuesday, 7 July 2015

Stoneburgh Spy Campus (Pt. 5): Tyrants, Ideologues and Spies are ‘Stronger by Treachery’ says Weisse

‘Bones are strongest at their broken places,’ declared Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener (Stoneburgh Military Academy’s lecturer on politico-criminalistics), as he commenced his second lecture on Day Two of the Psychodynamics of Espionage conference, though, in my own view, his choice of expository text seemed to condemn his listeners to the aridities of a secular sermon.
But, surprisingly, the Prof then darted off on a tangent to illustrate how his text provided a precise metonym for current breaches of border security by insurgents, namely the strengthening of incursion tactics at Calais, the point of Britain’s weakest offshore defences .
‘The bones of a born survivor heal from a break,’ he explained. ‘They are strongest in the place where they were once broken.’
He then planked down a pair of wire-cutters on the lectern with a rhetorical flourish.
‘Similarly, the clandestines camped in Calais (whose political allegiances are of the most troubling dubiety) are now known to be surpassingly inventive in exploiting a chink in the armour of UK-bound hauliers – in this case, literally – and it is by this weakness that they strengthen their tactics to traffick hostiles into Britain.’
Weissener paused and flipped a switch.
At once an x-ray view was projected on to the screen behind him, revealing a cargo of trafficked illegals, massed inside a curtainsider truck. (They were so crammed together that some unfortunates among the human freight had been forced to stand.)

‘I don’t think it has yet been observed by the international Press,’ Weissener continued, ‘that the desperate conditions in the illegal camps at Calais resemble in many ways the PoW camps of two world wars insofar as latterday camp inmates are driven to attempt astonishing feats of ingenuity in their pursuit of new means of escape.’

He produced a length of cable and invited a conference delegate from the assembly to – stooge-like with a sickly grin – snip it with the wire-cutters.

‘Zapp! And that is how easy it is to get under the wire,’ Weissener told us grimly. ‘The wire in question is the high-tensile TIR cable [Transports Internationaux Routiers standard] that secures the curtainsider trucks transporting goods through the Channel Tunnel.

‘Yes, anti-slash armoured curtains may well be up to spec, and double padlocks clearly in evidence, BUT these are to no avail if would-be clandestine entrants to the United Kingdom have clipped the security cable and RECONNECTED IT WITH SUPER GLUE once they have penetrated the cargo space. This ploy means that – though the TIR cable is seen to pass through all fastening points and remains taut – the glued severed ends are actually concealed behind the curtainsider’s strap fasteners.

‘And, yes, the vigilant driver may well re-test the tension of the cable, say, after he’s been occupied at the pumps, YET – to return to my original proposition – the vehicle’s defences “are strongest at their broken places.” Or “strongest” certainly in the opinion of those clandestines whose deceptions have gained them admission to their free ride out of continental Europe.

‘Another thing. It is even known that padlocks are sheared off the tensioned TIR line then reassembled with super glue . . . the more easily later to prise them silently apart undetected.’

Pregnable Embassies

‘Notwithstanding this . . .’ again the lightning of the Prof ’s darting mind seized on another aside, ‘. . . there is a complacency prevailing in the haulage industry that’s very similar to the reliance placed by security agencies on the impregnability of those impressively substantial, antiquated, square-cornered, steel-plated safes in which our embassies overseas continue to hoard classified documents.

‘Fact. The seams of such safes can be easily detected and forced open with basic workmen’s tools such as a heavy hammer and cold chisel . . . even the best examples of this Victorian construction can be ripped open by driving a wedge or chisel into the riveted seams, usually found at one of the top corners. Once the rivets are popped, the corners can be peeled back . . . however, forgive me, for those safe-crackers among you I am anticipating the instruction you’ll receive for the next addition to your crime sheet . . . your Advanced Peterman Course this afternoon.’ [Polite laughter]

Outlawry Strengthened by Broken Pledges

At which point, I truly believed Stoneburgh’s most eminent theoretician had veered so far from his subject that he would find no way back.

I was wrong.

‘And now, you may ask, to what purpose do I mention these breached defences so easily penetrated by the exigent guile of self-taught outlaws “riding the rails” to Dover?
‘The lesson I adduce and which I wish our counterespionage agencies to take most to heart is: A successful law-breaker is strengthened by transgressive acts.
‘Being outside the rule of law, the “incursionists” crossing borders bound for this nation have no code of conduct to observe and the ease with which they evade international law-enforcers makes them stronger in their defiance of the polities of our hard-won democratic way of life.’
The effort of this peroration caused Professor Weissener to pause and reach for a glass of water. He was clearly troubled by the extreme complexity of his own circuitous argument.
He wiped his forehead and resumed, wandering off the point (judging by the response of his listeners) to cite any number of political and martial acts of treachery to substantiate his views.
‘The future historian will, no doubt, describe the present-day incursions upon Britain in an allegorical vein, and it’s true that no more striking example of deception by would-be insurgents is the sublime instance of the Trojan Horse, the symbol of a broken pledge since the ‘gift’ to the Trojans was dissembled as the Greeks’ offering of atonement to the goddess Athena.
‘Some of you may take this interpretation to be visionary, but the insidious peril I am combating is an actuality and one that may turn a foot soldier into a rebel leader, and make a declarant of broken promises stronger by treachery.
‘Hence arises a grave mischief.
‘Tyrants, ideologues and spies are stronger by treachery.
‘Modern history is replete with examples: Hitler and the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (by his treacherous invasion of the Soviet Union Hitler reclaimed territories gained by the Soviets); Churchill and the forced repatriation – at the end of WW2 – of Cossacks (including women and children) to the USSR and their certain execution (an act of betrayal that has not tarnished Churchill’s reputation as revered ‘Saviour of the Nation’); the ambiguity of de Gaulle’s seeming promise to Algeria’s pieds noirs – “Je vous ai compris!”– and his subsequent u-turn did nothing to constrain his high-handed presidentialism during the succeeding decade of his politique de grandeur; Horatio Nelson’s betrayal of Neapolitan revolutionaries in 1799 in violation of the terms of an armistice has not toppled the admiral of ‘Immortal Memory’ from his pedestal nor impugned his gentleman’s ‘code of honour’; the posting to Washington of the master-spy Kim Philby as chief British intelligence officer at the capital served only to raise his espionage activities to a new level of treachery and strengthen his hand . . . and so on . . .’

A Trojan Horse Assumes Many Guises.

Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener glanced at his watch and gathered together his lecture notes.
‘But here I must end my illustrations. My subject is treachery. Your job is counterespionage. Major problems of vital national security continue to confront us and your goal is to identify those who break the sacred bond of trust before they assume the false integrity that can make them seem unassailable despite the denunciations of whistleblowers, as was the case with that arch traitor and double agent, the odious dipsomaniacal snake in the grass Kim Philby.’
I smiled to myself, and such was the sustained impression of a secular sermon that I expected him to add, ‘Here endeth today’s lesson,’ but, instead, Weissener again flipped a switch and a final image was projected on to the conference screen above him.
‘Before I close I would earnestly impress upon you particularly the notion that a Trojan Horse can assume many guises, and we should heed those doubters who, like the seer Cassandra, saw through the incursionist deceptions that threatened Troy but were ignored, and hence had to face defeat and submission to a hostile occupation.’

Re. The trafficking of ‘incursionists’.
‘I would earnestly impress upon you particularly the notion
that a Trojan Horse can assume many guises.’
Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener
(The limitless ingenuity of bootleggers in the Prohibition Era.)

•

Calais Stowaways:

Penalties for hauliers caught with clandestines on board are variable, according to levels of negligence, with a maximum level of £2000 per stowaway.

•

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

(where the counterespionage operations of Stoneburgh may be read in Red Coffee)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Tuesday, 23 June 2015

A Great Poet’s Disarming Admission: W.D. Snodgrass and the de Witts

I’ve deeply admired the distinguished American poet, W.D. Snodgrass, ever since the day Oxford University Press published After Experience* in the States; I attended the launch of this volume in New York in 1968.
      In particular, the superb title poem, “After Experience Taught Me . . .”, resonated with me because at once I recognised the quotation from the little Guide to Spinoza bequeathed to me by my father. It is Spinoza’s* Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect that provides Snodgrass with the poem’s schematic thesis (‘After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile ... etc.’ ) against which he counterpoints antithetical couplets of martial brutishness devised to reduce the enlightened lens-grinder to a dehumanised husk.
      My father, an eye-witness at the Nuremberg Trials, served in SHAEF under U.S. General Eisenhower from late 1943 until the end of WW2. I believe Father would have had a profound understanding of Snodgrass’s After Experience since listening at first hand to harrowing evidence of Nazi atrocities had been his daily lot.
  (See: Rates of Exchange: ‘Ici. Français assassinés par les Boches.’
  http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html  )
      But it was not until I learned much later the truth of the baptismal names masked by the initials W.D. – they actually stood for William De Witt and, therefore, he appeared to be of Dutch extraction – that it occurred to me to summon the courage to write to the poet.
      Was it too fanciful, I asked myself, to view Snodgrass’s cathartic work eviscerating the agents of the Holocaust (The Führer Bunker Cycle of Poems) as an act of reparation on behalf of his ancestors, the patrician de Witt brothers, murdered and disembowelled in 1672 in the Hague, in whose suburb, Voorburg, Spinoza resided.

      As I eventually wrote in my letter to W.D. Snodgrass: ‘I’m told that Spinoza, a Sephardic Jew, had developed an intimate friendship with Jan de Witt and his brother so the controversial philosopher had to be forcibly restrained from going into the streets to publicly denounce the murder. The two de Witts had been mistakenly identified as traitors by a Dutch mob that lynched them and mutilated their bodies, believing the brothers had been responsible for the defeat of the Dutch troops by the French in 1672.’
(It is said that Spinoza was moved to attend the scene of the crime with a notice inscribed Ultimi Barbarorum – Basest of Barbarians – until dissuaded by van der Spyk, the painter.)
      Ten generations or so later, I asked the poet, did latterday De Witt owe Spinoza a debt of honour?
       Some weeks later an airmail from Erieville NY arrived, which went some way to solve the riddle. W.D. Snodgrass wrote:

Thanks for your very kind letter . . . Your question about Spinoza, the de Witt brothers and my poems about the Third Reich is fascinating – downright ingenious – but I’m afraid my answer will have to be disappointing. I was always curious about where my middle name came from (that is, previous to my father, who was Bruce DeWitt Snodgrass). My family was always very vague about this, saying that we were mostly Scots, with a little Irish thrown in, but they thought we’d had an ancestor who was “German or something.” I was surprised, then, to find, on a trip to Belgium, and again on a later visit to Holland, that the name appeared frequently, often on store windows in the spelling “deWitte.” This amused and further puzzled me because, when I attended a high school reunion, I’d been surprised to ﬁnd that everyone addressed me as “DEwitt,” a name which seemed to imply the removal of someone’s intelligence. (I still believe that when I was actually in School, friends called me “De,” the same nickname my father went by, and I still do.)
This puzzle was solved for me by Philip Hoy, the literary critic and publisher who came here from London to interview me about 10 years ago. When I asked where he’d got his Dutch name (there were several Hoys in my home town), he said it was just where I’d got mine — many Dutch Covenanters had ﬂed to Scotland or England before emigrating on with their fellow-believers to the U.S. As a matter of fact, there was a Covenanter college (Geneva) only a block from my home in Beaver Falls, PA, but they are Reformed Presbyterians while my family were all United Presbyterians and considerably less stringent and hide-bound.
I once had known of the de Witt brothers and their relation with Spinoza, but had forgotten about it. Thanks for reminding me – it gives me a sense of closer relation with Spinoza than I can probably claim with justice. I hope this will give you the information you need.
With best wishes,
W. D. Snodgrass

His signature and handwriting had a crispness and flow that reflected the agility of a questing mind. (The letter was dated April 10 2004, some five years before his death, aged 82.)

Ultimi Barbarorum

It is my belief that Ultimi Barbarorum would make a fitting epigraph to this meditation on “After Experience Taught Me . . .” or even, perhaps, this stanza (from the The Führer Bunker Cycle, in the mouth of Joseph Goebbels):

                     Pray, children, pray.
                      Our Father who art in Nihil
                              We thank Thee for this day of trial
                              And for the loss that teaches self-denial.
                              Amen.


The mutilated bodies of the Brothers de Witte by Jan de Baen

Postscript.

To pursue the resonances of W.D. Snodgrass’s name to a point of supererogation, I should add, for the benefit of non-British readers of this text, that WD indicates ‘War Department’ in common notation in the UK, and can often warn civilians of sites of unexploded bombs.

* For another literary title derived from Spinoza’s works, see Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (The Ethics – Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, Part IV: Of Human Bondage).

For After Experience, see:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171513

For an intimate insight into the psyche of a committed Nazi, whose Anglophobic thoughts are preserved within the covers of Goethe’s Faust, see:
Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/between-life-and-death-january-14-1944.html

Friday, 12 June 2015

Stoneburgh Spy Campus Archive . . . (Pt. 4) R.A.P.I.E.R. Birth of a Plausible Intriguer and Enterprising Rogue.

As outlined in the first of these occasional bulletins from the Archives of Stoneburgh Military Academy, the noted socialite ‘Barbara Ely’ had been seconded to the Applied Behavioural Science and Psychological Operations unit of military intelligence based at Stoneburgh; an outcome that was surely almost inevitable, given her close friendship with Anthony Blunt.

As a psycho-scenarist of criminal rôle-play for lectures in state espionage, this dazzling socialite won a reputation within intelligence circles that was close to legendary, a reputation evidently strengthened by the corpus of training ‘featurettes’ she devised for the instruction of probationary intelligence agents.

The scenarios range over a number of countersubversion activities encountered in the IOC (Intelligence Operations Course) taught at Stoneburgh, including Diplomatic Cover, Turnaround, Bona Fides, Rogue Agent, Stalking Horse, and the functions of a Useful Idiot.

For Turnaround see:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html

Here (in an extract from Rogue Agent) is Barbara’s sketch of a disaffected fifteen-year-old (a youth modelled we have no doubt on the formative years of the traitor George Blake, a warped Calvinist) which gives us a glimpse of the schooldays of the ‘justifed sinner’ Blake professed himself to be. The ‘featurette’ is in the confessional mode of a schoolboy diary.

See also Profiling MI6’s Predestined Mole:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.html

‘Of course, Judas was reputedly a southpaw; medieval iconography invariably

depicts his bag of thirty pieces of silver clutched in his left hand.’

(Detail: Altar of the Holy Blood, lime-wood, Circa 1500, and arch traitor George Blake.

Note the Lacoste ‘Krokodil’ brand on Blake’s sports shirt; maybe his intended nod to

Soviet political satire of Western capitalism. Krokodil – a satirical periodical published in

the USSR – ridiculed capitalist countries and attacked political, ethnic and

religious groups judged to oppose the Soviet system.)

Friday, September 5 : I was put ‘On Report’ last week because of my late submission of an essay demanded by the school chaplain.
Old Hopalong [Rev. H. W. F. Walmesley] was once a star track runner, a champ of the hundred yard dash until invalided out of the army. His faith, like that of my father’s, is of a doctrinaire brand of muscular Christianity, and he is no less stern in censure of a miscreant’s lapses from high conduct.
So when this afternoon I was called out of class to report to his pastoral office in the school chapel I was pretty much prepared for any outburst of outraged godliness I may have provoked.
I found him in the robing-room of the vestry; a thin, dry, raw-boned man, with a curiously lazy right eye, which causes his active eye to gleam with greater fixity on the penitents summoned before him.
I saw my essay lay on the shelf of the ambry where the sky pilot and the choristers hang their vestments.
Old Hopalong was evidently in a tailspin. He sighed then huffed again on his spectacles to polish them.
‘I confess I am grievously displeased to see a debauchee so strayed from the path as to have wholly lost his way. I fear the clear light from the candle of the Lord no longer shines on your soul.’
He limped to the shelf and leafed through my manuscript.
‘I agree, sir,’ I answered placidly, ‘my premise is a somewhat complicated and abstruse calculation.’
Judas Iscariot: How the Twelfth Man Won the Match, my casuistical entry for the Divinity Prize Essay on the set topic of Predestination and the Betrayal Paradox, draws on the laws of cricket to examine the fulfilment of prophecy. I cited a recent notable county game in which the match was saved by a left-handed substitute player no less able than his fellows. (Three left-handed catches in two innings! A county record!) Of course, Judas was reputedly a southpaw; medieval iconography invariably depicts his bag of thirty pieces of silver clutched in his left hand.
My contention, then, has been to reveal to my schoolmasters that Judas was not the villain-of-the-piece nor unusually wicked, and the lesson we can learn from Judas’s rôle as fate-conniving instrument in the drama of the Apostolate is that out of any twelve men chosen for the advancing of an enterprise – in fact, out of any twelve men assembled on a field of play, never mind the cricket pitch – one man probably is, or will be, a Judas.
Old Hopalong pressed his hand to his forehead with all the febrility of a neurasthenic. Clearly he was impervious to reason, so I savoured all the more this unequal duel of brains.
He snorted and examined me forbiddingly over misted specs.
‘Qui vult decipi, decipiatur. I am not among the gullible who wish to be deceived, young man, nor shall I be deceived. My faith is a true blade that cuts through deceit.’
He pointed to an initialled comment scrawled in red pen on my essay’s title page.
I nodded and smiled encouragingly.
‘I can’t pretend to say I understand you very well.’
‘R.A.P.I.E.R.!’ He roared. ‘The Ready Answer of a Plausible Intriguer and Enterprising Rogue!’

His face had darkened a shade. He eased the celluloid of his dog collar as tears gathered in his failing eyes . . .

•

Note: Kim Philby, the Third Man of the Cambridge Five spy ring, was an avid follower of cricket and occupied himself after his defection to the Soviet Union mostly by reading The Times sports pages.

•

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

(where the counterespionage operations of Stoneburgh may be read in Red Coffee)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)