Stoneburgh Spy Campus . . . B.A.R. . . . ‘Please Burn After Reading’ Rubs Out Accountability of Command. (Part 6.)

Earlier this week, passing through the parklands of Stoneburgh in the bright winter sunlight, under a cloudless sky, I was reminded of a former denizen of our garrison town  –  our celebrated double agent, Irina P. – striding along the selfsame path in her military double-breasted coat (cadet-issue, a special indulgence!). She, too, in those early years of our acquaintance, was truly enamoured of our historic military academy . . . as I recorded in my memoir, Red Coffee* . . . 

[Irina] could scarcely believe her good fortune. The six historic cannon evenly spaced along the South Terrace, the great Park, the ornamental Lake, the Piranesian vaulted library, all conspired to create a classically golden atmosphere of privilege and distinction in which she basked. The day was warm; the month was March; Shirt Sleeve Order was five weeks away. She sat at the lakeside and wrote an airmail to her sister.  Irina described Stoneburgh as a ‘time capsule’. In her own country Time and Change raced like the clouds reflected on the water. She could not conceal her yearning to ‘remain always in ancestral gardens, seated on soft grass, without thinking’. 

     So you can imagine I was brooding on the duplicities of our tradecraft and on its pervasion of even the most humdrum routines of domestic life, including the demands of my daily jog, when I spotted Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener lounging on a bench in the sunniest corner of the colonnade. (Prof. Weissener, as I have mentioned in my earlier despatches, was formerly an agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, and is now Stoneburgh’s senior lecturer on politico-criminalistics, a respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion.)
     

‘Please Burn After Reading.’

Prof. Weissener put down his newspaper as I approached and pointed to a headline with his unlit briar pipe:

UK’S EU EXIT: ‘MEMORY-MEN’ CIVIL SERVANTS 

FOIL FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACTIVISTS

Speaking of the implications of preserving secrecy, as to the UK Government’s plans in the event of Britons voting Britain exit from the European Union, the former Senior Government Economist in the British Civil Service said today: ‘The Civil Service will have to do much preparatory work on trade and migration, so I think there’ll be a lot of highly classified work retained mentally. How much civil servants write down is a different question – that is one of the potential drawbacks of the world of Freedom of Information we live in – so, actually, if the Chancellor does not want anything written down [to avoid disclosure of plans to campaigners and journalists] then that is the way it will be.’   

     ‘Memory-men at Whitehall!’ His laugh was harsh. ‘Evidently one of the Mandarins has heeded my faculty Induction Lecture for the New Intake Group! Rule Number 9. It is extremely unwise to leave a paper trail if you intend to outpace the hostiles.’
     Sunlight glared on his spectacles so I could not see his eyes.
     He playfully wagged his finger to include me in the ranks of his favoured antagonists.
     ‘You more than most are familiar with the platitudinous exculpation of our spymasters: “Should you choose to accept this mission and you are captured or killed, the Government and the Service will disavow any knowledge of your actions.” ’
     ‘You mean the St Catherine’s House Switcheroo?’
     (I should explain that the St Catherine’s House Record Office, near Aldwych in central London, was at one time the primary source of intelligence agents’ false identities; our agents themselves had, as a ghoulish test of initiative, the task of locating a death certificate of a child whose birthdate and forename was closest to their own. Armed with the dead child’s birth certificate and shared forename, the agent was then able to assume a new mask and build a complete ‘back-story’, including intimate knowledge of the locale where the child had lived and died.  It was by the integrity of this fake identity that the plausibility and confidence of an agent in the field was sustained. In addition, of course, all essential documentation – passport, driving licence, bank account and national insurance card – were issued in the dead child’s name.)
     ‘Agreed,’ I added. ‘No paper trail. No comebacks. Unless the paper trail’s a false one . . . and one that would certainly NOT lead back to our masters.’
     ‘B.A.R. Burn After Reading. All government agencies, including our Intelligence Services, have that ultimate recourse, of course, and there’s always the principal’s washroom for surreptitious briefings, with or without the facility of eidetic recall.’

Memory-Men Bumped Off.

Prof. Weissener laid his cane aside and, after some deft preliminaries, lit his pipe.
     ‘But what of Cicero,’ he mused, ‘and his memory-man?’ Weissener – our most senior expert in the art of cryptanalysis – sent out an unreadable smoke signal as he spoke. ‘Cicero retained a nomenclator.’
     ‘A what?’
     ‘A Mnemonist. A Remembrancer or Prompter. A mnemonically gifted aide-de-camp. A nomenclator was often an astute polyglottic slave. Cicero’s man was charged to keep a roll call in his head of Cicero’s supporters together with a tally of all his master’s enemies. During his consulate, when Cicero declared martial law and upheld it by imposing the death penalty on conspirators against the Republic, I have no doubt that in the course of all those labyrinthine machinations his nomenclator was the repository of many of Cicero’s stratagems, an advantage that the Freedom of Information Act no longer permits our public officials here in Londinium, private email accounts notwithstanding!’ 
     ‘A human databank that walks and remains sober? An obvious security risk.’
     ‘Too true. To be a nomenclator in Roman times could be dicey. Wasn’t it Claudius who threw his memory-man to the lions. Maybe the poor fellow knew too much.’
      ‘Yes, a memory-man bumped off with a head full of ciphers,’ I ventured. ‘Surely that was the climax of Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps?’
       ‘There you are then.’ Prof. Weissener rose and stretched and favoured me with a grin, a rare concession.

Here lie the bones
of Aristarchus, freedman,
nomenclator.
Roman sepulchral inscription, 1st century AD.

‘The Art of Covering Your Tracks.’

Stoneburgh’s Senior Lecturer in Politico-Criminalistics fell into step beside me as we walked to the Refectory for morning coffee.
     ‘You know, after Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington reviewed a number of our passing out parades here on this very quad; apart from attending our Commissioning Dinners.’
     Prof. Weissener knocked out his pipe on the wheel of a gun carriage.
     ‘Now he knew the Art of Covering Your Tracks. A cunning devil whose actions we could all learn by.’
      The keen eyes of Weissener were alert to judge my response. 

      ‘Funnily enough, I was told this tale by the Chelsea Hospital Commandant. And he’s straight as an arrow himself.  The way he told it, the duke’s battle plan was to rarely give orders verbally. If an order had to be conveyed to one of his commanders holding a distant terrain, he was obliged to write them down and entrust them to an ADC to deliver them for him on a charger.  But listen to this. The duke’s strategy to preserve the infallibility of his command as a tactician was absurdly simple.  His orders were not written on paper – no, far too fragile in such conditions – nor were his commands written with quill and ink obviously in the field. Far too precarious under fire.’
     Weissener cleared the dottle from his pipe with a ballpoint pen and replaced them in the breast pocket of his Norfolk jacket.
     ‘No. On the battlefield, Wellington carried a sheaf of specially-treated ass and goat skins.  About the size of cloakroom tickets. He could write on these with pencil and once the orders were read, the skins could be wiped clean, preparatory to writing a new set of orders. How devilishly simple! By this method he neatly sidestepped the accountability of command! The clever fellow was never caught out in error . . . ’
     ‘. . .  Because he never left a paper trail!’ I completed with amused complicity.  I had never before seen the professor with such a pronounced Machiavellian disposition.
      ‘We should take a leaf from his book!’ the Professor Weissener concluded with a flourish of his cane. ‘The Cabinet Office should bring back vellum!’
      ‘Or publish and be damned,’ I murmured.

We ought to have more of the Cavalry between the two
high roads.  That is to say three Brigades at least besides
the Brigades in observation on the Right . . .   

* Sister Morphine (2008) see below . . . 

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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. 

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

‘Carol’ . . . In the Heat of the Moment and Other Febrile Automata

How curious to read that the genesis of Carol (the current acclaimed movie adapted from the famously transgressive novel, The Price of Salt, 1952) is to be found in a fever induced by chicken pox, the symptomatic high temperature under which Patricia Highsmith plotted her synopsis of a story that soon ‘flowed from the end of my pen as if from nowhere,’ as she later wrote.

Patricia Highsmith

Works That Write Themselves.

From which flows another curious thought because this distinguished American novelist prompts a memory of her eminent compatriot, William James, Doctor of Medicine (1870) and psychologist (and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience) who so subtly observed, ‘For aught we know to the contrary, 103 or 104 degrees Fahrenheit might be a much more favourable temperature for truths to geminate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees.’

How true. In the feverish heat of the moment certainly a number of great works of the imagination have been brought forth. One thinks also of Sir Walter Scott who, in 1819, under the influence of laudanum wrote The Bride of Lammermoor and claimed afterwards, on reading the proofs, that he did not recognise a single character, incident or conversation found in the book. 

Detektiv ‘Zherebets’ Houyhnhnmkin.

My as-yet-unpublished novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, was written in the same mood of involuntary volition, and similarly transcribed from an undisputed source. Englished in the spirit of the original, the often bawdy text makes great play of the young doctor’s febrile condition, his senses betrayed by a dangerous rise in body temperature akin to that of the rectal temperature of a horse having just undergone routine exercise:

Anton reflected that perhaps, after all, he had overlooked his affinity with horses; certainly, as the forenoon approached, his temperature was again rising to meet that of an average healthy horse which, if he were not mistaken, was some two degrees higher than that intermittent phenomenon, his own normal body heat.                                                                 He had hæmorrhaged again only the month past – profoundly from his right lung – practically a shtoff of disembogued blood pouring over his beard.                                                                                                                           He had recently in the mornings become aware of his unnaturally low temperature on rising, his excessive fatigue and his progressive failure of appetite. Yet now, as afternoon approached, his temperature had risen (a febrile state exceeding 40 degrees Celsius) and pulse quickened to over a hundred beats per minute. Under his jacket, sweat trickled from his armpit.  Profuse axillary sweating embarrassed him and he feared his condition smelt.                                                                                                               As for his excessive body heat, the ætiology of the cauma and desudation he knew intimately; long ago the prognosis had held that his compensatory emphysema would grow worse by remedy, and any remissions he could expect in the variations associated with the chronicity of his disease were now complicated by his intestinal catarrh, caused by a change in the water.     

In a grim diversion to displace the pain, Tchékhov feverishly imagined the very real prospect of his personal physician, D-r Klebnikov, surviving him to compose a waspish clinical footnote to his obituary for the edification of his medical colleagues: 

‘Manifestly, the observation has not been made in hagiographical writing on Tchékhov that the symptomatological signs of his two conditions – pulmonary tuberculosis and acute morphinism – were inextricably combined and compounded.  The co-existing conditions were presented, for example, in feelings of tremendous heat and sensations of terrifying cold, particularly during periods of withdrawal from the opiate. The giddiness to which Tchékhov on occasion referred could well have been a mild case of cinchonism brought about by an overdose of quinine, which, in the absence of an informed dual diagnosis, was not identified.  His meconeuropathia was further complicated by hyperæsthesiæ  induced by mood-elevating morphine derivatives.’

Tchékhov’s eyes are not closed to the truth of his opiate dependancy. In characteristically rueful condemnation of his elevated temperature,  Tchékhov at his lowest ebb begins to style himself Detektiv Zherebets [‘Stallion’] Houyhnhnmkin, evidently a bitter self-lacerating commentary on his drug-impaired virility. (If Tchékhov in this passage of D-r Tchékhov Detektiv assumes the sardonical appellation, ‘Stallion’ or ‘Stud’, then we must assume the reference recalls those envious jottings in his published literary notebook : ‘A vet. belongs to the stallion class of people.’ )

Fate Knocks at the Door.

And in the same opiate-induced fever, of course, Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan, a poem revealed to him as fully conceived, requiring merely its automatic transcription, until – at Line 54 – the notorious Person From Porlock arrived to knock on the door and break the spell.

This fateful distraction from the sublime oneiric prosody granted a dope-fiend reminds me of my good friend, The Great Poet, who wrote to tell me he had altered his will . . .

Have been making some small adjustments to my Will, and have added that you are to have first crack at my poetry books. [He was at Westminster School and won the Gumbleton Prize for English Verse.] No big deal [he added] but you might find something of interest, but not yet a while hopefully.

I wrote at once to record my appreciation . . .

I am genuinely flattered, but in my present mood I fear I shall predecease you. Should this not be the case, however, I shall make every effort to seek out your forwarding address and have your books sent on to you.                You will have a forwarding address, won’t you?                                               In Ghana it is believed that a person who dies prematurely can appear in a distant town and continue their life there.                                              Saman twén-twén the Ghanaians call them. Custom asserts that the ‘Dead-but-Leaving-People’ can be met only by someone who has not heard of their death.                                                                                                       So an accommodation address in Porlock might be the thing.                        This explains why so many people swear they saw X ‘only the other day’ and learn to their horror that X died some months before.                            Why is life made so mysterious when the explanations are really very simple? I shall be in Porlock if I predecease you.                                                       Should you lose your memory then we can meet there because you will not remember you heard of my death.                                                                  It is possible, though, that a poet even with a seriously impaired memory will remember that fateful person from Porlock . . .

It was on these terms that we agreed to meet in the Afterlife, an agreement, I may add, sealed during the worst bout of flu I’ve ever endured in my life, when I was in the throes of a high fever and running a barely tolerable temperature practically off the scale at 103°F.  

The tragedy is that my dear poet friend predeceased me, as he predicted.

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For excerpts from my as-yet-unpublished crime novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, 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/2015/01/d-r-tchekhov-skirmish-with-wolves-and.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
or
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/winter-rules-and-le-diable-boiteux.html

This long lost crime novel by Chekhov (he, himself, referred to such a work in progress in 1888) charts the misadventures of morphia-addict D-r Anton Tchékhov, aged 28 years, as he investigates the mysterious duelling death of an aristocratic cadet in a remote snowbound northern garrison. In a contest between the animistic pagan beliefs of a Cheremissian shaman-medicineman and his own psychopathological insights as a graduate doctor, Tchékhov, weakened by tubercular fevers and drug dependency, succeeds in solving the case and saving the life of a young prostitute, Mariya. 

For the origins of this text see my previous posting, D-r  Tchékhov, Detektiv.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/10/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-long-lost-novel.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. 

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

Take One Home for the Kiddies: More Palimpsestic Wordplay? (Part 3.)

As an archivist or – more grandly – a conservator I am quite hopeless.

In the poetry cuttings book I compiled in my early teens, mould grows on the petroleum gum I foolishly used to tack down clippings from literary periodicals, which in many cases I recognise as the first published appearance of what anthologists would regard as classic English poems of the mid to late twentieth century.

Thus, my once cherished pages are more than ‘slightly foxed’ (to borrow an antiquarian bookseller’s term). 

Despite this, these pock-marked pages never seem to lose their appeal.  The texts, of course, are perforce of a certain vintage yet they continue to stimulate closer study.

A Nagging Sense of a Familiar Echo.

For instance, thumbing once more through my collection the other night, I was struck once again by the ‘palimpsestic effect’ of a number of them; distinctive poems, which – like Dylan Thomas’s Hunchback in the Park – appear to give rise to unsettling resonances . . . a nagging sense of a familiar echo just barely heard . . . see my earlier foray into this phenomenon . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-humbert-in-park-more-palimpsestic.html

Am I misguided to detect concordances between the following popular Victorian verses for a child’s recitation and a well known squib by Philip Larkin? Folk memory . . . an oral tradition . . . the Connective Unconscious . . . call it what you will, the similarities of these morbid drolleries that subvert the Age of Innocence certainly suggest a perseveration of a creative impulse spanning two centuries, and one that measures infant mortality by the spit of a spade.

The Doll’s Funeral

When my dolly died, when my dolly died, 

I sat on the step and I cried and cried;

And I couldn’t eat any jam and bread, 

’Cause it didn’t seem right when my doll was dead. 

And Bridget was sorry as she could be, 

For she patted my head, and ‘O,’ said she, 


‘To think that the pretty has gone and died!’ 

Then I broke out afresh and I cried and cried.

We dug her a grave in the violet bed, 

And planted violets at her head; 


And we raised a stone and wrote quite plain, 

‘Here lies a dear doll who died of pain.’ 


And then my brother, said he, ‘Amen,’ 

And we all went back to the house again, 


But all the same I cried and cried, 

Because I’d a right when my doll had died.

And then we had more jam and bread, 

But I didn’t eat, ’cause my doll was dead. 


But I tied some crape on my doll house door, 

And then I stood and cried some more. 


I couldn’t be happy, don’t you see! 

Because the funeral belonged to me. 


And then the others went home, and then 

I went out and dug up my doll again.

On the other hand, perhaps it’s only the patina of age now disfiguring my keepsake book that prompts me to suggest, hereinabove, that the pungency of the English Cautionary Verse tradition is a taste indistinguishable even when savoured a century apart.

Take One Home for the Kiddies

                                         On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,
                                         Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep:
                                         No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass —
                                         Mam, get us one of them to keep.

                                         Living toys are something novel,
                                         But it soon wears off somehow.
                                         Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel —
                                         Mam, we’re playing funerals now. 

Two cuttings of Philip Larkin’s verse
as they first appeared in literary periodicals.

For further musings on palimpsestic texts and the versifying impulse see also: 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/lure-of-list-doomed-excavations-of-ur.html

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/solitary-truck-euphonious-assonance.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. 

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

Michael Haneke’s Amour: Throwing a Wrench into French Plumbing and . . . La Nouvelle Vague

‘No health without hygiene’ would seem an admirable sentiment for plombiers parisiens were it not for the paradox spawned by a nation of hypochondriacs fixated on the former at the expense of the latter, if Michael Haneke’s movie, Amour (2012), is to be believed.

Plumbing the Depths.

These thoughts are prompted by a scene in this Austro-French film where its principals – an elderly couple (Georges, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Anne, Emmanuelle Riva), prisoners of the infirmities of old age and of a neglected period Paris apartment in concurrent decline – lament the scarcity of Parisian plumbers and their chronic tardiness. Witness these exchanges . . . specifically the key passage spoken by Georges:

‘Les Frodon, ils ont attendu trois jours quand leurs toilettes étaient bouchées  . . .  Pas franchement agréable.’

•

GEORGES

               You can depend on that guy. 

ANNE

               I hope so. The last time, he kept us 
               waiting for ages, if you remember.

GEORGES

               (laughs while acquiescing)
               Yes, that’s true . . . If I call a 
               regular professional, we’ll still be 
               waiting in two months time.

ANNE

               (more to herself)
               Really?

GEORGES

               The Frodons waited three days when 
               their toilet was blocked. 
               Frankly not pleasant.

•

‘The Frodons waited three days when their toilet was blocked.  Frankly not pleasant.’

Here is the significant text that, in my view, contains within it the key to decrypting the central puzzle of this Austrian writer-director’s film à clef: the choice of national stereotypes as lay figures to satisfy the compositional aesthetic of satirised bourgeois French film-making, i.e. 2 x cultured elders to embody ageing salon gauchistes; and a supporting cast of 1 x understanding wife of an adulterer à la Buñuel; 1 x pert unconscionable care nurse à la Clouzot; . . . not forgetting the vox populi represented by 2 x potentially manipulative grippe-sou menials à la Chabrol (a genial caretaker of the apartment building whose shirking wife’s ‘maladie’ suggests a valetudinarianism supportive of the Tendance Hypocondriaque towards which the cynical British critic believes the French nation is unfailingly predisposed).*

Let’s be clear, the formative years of Trintignant and Riva, both octogenarians, were experienced in a France governed by the Front populaire, under which for the first time all French workers were guaranteed a two week paid vacation, a revolutionary boost to employee benefits that also included the 40-hour week, in effect a socialist Bill of Rights that demarcated the French ideological comfort-zone out of which France has since never strayed.

The Polish plumber is in trouble with his piping.

Plombiers de tous les pays, unissez-vous! 

In this context, the intention behind the Austrian satirist’s characterisation of the complacent/complaisant petite haute bourgeoisie becomes clear, for even when Georges is inconvenienced by the indifference of dilatory workmen (If I call a regular professional, we’ll still be waiting in two months time) he is obliged by France’s socio-Marxist legacy to sentimentally indulge their excesses and, apparently, pledge solidarity with any confraternity of slackers he may encounter.

There is a nudge here, surely, towards the notorious ‘Polish Plumber’ controversy of 2005 (Haneke’s screenplay for Amour was in development from as early as 1992), which exposed the resentful closed shop mentality of France’s entrenched ingénieurs sanitaires, ridiculed by francophone detractors who sought to ape the Communist Manifesto by mischievously proclaiming: ‘Plumbers of all countries, unite!’ 

So I continue to speculate thusly: Has Haneke’s Amour, therefore, a secret agenda to mock France’s labour protectionism? Through jaundiced Austrian eyes is this neo-Poujadism seen to be an absurd travesty of the workers’ paradise proselytised by the Comintern? Indeed, does Haneke decry France’s ring-fenced faux stakhanoviste entitlements as unearned by the lineal descendants of the Popular Front, and does he deplore the revival of such a self-serving partisanship – of a kind that once fomented the vicious internecine strife of a riven France under Nazi Occupation – now it’s seen to be expended on the vilification of Polish incursionist plumbers?

Au fond, when it comes to being a master of sly digs to remind French filmgoers of the true enemy of the people from France’s ravaged past, then – in Haneke’s skewed authorial vision – it evidently takes an Austrian highbrow to demonstrate who is top dog.

Of course, such an interpretation may be the sour grapes of a wary Brit . . . and yet . . . and yet . . . read on . . . there is more to Haneke’s Austro-French commentaries in Amour than the following simple words superficially convey . . .

‘Les Frodon, ils ont attendu trois jours quand leurs toilettes étaient bouchées  . . .  Pas franchement agréable.’

•

An Excremental Blockage is Frankly Not Pleasant . . . the Turbid Conduits of French Thought.

And it’s unpleasant, too, and mean-spirited to shiftily introduce into a supposedly sober screenplay the jejunity of taking potshots at that crucible of iconoclastic French Cinema, Cahiers du cinéma, whose editor-in-chief, appointed 2003, is Jean-Michel Frodon (pseudonym adopted from Frodo of Lord of the Rings).

I do not believe my dark suspicions are ill-founded. You tell me. What other meaning can be attached to ‘Les Frodon’ unless, specifically, the scatological reference is to a certain costiveness now observable in the pioneering journal of the Nouvelle Vague of French cinema, whose alumni includes Claude Chabrol, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut and Roger Vadim, all New Wave auteurs who have directed Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva in films regarded as far in the vanguard of global cinematic style.

To my mind, it’s almost as if Haneke is stating pedagogically that the French currently need a Refresher Course in avant-garde movie-making and that Amour is his Exercise in Style à la Queneau, a disparaging approach that, in my view, undermines the gravity of his subject matter.

Even his parodying of Intellectualisme Français is diminished by the fatuity of his characters’ expressions of apatheistic existential malaise. (Perhaps Haneke is sardonically remembering that Albert Camus permitted his seminal novel, L’Étranger, to be published in occupied Paris under German censorship, a contra-philosophical decision that still sparks controversy.)

Existential fatuities.
Georges:
Things will go on as they have done up until now.
They'll go from bad to worse.
Things will go on, and then one day it will all be over. 

I even go so far as to question, given Haneke’s subversive agenda, whether this pseudo-existential babble is just another smirking allusion – like his condemnation of French plumbers and their time-keeping by statute – to the essential blockage in the turbid conduits of French thought, never mind the state of French drains.

In other words, is this Austrian asking, seventy-five years after the Occupation of Paris, ‘Have the French truly put their house in order?’ 

And is Haneke answering a resounding No?

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*According to data from France, 13 percent of the French nation are afraid of suffering from disease in the absence of any signs or symptoms. Similarly, 32 percent of respondents have a persistent unfounded anxiety when certain signs or symptoms concern them. Government figures reveal that, annually, the French consume more medicine per head than any other country in Europe, astonishingly, at a cost 75 percent higher than the total NHS bill for prescription medicines in Great Britain.

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UK STOP PRESS : French baker fined for working overtime.

Dateline — Lusigny-sur-Barse — March 14 2018 : A French baker has been fined 3,000 Euros for keeping his business open seven days a week. The baker refuses to pay the penalty and is supported by the town mayor. ‘France has a traditionally strict attitude towards work, upholding the 35-hour working week, and informally guaranteeing long breaks for lunch and the whole of August off . . . In 1995, legislation was passed guaranteeing bakers a minimum five weeks off every year, but town halls are still allowed to regulate opening hours. In Paris, for example, bakeries are split into two selected groups — one that can close in July, and another that closes in August. Such a division is, however, much harder to enforce in countryside areas such as the one around Lusigny-sur-Barse, which has a population of less than 2000.’

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Horror of a Forty-Hour Week like being punched in the stomach.

In Laurent Binet’s hybrid history-as-postmodernist-infranovel (?), HHhH, 2009, centred on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, Binet admits the legacy he and his own generation have inherited from the Popular Front of 1936. 

Writing, unconsciously (it seems to me), in the manner of a Chauvinist Lothario, proud of his gauchiste Sorbonne credentials, he describes a ‘gorgeous’ French interlocutor: ‘[She is] the daughter of Communists, like us all.’   

In a similar perspective, from l’intellectuel rive gauche, Binet also writes: 

On August 21, 1938, Edouard Daladier, the French council president, gives an edifying speech on the radio: 

Faced with authoritarian states who are arming and equipping themselves with no regard to the length of the working week, alongside democratic states who are striving to regain their prosperity and ensure their safety with a forty-eight-hour week, why should France — both more impoverished and more threatened — delay making the decisions on which our future depends? As long as the international situation remains so delicate, we must work more than forty hours per week, and as much as forty-eight hours in businesses linked to national defence. 

Reading this transcription, I was reminded that putting the French back to work was the French right’s eternal fantasy. I was deeply shocked that these elitist reactionaries, understanding so little the true nature of the situation, would use the Sudeten crisis to settle their scores with the Popular Front. Bear in mind that in 1938, the editorials of the bourgeois newspapers shamelessly stigmatized those workers whose only concern was enjoying their paid holidays. Just in time, however, my father reminded me that Daladier was a radical Socialist, and thus part of the Popular Front. I’ve just checked this, and staggeringly, it’s true: Daladier was the defence minister in Leon Blum’s government! I feel like I've been punched in the stomach. I can hardly bear to tell the story: Daladier, former defence minister of the Popular Front, invokes questions of national defence not to prevent Hitler carving up Czechoslovakia but to backtrack on the forty-hour week — one of the principal gains of the Popular Front. At this level of political stupidity, betrayal becomes almost a work of art. 

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See also:

Eton versus Marlborough

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2023/09/tyro-poets-eton-v-marlborough-finishing.html

 

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

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.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. 

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

Christina James: The Telling Detail of Her Panoptic Vision. (In the Family.)

The art of the ‘police procedural fiction’ is supremely challenging and writers who succeed in transmuting the sheer slog of evidence-gathering – often, in truth, months of drudging unproductive investigations – into a riveting dramatic narrative commanding the reader’s intense empathic identification with both the protagonists and antagonists are very rare indeed. One thinks of Thomas Harris or James Ellroy or P. D. James as preeminent in the expression of the verisimilitude of true crime detection characterised by breathless suspense.
http://www.saltpublishing.com/products/in-the-family-9781907773242

Rara Avis.

Such a rara avis is Christina James, whose crime novel In the Family (the welcome debut of her Detective Inspector Yates series) demonstrates her deft assurance in sifting the ambiguities of subjective and objective reality, in the personal witness of suspects and detectives alike, as one would expect from the incident room of a by-the-book evidence-based police investigation . . . so, in James’s unique narrative diction for documenting the progress of this baffling multiple murder case, you’ll find style is form and form is style, in every sense of the term ‘form’, particularly. (Felon’s cant included).

It follows, then, that James has borrowed not a little of her unfussy, factual, panoptic narratives from the approved style and disciplines of first-person police incident reporting, prioritised as: Immediate impression of the crime scene faithfully rendered; Raw, direct, undoctored quotation of witness statements; An abundance of minutiae so no specific detail escapes the observer's notice (who knows what observations are crucial to the case?); Concise descriptive clarity to avoid misinterpretation of the report by alert critical readers; Hearsay reported as hearsay, not as evidential fact; Avoidance of over-legalistic or technical terms in favour of to-the-point, fact-based reporting; Honesty in retelling events, even if they reflect badly on the investigator's handling of the case (writing an untrue account may jeopardise the investigation later, or challenge the credulousness of the reader!) to name the principal guidelines observed; nor does the frequency of coppers’ regulation tea breaks pass unnoticed.

So here, exhibited by In the Family, is a triumph of documentary viscerality to relish . . . from the very start you feel you are right there, actively present at the inciting incident (a body in a shallow grave off a motorway slip road) from which the tentacles of the investigation proliferate.

‘Ars est celare artem . . . you might find it useful not to forget that,’ an expert witness reminds us on page 179. And, certainly, James, like the murder suspect of her creation, demonstrates the truism that it takes true art to conceal art and induce in us (and the investigation team) the suspension of disbelief. 

To this end characterisation and mood are augmented by almost preternaturally vivid and palpable evocations of fast-moving action, a super-reality summoned by well-drawn characters realised with the crispest of strokes: An eminent criminal psychologist possesses the ‘elegant angularity of a whippet’; a school’s ‘sea-green thick-rimmed cups’ are remembered from parents’ evenings; fingernails ‘bitten to the quick . . . varnished pillarbox red’; ‘She was already weary of playing hostess to his curmudgeonliness.’ [A Flaubertian sentence of subtle shades and texture!]; ‘She rolled her eyes at him. [It occurred to the inspector] she looked a bit like a mad dray horse herself’; ‘. . . the tiny cockloft of an office . . .’; ‘. . . he indicated some half-rotted apples on the ground.’; ‘. . . ten chocolate ginger biscuits carefully set out in an overlapping circle on a plate.’; ‘He was still loath to invest in proper toilet paper: there was a store of the squares of tissue in which oranges had been wrapped . . .’; ‘. . . the teacup slid a few inches across her slippery pale blue nylon overall.’; ‘. . . she was wearing a crimplene skirt of a curious yellow ochre hue . . . Rather incongruously, her feet were shod in scarlet leather moccasins.’ 

This word-painting with a purpose is of the highest order.

Parricidal Murderesses.

But more than this, our interest is centred on James's entirely novel treatment of avarice as a kind of criminal pathology, recalling the sociopathic manipulative behaviour of parricidal murderesses motivated wholly by greed for insurance payouts or inheritances, such as the notorious Mary Ann Cotton (between 1857 and 1872 she poisoned three husbands, her mother, a lover, eight of her own children, and seven stepchildren) and sisters Catherine Flannagan and Margaret Higgins (executed 1883) for poisoning family members and friends for small insurance settlements; and, more evocatively, from my own deepest darkest Sussex, Mary Ann Geering, hanged from the scaffold at Lewes prison in 1849 for the poisoning of her husband and two sons to gain death and sickness benefits from a Friendly Society, sums described by the defence counsel as so trifling that the jury could not impute so grave a crime to so small a motive.

It is the re-emergence of this sinister kind of cupidity – the kind that covets easy money and abandons received moral codes – which we find so troubling in the 21st century, especially when the motives for such crimes are complicated by familial duress . . . or even influenced by the secret emotional pressures of incestuous consanguinity.

‘It’s brass that interests us,’ one interlocutor of the prime suspect pronounces and one learns that the prime suspect does not disavow her complicity with this view. This is dangerous territory for moralists because, after all, covetousness is numbered among the seven cardinal sins and among the ten commandments so to relabel a ‘sin’ as a ‘pathology’ smacks of fashionable psychosociological revisionism. 

Panoptic 360-degree Neo-docu-novel.

Nevertheless, Christina James – from the 360-degree panoptic vantage of her neo-docu-novel and with the skill of a forensic pathologist – can be said to be reinventing for our times the ‘Fortune-Hunting’ novel of the 19th century (was their any other kind in the Age of Materialism?), wherein the hero and heroine in want of a fortune are invariably named Sterling and Libra.

Please be assured, discerning reader, In the Family is truly an unputdownable novel of disturbingly (and determinedly) acquisitive criminals viewed from the Panopticon of James’s infallible authorial omnipresence by whom the very hairs on the heads of her characters are numbered . . . because, as all lovers of classic detective fiction are aware, it’s the telling detail that counts . . . and here, throughout the chase, you may be certain it is the telling detail that’s spot on.