Catherine Eisner

Friday, 8 September 2023

Tyro Poets? Eton v Marlborough? (Finishing School for Versifiers, Pt.7.) Juvenilia

Breathes there a man with soul so dead

Who was not, in the Thirties, Red?

(G. Moor, New Statesmen, 1956.)

‘A lyric tongue and jaded Weltanschauung
should be the glamour of young gentlemen.’

(Catherine Eisner, 2023.)

It struck me the other day, just as a sort of prosodic hypothesis, that two tyro poets with brilliant minds – near contemporaries and destined for notoriety in the British press – should surely have composed some specimens of juvenilia showing promise in their 1920s schooldays, since, in each case respectively, their mentors were poets – Edith Sitwell and poet-in-the-making Louis MacNeice.

The schoolboys? Brian Howard and Anthony Blunt.
Schools? Eton (BH), Marlborough (AB).
Schoolfriends? Harold Acton (BH), Louis MacNiece (AB).
Poetic milieu? Edith Sitwell (BH), John Betjeman (AB).
Universities? Oxford (BH), Cambridge (AB).

Anthony Blunt Brian Howard

In short, two aesthetes of their time – whose schooldays were devoted to the callow pursuit of attitudes – would later demonstrate there was substantially more to their avant-garde posturing than larking about as pasticheurs.

Of course, in all fairness, the early vocation of Blunt, a maths wizard, was never that of a poet yet the sensitivities of a poet were nurtured by his compeer, fellow Marlburian MacNeice, who encouraged him to make this rare attempt, never to be repeated . . .

Specimen extract. (By Blunt, age 17, Marlborough.)

The harsh green outline of the downs

Tight as a bow string

Strikes a discord in the sky.

This edge of the abyss
Is fixed immutable
Beyond the power of time
Or God . . .

By contrast, for young Brian Howard his acute self-awareness and self-deprecation granted powers of shrewd discrimination to a boy, who – at age 13 – could write to his mother that he feared he’d been cursed with a ‘fraudulent imagination’, an opinion at odds with his earliest mentor, Edith Sitwell, who was in awe of his precocity: ‘I see more remarkable talent and promise in your work than of any other poet under twenty . . .’ (with the exception of her brother Sacheverell, she adds, of course). Brian was discovered by Edith when he was sixteen, at which age he records he won the Junior Long Jump at Eton.

Specimen extracts. (By Howard, age 16, Eton.)

. . . the green ocean . . . the green ocean . . . like a towel-horse
painted in half . . . paperbags are significant
of the futility of the kosmos when they bob up and down . . .
yes, dripping, dripping and the sensations of sticking
plaster that won’t come off . . .
it’s Verdi (throttled with light lager) . . . like acrid little chopped
up canary wings, falling down in jerks and bursts and jangles out of
a blue-gilt sky . . . they trip along the long parallels of
dry, biscuity planking . . .

Immortal lines. ‘Four lips make a mouth.’

These imagistic aspirational pseudo-Sitwellian lines composed at Eton are from Brian’s Expression of Sea and Beach from the Pier Buffet and are precursors of his poem in the anthology, Oxford Poetry 1924 (co-edited by Harold Acton), which contains the not so inconsequential biscuity line:

(I wish I was back home in Philadelphia).

Why did the small queens run so hurriedly

just because I play Satie on my musical box

a little furtive music like the rubbing together of biscuits . . .

And, of course, we are not alone in adoring the outré conversational chords of Satie so it is unsurprising that these 1924 poems (dismissed by Brian as ‘that bad derivative thing’) should appeal to Satie-lovers, and were considered ‘immortal lines’ by Betjeman, who cited them as ‘immortal’ for not only the biscuity acoustics of their vers libre music but also for Brian’s sensual phrase, ‘Four lips make a mouth . . .’

In my own view, there can be no doubt that Brian Howard, a schoolboy precociously drawn to the ‘Imagist’ vision, exhibited authentic synæsthesia . . . as of a (juvenile) alien Kosmonaut’s first encounter with the phenomena of our planet when assigned to a desperate search for sublime correlatives to match those of Worldlings.

Elementary utilitarianism denies adjectival fripperies.

A plutocratic pursuit by latent Leftists or Paper Marxists?

Of course, essentially, poetry in England at that time was a plutocratic pursuit since only the privately educated elect had the leisure of their privilege to garnish the utilitarian nouns of the People with the choicest of adjectival conceits packed in hampers sent from Fortnum’s. The Proles as poets – if there were such – perforce travelled light, sans adjectival fripperies, denied the luxury of excess baggage by the exigency of their voyaging in steerage.

Despite their dedicated posturing as champions of Ars Longa, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War certainly could be said to have chivvied those two schoolboy pals, Blunt and MacNeice, briefly into becoming more than bystanders in a Rebellium Brevis, during which they both affected to be Communist-leaning sympathisers.

An affectation? When Blunt was asked by an interviewer whether he had gone to Spain in 1936 for political reasons, Blunt admitted, ‘I went to see the pictures, dear boy! The Prado is a Mecca for art historians . . . Oh, I was only a paper Marxist!’ Even his companion on that trip, Louis MacNeice, conceded: ‘In the long run a poet must choose between being politically ineffectual and poetically false.’ MacNeice later wrote that he never shared the idealistic impulse of many of his fellow writers and friends to be a Communist, ‘I joined them . . . in their hatred of the status quo.’ It’s true that, recalling Marlborough in their final year, Blunt also confessed his political naivety: ‘Politics was simply a subject never discussed at all, and what happened to be going on at that time in Europe was no concern of ours. Inflation in Germany merely meant that one could get an incredibly cheap holiday!’

The First Englishman to Foresee the Nazi Horror.

For Brian Howard, however, whose boyhood in high society was lived uneasily outside the unspoken English Jewish Pale (mid-20th Century, for instance, the ‘No Jews’ policy in many of London’s gentlemen’s clubs was well known), there had been an early introduction at Eton to not-so-subtle degrees of anti-Semitism from his schoolfellows.

He was allowed no quarter in defence of his family name. ‘How is the Duke of Norfolk today?’ his classmates would taunt. He inveighed against his father – a fashionable art dealer — who, at birth, had presented him ‘. . . with an obviously false and pretentious name – not even adding the slight support of deed of poll.’ Shaped by such an upbringing, then, his precocious awareness of global political events fomenting the persecution of the Jews was matched only by his astonishingly mature assimilation of the most extreme avant-gardist cultural developments of the interwar years.

And unsurprising, therefore, that the exotic Howard – tormented by doubt as to his Jewish identity – was, according to Erika Mann, ‘. . . probably the first Englishman to recognise the full immensity of the Nazi peril and to foresee, with shuddering horror, what was to come.’

(In 1939, Brian wrote in a poem published in June of Britain’s anguished apprehension under the shadow of the ‘Phoney War’: ‘. . . fingers crack like the prophecy of shooting.’ Indeed, a prophetic line.)

Two years earlier, when a shooting war broke out in Spain, with Nazi Germany taking sides against the Republican government, Brian Howard was to the fore in condemning espousers of the Fascist cause. Paradoxically, he found himself set against the Imagist hero whose ‘unsurpassable technique and poetic vision’ he had venerated in his schooldays. Ezra Pound wrote of the Civil War: ‘Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.’

Brian Howard wrote: ‘A people, nearly half of whom has been denied the opportunity to learn to read, is struggling for bread, liberty and life against the most unscrupulous and reactionary plutocracy left in existence . . . With all my anger and love, I am for the People of Republican Spain.’

Don’t call me comrade.

It is of course wholly simplistic to remind ourselves with 20/20 hindsight that, for the many fervent British anti-Fascists of the Thirties, it took the fatal aberration of a dewy-eyed idealism in the face of merciless dictatorships to finally convince them to ally themselves to Communism as the only acceptable countervailing champion of the People . . . a conversion to be regretted in disillusion soon enough. Moscow show trials and Stalin’s purges would irrevocably change their minds.

In this sense, it’s intriguingly significant that in 1936 W. H. Auden (who never joined the Communist Party despite complex social views apparent in his Thirties political writings) changed ‘Comrades’ to ‘Brothers’ in his poem of 1932, Comrades Who When the Sirens Roar.

Да здравствует сталинская конституция!
Long Live the Stalinist Constitution!

The trajectory of Blunt’s beliefs was to meet that same disillusion. Recruited by the NKVD just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was swept up in the groundswell of anti-Fascism that had driven his contemporaries to support the Republican cause. (One’s enemy’s enemies are one’s friends.) Yet, as a young Cambridge don of cold-eyed didacticism, it’s more likely the superior role of ideologue tempted him to a decisive step further to take sides beyond the boundaries of Western Europe and sign up to the Soviet utopian dream, enlisted, however, more as a talent-spotter of Cambridge leftists from among promising undergraduates disposed to be suborned . . . fledgling spies destined for the heart of the British Establishment.

Blunt at that time (early 1937) played the canniest game of poker insofar as his Russian handlers never permitted him to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

Red propaganda laid on a bit too thick?

(Plus ça change . . . today, UK academics turn a blind eye to the increasing ideological threats posed by Chinese influence implicit in our universities’ acceptance of the ‘soft power’ that defines faculty funding issuing from autocratic strategists in Beijing. Students in fields of research such as advanced materials or quantum mechanics, or artificial intelligence or biotech, are particularly vulnerable to approaches by agents of hostile states.)

And as for High Treason and the betrayal of Britain by pinning his colours to the cause of the Soviet Union, Blunt answered, ‘We did not think of ourselves as working for Russia. We were working for the Comintern.’ Or to put it another way, is this the lofty intellectual’s claim to being an internationalist, to be ranked with Einstein, say, as a citizen of the world?

Incurable nostalgists.

But I digress, so let us quickly return to my modest attempt to correlate the parallel paths taken by a Marlburian Cantabrigian (Blunt) and Etonian Oxonian (Howard) towards our arrival at a cultural sensibility that can satisfy a 21st Century notion of a moralistic poetising aesthete, if such there be. In other words, ‘How does a writer, precipitated into a moral fog, remain forensically honest?’ (The term, ‘forensically honest’ was applied to a contemporary poet in my hearing the other day.)

For the answer, perhaps we should seek our True Oracle and Champion Skewerer of Communism – George Orwell. A dedicated polemicist and, indeed, a collector of polemical pamphlets, Orwell was also an unwitting pasticheur . . .

See Rural Bard or Faltering Palimpsestic Balladeer? https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/05/

When Orwell wrote the concluding couplet of an unfinished poem, the refrain must have persisted like an earworm from his days residing in Southwold, Suffolk . . .

When good King Edward ruled the land
And I was a chubby boy.

Imitative (unwittingly?) of a celebrated early nineteenth century Suffolk versifier, Orwell’s poem reveals the incurable nostalgist who hankers for the belle époque certainties of his youth. As his biographer spells out, ‘He was, indeed, a revolutionary in love with the Edwardian era.’

Can the same be said, then, of Blunt and Howard, two cultural rebels yet, in reality, both cleaving to dreams of a ‘Golden Country’ (cf. Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four) while seismic political convulsions would somehow leave them unscathed?

See Prescient Words of Godfather Who Foresaw Birth of Winston Smith.

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/03/year-zero-thing-with-one-face-prescient.html

Did Blunt, who had endangered the lives of one hundred and seventy-five thousand Allied servicemen, by betraying the secret of the D-Day landings to his Soviet masters, truly believe that he would return to a liberated Paris, cultural capital of the world, where the cognoscenti who had survived the Occupation would prostrate themselves at his feet? Indeed, did Blunt believe too that Paris was the eternal pleasure-dome of the fevered imaginings of Germany’s occupying troops, a belief expressed by Ernst Jünger – writer and decorated Wehrmacht captain and uninvited boulevardier of pillaged Parisian streets – in his denigratory observation, ‘One realises that the city was founded on the altar of Venus.’

Yes. One suspects Blunt shared the view of the Wehrmacht ‘tourists in uniform’ and, for him, Paris would always remain, as for Jünger, the cerebral sensualist’s first destination for intellectual R & R.

In Search of the Fourth Man by Catherine Eisner was published
in the literary journal, Ambit, issue 193, Summer 2008.
Particular reference is made to the avant-gardist photomonteur,
Helmut Herzfeld, a committed Communist, whose 1938 photo-
montage memorialising the victims of Guernica outstrips in its
passion the abstruse figurations of fellow-Communist, Picasso.

Commie-Tsars . . . Self-Elective Illiterate Minion-Dominions.

But then Blunt had convinced himself that he was serving the Comintern and not the Kremlin, hadn’t he? Never mind that even before the Occupation of Paris in 1940, Stalin had set his mind to ‘arming the people’ of France, with draft instructions from the Comintern to the French Communist Party, dated 11 June, providing for the creation of a ‘popular militia’*. It was proposed that French Communists living in Moscow be sent back to France ‘in order to raise up the people against the bourgeois traitors.’

Perhaps Blunt, the Francophile and distinguished francophone, truly did believe la France éternelle and her cultural treasures would somehow survive her defeat for cherishment by world citizens under the benign patronage of the Comintern. (A new interpretation, perhaps, of what the Nazis derided as Kulturbolschewismus?)

Is that what Blunt truly wanted? Or had he a liking to be ruled by the Commi-czars of a self-elective illiterate minion-dominion such as the Rumania of Ceaușescu? Orwellian motto: ‘Ignorance is Strength.’

Der neue Wilhelminismus. The Answer?

Englands und Deutschlands akute Nostalgie? The coronation of Charles III earlier this year brought to mind the writings of the conservative monarchist, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, an anglophile, whose Diary of a Man in Despair (Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten: Zeugnis einer inneren Emigration) describes the rise from a shabby ‘Furnished Room’ of ‘The-Man-with-the-Forelock’ and the domination of the Masses by a cabal of Industrialists and suborned generals from the early 1930s to the diarist’s summary execution by pistol shot (Genickschuss) in Dachau in 1945.

He writes: ‘Nationalism: a state of mind in which you do not love your own country as much as you hate somebody else’s.’

Reck concluded that to reconcile his own ethos to some semblance of civic rectitude required a return to Wilhelminism (Wilhelminismus) as the guarantee of peace when confronted with revolution of any stripe (Communism or National Socialism). He refers, of course, to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor and King of Prussia, forced to abdicate at the end of WWI.

What a pity, then, we have missed our own chance to live under Wilhelminism now Charles III has the throne. Maybe his heir, our Prince William, could remedy this omission as a salve to the troubled American Collective Unconscious. Prince William is, after all, named as America’s most popular public figure ahead of Trump and Zelensky. Perhaps William could assure world peace in the guise of the Count of Nassau, and by assuming this stirring title accorded one of his ancestors, King William III of England, he’ll return to rule the Amerikaanse Hollanders in New York and any other province or state eager to welcome him, as though the events of 1776 had all been a dreadful mistake.

For another patrician anglophile’s social remedy, compare

the Di Lampedusa Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di_Lampedusa_strategy

It’s clear to me that those conflicted nostalgists, Blunt and Howard, would have found this monarchical parlour trick an agreeable expedient, each of them absolved of an overburdened conscience . . . Brian Howard’s guilt that his modest oeuvre had not been truly iconoclastic enough and that he’d be remembered merely as an unfulfilled worldling . . . Anthony Blunt’s guilt that by the rigidity of his ideological posture he had denied the legacy of his nationhood, the gravest of too many broken taboos whose ultimate sanction was a sentence of ignominy. . . to be stripped of his knighthood and removed as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

The icy cerebrality of Blunt’s nature from his earliest undergraduate days can be measured by the occasion when the elite Cambridge debating society, the Apostles, met to vote on the question ‘Must art come from the heart?’ Both Blunt and Wittgenstein voted. Both were Trinity men. Both were mathematicians. One was a philosopher. One would be a spy. Blunt voted ‘No;’ Wittgenstein ‘Yes’. Needless to spell it out. Humanities versus Maths. Thought versus feeling. Blunt’s was the bloodless ideologue’s answer.

Yet, in the end, both Blunt and Howard slipped back – more or less resignedly – into the formalisms of the English culture that had bred them. Ideological Nimbys. Yes, revolution is all very well, but Not In My Back Yard. And looking back, doubtless Brian questioned whether his trail-blazing had truly been so far ahead of the ancien régime.

Brian Howard, a self-confessed failure, would still hold fast to the haughty manner defined by his penchant for classical axiomatic epigrams he’d striven to polish in his undergraduate years. Characteristically, Brian, a cocaine addict and a tuft-hunting colossal snob who toadied up to peers of the realm attending Oxford, had the ironic motto, ‘Put your trust in the Lords’ blazoned on a banner strung across his undergraduate rooms. Where, then, is the spirit of the 1937 barricades and of his championing of the ‘People of the Republic’ in his jaded oft-quoted remark, ‘Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life.’ Did his witticism refer to the thirty-somethings of all Spanish peasantry?

In such a stratified society, did the coteries of Blunt and Howard ever collide? When the Communist ‘recruiter’ of Blunt, his close friend Guy Burgess, escaped to the USSR, a newspaper manhunt was launched, and by the strangest of coincidences, which made world headlines, it was Brian Howard, while partying in Asolo in Italy, who was mistaken for the missing Cambridge spy. One posturing, flamboyant Englishman is much like any other, one supposes, in the eyes of our detractors on the Continent.

And for Blunt in retreat maybe there was escape too; escape into the gentlemanly preoccupations of the quondam don, where could be found the consolations of his last great fixation: the convoluted brilliant mind of mathematician Francesco Borromini, the 17th Century architect of Roman Baroque . . . a fixation directed with ‘maniacal concentration’, we learn.

We can only guess and wonder at the attraction held by those complex Borrominian geometries that are seen to blur sharply-demarcated boundaries through transformational interpenetrations, charged with the power to resolve, say, the intersection of two opposing planes into a miraculously invisible conjunction.

Mmm . . . yes, we can only guess at why such geometric ambiguities held such an attraction for Blunt.

A compulsion to study a great architect who can neatly resolve two opposing planes at an imperceptible conjunction?

How emblematic of a man who could with such ease switch ideological hobby horses mid-stream, as it were, and serve simultaneously as a spy for Communist Russia and as a loyal liegeman of HM The Queen. Arise Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO, knight of the realm and Keeper of the Crown’s Pictures . . . a liegeman who throughout his service during WW2 in MI5 passed over a thousand classified secret documents to his Soviet handlers, arduously memorised or copied under intense pressure and the constant threat of exposure.

For Blunt it was a moral imperative for which he would be harshly judged. It is a dilemma that faces any moralist seeking the strait gate and the single narrow path: How does one remain ‘forensically honest’? (But there is no path though the woods.)

As the Germans say, Du kannst nicht auf zwei Hochzeiten gleichzeitig tanzen. You can’t dance at two weddings at the same time.

Post-modern or Post-ironic Bobos?

Did I almost forget? In my notional prosodic contest between a Marlburian Cantabrigian and Etonian Oxonian, I conclude that Oxford won – thumpingly – by a length at Chiswick Bridge.

Today, in our self-referential postmodern world, one wonders whether Anthony Blunt, the Francophile, would have welcomed a France ruled by the cultural Comintern he foresaw. Probably. That’s because postmodernism – for Blunt – would be seen to have achieved the desired bloodless cultural shift by a new army of ideological warriors; warriors led by the cynical propagandising voice of a siren-like La Desapasionada he too would have undoubtedly followed.

France has a name for them, as you no doubt know: ‘Bobos’ . . . bourgeois-bohemians who are reactionaries at heart. The postmodernist writer Laurent Binet seems to believe in their creed of Po-Mo Oulipian fatuities. His ineffable unquestioning smugness is astonishing:

‘It is obviously impossible that I—son of a Jewish mother and a Communist father, brought up on the republican values of the most progressive French petite bourgeoisie and immersed through my literary studies in the humanism of Montaigne and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Surrealist revolution and the Existentialist worldview—could ever be tempted to “sympathize” with anything to do with Nazism, in any shape or form.’

HHhH by Laurent Binet, 2013.

No. An adherent of Nazism? No. Never. But the French would no more abandon their communistic societal underpinning than they would enter Le Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris without a horse. And how intriguing to les Alliés Binet’s despatch must be for those still among us who liberated the land of les cocos.

For more Po-Mo Bobo fatuities, see Michael Haneke’s Amour and reflections on the dilatoriness of Paris’s plumbers:

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2015/08/michael-hanekes-amour-throwing-wrench.html

Last word

Or to be fair, should, perhaps, the last word on these thorny questions be that of a KGB officer from the Third Department of the USSR’s Foreign Directorate whose terse verdict on the convolutions of our well-bred disingenuous Cambridge spies was to dismiss them as: ‘Ideological shit.’

So very Oulipian . . . so very self-referential . . . so very

Borrominian those geometries of the mind that are

seen to blur sharply-demarcated boundaries through

transformational interpenetrations, charged with the

power to resolve the intersection of two opposing lines

of thinking into a miraculously ambivalent conjunction.

Oh. Hang on! Orwell had a term for it.

Doublethink: the act of simultaneously accepting

two mutually contradictory meanings as correct.

Doublethink: ‘The Mutability of the Past.’

The sources for these Oxbridge character studies can found in definitive biographies researched by two remarkable women, with each writer sensitively intuitive and diligently scholarly in tracing every passage of the lives of these extraordinary subjects . . .

Brian Howard: Portrait of a failure (1968) by Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster.

Anthony Blunt: His Lives (2001) by Miranda Carter.

See also a glimpse of the proto-Bright-Young-Thing of the 1920s, here,

From an Unswept Floor . . .

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/05/walnut-from-unswept-floor.html

See also another intimate view of Anthony Blunt, here.

Slaves to Seconal: Droguée Antonia/Anthony and the Fourth Man . . . https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html

*Afterthought: The success of ‘popular militias’ as an ideology was sustained long ago, of course, by the Gun Lobby of the USA, France’s hallowed friend of Liberty. There’s even a statue devoted to her. See Ellis Island 1902

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/03/ellis-island-1902.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 (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Tuesday, 25 July 2023

Just Before Nine.

Just before nine, the cell door opened and
a voice warned, ‘It’s time!’
His arms were pinioned.

Outside the prison gates a multitude
surged. He smiled. ‘It’s time.
I was born no good.’

John George Haigh, the ‘Acid Bath Murderer’, was hanged
at 9am at Wandsworth Prison on August 10th 1949. The
Medical Panel of Statutory Inquiry had advised the Home
Secretary that Haigh was sane in law and no mitigation
outweighed the death sentence. As to religious mania, let
us remind ourselves that Haigh was a lapsed member of
the Plymouth Brethren, and shares the notoriety of
those other evil-doers and ‘Justified Sinners’ of the Elect. . .
‘the wickedest man in the world’ Aleister Crowley and
Dr John Bodkin Adams. The Certificate of Death was
posted on the prison gate at ten minutes past nine.

See also:
A Serial Killer Diarist and Unremarked Clues to John George Haigh’s Crimes
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/05/i-am-serial-killer-diarist-unremarked.html?m=0

Tuesday, 11 July 2023

Strewthisms : A Little Dictionary of English Exclamations and Curses as Religious Euphemisms

Extraordinarily enough, this year, I realise, marks twenty years since the
first submission of my ‘Strewthisms’ proposal to Penguin Reference Books
in the Strand. It was rejected. Rooting through a file, I stumbled across
this provisional list and was compelled (as a completist) to pick over the
bones of a forgotten unfinished project. In my own case, the historical
context is a mid-20th Century English childhood and the strictures of
devout – not to say priggish – British publishers in their avoidance
of profanities in the slang of schoolgirl heroines and schoolboy heroes
animating the pages of Girl and The Eagle comics, whose adventures were
a direct corrective to the violent American comics that had landed on our
shores as ships’ ballast to be branded a baleful influence coarsening young
minds. As I nostalgically wrote (Dispossession, 2008, Salt): ‘After so many
bitter winters of post war rationing, we’d sensed the dark clouds lifting to
herald a new dawn of bright comic books and pink bubble gum.’ Ironical,
perhaps, to remember that the Rev. Chad Varah CH CBE, co-founder of
The Eagle (wholesome comic for a new dawn of pure-minded New
Elizabethans) was more notably the founder of the Samaritans, the world’s
first crisis hotline to provide support to those contemplating suicide.

All fired
Begorrah
Begob
Bejasus
Blasted
Bloody
By Gad
By Goles
By Golly
By Jay
By Jingo
By Lakin (By Our Lady)
By Heck
Chriggle
Christopher
Christopher Columbus
Consarn
Cor Lumme
Crikey
Crimble
Crimbo
Cripes
Dadblamed
Dadblasted
Dadburned
Daddrat
Dadrot
Dagnab
Danged
Darn
Darnation
Dashed
Dern
Deuced
Dingbust
Doggone
Drat
’Eck as like
Egad
For the love of Mike
Gad
Gadzooks
Gadso
Gadswoons
Gard
Garn
Gee
Gee Whiz
Gemini (O Jesu Domini)
Glory be to Pete
Go to Ecky
Godblimey
Goldanged
Goldarn
Goldarnit
Golding
Golly
Good Christmas
Gorblimey
Gosh
Goshdarn
Have a Happy
Heck
Him Below
Holy Mackerel
Holy Smoke
I’ll be blowed
I’ll be darned
I’m dashed
Jeanie Mac!
(An expression roughly equivalent to the quite common formula
‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all the Holy Martyrs!’,
avoiding use the Lord’s name taken in vain.)
Jeese
Jeez
Jee Willikins
Jee Whiskers
Jeepers
Jeepers Creepers
Jiminy (O Jesu Domini)
Jiminy Crickets
Jings
Jumping Jehoshaphat
Kinnell
Land
Landsakes
Laws-a-me
Lawks
Lawksamussy (Lord Have Mercy)
Lor
Lordy Me
Lor Lummy
Lord Lovikins
Lumme (Lord Love Me)
Marry
Marry Come Up
Mother O’Murphy (Mother of Mercy)
My Sainted Aunt
Merry Crimble
Nobodaddy
Od saves
Od’s bobs
Od’s body
Od’s bodikins
Od’s pitikins
Od rod ’em
Od’s zounds
Oh Glory!
Old Nick
Ruddy
Sakes Alive
Snakes Alive
Save Us
’Sbobs
’Sbodikins
’Selp
’Sflesh
’Sfoot
’Slife
Strewth (God’s Truth)
Swelp
Swelpme
Swelpme Bob
Swop me Bob
Swop me Bod
Tarnation (even ‘What in Carnation?’)
Tarnation take me
The Man Upstairs
The Ould Fella
Wouns
What the Deuce
What the Dickens
Xmas
’Zbloud
’Zblud
’Z’death
Zoodikers
Zoonters
Zounds

•

A Moral Conundrum for Puritans:

Does a euphemism become no less a profanity when it’s translated in one’s head?

(And, yes, of course – for crying out loud! – this list of Strewthisms is no way near complete!)

PS. I grew up in the early Atomic Age when King Charles III, as a schoolboy, was heard to say ‘Blast!’ and was widely condemned by the British Press.

•

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

Sunday, 9 July 2023

A Ready Answer

‘One night I saw him standing naked at his bedroom window. Between his thighs hung the dark semblance of a hank of knotted rope. Later, I caught sight of him sitting on his fancied throne at the corner of the moonlit walled garden. His shoulders appeared to sag under the sheer weight of unbearable loneliness.’

Witness statement by schoolgirl Christelle Grace Temple, aet. 16,

from the Case Notes of Dr. Tibor Decuillé Cowry Ph.D., D.Sc., LL.D.,

Director, Royal Baronsgrove Institute, preparatory to the

pre-trial Psychiatric Report on Eugene Zerah Hoffrege, aet. 19.

•

In the humdrum is the beginning of murder.
    Painfully bored, I found myself once again in the chapel robing room with my mild objections sermonised to silence.
    ‘The Ready Answer,’ the school chaplain raged, ‘of a Plausible Intriguer and Enterprising Rogue!’
    He pointed for the nth time to the absurdest of the acronyms he’d scrawled in red pen on the title page of my latest slapdash essay, an initialled comment from his crackpot system of grades that denoted, I knew, the dire mark of Beta double-minus for our Revision papers.
    He stabbed the paper with a nail-bitten forefinger.
    ‘It must have taken considerable ingenuity to produce a mark as bad as this.’
    I nodded and smiled encouragingly.
    ‘I can’t pretend to say I understand you very well.’
    ‘R.A.P.I.E.R! The Ready Answer of a Plausible Intriguer and Enterprising Rogue! My faith is a true blade that cuts through deceit!’
    Old Hopalong 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.’
    The face of the Rev. H. W. F. Walmesley darkened a shade and he eased the celluloid of his dog collar.
    Tears had gathered in his failing eyes so he fumbled in his haste to retrieve a loose sheet of notepaper tucked under the first page of my essay.
    I recognised the oppressive regularity of my father’s handwriting.
    Like iron railings.
    ‘Judgement notwithstanding the verdict, this morning I had this curious letter from your father making enquiry as to whether the results of your entrance scholarship exam have been delayed. Hmmm.’
    His voice softened with a conciliatory – almost pitying – shift of tone.
    ‘For the sake of your poor parents I suggest you break the delicate news of your defeat without delay.’
    He limped to the ambry to fetch his missal and dismissed me with a grunt.
    ‘Cut along, boy.’

•

That evening, secure within my mother’s abandoned henhouse, I withdrew from a dusty ledge above my dissecting benches an official-looking letter and the envelope which had enclosed it.
    Its flap hung loose.
    I’d steamed it open weeks earlier.
    I read again the satisfying words in the dim light that filtered through the ventilation shutters.
    It was formal notification of the failure of the candidate to pass his University Entrance Scholarship examinations under an early admissions scheme.
    ‘I’m tired of setting an example,’ I sighed. I was aware the muted defiance in my voice possessed a new edge of rancour. ‘I’ve deliberately flunked where I was expected to win.’
    I resealed the letter in its envelope and returned it to its hiding place behind a congealed rubber glove.
    ‘I’m not at all sure that what I’ve done isn’t a chargeable offence – in the eyes of the Guv’nor,’ I murmured. ‘But at least I’ve won a brief reprieve, so ...’     I vowed to seize the precious fleeing hours!
    ‘Fugit hora! Carpe diem!’
    Until midnight I laboured to trim my best catapult for perfect balance, and to rebind the whipping cord on its grip.
    There was no hindrance to my remaining in the workshop from teatime to the small hours as the Ancient Parents were attending one of their interminable civic meetings exhorting bleeding-heart worldlings to bankroll country holidays for poor city children.
    I saw them leave by the gate, wearing their virtue for all the street to see.
    In the henhouse, the remains of my mother’s dry mash mixture packed in hempen sacks furnished a serviceable baffle for the thudding of my catapult practice.
    A half inch diameter ball-bearing or a one ounce drilled lead angler’s weight can deliver the knockout shock of a giant-killer’s sling-shot.
    After my carpeting by Old Hopalong, I’d sloped off in the lunch recess to visit Leggett Ironmongers and, just before Wednesday early closing, Edgar Leggett the elder had served me himself.
    ‘Found a fish to play?’ he’d mumbled; his chestnut hair was not his own, neither his teeth.
    ‘Yes,’ I’d nodded, ‘and one that will follow the bait.’

•

This morning, when I woke up, I thought, ‘Now there’ll be all Hell to pay!’
    Not even to my mother had I confessed my self-scuppered scholarship.
    The old Memsahib and the Governor – missionaries both – formed a definite idea long ago that their pious son should follow their righteous path and, like them, serve the Lord in heathen parts. From infancy my future has been the ever-pressing subject of their pained solicitude.
    I found the Governor in our sunless front parlour, bible in hand.
    ‘My bright boy,’ he began, with a wealth of sarcasm on the adjective.
    His posture was as straight as a harp string. He was waiting for me before the dead hearth, feet planted astride on the dark parquet. A faint glimmer of daylight struggled through the half-drawn blinds.
    ‘Ahem.’ He cleared his throat the way he does as a prelude to a bawling out.
    ‘Without faith, the world will end in spiritual ... ahem ...’
    ‘Mayhem?’ I suggested.
    ‘What have you to tell me? Can it be news of that free scholarship they put you forward for?’
    ‘Yes, Father. I’ve been ploughed.’
    He was smiling to himself.
    He had known all along! A copy of The Times lay open on the sideboard.
    ‘The ways of Providence are strange, sonny. Strange to us now.’
    He clasped his hands and I could see his eyes were raised heavenwards.
    (Though my parents consider me as an object of general censure, they also regard our family as having been elected by God to know the privileges of saving grace. These canting sectarian pieties are shared by the Redemptorian League whose usage, habit, and practice consume our daily lives.)
    ‘It’s evident that you have neither the desire nor the vocation for the divine calling.’ He turned his head with a resigned glance for an instant.

    ‘Yet one cannot help feeling that a wise Providence has done all for the best.’
    To my astonishment I was then told that my hard-souled and joylessly joyous father is busily preparing for the Promised Land Upstairs. Apparently, the Great Rapture of the Second Coming is far, far more imminent than his peculiarly illuminated Redemptorians had hitherto reckoned, and Judgement Day is now practically round the corner!
    ‘When, precisely?’ I demanded.
    ‘Certainly in less time than it would take for you to earn a first class degree, my boy.’
    ‘I see. But what day will it be, exactly?’ I persisted, thinking: ‘I may have other plans.’
    ‘The End of Days?’ My father’s answer rang out with rare good humour. His eyes were now fixed on a celestial distance. ‘Who knows? Today? Tomorrow? We may next meet when we rise with the Saints to greet the Lord in the air!’
    The old clock on the mantelpiece struck eight and he started.
    ‘Of one thing you may be certain.’ The Guv’nor snapped shut the Good Book with an air of finality. ‘We shall not taste death.’
    He stood in the doorway with thrown-back head and downward glance as from a pulpit and announced in organ-like tones:
    ‘This year, my boy, Holy Cross Day falls on a Sunday so the Elders are in good earnest to take our mission meeting to the Juvenile Colony and hold our Bible classes there.’
    I felt the pressure of his grip on my shoulder.
    ‘I count on your attendance. Observance is more than skin deep.’
    ‘Another praying-shop,’ I thought resentfully.

•

The farm settlement on the Fens is a training colony for juvenile delinquents and the Gov and the Mem are appointees of the Redemptorian League, charged to act as almoners in the disbursement of the league’s charitable funds.
    The inmates of this agrarian reform school are drawn from the lowest type of offenders, spawned by some of the most villainous families known to stalk London’s slums.
    I began to refine subtle thoughts that soon dominated my mind: ‘It would be something new and altogether exhilarating to be among young tearaways who consider it rather amusing to smash things or to steal without scruple or to reap some dim gratification in childish viciousness that finds joy in the pain of another.’
    My mind was beset by a curious inner turmoil.
    ‘Every reformation must have its victims,’ I brooded. ‘My thirst for blood has to be appeased. An urge over which I have no sanction.’
    I remained for some time in a state of sullen self-absorption, imagining my life degenerate into monotony, sacrificed to some futile sort of treadmill intended by my father.

•

The Sabbath found me trailing down the aisle, trapped in my wretched Sunday-second-best suit, keeping pace with the Gov and old Hopalong ... a poor sap doomed to hear the old trouper trumpet forth once more the Redemptorian League’s great work of moral rehabilitation and its God-given mission to reclaim every class of juvenile criminal and every den of East End undesirables from unwarrantable uncouthness.

    (Seven years ago, I – a boy soprano – sang solo in this very chapel. Psalm Twenty-Three. The voice of a seraph. As the notes rose to sweetest perfection, I remember, I would think of fists soaked in the vinegar of Christ to toughen my resolve to live without any thought of the punishment scroll.)
    I hid myself by the choir stalls, wedged in beside two doltish farmhands.
    From my breast pocket I produced a bloodied handkerchief (Old Hopalong’s red ink has its uses!) and pressed it to my nose and lips.
    My shoulders heaved. Dry retching is a ruse that even the dimmest First Former knows will succeed when intent on cutting lessons.
    The farm-oafs, appalled, propelled me towards a staff door where, with one sickened glance at my official Redemptorian Yellow Pass, a sidesman waved me through.
    (I had, that morning, filched Mother’s almoner permit from her handbag.)
    I found myself in the exercise yard, a paved quad commanded by a guardhouse perched on a upper level like a signal box.
    A flat racing forecast from Goodwood blared from a wireless.                 Evidently, staff watchfulness markedly slackens during the hours of compulsory divine worship.
    So I slipped through the entrance to the Laundry block, and up the stairs to the Infirmary overhead, wholly unchallenged.

•

The first thing I noticed was the rosary looped through the boy’s pyjama cord, and I smiled inwardly. My raid behind enemy lines was over before it had properly begun.
The boy-martyr I sought was the sole occupant of the sick bay.
I removed my Bible from my pocket, inserted the Yellow Pass prominently as a book-mark, and approached.

Diagnostic Observation Schedule: Alester Baptiste, aet. 14 years.
n.b. Collective worship abstention/recommend Constructive Play (d/c).

Thus was his entry on the bedside medical chart. I read rapidly.

    Apparently, the boy was in disgrace. (His playtime had been ‘d/c’, that is, ‘discontinued’.)
    I then put into execution the plan of action that had germinated in my uncurbed thoughts. Often and often I had pictured to myself what true devilment might be like, now I was to find out.
    I examined critically his dirty pudding of a face, his bizarre frizzed fair hair and the weak mouth of the simple-minded. Even so, he had perfect teeth.
    ‘Alester Baptiste?’
    ‘Who tell you my name? Yuh de bredthren fram de amshouse?’
    ‘Yes,’ I replied more or less truthfully.
    ‘Wozzup?’
    ‘I have news from the almoners. They have those funds for your release.’ I was guessing, yet his tawny eyes widened with recognition.‘We can get you out of here. Tonight.’
    ‘Inna de nigh? Yuh a jester, man!’
    ‘If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in this state-run snake pit, then listen.’
    I went to the window and pointed to the building below. It would be so easy, I explained forcibly, to climb over the roof of the refectory, drop on to the coal bunker, and slink away into the shadows of the shrubbery beside the moat.
    ‘Then cross the water in the shallows to the base of the tower, where I’ll be waiting,’ I said.
    At once he began to whimper.
    ‘Wenna de watta is dutty dey say don’t play inna it wid de running belly. In dis country I am cold too bad. It does leave me sick.’
    As evidence of this he withdrew his chamber pot from concealment under the bed.
    ‘Nonsense! We don’t have time to go into side issues, just do as I say! ’
    The lad’s intelligence was not keen enough to follow the drift of this remark so I shifted my position.
    ‘You can expect nothing here,’ I continued. ‘Nothing. It’s because you know they have nothing to give that you know you have nothing to lose.’
    ‘Dem is a no good bunch. I know dis t’ing for true.’
    He groaned heavily, and sank into his pillows.
    ‘Agreed. So it’s only right we get you out of here. And fast. Is that not so?’
    He regarded me with sudden doubt.
    ‘Wha’s agowin wid yuh?’
    ‘Are you able to keep a secret?’
    He looked at me with a vague fear in his face.
    ‘Shouldah wanna hear it?’ he wavered.
    I then explained every detail of his escape.
    ‘Tonight. Eleven o’clock.’
    ‘Eleben!’ the boy exclaimed with extraordinary brightness and emphasis.

    ‘We must hurry,’ I urged. ‘You need to decide now.’
    ‘Eleben! Yuh pwomise dis is true?’
    ‘Don’t ask for promises,’ I rounded on him, ‘ask only for revenge. Only blood drowns the pain.’
    I glanced at my watch, then plunged my hidden scalpel into the ball of my thumb. A thin stream of blood appeared.
    The demon in me waited and would not be satisfied until I saw the boy’s end written in his own blood.
    ‘You and me. We’re brethren. We must take the Oath of Brothers-in-Blood.’
    Sight of the blood seemed to transfix him and render him as passive and tractable as a little child. He allowed me to make an incision in his right thumb.
    It is repugnant to see mixed blood, to see blood mingle with mine in two veins at once, yet to achieve my ends I concealed my distaste.
    ‘Remember, you’ve to keep this business dark,’ I reminded him.
    ‘Breathe easy, man. My blood take yuh, man. Yuh is my best fren.’
    ‘Then that is all that need be said.’
    His dark listening face, framed by the smooth whiteness of the bed sheets, made him for the minute a painting imagined by an orientalist.
    ‘Eleven o’clock,’ I repeated.
    ‘Yuh mean,’ he muttered awkwardly, ‘dat yuh soon come back?’
    As a sign of the strange kinship we had sworn to one another, I bathed my mouth in his blood.
     I washed my hands in an enamelled tin basin, and reapplied lanolin cream to the boy’s bandage.
    The boy looked up with a gleam of something very like hope in his troubled eyes.
    I had been called upon to act the part of the Tempter and he was cast perfectly as the Tempted.
    ‘You have my word,’ I smiled.

•

Out on the colony forecourt I stood at the ramparts and surveyed the waters of the moat. A breeze coming up from the river brought with it the odour of sedgeweed.
The margins of the far banks were defended by barbed wire entanglements and, anyhow, as I’d warned the boy, the mud on the other side was so sticky and thick that, if he attempted to wade in at any point, the mire would be sure to swallow him up. The approach I favoured was a direct ascent of the bailey tower ruins, never mind the water’s shelving depth.
As I strode across the causeway I could think only of the boy, and of the bond of blood which had sealed our oath and united our hands; I could think only of the debt of blood that must be honoured and consecrated to my ends.

•

Later, when I returned for tea, I overheard the Memsahib talking to the Guv’nor.
    ‘It is clearly our duty to see those boys come to no moral harm.’
    She sniffed as only my parents can sniff; her own cue to yet another moralism.
    ‘None shall be forgotten; not a grain of corn shall be lost. Of that we may be sure.’

•

When eleven struck from the Colony stables I was much relieved somehow that it was not the sinister chimes of midnight I heard breaking the stillness of that desolate spot.
    The Moat Farm clockhouse surmounts the mews where the colony’s working horses are quartered and, despite our separation by the breadth of the moat, the shuffling of their hoofs in the straw reached my ears as I stood at the parapet of the ruined bailey I’d made my own watchtower.
    Of other farm sounds I heard none save for a rat scurrying on the ramparts to the waste bins behind the refectory kitchens.
    The planet Venus shone like a blue lamp, a caution I ignored.
    I had been standing there for two hours thinking of how I should kill him – slowly, in my own time, as with my animal and bird specimens – talking to him all the while. Thus I stood for many golden minutes revolving the possibilities of my point of vantage and assigning my actions to it.
    Then eleven struck and I perceived a shadow of a shadow stir below the roofline and the darkness yielded a new scurrier, which as quick as a trained monkey slid down a drainpipe to the bank of the moat.
    I heard Lester’s half-stifled gasp before he slipped into the shallows and breasted the smooth evenness of the waters towards me.
    ‘Young’un!’ I called softly.
    ‘A-who dat?’
    ‘Keep still until I throw a line.’
    I had secured a doubled rope to the tower’s lightning rod and I swung the two lines within the boy’s grasp.
    He rubbed his slim brown hands together and grabbed the ropes.
    ‘You my bredthren, man!’ he grinned with a show of extraordinarily white teeth.
    I braced my feet against the parapet and began to belay him up, foothold by foothold, until he reached a weathered stonework shelf that capped a buttress.
    I held the ropes taut then I caught his left wrist in my grasp.
    ‘Dis is not an easy somet’ing.’
    ‘Take hold of that slab,’ I whispered. ‘You don’t have a dog’s chance unless you do as I say.’
    As his hand gripped the ledge I whisked the rope up from his snatching fingers so smartly that it struck my face like a whiplash.
    ‘My arms ache,’ he moaned. He was panting hoarsely. ‘You nah hear what I say?’
    ‘No time for tears,’ I taunted. ‘Think of it as Constructive Play.’
    I had contrived his plight to be this dreadful and uneasy posture. Over one corner of the stone ledge was crooked his left arm, which principally supported the weight of his body, while his right leg was turned up and precariously hooked over the lip of the slab.
    In all truth he was on the slab at last.

•

I was greatly cheered by the success of my scheme and my heart now panted with eagerness to accomplish my great purpose.
    But I resolved first to explain to him the infallibility of the Redemptorian Elect and the preordination of all that would come to pass.
    Below me, in the darkness, the whites of the boy’s eyes widened.
    ‘Yuh inna big chouble, mista! A whole heap’f chouble.’
    One warning tug of the remaining rope was threat enough to silence him.
    ‘Sound travels on still water. If you raise your voice, the Superintendent will hear.’
    I then explained that special liberty by which we Redemptorians, the Chosen and Elected Ones, are made free.
    ‘You must know, Lester, that I was chosen and elected to be saved before the world was made.’
    ‘Yuh inna a jam, man, trus’ me!’ he persisted, writhing in pain.
    Fear held him in a vice.
    I smiled sweetly. Nothing in the world delights a Redemptorian so much as consigning detractors to eternal perdition.
    So I took the boy to task for his ignorance of the great doctrine of the election of grace, and of how I had been assured of salvation by an eternal decree never to be dissolved.
    I remembered word for word the assurances of my father.
    ‘We are the Chosen Few,’ I recited, ‘covenanted by God, who will never fall away.’
    ‘Tink God a-go help you?’ His voice was half-afraid, half-reproachful.
    The boy’s snivelling remarks began to nettle me and I became irritated beyond measure until I was positively glad to give up the task of delivering the sublime truths my father had brought to light.
    So I relaxed the remaining rope to see my half-strung marionette squirm and grapple with the ledge in a moment of panic.
    I was conscious of the sound of the tearing of some material, probably the canvas of his haversack as it fell. It rebounded off an outcrop of rock some eighty feet below.
    ‘Wha’appen to you? Wha’gawenon?’
    ‘I am going to kill you,’ I said quietly, without hurry, and my resolution rose, indignant to be quit of him.
    ‘You must be joke!’
    ‘Your last hour has arrived. You shall go your way, and I shall go mine.’
    That boy must have died a hundred times in the ten minutes I held him dangling in dread on the line. Looking down I saw his mouth gasping like a fledgling’s panting gape as he glanced sideways at the water.
    He was fighting for breath and I had the satisfaction of hearing his teeth chatter; I think he knew his end was near.
     ‘Fear is better than pain for the pleasure derived by the tormentor,’ I thought with a lighter heart. ‘To inflict great suffering and hear the cry of it and not to doubt. It is in this torment that one finds true greatness.’
    He seemed grateful when I smiled. That smile I bestowed on him was like the kiss of the torturer.
    Then a beam of light shot out across the causeway and the Reformatory Superintendent blew three loud blasts on his whistle.
    Lester’s lips trembled with a premonition.
    I let go the rope and reached for my catapult.
    He clutched his last safehold in bewilderment before a more than lucky slingshot caught him a true sockeroo smack between the eyes.
    ‘Lawd have mercy pon ...’
    He stopped suddenly, with a jerk, as a man stops in the narration of something which has left an ineffaceable pain in his life.
    His shirt clung wet to his back. The marks of his fingers were still wet on the ledge.
    As he fell, I remembered the thrush in our garden that had flown from the bird bath that morning.
    ‘Flying with wet wings,’ I thought.

•

The details of my return on the empty last bus are fragmentary and vague.

My coat-sleeve was nearly torn off, while all the buttons of my shirt had been wrenched away while lying on the parapet.

    Otherwise I showed no sign of scratch or hurt.
    ‘You do look cold, love.’
    The blue-trousered conductress with henna’d hair gave me the glad eye while she poured sweet tea from a chipped thermos flask into its stainless steel cap. Behind her right ear was a tucked a thinly rolled cigarette no more substantial than a toothpick. Her voice rasped.
    ‘How about it, lovey?’ She proffered the steaming cup.
    I smiled my hard inscrutable society smile that never betrays an emotion.
    I did not trust myself so far as to speak.
    Then she probed. ‘Well, you are a night-owl.’
    ‘Flat tyre,’ I lied without hesitation. I produced my cycle clips from my jacket pocket.
    ‘‘Had a spill. Gonna to fetch my bike in the morning.’
    The tea soon brought me to myself, and, after another deep draught, I was greatly revived and felt my spirit rise again above the sphere of mortal conceptions and the bourgeoisisms of the laws of men.
    On that rapturous night I came to the belief that the more laden with transgressions the sinner tends, the more likely is the bestowal by Heaven of the mercy of eternal grace.
    And I calmed myself with the serene and indissoluble certainty that, since my salvation was divinely preordained, so also was the manner of Lester’s death.

•

I remembered the scene in the vestry and the words of our school chaplain. He was afflicted by a curiously lazy right eye, which causes his active eye to gleam with greater fixity on the penitents summoned before him.
    ‘I confess I am grievously displeased to see a debauchee so strayed from the path as to have wholly lost his way.’
    He had leafed through my manuscript again before sounding off.
    ‘I fear the clear light from the candle of the Lord no longer shines on your soul.’
    ‘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, had 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.

•

That night, I dreamt I saw a Judas tree take root and blossom in my father’s high-walled garden. In my dream the flowers were blood-red.

(Extract from an unpublished novel, The Boy from the High-Walled Garden.)

•

Monday, 12 June 2023

A Discomposed Gnat-Bitten Townie Sulks and Composes an Anti-Haiku in Memory of a Disagreeable Visit to the Atonal English Countryside.

babbling of birds
the warbling of a brook
then a five-barred thing

The anti-haiku poet’s expression of a gnat horde
composed in a fury of fountain pen ink.

For three haikus perhaps holding a glimmer of promise and presumptuously dedicated to England’s truest nature poet, John Clare, at whose feet I sit, see: https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/02/three-haikus-in-homage-to-john-clare.html

Friday, 14 April 2023

Beware of Pity

(Ungeduld des Herzens*)

In homage to Stefan Zweig

             This blossomed tree grown crookèd on the hill

             an onshore wind espouses lest desire

             reveal that void – cathedral of the soul –

             whose hawk in spirals weaves a twisted spire.

Catherine Eisner

*The Heart's Impatience, a powerful psychological study of emotional betrayal, is a 1939 novel by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and it was his longest work of fiction; published in English as Beware of Pity. The protagonist, a young lieutenant, moved by compassion is trapped into a tragic engagement to a wealthy heiress, wheelchair-bound and infatuated and overwhelmed by a make-believe romance than can never be realised.

See also: Sternstunden, Toxic Pacts and the Silent Woman’s Tryst of Blood https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/12/sternstunden-toxic-pacts-and-silent.html