Dead Wife, New Hat. (Femme morte, chapeau neuf.)

Fish and guests smell at three days old, Anton Chekhov mused.
    In truth, that year at Madame Lintvaryova’s country villa in the Ukraine he had grown restless after two.
    On his solitary walks beside the teeming fishpools to the village his thoughts returned again and again to the problem of a short story considered worthy of inclusion in the memorial collection dedicated to his celebrated friend, the late storyteller Garshin.
    To refuse to contribute would be uncomradely and irreverent towards a man he’d loved. Anton despaired: All the short stories I have in my pending drawer are unsuitable. They’re either very vulgar, very frivolous or very long.
    He felt a compulsion to write a story about a writer of no talent, a neurasthenic undergraduate who affects to wears blue-lens spectacles, and whose return home to a lonely country-house is driven by the wish to die: He  reads French monologues, drinks alone, then everything turns out stupid, and he shoots himself.
    Anton struck his fist against his palm. Appalling bad taste! Hadn’t poor Garshin thrown himself down the stairwell from the fifth floor of his own apartment house only hours before Anton had planned to visit him?
    The recent tragedy was surely no fit subject for the symposium volume! Yet, in the beginning, Anton had found the villa’s old overgrown gardens highly poetical and a stimulant to his torpid, novelettish fancies.
    The countryside along the river, with its melancholy boarded-up manor-houses, seemed like some fabled enchanted domain, where the souls of beautiful women dwelled – to say nothing of ossified butlers and footmen still dressed like jesters who fondly recalled their days of serfdom – and where romantic young ladies pined for the most operetta-ish kind of love.
    Anton yawned. He, the braggart who’d once claimed he could write a feuilleton in five minutes whose subject was merely an ashtray, was reluctant to admit he was stumped.
    Pathological fatigue! There could be no other explanation for the feuilletoniste’s inertia. Twelve hours’ earlier, at two in the morning, he’d awakened with an attack of the night sweats in the room Aleksandra had assigned him. He had forgotten to pack his nightshirt and imagined he would appear foolish to ask his hostess for one. But a bad shift is better than no shift at all, so he’d attempted to sleep in his undervest.
    Except, dammit ... he could not cast from his mind the memory of a shy student teacher who’d stayed one night at the villa the previous spring. The young man had been sound asleep when suddenly a deaf old woman entered his room, carrying an enema, and with rapid dexterity inserted it. Thinking this visit must be the usual thing, the teacher did not protest; and in the morning, of course, when Aleksandra heard of it, she’d not had the heart to tell the blushing ninny the old woman had made a mistake.
    At this recollection, sleep had eluded Anton and, thereafter, he had lain shivering long into the small hours, his pulse contrapunto to the boom of a water-bittern from the marshes.
    Later that morning, however, by chance, he had retrieved his post: an unexpected package whose wrappings when torn off disclosed his abandoned nightshirt and combinations, laundered and neatly pressed.
    Inside was a note from the droll, red-haired porter, Motovilov, who’d guarded the door to Anton’s last lodgings. This importunate, lynx-eyed dvornick, observing Chekhov’s infirmities, had tormented the long-suffering doctor at every turn with meddlesome homespun remedies, which – because they were well meant – his victims were invariably too kindly disposed to decry.  Anton had tipped him handsomely, and Motovilov’s honest act was recompense for the many handouts.
    The enclosure was typical of the man:

Respected Sir
I dutifully enclose the eminent gentleman’s change of linen trusting by St. Paul who commanded Timothy to drink a little wine for his stomock’s sake that Your Honourableness will likewise partake of fifteen Botkin drops in five glasses of wine as having long acquaintance with the illconvenience of the colic and such disorders numbered among your complaints occasioned by The Hydropathy I am certain of a cure.
Begging to remain yr most humble obedient servant
Sergei Platonovich Motovilov
at the sign of The ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚

    The Censor had blanked out the offending words, beneath which was rubber-stamped: With the Permission of the Censor. When Anton examined the seals on the packing thread he saw they had been carefully replaced.
    Apparently, the waggish Motovilov had alluded to the tavern’s sign, the Imperial Eagle, in terms which savoured of lèse-majesté by committing to paper the name by which the tavern was more familiarly known: The Split Crow.
    No doubt Dr. Chekhov would again be the subject of a ‘See All, Tell All’ report to the Censorship Committee, with confidential memoranda attached to his dossier positing new speculations as to his views on schismatic separatists.
    So, in spidery writing, do the tenacula of a provincial state’s apparat fasten their grip.
    In recent months, censorship of letters by order of the Governor had been particularly vigorous as there were whispers of revolutionaries sent to foment civil unrest in the provinces.  Anton knew that he, himself, was among the first rank in the long catalogue of enemies of the state under surveillance by the despotic Political Department; not even new-born babes-in-arms were free from suspicion.
    A dame who kept a forbidden crèche of toddlers had been condemned for harbouring an illegal assembly of infants
    Inside the Secret Chancellery, the Internal Agency marshalled a vast army of anti-terrorist and counter-espionage agents who were supervised in systematic undercover activity connivant in penetrating all social ranks.
    The disguised men – Vidocqesque informers, correspondents and rumour-catchers – were planted as collaborators within all known revolutionary organisations and suborned by the higher police in every profession and craft to smell out sedition within the monarchical state.
    Spy fever knew no surcease.  Not a day passed without the exposure of yet another clandestine printing press or the betrayal of hidden archives, treasonable pamphlets, secret mimeographs, conspiracies, bomb factories and arsenals of the People’s Will Party or the public burning of the terrorists’ forbidden libraries.
    Once in Chekhov’s early years, the Censor of the Mails had intercepted the draft of a juvenile playlet, but the opusculum slipped the net without sanction since no trace of a plot was found.
    He recalled a former student at University who dreamt of devoting himself to literature and, at last, gave up the civil service and followed his calling to St. Petersburg. He became a censor.  Anton imagined him – even now – chewing on a stub, while he blue-pencilled his own tongue as well as better men’s brains.
    In the Customs Houses they treated a revolver with flippancy, but regarded typewriters as more dangerous than dynamite.
        No! In these oppressive times, the writer was like a whipped cur and his neck was in the noose of an editorial choke-chain, for there was no subject safe from the Tsar’s forbidding system of mental drill.
    Anton sighed. Frustratingly, the essential theme – the leitmotif – of the commissioned short story had yet to suggest itself.  The nagging thought was like the tongue ever turning to an aching tooth.  As he filed Motovilov’s letter in his correspondence case, he glanced at the quaint terms of the invitation he’d received in Moscow from his hostess, Madame Lintvaryova.
    How appropriate that the private passion of dear Aleksandra was the collecting of fossils, he thought, with a rueful smile.  One of the penalties of her acquaintanceship was her insistence that prospective guests should fossick for specimens for her study, and submit them to be tagged.
    He remembered how, the previous week, his unfolding of Aleksandra’s letter on the train had prompted him to send a hasty telegram to the Ukraine to advise his time of arrival.
    The train had halted by a woodstack to take on more fuel.
    According to the earnest railway steward, the track in the middle of the Russian forests was said to be laid so crooked the enginemen would throw crooked logs, grown on moonless nights, into the firebox.
    At the station refreshment room, the air fragrant with burning pine cones, a huge hissing samovar had dispensed a large glassful of fishy-tasting tea made from dried raspberry leaves.
    Anton’s immediate feeling had been of vexation that the fat peasant with the grizzled beard, in the soiled green tunic and red belt, should sell such filth.
    The slovenly oaf had sported a scorched fingerstall; the vodka on his breath smelled rank; and the sugar bowl was alive with reptant beetles, the grains spattered black with specks of fly-dirt like the pen-scratched elisions of a censorious revisionist hand.
    And he had no doubt the state’s reptant censors had read Aleksandra’s letter also; they must have crawled all over it for telltale signs of his having succumbed to anti-imperialistic sympathies.
    His seat safely retrieved in the second class compartment – among the merry, holidaying Little Russians bound for their summer cabins – he’d reread Madame Lintvaryova’s affectionate letter confirming the details of the rooms she had placed at his disposal at the villa, and the arrangements the good lady had advanced for the reception of Anton’s venerable admirer, the poet Pleshcheyev – St. Petersburg’s most ancient rehabilitated revolutionary. (Perhaps, in this regard, Anton considered, she would come to accept that old Pleshcheyev himself sufficed as a rare enough crustaceous relic to be added to her fossil collection.)
    Her letter clearly revealed that the passage of another year had not diminished her eccentricity, her enthusiasm, nor, mercifully, her caution.

Ave Antonius,
I have only now had time to examine your consignment.
    The Pleurotoma denticula ex petras was broken when it reached me. The Turbinolia sp. are very typical of that littoral. Your best find is the fine example of Dentalium subeburneum, which is quite scarce, and your Batillaria bouei seldom turns up.  I congratulate you on this. I rather guessed your Turritella would be a sulcifera, as this is the largest species I know in the Lutetian.
    Life here without you is too drear, dear, too, too drear.

Do come soon.
Your sincerely devoted
madame châtelaine et maîtresse d’hôtel.

    Had her cunning covert reference to the broken health of old Pleshcheyev from St. Petersburg (ex petras!) sufficiently pulled the wool over the spying eyes of the apparatchiki in the Post Office, Anton wondered listlessly.
    Anton had a suspicion that Madame Lintvaryova, a keen follower of Schopenhauer, would come to regard Pleshcheyev in the Ukraine as the same sort of symbol of the Will as was upheld by his coterie in Petersburg, that is, as an icon that the people worshipped because it was old and had once hung side by side with wonder-working icons.  (The wonder-working ikoni, in question, being that ex-revolutionary Dostoevsky, and the wild man Petrashevsky.)
    Now, as he strolled through the kitchen gardens towards the hothouses, Chekhov made a note to quiz Pleshcheyev on the madcap antics of his friend, Petrashevsky, and, with a degree of luck, to record them for posterity.
    All the same, Anton was damnably irritable.
    The railway on which he’d arrived for the house party was a little pully-hauly-push-me-pull-you affair, but the conductor was sprightly and sped efficiently on errands in long brightly polished boots. As a matter of habit, Anton had recorded this local colour in his notebook. The conductor wore a hat of Astrakhan black wool, blue trousers, and a surtout buttoned to the neck, bound round the waist with a magenta-coloured sash ending in long blue tassels.
    Anton had tipped him to be moved to another carriage. The tobacco smoke in the former car had been as thick as a Sikh’s beard.
      He had lately learned that Tolstoy had given up smoking for good, and Dr. Chekhov had decided to emulate the unpredictable patriarch by keeping St. Peter’s Fast, which had began on Trinity Sunday and was to be observed until the end of July. What’s more, from that day Anton had decided to restrict his chameleon diet to three cinnamon cakes and a dose from a bottle containing a solution of quinine, kalium bromatum, an infusion of rhubarb, tincture of gentian, and fennel water – all in one mixture, quantum sufficit.
    But his good intentions, he knew, were as enfeebled as his own illhealth and the slippery slope to moral backsliding was simply a matter of time.
    ‘Do not tell me that the Struggle is futile ...’ Anton murmured, quoting Pleshcheyev, an ironic twist to his lips. He felt frazzled from the heat.
    Then, suddenly, almost as though by a stroke of his own editorial pen, a new scene opened out before him, a sketchy new paragraph, as it were, suggested by an entrance pillar with a chipped capital where a collapsed brick coping broke the line of the crumbling kitchen garden wall.
        And there – in the nethermost corner of the abandoned nursery, basking in the sun-trap of a sunken flower garden – was seated Pleshcheyev, fast asleep.
    Dr. Chekhov, hardly containing his delight, sat down beside him.
    Surely no moment could be more promising.
    (When at last Pleshcheyev had arrived at Mme Lintvaryova’s Anton had been overjoyed; but a hectic round of parlour games and family outings had so conspired to deny the Grand Old Man and his protégé the respite of even one precious minute alone together and, in consequence, Anton had been thwarted of the occasion he sought to steer the old boy’s recollections towards his painful memory of the long-haired rebel, Mikhail Vasilyevich Butashevich-Petrashevsky.)
    Now, at this somnolent hour after lunch, Anton reflected, their tuft-hunting hostess was prone to sentimental reverie in her sitting room, for she regarded her old chairs, stools and sofas with the same respectful tenderness as she regarded her old dogs and horses, and, therefore, her home was something like an almshouse for furniture, never mind broken-winded literati.
    Pleshcheyev’s chin had sunk on his neck-tie; he lay with withered hands clasped on his belly, legs stretched out at full length; his breathing was light.
    Anton sent the under-gardener to fetch a sun-hat. The sun beat harshly on a glass of tea undrunk and on his patron’s mottled forehead.
     Soon the young man returned brushing moss from the crown of a panama the size of a parasol.
    Shaded by the hat, Pleshcheyev, understandably, at once awoke and protested, at which Anton saw his moment and seized it.
    An occasion lost cannot be redeemed, Anton thought, and promptly asserted that Petrashevsky’s hat had been, surely, considerably larger.
    Gently, Dr. Chekhov took the old man’s wrist and felt the pulse flutter under his fingertips as Alexie Pleshcheyev, sinking further into a brocaded cushion, described his first sighting of Anton’s childhood hero.
    On that memorable occasion, of course, Petrashevsky had been wearing his preposterously wide raincoat and equally preposterous wide-brimmed hat – a veritable sombrero.
    In this ensemble, calculated to scandalise the conservatively dressed civil servants of St. Petersburg, he would saunter to work; and, indeed, at times he would wear a four-cornered hat of a more recent French revolutionary vintage, delighting in the sensation he created.
    He abominated the fopperies of fawning courtiers, and those who studied to flatter the Autocrat made him feel quite faint.
    Petrashevsky had flouted the Palace’s disapproval of long hair by wearing curls to the shoulders and when ordered by his superiors to conform, he had appeared the next day with hair even longer.
    ‘But just as his director prepared to reprimand him,’ Alexie chuckled and his pulse leapt, ‘Petrashevsky yanked off a wig and revealed a completely shaven head!’
      Extraordinarily, Alexie continued, Petrashevsky had even once worn a woman’s dress to Kazan cathedral.  He had stood there, among the women, and pretended to pray.  His extremely masculine physique and black beard, however, soon attracted the attention of a deacon, who approached him and said: ‘Respected sir, you are, it appears to me, a man in a woman’s clothes.’ Petrashevsky had reportedly replied to the dignitary:  ‘My dear, it is not me but you who are clearly a woman masquerading in a man’s dress.’
     The deacon was so shocked by this answer from the sans-culottist that Petrashevsky was able to disappear into the crowd of worshippers.
    Pleshcheyev then attempted, in an amateurish sort of way, to analyse the deeper anti-authoritarian motives of Petrashevsky.
    ‘In truth, Antoine, his bizarre performance was mostly an infantile regression, you know, simply attention-seeking behaviour to compensate for the withdrawal of maternal love. The long hair, the defiance, it was all a result of the moral trauma of childhood neglect.’
    Pleshcheyev paused to savour his tea and the scents from the sunlit garden.
    ‘His mother was a harsh, self-denying woman who, when his father died, grudged him every penny of his inheritance.  Petrashevsky told me himself that at his father’s funeral his mother had falsely denounced him before the family mourners with the bitter accusation : “Admire this man for a worthy son!  He is glad of his father’s death!” Maternal rebuke and rejection followed him all his life. Should we wonder that he went off the rails and fixated on humiliating the mother state! Mind you, he inherited his mother’s sour tongue. The wine at those fashionable drinking soirees he presided over for stoking up the Friday night liberals was unbelievably nasty. Yes, a deadly vinum nastissimum. Dostoevsky called it Chateau du Chamberpot!’
    Chekhov began to cautiously draw out Alexie on the subject of the capture and staged execution of the notorious Petrashevskian Circle to which Pleshcheyev and Dostoevsky had belonged.
    Pleshcheyev half-closed his eyes and began :
    ‘Imagine. 5 a.m. in the morning. In the midst of December. It was two overcoats colder than the day before and the snow reached over our knees when we were transported to Semenovskiy Square. The Tsar had chosen December to submit us to the ultimate indignity. I mean, young Kaskin had earned the full measure of the Tsar’s hatred by being a nephew of one of the original Decembrist plotters who had rebelled over a quarter of a century earlier. He had spent the entire previous eight months of the investigation in strictest solitary confinement. The ordeal in the dark-chamber had driven him practically insane. He was almost unrecognisable, and so were we all. The scaffold was draped in black. Steps led up to it and a railing surrounded it. A short distance from the scaffold stood three wooden posts.  The crowd filled three sides of the square, and standing guard were a considerable number of military units.’
    Suddenly, Pleshcheyev’s eyes snapped open and he turned abruptly to Chekhov, his gaze full on him.
    ‘The soldiers had blacked their buttons,’ he unburdened, his eyes moist, agleam with indignation. He spoke with that hasty breathless voice that old men use when there is sickness or death in the house. ‘Beware the fate of our nation when you see the buttons of our soldiers blacked.’
    Chekhov nodded, rapt, but did not interrupt.
    ‘As Petrashevsky climbed the steps he turned to me, ridiculously clutching his credentials (here Pleshcheyev demonstrated the action, by discreetly placing his hands over his groin and cupping his balls), and then Petrashevsky said, in a high, lisping voice, “I’m so cold I don’t know whether I’m a Mikhail or a Mikhailina!” ’
    From the condemned men there had burst forth a scattering of strained laughter.
    ‘Well you know the rest,’ Pleshcheyev said brokenly.
    ‘We Petrashevskians, one by one, were led up to the scaffold and were ordered to stand in two rows of twelve and nine men facing each other. The State Auditor mounted the scaffold and to each of our hatless, shivering comrades was read a statement of his guilt which ended with the words: “The Military-Civil Court has sentenced all to execution by shooting, and on the 19th of December the Tsar wrote in his own hand, ‘So be it.’ ”
    ‘Only then for the first time did we prisoners learn the conclusion of the case against us, and understood the significance of those three wooden posts,’ Pleshcheyev whispered gravely.
    The Auditor’s reading lasted over half an hour.
    Then a priest joined the accused on the scaffold and called them to confession. None answered, except Timkovskiy who stepped forward to kiss the cross and then returned to his place in the ranks.
    Petrashevsky then also kissed the cross and Dostoevsky whispered to Spesnev, ‘We will be together with Christ.’
    Spesnev answered, ‘A handful of dust, I think.’
    ‘At that moment we all crossed ourselves,’ sighed Pleshcheyev.
    The ceremonial executioner had then passed down the lines of the accused, breaking an incised sword ritualistically above each head.
    The Petrashevskians were given white shirts with caps and were ordered to put them on.
    ‘Lord, how absurd we must appear in these costumes,’ Petrashevsky had exclaimed scornfully, and snickered.
    Then the first three of them –  Petrashevsky, Mombelli and Grigoryev – were led down the steps and across to the posts to be tied facing the fifteen rifles of the firing squad.
    ‘Dostoevsky and I were next so we only had a few seconds to make our farewells and embrace,’ Pleshcheyev murmured.
    The soldiers had then taken aim, but the command, ‘Fire!’, never came.
    An official waved a white handkerchief.  The death sentences for all of them had been commuted, to Siberian exile or to hard labour (or, in the case of Pleshcheyev, to active service as a private in a rehabilitation unit, in a penal line battalion, deployed in the exhumation of the slain temporarily buried on battlefields).
    Petrashevsky was then forced to dress once more in his prison garb, and heavy snow was falling as two blacksmiths appeared to fit iron fetters to his legs.
    Petrashevsky took the smith’s hammer and drove the nails into the fetters himself.
    A black hooded sleigh with black curtains drew up to the scaffold.
    Petrashevsky hobbled down the line of men, and each prisoner bade him farewell.
    There were tears in Pleshcheyev’s eyes.
    ‘That was the first time I really loved him,’ Alexie said reverentially.
    He removed the hat and passed it to Anton, shielding his eyes.
    Asked how he viewed the past from the tranquillity of his present-day standpoint, Pleshcheyev’s eyes again half-closed, like those of a daydreamer sunk in Oblomovian torpor:  ‘After the late unpleasantness (his euphemism for the assassination of the Tsar’s father seven years’ earlier) the highest spiritual state I attempt to attain, these days, is one of an ambiguous unforgetfulnesslessness.’
    The real live revolutionary, letting his eyelids droop, appeared to fall asleep.
    Regretfully, Anton opened a first edition of Pleshcheyev’s poems he had brought for the old man to autograph. The opportunity was now lost. Where the pages opened, his glance dwelt on two forgiving Pleshcheyevian lines: 

We shall teach the Love,
Whether as beggars or richmen.
For this we shall be pursued,
But we shall forgive our executioners.

    Pleshcheyev snored gently, his feet raised on an unfolded garden lounger of woven cane. His toe-caps were highly polished.
    As black as the buttons of soldiers in a penal regiment, Anton brooded. The meaning of the forcibly-conscripted old veteran’s remark was not lost on him.
    Future terrors seemed to cast their shadow before them.
    In the penal regiments, the snipers used this ruse to conceal their shiny decorations when on night shooting patrol.
    The sunlight gleamed brightly on buffed shoe leather.
    Madame Lintvaryova had attended to this particular detail of her distinguished guest’s toilette herself.
    Anton recalled a remark by Tolstoy: ‘For the best kind of revolutionary commend me a man who has never blacked his own boots.’
    He placed the Petrashevskian hat on his own head but the larger crown did not fit.
    I, too, have often turned my mind uneasily in the same direction, Anton pondered, fearing not to admit my fear of the salon-revolutionary’s path.
    The hat made his head so devilishly hot he felt as if his brains were bubbling over.  His scalp itched and he remembered with irritation a remark of Sarah Bernhardt’s at their last meeting at the Mayakovsky Theatre.
    ‘Mais, mon ange! Femme morte, chapeau neuf!’
    That the Divine Sarah had contended that his short stories were too long was a gross effrontery he simply could not ignore!
    Sarah had arched her fine white throat for her admirers’ regard as she’d thrown back her head and laughed. ‘Dead wife, new hat! Voilà! In all Russia there is no short story shorter than that!’
    ‘Ah! That’s all very well, madame, but please to observe, medicine is my wife,’ Dr. Chekhov had protested, ‘and literature, my mistress. Perhaps you suggest I should kill the one to make room for the other?’
    Seated beside the ancient Petrashevskian revolutionary, the writer-without-a-tale could have been heard to murmur sorrowfully, as he sank into slumber: ‘Maybe that day has come. Let this cup pass from me.’
    But the young under-gardener who came with a sickle in his hand to retrieve the hat was deaf from shooting game in the woods so he heard nothing.
    And it was his hat, after all.

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An edited extract from Catherine Eisner’s unpublished novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv.
For further extracts see 
Inductive Detection
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/inductive-detection.html
and Talking Raven . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai-khar-r-r-kai.html
and Winter Rules and Le Diable Boiteux . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/winter-rules-and-le-diable-boiteux.html
and Prof. Yanychev’s Three-Cornered Duel
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/d-r-tchekhov-textbook-case-prof.html
A Skirmish with Wolves, 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2015/01/d-r-tchekhov-skirmish-with-wolves-and.html
or D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv. A long lost novel, 
https://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. 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

 

Great Dictators: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Barbara Cartland, Edgar Wallace and Co.

I have often thought that there must exist any number of recordings gathering dust made by those ‘great dictators’, the famous novelists over the past century or so who advanced their craft beyond dependence on stenographers by speaking directly to phonograph, dictaphone or plastic disc.

As I noted in my remarks on the Napoleonic Henry James, the ‘Master’, due to rheumatism of the wrist, relied on ‘typewriters’, as shorthand typists were called circa 1900. Similarly, Joseph Conrad.

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/fruits-sec-and-napoleon-of-over.html

How far this vivâ-voce approach to prose conditions a writer’s style is a question that exercises many academics, particularly in the case of James and his tortured parentheses, described by one contemporary critic as ‘phraseologic stress’. Discerning criticism of his times disparaged James’s overcultivation of the parenthetical exposition, suspecting its origin lay in the hesitancies of dictation, a prose manner  that compels the reader ‘to leap the five-barred gates of his parentheses in a game of verbal hide-and-seek’ to keep the writer’s meaning in sight.

In this regard, James’s shunning  of the straightforward was noted by contemporary novelist Mrs Humphry Ward:

‘Personally, I regret that, from What Maisie Knew onward, he adopted the method of dictation. A mind so teeming, and an art so flexible, were surely the better for the slight curb imposed by the physical toil of writing. I remember how and when we first discussed the pros and cons of dictation ... he was then enchanted by the endless vistas of work and achievement which the new method seemed to open out. And indeed it is plain that he produced more with it than he could have produced without it ... Still, the diffuseness and over-elaboration which were the natural snares of his astonishing gifts were encouraged rather than checked by the new method ...’

(Incidentally, Aldous Huxley was the nephew of Mrs. Humphry Ward, whom he described as his ‘ literary godmother’. ‘I used to have long talks with her about writing; she gave me no end of sound advice. She was a very sound writer herself, rolled off her plots like sections of macadamized road. She had a curious practice: every time she started work on a new novel, she read Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau.’ )

So the jury is still out, it seems, when a verdict is demanded on the merits of dictation.

The roll call of the great dictators is long (Dostoevsky, Hardy, James, Milton, Scott, Stendhal, may be mentioned, together with Barbara Cartland) and many of the names will prompt loyal readers to return to consult the texts in attempts to find the nigh invisible seam between authorial longhand and the mechanical transcription of the author’s voice or dependency on a literary amanuensis.

Under such critical scrutiny, it seems, literary works are reweighed to determine where a writer’s distinctive style remains unalloyed, and where it is debased by oratorical flourishes.

That reliance on dictation can give rise to mockery of an author is confirmed by the following anecdote:

Famously, a visitor to the home of Edgar Wallace observed him dictate a novel in the course of one weekend. It became a standing joke that if someone telephoned Edgar and was told he was writing a novel, they would promptly reply, ‘I'll wait!’

PS. I could not find a suitable photo of one of my great dictators so here is another Edgar ... Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1935 dictating one of his books.

See also:
Miss Emily Dickinson Communes with the Great Dictator Mr John Milton . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/miss-emily-dickinson-communes-with.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   

Le gérondif d’un fruit sec.

That the writer looking for wriggle-room when attempting to compare the incomparable invariably finds a lexicon-defying escape hatch in the gerund was borne in on me on a further reading of George Saintsbury’s Scrap Books (I now have the set of three). 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/fruits-sec-and-napoleon-of-over.html 

As has been cogently observed by grammarians, as soon as we add a definite or indefinite article to what we regard as a gerund – whether singular or plural – we automatically transform its verbal sense into a verbal noun.

So clearly we hear the scream of a gerund when Hannibal Lecter says to Clarice Starling, ‘You still wake up sometimes, don't you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs.’ 

Or our ears are seduced by the art of a master prosodist in Poe’s gerunding of ‘And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming . . .’

The Pernickity.

But do we hear the scream of a gerund-like adjectival noun when George Saintsbury, in comparing the incomparable, writes: ‘Chocolate-boxity is after all better than Cubism.’ (?)

There’s a hidden definite article here, I suggest, cf. ‘... the pernickity and the fashionable ...’ from the Preface to The Four Gospels in Braid Scots - William A Smith (1901)

Thatlessness, Redundancy, Probability and Glitchiness.

A lawyer, a specialist in Shipping and Transport, wrote to me recently, pointing out there are  precedents in Marine Law being cited and discussed in relation to the case of the Costa Concordia tragedy. The bulletin was littered with redundant that’s, which obscured the legalese and what turned out to be an extraordinarily subtle argument.

Here, I have taken the liberty of editing the main argument by reducing six that’s to three.

It was argued by the First Claimant in the ‘Saint Jacques II’ that, as a matter of logic, the more times the First Claimant had navigated contrary to the separation scheme, the less there was any or real prospect of inferring that he had actual knowledge when he set the course on the day in question that a collision would probably result.

So here we see, ‘as a matter of logic’, a probability argument deployed in Maritime Law.  In this case, the more an incorrect thing is done without error the greater the expectation that similar illegal manoeuvres will be free of accident.

In practically the same post came intelligence of the development of randomised software algorithms whereby inexactness, if introduced into an ‘adder’ electronic chip, can yield computationally faster, more effective operations that are cheaper, because they are more energy-efficient.

What does the fate of the Costa Concordia have to do with Probability Theory applied to an electronic chip?

As the electronics guru makes clear, inexactness using probabilistic computation provides an opportunity to take ‘a more relaxed approach to what is correct.’

The results of processors that are ‘glitchy’ and reproduce errors might not be of the same quality as those that are the products of exact computing, free of randomness, but ‘background imperfections’ will not be important if the deviation from accuracy is of a low order.

However, let it be said, these considerations as to the definition of correctitude surely have no place in any examination of navigational contrariness when reliance is placed on probabilistic outcomes.

Fruits secs and the Napoleon of Over-Stippled Prose

A recent fossicking in a rummage sale at a Cambridge country house brought to light a rare volume by that scourge of poetastry, eminent francophile, and most donnish of philographers, George Saintsbury: his recondite Scrap Book of 1922.

His manner is dry. Extra Dry. His phrasing is convoluted with very often qualifying clauses further qualified by supplementary clauses before the subject of the sentence has been introduced, a practice that makes one’s head hurt.*

But never mind these incidental torments, Saintsbury is prescient and eloquent in his appreciation of Swinburne as the exemplar of Matter and Form, perfectly expressed in the poet’s ‘rush and roar’ of ‘volleying anapaests’ and the ‘rocketing soar’ of that masterpiece, a Song in Time of Revolution.

As to Saintsbury’s own views on criticism as a vocation, he writes: ‘Criticism is the result of the reaction of the processes of one mind on the products of another.’  The critic is to be considered, chemically, purely as a ‘reactant’ and he, Saintsbury, complains that ‘in the whole preceding history of criticism’ the mischief of prejudgement has prevailed, with critics ‘looking for certain pieces anticipated, not finding them, and judging accordingly.’

Well. My chemical reaction to Mr. Saintsbury’s tortuous 19th Century prose has been more a muted whimper than an outburst, for, regardless of my first impulse to recoil from over-ornateness, I find myself respecting the subtlety of thought that can introduce secondary shades of qualifications into such a recollection as this: ‘...a more delightful place than it then was I have seldom known.’

From his Scrapbook I can quote a no more representative fragment of Saintsbury’s dense prose than this remark: ‘There is no more mischievous class of human beings than a dissatisfied intelligentsia – no more pitiable or worthless one than a congregation of fruits secs.’

Here, surely, Saintsbury pierces to the root the discontent of a writer like Henry James, his exact contemporary, who famously lamented that both critics and the reading public failed to understand the modernity of his highly wrought prose technique, a matter of regret that never ceased to pain him.

Yet can one wonder at this exasperation with Jamesian mannerisms – the clotted adverbs, the finicky ramblings, the quaint syntax, the quibbling asides, the over-stippled effects – when even one of James’s later critics (Clara MacIntyre in 1912) could identify ‘such a sentence as “with the sense, moreover, of what he saw her see he had the sense of what she saw him” [as] not only hopelessly obscure; it seems grammatically incomplete.’ (The Golden Bowl, Chapter VIII.)

I suppose that I, too, like Clara, can quite easily take against this archetype of the Omniscient Narrator who fixedly intercepts each fleeting glance and counts each breath and flutter of heart and eyelid, if only because we mortals lack the infinite idle hours required to read these orotund ledgers of emotions encyclopedically itemised by a sedentary recording angel.

If this seems glib, please recognise here my veneration for a writer who, on his death bed, even in delirium, could yet compose perfectly measured and cadenced sentences.

Here, for your appreciation, is Henry James’s last dictation, dictated in delirium in 1915, weeks before his death. It's known as the ‘Napoleon** fragment’ or ‘Bonaparte letter’. As to its content, Henry may have thought he was writing to his brother William and his sister-in-law Alice. William had died six years before, but Henry probably thought of him as alive, and – significantly for an Omniscient Narrator – he may have seen him in his confused mind in the guise of Napoleon’s brother.

Dear and Most Esteemed Brother and Sister,

I call your attention to the precious enclosed transcripts of plans and designs for the decoration of certain apartments of the palaces, here, of the Louvre and the Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workmen who are to take them in hand. I commit them to your earnest care till the questions relating to this important work are fully settled. When that is the case I shall require of you further zeal and further taste. For the present the course is definitely marked out, and I beg you to let me know from stage to stage definitely how the scheme promises, and what results it may be held to inspire. It is, you will see, of a great scope, a majesty unsurpassed by any work of the kind yet undertaken in France. Please understand I regard these plans as fully developed and as having had my last consideration and look forward to no patchings nor perversions, and with no question of modifications either economic or aesthetic. This will be the case with all further projects of your affectionate NAPOLEONE

A Nightmare Courtroom Scene by Sir Max Beerbohm

Mr. Henry James subpoena’d, as psychological expert,

in a cause célèbre (1908).

Cross-examining counsel: ‘Come, sir, I ask you a plain question,

and I expect a plain answer!’  

* The puzzle of a number of George Saintsbury’s labyrinthine sentences resides in the unorthodox ‘order of appearance’ of nouns and pronouns, when a noun as a natural ‘antecedent’ is placed in apposition after the pronoun, sometimes challenging a reader’s comprehension with a pronoun’s referent placed towards the end of a sentence, and too distant from its noun-ish stand-in for us to readily grasp.

Edgar Allan Poe is conditioned by metrical constraints to succumb to the same stylistic tic.

I could not love except where Death

Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath.

                                                                                               Edgar Allan Poe 1831

and, Tennyson, of course:

. . . long since a body was found,         

His who had given me life—O father! 

**Consider this: The narrator of The Aspern Papers (a.k.a, Henry James), states, ‘I have been looking at furnished rooms all over the place, and it seems impossible to find any [in Venice] with a garden attached. Naturally in a place like Venice gardens are rare.’ (The narrator finds himself the possessor of such a rare garden.) Then, reader, consider that Napoleon, himself, with Venice as his dominion, caused the Giardinetti Reali (the Royal Gardens) to be created for his own pleasure, since he too recognised the scarcity of such an oasis in the ‘City of Water’.

 

●

 

PS: Those Who Believe they Know the Way the World Wags

Such exhibitions of narcissistic grandiosity as the foregoing Jamesiana – and by a ‘Master’, after all – certainly give us pause for thought; a thought that might prompt the question: Is the Omniscient Narrator just another term for Incipient Megalomaniac?

One is reminded of the words of Nietzsche, in one of his letters from Turin to Strindberg, where the signatory for Nietzsche – as madness overtook him – was The Crucified One.

That Nietzsche considered himself not only the Godhead but a god-given World Conqueror is evinced by his final brief note to Strindberg in the last days of 1888, his Year Zero.

I am powerful enough to break the history of humanity into two parts. I have commanded a royal holiday at Rome. I wish to order a fusillade.

Caesar Nietzsche

●

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://www.amazon.co.uk/Sister-Morphine-Narratives-Community-Psychiatric/dp/1844712990

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

A Droll Macaw with a Lyric Tongue.

Isn’t it astonishing how the lyric voice can often spring from a fount of less than heroic proportions.

I’m thinking of Swinburne here.

For Maupassant, his first impressions were of a poet short and thin ‘with a pointed face, a hydrocephalous forehead, pigeon-chested, agitated by a trembling which affected his glass with St Vitus’ dance, and talking incessantly like a madman.’

Swinburne was abnormally short with narrow sloping shoulders and tiny hands and feet. His eyes were green, and his disproportionately large head was topped by a great aureole of bright red hair. His appearance, plus his habit of fluttering his hands and hopping about as he excitedly talked, provoked a contemporary to compare him to ‘a crimson macaw’ who was ‘quite original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted and convulsingly droll.’

From this droll macaw issued sublime lyrics:
 

Vicisti, Galilaee. 

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;

We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;

But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.

I think we may assume that in describing laurel as ‘green for a season’ Swinburne did not speak ‘horticulturally’, as Wilde would say, but employs a metonym for the short-lived crown of bay leaves awarded to an energetic young poet whose ‘green fuse’ is destined to fizzle out.

However, considered strictly horticulturally, what can one make of this celebrated quatrain?
 

Pale as the duskiest lily’s leaf or head,

Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite,

Too wan for blushing and too warm for white,

But perfect-coloured without white or red.

I think the Linnaean system of classification would be defeated, in this case, by observations more fervid than evidential.

 

A Way of Seeing: Ronald Searle

Having only this evening viewed a truly remarkable (and sobering) documentary on BBC2 TV, The Fall of Singapore: The Great Betrayal, I was reminded of the recent death of that delightful and much admired satirical artist, Ronald Searle.

He was stationed in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese, and he was imprisoned first in Changi Jail and then taken as a slave labourer on the infamous Siam-Burma Death Railway. 

It is not bad taste, I’m convinced, to present this mordant poésie trouvée as a tribute to a great honorary Frenchman, since it is in his own words.

A Way of Seeing.

‘My friends and I,
we all signed up together,’
he recalled. ‘Basically
all the people we loved and knew,
and grew up with, simply
became fertiliser
for the nearest bamboo.’

Ronald Searle*

*Quoted verbatim from the Daily Telegraph obituary column, 3 January 2012.  Ronald Searle, acclaimed as one of the world's greatest satirical artists, died 30 December 2011, aged 91.

Mangled Frankenstein: the Perils of the e-Text.

In four years’ time (2016) I shall be ready to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of Frankenstein, when I intend to explode the myth of his haunting monster’s origins by publishing my own account of its true inspiration, a source unsuspected by my fellow mythologists. 

See:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/maimed-hero-frankenstein-exhumed-tragic.html

 I was reminded of these pending studies when recently encountering any number of misspellings and linguistic errors in a document scanned and converted to digital text by Optical Character Recognition.

The undue reliance placed on OCR and web-based texts is a concern that calls to mind the mangling of Mary Shelley’s classic text six years’ ago in a broadcast production of the drama. 

In that particular dramatization I was appalled to hear an actress seemingly quote Mary’s own exegetical introduction to Frankenstein:

‘Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endured with vital warmth.’

Of course, the true text should read (not ‘endured’) ‘... endued with vital warmth.’

(ENDUED = invested with.)

That this error was perpetuated was due, I fear, to the all-too-common failure today to consult the PRINTED TEXT and to placing reliance on the Web or remotely scanned texts.

MORAL: To remind us of the wisdom of scholarly engagement with a palpable text, here is a reference to the frontispiece of the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, published by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, London. 

‘They All Ought to be Hung’: a Minor Spat.

Talking of Roger Casement being ‘hanged on a comma’, I am reminded of my recent spat with an admired American translator from the French of a notable 20th Century authoress.

I had mildly disputed her translation of the French novelist (‘...both of them had been arrested and hung’) when I asked: ‘Did the authoress intend to convey the men were “hung” like game-birds to soften the flesh; or “hanged” until they were dead, in the customary usage of that participle?’

I had also asked (re. ‘... the heat in the church had made me nauseous ...’): ‘Did the authoress intend the narrator to convey that he, himself, caused nausea in others, i.e. a dose of Christianity had caused him to become offensive by his own odour?’

The eminent translator’s reply? ‘The distinctions you questioned are actually a matter of British or US English. Hanged (British) and hung (US) are synonymous. When a person is nauseous, he feels sick; when nauseated, something else makes him feel sick.’

Apparently, this American scholar studied at the Sam Goldwyn School of English.

As Dorothy Parker (a celebrated American, I believe) states in the Paris Review (Summer 1956):

‘Sam Goldwyn said, “How’m I gonna do decent pictures when all my good writers are in jail?” Then he added, the infallible Goldwyn, “Don't misunderstand me, they all ought to be hung.” Mr. Goldwyn didn’t know about “hanged.” ’

 

Oh well. It seems one person in America knows about “hanged”.

 

To Have and Have Not.

I was SO pleased to have a text of mine published this year in the Winter issue of Ambit, particularly as I feared its subject was contentious: the sickly aesthetic of Lewis Carroll. Anyhow, the piece was published free of any censorious hand ( A Bad Case : The Unexplained Growing Pains of Elise von Alpenberg ), prompting a deal of private correspondence in which I questioned those assumptions that accept there is a classical economy expressed by Carroll’s prose, a feature many would expect of an Oxford logician. 

Mind you, my misgivings are more to do with the sensibilities of an offended preciosity that few would indulge, for my contention is that, though the prose of Alice has, yes, a marvelous colloquial simplicity, it's disappointing to find speech like, 'Oh dear! I'd nearly forgotten that I've got to grow up again!'  

I would have thought that a logician would have retained the perfect-tense auxiliary verb HAVE and dispensed with the past participle of the verb GET. The sort of double verbing Carroll employs with his irritating auxiliary+verb clusters lacks the crystal clarity one would have expected from an Euclidean geometrist and syllogistic rationalist.

 My tender ear would prefer:

 'Oh dear! I'd nearly forgotten that I have to grow up again!'

However, an august grammarian (one the augustest) responds to demolish my theory.

He says: ' "I have got an idea" has a tense perfect-tense auxiliary verb HAVE followed by the past participle of the verb GET, with a slightly idiomatic meaning: normally "I have VERBed" is the perfect tense of "I VERB", and refers to something in the past seen from a present reference point and with present relevance; but "have got X" simply means "possess X". '

How elegantly put!

He goes on: 'English is loaded with auxiliary + verb sequences with slightly idiomatic meanings (i.e., meanings not fully predictable from the usual meanings of the words used) ... Nothing wrong with them, nothing surprising about them, nothing "doubled".'

Mmm. Nothing doubled, eh?  Still not entirely sure about that. 

Catechisms and Cliché : Fatuous Minds Think Alike or Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1)

I’m ashamed to admit I’ve taken agin a number of writers simply because, unknown to me, like Amundsen at the South Pole, they’ve trumped me by reaching the goal of our mutually contemplated journey first.

The harmless object of my ire is the poetess, Elizabeth Bishop, whose poem, First Lessons in Geography, reduced to ashes the bright ambitions I had when decades ago, at great personal cost, I first started to collect Pinnock’s early 19th Century Catechisms. If you are not familiar with Bishop’s ‘found poem’, then I should explain it’s practically a verbatim rendering of a page from Monteith’s Geographical Series, 1884, which as a pirated publication must have been a direct steal from Pinnock’s earlier works.

My purpose in pursuing Pinnock? Well, it was no different from Bishop’s in her pursuit of Monteith ... a love of a clarity of diction and directness in explaining the phenomena of this planet and our existence to a child. The page from my own collection reflects closely the language of Bishop’s Lesson VI and Lesson X, which I commend since my own efforts are now redundant.

Of course, this reduplicative thought calls into question the vaunted originality of acclaimed writers. Take Jane Austen’s most famous axiom. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’

My contention is that, like Pinnock’s prose, Austen’s structure follows the formulaic assertion favoured by late 18th Century expositors. The Universal English Dictionary of 1792 contains any number of constructions precisely like this: ‘... universally acknowledged to have been the author of the Gospel ...’; ‘... universally allowed to be the best Harbour in Great Britain ...’ etc. In my Pinnock's Catechism of Poetry, a volume in his standard series of primers, you may read a truth ‘universally allowed’ that Milton excels all others.  No Janeite scholar, as far as I know, has yet suggested that the aphoristic cadences of Miss Austen's prose owe much to schoolroom textbooks.

So like Miss Bishop, Miss Austen stirs doubts as to the nature of true originality, and prompts the inner questioning that should torment any self-respecting writer who shrinks from short-changing readers with banalities.

And before I leave the subject of Miss Bishop, I cannot escape commenting on perhaps her most famous work, her villanelle, One Art.

Do other readers share my doubts when considering the concluding lines of the final quatrain?

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

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

•

Postscript on Poetic Makeweights (December 6 2015)

For one solution to the One Art puzzle see my later post . . . .
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/no-poetic-makeweights-thank-you-pastry.html
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 3)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/finishing-school-for-versifiers-part-3.html

Two Tautologies : Right and Wrong?

My long-held interest in Henry Harland, chameleon-like editor of the The Yellow Book (feigned Russian-born descent) led me to the British Library website whose profile of Harland begins thus... 

‘An itinerant traveller, role-player, and protégé of some of the key literary taste-makers of his time ...’ 

As an inveterate snatcher-up of unconsidered tautologies, I am reminded of my recent error in directing the attention of an eminent grammarian to the opening chapter of The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler: 

‘It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.’

Was not that first sentence tautological, I asked, with WET RAIN hardly exemplary hard-boiled prose.

Seemingly I had tried the patience of that patient man because promptly came a rap on the knuckles: 

‘Some people (especially those on the west coast of the U.S., where Chandler's novel is set) make a distinction between "wet rain" and "dry rain." (See Joel Achenbach's piece on "Dry Rain Again": http://voices.washingtonpost.com/achenblog/2005/09/dry_rain_again.html). More interesting than the apparent tautology, I think, is the paradox of a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills, which introduces a major theme of “The Big Sleep": the gap between appearances and reality.’

May I confess here I sat, bowed, in sackcloth and ashes for at least the length of my elevenses.

 

No Geraniums! Wrong Wreath for Dickens’s Grave

What an opportunity lost!  I note, with regret, that last month a wreath of insipid white roses and snowdrops was laid on Charles Dickens's grave, at Poets’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, to mark the bicentennial of his birth (February 7th 2012). This act seems somewhat out of sympathy with the spirit and essence of the man, when his coffin at his burial was famously scattered with his favourite flower, the scarlet geranium of sooty old London, an altogether cheerier effect.

Well. There it is. We’ll just have to wait another hundred years, I suppose.

Consobrinal Twinship, Esau and De Wikkelkinderen

Twinship is an ever-absorbing phenomenon for me for I can claim to be one of consobrinal (first-cousin) twins.*  I was brought up as the ‘twin’ of my first cousin (we were conceived in the same month**) who was adopted by my mother when her only sister died giving birth (septicemia due to absence of penicillin). We were born ten days apart. Sibling rivalry was compounded by another curious aspect of our upbringing and that was the ‘precocious puberty’ of my ‘sister’, which I now believe was due to her living in a household with the presence of an unrelated male (i.e. my father); from the earliest age she was exposed to non-familial male pheromones, an exposure which is now regarded as the trigger for premature pubertal development. 

Rivalrous cousinhood in twinship is an important sub-theme in my narratives.
      

As to true twins, the Esau versus Jacob story is possibly the most powerful nativity of archetypes ... BUT ... as distinguished paediatricians have observed (G Corney & W Aherne) the event recorded in Genesis —‘the first came out red’ — could actually be an example of disparity in haemoglobin values, where one twin is born pale and the other twin is born with heightened colour. It was realized towards the end of the nineteenth century that there could be a difference in the haemoglobin values in uniovular twins. As Corney and Aherne affirm, the Esau versus Jacob story ‘may well have been the first description of the birth of a plethoric twin,’ a syndrome in which one twin is born anaemic, the other polycythaemic.

De Wikkelkinderen (The Swaddled Children) of 1617 depicts infant male twins who most likely succumbed to Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTS), otherwise known as ‘placental transfusion syndrome’, a condition that only affects identical twins that share one placenta (monochorionic). This is suggested by their marked difference in colouring — one twin’s face is red, while the other twin’s face is white.

The fine details in the painting suggest that the unknown artist portrayed his subject matter faithfully. The infants in question were the children of Amsterdam Mayor Jacob Dirkszoon de Graeff (1571–1638) and his wife Aeltje Boelens (1579-1620). The painting is dated 7 April 1617, possibly the day the twins died.  Did the twins’ mother die three years later from a broken heart?

 

* Latin : sobrina - female cousin and sobrinus - male cousin. Only recently (September 2013) have I stumbled across the lines by Robert Southey that fully distil the marvel of cousins born at the same hour resembling each other ...

What marvel then if thus their features wore 

Resemblant lineaments of kindred birth?

 

** PS (14.01.23)  The Daily Telegraph this month records the death of an extraordinary non-twin, having been born ‘shortly before her sister Claudia: their birth written up in The Lancet’ as ‘an example of “superfetation”, an extremely rare condition in which babies conceived a month apart are born as twins.” ’

See Twinlife at :

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/resemblant-lineaments-of-kindred-birth.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

Respectable Log-Rolling

At the beginning of January 2012, I wrote to the editor of Private Eye to comment on their traditional New Year log-rolling* feature, which contained in my opinion an unwarranted attack.

Dear Editor

I do take issue with your singling out of D.J. Taylor for pretentiousness in his review of Professor Coustillas's magisterial Life of George Gissing (Part 1) under your terms for inclusion within the 'obscurely highbrow' category of literary reviews for 2011 (PE no. 1304). Professor Coustillas is the chronicler most venerated by Gissingites and a plainer speaking critic of this 19th century master one could not find. Anyhow, the works of Gissing are anything but obscurely highbrow. It's because they are subtle dramas of social realism written in perfected plain English prose that they are so admired.
Etc.

My letter duly appeared in the January 25 2012 Issue 1306, and I felt I had staunchly defended Gissing's greatest champion against gross charges of high brow elitism, unwarranted in respect of both the biographer AND his subject.

I hasten to declare my interest.

I am a devoted disciple of Gissing, and admire his neutral prose style. And like Gissing, I don’t actively shun the passive voice or negative form of statements if they add variation to the texture of one’s prose.  I have no doubt that this attitude flouts today's convention, which holds that the active voice should dominate one’s writing style.

Funnily enough, shortly after shooting off my letter to PE, I found myself re-reading Morley Roberts on the idiosyncracies of his pal, Gissing.  Roberts writes: ‘On more than one occasion, as it was known that I was acquainted with Gissing, men asked me to write about him. I never did so without asking his permission. This happened once in 1895. He answered me: "What objection could I possibly have, unless it were that I should not like to hear you reviled for log-rolling? But it seems to me that you might well write an article which would incur no such charge; and indeed, by so doing, you would render me a very great service.” ’

So there it is. Log-rolling is quite respectable according to GG !

*Log-rolling = The exchanging of favours or praise, as among artists, critics, or academics.

A Surrealist’s Misfortune

Although the Daily Telegraph’s well-observed obituary (February 4, 2012) of Dorothea Tanning, the surrealist, pointed up her sense of ill-luck at having been consigned to exist as an artist only in the shadow of her husband, Max Ernst, her obituarist did not identity another misfortune, which was to be the appointed artist for the label of the 1965 Château Mouton Rothschild, variously described as possibly the worst vintage of the last two centuries, and giving off an odour of rotten garbage and stale mushrooms. It is considered by many connoisseurs to be undrinkable.