In Two Minds: Poe’s Palimpsestic Wordplay.

I was flattered recently when my Russian correspondent, an eminent authority on Edgar Allan Poe, consulted me on a thorny textual question of interpretation:

‘Can you explain the meaning of the word “grosser” in the final phrase of Poe’s The Man of the Crowd? “The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the Hortulus Animæ, and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen.’ ” Does it mean simply bigger or thicker or worse or viler?’

Having consulted the authorities, I wrote: ‘I agree with the Poe commentator’ (Columbia University, New York) who writes on the nature of evil examined in The Man in the Crowd thus: 

‘In its wicked aspect, then, the heart of the world (for it is odd to think that the world has more than one heart - a worst, a better, etc.) is a bigger, fatter book than a devotional primer intended to instruct gentle readers in the cultivation of character (and gardens). God has mercifully arranged it so that the bigger book is illegible.’

In short, I wrote, to my Russian correspondent, ‘In this context, grosser DOES NOT mean eviller or more disgusting but refers to the greater cubic volume of the worst heart of the world if imagined as a book and compared with the Hortulus Animæ. ( The Little Garden of the Soul being a slenderer book concerning the cultivation of morals.)’

But a day later I had second thoughts. Forty years before Poe, in 1802, Walter Scott writes in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border:

 ‘But the Peris [fairies] hover in the balmy clouds, live in the colours of the rainbow, and as the exquisite purity of their nature rejects all nourishment grosser than the odours of flowers, they subsist by inhaling the fragrance of the jessamine and rose.’ 

It seems to me, Scott uses GROSSER to suggest that if the quiddity of a thing is somehow denser than the thing it resembles it is a corrupt version of that thing. So, to the Peris, the scent of wood sap would be grosser, even if it is actually pleasant to us.

So, after all, I thought, perhaps the Russian interpretation was almost correct. The worst heart in the world, regarded as a book, is a corrupt version of a book of Devotional Readings to Cultivate the Soul. But it does not mean that Poe has made a mistake and regarded the Hortulus Animae as a disgusting book. Poe seems to be saying that the worst heart of the world is a profaner version of the sacred Hortulus Animae.

Yet still I was unsatisfied with this reasoning, and felt compelled to examine the question in greater detail:

IMPORTANT NOTE AS TO COMPARISON OF MEANINGS IN EARLY 19TH CENTURY ENGLISH.
GROSSER = MORE INTENSE IN ITS EFFECT (OR CONCENTRATED IN ITS EFFECT).
GROSS WEIGHT = COMPLETE, INCLUSIVE WEIGHT.

The example I gave from Walter Scott demonstrates a writer can compare VERY REFINED DEGREES of grossness, which if greater, induce disgust.

SCOTT 1802 : Nourishment grosser than the odours of flowers.
[ So the lovely smell of moss or ferns is grosser or MORE INTENSE IN ITS EFFECT; therefore disgusting, IN RELATIVE TERMS. ]
POE 1840 : The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the spiritually moral book cited.
[ So the worst heart in the world is a book MORE INTENSE IN ITS EFFECT than this spiritually moral book. ]

A gross perfume could be described as TOO HIGHLY CONCENTRATED and TOO INTENSE. A gross spiritual tract is the gross (inclusive, complete) weight of thought and meditation on the soul. A grosser book is MORE INTENSE IN ITS EFFECT, so disgusting, IN RELATIVE TERMS.

Hence:

The worst heart of the world is a book more intense in its effect than the Hortulus Animae, and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that er lasst sich nicht lesen. [ The book/person does not permit itself/himself to be read. ]

My dissatisfaction with these unresolved niceties led me to approach Columbia University’s Poe specialist for a final ruling; an approach that prompted this subtle commentary: 

‘The English in use in Poe’s day, and Poe’s use, carries all the senses of grosser as denser, bigger, more massive.  “Fat” carries all of that for contemporary American English native speakers (it's an idiomatic expression over here, and I was giving a talk to US English speakers).  I’d be concerned about using “more intense in its effect” as the translation guideline for Poe’s “grosser.” 

‘The book is even bigger than standard guides for the cultivation of virtue.  Poe thinks that this will be necessarily true.  The thought is that a catalog of the abuses of good in human life grows more quickly than the catalog of goods, because each new good produced opens indefinitely many opportunities for its own misuse.  I have no idea how to translate THAT image into a claim about the book of the bad heart having AN effect.  It is the dynamic growth of that book that makes it impossible to complete the catalog of evils, and the dynamic growth of that book that makes it impossible to read.  Flatly—a book that rewrites itself and enlarges itself every time human ingenuity opens a new kind of good in human life cannot be read in part because it cannot ever be a completed book.  It is as though it was an organism rather than a text (which is part of why we get the wrong article in the German phrase). [This remark refers to er, relating to a man, in comparison with es, relating to a thing.]

‘Poe's theological background came from serious engagement with the sermons of Jonathan Edwards and a kind of atmospheric Eastern Seaboard US Calvinism more generally.

‘So I'd go with “denser” rather than “more intense in its effect”—that gets you closer to the sense that a single good can be abused in indefinitely many ways, and that each new leaf in the good book introduces the possibility of MANY new leaves in the bad.’

Well, I am truly grateful to – and humbled by – my correspondents’ erudition, yet feel that overall I have observed what I would call the ‘Palimpsestic effect’ whereby one meaning in a later century over-writes the meaning in an earlier.  Take the word, ‘egregious’, and consider how it has shifted from ‘outstandingly good’ to ‘outstandingly wicked’ and now it’s shifting back again, if I am not mistaken.

Last word. Here is my great-uncle’s illustration to Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. 

A tailpiece, you might say, to The Facts in the Case of Poe’s Palimpsestic Wordplay.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

 

Freakout.

I’m just completing Sybille Bedford’s thoughtful biography of Aldous Huxley (volume two) in which she moralises on the question of Huxley’s advocacy of mescalin and other mind-rinsing psychedelic drugs.

Would it — and should it — have occurred to him that the contents of The Doors of Perception might trickle within the reaches of the half-baked, the under-educated, the unstable and indeed the pre-experienced young.

The last words Aldous Huxley wrote on his writing tablet were some hours before his death:
 

LSD – Try it

intermuscular

  100 mm*

 

*100 micrograms (μg)

He died peacefully with the doctor observing ‘a marked beneficial effect’ from two injections of LSD two hours apart. 

Well, Aldous Huxley without question belonged to the world’s intellectual elite and his own quest for self-transcendence, sometimes induced by psychedelic drugs under medical supervision, may be seen as a deliberately considered extension of the researches that support his vast corpus of writings on the philosophical, cultural, sociological and aesthetic concerns of the age. BUT, Ms Bedford makes clear her own reservations as to his moral soundness when assuming the responsibilities of an influential sage :

The extent to which his writings, and example, can be held to be causative factors in today’s drug scene is difficult, perhaps impossible to tell.

I agree. Yet, though she is certainly correct in pointing out the dangers that await the pre-experienced young when they dabble in psychedelics, I do not to this day regret the fecklessness — nor, indeed, the reckless half-bakedness — of my own youthful experiences of LSD, as I explain in my introduction to Sister Morphine:

The lyric, ‘Tell me, Sister Morphine, how long have I been lying here?’ by Marianne Faithfull, gave me the title of my book and Marianne, whose troubled life as a registered heroin addict is well documented (and whom I knew briefly when we were very young), inspired one of my case histories in which I trace the psychosis of a naïve young woman tempted to experience the hallucinatory visions induced by addictive drugs. In this case the drug is LSD; the place is the Swinging London of the Sixties ... and the temptress is the narrator’s elder twin sister.

‘ “Tonite let’s make love in London,” ’ Victoria quoted, speech slurred, on my return that evening. Those liquid eyes were again distilled to needlepoint droplets of narcosis, I noticed, and her flesh lacked skin tone. 
    Her mouth, I could see, was dry, with white flecks of spittle in the corners.
    Three years before, when I was fifteen, our mother had been shocked when she learned I had accompanied Victoria (at Vix’s insistence) to hear Ginsburg recite at the Royal Albert Hall. (‘Infantile scatology,’ was Mother’s verdict.)
    Now in the darkened drawing room Victoria beckoned to me and extended her palm.
    She held a small cube wrapped in metal foil.
    ‘A sugar lump to gild the pill,’ she said tenderly.
    I recoiled but she seized my arm and pressed the object firmly into my hand.
    ‘Know what this is?’
    ‘Haven’t the faintest,’ I whispered fearfully. But I knew.
    ‘A tab. A dot. For dropping acid, silly,’ she said.
    She unwrapped the cube and placed it on my tongue. I tried to spit it out but she sealed my lips with her fingertips. Involuntarily I swallowed.
    ‘Tune in, dearest heart,’ she soothed, ‘turn on. I will be your guide.’
    A great languor stole over me.
    Victoria took my hand in her hot, dry clasp and we began to dance.
    She led. I followed.
    (When I was no more than five years old she told me I must call her The Miss Victoria. Whether I cared for the fact or not, she asserted, I as the younger daughter was destined indefinitely to be merely a Miss. Even then, please understand, she had conferred on me a subordinate title.)
    Marianne began to sing from the radiogram: ‘I always needed you to look out for me ... oh, baby ...’
    At first, the rubberiness of my gums from the anaesthesia I found frightening.
    Soon, however, I began to sink into an hallucinatory reverie.
    It is true that during those psychedelic hours with Victoria I learned the meaning of Ginsberg’s ‘Blake-lit Mohammedan angels’ – because, for two eternities more ancient than Chaos, I stared at a milliard of those lucent homunculi in the reticular texture of the drawing room wallpaper. Yet ... I also stared into that purgatoried place where every monster has its own multitudes.
    By looking through the fissures of the old house, I seemed to see not only the stars but to penetrate upper chambers I had never fully explored.
    At an unknown hour I found myself floating some distance above Victoria’s bed gazing into upcast and darkly oracular eyes to contemplate a voluptuary pythoness wearing my face whose every sensuous uncoiling convulsion was suspended in an aphrodisiac prolongation I, also, shared.
    Over her seraphic nakedness a swarm of furry bees hovered which slowly resolved itself into a shock of tightly crinkled hair ... the frizzy Afro hair of ...
    Toby!
    Toby lay across her – a supersexual being of extraordinary radiance and beauty hewn from an heroic age.
    Colours intensified. Light diffracted. Objects distorted and shrank.
    Somehow, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the big wardrobe seemed to acquire an enormous significance.
    Time warped.  Joss sticks were lit.
    As from the edge of a great divide I observed a distant simulacrum of my being receive the tributes of the flesh ...  he-she and he-I and I-she, all interconnected by a glowing force field which seemed to strike sparks as lips touched, and melded into a totality of incorporeal sensation.
    The bed had dematerialised, as had those affirmers of mortality, our teeth and gums.
    I learned too late all trips are braved sans gritted jaw.
    The foundations of the house had dissolved into the infinite void and our flesh seemed to be tingling with electric static as we brushed the dark velvet of deep space ... a friction which seemed to transmute that insubstantial velvet into aurorean ripples of charged silk, billowing in waves, stimulating our senses with the glancing touch of a thousand quickening fingers, until we knew ourselves as one flesh, a single skin, slick with sweat, yearning like a fierce rolling tide to break together on a nearing shore.
    Then the wave receded and – beached – we lay together, struggling for breath as though we had just swum the infernal regions’ Hellespont.
    By unspoken agreement we avoided each other’s eyes, and before our temporal lives fully reasserted themselves, I remember, we three were next sitting cross-legged  – Victoria, Toby and I – watching in wonder the slow-motion, frame-by-frame, glittering parabola of a silver snuffbox we pitched from hand to hand.
    Drug-induced synaesthesia I mused, was like a problem in grammar, where the active and the passive voices become confused and there is a difficulty in distinguishing the moment of action from the resultant state and no one knows whether they are the object of the action or the subject performing it.
    A new word for my lexicon I learned that night was ‘freakout’.
    ‘Here, take it.’
    I groaned in protest. Toby stared down at me with eyes like live coals.
    ‘Fifty milligrams of Thorazine,’ Toby persisted, ‘it’ll bring her down.’
    His words cooled me better than cold water.
    ‘Precious, my poor precious,’ Victoria cooed, smoothing my brow.
    I have to tell you that, even adrift in a drug-induced nirvana, the deepest love can turn to deadliest hatred. I confess to you now that the not-so-beatific emotion I brought back from the Other Side was a revived green-eyed envy towards my elder sister, Victoria ... I, the last born, was ever mamma’s darling; she was daddy’s.

 ●

Flashback. The Wind of Time.

Note (November 9 2015): The weather is particularly mild just now and the fragrance last night of an Elaeagnus shrub clinging to a bank above the sea reminded me of an unnameable phenomenon I believe unremarked by trippers returning from their voyage to Inner Space . . . I speak of the Wind of Time. Certainly, LSD at its most revelatory reveals a dimension where a (Cosmic?) Wind, a rushing in the ears, is experienced expressive of Time’s racing passage . . . the flow of the strongly scented breath of the Elaeagnus flowers last night revived a memory and for a moment the experience was relived . . . and again the involuntary numbing of gums and teeth (sans gritted jaw).

 

●

 

  

●

My principal theme in ‘Sister Morphine’ is the sheer unpredictability of women’s behaviour when conditioned by prescription drugs. For this suite of interconnected women’s narratives I have refashioned case histories as fictions to delineate the effects of drug administrations on clients observed in psychiatric nursing and psychotherapy ... particularly,  the more bizarre asocial psychoses – and sometimes criminal behaviour – made manifest by the multifaceted side effects of prescription drugs such as antidepressants, tranquilizers and mood stabilizers.

In ‘Sister Morphine’, fifteen women – Felícia, Charlotte, Zoë, Elenore, Eveline, Miriam, Grete, Esther, Marianne, Irina, Mary, Elspeth, Theresa, Isolde and Roberta – will unveil their psychoses to you ... but not until the last page do they unlock the unsuspected secret that unites their destinies.

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.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, for extracts
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

Adamantine Madame. Enamelled Emma.

My last post raises the question of Nobel prize-winners with feet of clay boosted to stand on the adamantine shoulders of giants. http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/pinterland-hogs-crabs-parnassus-and.html

Adamantine. 

Now that descriptor, I confess, is suggested by a remark made by novelist and Francophile Julian Barnes at the Hay Festival Cartagena de Indias last month, reminding us of his ever-intensifying veneration for Flaubert.

For myself, I continue to read him, and I find that I do read the books differently, still. I go back the most often to Madame Bovary, and I still find, in its adamantine perfection, that there are new things to discover, things I had not noticed before.

A remark which makes me wonder whether Julian Barnes is aware of the subtle workings of his subconscious, which have led him to well-nigh an élégance palindromique in his choice of adjective.

Indeed, an adamantine Madame.

The fact that this palindromic effect is subliminally perceived at the threshold of our awareness might be taken as further evidence, should we need it, of the magic Flaubert continues to exert on us each time we return to him.

I was reminded of an interview conducted by novelist Megan Taylor in 2009, where my own veneration for Madame Bovary is given full rein http://www.megantaylor.info/2009/02/an-interview-with-catherine-eisner/:

Also I am re-reading ‘Madame Bovary’ in the first (and brilliant) English Edition translated by Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor ( I have an original copy; it cost me £250 even twenty-five years ago!). How’s this for an image from Flaubert: ‘The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace …’ However, I suspect Flaubert may have been chiding the indolent Emma for neglecting to have her chimney swept!

Perhaps I should have mentioned, too, those sticky unwashed cider glasses...

Some flies on the table were crawling up the glasses that had been used, and buzzing as they drowned themselves in the dregs of the cider. The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace, and touched with blue the cold cinders. Between the window and the hearth Emma was sewing; she wore no fichu; he could see small drops of perspiration on her bare shoulders.

Of course, Julian Barnes has famously remarked that the colour of Emma’s eyes is puzzlingly changeable throughout the novel.

Seen thus closely, her eyes looked to him enlarged, especially when, on rousing, she opened and shut them rapidly many times; black in shade on waking, dark blue in broad daylight, they were like layers of different colours, and darker in the background, grew paler towards the surface of the enamel.

... la surface de l’émail.

Yes, I can see the character of Emma there in her eyes. Her superficiality. Enamelled Emma.

That the DNA of Madame Bovary remains still to be unthreaded is the measure of the adamantine integrity of this complex masterpiece. That is why we should be very cautious indeed as to whom, in any age, we should single out to wear the laurel crown for honour as supreme Man (or Woman) of Letters... Flaubert set the bar so high, at such a rarefied altitude, that none but authentic titans can command a pedestal worthy of comparison.   

Pinterland. Hogs. Crabs. Parnassus. And a paucity of creative energy.

Let me be quite clear. I consider Harold Pinter a misogynistic writer who has never written a gender-affirming dramatic part for a woman (unless the part has been conceived by another more sensitive writer in the course of one of his adaptations for the screen, e.g. works by Penelope Mortimer, Robin Maugham, L.P. Hartley, et al). In my own view, Pinter positively relishes victimhood, particularly when women are on the receiving end. I also consider much of his Mockney vernacular to be positively clunky and frequently unconvincing, with speeches more often than not shaped for an actor’s voice (his) rather than driven by the authentic character of the East End.

As the Swedish Academy, in its Nobel citation, commented, Pinter, the chronicler of random acts of verbal and physical violence, is a writer who ‘uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.’  This is the familiar Pinterland we recognize, with invariably a forced entry that is more thuggish-for-thuggishness’s-sake than redemptory or cathartic art. In short, the verbal menace of the rapper has been validated.

Is such nihilistic rapping nourishing to mind and spirit? I remain unconvinced. As well ask Tarantino.

But it is not this particular aspect of his writings that has triggered this rather sour digression of mine. My point in raising a question mark over Pinter’s stagecraft is to identify a seeming dullness and dreary sameness in the very building blocks of the constructions he has fashioned as an actor/playwright.

I have no doubt that somewhere in that vast archive of his, maintained by his literary estate, he is to be found on record defending a Pinteresque theory that grounded speech and action require no more for their emergence than the promptings of a minimalist stage set of one glass of water or the contents of a bureau drawer. Well and good, as writerly theories go, until you note the striking similarity between the opening scenes of A Night Out (1959) and The Homecoming (1964).

Why should this be worthy of our notice, you might ask. Isn’t this quibbling of no account? I don’t think so.  I think the dramaturgical repetitiousness I intend to expose here actually indicates a paucity of creative energy (see my observations on Elizabeth Bishop, in this regard http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/catechisms-and-cliche-fatuous-minds.html), and this deficit may also be observed in Pinter’s characterization of women.

I am talking here about LAY FIGURES and the delimited OUTER THRESHOLDS of an artist’s imagination. You must judge for yourself whether there are, rather obviously, lay figures in the following plays, written five years apart, and whether these figures are merely manipulated to forms that come, in the end, to resemble first year students’ extemporary acting exercises, of the kind favoured by their teachers, which depend on the suggestibility of minimal props composed of humdrum domestic objects.

‘Have you seen my tie? Where’s my tie?’ A Night Out 1959. (5 seconds into opening act, a search for necktie.)

‘What have you done with the scissors? Where’s the scissors?’ The Homecoming 1964 (5 seconds into opening act, a search through drawers.)

I believe the playwright has nodded at these moments, like a liar who lacks the invention to perpetrate a new lie so falls back on an old one, daring to risk exposure*. 

(We should also observe that in these two instances the Rule of Chekhov’s Gun, the rule of dramatic foreshadowing, is broken. ‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.’)

An intimate correspondent of mine shares my doubts as to Pinter’s stagecraft. Pinter’s claim to stylistic uniqueness, my correspondent maintains, is debatable.  The circularity of his riffs of looping, regrouping repetitious speech (in German theatre, such declamations are called arias) find its origin, my correspondent believes, in an earlier exponent, the popular dramatist and novelist, Patrick Hamilton.

Compare Pinter’s The Homecoming (1964) with Hamilton’s Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953). If you don’t concede there’s a certain je-ne-sais-quoi about their mannerisms that summons up a prickly sense of déjà vu, then at least admit that Pinter has strayed out of his East End manor on to Hamilton’s turf.

‘You and I were made for each other ...’  he had said, either breathlessly or passionately (she could not tell which) after a protracted kiss ...
            ‘In what way?’ she had then tried. ‘Tell me ...’
            ‘In every way,’ he had said. ‘You must know. I mean the whole hog.’
            [She] had been (and still was) mystified by the exact nature of [his] Whole Hog, which, for some weeks now, had been appearing in his conversation.
            How whole was this puzzlingly allegorical animal? ...
            And so she had then braced herself to force [him] to give a much clearer picture of his own conception of his own Hog.
            ‘When you say “whole” hog,’ she had said, ‘what do you mean, exactly?’

Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse

LENNY (to TEDDY): ... And here he is upstairs with your wife for two hours and hasn’t gone the whole hog. ... What do you make of it, Joey? You satisfied? Don’t tell me you’re satisfied without going the whole hog?
JOEY: I’ve been the whole hog plenty of times. Sometimes ... you can be happy ... and not go the whole hog. Now and again ... you can be happy ... without going any hog.
TEDDY: He had her up there for two hours and he didn’t go the whole hog.

The Homecoming

I summon to the witness stand two acute observers on the deceptions of art to anatomize further, with greater skill than my own, the inauthenticity of the creative impulse. 

Here they strip the bones off two carcasses.

First up, Robert Graves, the visionary poet, attempts to demystify the quiddative conundrum of good art and bad art when defining the distinction between good poetry and fake poetry. 

‘When is a fake not a fake?’ Graves asks.
 

Answer: ‘When the lapse of time has obscured the original sources ... and when the faker is so competent ... that even the incorruptible porter at Parnassus winks and says “Pass, friend!” This sort of hermit-crab, secure in stolen armour, becomes a very terror among simple whelks.’

Next up, Aldous Huxley: ‘There are slightly reckless good poets, and there are good poets who, at times, are extremely reckless...’ He then cites the conclusion of Yeats’s Byzantium to illustrate the ‘recklessness’ of his proposition: ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’

From which we can conclude that intoxication induced by language can leave us with a headache and, in the cold light of dawn, we must be alert to the duplicity of hermit crabs in stolen armour whose secondhand speeches will ultimately be found fitting only for declamation from the lower slopes of Parnassus.

* Pinter-watchers should also note the occurrence of that actor’s prop, the glass of water, reappearing in The Homecoming (1964), having rematerialised from the set of The Servant (1963) whose screenplay is by Harold Pinter, adapted from 1948 novella by Robin Maugham. The glass ot water has an even earlier appearance in The Dumb Waiter (1957).

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.

●

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

●

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