I have a Rendezvous with Dread at Destination Echoville

Last night, I awoke to the thought that there is definite pattern to a number of Arabian Nights fables, a template that has been hijacked by certain 20th century hardboiled writers of fiction, and also by a fabulist whose febrile cranium must have been eggshell thin.

The classic fable derived from Scheherazade’s telling goes like this ...

Narrative: A dream or a vision compels the Dreamer or Visionary to flee to a distant city where a revelatory encounter teaches him to see himself for what he truly is, the Blessed or the Damned.  

Interpretation? Like Scheherazade’s dreamer-protagonist, you attempt to flee your ego yet there is no escape, for you have fled in your reverie to the false refuge of an Altered State – let’s call the place Echoville – where your neuroses are mirrored by a Shadow-Self whose actions challenge you to return to true Selfhood, whereupon you learn whether you’re to be punished or spared. 

The Ruined Man who Became Rich Again through a Dream.

In the Arabian Nights, this fable of Fall and Redemption is one of the simplest and, hence, the more striking, for it is straightforwardly linear (insofar as the narrative line passes through a looking-glass).

A wealthy man of Baghdad who had lost all his money, in despair, lay down to sleep and in his dream heard a voice say, ‘Verily thy fortune is in Cairo. Go thither and seek it.’ So he set out for Cairo and in that city he was mistaken for a thief, seized by the police and beaten near to death. After three days in a cell the Chief of Police sent for him, asking ‘Whence art thou?’ ‘From Baghdad,’ the prisoner replied, ‘I saw in a dream One who said to me, “Thy fortune’s in Cairo. Go thither to it.” ’ The Police Chief laughed and said, ‘Thrice have I seen in a dream One who said to me: “There is in Baghdad a house with a jetting fountain and under it a great sum of money lieth buried. Go thither and take it.” Yet I went not for I had no faith in an idle dream, which is only the foolery of sleep.’ The poor man was given money to return home by the Police Chief, whose dream of a house with jetting fountain perfectly resembled the man’s own house in Baghdad, so when the wayfarer returned to his city he at once dug underneath the fountain in his garden, and discovered a great treasure. Thus abundant fortune is given to the Blessed when the dreamer becomes the dreamt in another’s thrice seen dream.

As I admitted once in an interview with novelist Megan Taylor, ‘At present I am re-reading The Arabian Nights; the story The Ruined Man who Became Rich Again through a Dream has a theme I stole for the final chapter of Sister Morphine, but it is unlikely I’ll ever find a better theme! 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html 
Of course, Scheherazade is really the Muse of all women writers, as a Storyteller-Under-Duress. MsLexia (rather a needy and whiny title for the journal, in my own view) has published works of mine, but Scheherazade* would have been a more apposite and affirming title, don’t you think? There are elements of Scheherazade’s dilemma in Sister Morphine … the narrator, a grief-counsellor, tells her stories to ward off her own grief.’

And, no, I have never found a better plotline in The Arabian Nights than the one I chose for my Sister Morphine all that time ago.  

Las ruinas circulares of Borges

The fabulist, Jorge Luis Borges, of course has taken similar tales from The Arabian Nights to refashion his own parables, notably The Circular Ruins in which ...

Narrative: A Necromancer induces himself to dream over many years the creation of another human being, a Youth conceived as a shadow of himself, and brings him into the world to live in a parallel temple not unlike the ruined pagan temple in which he ritually sleeps. He fears the Youth, his creation, will dematerialise should knowledge dawn that the being is but a projection of the Necromancer’s own mind. But at the moment of his own extinction, the Necromancer learns that he, too, is an imagined creature, made from another’s dreams.

Interpretation? Here Echoville is a mirrored semi-ruinous circular temple in which the objectivisation of the self may be seen, yet with self-knowledge comes the dissolution of the persona, bringing with it derealisation and the self-destruction that follows when disillusion denies the suspension of disbelief that is consentient existence.

The Dreamer Dreamt by Another is a motif that appears often in the works of Borges, and one must assume that part of his meaning is this: the vividness of everyday existence can be so bright as to extinguish the complementary shadow self that could make our personalities integrated and whole, just as the ‘sun destroys the interest of what’s happening in the shade.’

As to looking-glass linearity, the epigraph for The Circular Ruins is taken from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: 

‘And if he left off dreaming about you ...’ 

It comes from the passage in which Alice is told by a Looking-Glass character that her existence is jeopardised since she is simply a character in another character’s dream ... a character who, in the context of the story, she herself is dreaming as she sleeps in ‘Oh! Such a nice dream!’

An Englishwoman should not forget that many of Borges’s stories were directly inspired by English authors: Conan Doyle’s studies in scarlet (problems solved by inductive detection sharpened by the intermediations of cocaine) and G. K. Chesterton’s brown studies (problems solved by intuitive detection aided by the intercessions of the divine).

Note: It has only just occurred to me that A Study in Scarlet, written in 1886, was really rather an avant-garde title for Conan Doyle, when one considers that James McNeill Whistler in the same year was elected president of the Society of British Artists. So really the atmosphere of Conan Doyle’s London was not quite as pea-soupy as Borges might have supposed.

Appointment in Samarra.

So, the three-pipe problem of the thrice dreamt dream as a parable of Ego and Alter Ego – when Conscious fears or desires are transmuted by Subconscious fears or desires in the Echoville of Looking-Glass-land – still concerns the dreamer when considering other specimens from this literary genre, even those from the pens of the most hard-bitten pulp fictionists.

John O’Hara’s first novel, for instance, Appointment in Samarra, begins with this epigraph:

A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Shortly, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, and she made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant’s horse, the servant flees as fast as the horse can gallop to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture. She replies, ‘That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’

Now. Should you pursue the origin of this fable you will run into a pea-souper of daunting obfuscation. Suffice to say, some scholars believe, erroneously, that the origin of novelist Somerset Maugham’s celebrated parable (quoted in his theatrical drama, Sheppey, 1933) is When Death Came to Baghdad, a ninth century Arabian Sufi story in the sage Fozayl ibn Ziyad’s so-called Hikayat-I-Naqshiyya (Stories-with-a-Design).

Let me record here: no such collection of stories is known to exist, nor does the adjective naqshiyya (from naqsh, ‘picture, drawing’) seem a likely contemporaneous construction. Nor is it possible that the sage recorded the fable since we have no surviving writings from this very early Sufi, who probably died about 803. Another problem is that this title is clearly in New Persian (i.e., in the Arabic script), which was not yet in literary use at the time of Fozayl ibn Ziyad, otherwise known as Fudail ibn Ayad or Al-Fudhayl bin Iyyadh.

This is a perfect fable, elegantly symmetrical, with a dramatic punch unequalled by most western fictionists. Yet its origin is cloaked in mystery, a condition of recognition that would have profoundly satisfied Borges.

As it is, the fable has been cited often as a parable of the powerlessness of mortals to escape their brute fate and, as to similar metaphysical resonances derived from eastern mysticism discernible in 20th Century popular American fiction, Appointment in Samarra is spoken of in the same breath as The Postman Always Rings Twice. 

The Postman Always Rings Twice.   

This theme of the inescapability of fate finds contemporary expression in The Postman Always Rings Twice, the classic crime novel of 1934 by James M. Cain, author of Double Indemnity. In a Borgesian paradox that outrivals the master, nowhere in the novel does a postman appear, nor is one even alluded to. 

Cain, it is to be believed, had an explanation for the title saying it arose from a discussion with screenwriter Vincent Lawrence. According to Cain, Lawrence spoke of the anxiety he endured when waiting for the postman to bring news on a submitted manuscript — specifically noting that he would know when the postman had finally arrived because he always rang twice. Cain then seized upon the phrase as a title for his novel. 

In their understanding of the phrase’s significance, the ‘postman’ represents Fate, and the ‘delivery’ represents the protagonist’s own death as just retribution for murdering his lover’s husband. 

This echoes the Samarran second appointment with death, since in both cases the protagonist misses the first ‘ring’ by escaping retribution. However, Messenger Death ‘rings again’, and this time the ring is heard and Death’s Chosen are fated to die and be judged in purgatorial Echoville.

In the words of Alan Seeger (C1916) ...

I have a rendezvous with Death ...
At midnight in some flaming town ...
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

*Footnote 31.08.13 : Oh dear. Once again originality fails me, because reading a biographical sketch of Jean Cocteau I learn that Cocteau founded the magazine, Schéhérazade, with Maurice Rostand and François Bernard in 1909.

See also Strand Magazine for my further thoughts on James M. Cain’s novel and how he is held in veneration in France:

https://strandmag.com/why-did-the-postman-ring-twice-and-why-its-best-to-miss-appointments-in-samarra/

•

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

 

 

Lure of the List: Doomed Excavations of the Ur-Text and Other Futilities (Palimpsestic Texts Part 1)

I studied the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins for GCE A Level Eng Lit, and I still refer to his On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue (1865) as a theory of aesthetics worthy of application to most decorative arts, even to the descriptive passages in my fictions. 

Mind you, you would have to look very hard indeed between the lines to detect their masked presence.

However, it’s my own Theory of Palimpsestic Texts I wish to put to the test on this occasion. 

My theory proposes that, despite the most rigorous scholarship, the critic can never be sure that an ur-text is not waiting to be excavated that prefigures the literary effusion under review, whose uniqueness had seemed at first reading so promisingly sui generis.

Yes. So often when the Enchanted Reader peels away the palimpsests, the Disenchanted Reader finds older writings still legible beneath. 

Take, for instance, the love English poets have for shopping lists...

The Lure of the List.

Consider the poem, In the Valley of the Elwy, by Manley Hopkins (whom Kingsley Amis bibulously considered a neurasthenic whose spirituality was crippled by an ‘obsessive affectation of singularity’, and who should have drowned in the wreck of the Deutschland) ...

Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
All the air things wear that build this world of Wales. 

Is it unfair to recall here the cadences of Tennyson, from Ulysses (1842) some thirty years earlier...

Much have I seen and known; cities of men 

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

But do these cadences derive from a work even earlier in the century of their youth?

Look at Wordsworth’s Composed upon Westminster Bridge of 1802 to see the lure of the list assert itself ...

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

(... although, as has been pointed out, you could also see Croydon from that point of vantage).

... Nor, I belatedly add, should we ignore the potency of this effect when observed in Milton’s Paradise Lost ...

Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues, Powers . . .
. . . Princes, Potentates, Warriors, 

 

or

 

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death . . .

 

or. yet again, 
Alice Through the Looking-Glass

 

To talk of many things: 

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —. 

Of cabbages — and kings —.

compare with Richard II

 

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; . . .

 

Liverpudlian Precursor.

There must be a passion akin to a cataloguer’s or indexer’s or, in the case of John Lennon, aged thirteen, a nascent lyricist’s, to see a tabulated itemisation metamorphose into art; see Lennon’s Met Office Weather Report in Eskimonisian from the witty schoolboy magazine he edited, The Daily Howl (C1953) ...

Weather Report. Tomorrow will be muggy, followed by tuggy and weggy. The rest follows. ‘Ǫoglé hînķle wýrtle fóò.’ You may have noticed that it is written in Eskimonisian, especially for our Eskimonisian readers.  

Yet, that power of rhythmic memorization, which drove the precocious John Lennon to his garbled rendering of ‘Dogger, Humber, Wight, Rockall, Faeroes’ is also found in a frequently cited work by a fellow Liverpudlian (by culture not birth), the poet Carol Ann Duffy.

Her Prayer, 40 years later than Lennon’s, concludes with the moral relativist’s lines: 

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer — 

Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy                                     John Lennon

 

The Sisyphean Task of the Ur-Textualist.

So, in this special case of the Shipping Report, where does the ur-textualist begin an excavation? 

Maybe this comparison only goes to prove that the lyric voice of an idiot savant (a possessed tongue, in general, I mean, though the voices of John Lennon, Dylan Thomas and Arthur Rimbaud spring to mind) is likely to defeat the ur-textualist in search of the buried remains of a causality that could predate what is claimed to be a first occurrence.

Take a look at another poet, Philip Larkin, to test the Palimpsestic Effect. 

See, for instance, the end of the penultimate stanza of his magnificent Whitsun Weddings (1958) ...

I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

Then refer to the opening lines of W. H. Auden’s As I walked out one evening (1937) ...

As I walked out one evening,

Walking down Bristol Street,

The crowds upon the pavement

Were fields of harvest wheat.

And compare Larkin’s ultimate line – Sent out of sight – with Sassoon’s on; on; and out of sight (Everyone Sang).

Who, then, are the precursors?

Are they, I wonder, my old friends Mr and Mrs Anon? See
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/commoners-rights-to-heroic-quatrain.html 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/mr-and-mrs-anon.html

Here are some of the most beautiful words in the English language (Thomas Nashe’s In Time of Pestilence, 1593) ...

Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die:
Lord, have mercy on us. 

And yet.

And yet, the oldest hand-book of English Proverbs, one that harks back to paraemiographia and Adagia collected before Thomas Nashe lived, records an English saw from the lips of the ‘inglorious’ ignoramuses (as Kingsley Amis would have it), citing this old saying ...

Fair fall truth and daylight.

The ‘Here is Where’ Formula.

However, I will sign off this posting with the reluctant acknowledgement that Kingsley Amis in his own poems could nail with savagery the egregiously unoriginal in poetry, satirizing the earnestness of those poets unblessed by a lyric tongue. 

Here, in Here Is Where (from A Case of Samples, 1956),  he damns the insipidness of certain versifiers (just open the pages of the New Yorker from any issue in the last four decades and you’ll find any number of such formulaic constructions).

                                 Here, where the ragged water
                                 Is twilled and spun over
                                 Pebbles backed like beetles,
                                 Bright as beer-bottles,
                                 Bits of it like snow beaten,
                                 Or milk boiling in saucepan ...

                                 Going well so far, eh?

Ah. 

When things start writing themselves you should know that it’s truly time to stop.

Afterthought.

In the end, though (vis-à-vis originality), I think certain writers in English of an acquired sensibility must recognise, as Amis points out, that they are very often merely hangers on in a proscriptive system of artistry that constrains them to travel clustered in the same orbit, hung in perfect equipoise between the gravitational pull of mundanities and the limitless attractions of the cosmos, because they have all attained exactly the same critical mass.

 

Liverpudlian post-post-scriptum.

(30-09-13) I have just viewed for the first time the opening of Liverpudlian Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), a movie about working class life in 1940s Liverpool, which begins with a radio Shipping Forecast voiceover ... a rather too familiar device for conveying emotional weather that seems to bear out my foregoing remarks

Found! The Last Faithful Husband in France.

A recent fiction of mine (Darkly, More is Seen, Spring Issue of Ambit 212) considers infidelity in lovers as an unstoppable force of nature, the opinion held by my passive-aggressive narrator who fails to revise her cynical view of French mores due to a tendency to glare at Gallic seduction rites through Anglo-Saxon-tinted spectacles.

As she confesses:

I could not dismiss our parting in the light, practical manner with which the French seem to deal with natural catastrophes of the heart. In France, I’m aware, no woman is expected to remain physically faithful for three years, let alone a decade.

Darkly, More is Seen.

 I am reminded of a truisme français, formulated over three centuries ago:  

The struggle we undergo to remain faithful to one we love is little better than infidelity.

François de la Rochefoucauld

But it was neither of these two attitudes that prompted this brief posting.

No. What set me off on these musings was a recent screening of that truly gripping thriller, L’Homme Qui Voulait Savoir (The Vanishing, 1988, Dir. George Sluizer), starring the beguiling Johanna ter Steege. 

Here are fervent protestations of fidelity from its sinister French antagonist, Raymond Lemorne (played by a Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), addressing his wife:

‘I am the last Frenchman who can be proud of having known only one woman in his life.’

 An admirable sentiment.

Except it’s a sentiment professed by a homicidal French sociopath.

●

Postscript 06.06.16

In response to this post, a correspondent has complained, ‘It’s all very well to condemn the customary dalliances of the French, but what is your true opinion of the English attitude to the institution of marriage?’

In answer, I drew her attention to the English film, The Thirty Nine Steps (1935), wherein the hero, masquerading as an adulterous lover leaving his mistress’s flat at dawn, enlists the aid of a milkman to evade pursuing enquiry agents.

                English Adulterer: You married?

                Cockney Milkman: Yes. But don’t rub it in. 

Footnote 28.07.20

I note the death of Parisienne Olivia de Havilland who wrote Every Frenchman Has One. I'm determined to read it.

Joan Smith and the Faint Aroma of Performing Seals

I’ve just heard that Joan Smith is augmenting her brilliant early broadside, Misogynies (Faber 1996) with her new The Public Woman (Westbourne Press), a compelling examination of male hostility towards women.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Public-Woman-Joan-Smith/dp/1908906049 

The news of her latest work reminds me of my citing of her earlier title in a little essay of mine in 2004 (Ambit Spring Issue 176), Faint Aroma of Performing Seals.
 

There was a piquant flavour to my piece, and this is how I began ...

‘When love congeals it soon reveals the faint aroma of performing seals,’ wrote Lorenz Hart, which raises the fascinating question as to whether there exists a distinct fishiness, released by pheromonally-induced alterations, permeating the ups and downs of the love-life of the female hominid.

A question of questionable taste, you may say, but reassuringly I am in the distinguished company of Joan Smith in raising it.

If you haven’t read her landmark collection Misogynies then really it’s time you did – and in particular – her marvellous essay, Patum Peperium (‘Gentleman’s Relish’), especially in the context of the continuing debate surrounding the ordination of women priests.

What, then, is the connection between ‘performing seals’, an ‘anchovy paste’ and ‘pheromones’?

First, Joan Smith on the subject:  ‘An Anglican curate, interviewed in the Independent, “said that you might as well ordain a pot of anchovy paste as a woman.” ’
 
Smith then goes on to develop her powerfully persuasive theory of a misogynistic conspiracy, fomented by a male hominidal cabal, revealed by the curate’s aforesaid put-down remark.

‘The sexual imagery is irresistible: the paste is made of fish, a smell strongly and pejoratively associated with the female genitals; it is famously spicy and strong, for use only in small quantities ... our clever curate has boiled down thousands of years of hostility to women into one telling phrase.'

From Tertullian to St Augustine to St Jerome the misogynic theologians are castigated by Smith in her essay but, in the process, her rather fascinating topic of the fishy aphrodisiac qualities of ‘Gentleman’s Relish’ is abandoned.

With my reader’s indulgence, I wrote, it was a topic I was quite eager to return to.

Neglected in her essay, I regretted, was a passage from Huysmans’ Against Nature (À Rebours) which chimes very well with her original theme. From Chapter Nine we learn that the ‘carnal nature’ of the dissolute, epicene dilettante Des Esseintes has ‘lain dormant for months’ and his thoughts return to ‘a box full of purple bonbons’. (Shades of Lolita and ‘Papa's Purple Pills’* or ‘purpills’ of Humbert Humbert.)

‘These bonbons ... known by the ridiculous name of Pearls of the Pyrenees, consisted of a drop of schoenanthus scent or female essence crystallized in pieces of sugar; they stimulated the papillæ of the mouth, evoking memories of water opalescent with rare vinegars and lingering kisses fragrant with perfume.’

Here we can catch the wave of that arch-sensualist’s Proustian stream of consciousness.
 
Pearls evoke oysters, of course, and ever since Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, arose from the foam on an oyster shell, fresh oysters have been regarded as an aphrodisiac.      

Oysters are famous for their aphrodisiac qualities due to their high mineral salt and glycogen content, an essential element in muscle contraction (ingredients of little consequence for Des Esseintes, however, whose ‘impotency had been established beyond doubt’). 

And what of Des Esseintes’ ‘schoenanthus’ scent? That hint of lemongrass (schoenanthus) would have compounded his blend of stimulants. After all, for the most intimate tête-à-tête oysters are best served on a bed of crushed ice on a silver platter with two lemons cut in quarters.

So far, our literary aphrodisiac recipe to pep up the sex life of jaded homidæ is looking promising ...

And so on, for two-and-half pages of pretty conclusive aphrodisiacal formulæ ... ‘Cosmeticians please note.’

Yes, I was quite pleased with my little essay, and I am today very grateful in acknowledging Joan Smith as its inciter. Thank you. And may I wish every success for The Public Woman, a necessary continuing polemic, and a sequel long overdue.

Postscriptum.

I just had the thought today that maybe the feminist slogan, ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’, has, after all, an unintended anchovy-like aphrodisiacal sublimation embedded in it.

*Another thought (16-07-13): has the Annotated Lolita (I don’t have a copy) observed that Papa’s sinister purple pill refers to a papaveraceous sedative ... in other words, an opiate?

●

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

 

Mr Twiddle: Agent Provocateur.

I see I drew a moral in my last post.

Here’s another moral drawn; again by Mrs Stock-Engländer, the wife of that arch-Englishman, my father.

My mother, when reading us bedtime stories, was alert to question Enid Blyton’s world view: ‘Into my books I pack ethical and moral teaching,’ Miss Blyton claimed.  A claim dismissed by Mother’s strictest censures.

Even now I recall my mother’s observations, over fifty years ago, when reading a tale of Mr Twiddle (a petit-bourgeois Pickwickian creation of Blyton’s). The moral of one particular bedtime read was: ‘Trust makes way for treachery,’ for kindly Mr Twiddle tested his housemaid’s honesty by calculating to ‘mislay’ coins on the stairs.  The housemaid was tempted and dismissed for theft. I clearly remember my mother’s condemnation of this entrapment as the act of an agent provocateur. 

That was the moral my mother drew, and the moral I pondered on, aged seven.

Postscript . . . Tests of Honesty in a Building Society.

Curiously, I have just stumbled across the following account of a young trainee secretary in a well-known British building society (Life’s Too Short: True Stories About Life at Work, 2010), who reluctantly attended college to . . . 

. . . learn shorthand and touch-typing. This prepared me for my first job  in the Halifax Building Society. Life in a branch of a building society was a gentle introduction to the working world . . . There was one colleague who left one and two pence pieces around the staff room to test our honesty.

We are all vermin now.

So the British prime minister pronounces, ‘We are all Thatcherites now.’

Here, surely, is a species of Doublespeak parroted by the chatterati that is as brassnecked as any utterance by those who presume to misappropriate this familiar one-size-fits-all, catch-all-catchphrase for their own ends.

Consider the case of British novelist Zadie Smith, who writes of 21st century alienation in England as akin to Kafka’s existential crisis of the Jew: ‘What is Englishness? … We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer, now.’ *

So we are all verminous bugs now, are we?’

I truly regret coupling the names of Margaret Thatcher and Franz Kafka in the same breath (mind you, their surnames are powerfully trochaic), yet I must protest the heavy-handed usage of a remark that originated with a British Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1888, if I am not mistaken … ‘We are all Socialists now.’

How ironic, then, that three masters of German letters should be a ghostly triumvirate summoned up – by association – at the promptings of an angst-ridden professional soul-barer to challenge the naïve platitudes of her earnest schoolgirl thesis.

Did not Goethe towards the end of his life say that a person should be, ‘ein gemäßigter Liberaler, wie es alle vernünftigen Leute.’ (Quoted as: ‘Any sensible person is a moderate liberal’) 

And did not Thomas Mann echo his words and say, with good reason, ‘Jeder vernünftige Mensch ist ein gemäßigter Sozialist.’ (‘Any sensible person is a moderate socialist.’)  

Kafka knew the works of Goethe inside out and venerated his writings so I believe it is distinctly flawed thinking for Zadie Smith to invoke Kafka’s name to support her disloyal and extremist notion of chronic sociopathy in Great Britain, the cradle of Liberalism (Locke, Mill, Cobden, Wollstonecraft, Stopes, et al).

As we know, Margaret Thatcher famously said, ‘There is no such thing as society.’ And now it appears the darling of thinking women’s reading groups agrees with her.

I asked my mother, when she was nearing the end of her life and infirm, how she placed herself as a participant in English society. She looked up from her knitting and said, ‘You know very well the pattern I follow, dear. The tenth balaclava this is I am knitting for the lifeboatmen. [She was a supporter of the RNLI.] Am I not part of your national life? [Then, with a dig at me for my not-so-frequent visits.] I am of society. Yes. Even if your mother is never seen by it.’

As Mother was only too aware, my paternal aunt had lambasted my father in a fierce letter (from Berlin, November 17, 1929) accusing him of becoming a stereotypical arch-Englishman (Stock-Engländer) ... of having ‘gone native’, so to speak ... so the question of national identity had clearly exercised the sister of my father, who in his own characteristically quiet yet dogged way had resolved his own existential crisis, at least then... it was a different problem after WW2.

Authentic voices.

However, this absurd breast-beating of Zadie Smith – moreover, a public agonizing in peacetime England – raises other questions, which I have persisted in pursuing with a most distinguished literary editor of one of London’s quality daily newspapers.

I had referred ‘... to certain solipsistic postwar poets who, in my own view, exhibit a maudlin notionality of identification with Holocaust victims that devalues the scale of human suffering.’ 

These remarks were prompted by Zadie Smith’s reference to Sylvia Plath, in her Kafka essay, in which she writes, ‘For there is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish Question (“What have I in common with Jews?”) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. Sylvia Plath hinted at this: “I think I may well be a Jew.” ’  

Well, the crazy conclusion to all these musings is that – though I had NOT specifically mentioned Sylvia Plath – the distinguished literary editor guessed whereof I spoke.

He wrote: ‘Wherever you stand on “maudlin identification”, it’s a very old argument, and I’m not sure it’s worth reviving. And I’m afraid her poems are always going to be a bit more interesting than Karen Gershon’s, aren’t they?’ **

Really?

MORAL : Germans have a word for a denigrating self-loather: a Nestbeschmutzer (a besmircher of one’s own nest). Zadie Smith’s self-styled alienation is hard to swallow, in my view, when she is gifted with the greatest boon ever conferred to unify a nation: the pure reason of the English language as a medium of connexion rather than of estrangement. Alienation? She did not have the misfortune to be cursed with the split personality of futurist L v. K, who was born in 1902 in Elsass/Alsace. Up to the age of 16 his studies were in German until the political overthrow of 1918 and his teachers changed to French, an agonizing relinquishment of the language he loved. See my The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K at the South Bank Poetry Library for a tragedy of true alienation ...

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=9440 

Divided loyalty?*** I suggest Zadie Smith examines the example of Anglophile Adam von Trott zu Solz before she makes that claim.  

Better to be a Stock-Engländer than an Ungeziefer. 

 

*   See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3558156/Zadie-Smith-on-Kafka.html

** For the poems of Karen Gershon, a Kindertransport refugee, see

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/gershon-karen

*** Oh, and maybe, too, Zadie Smith should listen to actor Richard Burton – a Welsh speaker – conjugating the verb ‘to be’ . . . ‘I will teach you the greatest poem in the English language, the present tense of the verb “to be”: I am, thou art, she is, he is, we are, you are, they are . . . ’