Cold Comfort Conjugation in my Darkest Sussex

It’s a tarrible gurt noration (terrible great travesty) told abroad that a dusty parody of the rural novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), deserves its popularity as a vaunted classic of English comic fiction, when the distinguished prototype from which Stella Gibbons derives her satire (Sussex Gorse, 1916, by Sheila Kaye-Smith) is a fine novel in its own right, and unjustly neglected.

Sheila Kaye-Smith, 1923,
by
Robert John Swan (1888-1980)
The pose in the picture is said to be based
on Titian’s A Man with a Quilted Sleeve. 

As I wrote to a Professor of Modern English Literature in California, whose Intensive Writing Course on The Fictions of the Sexes includes Cold Comfort Farm:

I’d be very interested to know whether any critique of this novel in your tutorials ever includes the acknowledgement that the writer Gibbons satirises (Sheila Kaye-Smith) was a very fine chronicler of Sussex dialect and rural life, and her novel, Sussex Gorse, is a moving work of literature, true to the character of Sussex farming stock. I was brought up for some years on a Sussex farm so I can vouch for the fidelity to customs and dialect of Kaye-Smith’s writings. You may find the dialect impenetrable in Kaye-Smith BUT another point to consider is that Sussex dialect is very similar to US Southern rural speech with pronouns ‘his’n’ and ‘her’n’, for example, while Sussex has exported many other grammatical features to the States.

I am invariably admiring of the open-mindedness of academics, and the professor truly did not disappoint me in his prompt response:

Thank-you for that excellent reference. I am tracking down copies of Sheila Kaye-Smith’s work for our University Library, and will read her for the next time I teach Cold Comfort Farm.

My mother, poultrykeeper on East Sussex farm 1930s.

Of course, for American dialectologists, these grammatical niceties present an ever-widening, ever more complex vista of the diaspora of those inheritors of our rural English tongue.

I am not an American dialectologist but I can observe with certainty that Zane Grey and his fellow practitioners of classic Western fiction, including Colonel William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill), correctly conjugate their possessive pronouns:

‘Keep back ... you snake! Or I’ll put out one of them slinky eyes of your’n!’

‘I felt as how ef yer was a good set of fellers you wouldn’t mind havin’ another true rifle and arm with your’n, for this is an all-fired dirty Injin country, you know.’*

Yet the odd thing is that I would not again have been reminded of my early interest in Sussex dialect – an interest that had all but faded from my mind – had not a certain ‘award-winning’ literary composition been cited to me as a superlative example of the common speech of Sussexers, when analysis of the text revealed at once in the tenth line a solecistic howler that no Sussex child – let alone an acclaimed scholar of our county’s provincialisms – would have inflicted on the ear of her elders. And the contentious phrase?

Gaffer stands in the yard and counts ourn hogs an’ lambs.

Ourn? No! Our hogs an’ lambs. (I imagine the prize for that literary composition was awarded by metropolitan critics.)

As the Rev. W.D. Parish, Vicar of Selmeston, writes, in his Dictionary of Sussex Dialect (1875):

The possessive pronoun is thus conjugated in Sussex,

Mine, thine, hisn [his own] or hern.

Ourn, yourn, theirn.

[Mine, thine, his, hers, ours, yours, theirs.]

To aid our parsing, the Rev. Parish gives us any number of specimen utterances.

That new lean-to of yourn is a poor temporary thing.

Robbuts! Ah, I layyou never see such aplaace for robbuts as what ourn is! 

These strict observances of grammatical rules cannot be neglected, in my view, when attempting to faithfully reproduce Sussex rural speech heard within living memory.

In my own fiction, Sister Morphine (2008), I remember, the speech of Wilkes, a Sussex farmworker, employs two possessive pronouns (the episode, Dispossession), both observant of rules that neither Buffalo Bill nor Zane Grey contravene ... so if they didn’t breach them why should we?

Yore ma sez as how the babe is her’n.

As you can just possibly begin to imagine, my brother’s birth was a fearful page in the record my existence.

    I can remember Boy in his pram, a peevish elf in a pointed woollen hat. That elfin cap concealed a skull elongated by a forceps birth, as though he had been delivered by coal tongs.

    Coincidentally, Grasper the sheepdog was struck dead six months later in an altogether less violent thunder storm; a bolt aimed true and found the brass tag that honoured his name; a medal struck by lightning, you might say.

    Mention of that sheepdog recalls a variant account of my brother’s nativity story, a kind of parallel creation myth that relates the genesis of the Young Lord and Master. As it also concerns myself it bears retelling.

•

A lamb, you know, can be born with eyes of a different colour and, in ancient times, shepherds believed such a lamb had two different sires. In fact, a lamb characterised by this phenomenon is one of my earliest memories.

    When I was going on seven, on the way to the lambing sheds one spring morning, Wilkes, the farmhand, pointed out a tawny-eyed ram, then, in the pens, he showed me lambs with brown eyes and, later, a sickly lamb with blue eyes suckling on a ewe. Disowned, in a corner, on shaky legs, stood an even sicklier lamb with an eye of each colour.

    ‘ ’Minds me of the time tha’ brother of yourn come into this world ’cause, true enough, he were born in a barn.’

    ‘In a barn?’ I exclaimed in wonderment.

    ‘Ain’t you never heard tell of the birth of yore brother? T’was full moon and light as day. Heard this hollarin’ an’ fancied diddikoy folk mostlike must of took the wrong turnin’ into the yard. So afore it’s light I got the lantern an’, begger me, I wouldn’t of belieft it if I hadn’t sin it wi’ my own eyes, a diddikoy babe bawlin’ in the cowhouse! An’ no sign o’ the mite’s mother.’

    ‘No!’

     ‘On my word. Next thing I knowed, yore ma comes hurryin’ outen the gate in her nightgown so I arsts her if summat’s wrong.  Then the mistruss took on summat terrible – sez the diddikoys are allus up to tricks – sez they’ll take away a mort of things as they’ve no call to have. She set up such a din, cryin’ and sobbin’, sayin’ as how the brat’ll be tarrible difficult to rear on account o’ it bein’ a child o’ the gyppos.’

    ‘A gypsy’s child! No!’

    ‘Then yore ma ketches holt o’ the babe an’ laid it on a silk idydown. “They’ll be a bout o’ trouble wi’ tha’ boy, shouldn’t wonder,” sez I, but yore ma jest gives it a sup o’ milk, an’ a crust to bite on, an’ sez as how the babe is her’n.’   

    He rubbed his nose reflectively.

    ‘An’ nobody didn’t tek it away from yore ma agin, ’cause nobody didn’t know the mistruss had bin cheated by the diddikoys. Same as a cuckoo, surely.  Jest ’sposin’ a cuckoo come along and turned out all them blue eggs and laid a speckly brown ’un.’

Sturdy double negative.

You’ll note that I refrain from discussing the double negative here (‘nobody didn’t know’), which is such a feature of Sussex rural speech, no different from American ruralisms.

‘Eleven hundred hides stole from my camp,’ replied the grizzled hunter, ‘an’ ain’t never heerd of them since, let alone seein’ hide or hair.’  Zane Grey  

As H. L. Mencken remarks in his The American Language, (1921): ‘Syntactically, perhaps the chief characteristic of vulgar American is its sturdy fidelity to the double negative.’

Well, I don’t see nothing wrong in that.

NOTE: See Epitaph for an Anti-Hero (previous post) ‘... you don’t value nothing. You don’t respect nothing.’

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/anti-antihero-heroine-takes-heat-to.html 

Postscript April 13 2015

One other thought about the title, Cold Comfort: Please be aware that Cold Harbour farms and place names abound in England, particularly Sussex.

It is a Saxon place name, meaning a refuge from the cold.

The Cold Harbours or Coldharbours are all in the vicinity of one or other of the great Neolithic or Roman roads, and were originally the remains of partially destroyed Roman or Romano-British dwellings, or settlements. Travellers used them as being more or less secure places in which to spend a night. As the places became known, traders gathered there to distribute goods and do business, and eventually the places once more became villages, but retained the old generic name.

So the title is also a play on a familiar Sussex place name, in my own view. 

* Shades of King Solomon’s Mines. Allan Quatermain to his hunting party on their mission to Kukuanaland: ‘I may say that I like you and believe that we shall come up well to the yoke together.’

Anti-Antihero Heroine takes Heat to Hail Fritz Lang and Emily Post.

Am I alone in thinking (I suspect I am) that émigré Fritz Lang is perpetrating a European sophisticate’s grotesque caricature of American table manners and rudimentary cuisine in his The Big Heat (1953)?

For I believe high satire defines the scene of supper-time exchanges between police sergeant Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) and wife, Katie (Jocelyn Brando, sister of Marlon), with Lang — none-too-subtly — guying suburban domestic rituals performed in dinettes from coast to coast where Everyman is king; a demoticised king whose gun is always toted, and whose castle’s ever moated by a homesteader’s white picket fence.

No salad. A baked potato, a massive wedge of steak 
with bottled brown sauce and canned beer.

Consider the sly interplay between consumables as fast food is dished out from a diner-style menu of fried steak, baked potato, cigarettes and canned beer. What, we ask, would New Yorker Emily Post, la grande prêtresse des bonnes manières, have made of it.

It’s a long overdue question, so — after precisely sixty years of agonising — why not allow the simple folk of Hicksville their own agony-aunt-column to quiz her?

Hicksville: Is it not egregiously impolite for Bannion to smoke a cigarette in his wife’s kitchen and, moreover, while nibbling a bread-stick, to perch his smouldering butt-end at the edge of the countertop on which their food is prepared?
Emily Post: Smoking like a furnace in most polite circles is to be abhorred. Nor should one talk with one’s mouth either full of food or barricaded with tobacco. On the other hand, the Hicksville wife should not make a display of intolerance, or she had better take the first train back home, since she is likely to find New York very, very lonely.  

Hicksville: Is it not equally impolite for Bannion to tuck into his steak, plunging his knife into his baked potato before his wife is seated at the supper table?
Emily Post: The bolting of meals is to be deplored. No one should begin eating until everyone is seated. The knife must never be used to scoop baked potato out of the skin, or to butter potato ... butter for baked potatoes is taken on the tip of the fork shovel fashion, laid on the potato, and then pressed down and mixed with the prongs held points curved up.

Hicksville: Bannion’s wife, Katie, carves her husband’s steak on the supper table. Is this correct form?
Emily Post: A certain type of man always likes to carve, and such a one does. Carving on the table was once considered an art necessary to every gentleman.

Hicksville: Appallingly, Bannion brings two beer cans from the fridge to place on the table; the implication being that they will remain there. Surely this is a solecism of a very ugly character?
Emily Post: In proper serving of cold drinks of all sorts, even where a quantity of bottles, pitchers and glasses need space, everything should be brought on a tray. A cloth must always be first placed on the table, before putting down the tray. The tray may be a massive silver one that requires a footman with strong arms to lift it, or it may be of Sheffield or merely of effectively lacquered tin. 

Hicksville: The absence of vegetables or salad is troubling. Surely a meal composed of a baked potato and a massive wedge of steak with bottled brown sauce (high in carbohydrates and cholesterol) cannot be considered wholly nutritious?
Emily Post: Steak and broiled chicken are fairly practical since neither needs gravy, condiment, or sauce — especially if you have a divided vegetable dish so that two vegetables can be passed at the same time.

Rebel cop as New York anti-hero.

Emily Post may have held inflexible views on table place settings and dining etiquette (‘...the diner must never be allowed to hold his fork emigrant fashion, perpendicularly clutched in the clenched fist, and to saw across the food at its base with his knife...’) but she was also aware that the younger New Yorkers of her day were as a breed fiercely independent of their elders. (Incidentally, we may reasonably assume The Big Heat has New York as its setting because Bannion’s wife talks of ‘Jersey mosquitoes’ attacking on all sides.) 

Yet, all the same, I believe Emily Post would have applauded Fritz Lang’s satire (she was in her 81st year when The Big Heat was premiered and New York’s cinemagoers first saw rogue cop Bannion bolt fast food any old how, then turn in his badge to prowl the mean streets on a payback mission to bring down the gangland syndicate that murdered his cigarette-and-beer-sharing post-Postian proto-feminist wife). 

As Emily Post concedes, the generation of young males growing to manhood in the first half of the twentieth century, ‘… don’t care enough … to live up to the conventions of “manners” that old-fashioned hostesses demand. And as these “rebels” are invariably the most attractive and the most eligible youths, it has become almost an issue; a hostess must in many cases either invite none but older people and the few young girls and men whose mothers have left cards for them, or ignore convention and invite the rebels.’

The Emily Post Eligibility Test for New York’s ‘attractive’ rebels.

Emily Post lived just long enough to greet the 1960s, so she was no stranger to the rising class of Rebel Hero emerging from Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York whose alumni include those classic antiheroes, James Dean, Paul Newman and the kid brother of rogue cop Bannion’s screen wife, Marlon Brando.

But hang on! 

What our Hicksville country cousins eagerly desire to know, surely, is: would Emily Post have recognised the Strasberg rebel’s attractive onscreen persona as fundamentally the biddable notional firebrand who will eventually be welcomed by the Quality to dance the cotillion at Lucy Wellborn’s débutante ball? 

Hicksville: Consider The Wild One (1953), released in the same year as The Big Heat. Is biker gang leader Johnny Strabler (Marlon Brando) rebelling against anything of socio-political significance other than those forces that oppose his narcissism? 
Emily Post: Exhibitions of anger, fear, hatred, embarrassment, ardor or hilarity, are all bad form in public. And bad form is merely an action which ‘jars’ the sensibilities of others. 

What are you rebelling against, Johnny?’

‘Whaddaya got?’

Hicksville: Would you censure the Method school of acting, which, despite its emphasis on theatrical honesty and total immersion in the character’s emotional state, is often associated with actors who have never overcome a tendency to mumble? Take, for example, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), whose risible angst finds its causative agent in the trauma of witnessing his father’s emasculation by frilly apron.
Emily Post: In all monosyllabic replies a child must not say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ or ‘What?’ ... Any number of busy men scarcely know their children at all, and have not even stopped to realise that they seldom or never talk to them, never exert themselves to be sympathetic with them, or in the slightest degree to influence them. To growl ‘Mornin’,’ or ‘Don’t, Johnny,’ ... is very, very far from being ‘an influence’ on your children’s morals, minds or manners.

‘What are you rebelling against, son?’

‘Undiagnosed Frilly Apron Complex, Daddy.’

Hicksville: Would you consider an incident of public disorder, drunkenness, and fatuous vandalism the impressive act of a Rebel Hero? One recalls the opening scene of Cool Hand Luke (1967) in which beer-swigging Paul Newman beheads parking meters with a pipe-cutter.  
Emily Post: An older man addicted to the use of too much alcohol, need not be discussed, since he ceases to be asked to the houses of ladies. A gentleman may be in his shirt sleeves actually, but he never gets into shirt sleeves mentally — he has no inclination to. All thoroughbred people are considerate of the feelings of others no matter what the station of the others may be. 

‘What we have here is a failure to communicate.’

Hicksville: Perhaps you could direct us to your own Emily Post Method for overcoming inarticulateness and achieving an expressive persona that is distinguished by simplicity and a grounded honesty of utterance.  
Emily Post: Simplicity of speech and manners means language in its purest, most limpid form, and manners of such perfection that they do not suggest ‘manner’ at all. Unconsciousness of self is not so much unselfishness as it is the mental ability to extinguish all thought of one’s self — exactly as one turns out the light. Simplicity is like it, in that it also has a quality of self-effacement, but it really means a love of the essential and of directness. Simple people put no trimmings on their phrases, nor on their manners.

Epitaph for an Antihero.

Hicksville: It’s time to extend a big thank you, Emily Post, for reminding us of your god-fearing forebears who evidently tempered your discrimination in matters of speech, morals and, indeed, table manners. Our citing of Paul Newman as Rebel Everyman reminds us also of his earlier movie, Hud (1963), and the almost Old Testament judgement on the eponymous antihero pronounced by his high principled father. ‘That’s the shame of it ... ’cause you don’t value nothing. You don’t respect nothing. You keep no check on your appetites. You live just for yourself and that makes you not fit to live with.’ Indeed, an Epitaph for an Antihero. 
Emily Post: Occasionally too, there appears in Best Society a provincial in whose conversation is perceptibly the influence of much reading of the Bible. Such are seldom if ever stilted or pompous or long-worded, but are invariably distinguished for the simplicity and dignity of their English.

‘You gonna get your mouth around that?’
‘Gonna try’

Template for a True Antihero.

Let me confess it. My jaundiced view of the American Antihero derives from my first encounter with a gun-toter in New York City in 1968, the decade in which Emily Post died (1872-1960). The occasion was a thanksgiving dinner and, after the grace was said, my table companion turned to the Limey and removed from his waistband his NYPD .38 special as a cue to laud the rights he enjoyed to bear arms, being essential, he insisted, for the security of a ‘free State’.  That was his thanksgiving.

In the sixties, some 50 percent of New York households boasted a handgun, yet, regrettably, Emily Post had not prepared me with the correct form to manage this encounter, so I nodded vigorously and passed the cranberry sauce with a sickly grin. Actually, Emily Post reserves her advice on the politesse of gun ownership to a few words. Despite the askance glances of wife and valet, a gentleman customarily resolves that ‘every evening is spent in cleaning guns’, and she adds the admonition that the gentleman’s son should be ‘taught by his father or a guide — at all events, some one — how and how not to hold a gun ...’

Anyhow, any discontent with the shortcomings of the American Antihero – whose whining consumerist anomie is exhibited here, specifically, the rebel’s want of a heartfelt grown-up cause, an infantilism that Emily Post presciently identified in the ‘younger fashionables in New York’ almost a century ago – is predicated on literary conditioning that takes as its template the searing heroics of a REAL Old World vigilante (executed March 20 1540, Berlin) ... Michael Kohlhaas, as envisioned by that master of German Letters, Heinrich von Kleist, in his classic eponymous Revanche-Geschichte. (It decidedly does NOT concern the antics of a drunken saddo, such as the ‘hero’ aforementioned.)

My adulation is boundless, as was Kafka’s, for this existential antihero without peer ... a charismatic rebel WITH an exhilarating, soul-blazing cause.

●

Post-Postian Postscript

I should not allow this opportunity to pass, in reflecting on American mores observed by cinema-goers of my mother’s generation, without a flashback to her consternation at witnessing Marlon Brando as the sheriff in The Chase (1966) polishing his toe-caps with his boots on, his foot braced on the arm of his living room chair. It was a solecism incomprehensible in its magnitude. Incidentally, The Chase, was one of only two films in which Jocelyn Brando appeared in a supporting role with her celebrated brother; the other was The Ugly American (1963).

Incidentally, my mother pointed out, much later, that Carly Simon, a New Yorker, appeared to be exposing a supreme breach of good manners in her celebrated lyrics. You’re So Vain: ‘No respectable man would walk into a party still wearing his hat, would they?’

Boot polish! Marlon Brando and Robert Duvall in The Chase 

●

Post-Brexit Footnote 08.07.2016 : A correspondent takes issue with me to question whether there exists a truly sustaining belief in the survival of high toned etiquette in Britain today, considering it a false ‘preciosity’ to suggest that somehow American table manners are a ‘burlesque’ of an enduring English correctitude. Well, I am pleased to reassure my correspondent that back-sliding in the Best Behaviour department is not wholly restricted to diners in the States, and there are back-slidden malefactors to be found in the very best High Society in England, particularly, it seems, among the Ruling Class at Westminster. Consider the scandal whipped up by the newspapers in 1996 when Conservative junior minister David Heathcoat-Amory resigned on a point of principle (a pre-Brexit protest at the over-regulation imposed by the European Union and the Tories’ ambivalence in rejection of a single European currency). 

On his announcement of his resignation, the UK press published a photo of a milk bottle on his breakfast table. This was regarded as a glaring solecism for a toff* by some. ‘Can any person who permits a milk bottle on his table be considered for high office?’ the newspapers reported. (Source: Confessions of a Eurosceptic by David Heathcoat-Amory, 2012.)

*For more revisionist views on English toffs, see:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/12/verifiable-proof-of-englishness-my.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

Hypatian Erotica Awards … High Victorian nominees announced!

A recent issue (24.05.13) of The Lady (founded 1885), belatedly arriving in the mails, contains the oddest intelligence. Its correspondent writes:

Hugh Betts, who works at Maggs booksellers in Berkeley Square, told me that he knows a girl currently writing a PhD on Wrists and Waists in English fiction of the 19th Century.

Thought provoking. 

In the same speculative vein, my recent blog post (here) recalling the metrical brilliance of the poet Roy Fuller

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/by-grand-satyr-stanzas-i-sat-down-and.html

jogged my memory of reading his fine novel of 1959, The Ruined Boys*, in which he charts the lost innocence of schoolboy protagonist, Gerald Bracher, who had ‘discovered that a cupboard in a classroom senior to his own housed a collection of books...’ that, if intuitively delved into, could satisfy his secret unspoken desires.

The most unlikely books sometimes proved to contain what he was seeking and the ardour of his quest seemed to give him a fine instinct not only for the right book but for the vital part of it. So it was scarcely any surprise that turning over the pages of a brown Victorian volume of small dull print whose title–Hypatia–had vaguely held out its only promise, he found:

‘She shook herself free from her tormentors, and springing back, rose for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around – shame and indignation in those wild clear eyes, but not a stain of fear.’

 

Hypatia by Charles William Mitchell

Rereading that passage, it seems to me that this subject of teasingly half veiled erotic texts from High Victorian writers bears further enquiry, and for the ardent Geralds among us it surely deserves its own award and nominees.

As such texts invariably teeter on the carnal brink I suggest the Hypatian Erotica Awards has a ring to it, with the breathless ingénue in a state of déshabillé the customary object of literature’s wish-fulfilling male predations. Is that actually a laced bodice ripped off and cast aside at the base (left) of the painting shown, or is it Hypatia’s Alexandrian sandal?

Take this seduction scene from a fiction published in 1888 ... 

...the atmosphere was heavy with the melancholy odour of refined white blossoms such as stephanotis, tuberose, and lilies of the valley ... [She] was at his side, just a little breathless, the flowers on her dress a little crushed, and the lace rising and falling rapidly. The moment was propitious for the study of human nature, and [she] saw it in a new phase ... [he] laid his hand upon her wrist. [She] experienced a sudden sense of chilliness all over. There was an obstruction in her throat and she prayed inwardly that something might happen suddenly ... to prevent him saying more ... The music went on, and there was a vibration in the floor as of people dancing. In a dark corner of the conservatory the monotonous drip-drip of a tap imperfectly turned made itself heard. [He] had taken her hand within his fingers now.

‘... I will never,’ [she said], with dangerous calmness, ‘be bullied or frightened into loving you. Surely you know me well enough to recognize that.’

... She turned half away from him, and moved towards the door, but before she had taken two steps his arms were round her, crushing her painfully. With sudden passion he kissed her twice on the lips ... Then he released her with equal abruptness. She stood for a moment, while he looked down at her, breathing hard ; then she raised her gloved hand, and pressed back over her ear a tiny wisp of golden hair that had escaped and curled forward to her smooth cheek.

Yes. The breathlessness of the crushed breast is quite a feature of this author, fixated on

visions ‘of soft clinging silks and incomprehensible gauze.’

Incomprehensible Gauze. Mmmm. That phrase could serve as the title of a study of John Ruskin’s marriage.  

Clinging silks with close-fitting bombazine, then, seems an essential feature of stimuli in popular literature as effective rousers of sensuality in the genteel Victorian reader desirous of the vicarious thrill of the chase.

She was almost crouching at his feet — crouching gracefully in her close-fitting black dress, with the beautiful golden head bent and turned from his sorrowful eyes.

Designedly, constrictiveness of dress as the cynosure of the writer’s hot gaze intensifies the reader’s voyeuristic complicity. But is tight-bound breathlessness, or yet the glimpse of wrists and ankles, deserving of the first rank of the excitants to ignite the timid reader?

Sportsgirls.

No. In my view, at the highest ranking, I would place descriptions of the sweated brows exhibited by female athleticism. (cf. Betjeman’s sportsgirls, Joan Hunter Dunn before her ‘warm-handled racket is back in its press’ or Pam whose ‘Old Malvernian brother ... can’t stand up to’ her ‘wonderful backhand drive.’)

Consider George Gissing’s Fleet-Footed Hester (1893) for an instructive expression of this attraction:

At sixteen, Hester had a splendid physique: strangers imagined her a fine girl of nineteen or twenty. It was then she ceased running races with the lads in London Fields …

Grown to a young woman, Hester provokes a fight between two rivals for her hand

Her face was hot … Hester went off in the opposite direction, an exulting smile in her eyes … On reaching home, Hester lit her lamp — it revealed a scrubby little bedroom with an attic window — took off her hat and jacket, and deliberately lay down on the bed. She lay there for an hour or more, gazing at nothing, smiling, her lips moving as though she talked to herself. At eleven o’clock she rose, put on her hat, and once more left the house. She walked as far as the spot where the fight had taken place. It was very quiet here, and very gloomy. A policeman approached and she spoke to him.
‘P’liceman, can you tell me ’ow fur it is from ’ere to the corner of Beck Street?’ she pointed.
‘Cawn’t say exactly. Five ’undred yards, dessay.’
‘Will you toime me while I run it there and back?’
The man laughed and made a joke, but in the end he consented to time her. Hester poised herself for a moment on her right foot, then sprang forward. She flew through the darkness and flew back again.
‘Four minutes, two second,’ said the policeman. ‘Not bad, Miss!’
‘Not bad? So that’s all! Find me the girl as can do it better.’
And she ran off in high spirits.

We don’t have to spell out sublimated sexual arousal when the clues are in Hester’s restlessness, ungratified and raw. (Incidentally, the male world record-holder’s speed for the 1000 yards of 1881 was twice as fast as Hester’s speed, which was nonetheless impressive.) 

Encrypted caresses or too easily decipherable seductions?

But for a sophisticated account of a consensual heterosexual sadomasochistic pact – redolent of pheromonal exudations such as sweat and damp hair – the narrative below by an English regional fictionist (born 1867) is, for those times, unsurpassed for its novelty in founding its intense eroticism on quotidian reality, in this case the rural setting of the Derbyshire dales. A flirtation between a beautiful, much-courted village girl and a rejected suitor ...

... her flushed face bore a pleasant look of malice ... She turned and faced him defiantly.
‘I wunna!’
‘But yo’ will, for i’ll mek yo’.’ ...
It had never struck her before that he was very handsome, but as he stood there without jacket or waistcoat, and with his snowy shirt all damp with perspiration, she became convinced that there was none in the neighbourhood half so worthy of the name of man ...

She set down the basket and showed him her hands. The skin was roughened, the finger-tips were bleeding. The sight made his eyes swim ...
He came nearer and caught her in his arms.
‘I wouldna hev done et ef I hadna looved yo’.’
‘Et’s all reet ... Yo’ll be master, I reckon.’
And she kissed him, and he led her to the road.

Or take this sinister coded erotic encounter from the author of the 1888 conservatory seduction ...

He rose from his seat and deliberately crossed the room to the sofa where she had sat down, where he reclined, with one arm stretched out along the back of it towards her. In his other hand he held his riding-whip, with which he began to stroke the skirt of her dress, which reached along the floor almost to his feet ... She gave a strange little hunted glance round the room ... Then she leant forward and deliberately withdrew her dress from the touch of his whip, which was in its way a subtle caress. 

Yes. Coded eroticism for Victorian fictionists seems to function through dependence on ravishing detail of an almost hallucinatory Dadd-like painterly meticulousness.

This trick of the cinematic close-up, like the whip and dress-hem, can be seen in the example singled out in my recent post on Emma Bovary, Adamantine Madame.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/adamantine-madame-enamelled-emma.html 

Between the window and the hearth Emma was sewing; she wore no fichu; he could see small drops of perspiration on her bare shoulders.

Oh. Did I mention I bought my prized first English edition of Madame Bovary from Maggs of Berkeley Square? More than a quarter of a century ago.

Puzzle of the missing pizzle.

As to more decipherable seductions, even the novice literary cryptographer is quick to unriddle the cruder emblems of sexual intrigue when the determined symbolist is intent on delivering his message with a semiotic battering ram, whose impact is no less subtle than the authorial telegraph pole it evokes with which the messenger signals the callowest itch of lust.

So let me conclude with two contrasting views on literary expressions of sexual desire.

My aim has been to demonstrate how the intensely observed teasing glimpses of so-called second-rank 19th century novelists succeed in their purpose to provoke the fantasizing reader to imaginative immersion in what is, essentially, a fictive sexual adventure; whereas, by contrast, the clumsier overt symbolism of a vaunted stylist of the period tends sometimes to neuter, indeed sabotage, intended erotic effects with the reader left disengaged.

For the last word, look no further than Thomas Hardy and his Jude the Obscure (1895). Consider this famous passage:

On a sudden something smacked him sharply in the ear, and he became aware that a soft cold substance had been flung at him, and had fallen at his feet.

A glance told him what it was—a piece of flesh, the characteristic part of a barrow-pig, which the countrymen used for greasing their boots, as it was useless for any other purpose. 

‘I didn’t throw it, I tell you!’ asserted one girl to her neighbour, as if unconscious of the young man’s presence.

 ‘But you want to speak to me, I suppose?’

‘Oh yes; if you like to.’

No better than a slap in the face with a wet fish (as the saying goes), that ‘characteristic part’ of the pig considered ‘useless’ is, in fact, an overwrought symbol of clunking gaucheness, as I see it, spelling out its message in banner headlines: ‘This is a sexual pass! Wake up, Mr Libido!’ 

Extraordinarily enough, when a perfectly applicable term for this porcine boot-grease exists and is ready to hand – ‘pizzle’ – the word appears nowhere in Hardy’s text, a needless evasion that consigns the reader – this reader, at least – to feeling distinctly short-changed.

So no nominations here, then, for the Hypatian Erotica Awards that distinguished poet Roy Fuller prompted, whose own Mythological Sonnets are, conversely, rich in allusion and unforced sensuality:

Trailing great pizzles, their dun stallions
Huddled against hedges while our mares
Cavorted in the grass, black, yellow, bronze.  

‘Stallions’ and ‘bronze’ ... words destined to be spellbound by a magician of rhyme.

And since Fuller so perceptively quotes from Hypatia, in a text I have remembered for more than half a century, maybe I should conclude with its author’s true, irrepressible, High Victorian, libidinous outpourings ... the love letters that passed between Charles Kingsley and his bride-to-be, Fanny Grenfell.

It is to them that the Hypatian Erotica Awards are awarded. The judge’s verdict is final: Charles and Fanny are uncontested joint winners.

Thrilling writhings. Wandering hands. Smelling salts.

In the fourth decade of the 19th Century, the most remarkable love letters were exchanged between the young curate, Charles Kingsley, and wealthy socialite, Frances Eliza Grenfell, five years his senior, who opened their hearts to each other with an explicitness that scholars of that period rarely encounter, certainly in texts unredacted.

No bland, sentimental billing-and-cooing billets-doux but Frances’s imaginings of ...

... delicious nightery [when they would lie in each other’s arms] and I will ask you to explain my strange feelings ...

These strange feelings of the lovelorn – agonising physical pains in her heart – caused Fanny to resort to large doses of morphine and salvolatile.

As for Charles, the floodgates of his private fantasies were unloosed without constraint ...

When you go to bed tonight, forget that you ever wore a garment, and open your lips to my kisses and spread out each limb that I may lie between your breasts at night ... Will not these thoughts [by postponing bliss] give us more perfect delight when we lie naked in each other’s arms, clasped together, toying with each other’s limbs, buried in each other’s bodies, struggling, panting, dying for the moment. Shall we not feel then, even then, that there is more in store for us, that those thrilling writhings are but dim shadows of a union which shall be perfect?

The perfect union Charles, an accomplished artist, envisioned was their hallowed lovemaking for all eternity, pinioned on orgasmic pulsing waves ... a fevered sketch of which remains: 
 

The consecrated lovemaking of Charles and Fanny,
pinioned on the pulsing waves of Eternal Orgasm.

Charles once told Fanny: ‘Your letter about bare feet almost convulsed me. I have such strange fantasies about bare feet.’ And his fetishisation of Fanny continued:

...my hands are perfumed with [your] delicious limbs, and I cannot wash off the scent, and every moment the thought comes across me of those mysterious recesses of beauty where my hands have been wandering, and my heart sinks with a sweet faintness and my blood tingles through every limb ...

The Ascent of Charles and Fanny to Eternal Sexual Bliss

The power of suggestion.

Nevertheless, Charles feared the sight of Fanny on their wedding night would unman him. Some months before their marriage he wrote:

I have been thinking over your terror at seeing me undressed, and I feel that I should have the same feeling ... until I had learnt to bear the blaze of your naked beauty.

So there it is. At last, the authentic.   

The blaze of naked beauty. 

This fierce eroticism, forged by lovers separated by the proprieties of polite society, and expressed in a series of astonishing epistolary convulsions, underscores my initial point ... effective erotic writing relies on the power of suggestion and the tingling religio-sexual experience of ‘touching the veil’ recorded by Charles Kingsley is the more ardent for its trembling – like the Song of Solomon – on the brink of coherence, and for daring to breach the boundaries of scriptural agápē.

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* re. The Ruined Boys, see, also, a very fine contemporaneous novel that charts similar territories of betrayal and lost innocence in a girls’ school: The Chinese Garden (1962) by Rosemary Manning.

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See also: Sex Lessons from History Unhindered by 20/20 Hindsight

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/sex-lessons-from-literature-unhindered.html