Saturday 15 October 2011

Spoofery: a Brush with Imagists... the Duping of the Modernists...

Amateur Literary Sleuthing Unpursued (Part 1)

Talking of Marianne Moore (who was first published by H.D., the Imagiste wife of Richard Aldington) see my post
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/10/mr-and-mrs-anon.html
I’ve just archived a note that appeared in the Richard Aldington Newsletter, Vol. 35, No. 4, Winter 2007-08: ‘Catherine Eisner calls our attention to a novel by Christopher Sykes, Answer to Question 33, in which she believes there is a satirical reference to RA: see pages 54-60.  Sykes wrote the “Introduction” to RA’s Lawrence of Arabia, seven years after RA’s death and fourteen years after the first edition.’

Actually, on September 25 2007 I wrote to the Richard Aldington Newsletter ...

'Here is the key passage from Answer to Question 33 by Christopher Sykes, a novel published in 1948, which does, indeed, contain the satire on Imagist poetry ... whose target was probably Richard Aldington.'

(There are echoes here, too, of the 1944 Modernist Hoax of Ern Malley in Australia). 

[Extract] Pages 54 to 60 ... the duping of the Modernists ... a 20th century Chatterton ...  '... the familiar act of forgery ...'

There was a magazine called The Cherwell of which he was the editor. Because poor Summers lacked any ability to put his music into a creative channel he was attempting to transform himself into a literary man, for like most musical men his talent had a large literary overflow. In literature, however, he lacked the necessary precision of ear to discriminate between the authentic and the sham. Thus, to my surprise, to my shame now for I should have told him what I was doing, he was my first dupe. This had great results for me.

Throughout that Spring of 1928 I wrote one poem a week for The Cherwell. I had studied many of the modern masters. Without understanding a word of what I was reading I had ploughed through the works of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce and I had rummaged among the works of many lesser-known stylists. I did not then possess any power of self-criticism, for had I done so, I would have chided myself for wasting time on studies concerning things in which, by no wild stretch of the imagination, could I in any sense partake. But I was young, and so I went doggedly forward. I began to pose as an authority on modern culture, which term included all the arts as well as philosophy. I began to discuss these things loudly in my rooms, and like the muezzin uttering the call to prayer I was answered by a congregation flocking to my rooms. In the manner of the bygone aesthetes I cultivated a loud feminine voice which dropped a semitone at the end of each sentence. In the now restricted world illumined by the sacred aesthetic flame I was a pronounced success. As for my poems—but no. On second thoughts I will not reproduce one. I replace the knife. I will but briefly indicate what sort of stuff they were. I plagiarised freely. I took passages from the less well known of the modern poets and substituted all key nouns and verbs, changed meanings, and the order of ideas. And I was never once found out. My principal point of style, also not original, lay in contrasting title and subject. For example a poem abounding in brutal images was entitled "A Study in Circles;" poems about machinery were called "Lilac in Summer" or " Ocean Twilight;" a poem which so far as it meant anything at all described the flight of a king-fisher was called "The Death of St. Jerome," while one about buttercups had the title "Murder in Kiev." My main care was to defend myself from criticism by making my meaning unattainable to any reader. I used to talk about the modern discovery that absence of signification enlarged the space-value of emotion, whatever that meant. I became famous in my way. Be indulgent, please, if I say that my deceptions began ever so slightly to deceive myself, and that my head was a little turned. Success when young is a potent wine.

I sent all my poems to Caroline. She wrote thanking me. And there the matter might have ended had I not met Madame Freine.

There was one piece of knowledge which I needed then but of which I was wholly unaware: namely, that the French, being poor linguists, make more mistakes in judging foreign literature than one would guess from their high intelligence : in English letters Shakespeare is taken on trust, but after him the game is open. Great English genius, no matter how famous, can stay unacclaimed, while dubious talents some-times receive such homage as is only due to immortals. Perhaps the French repose an exaggerated confidence in the opinions of their leading intellectuals, and perhaps the intellectuals are misled by the acuteness of French criticism into believing it to be universal; or it may be that French nationalism, that most fierce passion, makes it more difficult for Frenchmen than for others to make serious literary excursions away from home. Whatever the explanation, French ignorance of foreign letters is often the amazing flaw in a brilliant mind. In what other place than Paris could a literary man believe that Boswell's Johnson was written by Dickens.

This French blindness caught me out. I had been told, particularly by Frenchmen at Oxford, that France was the centre of the world's culture. I had been told that if an Englishman liked something, well, he liked it, but if a Frenchman liked something, then, I was assured, I must be prepared to readjust my ideas. I followed this system carefully. Although I posed then as one of the great destructive cynics of the world, I believed pretty well everything I was told.

Madame Freine came to Oxford. She had an engagement to write some articles on modern English Literature for a French periodical called L'Epoque Moderne, and it was widely known that one of these would be devoted to literary tendencies among "Les Jeunes." She was a dark, medium-slzed middle-aged lady a little inclined to stoutness and perspiration, chiefly remarkable in appearance for the gloom of her clothes and the hideosity of her face, and though she was not witty or brilliant in conversation it was evident as soon as you began to talk to her that she was a person of very lively mind. I met her in Edmund Summers's rooms in a house on the High, and she told me a great deal about Marcel Proust whom she had known intimately. While she talked she examined me with piercing and critical eyes. I thought she was very nice and very interesting.

Now shift the scene to Paris and picture me two months later living in a little pension with three other English boys as the slave of Professor Jouvel who lived a few houses away in the Rue Bonaparte. Jouvel was a little grey-haired man with a high strained voice, possessed of a stupendous energy which often took you unawares because it was so effortless. It rose up irresistible like some phenomenon of nature. He worked from seven in the morning till late every night and expected other people to do the same. We saw him daily for four hours ; four hours of unremitting toil ; four hours during which we learned more than we might have done in four years elsewhere, and which, because Professor Jouvel's mental machinery had the beauty and smoothness of perfection, were extraordinarily enjoyable. But if preparatory work had been neglected then those four hours in that little hot over-furnished room might have been spent as comfortably on the rack. Our master was very severe. He never scolded or nagged, hut he had the art of causing embarrassment wrought to a high pitch. If he was displeased with you he had a way of implying that this was because you were a nonentity ; your intellectual abilities did not belong to the better classes of the mind ; it wasn't your fault. He regretted having made a mistake. Under this harsh discipline we immediately adopted the life of slavery. We never went out. We worked very well. Five minutes after meeting Professor Jouvel my silly arrogance dropped from me. And then Professor Jouvel, of all people in the world, gave it back to me.

We respected, we even revered, our master, but it was impossible to feel any warmth of affection for any one so icily cold. At the end of our daily four hours we used to relax for fifteen minutes, smoking cigarettes and talking of ordinary frivolous things. The Professor's frivolous subjects were food and botany and to these he brought an austere spirit of criticism. The idle moment of the day was the reverse of hectic, so much so that I was very much surprised one afternoon when our master turned to me with an almost human smile.
"Monsieur Kirkby," he said, "I hope very much that your studies here do not prevent you working at your poems."
"My poems?" I stuttered. I was quite at sea. Surely, I thought, he could not be laughing at me?
"Yes, your poems. Ah," he said holding up a finger (but not exactly playfully), "your reputation is known to us here, you see, and I feel responsible that you do not neglect your talents. I consider that, if you do not already do so, you should deliberately set aside an hour a day, even two, and devote them to poetic composition."
"But Professor," I gasped, "the only poems I've ever written were published in a students' magazine at Oxford. How on earth___"
"Just so. We must all start humbly, just like that ; it is the right way. Perhaps I should explain to you how I know of your poems. My esteemed friend and colleague in the Societie des Recherches Litteraires, Madame Freine, has consecrated no small part of an article, appearing in the current number of L'Epoque Moderne to a criticism of your work. I felicitate you, young man. Praise from Madame Freine is not lightly earned. Is it possible that you have not seen the article ? ''
"No, I haven't." My head was swimming.
"Then you may take my copy home and return it to-morrow. I wish you also to bear my former remarks in mind. For many years, indeed all my life, I have been an amateur of poetry. I know how rare that gift is, how precious. It seems to me, Monsieur Kirkby, that you approach the moment when you should publish a book of your productions, your collected pieces and some others. You should consider this a serious part of your duties.''
"B-b-but," I said, not knowing what to say, "are-—-are you sure?"
"My dear friend," said Professor Jouvel laying a hand on my shoulder (an unprecedented show of affection), "I dare to make no personal judgment of your poems. My knowledge of English suffices not. I repose however my confidence in the judgment of Madame Freine. You may do so too. You may he very sure of the value of your talent." He adjusted his pince-nez giving dramatic weight to what he had said." And now, gentlemen," he concluded to us all, "you have much work to do and I shall not detain you. As arranged, we discuss the period of Rudagi at two o'clock to-morrow. Bonsoir.'' We shook hands with him in turn according to our custom, and I hurried home with L'Epoque Moderne under my arm.
I read Madanie Freine's article about seventeen times. A vast and terrifying idea began to convulse my mind : that I was possessed of genius, that I belonged to the immortals, that Milton, Dryden, Coleridge were my fellows. It was written in Madame Freine's article that as in the late sixteenth century, so now the English language was under-going a period of transition and passing through a stylistic revolution. Many different tendencies were striving for the mastery, and these she enumerated at some length. Then she said that revolutionary periods are the only ones in when it is possible for youthful movements to achieve a domineering position and bearing this in mind she regarded the sincere and deeply significant movement of the young intellectuals of Oxford as a phenomenon striking but important. My name then appeared. This young poet, she said, shows already an astonishing virtuosity but one remarks with a smile of relief, for virtuosity may render us disquiet, that his talent commences to operate in a defined direction. The sombre and terrible images evoked from a formidable imagination by the sure touch of this young but masterly technician reveal unsuspected worlds to us. It is perhaps from such a side that one may previsage the blow of Brumaire such as a triumphant movement may carry against the confusion of an epoch devoted to revolutionary experiments. A lot more in the same manner.

I surrendered. I shrieked aloud with joy. My head swelled as it had never done before. I saw myself as the Napoleon of letters. No diplomatic service for me! The artist's life instead, the fame that perishes not, the sacred light that flickers on immortal brows ! Before condemning me as a complete ass I ask the reader to believe that deep down inside me another voice spoke saying, " Fool, don't be taken in," and that in spite of the babel of self-praise now loosed within me this voice was never quite stilled. That will be my defence at doomsday, but oh what exaltations of self-deceiving pride it will have to explain away!

I bought a great many copies of L'Epoque Moderne and I sent one of them to Edmund Summers asking him if he knew of a publisher. When I walked in the Boulevard St. Germain or sat in the Deux Magots sipping an aperitif I used to wonder sometimes whether any of my neighbours or the passers-by realised that I was "Le celebre Kirkby" with whose fame the capital of France, I supposed, was ringing. Unfortunately I never met any French people at all, as Professor Jouvel gave us no time to do so. If I had done so they might have set me straight again. Mistaken as the French are about English writing they are very wise about all human beings. When I heard from Edmund Summers that he had found a publisher interested in my work my conceit reached satanic proportions.

Our life in Paris came to an end. Professor Jouvel gave us a small but delicious dinner (we had never eaten with him before) accompanied by small but exquisite potations of wine. We were all feeling very tired, myself more tired than the others, for apart from my studies of Arabic and Persian I had by now written fifteen additional poems. These with my Oxford "works" were to be the contents of my first book, Moonlight Sonata and Other Verse. My memory is mercifully dim when it comes to mental and spiritual experiences in the production of poetry but I think that when I got down again to the familiar act of forgery I must sometimes, in some part of me, have realised what a fool Madame Freine really was. My last memory of Paris, however, is of looking at the towers of Sacre Coeur as the train pulled out of the station and thinking how interesting the chapter on Paris would be to my biographer. Oh dear, oh dear.
I had a year to put in before my diplomatic examination so it was arranged that although my Oxford career was finished I should go back there for one term to work with a crammer, as the London crammer for whom I was destined could not take me till January of 1929. Thus it was in an Oxford bedroom in an attic on the Broad that I awoke one morning in November to find myself famous. No, not really famous-—I was spared that ; famous in a little diminishing part of Oxford, famous among some lunatics in Mayfair, dimly heard of in Bloomsbury and Chelsea, very slightly famous in the Ritz. I was very excited. I was well reviewed, not hailed as the Emperor of literature as by Madame Freine, but told I was very clever indeed and a real poet. I made £150 out of Moonlight Sonata and Other Verse. I think that was the only sensible thing about it.


-

To the Editor of Richard Aldington Newsletter I added:
"I note that Christopher Sykes wrote the introduction to Lawrence of Arabia, a Biographical Enquiry by Richard Aldington, seven years after RA's death, and fourteen years after the first edition. I'm aware that in scholarly circles one should assume nothing but, in truth, I had assumed – since Aldington and Sykes were Middle East commentators (Sykes more than Aldington, in fact, and a Middle East specialist in WW2) - that in introducing this new edition he was paying a tribute to some past acquaintanceship in the interwar years, when they had exchanged yarns. Sykes's satire of 1948 would then link him directly to RA, the poet."

Friday 14 October 2011

Inductive Detection

He wrote in his notebook, "How delightful on a bright, frosty day when a new sleigh with a rug comes to the door." 
    The General had sent a surprisingly grand, light Finnish sledge of gilded osier and spruce, with birch blades.  An altogether excellent turn-out - with a matching Finka - but no splash-board.
    The surly Jehu, chewing cedar nuts on the box-seat, wore a long coat bordered with matted furs of castor and zibeline.  The liver-coloured racer with nervous, pointed ears, and a mane that sparkled like spun glass, pawed the fresh sleighing snow and quivered with suppressed eagerness. 
    A small boy with a pinched grubby face - one of the town's inevitable street-waifs clambered on to the rear runners.
    The Stationmaster, whom Anton distinguished by that official's singular, venerable, black and red, pancake-shaped cap, sang out cheerily a warning note.
    "Whip behind!"
    The hackman whipt behind.
    A plaintive voice called, "Dai kopeiku!"
    Anton drew aside the lap-robe and tossed a coin to the urchin, as the cast-off child scrambled dejectedly to his feet from a sidewalk of freshly trodden slush.
    The whip cracked again.
    Before them, the pitted road was clean once more, bleached by new-fallen snow.
    Anton had long confessed a sneaking regard for the inductive method of detection popularised by Shklyarevsky* who had imitated the pirated novels of Émile Gaboriau; and, as the sledge surged over the ukhábam – the transverse ruts which furrowed the road – he studied closely the strenuous piaffing of the Orloff in the shafts and deduced, beyond dispute, that the beast in her palmier days must have been harnessed to a distinctly different rig. 
    They were running alongside verst upon verst of hurdle fences raised as snow screens to protect the mainline rails and marshalling tracks from drifts.
    Despite this containment the trotter persisted in veering heavily to the left.
    The animal furnished material for an absorbing deductive digression.
    Anton noticed the drivers's off-side flick of his whip and corrective twitch of the ribbons ; the reins glittered with sharpened metal blades embedded in the thong to strike the roadster's stifles.
    Approaching his task with all the rigour of a good diagnostician, D-r Tchékhov noted, too, that the stinging lash was fashioned from a sazhen length of stolen telegraph wire.
    Another thing. The animal’s left hindleg was sickle-hocked and, when the sled had first moved off, Anton had observed at once the raised hoof on that deformed limb was weighted with a horseshoe kidney† of impacted snow.
    This degenerating weakness of the gambrel and tendency to yaw, coupled with her one-sided gait, were all signs which pointed conclusively to the fact that, in her previous employ, the creature had spent practically all her working life in the out-rigger position of a troika, with the off fore-leg leading.  
    Detektiv Tchékhov could not refrain from imparting his suspicions, and tested his theory on the driver, who grunted his assent.
    “If I gave her her head, given half a chance, she'd chase her own tail!”
    The high-set tail rose and fell before them in rapid motion, as if the mare was cracking nuts.


Notes
*  A. A. Shklyarevsky, author of The Undiscovered Crime (1878), the latter being
    a provisional working title of Chekhov’s A Textbook Case in this segment of his
    manuscript in progress (later deleted and replaced with The Fatal Debut).
†  Motifs drawn directly from his medical studies are rare in this period of Chekhov’s
    literary development.  A horseshoe kidney is a congenital defect producing a fusion
    of two human kidneys into a horseshoe shape.


Additional Editorial Note
This draft requires much discreet amendment. Either the copyist has slipped up or Chekhov is in error! The  horse is called kon' (male) on ms page 1 and loshad' (female) on ms page 2.  Also on page 1 it is called a Finnish horse, and on page 2 an Orloff trotter!

For the origins of this text see my previous posting, D-r  Tchékhov, Detektiv.
http://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, 
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv. A long lost novel

A long lost crime novel by Chekhov surfacing in the 21st Century? Not possible, you say! Yet Chekhov, himself, referred to such a work in progress in a letter to Pleshcheev on 9 Feb. 1888: "Ah, if you knew what a plot I have in my noddle! What marvelous women! What funerals ...!"

So, the tale that spoke to me across a century from the packet of papers I inherited from my father, when I understood its provenance, was not so altogether surprising that I missed a heartbeat.

The packet was labelled The Fatal Debut (a provisional title, I believe) in Chekhov's own hand on the wax paper wrapper containing his papers. However, the handwriting of the enclosed manuscript was not wholly in Chekhov's own distinctive penscript, but in other hands (his brothers Aleksandr, Nicholya, Misha and others). The work was translated and annotated by my father, from whose ms (see specimen pages) I have drawn for my own restoration of the novel.

His ownership of the original manuscript (deposited in my father's bank) is accounted thus:

My father, a polyglot, born 1903, travelled widely in his schooldays, studying at Herder Realgymnasium, Berlin ; Escuela Alemana, Barcelona ; Institut Minerva, Zurich ; and Handelsschule Weiss, Vienna.

In World War II, my father, by now a naturalised Englishman serving in the British Army, was an interpreter with SHAEF at the Nürnberg Trials.

According to a diary note of March 8 1946, he interrogated a General Vadim Ignatyvich Kulikov, who, in his youth, had been a close friend of Chekhov. (Kulikov, embittered by his failure to protect his Mari family against the post-revolutionary dekulakization in the inter-war years, had, remarkably, at the age of 69, defected to the Germans to lead a Cossack Unit subordinated to a Sicherungs Division, stationed in Glogau, Poland, which was active in the Kiev area and Croatia in 1943, deployed against saboteurs. After the series of interrogations conducted by my father, and following demands from the Soviets for Kulikov's repatriation, he was returned to Russia later in 1946, where after a show trial in Moscow he was executed for treason.)

In his private confession to my father, Kulikov stated he had "... exchanged half a carton of Chesterfields, two tins of cocoa and one can of condensed milk for the 'FD ms' in possession of a fellow prisoner, Vassily Gremoukhin, a collaborator, and émigré son of the ciseleur, Anatoly Gremoukhin, a distinguished former workmaster in the St. Petersburg House of Carl Fabergé".

From extant notes and journal references uncovered by my father, it seems Chekhov visited Gremoukhin in 1901 the month before his marriage to Olga Knipper to lay preparations for the special commission of a wedding gift: "A pair of engraved rock-crystal toilet bottles with mounts of enamelled translucent pink on a guilloché ground, one surmounted by a varicoloured chalcedony dog, the other by a cat in purpurine, each with cabochon ruby eyes."

Chekhov did not warm to Gremoukhin. Evidently, the commission was of a private nature and was not passed through Fabergé's books; Chekhov was, as so often during his courtship, pressed for cash and Gremoukhin demanded security against completion of the gift. (Gremoukhin's telephone number is given as Moscow 1173, by the way.)

Chekhov writes: "The manuscript was to hand (I had only that day assembled the pages for archiving) and, reluctantly, the work was placed in Gremoukhin's safekeeping as my guarantee. The hastiness of the agreement was prompted by the arrival of the maître, Fabergé himself, who benignly greeted me with the words:  'I must tell you at once, sir, the only doctor in whom I have ever put my faith at all is the good Berncasteler Doktor!' (He was referring to his favourite dry white Moselle.)"

In the event, as Gremoukhin's son related to my father, Chekhov never redeemed his manuscript, on which I have presumed to confer the title: D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv.

A sample chapter, Inductive Detection, from 270 transcribed pages (see mss below in a copyist's hand) may be read here ... you'll note the last page is irreverently overwritten by my father with notes on ordnance and supply columns!





A number of extracts from the as-yet-unpublished crime novel, 
D-r TchékhovDetektiv, have been posted here over recent years :

A Skirmish with Wolves
or Chekhov’s talking raven,
or Dead Wife, New Hat,
or Inductive Detection,
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, 
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Thursday 13 October 2011

Hushed Up Chekhov

In the centennial of Chekhov's death, I wrote the following essay (published in the Jewish Chronicle, December 24 2004) in which I identify the suppression of commentary on the anti-Semitic aspects of Chekhov's correspondence and writings and drama.


In this, the year's end of Anton Chekhov's centenary [2004], many devotees will be unaware that, within international Russian-speaking Jewry, their hero is often vilified.
    In the West a controversy is raging among emigrant critics who claim there's a strain of anti-Semitism editorially suppressed in Chekhov's letters, and who point to a coded Jew-baiting hidden in his writings.
    Specifically, Jewish critics assert that Chekhov's literary career was advanced by influential mentors who were ideological anti-Semites. Certainly, Chekhov's disquieting character flaw was kept well-hidden in the Soviet epoch thanks to discreet censorship.
    Airbrushed out of Soviet history books were these remarks of Chekhov, "... our critics are almost all Jews, who don't know the core of Russian life, and are alien to it, its spirit, its forms, its humour ..."    
    Recently, an American-Jewish magazine condemned Chekhov's alleged silence during the Tsarist anti-Jewish pogroms.
    This accusation prompted me to search in vain within the new centennial collection (Chekhov: A Life in Letters, Penguin) for his correspondence with a certain Jew.
    But nowhere in this selection will you find Chekhov's notorious letter suppressed equally by his principal British biographer and Soviet guardians of the Chekhov legend.
    In 1881, following the rape and carnage of anti-Semitic pogroms, Chekhov writes to his former schoolmate, Solomon Kramariov, "If you are beaten ... I'll come. I like beating up your brother-exploiters ... Let you see in your dreams, Israeli, your move into the paradise! Let the justifiable anger of Russian citizens frighten and undermine your nerves!!!"
    Gallows humour, indeed, and this particular passage has been likewise sanitised by Donald Rayfield in his exhaustive biography. (Anton Chekhov: A Life.)        
    The Penguin selection claims to be the "first uncensored edition" but its editors are careful to shield readers from any hints of Chekhov's youthful anti-Semitism.
    Young Anton was fond of the Judophobic poet, Nekrasov, whose influence on Chekhov's early drama, Platonov, is evident.
     "A Yid stands in higher esteem ... There are fatal words on his forehead: For Sale at Public Auction!" This remark, by echoing Nekrasov's poem maligning a prostitute, equates Jewry with prostitution.
    Chekhov used "Yid" habitually in correspondence.  Similarly, Chekhov's youthful first novel reveals usage of "Yid" to be the norm.
    Unrecorded in the new Penguin edition is Chekhov's letter condemning this novel's publisher: "There's a new administration (Kurepin and Yids) there, more disgusting than the previous one."
    Early in his career, Chekhov fell under the spell, too, of another Judophobic writer, Leskov.
    The charge against Chekhov by Judophile critics is that both he and Leskov were "birds of a feather" who collaborated with reactionary, anti-Semitic periodicals. The entrenched anti-Semite, Suvorin, editor of the Judophobic New Times was Chekhov's lifelong friend.
    There is a sense of intimately shared mockery; on holiday, Chekhov writes to Suvorin: "The place swarms with Jews, among the mangiest specimens ... Jews are cowardly people ..."
    Yet, paradoxically, many years' later, Chekhov became a staunch defender of a Jew, Captain Dreyfus. (In this celebrated scandal Dreyfus was falsely accused of passing French military secrets to the German embassy in Paris.)
    When Suvorin declared New Times to be virulently anti-Dreyfusard Chekhov's opinions rapidly matured, swayed by Zola's famous campaigning article, J'accuse!
    The severing of Chekhov's friendship with Suvorin can be dated from their acrimonious falling out over Dreyfus. Chekhov writes: "The attitude of New Times to the Zola affair has been simply vile."
    Yet, the previous year, Chekhov can write casually: "To defend myself from gossip is like begging a loan from a [Jew]." The Soviets censored the word "Jew".
    Chekhov also writes: "I'm not going to write for The Northern Herald because I don't get on with their Israelites."
    This periodical was published by a woman Chekhov cursed for her "Jewishness".
    One hundred years' later, another woman critic, Viktoria Levitina, writes: "Chekhov is a wonderful legend of Russian literature: humanity, tolerance, tactfulness. There existed a sacramental formula in Russian law-making - 'except Jews'. All Chekhov's virtues don't concern Jews either." Chekhov's humanity is the myth of "a writer who is just considered to be a classical one."
    Judged by this latest Penguin selection, these darker suspicions colouring Chekhov's character are not given space to intrude, a deficiency which denies us revisionist insights to reassess his reputation.
      Not least among allegations of Chekhov's Judophobia is the innuendo that his intended Jewish bride, Dunya Efros, inspired the spirited Jewess in his short story written supposedly as an act of revenge in the year of his broken engagement; its protagonist has "a prejudice against un-Russian faces in general ..." Chekhov referred to Dunya as "Efros with her nose" and a rich zhidovochka.
    Chekhov's play, Ivanov, affirms, too: "Do not marry a Jewess or a bluestocking ..."
    Chekhov's misogynistic anti-Semitic aphorism echoes in our hearts when we consider that Dunya was arrested in WW2 Vichy and gassed by the Nazis.
    With 20/20 hindsight, any critic risks glibness in being too eager to judge.       
    But four years before his death, as late as 1900, Chekhov can still grumble in exasperation with Tolstoy, "I can't think why he bothers to talk to these Jews."

[See page 39. The Full Collection of Works and Letters in Thirty Volumes. Letters in Twelve Volumes. Letters. Volume 1. 1875-1886. Moscow, 1974. The anti-Semitic passage from the diary of February, 1897 is also included in this collection. Oddly enough, the Collection of the 1960s, in 12 volumes, skipped all the letters of 1880-1882. Incidentally, Chekhov refers to Kramariov as "Kramarov" which sounds more Jewish, i.e. son of Kramer = merchant.]

Footnote: a teleological conundrum.

It’s noticeable that the publishing here of the unedited text of my centennial article from 2004 has prompted certain speculations as to my own personal standpoint in relation to the post-pogrom diaspora at the turn of the last century. You’ll perhaps have noted that I wrote in clarification:
The reality of anti-Jewish pogroms in Tsarist Russia is not unknown to my family. My grandmother very closely witnessed, in the East End of London, the impact of Russian Jewish immigrants on communities in England (a mass influx of some 120,000 in the first waves fleeing the Russian empire’s anti-Semitic persecution). Hence, Londoners of the 1880s through to the early 1900s were, like Chekhov, no strangers to Russian Jewish customs and culture and my grandmother’s understanding of them was no less profound than his. In fact, it’s quite probable that Londoners knew more about displaced Russian Jews than Chekhov's countrymen who banished them. 
In reality, my grandparents were also members of a diaspora of sorts – in their case descendants of expelled Huguenots – so their views as Londoners were not coloured by extreme reactionary anti-alienism prejudices against the immigrant condition and the ghettoization of the East End. I will merely note that a common British perception of the refugee Jew in the East End of my grandparents’ times is best summed up by the eminent British socialist, Beatrice Webb, when observing (1888-1889) Jewish immigrant life for Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London.

Beatrice Webb writes of the new arrivals, fleeing persecution, as representing a survivalist class of entrepreneur that, due to their historic experience of persecution, had ‘weeded out the inapt and incompetent’ and sharpened their instincts into ‘an instrument for grasping by mental agility the good things withheld from them by the brute force of the Christian peoples’ and who regarded the best exemplar of their own kind as ‘in a fair way to become a tiny capitalist — a maker of profit . . . [who] feels himself the equal of a Montefiore or a Rothschild.’ Beatrice Webb, needless to add, was one of the founders of the Fabian Society; she coined the term ‘collective bargaining’ and wrote The History of Trade Unionism (1894). The stark conflict witnessed by my grandparents in the East End – contemporary movements towards organised labour versus the immigrants’ sweatshop practices that drove down wages – can therefore be better appreciated as the goad behind my grandfather and his becoming a very early member of the Fabian Society, that champion of co-operative endeavour and advocate of a welfare state and a national minimum wage.  

See also a variant of this article at:
https://peoples-press.com/index.php/morning-star-online-from-2004/culture/item/8338-chekhov-s-letters


The English View on Pogroms

Today (December 8 2017), astonishingly, I was turning the pages of a little book on East Anglian Dialect (‘Lingual Localisms’), published in London in 1823, and among all the quaint rustic sayings and ‘mitigated oaths’ I found the word, ‘Pogram’

So from almost two hundred years ago, here’s the view of a sophisticated English scholar and etymologist:
POGRAM [original spelling unchanged]: A word that has not been much heard till of late years [i.e. 1821 Odessa pogroms marked the beginning of the 19th century pogroms in Tsarist Russia], though I believe it not to be of recent coinage: indeed I’m pretty sure I have seen it somewhere. It is now generally applied by vulgar churchmen to dissenters of different denominations. Not however to papists, jews, or quakers. The remark that mutual rancour of conflicting sects is inversely as their degree of difference, holds good all the world over. Christians hate each other more than they do Jews or Mahommedans. And the latter, however inveterate against Christians, are yet still more so mutually in regard to sectarian difference: though in fact such difference be unimportant, and comprising no point of faith, beyond who was the fittest man to succeed Mahommed in the Khalifat, or civil and pontifical supremacy. Even the tolerant Hindus, who admit no proselytes, and aver that all mankind are more or less Hindus, have had desolating wars among themselves on points of faith and practice; and hate each other with considerable intensity; greatly exceeding what they feel towards Christians, or Mahommedans. It has been reserved for the Hindus to carry on merciless wars of extermination on a question of physiological function. Yet such are points of history and I believe of fact. The original question was whether their Jupiter or Juno were the most potential in the infancy, or before the infancy, of society?

That last remark, I suspect, teeters very close to iconoclasm yet this writer wrote in the Regency era so it’s not altogether surprising, because this kind of robust opinion was to thrive for over a decade until Victorian stuffiness stifled bluff hearty outbursts like this in the name of good taste.


Silence of the British Press, September 2018.

It should be recorded here that, in the 2018 debates by British mainstream news media on the question of anti-Semitism persisting in the UK Labour Party (September 2018), there was silence on the matter of its enshrinement in the ideological foundations of trade unionism articulated by Fabianism from which the Labour Party sprang. 

Just a further small sample of Beatrice Webb’s writings indicate the source of traditional Labourite/Fabian prejudice.  

In short, the explicit animus levelled by Labourites/Fabians against Jews is defined in Beatrice’s own words: 
‘. . . the immigrant Jew, though possessed of many first-class virtues, is deficient in that highest and latest development of human sentiment – social morality.’ 
Another quote from Beatrice: 
‘In the Jewish inhabitants of East London we see therefore a race of brain-workers competing with a class of manual labourers. The Polish Jew regards manual work as the first rung of the social ladder, to be superseded or supplanted on the first opportunity by the estimates of the profit-maker, the transactions of the dealer, or the calculations of the money-lender . . . ’


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 extremisCompulsive 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  

Wilde... apostrophiser of boys but not punctuation

Can punctuation, as well as poetry, provide a critical plot twist in my fiction?

Well. Yes. Remember, Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist, was 'hanged by a comma'.

In my latest collection of fiction, Listen Close to Me (Salt 2011), a bibliophile remarks on Wilde's cavalier use of the apostrophe. '[Wilde ] had a habit of apostrophising possessive pronouns when everyone knows they're absent.'

The truth of this observation I confirm in my miniature essay, Addendum to a Forgotten ms (Ambit, Issue 203, Winter 2011).

Meanwhile, if you doubt my word, take a look at Oscar Wilde's inconsistent apostrophising evidenced by the following writing samples. They are from his manuscript ('it's marble hue ... it's vein of blue ...') for his poem, Roses and Rue, of 1885.

Are these errors pathological? A Freudian graphologist might think so!

At Grass, the Blinking Stars ... Doctored Art?

I'm certain I recall reading in Andrew Motion's biography of Larkin (Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, Faber and Faber, 1993) that, though he much admired Larkin's well known poem about racehorses put out to grass, he was disturbed by the inaccuracy of the final line of the final stanza ...

Only the groom, and the groom's boy,
With bridles in the evening come.

Motion feels that racehorses 'At Grass', taken by grooms to their stables, by implication, would be led by 'halters'.  The line, then, should read:

Only the groom, and the groom's boy,
With halters in the evening come.

Motion is absolutely right here. The bridles suggest horses equipped for a race, which is quite the opposite of the poem's mood of 'Veterans at Rest' and 'Triumphs Past'.

This brings me to the heretical idea that works of art, conceivably, could be tweaked and doctored to engage more empathetically with latter-day sensibilities. Do I mean bowdlerisation? No! Of course not!

I mean that some modern meanings of certain words can torpedo the effects the lyricist intended.  Shall I ever forget the ripple of laughter at the Royal Festival Hall when that splendid Toulonnais, Gilbert Becaud, sang an English translation of one of his songs: 'The blinking stars are dancing ...'  He simply could not understand the Londoners' (not unkind) laughter.

My sensibilities are also disturbed by the jarring appearance of 'free lances' in Louis MacNeice's classically perfect 'The Sunlight on the Garden', even though I know very well the meaning MacNeice intended, and its pathos. It's just that so many other contemporary – and dullish - associations are now conjured up by the term. That is why I have presumed, for my own private delectation, to doctor the poem so my attention does not waver at the beginning of the second stanza.

A massive presumption, yes! (To loosely change: Our freedom as free lances/Advances towards its end;/The earth compels ...) N.B. The iron 'Siren' neither reflects the Spanish Civil War nor the London Blitz of WW2 since this prophetic poem was completed in the mid 1930s. The dictators who wreaked havoc in both those conflicts I now dub, specifically, the 'unanswerable rogues' who never answered for their actions.

The Sunlight on the Garden

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

We know the rogue who answers
Unanswerably at the end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful, too,
For sunlight on the garden.

Tuesday 11 October 2011

Mr and Mrs Anon.

To return to the theme of the 'mute inglorious' Mr and Mrs Miltons so despised by Kingsley Amis (see my September posting, Commoners' Rights to the Heroic Quatrain).
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2011/09/commoners-rights-to-heroic-quatrain.html
The defence of Anon must be for me a recurrent fixation because I'm reminded I touched upon it in my Elegy from a Locked Drawer in Sister Morphine (2008), where my youthful protagonist's flirtation with Toby Freemartin takes this turn ...

It was clear we were hitting it off.
    'What is your favourite colour?' he asked.
    'Iridescence,' I answered quickly (paying homage to Marianne Moore).
    'And your favourite poet?'
    'Anon.'
    His smile was wary. I suspected he was more than a little stuck on me but puzzled by the immature elusiveness I often contrived to make myself more fetching.

-

So, evidently, my views haven't changed since my teens.  And certainly my notebooks record any number of memorable sayings, saws and proverbs whose authors are Anon, yet whose utterances, like folk tunes, cling fast to the mind with a grip fiercer than that of any named poet.

Look. Here. I've just this minute taken eight random folk sayings and arranged them in two 'found stanzas' ...

Thought lies in Bed and is beshatten.
Mope-eyed for living so long as a Maiden,
She cannot leap an Inch from a Slut
Yet can correct the Magnificat.

They say Old Maids lead Apes in Hell.
The Body is the Socket of the Soul
Put together with a hot Needle and burnt Thread. 
Then ask: Would you know her Secrets? Who’s to know who’s a Good Maid?

Remember, Sir Kingsley, the ballad, the proverb, the inventive oath, the cautionary tale, owe their origin to Mr and Mrs Anon.

A solitary truck ... euphonious assonance.

Talking of poetasters. I should note frankly that memories of my youthful experiences when working on an academic publisher’s poetry list were refashioned as Elegy from a Locked Drawer in my Sister Morphine (Salt 2008). This is how I recall the first day at the publisher's office and meeting the intimidating editorial team ...



    I took to him instantly. His name was Toby Freemartin, the editor's copy assistant and general progress chaser. Opposite him, seated across the aisle, was our office section leader, Desmond, a small, fussy, mild-featured copywriter who could, nonetheless, unsheathe kittenish claws to rake his victims with a lacerating wit.
    Toby made a long arm and boldly withdrew from my grasp the cloth-covered writing-case I had brought with me which bore my name. He untied the tapes and riffled through the thin sheaf of poems I had not dared to show the editor.
    'Audenian,' he sniffed, passing each sheet ponderously to Desmond.
    'Macspaunday without the audacity,' Desmond purringly demurred.
    They were both absolutely right, of course.
    Soon a spirited argument developed which centred on my indictment of a number of curious imprecisions which, in my own view, annoyingly marred Auden's phrasing; I was soon citing '... a solitary truck, the last of shunting in the Autumn ...' as a particularly glaring example of such infelicities. Their protests were silenced when I mentioned my great-uncle had been a locomotive engineman hauling French Sleeping Cars on the Continental Express for more than twenty years. He had shown me his railway company's pre-war Signals Manual, I said, which proved conclusively that shunting in sidings was not exclusively seasonal work.
    ' "During darkness, fog or falling snow," ' I quoted, ' "the trackloading in either direction must not exceed ten goods-wagons and a tail lamp must be placed on the last truck by a handsignalman." '
    My great-uncle and his Marxist footplateman agreed that Auden's phrase was ultimately meaningless, I assured them airily, and simply a case of seductive euphonious assonance.
    Toby and Desmond exchanged thoughtful glances.
    I think I must have succeeded in impressing them.

Wednesday 28 September 2011

The Graze.

Well, why not? Miriam R. in my Sister Morphine confesses (page 116) she's something of a poetaster, but should that admission prevent sight of her scribblings?
 
The graze.
 
Children weep for their future lives.
                In the cinder grit beneath the skin,
                                    in the nettle's spite and wasp's sting,
           apprehend a lover’s griefs,
                       and husband spurned.
       And the infant, sobbing,
                       fallen from her swing,
                          chants 
                        a lament for wives
                                abandoned. 
 

Tuesday 27 September 2011

Sister Morphine: ‘darkly comic and unputdownably brilliant’.



Sister Morphine

Women’s Narratives from the Case Notes of a Community Psychiatric Nurse

The principal theme of my 'Sister Morphine', published in 2008, 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.

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION: Masterful, darkly comic and unputdownably brilliant, this first novel by Catherine Eisner is an instant 21st-century classic. Sister Morphine tackles themes of suicidality, sibling murder, child abuse, morbid self-harm, guilt, jealousy, incest, drug addiction, infidelity, illegitimacy, obsessive compulsion, bereavement and a case of grand larceny in the second degree. All wrapped up in the confidential case notes of a Community Psychiatric Nurse exploring the multifaceted side effects of psychoactive drugs.



'Eisner has mastered the twist in the tale and her stories cascade vividly into derangement.'
Cameron Woodhead
THE AGE


'… a genuinely unsettling voice, at once comic, intelligent and slightly, scarily deranged … a true technical triumph.'
Kate Clanchy
MsLEXIA


'Erotic … enthralling … very pictorial … very original.'
Neville Marten
INK


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


Extract : Dispossession (Patient ID CPN0312110842: Mary H.)


I can remember in every bright-etched detail the precise moment I first decided to murder my brother.
    I had returned to our family home, the day after my mother’s funeral, to discover he had changed the locks.
    I knocked on the bay window for several minutes before he emerged, obviously hungover, yawning lazily like a sated cat.
    He stretched his arms and barred the hallway.
    ‘Don't come anywhere near this property again!’ he shouted. ‘I don’t want even your damned shadow falling on this house! Understand?’
    He then slammed the door with his boot ...
    ... He had won that last bout, I conceded, but, I vowed, feather by feather this goose would be plucked.


Extract : Soft Skin (Patient ID EP0841060170: ‘Leisha’ Felícia F.)


Now, as she sat at her desk, an hour after the holdup, she marveled at the nerve with which she had outfaced her co-workers who had scrutinized her every move.
She busied herself by filing an interoffice memo entitled, Armed Robbery Prevention Strategies. She glanced at a sub-section which stated:
Unarmed ‘soft-skin’ operators, proportionate to armed security guards under special category instructions, should listen attentively to robbers, be calm, courteous, and patient, and treat the robber as you would a customer. Do not resist, but cooperate unhesitatingly with the robber, as this is the most reliable way to avoid injury.  Don’t try to be a hero.  Take no action that would jeopardize your safety or the safety of others. Activate alarms only if you can safely do so without detection.
Well. As a vulnerable ‘soft-skin target’ she had acted accordingly. She hadn’t resisted. On the contrary!
When Sonny had entered the bank lobby precisely at 4:00 pm, closing time, he was carrying a gray, nylon, carry-on flight bag from which he pulled a silver semi-automatic handgun. He was wearing black motorcycle-type gloves with red stripes running down the fingers. (They reminded Leisha of the burned out veins along Sonny’s pitted forearm.)
He was also wearing a beige hooded sweatshirt, a black baseball cap, camouflaged battle-dress-uniform pants, aviator sunglasses, and a black and yellow bandanna over his lower face.  
The senior police officer had demanded a description of the robber but all Leisha could say she remembered of the incident were ‘three eyes’.
She had rehearsed her statement and knew exactly what she intended to say.  Three eyes. I swear. That’s all I saw. Two eyes leveled at me and the eye of the gun!
She swallowed hard at the thought of those two eyes and that unwinking eye of the gun.
The descriptions of the unknown masked man given by the clerks at the neighboring desks had not been any more conclusive: ‘a hideous little guy with creepy eyes’ and ‘a spaced out drug-nut waving a pistol looking like a mad scientist.’
Leisha recalled Sonny’s sallow face, slick with sweat, and rapid tongue darting to wet his cracked lips. His repetitive demoniacal screaming of ‘Gimme all your money! Right now!’ had achieved its desired effect. Leisha had promptly obeyed.
Sickened, Leisha sat at her position and folded her hands tightly on the desktop to control their shaking.
Across the polished marble floor of the lobby, behind the brass teller cages, she saw the bank’s auditor was glaring at her. He weighed two hundred and eighty pounds and he now presented the appearance of a man who had been recently boiled in a bag.
    After all, the bank’s hard currency reserves had just been depleted by more than a quarter-million dollars.


Extract : A Stranger in Blood (Patient ID CPN0338200976: Elspeth P.)


‘A woman without a past has no future.’ I laughed without thought. ‘The question you should have asked is not where I’m going but where I’m from.’
I rapped my forehead with my knuckles.
‘A locked room mystery for you, look.’ I twisted my hands together.  ‘Locked inside my head the real me is! No way in or out! I know what I know, but no more, see. It’s hopeleth.’
In moments of extreme emotional disturbance I revert to the cadences and syntactical quirks that betray the speech of my Welsh childhood, and the pronounced lisp of my infancy again afflicts my tongue.
My therapist nodded encouragingly, then fingered her chignon to assure herself it had not strayed. She wore a false hairpiece. I did not trust her.
‘I own to being a bastard,’ I said. My lip did not tremble. ‘Satisfied?’
An ‘identity crisis’ had been glibly mooted when I’d earlier confessed to the confusion that bedevils the psyche of an adoptee, and to my reluctance to delve deeper into the mystery of my true parentage: a father unknown, and the identity of my birth-mother withheld by my adoptive parents, Mam and Da.
‘Self-knowledge requires more,’ she put in portentously.
She began to probe further into my past, alluding to childhood phobias.
At which point I clammed up. I’m perfectly aware that ‘basket’ is an English euphemism for ‘bastard’, of course, but I certainly will not openly admit to my compulsive avoidance in supermarkets of the ‘Baskets Only’ checkout line.
The Hospital Almoner handed me Da’s personal effects in a yellow plastic bag intended for the disposal of clinical waste. It contained three items: his dentures, his snuff box and a scrap of charred paper melded to a remnant of his candlewick dressing-gown, evidently cut from his grasp.
A blackened birth certificate . . . Truly, this page might just as well have been a Dead Sea scroll for all the evidence of anyone’s identity it proved because, by a perversity of fate, the essential details of my birthplace and the names of my biological parents, and all other handwritten entries penned by the registrar, had been scorched into oblivion.
It was as though some cosmic dramatist had sketched out an improbable plot with no shred of evidence to even hint as to how to resolve the dénouement of that inscrutable design.
My half-suppressed moan became the senseless giggle of one who laughs to prevent too deep an apprehension of spiritual distress.
I thought: How characteristic of my over-principled Da! Of all the cherished possessions he could have chosen to save from the burning building, he chose, at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour, the birth certificate he’d never wished me to see!
For, in all the years of my childhood, I never once sought to learn the identity of my natural mother. The very thought of my demanding her name I knew would profoundly upset my adoptive parents, such a fear I had of bringing down on my head the confusion of further rejection.
Besides, my greater fear – more than filling in the blanks, and laying that ghost to rest – was my dread of disappointment, the complete devastation of my persona, should I learn who my biological parents truly were and fail to come to terms with unwelcome knowledge.
So the deed box remained unopened; and I promised myself I would never seriously trace my natural mother while Mam and Da were alive.
My mouth was dry, and I gulped water with an unsatisfied thirst.
The picture of my loss was now clear: my uprighteous God-fearing Da trapped in a burning outbuilding, the protagonist of a tragic morality play of his own contrivance, holding the key to my destiny in his unnaturally white hand.
For now I understood, with a terrible finality, my search for my lost past was, by far too many years, long overdue, and the last traces that could disclose the secrets of my doubtful parentage were crumbling to ashes in my belated grasp.
As I have repeated many times: ‘A woman without a past has no future.’ And an ‘identity crisis’ is too facile a prognosis to describe the dilemma of one whose lodestone is jettisoned before her quest for selfhood can begin. For how else can I regard a life built on falsehood? It may seem difficult for a non-adoptee to understand but it was like looking back on the day when I had first laid the foundation stone of an edifice whose ultimate design I’d never visualised. Now it was erected it was astonishing to see it had no recognisable shape. Yet with such scant clues, tell me, how was I then to rightly learn the answer to the question: Whose child am I?




EAN13:  9781844712991
ISBN:  9781844712991
Author:  Catherine Eisner
Title:  Sister Morphine
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FB
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  04-Jul-08
Extent:  496pp
Height:  234 mm
Width:  153 mm
Thickness:  39 mm
Weight:  744 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 18.99
Price:  USD 36.95
Rights:  World



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. 
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Colour Blind

Actually, to pursue my current theme of found poems, the following poem of mine was published in MsLexia in their Summer/Autumn issue of 2002 ... 


Colour blind

The pyrotechnicienne from Alsace
                          hired for my fireworks party
described afterwards her
                                       favourite explosive device.

Construction:
4 kilo shell
3 kilo shell
2 kilo shell
(compacted into a single projectile).

  Effect:
Red
 fan-
palm
green
parasol
vermilion
nightflowering
chrysanthemum

As she said,
                                                  not without remorse,
“This is a spectacle I shall never see
                            for my own pleasure
because when I light the fuse I am stranded directly beneath,
              yet someone once thanked me and
                                             asked if I would be kind enough
to hang
another chandelier
   in the void.”

Monday 26 September 2011

Poésie trouvée ... the unsought text

Talking of poems composed from found objects, the following is practically poésie trouvée insofar as the text fell nigh fully formed into my lap unsought ...

The Poetess Attempts to Eulogise
a Wonder of Nature
in a Lightning Storm


A peculiar feature as to a lightning-stroke
is its photographic properties.

In this connection a poetess
of twenty-two years,
while climbing a tree to eulogise a bird in its nest,
was struck by lightning
and afterwards showed upon her breast
a picture of the tree,
with the nest upon one of its branches. 

This theory of lightning-photographs
of neighbouring objects on the skin
has probably arisen
from the resemblance of the burns to natural subjects
due to the ramifications of the blood-vessels
as conductors,
or to peculiar electric movements
which can be demonstrated by
positive charges on powdered moss spores.

After her accident, the poetess
wrote no other verses
since, as she remarked, there
could be no more vital poetry
than that written on her breast.


Catherine Eisner, 'Ambit' magazine, Issue 198, Autumn 2009. 
(The gestation of a poem as a critical plot twist is a subject explored more than once in my fiction.)

For a critical plot twist, see also remarks on Nabokov’s The Gift, here  . ..
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/did-someone-call-for-recitation.html

Commoners' Rights to the Heroic Quatrain

I wonder who remembers now Kingsley Amis's reactionism* in citing Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard as 'a great Rightie poem; no work of literature ever argued more persuasively that the poor and ignorant are better off as they are.'

So that's all right, then, 'some mute inglorious' Mr Milton or Mrs Milton are better off laid to rest with our dismissive thought that no lyrical utterance ever passed those illiterate villagers' lips in their lifetime, or profound or original observation ever struck their minds! Absurd!

I was reminded of Amis's idiotic snidery when I came across this poem by David Sweetman the other day. This is the truest, purest, refutation I have yet encountered of Amis's fascistic authoritarian contempt for the People, literate or otherwise, and of his 'kingsley' assumption that metaphor and simile do not figure in the spiritual lives of ALL subjects of the realm.


Cold Beds

Thirty years she had waited for disaster
and when they told her he had drowned
she nodded. Like things seen in Holy prints

there had been signs: the greengrocer
piling bound asparagus as if to burn a saint
made her cross herself quickly.

And when she took flowers for Bob
a dead gull lay on the boy's grave,
plump and grey as the shell that killed him.

So now the father’s gone, after thirty years
on a bed too big for one, she sees it all:
the sails becalmed at the window,

her Madonna for a prow, the moonlight
that gives their walnut cupboard the pattern
of waves closing over his head.

David Sweetman
From ‘Looking into the Deep End’ (Faber, 1981)

* For Amis’s shamefully reactionary remarks, see page 320, ‘The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse’ (1988)

Thursday 8 September 2011

Phantom Words 3 : Tatters / Smoulderings

I did not think I would stumble over an answer so swiftly when I wrote, at the beginning of September, ‘Another phantom word that also demonstrates the English language to be wanting is a label for that particular cobwebby flake-like ember that floats on air currents above a bonfire. It’s not ash or a cinder or exactly a smut. It could be a “floater”, like those shadows on the retina. Now this floating ember is a quite specific phenomenon, yet the word for it has floated out of my reach ... and it's a minor frustration that, if unresolved, could lead to an unhealthy degree of obsessiveness.’

Then.

The image of a burning flag occurred to me, And surely ‘smouldering tatters’ (shreds of cloth, newspaper, wood fibre, etc.) provides the correlative image.

Example: Outside the looted embassy its flag was burned by rebels until only smouldering tatters floated across the square.

P.S. (28-09-11) Is this too simple a solution now I wonder?
A gerundive answer now occurs to me when we learn that a 'smouldering' could be a noun. Should we revise our example, then?

Example 2: Outside the looted embassy its flag was burned by rebels until only tattered smoulderings floated across the square.