Monday 25 January 2016

Satirical and satyrical, extramural and intramural studies: Alexis Lykiard’s ‘Schooled For Life’.

One’s first impulse on reading Alexis Lykiard’s latest verse collection, Schooled For Life, is to adapt Wilhelm Busch’s famous dictum Ist der Ruf erst ruiniert, lebt es sich recht ungeniert and remind ourselves of its possible converse: Wird der Ruf erst mal geehrt, lebt’s sich gaenzlich ungeniert. In other words:

Once your reputation is won, 
You can live a life of fun.

For there is no doubt here that Alexis, having claimed his bardic laurels to join the pantheon, is having a great deal of fun at the expense of a number of cockshies, including settling old scores for slipper-thrashings from the missile-throwing pedagogues and catechising clergymen of his schooldays, as well as taking well-aimed pot-shots at vaunted British poets of a certain vintage and at pundits who have earned his opprobrium, not forgetting his risking lese-majesty with broadsides unleashed to singe the monarch’s kin. 


Bitingly satirical and mischievously satyrical by turns, but always classically-Attically aphoristic (Alexis’s signature grace note), these poems may be enjoyed for their allusiveness just as much as for their neatly turned wit and banter. Witness, then, his chronicling of the privations of prep school life, where the nascent poet was . . .

. . . definitively marked for life.

Marked for Life — despite, we suspect, his schoolboy essays most likely scoring Alpha Plus — was no doubt an alternative title the poet spiked for this verse collection. In fact, such a poignant phrase captures the mood of Alexis’s troubled post-war childhood of exile and assimilation, as he seeks reassurance, recording the past in B-movie monochrome; how he was:

. . . desperate to fit in, own up, and accept my fate . . .
                                          . . . Those times,
elusive yet recurrent, slow to fade away,
aren’t so disturbing to return to — younger days
of ’48, remembered rather as dark grey,
exhaustingly austere, too drab for love or hate.    

A mood he countered, we learn, by his immersion between Chapel and Corps (organ music was a sonorous bore) in eclectic reading matter, including the novels of Charles Kingsley, a boyhood taste shared by a poet of enviable metrical brilliance from an earlier generation, Roy Fuller. In fact, Fuller’s account of reading Hypatia* is to be found in his fine novel of 1959, The Ruined Boys, in which he charts lost innocence much as Alexis does here in his own verses . . . 

New troops of ruined boys fall in now, older soldiers gone . . .

and, of course, both poets appropriate the Master’s foreboding voice of 1930, Auden’s They gave the prizes to the ruined boys

Readers of Alexis’s verses have learned to be alert to such allusive ludic nudges to his confraternity of pantheonic heroes born of his omnivorous appetite for the bon mot. When he isn’t head-butting sycophantic laureates and other toadies or savaging ‘Faberized’ fellow-travelling poetasters and flâneurs, this hircine omnivore is — satyr-like — more characteristically in Dionysian pursuit of the teasing evidence of bliss or of the true life [that] goes on forgotten. (A quest for the cleansing truths he admires in fellow poet D J Enright, which prompts Alexis’s penetrating and touching tribute, Master of His Arts.)

It is due to that same omnivorousness that Alexis has absorbed the finesse of favourite precursors in his verses, we are pleased to find, particularly in a suite of poems documenting Alexis’s recollections of prison life as writer/teacher-in-residence in the 1980s, with such redolences as . . . 

. . . before this rapid cloudburst’s done
its worse, made space again for blue.  

. . . high chainlink fence. And so the shutter clicks
to recollect our borrowed time. 

In Captive Audience the observation of barracking inmates is demotically spot on: 

. . . Young dopers relish any whiff of farce . . .
. . . aware
enough to suss that Art’s 
an ancient con, a fancy caper, mere
time-displacing trick. 

These witty poems of reluctant pedagogy where roles are reversed, with pupil turned educationist or even graduating to Brit. Council bratpacker, recall to mind the night classes taught by sometime Movement poet, Laurence Lerner, whose Those girls, those girls . . .  (who imbibe a knowledge they believe to be / objective: not about themselves or me) is still remembered with fondness, an unresolved conundrum of Socratics that also calls to mind the case that the works of pedagogic poets comprise an actual genre in the classification of verse and here, in Alexis Lykiard’s Schooled For Life, there’s a respectable portion of it.

So an English education, both private and state-run — in all its incarnations and incarcerations, extramural and intramural — is Alexis’s overarching theme. Alexis’s atavistic Greekness and his relish for the niceties of English idiom are especially apparent in his first memories of school in 1946, when hors de combat on the . . .

First day at day school, 
in the Morning Break, I broke
my arm . . .

and he becomes even more the Hellenist when invalided out of school . . .

. . . as lapsed Stoic, 
my first words to the doctor
had been “I suffer”.

This canny adaptability of the chameleonic émigré — alert to local colour — is confirmed later when [following a kangaroo court in the dorm] . . .

Holding fast under duress, 
hedonist Greek, I feigned becoming Spartan

A representative example of his narrative voice is his Chaps in Chapel and its elegiac conclusion that hints at immanence when recapturing his awkward past . . .

The Truth did not belong to some religionist 
more likely to All people that on earth do dwell.’
Fate or capricious genes will dole out our few days;
The sole concern is living well. Yet idols cast their spell:
Vainly we look skyward, though shadows need no praise. 

However, this callow crisis of belief apart, it is difficult to quite see why Alexis the Dionysian maker of verses — whose flannel shorts stayed up via serpent-clasp elastic belt — dismisses the motto of his old school as obscure. (Radley: Sicut serpentes, sicut columbae. ‘Be wise as snakes and gentle as doves.’) 

Surely there is no better motto for summoning up the uneasy duality that haunts the exilic poet?

Sicut serpentes, sicut columbae.
‘. . . . I’d learned enough from books, from boys behaving badly,
The time was ripe to take my leave of privilege and Radley.’

For more musings on precocious schoolboy poets (writing in Latin and in Herodotean Greek), see:

* For the Hypatian Erotica Awards (inspired by Charles Kingsley’s novel) awarded for  High Victorian literary texts teetering on the carnal brink, see:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/hypatian-erotica-awards-high-victorian.html

Saturday 23 January 2016

Stoneburgh Spy Campus . . . B.A.R. . . . ‘Please Burn After Reading’ Rubs Out Accountability of Command. (Part 6.)

Earlier this week, passing through the parklands of Stoneburgh in the bright winter sunlight, under a cloudless sky, I was reminded of a former denizen of our garrison town  –  our celebrated double agent, Irina P. – striding along the selfsame path in her military double-breasted coat (cadet-issue, a special indulgence!). She, too, in those early years of our acquaintance, was truly enamoured of our historic military academy . . . as I recorded in my memoir, Red Coffee* . . . 
[Irina] could scarcely believe her good fortune. The six historic cannon evenly spaced along the South Terrace, the great Park, the ornamental Lake, the Piranesian vaulted library, all conspired to create a classically golden atmosphere of privilege and distinction in which she basked. The day was warm; the month was March; Shirt Sleeve Order was five weeks away. She sat at the lakeside and wrote an airmail to her sister.  Irina described Stoneburgh as a ‘time capsule’. In her own country Time and Change raced like the clouds reflected on the water. She could not conceal her yearning to ‘remain always in ancestral gardens, seated on soft grass, without thinking’. 
     So you can imagine I was brooding on the duplicities of our tradecraft and on its pervasion of even the most humdrum routines of domestic life, including the demands of my daily jog, when I spotted Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener lounging on a bench in the sunniest corner of the colonnade. (Prof. Weissener, as I have mentioned in my earlier despatches, was formerly an agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, and is now Stoneburgh’s senior lecturer on politico-criminalistics, a respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion.)
     

‘Please Burn After Reading.’

Prof. Weissener put down his newspaper as I approached and pointed to a headline with his unlit briar pipe:
UK’S EU EXIT: ‘MEMORY-MEN’ CIVIL SERVANTS 
FOIL FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACTIVISTS

Speaking of the implications of preserving secrecy, as to the UK Government’s plans in the event of Britons voting Britain exit from the European Union, the former Senior Government Economist in the British Civil Service said today: ‘The Civil Service will have to do much preparatory work on trade and migration, so I think there’ll be a lot of highly classified work retained mentally. How much civil servants write down is a different question – that is one of the potential drawbacks of the world of Freedom of Information we live in – so, actually, if the Chancellor does not want anything written down [to avoid disclosure of plans to campaigners and journalists] then that is the way it will be.’   
     ‘Memory-men at Whitehall!’ His laugh was harsh. ‘Evidently one of the Mandarins has heeded my faculty Induction Lecture for the New Intake Group! Rule Number 9. It is extremely unwise to leave a paper trail if you intend to outpace the hostiles.’
     Sunlight glared on his spectacles so I could not see his eyes.
     He playfully wagged his finger to include me in the ranks of his favoured antagonists.
     ‘You more than most are familiar with the platitudinous exculpation of our spymasters: “Should you choose to accept this mission and you are captured or killed, the Government and the Service will disavow any knowledge of your actions.” 
     ‘You mean the St Catherine’s House Switcheroo?’
     (I should explain that the St Catherine’s House Record Office, near Aldwych in central London, was at one time the primary source of intelligence agents’ false identities; our agents themselves had, as a ghoulish test of initiative, the task of locating a death certificate of a child whose birthdate and forename was closest to their own. Armed with the dead child’s birth certificate and shared forename, the agent was then able to assume a new mask and build a complete ‘back-story’, including intimate knowledge of the locale where the child had lived and died.  It was by the integrity of this fake identity that the plausibility and confidence of an agent in the field was sustained. In addition, of course, all essential documentation – passport, driving licence, bank account and national insurance card – were issued in the dead child’s name.)
     ‘Agreed,’ I added. ‘No paper trail. No comebacks. Unless the paper trail’s a false one . . . and one that would certainly NOT lead back to our masters.’
     ‘B.A.R. Burn After Reading. All government agencies, including our Intelligence Services, have that ultimate recourse, of course, and there’s always the principal’s washroom for surreptitious briefings, with or without the facility of eidetic recall.’


Memory-Men Bumped Off.

Prof. Weissener laid his cane aside and, after some deft preliminaries, lit his pipe.
     ‘But what of Cicero,’ he mused, ‘and his memory-man?’ Weissener – our most senior expert in the art of cryptanalysis – sent out an unreadable smoke signal as he spoke. ‘Cicero retained a nomenclator.’
     ‘A what?
     ‘A Mnemonist. A Remembrancer or Prompter. A mnemonically gifted aide-de-camp. A nomenclator was often an astute polyglottic slave. Cicero’s man was charged to keep a roll call in his head of Cicero’s supporters together with a tally of all his master’s enemies. During his consulate, when Cicero declared martial law and upheld it by imposing the death penalty on conspirators against the Republic, I have no doubt that in the course of all those labyrinthine machinations his nomenclator was the repository of many of Cicero’s stratagems, an advantage that the Freedom of Information Act no longer permits our public officials here in Londinium, private email accounts notwithstanding!’ 
     ‘A human databank that walks and remains sober? An obvious security risk.
     ‘Too true. To be a nomenclator in Roman times could be dicey. Wasn’t it Claudius who threw his memory-man to the lions. Maybe the poor fellow knew too much.’
      ‘Yes, a memory-man bumped off with a head full of ciphers,’ I ventured. ‘Surely that was the climax of Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps?’
       ‘There you are then.’ Prof. Weissener rose and stretched and favoured me with a grin, a rare concession.


Here lie the bones
of Aristarchus, freedman,
nomenclator.
Roman sepulchral inscription, 1st century AD.


‘The Art of Covering Your Tracks.’

Stoneburgh’s Senior Lecturer in Politico-Criminalistics fell into step beside me as we walked to the Refectory for morning coffee.
     ‘You know, after Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington reviewed a number of our passing out parades here on this very quad; apart from attending our Commissioning Dinners.’
     Prof. Weissener knocked out his pipe on the wheel of a gun carriage.
     ‘Now he knew the Art of Covering Your Tracks. A cunning devil whose actions we could all learn by.’
      The keen eyes of Weissener were alert to judge my response. 
      ‘Funnily enough, I was told this tale by the Chelsea Hospital Commandant. And he’s straight as an arrow himself.  The way he told it, the duke’s battle plan was to rarely give orders verbally. If an order had to be conveyed to one of his commanders holding a distant terrain, he was obliged to write them down and entrust them to an ADC to deliver them for him on a charger.  But listen to this. The duke’s strategy to preserve the infallibility of his command as a tactician was absurdly simple.  His orders were not written on paper – no, far too fragile in such conditions – nor were his commands written with quill and ink obviously in the field. Far too precarious under fire.’
     Weissener cleared the dottle from his pipe with a ballpoint pen and replaced them in the breast pocket of his Norfolk jacket.
     ‘No. On the battlefield, Wellington carried a sheaf of specially-treated ass and goat skins.  About the size of cloakroom tickets. He could write on these with pencil and once the orders were read, the skins could be wiped clean, preparatory to writing a new set of orders. How devilishly simple! By this method he neatly sidestepped the accountability of command! The clever fellow was never caught out in error . . . ’
     ‘. . .  Because he never left a paper trail!’ I completed with amused complicity.  I had never before seen the professor with such a pronounced Machiavellian disposition.
      ‘We should take a leaf from his book!’ the Professor Weissener concluded with a flourish of his cane. ‘The Cabinet Office should bring back vellum!’
      ‘Or publish and be damned,I murmured.


We ought to have more of the Cavalry between the two
high roads.  That is to say three Brigades at least besides
the Brigades in observation on the Right . . .   


* Sister Morphine (2008) see below . . . 

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)