theinkbrain.wordpress.com Open in urlscan Pro
192.0.78.12  Public Scan

Form analysis
4 forms found in the DOM

GET https://theinkbrain.wordpress.com

<form method="get" id="searchform" action="https://theinkbrain.wordpress.com"><input type="text" class="textbox" value="" name="s" id="s"><input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search"></form>

GET https://theinkbrain.wordpress.com

<form action="https://theinkbrain.wordpress.com" method="get"><label class="screen-reader-text" for="cat">Blog Categories</label><select name="cat" id="cat" class="postform">
    <option value="-1">Select Category</option>
    <option class="level-0" value="726">Authors</option>
    <option class="level-0" value="187009">Books and Reviews</option>
    <option class="level-0" value="18">Music</option>
    <option class="level-0" value="3748">Non-fiction</option>
    <option class="level-0" value="423">Poems</option>
    <option class="level-0" value="287551">Poets and Poetry</option>
    <option class="level-0" value="955">Stories</option>
    <option class="level-0" value="5297">Translations</option>
  </select>
</form>

POST https://subscribe.wordpress.com

<form method="post" action="https://subscribe.wordpress.com" accept-charset="utf-8" style="display: none;">
  <div class="actnbr-follow-count">Join 138 other subscribers</div>
  <div>
    <input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Enter your email address" class="actnbr-email-field" aria-label="Enter your email address">
  </div>
  <input type="hidden" name="action" value="subscribe">
  <input type="hidden" name="blog_id" value="10281708">
  <input type="hidden" name="source" value="https://theinkbrain.wordpress.com/">
  <input type="hidden" name="sub-type" value="actionbar-follow">
  <input type="hidden" id="_wpnonce" name="_wpnonce" value="a3d94b7186">
  <div class="actnbr-button-wrap">
    <button type="submit" value="Sign me up"> Sign me up </button>
  </div>
</form>

<form id="jp-carousel-comment-form">
  <label for="jp-carousel-comment-form-comment-field" class="screen-reader-text">Write a Comment...</label>
  <textarea name="comment" class="jp-carousel-comment-form-field jp-carousel-comment-form-textarea" id="jp-carousel-comment-form-comment-field" placeholder="Write a Comment..."></textarea>
  <div id="jp-carousel-comment-form-submit-and-info-wrapper">
    <div id="jp-carousel-comment-form-commenting-as">
      <fieldset>
        <label for="jp-carousel-comment-form-email-field">Email (Required)</label>
        <input type="text" name="email" class="jp-carousel-comment-form-field jp-carousel-comment-form-text-field" id="jp-carousel-comment-form-email-field">
      </fieldset>
      <fieldset>
        <label for="jp-carousel-comment-form-author-field">Name (Required)</label>
        <input type="text" name="author" class="jp-carousel-comment-form-field jp-carousel-comment-form-text-field" id="jp-carousel-comment-form-author-field">
      </fieldset>
      <fieldset>
        <label for="jp-carousel-comment-form-url-field">Website</label>
        <input type="text" name="url" class="jp-carousel-comment-form-field jp-carousel-comment-form-text-field" id="jp-carousel-comment-form-url-field">
      </fieldset>
    </div>
    <input type="submit" name="submit" class="jp-carousel-comment-form-button" id="jp-carousel-comment-form-button-submit" value="Post Comment">
  </div>
</form>

Text Content

 * Home
 * About
 * 


THEINKBRAIN


LITERARY AND OTHER THOUGHTS

Feeds: Posts Comments



CERTAIN THINGS LAST: SHERWOOD ANDERSON

15 April, 2013 by theinkbrain

Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a year now I have been thinking of writing a certain book. “Well, tomorrow
I’ll get at it,” I’ve been saying to myself. Every night when I get into bed I
think about the book. The people that are to be put between its covers dance
before my eyes. I live in the city of Chicago and at night motor trucks go
rumbling along the roadway outside my house. Not so very far away there is an
elevated railroad and after twelve o’clock at night trains pass at pretty long
intervals. Before it began I went to sleep during one of the quieter intervals
but now that the idea of writing this book has got into me I lie awake and
think.
For one thing it is hard to get the whole idea of the book fixed in the setting
of the city I live in now. I wonder if you, who do not try to write books,
perhaps will understand what I mean. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. It is a
little hard to explain. You see, it’s something like this.                      
                                                                               
                                                                               
                                                   

You as a reader will, some evening or some afternoon, be reading in my book and
then you will grow tired of reading and put it down. You will go out of your
house and into the street. The sun is shining and you meet people you know.
There are certain facts of your life just the same as of mine. If you are a man,
you go from your house to an office and sit at a desk where you pick up a
telephone and begin to talk about some matter of business with a client or a
customer of your house. If you are an honest housewife, the ice man has come or
there drifts into your mind the thought that yesterday you forgot to remember
some detail concerned with running your house. Little outside thoughts come and
go in your mind, and it is so with me too. For example when I have written the
above sentence, I wonder why I have written the words “honest housewife.” A
housewife I suppose can be as dishonest as I can. What I am trying to make clear
is that, as a writer, I am up against the same things that confront you, as a
reader.
What I want to do is to express in my book a sense of the strangeness that has
gradually, since I was a boy, been creeping more and more into my feeling about
everyday life. It would all be very simple if I could write of life in an
interior city of China or in an African forest. A man I know has recently told
me of another man who, wanting to write a book about Parisian life and having no
money to go to Paris to study the life there, went instead to the city of New
Orleans. He had heard that many people lived in New Orleans whose ancestors were
French. “They will have retained enough of the flavor of Parisian life for me to
get the feeling,” he said to himself. The man told me that the book turned out
to be very successful and that the city of Paris read with delight a translation
of his work as a study of French life, and I am only sorry I can’t find as
simple a way out of my own job. The whole point with me is that my wish to write
this book springs from a somewhat different notion. “If I can write everything
out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened,” I say
to myself and smile. During these days I spend a good deal of time smiling at
nothing. It bothers people. “What are you smiling about now?” they ask, and I am
up against as hard a job trying to answer as I am trying to get underway with my
book.
Sometimes in the morning I sit down at my desk and begin writing, taking as my
subject a scene from my own boyhood.
Very well, I am coming home from school. The town in which I was born and raised
was a dreary, lonely little place in the far western section of the state of
Nebraska, and I imagine myself walking along one of its streets. Sitting upon a
curbing before a store is a sheep herder who has left his flock many miles away
in the foothills at the base of the western mountains and has come into our
town, for what purpose he himself does not seem to know. He is a bearded man
without a hat and sits with his mouth slightly open, staring up and down the
street. There is a half-wild uncertain look in his eyes and his eyes have
awakened a creepy feeling in me. I hurry away with a kind of dread of some
unknown thing eating at my vital organs.  Old men are great talkers. It may be
that only kids know the real terror of loneliness.
I have tried, you see, to start my book at that particular point in my own life.
“If I can catch exactly the feeling of that afternoon of my boyhood, I can give
the reader the key to my character,” I tell myself.
The plan won’t work. When I have written five, ten, fifteen hundred words, I
stop writing and look out at my window. A man is driving a team of horses
hitched to a wagon-load of coal along my street and is swearing at another man
who drives a Ford. They have both stopped and are cursing each other.
The coal wagon driver’s face is black with coal dust but anger has reddened his
cheeks and the red and black have produced
a dusky brown like the skin of a Negro. I have got up from my typewriter and
walk up and down in my room smoking cigarettes. My fingers pick up little things
on my desk and then put them down.
I am nervous like the race horses I used to be with at one period of my boyhood.
Before a race and when they had been brought out on the tracks before all the
people and before the race started, their legs quivered. Sometimes there was a
horse got into such a state that when the race started he would do nothing.
“Look at him. He can’t untrack himself,” we said.
Right now I am in that state about my book. I run to the typewriter, write for a
time, and then walk nervously about. I smoke a whole package of cigarettes
during the morning.
And then suddenly I have again torn up all I have written. “It won’t do,” I have
told myself. In this book I am not intending to try to give you the story of my
life. “What of life, any man’s life?—forked radishes running about, writing
declarations of independence, telling themselves little lies, having dreams,
getting puffed up now and then with what is called greatness. Life begins, runs
its course and ends,” a man I once knew told me one evening, and it is true.
Even as I write these words a hearse is going through my street. Two young
girls, who are going off with two young men to walk I suppose in the fields
where the city ends, stop laughing for a moment and look up at the hearse. It
will be a moment before they forget the passing hearse and begin laughing again.
“A life is like that, it passes like that,” I say to myself as I tear up my
sheets and begin again walking and smoking the cigarettes. If you think I am
sad, having these thoughts about the brevity and insignificance of a life, you
are mistaken. In the state I am in such things do not matter. “Certain things
last,” I say to myself. “One might make things a little clear. One might even
imagine a man, say a Negro, going along a city street and humming a song. It
catches the ear of another man who repeats it on the next day. A thin strand of
song, like a tiny stream far up in some hill, begins to flow down into the wide
plains. It waters the fields. It freshens the air above a hot stuffy city.”
Now I have got myself worked up into a state. I am always doing that these days.
I write again and again tear up my words.
I go out of my room and walk about.
I have been with a woman I have found and who loves me. It has happened that I
am a man who has not been loved by women and have all my life been awkward and a
little mixed up when in their presence. Perhaps I have had too much respect for
them, have wanted them too much. That may be. Anyway I am not so rattled in her
presence.
She, I think, has a certain control over herself and that is helpful to me. When
I am with her I keep smiling to myself and thinking, “It would be rather a joke
all around if she found me out.”
When she is looking in another direction I study her a little. That she should
seem to like me so much surprises me and I am sore at my own surprise. I grow
humble and do not like my humbleness either. “What is she up to? She is very
lovely. Why is she wasting her time with me?”
I shall remember always certain hours when I have been with her. Late on a
certain Sunday afternoon I remember I sat in a chair in a room in her apartment.
I sat with my hand against my cheek, leaning a little forward. I had dressed
myself carefully because I was going to see her, had put on my best suit of
clothes. My hair was carefully combed and my glasses carefully balanced on my
rather large nose. And there I was, in her apartment in a certain city, in a
chair in a rather dark corner, with my hand against my cheek, looking as solemn
as an old owl. We had been walking about and had come into the house and she had
gone away leaving me sitting there, as I have said. The apartment was in a part
of the city where many foreign people live and from my chair I could, by turning
my head a little, look down into a street filled with Italians.
It was growing dark outside and I could just see the people in the street. If I
cannot remember facts about my own and other people’s lives, I can always
remember every feeling that has gone through me, or that I have thought went
through anyone about me. The men going along the street below the window all had
dark swarthy faces and nearly all of them wore, somewhere about them, a spot of
color. The younger men, who walked with a certain swagger, all had on flaming
red ties. The street was dark but far down the street there was a spot where a
streak of sunlight still managed to find its way in between two tall buildings
and fell sharp against the face of a smaller red-brick building. It pleased my
fancy to imagine the street had also put on a red necktie, perhaps because there
would be lovemaking along the street before Monday morning.
Anyway I sat there looking and thinking such thoughts as came to me. The women
who went along the street nearly all had dark colored shawls drawn up about
their faces. The road-way was filled with children whose voices made a sharp
tinkling sound.
My fancy went out of my body in a way of speaking, I suppose, and I began
thinking of myself as being at that moment in a city in Italy. Americans like
myself who have not traveled are always doing that. I suppose the people of
another nation would not understand how doing it is almost necessity in our
lives, but any American will understand. The American, particularly a
middle-American, sits as I was doing at that moment, dreaming you understand,
and suddenly he is in Italy or in a Spanish town where a dark-looking man is
riding a bony horse along a street, or he is being driven over the Russian
steppes in a sled by a man whose face is all covered with whiskers. It is an
idea of the Russians got from looking at cartoons in newspapers but it answers
the purpose. In the distance a pack of wolves are following the sled.A fellow I
once knew told me that Americans are always up to such tricks because all of our
old stories and dreams have come to us from over the sea and because we have no
old stories and dreams of our own. Of that I can’t say. I am not putting myself
forward as a thinker on the subject of the causes of the characteristics of the
American people or any other monstrous or important matter of that kind. But
anyway, there I was, sitting, as I have told you, in the Italian section of an
American city and dreaming of myself being in Italy.
To be sure I wasn’t alone. Such a fellow as myself never is alone in his dreams.
And as I sat having my dream, the woman with whom I had been spending the
afternoon, and with whom I am no doubt what is called “in love,” passed between
me and the window through which I had been looking. She had on a dress of some
soft clinging stuff and her slender figure made a very lovely line across the
light. Well, she was like a young tree you might see on a hill, in a windstorm
perhaps.
What I did, as you may have supposed, was to take her with me into Italy.
The woman became at once, and in my dream, a very beautiful princess in a
strange land I have never visited. It may be that when I was a boy in my western
town some traveler came there to lecture on life in Italian cities before a club
that met at the Presbyterian church and to which my mother belonged, or perhaps
later I read some novel the name of which I can’t remember. And so my princess
had come down to me along a path out of a green wooded hill where her castle was
located. She had walked under blossoming trees in the uncertain evening light
and some blossoms had fallen on her black hair. The perfume of Italian nights
was in her hair. That notion came into my head. That’s what I mean.
What really happened was that she saw me sitting there lost in my dream and,
coming to me, rumpled my hair and upset the glasses perched on my big nose and,
having done that, went laughing out of the room.
I speak of all this because later, on that same evening, I lost all notion of
the book I am now writing and sat until three in the morning writing on another
book, making the woman the central figure. “It will be a story of old times,
filled with moons and stars and the fragrance of half-decayed trees in an old
land,” I told myself, but when I had written many pages I tore them up too.
“Something has happened to me or I should not be filled with the idea of writing
this book at all,” I told myself going to my window to look out at the night.
“At a certain hour of a certain day and in a certain place, something happened
that has changed the whole current of my life. “The thing to be done,” I then
told myself, “is to begin writing my book by telling as clearly as I can the
adventures of that certain moment.”



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
A task one hopes to complete and yet defers because it cannot be begun is
perfectly expressed by the the word the Romans thought they heard in the cry of
the raven – “cras, cras,” meaning “tomorrow, tomorrow” – and which symbolises 
hope as well as procrastination. This seems to aptly echo the predicament
adumbrated by Sherwood Anderson in this essay “Certain Things Last”, which he
wrote sometime in the twenties, and which was found among his papers and
published only in 1992.

We do not know if it was ever intended for publication; indeed, we cannot even
know for certain if he completed the piece. All writers feel this way at times
about the things they write, because they know what a devilishly difficult job
the task of writing can present. Noah’s raven, and the first to be released from
the ark, (unlike his second envoy the docile dove) never returned. We may wonder
what happened to it, and how it was reunited with its mate who presumably was
released after the flood subsided. But reunited they must have been, on some
hopeful ‘tomorrow,’ for the world veritably teems with ravens and their ilk.

Anderson’s ‘tomorrow,’ after a difficult boyhood and adolescence in the small
and typically claustrophobic town of Clyde, Ohio, led to the occupation of
writer. By his own account, his best known work, a compilation of 22 stories
published under the title of Winesburg, Ohio, came to him all in a rush.  

> “…it was a late fall night and raining…I was there naked in the bed and I
> sprang up. I went to my typewriter and began to write. It was there, under
> those circumstances, myself sitting near an open window, the rain occasionally
> blowing in and wetting my bare back, that I did my first writing…I wrote it,
> as I wrote them all, complete in the one sitting…The rest of the stories in
> the book came out of me on succeeding evenings, and sometimes during the day
> while I worked in the advertising office…”

But “Some Things Last” seems to tell a different story. As the cry of the raven
suggests, the exercise of writing requires the disordering of time. Anderson’s
writing career commenced after a mental breakdown, shortly after which he
abandoned his family. Four days after he ‘disappeared’, he was found  thirty
miles away in Cleveland, having walked that distance. He never went back home.

In order to make its way into writing, the past must be recollected, relived and
recreated. It must sometimes be artificially rearranged and reordered before it
can be placed in front of a reader, and if that weren’t enough cause for dismay,
past and present, these two parallel and simultaneously unfolding tracks must be
made to seem to come seamlessly together.

The task set for himself here by Anderson, that of trying to grasp at the
flickering pattern cast by scattered thoughts and  then to collect them for an
arrangement to set on the page, is the perennial bane and delight of the writer.
I don’t know if this is a task which may be better accomplished by a woman
writer; certainly women like Virginia Woolf excelled at it, but Anderson shows
us how a virtue may be made of stumbling. He conveys the slipperiness of the the
whole process  so vividly that even to  someone who doesn’t think much about
writing, the feeling of helplessness and unease comes wholly through. The
hopeless feeling of being unable to ferry a thought from the having to the
expressing of it is particularly acute when the ability to do it remains lost
somewhere that is not amenable to recall.  It is like floating in dark water and
trying to remember how to move one’s arms and legs. I think this is in part
because the language of recall is not strictly speaking ‘language’ but a kind of
code conveyed in images.



“Some Things Last” is writing thrice removed: it is writing that shows how a
writer writes about writing. There is self-revelation in it, but only so much.
Anderson is willing to reveal that he smokes somewhat to excess, but not that he
drinks, though drink he did. His death in 1941 at the age of 64 – while  he and
his fourth wife Eleanor Copenhaver were on a cruise to South America – was
caused by peritonitis following the accidental ingestion of a toothpick from
either a martini or an hors d’ oeuvre, though I rather think it was the former 
than the latter.

Whether lubricated by alcohol or  driven by digressiveness or restlessness,
Anderson’s mind, resorts to narratives of flowing images, even as he anxiously
attempts to impose order and structure on his wayward thoughts in order to
secure an outcome. He in turn surrenders and attempts to control in order to
impose a shape or a structure or even an account of something written. Indeed
one cannot be certain if this piece of writing was guided to its intended
conclusion, or if it simply petered out at an impasse or a cul de sac with
nowhere else to go and no way to turn back. “What is the point?” we wonder. Is
it only to show that the writing of a book is a difficult enterprise, and that
someone  who sets him- or herself to the task must contend with endless
distractions, diversions and detours on the way to getting the job done? Or is
it to reveal the unruly nature of the process, how the very thoughts that must
make up the content turn out to be perturbations, which as they move away from
their point of origin, take one further and further away from the goal? Writers 
must learn to negotiate these obstacles, for they can never quite be overcome.

It would seem that a solution to the writer’s dilemma must be found in a
skillful compromise. The kind of aimless undirected dreamy musings, the fragile
repositories of vivid and detailed imagery, must be permitted to go on unimpeded
even as some agent of the thinking self stands by to take notes. And it seems
that Anderson possessed a good note-taker, since it was he who wrote “She had on
a dress of some clinging stuff and her slender figure made a very lovely line
across the light” and  “she was like a young tree you might see on a hill  in a
windstorm perhaps…..”    

One of the chief difficulties of writing is that what is written about, the
sights, smells and sensations of it, come almost always from a different time
and place from when the writing takes place. They are imported from another
world, which has to be recalled and recreated in the mind at the moment of
writing. The writer has to recall them from when, like a traveller, he or she 
had to keep track of that place in the country, that path,  and the details 
observed while on it, and the objects which were chosen to bring back from the
journey.  Then, as now, there were problems to be solved – what could properly 
be packed – what carried – and how these things would look when placed in the
writer’s parlour or on the mantel. Would they bring back the sights and smells
they seemed to be imbued  with  at the first encounter? Or would they become
lifeless and incongruous when removed from their proper context, when forced to
inhabit an unnatural place? Should the suggestion of the princess who lives in
the castle at the end of the path along the green, wooded hill, be permitted to
intrude? Yes, perhaps because it seems to echo the diffident insecurity this
writer felt about his woman friend. And the blossoming trees, the evening light
and the flowers in her dark hair must come along too. Then of course, black hair
and Italian nights, which are shadowy counterparts of each other, must gain
admittance as well. If in the next moments one ‘goes to his window to look out
at the night,’ one might see, instead of the spark-sprinkled darkness of a
sleeping city, “the moon and stars, and half-decayed trees in an old land.’

The thoughts and images we carry away from our inward travels seem to undergo a
change when made to enter the outside world. They are like poems which resist
being translated into a different language. The greatest care must be taken so
that they do not become mere representations of what they truly are in their own
voice and  tongue. The difference between the inner and outer life is not always
bridgeable, something most writers simultaneously accept and struggle mightily
against.



The task of moving words from mind to paper, of trapping moments vivid with life
and fixing them on the page, can seem daunting at times. The troublesomeness and
difficulty of committing to memory the elusive phenomena of fleeting suggestions
of thoughts and brief flares of barely glimpsed images as they pass through the
mind seem at times quite hopeless, and recollecting them seems like gathering
leaves blown by the wind. Time too is not durable. It warps and bends in the
attempt to draw it through the lens of memory.  Are these what Anderson refers
to as ‘the adventures of that certain moment?’ Are they fit to be the chosen
subject of a piece of writing?  Or should they be consigned to some vague
designation of questionable value, to occupy the limbo between something which
used to be either sustaining or memorable but is no longer, but is now discarded
and stale as an old torn photograph or a half-eaten meal left neglected to grow
cold on the kitchen table? Are these some things that last? Are they?




RATE THIS:

i

12 Votes



Posted in Authors, Non-fiction, Stories | Tagged American short stories,
American Writers, Certain Things Last, Sherwood Anderson | 16 Comments »


PARTHENOPE: REBECCA WEST

24 January, 2013 by theinkbrain

Rebecca West (December 21 1892 – March 15 1983)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Uncle Arthur had red hair that lay close to his head in flat, circular curls,
and a pointed red beard, and his blue-green eyes were at once penetrating and
bemused. He was the object of mingled derision and respect in our family. He was
a civil servant who had early attracted attention by his brilliance; but the
chief of his department, like so many English civil servants, was an author in
his spare time, and when he published a history of European literature, my uncle
reviewed it in the leading weekly of the day, pointing out that large as was the
number of works in the less familiar languages that his chief supposed to be
written in prose, though in fact they were written in verse, it was not so large
as the number of such works that he supposed to be written in verse, though in
fact they were written in prose. He wrote without malice, simply thinking his
chief would be glad to know. My uncle never connected this review with his
subsequent failure to gain a promotion that had seemed certain, or to have the
day as snug as civil servants usually had it in the nineteenth century. But in
the course of time his chief died, and my uncle rose to be an important
official. However, he did a Cabinet Minister much the same service he had
rendered his chief, and he never received the title that normally went with his
post.
So he seesawed through life, and I liked his company very much when he was an
old man and I was a young girl, for it was full of surprises. When I asked him a
question, I never  knew if his answer would show that he knew far less than I
did or far more; and though he was really quite old, for he was my father’s
elder by many years, he often made discoveries such as a schoolchild might make,
and shared them with an enthusiasm as little adult. One day he gave me no peace
till I had come with him to see the brightest field of buttercups he had ever
found near London; it lay, solid gold, beside the great Jacobean mansion Ham
House, by the river Thames. After we had admired it he took me to nearby
Petersham Church, to see another treasure, the tomb of Captain Vancouver, who
gave his name to the island; my uncle liked this tomb because he had spent some
years of his boyhood in Canada and had been to Vancouver Island when it was
hardly inhabited. Then we had tea in an inn garden and it happened that the girl
who waited on us was called away by the landlord as she set the china on the
table. His voice came from the kitchen: “Parthenope! Parthenope!” My uncle
started, for no very good reason that I could see. There had been a time when
many ships in the British Navy were called after characters in Greek history and
mythology, male and female, and therefore many sailors’ daughters had been given
the names of nymphs and goddesses and Homeric princesses and heroines of Greek
tragedy. The only strange thing was that it was a long time since British ships
had been christened so poetically, and most of the women who had acquired these
classical names by this secondary interest were by now old or middle-aged, while
our little waitress was very young. She had, as she told us when she came back,
been called after a grandmother. But my uncle was plainly shaken by hearing
those four syllables suddenly borne on the afternoon air. His thin hand plucked
at the edge of the tablecloth, he cast down his eyes, his head began to nod and
shake. He asked me if he had ever told me the story of the Admiral and his seven
daughters, in a tone that suggested that he knew he had not and was still trying
to make up his mind whether he wanted to tell it now. Indeed, he told me very
little that day though I was to hear the whole of it before he died.
The story began at the house of my grandmother’s sister, Alice Darrell, and it
could hardly have happened anywhere else. When her husband, an officer in the
Indian Army, died of fever, her father-in-law had given her a house that he had
recently and reluctantly inherited and could not sell because it was part of an
entailed estate. He apologized for the gift, pleading justly that he could not
afford to buy her another, and she accepted it bravely. But the house lay in a
district that would strain anybody’s bravery. To reach it, one travelled about
eight miles out of London along the main Hammersmith Road, the dullest of
highways, and then turned left and found something worse. For some forgotten
reason, there had sprung up at this point a Hogarthian slum, as bad as anything
in the East End, which turned into a brawling hell every Saturday night. Beyond
this web of filthy hovels lay flatlands covered by orchards and farmlands and
market gardens, among which there had been set down three or four large houses.
There was nothing to recommend the site. The Thames was not far distant, and it
was comprehensible enough that along its bank there had been built a line of
fine houses, But at Alice Darrell’s there was no view of the river, though it
lay near enough to shroud the region in mist during the winter months. It was
true that the gardens had an alluvial fertility, but even they did not give the
pleasure they should have done, for the slum dwellers carried out periodical
raids on the strawberry beds and raspberry canes and orchards. These stranded
houses had been built in Regency times and were beautiful, though disconcerting,
because there was no reason why they should be there, and they were so oddly
placed in relation to each other. They all opened off the same narrow road, and
Aunt Alice’s house, Currivel Lodge, which was the smallest of them, lay at the
end of a drive, and there faced sideways, so that its upper windows looked
straight down on the garden of the much bigger house beside it, as that had been
built nearer the road. This meant that my grandaunt could not sit on the pretty
balcony outside her bedroom window without seeming to spy on her neighbours, so
she never used it. But when my Uncle Arthur went to stay with her as a little
boy, which was about a hundred years ago, nothing delighted him more than to
shut himself in his bedroom and kneel on his window and do what his Aunt Alice
could not bear to be suspected of doing.
Currivel Lodge should have been a dreary place for the child. There was nowhere
to walk and nowhere to ride. There was no village where one could watch the
blacksmith at his forge and the carpenter at his bench. In those days, nobody
rowed on the Thames anywhere but at Oxford, unless they were watermen earning
their living. There was little visiting, for it took a good hour to an hour and
a half to drive to London, and my needy grandaunt’s horses were old crocks. Her
children were all older than little Arthur. But he enjoyed his visit simply
because of the hours he spent on that window seat. I know the setting of the
scene on which he looked, since I often stayed in that house many years later;
for of course my grandaunt’s family never left it. When the entail came to an
end and the property could have been sold, there were the Zulu Wars, and South
African War, the First World War, and all meant that the occupants were too busy
or too troubled to move; and they were still living there when the house was
swept away in a town-planning scheme during the twenties. What Arthur in his day
and I in mine looked down on was a croquet lawn framed by trees, very tall
trees-so tall and strong, my uncle said with approval, that though one could not
see the river, one knew that there must be one not far away. Born and reared in
one of the wettest parts of Ireland, he regarded dry weather and a dry soil as
the rest of us regard dry bread.
To the left of his lawn, seen through foliage, was a stone terrace overgrown
with crimson and white roses. Behind the terrace rose the mellow red rectangle
of a handsome Regency house with a green copper cupola rising from its roof.
What my uncle saw there that was not there for me to see was a spectacle that
gave him the same soft of enjoyment I was to get from the ballet  Les Sylphides.
When the weather was fine, it often happened that there would come down the
broad stone steps of the terrace a number of princesses out of a fairy tale,
each dressed in a different pale but bright colour. Sometimes there were as few
as four of these princesses; occasionally there were as many as seven. Among the
colours that my uncle thought he remembered them wearing were hyacinth blue, the
green of the leaves of lilies of the valley, a silvery lilac that was almost
grey, a transparent red that was like one’s hand when one holds it up to a
strong light, primrose yellow, a watery jade green, and a gentle orange. The
dresses were made of muslin, and billowed in loops and swinging circles as their
wearers’ little feet carried them about in what was neither a dance nor the
everyday motion of ordinary people. It was as if these lovely, creatures were
all parts of a brave and sensitive and melancholy being, and were at once
confiding in each other about their griefs, which were their common grief, and
giving each other reassurance.
Some carried croquet mallets and went on to the lawn and started to play, while
the others sat down on benches to watch them. But sooner or later the players
would pause and forget to make the next stroke, move toward each other and stand
in a group, resting their mallets on the ground, and presently forget them and
let them fall, as the spectators rose from their seats to join them in their
exchange of confidences. Though they appeared in the garden as often as three
times a week, they always seemed to have as much to say to one another as if
they met but once a year; and they were always grave as they talked. There was a
wildness about them, it was impossible to tell what they would do next, one
might suddenly break away from the others and waltz round the lawn in the almost
visible arms of an invisible partner; but when they talked, they showed
restraint, they did not weep, though what they said was so plainly sad, and they
rarely laughed. What was true of one of them was true of all, for there seemed
very little difference between them. All were golden-headed. The only one who
could be told apart was the wearer of the lilac-grey dress. She was taller than
the rest, and often stood aloof while they clustered together and swayed and
spoke. Sometimes a woman in a black gown came down from the terrace and talked
to this separate one.
The girls in the coloured dresses were the seven daughters of the Admiral who
owned the house. My uncle saw him once, when he called on Alice Darrell to
discuss with her arrangements for repairing the wall between their properties: a
tall and handsome man with iron-grey hat, a probing, defensive gaze, and a mouth
so sternly compressed that it was a straight line across his face. The call
would never have been made had there not been business to discuss. The Admiral
would have no social relations with his neighbours; nobody had ever been invited
to his house. Nor, had such an invitation been sent, would Aunt Alice have
accepted it, for she thought he treated his daughters abominably. She could not
help smiling when she told her nephew their names, for they came straight off
the Navy List: Andromeda, Cassandra, Clytie, Hera, Parthenope, Arethusa, and
Persephone. But that was the only time she smiled when she spoke of them, for
she thought they had been treated with actual cruelty, though not in the way
that might have been supposed. They were not immured in this lonely house by a
father who wanted to keep them to himself; their case was the very opposite. The
Admiral’s daughters were, in effect, motherless. By Aunt Alice my Uncle Arthur
was told that the Admiral’s wife was an invalid and had to live in a mild
climate in the West of England, but from the servants he learned that she was
mad. Without a wife to soften him, the Admiral dealt with his daughters
summarily by sending each of them, as she passed her seventeenth birthday, to be
guided through the London season by his only sister, a wealthy woman with a
house in Berkeley Square, and by giving each to the first man of reasonably
respectable character who made her an offer of marriage. He would permit no
delay, though his daughters, who had inheritances from a wealthy grandfather, as
well as their beauty, would obviously have many suitors. These precipitate
marriages were always against the brides’ inclinations, for they had, strangely
enough, no desire but to go on living in their lonely home.
“They are,” Aunt Alice told her nephew, hesitating and looking troubled, “oddly
young for their ages. I know they are not old, and that they have lived a great
deal alone, since their mother cannot be with them. But they are really very
young for what they are.” They had yielded, it was said, only to the most brutal
pressure exercised by their father. It astonished my uncle that all this was
spoken of as something that had happened in the past. They did not look like
grown-up ladies as they wandered in the garden, yet all but two were wives, and
those two were betrothed, and some of them were already mothers. Parthenope, the
one with most character, the one who had charge of the house in her father’s
absence, had married a North Country landowner who was reputed to be a
millionaire. It was a pity that he was twice her age and had, by a dead wife, a
son almost as old as she was, but a fortune is a great comfort; and none of her
sisters was without some measure of that same kind of consolation. Nevertheless,
their discontent could be measured by the frequency with which they returned to
the house of their childhood.
The first time my uncle visited Currivel Lodge, the Admiral’s seven daughters
were only a spectacle for his distant enjoyment. But one day during his second
visit, a year later, his aunt asked him to deliver a note for Miss Parthenope at
the house next door. Another section of the wall between the properties was in
need of buttresses, and the builder had to have his orders. My uncle went up to
his bedroom and smoothed his hair and washed his face, a thing he had never done
before between morning and night of his own accord, and when he got to the
Admiral’s house, he told the butler, falsely but without a tremor, that he had
been told to give the note into Miss Parthenope’s own hands. It did not matter
to him that the butler looked annoyed at hearing this: too much was at stake. He
followed the butler’s offended back through several rooms full of fine
furniture, which were very much like the rooms to which he was accustomed, but
had a sleepy air, as if the windows were closed, though they were not. In one
there were some dolls thrown down on the floor, though he had never heard that
there were any children living in the house. In the last room, which opened on
the stone terrace and its white and crimson roses, a woman in a black dress with
a suggestion of a uniform about it was sitting at an embroidery frame. She
stared at him as if he presented a greater problem than schoolboys usually do,
and he recognized her as the dark figure he had seen talking with the tallest of
the daughters in the garden.
She took the letter from him, and he saw that the opportunity he had seized was
slipping out of his grasp, so he pretended to be younger and simpler than he
was, and put on the Irish brogue, which he never used at home except when he was
talking to the servants or the people on the farms, but which he had found
charmed the English. “May I not go out into the garden and see the young
ladies?” he asked. “I have watched them from my window, and they look so
pretty.”
It worked. The woman smiled and said. “You’re from Ireland, aren’t you?” and
before he could answer she exclaimed, as if defying prohibitions of which she
had long been weary, “What is the harm? Yes, go out and give the note to Miss
Parthenope yourself. You will know her – she is wearing grey and is the
tallest.” When he got out on the terrace, he saw that all seven of the Admiral’s
daughters were on the lawn, and his heart was like a turning windmill as he went
down the stone steps. Then one of the croquet players caught sight of him-the
one who was wearing a red dress, just nearer flame colour than flesh. She
dropped her mallet and cried, “Oh, look, a little boy! A little red-haired boy!”
and danced toward him, sometimes pausing and twirling right round, so that her
skirts billowed out round her. Other voices took up the cry, and, cooing like
pigeons, the croquet players closed in on him in a circle of unbelievable
beauty. It was their complexions that he remembered in later life as the marvel
that made them, among all the women he was ever to see, the nonpareils. Light
lay on their skin as it lies on the petals of flowers, but it promised that it
would never fade, that it would last forever, like the pearl. Yet even while he
remarked their loveliness and was awed by it, he was disconcerted. They came so
close, and it seemed as if they might do more than look at him and speak to him.
It was as if a flock of birds had come down on him, and were fluttering and
pecking about him; and they asked so many questions, in voices that chirped
indefatigably and were sharper than the human note. “Who are you?” “You are Mrs 
Darrell’s nephew?” “Her brother’s child or her sister’s?” “How old are you?”
“What is your name?” “Why is your middle name Greatorex?” “Oh, what lovely hair
he has – true Titian! And those round curls like coins!” “Have you sisters?”
“Have they hair like yours?” Their little hands darted out and touched his
hands, his cheeks, his shoulders, briefly but not pleasantly. His flesh rose in
goose pimples, as it did when a moth’s wing brushed his face as he lay in bed in
the dark. And while their feathery, restlessness poked and cheeped at him, they
looked at him with eyes almost as fixed as if they were blind and could not see
him at all. Their eyes were immense and very bright and shaded by lashes longer
than he had ever seen; but they were so light a grey that they were as
colourless as clear water running over a bed of pebbles. He was glad when the
woman in the black dress called from the terrace. “Leave the boy alone!” He did
not like anything about the Admiral’s daughters, now he saw them at close range.
Even their dresses, which had looked beautiful from a distance, repelled him. If
a lady had been sitting to a portrait painter in the character of a wood nymph,
she might have worn such draperies, but it was foolish to wear them in a garden,
when there was nobody to see them. “Leave the boy alone!” the woman in black
called again. “He has come with a letter for Parthenope.”
She had not been one of the circle. Now that the others fell back, my uncle saw
her standing a little way off, biting her lip and knitting her brows, as if the
scene disturbed her. There were other differences, beyond her height, that
distinguished her from her sisters. While they were all that was most feminine,
with tiny waists and hands, and feet, she might have been a handsome and
athletic boy dressed in woman’s clothes for a school play. Only, of course, one
knew quite well that she was not a boy. She stood erect, her arms hanging by her
sides, smoothing back the muslin billows of her skirt, as if they were
foolishness she would be glad to put behind her; and indeed, she would have
looked better in Greek dress. Like her sisters, she had golden hair, but hers
was a whiter gold. As my uncle and she went toward each other, she smiled, and
he was glad to see that her eyes were a darker grey than her sisters’, and were
quick and glancing. He told her who he was, speaking honestly, not putting on a
brogue to win her, and she smiled and held out her hand. It took her a little
time to read the letter, and she frowned over it and held her forefinger to her
lips, and bade him tell his aunt that she would send over an answer later in the
day, after she had consulted her gardeners, and then she asked him if he would
care to come into the house and drink some raspberry vinegar. As she led him
across the lawn to the terrace, walking with long strides, he saw that her
sisters were clustered in a group, staring up at a gutter high on the house,
where a rook had perched, as if the bird were a great marvel. “Should I say
good-bye to the ladies?” he asked nervously, and Parthenope answered, “No, they
have forgotten you already” However, one had not. The sister who wore the
light-red dress ran after him, crying, “Come back soon, little boy, Nobody ever
comes into this garden except to steal our strawberries.”
Parthenope took him through the silent house, pausing in the room where the
dolls lay on the floor to lift them up and shut them in a drawer, and they came
to a dining room, lined with pictures of great ships at war with stormy seas.
There was no raspberry vinegar on the top of the sideboard–only decanters
wearing labels marked with the names of adult drinks he was allowed only at
Christmas and on his birthday, and then but one glass, and he always  chose
claret. So they opened the cupboard below, and sat down together on the carpet
and peered into the darkness while he told her that he did not really want any
but if it had gone astray he would be pleased to help her find it. But when the
decanter turned up at the very back of the shelf (and they agreed that that was
what always happened where one lost anything, and that there was no doubt that
objects can move), they both had a glass, talking meanwhile of what they liked
to eat and drink. Like him, she hated boiled mutton, and she, too, liked goose
better than turkey. When he had finished and the talk had slowed down, he rose
and put his glass on the sideboard, and offered her a hand to help her up from
the floor, but she did not need it; and he gave a last look round the room, so
that he would not forget it. He asked her, “Why is your chandelier tied up in a
canvas bag? At home that only happens when the family is away.” She answered,
“Our family is away,” speaking so grimly that he said, “I did not mean to ask a
rude question.” She told him. “you have not asked a rude question. What I meant
was that all but two of us have our own homes, and those two will be leaving
here soon.” It would not have been right to say that she spoke sadly. But her
tone was empty of all it had held when they had talked about how much better
chicken tastes when you eat it with your fingers when you are out shooting. He
remembered all the sad things he had heard his aunt say about her family, the
sadder things he had heard from the servants. He said, “Why don’t you come back
with me and have tea with my aunt?” She said, smiling, “She has not asked me.”
And he said, “Never think of that. We are not proper English, you know; we are
from Ireland, and friends come in any time…” But she thanked him, sighing, so
that he knew she would really have liked to come, and said that she must go back
to her sisters. As the butler held the front door open for my uncle, she gave
him a friendly slap across the shoulders, as an older boy might have done.
After that, my uncle never watched the Admiral’s daughters again. If a glance
told him that they were in the garden, he turned his back on the window. He had
not liked those staring eyes that were colourless as water, and it troubled him
that though some of them had children, none had said, “I have a boy, too, but he
is much younger than you,” for mothers always said that. He remembered
Parthenope so well that he could summon her to his mind when he wished, and he
could not bear to see her with these women who made him feel uneasy, because he
was sure that he and she felt alike, and therefore she must be in a perpetual
state of unease. so when, the very day before he was to go back to Ireland, he
looked out of his bedroom window and saw her alone on the lawn, he threw up the
sash and called to her; but she did not hear him. She was absorbed in playing a
game by herself, a game that he knew well. She was throwing a ball high into the
air, then letting her arms drop by her sides, and waiting to the last, the very
last moment, before stretching out a hand to catch it. It was a strange thing
for a grown-up lady to be doing, but it did not distress him like the
play-ground gambolling and chattering of her sisters. They had been like
children as grownups like to think of them, silly and meaningless and
mischievous. But she was being a child as children really are, sobered by all
they have to put up with and glad to forget it in play. There was currently some
danger that his own father was going to get a post in some foreign place and
that the whole family would have to leave County Kerry for years and years; and
when he and his brothers and sisters thought of this, they would go and, each
one apart, would play this very same game that Parthenope was playing.
He did not want to raise his voice in a shout, in case he was overheard by his
aunt or his mother. They would not understand that although Parthenope and he
had met only once, they knew each other quite well. He got up from the window
seat and went out of his room and down through the house and out into the
garden. There was a ladder in the coach house, and he dragged it to the right
part of the wall and propped it up and stopped it with stones, and climbed to
the top and called “Miss Parthenope” When she saw him, she smiled and waved at
him as if she really were glad to see him again.
“Where are your sisters” he asked cautiously.
“They have all gone away. I am going home tomorrow.”
“So am I.”
“Are you glad?”
“Papa will be there,” he said, “and my brothers and sisters, and Garrity the
groom, and my pony.”
She asked him the names of his brothers and sisters, and how old they were, and
where his home was; and he told her all these things and told her, too, that his
father was always being sent all over the world, and that of late he and his
brothers and sisters had heard talk that someday,, and it might be soon, he
would be sent to some foreign place for so long that they would have to go with
him, and they didn’t want this to happen; for though they loved him and wanted
to be near him, they loved County Kerry, too. At that, she stopped smiling and
nodded her head, as if to say she knew how he must feel. “But perhaps it won’t
happen,” he said, “and then you must come and stay with us for the hunting.” He
thought of her in a riding habit, and at that he noticed that she was wearing a
dress such as his own mother might have worn – a dress of grey cloth, with a
tight bodice and a stiffened skirt, ornamented with braid. He said, “How funny
to see you dressed like other ladies. Don’t you usually wear that lilac-grey
muslin dress?”
She shook her head. “No. My sisters and I only wear those muslin dresses when we
are together here. My, sisters like them.”
“Don’t you?”” he said, for her tone had gone blank again.
“No,” she answered, “not at all.”
He was glad to hear it, but it seemed horribly unfair that she should have to
wear clothes she did not like, just because her sisters did; nothing of the sort
happened in his own family. “Then don’t wear them” he said passionately. “You
mustn’t wear them! Not if you don’t like them!”
“You’re making your ladder wobble,” she said, laughing at him, “and if you fall
down, I can’t climb over the wall and pick you up.” She started across the lawn
toward the house.
“Garrity says that you’re lost if you let yourself be put upon,” he cried after
her, his brogue coming back to him, but honestly, because he spoke to Garrity as
Garrity spoke to him. He would have liked to have the power to make her do what
she ought to do, and save her from all this foolishness.
“Good-bye, good-bye,” she called across the growing distance. “Be a good boy,
and come back to see us next year.”
“You will be here for sure?” he asked eagerly.
“Oh, yes,” she promised. “We will always be back here for some time in the
summer. My sisters would rather be here than anywhere in the world.”
“But do you like it yourself” he asked angrily.
It was no use. She had run up the steps to the terrace.
My uncle did not come back the next year, because his fears were realized and
his father was appointed to a post in Canada. But from his aunt’s letters to his
mother he learned that even if he had returned to Currivel Lodge, he would not
have seen Parthenope, for the Admiral sold the house later that year, as soon as
his two remaining daughters went to the altar, which they did with even greater
reluctance than their elder sisters. Alice Darrell’s maid happened to be at the
window one winter day and saw the two of them walking up and down the lawn,
dressed in those strange, bright muslin gowns and wearing no mantles, though the
river mist was thick, while they wept and wrung their hands. Aunt Alice felt
that even if the Admiral had felt obliged to bundle all his daughters into
matrimony, he should at least not have sold the house, which was the one place
where they could meet and have a little nursery happiness again.
In the course of time, Uncle Arthur came back to Ireland, and went to Trinity
College, Dublin, and passed into the English Civil Service, and was sent to
London. The first time he went back to Currivel Lodge, he stood at his bedroom
window and stared out at the croquet lawn of the house next door, and it looked
very much like other croquet lawns. Under the trees two men and two women were
sitting round a tea table, all of them presenting the kind of appearance, more
common then than now, that suggests that nothing untoward happens to the human
race. It occurred to him that perhaps his boyish imagination had made a story
out of nothing, but Aunt Alice gave him back his version intact. The Admiral had
really hectored his daughters into early and undesired marriages, with the most
brutal disregard for their feelings, and the daughters had really been very
strange girls, given to running about the garden in a sort of fancy dress and
behaving like children – all except Parthenope, who was quite remarkable. She
had made her mark in society since then. Well, so they all had, in a way. Their
photographs were always in the papers, at one time, and no wonder, they were so
very pretty. But that seemed over now, and, indeed, they must all be out of
their twenties by now, even the youngest. Parthenope’s triumphs, however, had
been more durable. It was said that Queen Victoria greatly approved of her, and
she was often at Court. My uncle always thought of Parthenope when he was
dressing for any of the grander parties to which he was invited, and he soon
found his way to the opera and ascertained which was her box, but she was never
at the parties, and, unless she had changed out of all recognition, never in her
box at Covent Garden, either. My uncle did not wish to approach her, for he was
a poor young man far below her grandeur, and they belonged to different
generations; at the least, she was twelve years older than he was. But he would
have liked to see her again.
Soon, however, he received an intimation that that would not be possible. One
morning at breakfast he unfolded his newspaper and folded it again almost
immediately, having read a single paragraph, which told him that Parthenope had
met a violent death. He had failed to meet her at parties and to see her in her
opera box because she had been spending the winter abroad, taking care of two of
her sisters who had both been the victims of prolonged illness. Originally, they
had settled at Nice, but had found it too urban, and had moved to a hotel at
Grasse, where they spent some weeks. Then a friend had found them a pleasant
villa at Hyères, and the party had started off from Grasse in two carriages.
Parthenope and her sisters and a lady’s maid had travelled in the first, and
another maid and a courier had followed in the second. The second carriage had
dropped far behind. Afterwards, the coachman remembered that he had been oddly
delayed in leaving the inn where they had stopped for a midday meal; he had been
told that a man was looking for him with a letter for his employers, and failing
to find him had gone to a house some way down the village street. The coachman
sought him but there was nobody there; and on his return to his horses he
discovered that a harness strap was broken, and he had to mend it before they
could resume their journey. After a sharp turn in the road, he had found himself
driving into a felled tree trunk, and when the courier and the maid and the
coachman got out, they could see no sign of the first carriage. It was found
some hours later, abandoned on a cart track running through a wood to a river.
There was no trace of any of its occupants. Later that same day the maid crawled
up to a farmhouse door. Before she collapsed she was able to tell the story of
an attack by masked men, who had, she thought, killed the three sisters outright
because they refused to tell in which trunk their jewel cases were packed. She
had escaped during the struggle, and while she was running away through the
woods, she had heard terrible prolonged screaming from the riverbank. As the
river was in flood, there was no hope of recovering the bodies.
After my uncle had read all the accounts of the crime that appeared in the
newspapers, and had listened to all he could hear from gossiping friends, there
hung, framed on the wall of his mind, a romantic picture of a highway robbery,
in the style of Senator Rosa, with coal-black shadows and highlights white on
hands lifted in imploration, and he felt no emotion whatsoever. When he had
opened The Times at breakfast, his heart had stopped. But now he felt as if he
had been stopped before an outmoded and conventional picture in a private
gallery by a host who valued it too highly.
A year or so later, Alice Darrell mentioned to him an odd story she had heard.
It appeared that Parthenope had been carrying a great deal more jewelry than
would seem necessary for a woman travelling quietly with two invalid sisters. To
be sure, she had not taken all tire jewelry she possessed, but she had taken
enough for the value to be estimated at fifty thousand pounds; and of this not a
penny could be recovered, for it was uninsured. Her husband had left the matter
for her to handle, because she had sold some old jewelry and had bought some to
replace it just about the time that the policy should have been renewed, but she
had failed to write the necessary letter to her lawyers till the very night
before the journey to Hyères, and it was found, unposted, at the hotel in
Grasse.
“Parthenope!” my uncle said. “Let an insurance policy lapse! Parthenope! I’ll
not believe it.”
“That’s just what I said,” Alice Darrell exclaimed. ‘Any of the others, but not
Parthenope. She had her hand on everything. Yet, of course, she may have
changed. They are a queer family. There was the other one, you know – the one
who disappeared. That was after the accident.
It seemed that another sister – Hera, Aunt Alice thought it was – had also
suffered ill health, and had gone to France with a nurse, and one day her cloak
and bonnet were found on the bank of a river. “I wish that things turned out
better,” Aunt Alice remarked sadly. “They do sometimes, but not often enough.”
This was the only criticism of life he had ever heard her utter, though she had
had a sad life, constantly losing the people she loved, to tropical diseases or
to wars against obscure tribes that lacked even the interest of enmity. What she
uttered now made him realize that she had indeed thought Parthenope remarkable,
and he said, smiling, ” Why, we are making ourselves quite miserable about her,
though all we know for sure is that she let an insurance policy lapse.”
He did not hear of the Admiral’s daughters again until after a long space of
time, during which he had many other things to think about: his career, which
was alternatively advanced by his brilliance and retarded by his abstracted
candour; a long affair with a married woman older than himself, some others that
were briefer; and his marriage, which, like his career, and for much the same
reason, was neither a success nor a failure. One day when he was reading the
papers at his club, he heard two men speaking of a friend who was distressed
about his mother, whose behaviour had been strange since she had been left a
widow. She had rejected the dower house and gone off to the Continent to travel
by herself and now refused to come back to see her family or to meet them
abroad. The mother had an old Greek name, and so had a sister, who had got
herself murdered for her jewels in the South of France. My uncle went on staring
at his newspaper, but it was as if a door in his mind were swinging backward and
forward on a broken hinge.
Many years later, when Aunt Alice was dead and my uncle was a middle-aged man,
with children who were no longer children, he broke his journey home from a
conference in Spain at a certain town in the southwest of France, for no other
reason than that its name had always charmed him. But it proved to be a dull
place, and as he sat down to breakfast at a cafe€ in the large and featureless
station square, it occurred to him to ask the waiter if there were not some
smaller and pleasanter place in the neighbourhood where he could spend the rest
of the day and night. The waiter said that if Monsieur would take the horse-bus
that started from the other side of the square in half an hour, it would take
him to the village where he, the waiter, was born, and there he would find a
good inn and a church that people came all the way from Paris to see. My uncle
took his advice; and because his night had been wakeful, he fell asleep almost
as soon as the bus started. He woke suddenly to find that the journey had ended
and he was in a village which was all that he had hoped it would be. A broad,
deliberate river, winding among low wooded hills, spread its blessings at this
point through a circular patch of plain, a couple of miles or so across, which
was studded with farmhouses, each standing beside its deep green orchard. In the
centre of this circle was a village that was no more than one long street, which
looked very clean. The houses were built of stone that had been washed by the
hill rains, and beside the road a brook flowed over a paved bed. There were
bursts of red valerian growing from the cracks in the walls and in the yard-long
bridges that crossed the brook. The street ended in a little square, where the
church and the inn looked across cobblestones, shaded by pollarded limes, at the
mairie and the post office. At the inn, my uncle took a room and slept for an
hour or two in a bed smelling of the herbs with which the sheets had been
washed. Then, as it was past noon, he went down to lunch, and ate some potato
soup, a trout, some wood strawberries, and a slice of cheese. Afterwards, he
asked the landlord how soon the church would be open, and was told that he could
open it himself when he chose. The priest and his housekeeper were away until
vespers, and had left the church keys at the inn. When he went to the church, it
was a long time before he unlocked the door, for there was a beautiful tympanum
in the porch, representing the Last Judgement. It was clear-cut in more than one
sense. There was no doubt who was saved and who was damned: there was a beatific
smile on the faces of those walking in  Paradise, which made it seem as if just
there a shaft of sunlight had struck the dark stone. Also the edges of the
carving, though the centuries had rubbed them down, showed a definition more
positive than mere sharpness. Often my uncle played games when he was alone, and
now he climbed on a wooden stool which was in the porch, and shut his eyes and
felt the faces of the blessed, and pretended that he had been blind for a long
time, and that the smiles of the blessed were striking into his darkness through
his fingertips. When he went into the church, he found, behind an oaken door,
the steps that led to the top of the tower. He climbed up through darkness that
was transfixed every few steps by thin shafts of light, dancing with dust,
coming through the eyelet windows, and he found that though the tower was not
very high, it gave a fine view of an amphitheatre of hills, green on their lower
slopes with chestnut groves, banded higher with fir woods and bare turf, and
crowned with shining rock. He marked some likely paths on the nearest hills, and
then dropped his eyes to the village below, and looked down into the oblong
garden of a house that seemed larger than the rest. At the farther end was the
usual, pedantically neat French vegetable garden; then there was a screen of
espaliered fruit trees; then there was a lawn framed in trees so tall and strong
that it could have been guessed from them alone that not far away there was a
river. The lawn was set with croquet hoops, and about them were wandering four
figures in bright dresses—one hyacinth blue, one primrose yellow, one jade
green, one clear light red. They all had croquet mallets in their hands, but
they had turned from the game, and as my uncle watched them they drew together,
resting their mallets on the ground. some distance away, a woman in black,
taller thin the others, stood watching them.
When one of the croquet players let her mallet fall on the grass, and used her
free hands in a fluttering gesture, my uncle left the top of the tower and went
down through the darkness and shafts of light and locked the church door behind
him. In the corner of the square he found what might have been the chateau of
the village – one of those square and solid dwellings, noble out of proportion
to their size, which many provincial French architects achieved in the
seventeenth century. My uncle went through an iron gateway into a paved garden
and found that the broad door of the house was open. He walked into the
vestibule and paused, looking up the curved staircase. The pictures were as old
as the house, and two had been framed to fit the recessed panels in which they
hung. The place must have been bought as it stood. On the threshold of the
corridor beyond, he paused again, for it smelled of damp stone, as all the back
parts of his father’s house in County Kerry did, at any time of the year but
high summer. It struck him as a piece of good fortune for which he had never
before been sufficiently grateful that he could go back to that house any time
he pleased; he would be there again in a few weeks’ time. He passed the open
door of a kitchen, where two women were rattling dishes and pans and singing
softly, and came to a closed door, which he stared at for a second before he
turned the handle.
He found himself in a salon that ran across the whole breadth of the house, with
three French windows opening on a stone terrace overlooking the garden. As he
crossed it to the steps that led down to the lawn, he came close to a bird cage
on a pole, and the scarlet parrot inside broke into screams. All the women on
the lawn turned and saw him, and the tall woman in black called, “Que
voulez-vous, Monsieur?” She had put her hand to her heart and he was eager to
reassure her, but could not think how, across that distance, to explain why he
had come. So he continued to walk toward her, but could not reach her because
the four others suddenly scampered toward him, crying “Go away! Go away!” Their
arms flapped like bats’ wings, and their voices were cracked, but, under their
white hair, their faces were unlined and their eyes were colourless as water,
“Go away!” shrilled the one in light red. “We know you have come to steal our
strawberries. why may we not keep our own strawberries?” But the figure in black
had come forward with long strides, and told them to go on with their game, and
asked again, “Que voulez-vous, Monsieur?” Her hair was grey now, and her mouth
so sternly compressed that it was a straight line across her face. She reminded
my uncle of a particular man – her father, the Admiral-but she was not like a
man, she was still a handsome and athletic boy, though a frost had fallen on
him; and still it was strange that she should look like a boy, since she was
also not male at all. My uncle found that now he was face to face with her, it
was just as difficult to explain to her why he had come. He said, “I came to
this village by chance this morning, and after I had luncheon at the inn I went
to the top of the church tower, and looked down on this garden, and recognized
you all. I came to tell you that if there is anything I can do for you I will do
it. I am a civil servant who has quite a respectable career, and so I can hope
that I might be efficient enough to help you if you need it.”
“That is very kind,” she said, and paused, and it was as if she were holding a
shell to her ear and listening to the voice of a distant sea. “Very kind,” she
repeated. “But who are you?”
“I am the nephew of your neighbour, Mrs Darrell,” said my uncle. “I brought you
a letter from her, many years ago, when you were all in your garden.”
Her smile broke slowly. “I remember you,” she said. “You were a fatherly little
boy. You gave me good advice from the top of a ladder. Why should you have found
me here, I wonder? It can’t be that, after all, there is some meaning in the
things that happen. You had better come into the house and drink some of the
cherry brandy we make here. I will get the cook to come out and watch them. I
never leave them alone now.”
While she went to the kitchen, my uncle sat in the salon and noted that, for all
its fine furniture and all its space and light, there was a feeling that the
place was dusty, the same feeling that he had noticed in the Admiral’s house
long ago. It is the dust of another world, he thought with horror, and the
housemaids of this world are helpless against it. It settles wherever these
women live, and Parthenope must live with them.
When she came back, she was carrying a tray with a slender decanter and very
tiny glasses. They sat sipping the cherry brandy in silence until she said, “I
did nothing wrong.”
He looked at her in astonishment. Of course she had done nothing wrong. Wrong
was what she did not do.
But she continued gravely. “When we all die, it will be found that the sum I got
for the jewelry is intact. My stepson will not be a penny the worse off. Indeed,
he is better off, for my husband has had my small inheritance long before it
would have come to him if I had not done this.”
“I knew you would have done it honestly,” said my uncle. He hesitated. “This is
very strange. You see, I knew things about you which I had no reason to know. I
knew you had not been murdered.” Then my uncle had to think carefully. They were
united by eternal bonds, but hardly knew each other, which was the reverse of
what usually happened to men and women. But they might lapse into being
strangers and nothing else if he showed disrespect to the faith by which she
lived. He said only, “Also I knew that what you were doing in looking after your
family was terrible.”
She answered, “Yes. How good it is to hear somebody say that it is terrible, and
to be able to answer that it is. But I had to do it. I had to get my sisters
away from their husbands. They were ashamed of them. They locked them up in the
care of strangers. I saw their bruises.”  My uncle caught his breath, “Oh,” she
said, desperately just, “the people who looked after them did not mean to be
cruel. But they were strangers; they did not know the way to handle my sisters.
And their husbands were not bad men, either. And even if they had been, I could
not say a word against them, for they were cheated; my father cheated them. They
were never told the truth about my mother. About my mother and half her family.”
She raised her little glass of cherry brandy to her lips and nodded, to intimate
that that was all she had to say, but words rushed out and she brought her glass
down to her lap. “I am not telling the truth. Their husbands cheated, too. No, I
am wrong. They did not cheat. But they failed to keep their bond. Still, there
is no use talking about that.”
“What bond did your sisters’ husbands not keep?” my uncle asked.
“They married my sisters because they were beautiful, and laughed easily, and
could not understand figures. They might have considered that women who laugh
easily might scream easily, and that if figures meant nothing to them, words
might mean nothing, either, and that if figures and words meant nothing to them,
thoughts and feelings might mean nothing, too. But these men had the impudence
to feel a horror of my sisters.”
She rose, trembling, and told him that he must have a sweet biscuit with his
cherry brandy, and that she would get him some; they were in a cupboard in the
corner of the room. Over her shoulder, she cried, “I cannot imagine you marrying
a woman who was horrible because she was horrible, and then turning against her
because she was horrible.” She went on seeing some wafers out on a plate, and he
stared at the back of her head, unable to imagine what was inside it, saying to
himself, “She realizes that they are horrible; there is no mitigation of her
state.”
When she sat down again, she said, “But it was my father’s fault.”
“What was your father’s fault?” he asked gently, when she did not go on.
“Why, he should not have made us marry; he should not have sold our house. My
sisters were happy there, and all they asked was to be allowed to go on living
there, like children.”
“Your father wanted his daughters to marry so that they would have someone to
look after them when he was dead,” my uncle told her.
“I could have looked after them.”
“Come now,” said my uncle, “you are not being fair. You are the same sort of
person as your father. And you know quite well that if you were a man you would
regard all women as incapable. You see, men of the better kind want to protect
the women they love, and there is so much stupidity in the male nature and the
circumstances of life are generally so confused that they end up thinking they
must look after women because women cannot look after themselves. It is only
very seldom that a man meets a woman so strong and wise that he cannot doubt her
strength and wisdom, and realizes that his desire to protect her is really the
same as his desire to gather her into his arms and partake of her glory.”
Moving slowly and precisely, he took out his card-case and was about to give her
one of his cards when a thought struck him. She must have the name of his
family’s house in County Kerry as well as his London address, and know that he
went there at Christmas and at Easter, and in the summer, too. She would be able
to find him whenever she wanted him, since such bootblack service was all he
could render her.
She read the card and said in an astonished whisper, “Oh, how kind, how kind.”
Then she rose and put it in a drawer in a secretaire, which she locked with a
key she took from a bag swinging from the belt of her hateful black gown. “I
have to lock up everything,” she said, wearily. “They mean no harm, but
sometimes they get at papers and tear them up.”
“What I have written on that card is for an emergency,” said my uncle. “But what
is there I can do now? I do not like the thought of you sitting here in exile,
among things that mean nothing to you. Can I not send you out something English
– a piece of furniture, a picture, some china or glass? If I were in your place,
I would long for something that reminded me of the houses where I had spent my
childhood.”
“If you were in my place, you would not,” she said. “You are very kind, but the
thing that has happened to my family makes me not at all anxious to remember my
childhood. We were all such pretty children. Everybody always spoke as if we
were bound to be. And in those days nobody was frightened of Mamma – they only
laughed at her, because she was such a goose. Then one thing followed another,
and it became quite certain about Mamma, and then it became quite certain about
the others; and now I cannot bear to think of the good times that went before.
It is as if someone had known and was mocking us. But you may believe that it is
wonderful for me to know that there is someone I can call on at any time. You
see, I had supports, which are being taken away from me. You really have no idea
how I got my sisters out here?”
My uncle shook his head. “I only read what was in the newspapers and knew it was
not true.”
“But you must have guessed I had helpers,” she said. “There was the highway
robbery to be arranged. All that was done by somebody who was English but had
many connections in France, a man who was very fond of Arethusa.  Arethusa is
the one who spoke to you in the garden; she always wears red. This man was not
like her husband; when she got worse and worse, he felt no horror for her, only
pity. He has always been behind me, but he was far older than we were, and he
died three years ago; and since then his lawyer in Paris has been a good friend,
but now he is old, too, and I must expect him to go soon, I have made all
arrangements for what is to happen to my sisters after my death. They will go to
a convent near here, where the nuns are really kind, and we are preparing them
for it. One or other of the nuns comes here every day to see my sisters, so that
they will never have to be frightened by strange faces; and I think that if my
sisters go on getting worse at the same rate as at present, they will by then
believe the nuns when they say that I have been obliged to go away and will come
back presently. But till that time comes, I will be very glad to have someone I
can ask for advice. I can see that you are to be trusted. You are like the man
who loved Arethusa. My poor Arethusa! Sometimes I think,” she said absently,
“that she might have been all right if it had been that man whom she had
married. But no,” she cried, shaking herself awake, “none of us should have
married, not even me.”
“Why should you not have married? asked my uncle. “That the others should not I
understand. But why not you? There is nothing wrong with you.”
“Is there not?” she asked. “To leave my family and my home, to stage a sham
highway robbery, and later to plot and lie, and lie and plot, in order to get my
mad sisters to a garden I had once noted, in my travels, as something like the
garden taken from them when they were young. There is an extravagance in the
means my sanity took to rescue their madness that makes the one uncommonly like
the other.”
“You must not think that,” my uncle told her. “Your strange life forced
strangeness on your actions, but you are not strange. You were moved by love,
you had seen their bruises.”
“Yes, I had seen their bruises,” she agreed. “But,” she added, hesitantly, “you
are so kind that I must be honest with you. It was not only for the love of my
sisters that I arranged this flight. It is also true that I could not bear my
life. I was not wholly unselfish. You do not know what it is like to be a
character in a tragedy. Something has happened which can only be explained by
supposing that God hates you with merciless hatred, and nobody will admit it.
The people nearest you stand round you saying that you must ignore this
extraordinary event, you must – what were the words I was always hearing? –
‘keep your sense of proportion,’ ‘not brood on things.’ They do not understand
that they are asking you to deny your experiences, which is to pretend that you
do not exist and never have existed. And as for the people who do not love you,
they laugh. Our tragedy was so ridiculous that the laughter was quite loud.
There were all sorts of really funny stories about the things my mother and
sisters did before they were shut up. That is another terrible thing about being
a character in a tragedy; at the same time you become a character in a farce. Do
not deceive yourself,” she said, looking at him kindly and sadly. “I am not a
classical heroine, I am not Iphigenia or Electra or Alcestis, I am the absurd
Parthenope. There is no dignity in my life. For one thing, too much has happened
to me. One calamity evokes sympathy; when two calamities call for it, some still
comes, but less. Three calamities are felt to be too many, and when four are
reported, or five, the thing is ludicrous. God has only to strike one again and
again for one to become a clown. There is nothing about me which is not comical.
Even my flight with my sisters has become a joke.” She sipped at her glass. “My
sisters’ husbands and their families must by now have found out where we are. I
do not think my husband ever did, or he would have come to see me. But there are
many little indications that the others know, and keep their knowledge secret,
rather than let loose so monstrous a scandal.”
“You say your husband would have come to see you?” asked my uncle, wanting to
make sure. “But that must mean he loved you.”
At last the tears stood in her eyes. She said, her voice breaking, “Oh, things
might have gone very well with my husband and myself, if love had been possible
for me. But of course it never was.”
“How wrong you are,” said my uncle. “There could be nothing better for any man
than to have you as his wife. If you did not know that, your husband should have
made you understand it.”
“No, no,” she said. “The fault was not in my husband or myself. It was in love,
which cannot do all that is claimed for it. Oh, I can see that it can work
miracles, some miracles, but not all the miracles that are required before life
can be tolerable, Listen: I love my sisters, but I dare not love them
thoroughly. To love them as much as one can love would be to go to the edge of
an abyss and lean over the edge, farther and farther, till one was bound to lose
one’s balance and fall into the blackness of that other world where they live.
That is why I never dared let my husband love me fully. I was so much afraid
that I might be an abyss, and if he understood me, if we lived in each other, he
would be drawn down into my darkness.”
“But there is no darkness in you,” said my uncle, “you are not an abyss, you are
the solid rock.”
“Why do you think so well of me?” she wondered. “Of course, you are right to
some extent – I am not the deep abyss I might be. But how could I be sure of
that when I was young? Every night when I lay down in bed I examined my day for
signs of folly. If I had lost my temper, if I had felt more joy than was
reasonable, I was like one of a tuberculous family who has just heard herself
cough. Only the years that had not then passed made me sure that I was unlike my
sisters, and until I knew, I had to hold myself back. I could not let the fine
man who was my husband be tempted into my father’s fault.”
“What was your father’s fault?” asked my uncle, for the second time since he had
entered that room.
Again her disapproval was absolute, her eyes were like steel. But this time she
answered at once, without a moment’s hesitation: Why, he should not have loved
my mother.”
“But you are talking like a child!” he exclaimed. “You cannot blame anyone for
loving anyone.”
“Did you ever see him?” she asked, her eyes blank because they were filled with
a distant sight. “Yes? You must have been only a boy, but surely, you say that
he was remarkable. And he had a mind, he was a mathematician, he wrote a book on
navigation that was thought brilliant; they asked him to lecture to the Royal
Society. And one would have thought from his face that he was a giant of
goodness and strength. How could such a man love such a woman as my mother? It
was quite mad, the way he made us marry. How could he lean over the abyss of her
mind and let himself be drawn down into that darkness?”
“Do not let your voice sink to a whisper like that,” my uncle begged her. “It –
it –”
“It frightens you,” she supplied.
“But have you,” he pressed her, “no feeling for your mother?”
“Oh yes,” she said, her voice breaking. “I loved my mother very much. But when
she went down into the darkness, I had to say good-bye to her or I could not
have looked after my sisters.” It seemed as if she was going to weep, but she
clung to her harshness and asked again, “How could my father love such a woman?”
My uncle got up and knelt in front of her chair and took her trembling hands in
his. “There is no answer, so do not ask the question.”
“I must ask it,” she said. “surely it is blasphemy to admit that one can ask
questions to which there are no answers. I must ask why my father leaned over
the abyss of my mother’s mind and threw himself into it, and dragged down victim
after victim with him – not only dragging them down but manufacturing them for
that sole purpose, calling them out of nothingness simply so that they could
fall and fall. How could he do it? If there is not an answer – ”
He put his hand over her lips. “He cannot have known that she was mad when he
begot his children.”
Her passion had spent itself in her question. She faintly smiled as she said,
“No, but I never liked the excuse that he and my sisters’ husbands made for
themselves. They all said that at first they had simply thought their wives were
rather silly. I could not have loved someone whom I thought rather silly. Could
you?”
“It is not what I have done,” said my uncle. “May I have some more cherry
brandy?”
“I am so glad you like it,” she said, suddenly happy. “But you have given me the
wrong glass to fill. This is mine.”
“I knew that,” he told her. “I wanted to drink from your glass.”
“I would like to drink from yours,” she said, and for a little time they were
silent. “Tell me,” she asked meekly, as if now she had put herself in his hands,
“do you think it has been wrong for me to talk about what has happened to me?
When I was at home they, always said it was bad to brood over it.”
“What nonsense,” said my uncle. “I am sure that it was one of the major
misfortunes of Phèdre and Bérénice that they were unable to read Racine’s
clear-headed discussions of their miseries.”
“You are right,” said Parthenope. “Oh, how kind Racine was to tragic people! He
would not allow for a moment that they were comic. People at those courts must
have giggled behind their hands at poor Bérénice, at poor Phèdre. But he ignored
them. You are kind like Racine.”
There was a tapping on the glass of the French window,, and her face went grey.
“What has happened now? Oh, what has happened now?” she murmured to herself. It
was the cook who had tapped, and she was looking grave. Parthenope went out and
spoke with her for a minute, and then came back, and again the tears were
standing in her eyes. “I thought I might ask you to stay all day with me,” she
said. “I thought we might dine together. But my sisters cannot bear it that
there is a stranger here. They’re are hiding in the raspberry canes, and you
must have heard them screaming. Part of that noise comes from the parrot, but
part from them. It sometimes takes hours to get them quiet. I cannot help it;
you must go.”
He took both her hands and pressed them against his throat, and felt it swell as
she muttered, “Good-bye.” But as he was going through the paved garden to the
gateway he heard her call “Stop! Stop!” and she was just behind him, her skirts
lifted over her ankles so that she could take her long strides. “The strangest
thing,” she said, laughing. “I have not told you the name by which I am known
here.” She spelled it out to him as he wrote it down in his diary, and turned
back toward the house, exclaiming, “What a thing to forget” But then she swung
back again, suddenly pale, and said, “But do not write to me. I am only giving
you the name so that if I send you a message you will be able to answer it. But
do not write to me.”
“Why not?” he asked indignantly. “Why not?”
“You must not be involved in my life,” she said. “There is a force outside the
world that hates me and all my family. If you wrote to me too often it might
hate you, too.”
“I would risk that,” he said, but she cried, covering her eyes, “No, no, by
being courageous you are threatening my last crumb of happiness. If you stay a
stranger, I may be allowed to keep what I have of you. So do as I say.”
He made a resigned gesture, and they parted once more. But as she got to her
door, he called to her to stop and hurried back. “I will not send you anything
that will remind you of your home,” he said, “but may I not send you a present
from time to time – some stupid little thing that will not mean much but might
amuse you for a minute or two?”
She hesitated but in the end nodded. “A little present, a very little present,”
she conceded. “And not too often.” She smiled like the saved in the sculpture in
the church, and slowly closed the door on him.
But when he was out in the square and walking toward the inn, he heard her voice
crying again, “Stop! Stop!” This time she came quite close to him and said, as
if she were a child ashamed to admit to a fault, “There is another thing that I
would like to ask of you. You said that I might write to you if I wanted
anything, and I know that you meant business things – the sort of advice men
give women. But I wonder if your kindness goes beyond that; You are so very
kind. I know all about most dreadful things in life, but I know nothing about
death. Usually I think I will not mind leaving this world, but just now and
then, if I wake up in the night, particularly in winter, when it is very cold, I
am afraid that I may be frightened when I die.”
“I fear that, too, sometimes,” he said.
“It seems a pity, too, to leave this world, in spite of the dreadful things that
happen in it,” she went on. “There are things that nothing can spoil – the
spring and the summer and the autumn.”
“And, indeed, the winter, too,” he said.
“Yes, the winter, too,” she said and looked up at the amphitheatre of hills
round the village. “You cannot think how beautiful it is here when the snow has
fallen. But, of course, death may be just what one has been waiting for; it may
explain everything. But still, I may be frightened when it comes. So if I do not
die suddenly, if I have warning of my death, would it be a great trouble for you
to come and be with me for a little?”
“As I would like to be with you always, I would certainly want to be with you
then,” he said. “And if I have notice of my death and you are free to travel, I
will ask you to come to me.”
My uncle found that he did not want to go back to the inn just then, and he
followed a road leading up to the foothills. There he climbed one of the paths
he had remarked from the top of the church tower, and when he got to the bare
rock, he sat down and looked at the village beneath him till the twilight fell.
On his return to London, he painted a water-colour of the view of the valley as
he recollected it, and pasted it in a book, which he kept by his bedside. From
time to time, some object in the window of an antique shop or a jeweller’s would
bring Parthenope to his mind, and he would send it to her, The one that pleased
him as most fitting was a gold ring; in the form of two leaves, which was
perhaps Saxon. She acknowledged these presents in brief letters; and it
delighted him that often her solemn purpose of brevity broke down and she added
an unnecessary sentence or two, telling him of something that had brightened her
day – of a strayed fawn she had found in her garden, or a prodigious crop of
cherries, which had made her trees quite red. But after some years these letters
stopped. When he took into account how old she was, and by how many years she
had been the elder, he realized that probably she had died. He told himself that
at least she had enjoyed the mercy of sudden death, and presently ceased to
think of her. It was as if the memory of her were too large to fit inside his
head; he felt actual physical pain when he tried to recollect her. This was the
time when such things as the finest buttercup field near London and the tomb of
Captain Vancouver seemed to be all that mattered to him. But from the day when
he heard the girl at the inn called by the name of his Parthenope, he again
found it easy to think of her; and he told me about her very often during the
five years that passed before his death.



 

 

 

 

 

Blogs by their very nature tend to be personal, so it may not be amiss for me to
admit that a few months ago I suffered a reverse which then slipped into an
ever-worsening slump, and that since then my thinking has still not recovered
its accustomed level of serviceability. But this story by the redoubtable
Rebecca West has gone a long way towards ameliorating that condition, though not
my present inclination to cavil and inveigh.

It is the kind of old-fashioned, rambling short-story one is pleased and
surprised to find being published in the New Yorker on the cusp of the ‘sixties.
The story has nothing in it – not even a trace –  of anything sordid, base or
dull, and none of West’s caustic wit at the forefront, for there is no need here
for her to be blatant about it. Her narrative is deceptively relaxed, but finely
wrought – an antique gold watch chain attached to a fine old watch that keeps
perfect time.

It comes as no surprise then, that reading it was to me as a gentle restorative,
and in its way a redemption. I have to curb myself in order to restrain, as one
would call it, an excess of enthusiasm, as one feels when encountering after a
long while an old love, or the object of a deep affection. But why should I be
so powerfully affected? The simple and truthful answer is that something in me
was made to resonate.
As with all periodicals, even the highly traditional New Yorker has had to
change somewhat with the times, and the changes are never more apparent to me
than in the current quality and tone of its fiction. I do not know whether there
have been still further changes, and perhaps for the better, in recent times,
but since I  have simply stopped reading the short stores, I have no way of
knowing for certain if the cooked cardboard characters going about their
uninteresting business have ceased to inhabit the fiction features. Perhaps it
is not the New Yorker which is to blame, but the dearth of available material.
Perhaps before too long I might persuade myself to summon the gumption to try
reading another such offering, because I would like very much to be surprised.

Part of the problem is perhaps that in this century, short-stories have become
recognisably formulaic, consistently striking the same dull note. The challenge
in many instances seems to be how much can be written about little or nothing
that is of any significance, and how much talent and determination can be
brought to documenting a catalogue of banalities. Not that it can’t be superbly
done, and Elizabeth Bowen’s October 11, 1941 piece “Everything’s Frightfully
Interesting” written almost entirely in dialogue, takes triviality and vapid
conversation to the level of sublimity. But Bowen isn’t around anymore is she –
nor is Katherine Mansfield or Sylvia Townsend Warner, or for a matter of fact
Rebecca West. Its needs must when the devil rides for the New Yorker I suppose,
when there are no longer any such writers to contribute.

All writing is contrived: that is axiomatic, and the most of it more flagrantly
than the small remainder. But some contrivances are so obviously, so egregiously
and blatantly, fake as to resemble painted corpses, and the surrounding flowers
and white satin only serve to accentuate that there is no life to be found
here.  I often wonder if this kind of writing is the precursor of further
corruption. Certainly it is not something which belongs above-ground, as one
instinctively feels in it the incipience of decay. The New Yorker published 
“Parthenope” on November 7 1959, but this story seems much older in tone, and
one suspects that West might have written it several decades earlier. Then too,
her characters were born in the Victorian era, and this is something we must
bear in mind when we read her story. So I could, I suppose, conclude that some
of my obvious delight derives from my bitter and forlorn inner literary atavist
raising its shaggy head.

In “Parthenope” we have all the potent ingredients of a Victorian story finely
adapted to a later time: first love, an implacably authoritarian father,
madness, victimised women, self-sacrifice, an honourable protagonist, glimpses
into the workings of families, foreign travel, inter-generational relationships,
and a high moral tone modulated to a contemporary range of hearing. Still, I
find West’s adumbration of the original Parthenope story curious. Our
Parthenope, despite her act of heroic self-sacrifice, was a married woman and
not a virgin (the Greek name ‘Parthenope’ means maiden-face), and did not commit
suicide for love of an adventurer. And Uncle Arthur, despite his infidelities
and foreign travel, was no Odysseus. True, he seems to have been beckoned by the
siren’s song, but he never stopped his ears to keep from hearing it, and I think
he was ready to love as fully and authentically as he could, had he been so
permitted. The Sirens’ call is a metaphor for the implacable undertow that
beauty and music have on our lives. These two forces often divert us from our
charted course, and we founder on them and lose our wonted bearings, but the
paradox is that rather than killing us, they remove us from the deadness of what
life would be without them. Perhaps it is a small but definite riff of
redemption that West intended us to hear, for there is no connection in the
story to Naples, where after her suicide Parthenope’s body was washed ashore
between Chiatamone and Posilippo at a place originally called Parthenope by the
Greeks and Neapolis by the Romans. West might have chosen to name her character
after Parthenope in order to echo the themes of the divine punishment visited
upon the Sirens,  their uncanny natures, as well as that of unfulfilled love,
all themes which possess the elements of tragedy, but don’t quite rise to its
accepted requirements.



West’s Parthenope is an intriguing character. Her androgynous appearance,
stressed and carefully described by West, suggests for me a subtly lesbian
flavour, much like Marion (another resourceful and loyal sister) in Wilkie
Collins’ The Woman in White. When she creates an almost saintly heroine who
martyrs herself in order to take care of her weak-minded sisters (one of whom
nevertheless knew about Titian, and loved light, red dresses and red hair), West
departs from her unshakable conviction that self-sacrifice in women is to be
deplored, or perhaps this story predated that conviction. But is it really
sacrifice when it is the only choice one can make, and other choices lead only
to self-betrayal? Is West implying there is no such thing as being altruistic?
Or in Parthenope is she painting for us a different kind of ‘sacrifice’ which
has nothing to do with weak submission, but a strong and decisive resolve to
assume responsibility for the happiness and welfare of her sisters? Certainly
Parthenope showed evidence of an exceptional courage when she set aside the fear
that she herself might go mad in the future, and  put into action a daring plan
to rescue her sisters from the horror of the lives to which their mental disease
and and unsympathetic husbands had destined them. Though Fate ran through it
like an indelible blight, there seems to have been so much grace to be found in
her uneasy life, and there is no doubt at all that in the last or any other
judgement, Parthenope would be on the side of those redeemed. She herself is one
of the things that ‘nothing can spoil’.

The ambivalent feelings reserved by his family for Uncle Arthur (‘derision and
respect’) give us an important key to his character. He is brilliant but
clueless, at least in regard to his relationships with his superiors in the
Civil Service. He also seems to be  ineffectual, unambitious, and with the
exception of the niece in the story, his family ties seem rather loose. But that
may be only as it appears. Uncle Arthur’s career setbacks have hidden
implications. Anyone who has been employed for any significant length of time in
a State bureaucracy will soon learn that these are highly corrupt places, where
those in power have gained their position through political manouevering.
Superiors, even if they are not intrinsically evil, are people who manage to set
themselves up in positions of authority over others, and soon themselves become
the tools of moral corruption. That Uncle Arthur seems to have been oblivious to
this could mean one of two things: either he might not have cared enough about
the consequences of offending the vanity of his chiefs, or something in his
character carried him beyond the reach of the internal culture of his
profession. He seems quite simply to have been a gentle scholar who nevertheless
did not desist from using his scholarship to point out the vanity and ignorance
of his eminently placed superiors. To describe him as unambitious is one of the 
greatest compliments it is possible for me to pay a civil servant, since in my
personal experience at least, what is required in order to fulfill any
professional ambitions in such an organisation or one like it, is close and
vigilant engagement with a pack of highly detestable characters, and a
willingness to engage with them on questionable terms. He had, I think, a great
sense of justice and fairness,  and an instinctive honesty. It seems not to have
been learned, or forced, or acquired as a desirable trait, and not adopted to
please God, but an instinct for virtue. He did not turn bitter for not having
reaped the rewards he might have expected  either in his career or his marriage,
or for that matter, for not having managed a single successful relationship with
a member of the opposite sex.

It is possible that marriage failed to give satisfaction because there was
nothing there that needed saving, the impulse to save being deeply ingrained in
his character. When he shuts his eyes and explores the faces of the blessed on
the tympanum of the chapel, one feels it is an act  which afforded him great
satisfaction and pleasure. He would have wished to save Parthenope had he been
given the opportunity. She had inspired in him an instant spark of
fellow-feeling, and the first flaring of indignation he felt on her behalf had
never been entirely extinguished. That was his immediate impulse when he saw her
again, and when he found this was not possible, he resolved to offer her
whatever ancillary support it was in his power to provide. He never seems to
have been able to forget Parthenope, and one wonders if he sought her echo in
the older married woman with whom he had an affaire. His infidelities
notwithstanding, we find in him the unmistakable evidence of a lofty nature: a
deferential love, deference being the complex and evolved behaviour it always is
when at its finest and not merely a trait which cannot be distinguished from
weakness or inferiority.



Though his love was to find no conventional fulfillment, he found no cause to
repine. Even at a difficult moment he was determined to find joy by resolving to
be alive to life and natural beauty. He may have been deprived of youthful
happiness, the lush beauty of Summer and Autumn, but he would claim from what
remained whatever there was of love and happiness to be desired by his heart.
This to me seems much more suggestive of strength than weakness.  Arthur was
precocious when young and child-like when old. Does this mean he was at his core
a balanced well-integrated being? Or does it suggest he was always out of synch
with his chronological stage in life? At an obvious level, I think it reveals
that he possessed an ability to respond to circumstances with an unexpected
amplitude of feeling .

This and other aspects of West’s story lead me to the conclusion that she wrote
it when still quite young. For instance, every exchange between Uncle Arthur and
Parthenope when he was a young boy and an old man, is marked by a tacit
discernment and intuitive grasp of what each reveals to the other. This is very
much the kind of understanding young people would like their elders to have, and
would wish to be seen to have themselves. To be perceived and to be taken
seriously by an adult is a gift which a young child in Victorian times could not
often expect to receive, and it is no wonder then that Uncle Arthur found
Parthenope unforgettable.

I suspect that Uncle Arthur was never really understood by anyone else. I
suspect he might have seemed remote and removed with his family, to whom he was
neither fish nor fowl, and his peers and colleagues were probably at a loss of
what to make of him. He seems to have been adept at keeping his own counsel, and
accustomed to keeping his ears open and his mouth shut, which is an equally
useful skill in a State bureaucracy, or a club or breakfast table when one has
just read a shocking bit of news about which it is important to not immediately
comment. Nor does he seem to have flaunted his brilliance or erudition or worked
to his advantage his astute understanding of the relationships between men and
women, which is why, I suppose, he seems, despite such  obvious disappointments,
to have no axe to grind in that regard.  Though by the time he meets Parthenope
again, and being very much comme il faut, he knows exactly when to presume, and
when not. He lets himself onto the premises unannounced, and allows himself the
intimacy of drinking from Parthenope’s glass. He appears not to have outgrown
his childish claim of “we are not proper English you know…” but retains intact
the same delicacy about her feelings he possessed as a child. I think more than
the recognition and appreciation of one lonely soul of another it is the
knowledge that each was the only soul to whom the other could make itself known
that forms the basis of their ‘unbreakable bond’. They have much in common, and
though he is wrong about a few things about her (such as when he mistakenly
assumes that she suffers from a sense of exile and misses her old home in
England and wishes to to be reminded of it), he recognises her strength and
beauty, and in fact sees her much better than she appears to see herself. One
hopes that before he left, and  later by his continued expression of loyalty and
love, he was able to convince her to recognise her strength and worth. I hope as
well he might have persuaded her to find a more personal happiness for herself
than she had permitted herself to have until then, though West rings down the
curtain on Parthenope without permitting us the gratification of knowing that to
any degree of certainty.

I suppose this might be a good place at which to stop my commentary, but many
speculations still linger on in my mind. West’s classical allusion is a
reflection of the punishment the Sirens incurred for challenging the Muses in a
contest of singing, after which they were changed into creatures with the heads
of birds and the bodies of women, which seems to imply, given a dual nature. In
the case of Parthenope (the siren), the punishment was worse: her failed attempt
to seduce Odysseus drove her to suicide. In giving Parthenope the face of a
woman and the body of a boy, West suggest a similar duality. Along with that,
West endows her with traits thought conventionally to be masculine, those of
protectiveness, courage,  and resourcefulness. Uncle Arthur however bears only
the vaguest  resemblance to Odysseus, and that only in the feeling we get that
he is a wanderer always far from home. But there is a hidden implication here as
well. The union of Odysseus and Penelope is described by Homer as comprising a
perfect balance of male and female. So this is what appears to me to be at the
root of Uncle Arthur’s ‘homesickness’, a fact that as a classical scholar, might
not have escaped him entirely. He seems to have lacked the ability to respond
competently and effectively to a situation that needed changing or improving,
and simply tolerated the circumstances in which he found himself with what might
be seen as as bland passivity, as Parthenope did not.



Parthenope’s ‘presumption’ may have been that she took it upon herself to play a
masculine role, that of a guardian and protector of women. Complexities of
character sometimes tend to be sorted out in pairs of opposites such as
‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’. The reason she was not fatally punished for this is
that she, like Odysseus, ‘lashed herself to the mast’ – hers the mast of the
eternal vigilance she exercised over her thoughts and actions, always subjecting
herself to the closest scrutiny for any sign of incipient madness. Thinking
herself always to be on the very brink of that abyss, she would never permit
herself to be lost in it, and so discharged her duties sedulously and
assiduously like the ‘wise virgin’ she was. Vigilance was the price for avoiding
perdition.

Parthenope’s understanding of tragedy was entirely Greek, whereas Uncle
Arthur’s, with its understanding of redress and even salvation, tends towards
the Christian, and in this he does indeed resemble Racine to whom West would, as
Parthenope does, compare him. But another Racinian insight (a term I just made
up) is that tragedy derives from the realisation that one can do nothing to
alter the more intractable forms of tragic inheritance, as well as the
irresistible compulsion to reflect upon it which usually accompanies an
introspective nature. I think ‘Parthenope’ also invites us to ask the question
of what rises to the level of tragedy and what does not, or not quite does, and
the parts played by fate and choice in our lives. Parthenope chose to forego the
happiness of a continued liaison with Uncle Arthur for fear of the tragic
consequences she believed might ensue if she did not withhold herself,  and he
complies with her mandate with only a few small but significant exemptions. So
both of them resolve their dilemmas by deciding to forgo happiness in order that
in doing so tragedy might be averted.

But my own stubborn mind reverts to a third option, that of propitiation. The
gods are not always implacable, and their vanity predisposes them to be
susceptible to appeasement. I don’t know why at this point I was reminded of the
Palinode written by Stesichoros, by which means he induced Helen (who was
worshipped by the Spartans as a goddess) to retract the penalty of blindness she
had imposed on him for the impudent statements he had made about her. In his
palinode Stesichoros revised history:

There is no truth in that story,
You didn’t ride in the well-rowed galleys,
You didn’t reach the walls of Troy.

Though there is no mitigation for ultimate tragedy, there is some for loss, and
one of them is the retention of dignity. Uncle Arthur insisted on reframing
Parthenope’s despairing characterisation of her tragedy as verging on farce to a
great misfortune faced with gallantry and strength, and in doing so he restored
to her a sense of her own dignity. Sometimes this perspective can only be gained
by securing a view from a point above the plane of action. Uncle Arthur’s ascent
to the top of the church tower permitted him to catch sight of Parthenope’s
sisters playing croquet, and thus to find her again. In aiding a revisitation of
her past, he helped her reexamine her father’s behaviour and her own conclusions
about him in a different light, and in so doing perhaps he rewrote Parthenope’s
history himself.

Another possibility is that Parthenope might well have served out her term of
punishment. I wonder if this idea occurred to Uncle Arthur, though it was one he
was constrained by Parthenope from pursuing. The foregoing  of the pleasure of a
day spent in each other’s company was one of the final offerings laid by
Parthenope on the altar of the punitive gods, but they must have known that in
the preceding years Uncle Arthur too had paid a collateral price, because  both
he and Parthenope had, each in his and her different way, become exiles.
Although both of their exiles possessed ambiguous elements (hers because she
herself wished to escape her old life, and his because he was deterred from
finding as fitting a place in life with her as might have been wished), the
price paid by him might have been considered to augment hers. Euripides remarked
that “All women are exiles”,  but we sense in Uncle Arthur too a certain
rootlessness, and what appear to be his frequent travels away from home may have
been contrived in part to sharpen the pleasure of his return. He shows no
indication of wanting to return to his his wife and family, though is it left
unclear if he had either to return to. ‘Home’ to him meant a place and not
people, but it may have been that this was an accommodation he was inclined to
make, in the absence of the only person who mattered to him and with whom he
might have been ‘at home’.



It did not matter to Uncle Arthur that in sharing Parthenope’s life he risked
incurring God’s displeasure, but it mattered very much to her. Was her dread
merely a superstition, or was she right? That one is hated by God for this, that
and the other reason, is an assertion many Christians use in order to bully the
people they themselves hate, but what if they are on to something? We have only
to cast a single look about us in order to see everywhere the evidence of a
malevolent God, and if further proof were required, we are assured that it is in
His image that man was created. But one thing is certain: there are certain
kinds of human love which seem as if they could put God to shame, and this was
demonstrated by Parthenope, who believed that God hated her. She sent Uncle
Arthur away for his own safety. In caring for her sisters she demonstrated that
the sternest, most consistently enduring morality is inspired and dictated by
love, for all other kinds are bound sooner or later to fail; and in refusing to
let Uncle Arthur run the risk of being cursed as she was, she revealed the
hidden grace of blasphemy.

 

 

 

More on Rebecca West

 

Rebecca West, Dame Commander of the British Empire and member of the French
Légion d”Honneur was born Cicely Isabel Fairfield, on the winter solstice
December 21 1892, and died on March 15 1983 the Ides of March.
Victoria Glendinning’s biography on  Rebecca West: A Life
A fine chapter in Rosemary Dinnage’s book of some  remarkable  women  Alone,
Alone
Link to the post on Rebecca West Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_West




RATE THIS:

i

11 Votes



Posted in Stories | Tagged British Writers, Parthenope, Short Stories | 22
Comments »


SIR THOMAS WYATT’S STALKING FOOT

17 December, 2012 by theinkbrain

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 – 11 October 1542)

A couple of mornings ago, I heard an omen from a solitary jay who alighted on
the plum tree outside my front door and gave five sharp bugle blasts of “mean,
mean, mean, mean mean.” I remembered her when I sat down to write this post, and
heard the tut-tutting of my good angel who stood behind my shoulder and
corroborated the jay’s message with a low “wicked,wicked.”  I felt constrained
to stop for a short space to examine my soul, and my motivations for the task I
had been setting for myself, but finding nothing there to fit the description of
either “mean” or “wicked”, I concluded that the words had not been meant to
deter me, but referred to people now long dead and buried, about whom I had been
thinking.

Ever since I read Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem “The Lover Showeth How He Is Forsaken
of Such as He Sometime Enjoyed” many years ago, something about it bothered me.
It felt like a badly put-together puzzle, the pieces of which did not fit, and
whose picture  did not make sense. I felt compelled to try and work out why I
had found its meaning as well as its construction so aggravating.
I have a few steadfast beliefs about poets and poetry, one of which is that
genuine poets are closet moralists, whose morals are not to be confused with the
cheap variety of conventional social and religious prescriptions but rather are
the expression of a deep sense of personal integrity and a devotion to honesty
in all things. The other is that to be a poet is not simply to have the knack of
versifying, nor is it an avocation, or in fact a vocation. It is a matter of
whole-hearted dedication to a calling.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was Ambassador to Spain, Special Envoy to France, Marshall of
Calais, Sheriff of Kent, Member of Parliament, and Vice-admiral Elect of the
Fleet. His patron had been Thomas Cromwell, the cunning and unscrupulous advisor
who had replaced Cardinal Wolsey as counsel to Henry VIII. Wyatt was a
professional  diplomat who wrote poetry – or maybe I should call it verse – for
the purpose of charming and seducing women. Though he had a reputation for being
handsome, the portrait of him by Hans Holbein the younger, reveals a balding,
pasty-complected man with close-set puffy eyes and a limp beard, who appears
much older than his years (Wyatt died at the age of 39).



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the Wyatt sonnet I have been looking over in the last two days.

The Lover Showeth How He Is Forsaken of Such as He Sometime Enjoyed

They flee from me that sometime did me seek              
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle tame and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?
It was no dream, I lay broad waking.
But all is turned through my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness
And she also to use newfangledness.
But since that I so kindely am served,
I fain would know what she hath deserved.



 

This sonnet leaves its most lingering impression in the potent erotic image
which runs like a broken thread throughout its warp, that of a slender,
beautiful, bare-footed young girl, diaphanously and negligently clad, who enters
the bedchamber of a paramour to slip off her silk chemise and offer herself up
to who knows what, with a kiss and a lubricious invitation.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rendered in prose it reads something like this:
They run away from me now, who formerly pursued me, even coming to my bedroom
half naked, those women who used to be so submissive and tractable.  Now they
have reverted to wildness, and forget the risks they took in order to ‘take
bread’ from me. Now they busily look elsewhere. Thank goodness twenty times over
it wasn’t always like this. One woman in particular came scantily clad in a
charming negligee and slipped it off her shoulder, addressed me with an
endearment, and  putting her arms around me, kissed me and asked me how I liked
it. Honestly, I wasn’t just dreaming, but wide awake when this happened! But
now, because of my kind forbearance everything is changed into a kind of
rejection, when I have been given permission to leave, and she is free to be as
capricious as she would wish. Since now I am the victim of such mistreatment, I
would like to know if she has received her just deserts.

Seldom does a poem disclose its flaws so early, so thoroughly and so completely
as does Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem, better known by its first line “They flee from
me that sometime did me seek”, and seldom has such extravagant ineptitude and
knavery as has been expressed in it been put to such a subtle purpose. The first
hint comes of course with the very first word, “they”, followed by  a shamefully
unworthy expression of rancour and self-pity.  From there things could only get
worse.

As I see it, a dejected Tom Wyatt is bemoaning his fate at having to forego the
‘favours’ of the women he had formerly been accustomed to enjoy. Since the poem
is not dated, it cannot be known for certain whether it covertly refers to Anne
Boleyn, but if so, she would have been amply justified in fleeing from him.
Wyatt’s patron Thomas Cromwell was Anne’s nemesis. Cromwell’s machinations in
bringing trumped-up charges of adultery and incest against Anne and several
others were instrumental in her being found guilty of treason. Anne was executed
by decapitation. Wyatt, who was a great deal luckier, was released after a few
months imprisonment in the Tower of London.

Wyatt begins his poem with the lines They flee from me that sometime did me
seek/ With naked foot stalking in my chamber. The unfortunate and inept
placement of the word ‘stalking’ close to ‘foot’ shows a singular disregard for
the faculty of hearing. I can see how this infelicity occurred. Wyatt must have
begun: “….. with stockinged foot entering my chamber.” but then he had the
impulse to substitute the more suggestive and evocative “naked” for
“stockinged.” So far so good. He then had the idea to change the verb to
something more surreptitious; then he realized that he could change “stocking”
to “stalking,”  Though why a woman would have to stalk him in his own chamber is
a little difficult to imagine. He must have hesitated a bit at the word. Perhaps
he thought he might suggest that, as he went about his business brushing his
hair, folding his clothes and putting on his nightgown,  some interloper was
stepping ever closer to him even as he failed to notice what she was about.  He
must have sensed that the inappropriateness of the word might be overlooked in
light of the novel suggestion that he, the passive male prey, was pursued and
caught by a sexually avid female.  It seems quite clear that from the word
“foot” which came shod with “naked” and “stalking” had managed to create an
image of predator and prey in the context of an illicit assignation, and so it
seems that the single word ‘foot’ wound up  dictating the course of the entire
sonnet.



Having committed himself to the ‘wild thing’ conceit, he finds himself stalled
in the doldrums for a moment.  How to reverse the image of  male prey and female
predator he has already established? He puts down his quill and looks idly
around him; his eye falls on a dusty copy of his schoolboy Chaucer.  He picks it
up, and leafing through it, stops at “The Squire’s Tale.”  He happens on the
lines….
*That ‘Everything, returning to its kind,                    
Gladdens itself’; thus men say, as I guess;
Men love, and naturally, newfangledness,
As do these birds that men in cages feed.
For though you night and day take of them heed,
And fairly strew their cage as soft as silk,
And give them sugar, honey, bread, and milk,
Yet on the instant when the door is up,
They with their feet will spurn their feeding cup,
And to the wood will fly and worms will eat;
So are they all newfangled of their meat,
And love all novelties of their own kind:
Nor nobleness of blood may ever bind.

…and suddenly he feels the riffle of a welcome breeze pushing against his sails.
He has been able to move forward by making a connection between “stalking” and
“wild” with Chaucer to kindly show him how. He hopes that with the the pretty
image of some wild creature picking crumbs from his outstretched hand, he has
somehow painted over the previous image of himself being stalked.

Perhaps it is no great sin to filch from Chaucer, even Shakespeare did it, (in
Two Gentlemen of Verona) and from this very tale, but Wyatt is not content 
simply to  borrow. He distills twelve whole lines from Chaucer, thanks to whom
he is out of the doldrums, and halfway through his poem. This in turn gives him
the inspiration to think about birds gone wild, and meek women who easily divest
themselves of their veneer of civilisation and revert to their crude worm-eating
in preference to ‘bread at his hand’. Fleeing birds and flighty women – that’s
close enough. He hopes that we might have forgotten that the formerly wild woman
who stalked him like an animal is now being compared to a caged bird.  No matter
that Chaucer’s point was that even pampered birds prefer rough freedom to
luxurious bondage, and remain ever vigilant for the chance to flee their cages.
In Wyatt’s mind this idea is distorted, and the point he chooses to make is that
women are ungrateful, and unmindful of the men from whom they have ‘taken
bread.’

Next he lights on ‘newfangledness’ as suitable polysyllabic filler and filches
that as well. Now what? Perhaps an exclamation with a time-muddling
indeterminate tense will do the trick: something along the lines of ‘thank
goodness!’ Thus we have thanked be fortune if it had been, would it have been or
should it have turned out differently, (hath means both had and has) and
“Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise, Twenty times better;”.
Having already come up with the adjective of ‘naked’ for foot, and a
concupiscent note having been struck, he decides to employ the details of one of
his assignations. He forges ahead with…

….but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?

This works well for a few lines. But once again he grinds to a halt. Where can
he go from here? Obviously not to whatever actions followed the kiss – that
would make too much of a good thing – so he hastens to assure us that this
incident was not the result of one of those unfortunate dreams of a shameful
origin, but a real-life happening, but his demure “it was no dream” tends to
give him away. His very asseveration serves to convince me that it was indeed no
more than a dream, which he has chosen to enlarge into a boast. But now what?
Where is he to go from here? He plugs the gap with two lines of uncertain
meaning:



But all is turned through my gentleness, Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
by which he hopes he might persuade us to think of him as resigned and passive
and hard-done-by. He entertains the hope that we his readers would not as yet
have emerged form the fog of erotic befuddlement cast by lines 9 – 13.

Finally, he has only four lines left to finish, and he begins to wind up his
sonnet. Rather unexpectedly he decides in the next two lines, to tell the 
obvious truth in however confused a manner: He has been cut loose, by the ‘she’
(which used to be’ they‘) who has so unkindly chosen to go her own way. “And I
have leave to go of her goodness, And she also to use newfangledness.”  But this
is an untenable situation, and to be deplored – it is against nature for women
to decide….

He cannot resist a spurt of sarcasm and rancour and the chance to insert himself
and his own agency as being the source of considerable magnanimity. “But since
that I so kindely am served, I fain would know what she hath deserved.”

I read it as ironic: ‘since I am so kindly (irony for badly) served, I wonder
(actually, I know) what  ought to happen to her. Since she was so unkind to me,
I hope something unpleasant happened to her’.

I  think I see him smirk on the word “kindely”. Perhaps he has heard of the
swordsman sent for from France to sever Anne’s neck, which also aptly fits the
description of “long and small”  which he has earlier applied to a woman’s arms.

Wyatt must have felt some considerable satisfaction at having managed to
shepherd his sonnet from its unpromising inception to a passably neat
conclusion. He is aware of having nimbly sidestepped a potentially dangerous
pitfall presented by the clumping of foot and naked and stocking and stalking,
and turned them to his advantage. It was a lucky thing too, happening  in a
pinch upon Chaucer’s Squire, and using two sly slippages of meaning  and
confusions of tense and reversals in imagery in order to add some depth of
suggestion.

He has managed to subtly smear the reputation of a woman some will identify as
Anne Boleyn, whom he had previously lusted after, by craftily suggesting that he
has been the recipient of her unsolicited sexual favors. He implies that she had
been in some manner kept (‘taken bread’) by him. However, he can plausibly claim
that the word “they” implies that no particular woman is being referred to. 
Wyatt is well aware that he owes his life to the fact that he had first taken
care to shield himself from his sovereign Henry VIII’s paranoid jealousy, having
warned him (prior to Henry’s marriage) that Anne  Boleyn would not make a
suitable wife.

It matters not whether the “she” of his sonnet was a woman wild or tame, or wild
pretending to be tame, or wild then tame and then reverted to wildness. Was she
even human, and not merely a passager who refused to be hooded, but drew down
her nictitating membrane when she elected not to see him, and at a time when he
would have preferred she had. He has kissed and told, and done a great deal
better than if he had openly boasted of sexual conquests in a tavern, but done
so nonetheless, with great pretense at refinement. He supposes he has enmeshed
his readers in an erotically charged fantasy, carefully contrived to infect
their minds with an image that is  lubricious and suggestive, that he evidently
wishes them to dwell on. As he laid down his pen, Wyatt may have slyly moistened
his lips, contemplating the insidious way in which he had managed to enmesh his
readers’ imaginations.

The absence of love, the salacious note, the whining tone, the lack of
sincerity, the arrant denigration implicit in his derisive plural ‘they’ (later
slyly modified to ‘she’), the inability to decide if the woman in his poem was
the predator or the prey and stick to it, all bespeak shamelessness, falsity and
clumsiness. Even the title sounds more like an expression of discontent over
loss of privilege than either regret or a lament for lost love. At any rate, he
might have thought, he has managed to write a sonnet, and that must count for
something. And so, with the initial dejection he felt when he began his poem
satisfactorily ameliorated, this non-poet probably put down his quill and blew
out his candle for the night.

 

 

 

When probed for its weak spots and with the unnecessary allusion to Chaucer
removed, Wyatt’s sonnet might be be made to read thus….

Wyatt somewhat redeemed.

She flees from me that sometime did me seek                
With stockinged foot entering my chamber
I have seen her gentle, tame and meek
Who now is wild, refusing to remember
That in the past she placed herself in danger
To take my hand, though now far does she range.
Heaven be thanked it was not always so
But in more pleasant times she came to me
Clad thinly in her silks in beauteous guise
Slipped her loose gown which from her shoulders fell
Clasped in her slender arms I heard her tell
Me softly whispering, as we did  kiss
Dear heart, tell me, do you like this – and this?
It was no dream from which I durstn’t waken
And all that I was helpless to prevent
Being lost is lost and now I am forsaken
As she has left me here and flown away.
Now she is willful and intransigent
And so, since I have been thus cruelly served
I wonder if she found what she deserved.



 

*Chaucer’s original, which of course is what Wyatt would have read:

That `alle thyng, repeirynge to his kynde,                
Gladeth hymself;’ thus seyn men, as I gesse.
Men loven of propre kynde newefangelnesse,
As briddes doon that men in cages fede.
For though thou nyght and day take of hem hede,
And strawe hir cage faire and softe as silk,
And yeve hem sugre, hony, breed and milk,
Yet right anon as that his dore is uppe
He with his feet wol spurne adoun his cuppe,
And to the wode he wole and wormes ete;
So newefangel been they of hire mete,
And loven novelries of propre kynde,
No gentillesse of blood ne may hem bynde.


RATE THIS:

i

10 Votes



Posted in Poems, Poets and Poetry | Tagged Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Lover Showeth
How He Is Forsaken of Such as He Sometime Enjoyed, They flee from me that
sometime did me seek, Tudor Poetry | 9 Comments »


NOOR INAYAT KHAN, SOE HERO

9 December, 2012 by theinkbrain

Noor Inayat Khan January 4 1914 – September 14 1944

A month ago, in a section of Bloomsbury known as Gordon Square, a modest
memorial to an almost forgotten hero was unveiled by Princess Anne. The memorial
was dedicated to a young woman who went by the name of Nora Baker, who was
without a doubt the most unlikely spy of WWII. Her given name was Noor Inayat
Khan.

At the time I began writing this post a couple of months ago, Noor Inayat Khan
had already become a fixture of my imagination, but had not captured it, so to
speak. Though I had completed the ‘factual’ part of the post, I feared I would
not be able to put it up, because  it was clear to me that mere facts could not
reveal the person they were about.

Despite all that is now known about her, this woman remained, and remains
shimmeringly elusive, and all the facts used by those who admire, and indeed
revere, her fail to get at the heart of who she really was. I myself had to let
my post lie fallow until the thread I needed to unravel her personality gently
glided into my hand.

Many of us are strangely fascinated by stories about spies. Reading about their
dangerous adventures compensates us in some vicarious measure for our dull and
uneventful lives. We imagine spies to be masters of intrigue and deception,
seducers and seductresses of exceptional talent, who take dangerous risks,
complete their missions and live to tell the tale. Spies belong to a species of
people with flexible identities, elastic morals and what has been referred to by
some as situational ethics, who covertly serve their governments, and do not
hesitate to kill in the service of their countries.

With one qualified exception Khan was none of these things. The exception was
that England was not her country. But it was the country of her adoption, and
one she unswervingly served, and for which she sacrificed her life. A more
idealistic person would be hard to imagine; she had been brought up in the
mystical Sufi tradition and had internalised all the lofty principles of this
great surviving branch of an ancient spiritual practice predating  both Islam
(with which it is associated) and Christianity.

To call someone a saint is to encumber her with a whole constellation of
associations which are usually tainted with religious beliefs. Yet, when a
seemingly ordinary human being manages to live a life of extraordinary goodness 
and unselfishness, despite extraordinary hardship and without in the least
compromising that goodness, what other description can be found to serve? Khan’s
whole character, from her childhood on, shimmers with a deeply human and
completely unpretentious sanctity. She seems to have discharged all her
self-chosen duties in a spirit of intense love and sacrifice.

In 1940 the British Government conceived of a plan of espionage, reconnaissance
and sabotage to be conducted by ‘civilian personnel’ in Axis occupied countries.
The scheme was enthusiastically approved by the cabinet (though not the
military), and in time a group of volunteers was assembled and trained, and sent
forth, in Churchill’s grandiloquent phrase, to “set Europe ablaze.” The secret
organisation formed to carry out this mission was the Special Operations
Executive, or the SOE, and this was the organisation which recruited Noor Inayat
Khan.

The SOE was active from July 22nd 1940 to January of 1946  and numbered  around
13000 agents. By April of 1942, when Churchill tacitly agreed to admit women
into the SOE, over 3,200 agents, or nearly a quarter of the total number, were
women. In a statement given by Captain Selwyn Jepson, an SOE senior recruiting
officer, when interviewed by the Imperial War Museum for its sound archive, he
stated:“I was responsible for recruiting women for the work, in the face of a
good deal of opposition, I may say, from the powers that be. In my view, women
were very much better than men for the work. Women, as you must know, have a far
greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men. Men usually want a mate
with them. Men don’t work alone, their lives tend to be always in company with
other men. There was opposition from most quarters until it went up to
Churchill, whom I had met before the war. He growled at me, “What are you
doing?” I told him and he said, “I see you are using women to do this,” and I
said, “Yes, don’t you think it is a very sensible thing to do?” and he said,
“Yes, good luck to you'” That was my authority!”

In an excerpt from the book They Fought Alone, by Maurice Buckmaster the chief
of the SOE and published in 1959, Buckmaster states “Often I would go down
together with others from headquarters and would cross-question recruits, taking
on the roles of Gestapo men, in order to try and break their cover-stories. By
this means the story itself would become ingrained in their minds and they
themselves would gain some small idea of the rigours of interrogation. If they
survived without cracking, their confidence would be greatly increased and they
could face the thought of genuine German interrogation in the knowledge that
they had already withstood a similar grilling successfully. These rehearsals
were grim affairs and we spared the recruits nothing. They were stripped and
made to stand for hours in the light of bright lamps and though, of course, we
never used any physical violence on them, they certainly knew what it was to go
through it by the time we had finished. If they cracked badly under the strain,
it was tolerably sure that we would not send them, for it was clear that a man
who caved in when questioned by H.Q. staff, in however realistic conditions,
would be only too likely to wilt in the face of the Boches. A minor slip would
not be held against a man, but too general a collapse most certainly would; we
derived no pleasure, I need hardly say, from those occasions when our cruel
jibes, our reiterated and shouted questions and our implacable persistence broke
a man’s spirit, but we could console ourselves with the fact that his cracking
at a rehearsal might well have saved his life –  and others  – by preventing the
possibility of his doing the same thing with the enemy. We were not playing a
game.”



One of the SOE’s most notable recruits, Khan was born in Moscow, Russia, on the
second of January 1914. She lived first in France and later in England. Although
English was her mother tongue, she spoke fluent French, and this was the main
reason she came to the attention of and was recruited by the SOE while she was a
member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. She had joined the WAAF under the
name of Nora Baker, shortly after arriving in Britain after escaping the German
invasion of France on May 10th of 1940. Khan and her family reached Falmouth on
June 27th 1940. Her mother, Ora Ray Baker, was an American, a cousin of Mary
Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science movement. Her father Inayat Khan,
was an Indian belonging to the Sufi sect of Islam, a sect long persecuted by
mainstream Muslims. She was an accomplished musician, who, prior to the German
invasion, was studying music in the Paris conservatory under Nadia Boulanger,
and child psychology in the Sorbonne. When she volunteered with the WAAF she had
just published a book of Buddhist stories (Jataka Katha) for children, a book
which is still in print.

Khan’s life was interwoven with all manner of complexities, religious, national,
ethnic, philosophical, and ethical. She was a British subject who believed in
independence for India, a confirmed pacifist engaged in covert operations in
WWII, and a woman in a largely male-dominated network. The SOE officers 
entrusted with Khan’s training were probably quite uncomprehending of Khan’s’s
pacifist philosophy.  Leo Marks recollects that the sound of a gunshot once sent
her into a trance from which she took hours to emerge.  The S.O.E swept aside
the ethical reservations  voiced by other military agencies, notably the  Royal
Air Force,  about dropping civilian agents behind enemy lines and requiring them
to carry out military operations, sabotage and the arming of underground
movements. They therefore provided their agents with weapons. But Khan refused
to carry a gun, because she was resolved to never take a life.The Imperial War
Museum has the weapon issued to Khan, which she left behind, in accordance with
her pacifist principles. The S.O.E also issued cyanide capsules to its agents,
but Khan chose not to take hers with her on her mission.

British National Archives file

The first three months of Khan’s training  with the SOE, included wireless
operations and resistance of interrogation. She had already trained as a nurse
with the Red Cross when she volunteered with WAAF on November 19th 1940. At the
time of her recruitment by the SOE she had been an Assistant Section Officer in
the WAAF with a salary of £300.00 per year, and it was at this time that she
received her initial training as a wireless operator. Khan was one of 39 women
out of a total of about 400 agents who would be dropped behind enemy lines in
occupied France by the S.O.E.  Khan was given the cover name Jeanne Marie
Regnier and the code name Madeleine. During her training with the S.O.E. Khan
was derided for her aversion to (described as ‘fear of’) weapons. The weapons
developed by the SOE for use in sabotage operations were truly ingenious and
formidable, and many of them are still in use today. Agents were trained in the
use of lethal weapons which included garrotes, specially designed knives,
firearms and explosives. Not for the squeamish, this was real training in
hands-on murder. She was also trained in methods of ‘resisting interrogation.’
Her instructions were to remain silent under interrogation for 48 hours. Killing
and being killed were considerations the  300 to 400 operatives in Buckmaster’s
F (French) section could not ignore, since their own casualty rates were between
30 and 40%.

Sebastian Faulks, author of Charlotte Grey, a novel about a Scotswoman who
joined the French underground in WWII, was asked  in an interview whether his
fictitious character was based on the real-life agent Nancy Wake. Faulks stated
unequivocally that she was not. He then referred to an article he had written in
the Times about Wake, who had died in 2011, in which he states “The prime
requirement was the ability to speak the language. So poor was British language
ability in general that even people who were hopeless at keeping secrets might
be recruited if  they were bilingual. A French-speaking woman called Noor Inayat
Khan, an Indian princess, was recruited despite the fact she told her handlers
she could never tell a lie.” There is an interesting anecdote about Khan in the
book Between Silk and Cyanide written by her SOE cryptography instructor Leo
Marks, who states that “She was cycling towards her ‘safe-house’ to practice
transmitting when a policeman stopped her and asked what she was doing.’I’m
training to be an agent,’ she said, ‘here’s my radio — want me to show it to
you?’ She then removed it from its hiding place and invited him to try it.”

Despite these indications of her probable inappropriateness for the kind of
mission intended for their agents, the SOE chose Khan. The remarkable fact is
that ultimately she proved to be valiant and invaluable. Official records claim
that Khan was one of the most gallant agents ever recruited by the S.O.E and one
of only three women to be awarded the George Cross citation for ‘conspicuous
courage moral and physical’ in WWII. She was also awarded the Croix de Guerre 
with Gold Star by France. General Sir Colin Gubbins, who the was ‘the prime
mover’ of the of SOE, said that she occupied “the principal and most dangerous
post in France”.

Khan’s insertion in France as an SOE agent  took place three years after her
family escaped to England in the wake of the German occupation. The drop off,
which took place at very short notice June 17th 1943, was by special Westland
Lysander aircraft because Khan could not be parachuted in due to the fact that 
no harness could be found that would be small enough to fit her 5’3″ 108 lb.
frame. In France, the BBC French Service broadcast a message from their
headquarters in Bush House, to say that ‘Madeleine’ (referred to as ‘Nurse’) was
about to be inserted. She was met on that full moon night at the drop-off site
in Le Vieux Briollay in the Angers district of France by Flight Lieutenant Henri
Déricourt RAF, code name “Gilbert”, who was a member of the French Resistance,
but was also a double agent in the pay of the Gestapo. (Whether the SOE knew at
that time that Déricourt was a double agent  and a traitor and had already been
in contact with German Intelligence for six weeks, is uncertain, but I believe
it may well be the case.)  Khans’s mission was compromised from the start due to
Déricourt’s treachery. Khan was supposed to join the Prosper Network, a group of
operatives headed by Francis Suttill.  SOE chief Maurice Buckmaster had been
warned by Jack Agazarian, one of the  chief SOE operatives in France, about the
threat to Prosper posed by the SOE operative Henri Déricourt, a former pilot in
the French Air Force. Buckmaster’s failure to heed this warning resulted in
compromising the 67 drops of SOE operatives in France. In consequence, it is
impossible to avoid the conclusion that far more than Déricourt, it is
Buckmaster himself who bears direct responsibility for the deaths of all the SOE
operatives who were subsequently delivered into the hands of the Gestapo,
including  Jack Agazarian and Noor Inayat Khan. Long after the war, in an
interview with the writer Jean Overton Fuller, Déricout claimed that when he had
given information to the Gestapo he had been acting on instructions given to him
from a ‘higher authourity’ in London. It has been suggested that Déricourt had
been inserted in the SOE by MI6, the British Special Intelligence Service, but
it seems much more likely that Déricourt might have been acting under the orders
of Buckmaster himself.



When Khan landed in France, the backup Déricourt was responsible for providing
did not materialise.The next day, on Thursday June 17th, Khan arrived at the
apartment of Emile Henri Garry. Carrying her wireless equipment, she next made
her way to Paris on her own. She had remarkable luck: stopped by the Gestapo as
she cycled with her radio, she no doubt refused to lie, but somehow allowed them
to believe that  it was a cine projector. Khan was left alone to transmit
information, and she remained on the run until her capture by the Gestapo five
months later in November of 1943. During this time she had to carry her wireless
equipment, which weighed over 32 lbs., in a suitcase. When she would get ready
to transmit she had to set up her transceivers and the over 21 metres of aerial
it needed to transmit.  It had been estimated that the Germans would be able to
detect the source of transmissions within 30 minutes of their being sent. This
placed her in extreme danger for the entire duration of her mission. Within one
week of landing behind enemy lines, almost all the members of the Prosper
Network Khan had been sent to join had been arrested by the Gestapo.  The
Gestapo had captured  seven other S.O.E wireless operators, and now they only
had to focus on tracking the last one: Khan. Even so, she managed to elude the
Gestapo sweeps for two months.  Buckmaster later claimed that he had offered
Khan an escape, but, knowing that she was the only operator left and so was of
vital importance to the S.O.E, she had refused. Her position was described by
the S.O.E as being “the principal and most dangerous post in France.”

When Khan was finally captured by paid informants of the Gestapo sometime near
the beginning of October 1943, it was not because of any lapse or carelessness
on her part, but because she was betrayed.  Renée Garry, the sister of that same
member of the Resistance (Émile Henri Garry) who had first harbored her, is
thought to have been jealous of Khan’s role as an SOE agent. Renée Garry had
applied to join the the Prosper Network, but had been refused. She then
approached the Gestapo and offered to give Khan up. Renée Garry received 100,000
French Francs (£500) for her vindictive act of treachery in revealing the
location of Khan’s wireless equipment to a German agent by the name of Ernst
Vogt. Though Khan was caught by surprise when she arrived at the Garry residence
a few metres  away from the Gestapo Headquarters, she resisted strongly and put
up a fierce fight. She was  restrained only when Pierre Cartaud, who accompanied
Ernst Vogt, threatened to shoot her.  Khan was then removed to the Gestapo
headquarters on Avenue Foch and held captive on the fifth floor in what before
the war used to be the servants’ quarters.

As far as can reliably be ascertained by sifting through various and at times
contradictory accounts, Khan was  removed from the Gestapo Headquarters at 84
Avenue Foch in Paris and transported by train to the civilian prison in
Karlsruhe, Germany. One account has her being transported with four other women
to Natzweiler concentration camp and executed there. Initially, after the war,
the British put the staff at the Natzweiler concentration camps on trial and
charged them with the murders of Khan and four other women agents. Later the
court transcript was altered to read Dachau, perhaps because  German records
indicate that Khan was taken to Pforzheim camp where she was detained for over
eleven months, and finally to Dachau, where she was executed. However there are
no records in the Dachau prison archives which indicate that Khan was taken to
Dachau. Khan is documented in the Pforzheim records under the name of Nora
Baker. There, probably due to her repeated efforts to escape  from Avenue Foch,
she received extraordinarily rough treatment (she was kept in chains in a cell
of minute proportions  for the entire period of her imprisonment). However, it
is unlikely that Khan was tortured in order to extract information – there was
no reason to do that because for the ten months since her capture in November of
1943, the Gestapo already had all the records of all wireless communications 
between Khan and the SOE.  The  information purported to have been extracted
from her in Pforzheim was incorrect. For example, the record states she was born
in London, when in fact Khan was born in Moscow. This has led to speculation
that the Pforzheim records had been faked by the SOE, but I think it is rather
more likely that Khan was continuing to resist by providing false information to
the Germans. This latter supposition is consistent with her character as
revealed by testimony from the officer who captured Khan and the rest of the
operatives in Paris, and who was in charge of  interrogations at the Gestapo
headquarters in Paris at the time of Khan’s apprehension, Hans  Josef Kieffer. 
After the war when Kieffer was tried for war crimes by the British Military, he
testified that he had been able to get nothing from Khan, that she never broke
under interrogation, and did not reveal any information pertinent to her
mission.

There were two versions of what ultimately befell Khan. The first was that she
and three other French agents, Madeleine Damerment, Elaine Plewman and Yolande
Beekman, were  executed by a gunshot to the back of the head by Friedrich
Wilhelm Ruppert in Dachau in September of 1944. This testimony was presented  on
April 29th 1945 at the American Military Tribunal, by Rudolph Wolf, who was a
prisoner in Dachau from September of 1942 until the camp was liberated on April
29th of 1945. Wolf had been paid  by the British for his uncorroborated
testimony.



Another version of events  surfaced fourteen years later in 1958, when Jean
Overton Fuller, who had published a biography of Khan in 1952, was contacted by
a Dutchman with the initials A.F. who told Overton that he had been a prisoner
in Dachau and had witnessed Khan’s execution. He stated that the English
prisoner, undoubtedly Khan, had been picked out from the other prisoners and
stripped and beaten until she was a bloody mess, and then shot.

The dates of the execution have been variously given as September 11th,
September 12th, September 13th and September 15th of 1944. It seems most likely
that the four prisoners were brought to Dachau on the morning of September 11th
and executed a day or two later. Although the uncorroborated eyewitness
testimony of Rudolph Wolf places the execution on the morning of September 13th,
the plaque in the Dachau crematorium gives the date of the execution of the four
women as September 12th.

To learn the truth of all this, it would surely be useful and informative to
examine the H.S.9 reports (personnel files) in the British National Archives The
BNA states: This series contains personnel files of SOE agents and staff. The
files may contain papers dealing with the service records of individuals,
including medical reports, appraisals of performance and suitability for
particular roles, as well as passport-style photographs of the subject and
reports of their activities. The contents in any individual’s file can vary
considerably however, and some files only contain a very brief note indicating
that an individual was considered for service in SOE, but rejected. Some papers
in many of the files are damaged or mutilated to some extent: many have been
partly burnt; some names have been removed by being cut out from papers at some
time in the past. The files also include papers in many different languages,
according to the work performed by the individual concerned. Some extracts
continue to be retained by the Department under section 3(4) of the Public
Records Act and there are dummy sheets in place to indicate where this has
happened. Many files contain passport-style photographs of the agents.

I came across various claims stating that Khan’s file is reported to have been
declassified, but when I searched for her H.S 9 report I found that the access
conditions were described as “subject to closure for periods of up to 85
years”,  and an opening date of January 2025 had been appended. The H.S 9/836 
file was designated as a “closed or retained document,” and it was additionally
stated that “This document is closed and cannot be viewed or re-opened as a
digital or printed copy.”  It would have been possible for me to submit a paid
request for information contained in Khan’s SOE files, which would then have
been subjected to a review by the appropriate government agencies, but  given
all these already admitted restrictions there was little to suggest either that
the decision would fall in my favor or that, should permission be granted, there
would be anything of substantial interest and value revealed. Under such
uncertainty it seemed to me pointless to submit a request –  particularly since
it now seemed, at least to me, reasonable to assume that the SOE had something
to hide.

One scenario this otherwise hard to understand secrecy suggests is that  the SOE
was completely incompetent. But there is  a more sinister possibility: that the
sacrifice of Khan was in full accord with intentions of the SOE.

Khan’s story has to be examined in the light of the plans the Allies, and more
particularly the British, were making for the future D-Day invasion of France.
For obvious reasons these plans had to be kept unassailably secret, and the
location of the planned invasion had to be carefully guarded if the allied
assault was not to be met with stiff German resistance. Great pains were taken
to throw Hitler off the scent, and induce him to deploy his heavily armoured
panzer divisions on the Seine to the North-East of Pas-de-Calais where they
would be the least helpful to him and where they would be least capable of 
inflicting damage on the allies.

One of the most reliable ways for the Allies to assure that the Germans were
confused and misled would have been through disinformation. With telephone lines
being cut in advance of the D-Day plans, one of the only reliable means left for
achieving this disinformation would have been to have available someone such as
Khan–someone inept and expendable who, when she was inevitably captured, would
have naturally left the Germans  assuming that they were the beneficiaries of a
stroke of good luck in being able to eavesdrop on the  communications  between
the British and their covert agents in France.  This would have taken long range
planning – this fortuitous placement of someone who would seem (to the Germans) 
to compromise the lines of communication of the SOE.

There are many seemingly unrelated facts about Khan’s mission which do not lead
to any clear conclusion by themselves, but which taken together point in the
direction of  a cynical – if not sinister – plan–a plan on the part of the very
organization she risked (and lost) her life to serve: the SOE. Here are some of
those provocative facts:



1.That Khan was selected for her mission is surprising, given the SOE’s
extremely derogatory views about her temperament and her unsuitability for the
task to which she was being assigned. One evaluation of Khan said she was“Not
over-burdened with brains, but has worked hard and shown keenness apart from the
security part of the course. She has an unstable and temperamental personality,
and it is very doubtful whether she is really suited to work in the field.

2.That she was given instructions to carefully keep with her all her
communications was another glaring inconsistency. No self-respecting spy agency
on earth would require an agent to retain copies of highly incriminating
documents, particularly if the possession of such documents not only would make
the spy agency transparent and vulnerable to the enemy, but also would place the
spy at risk of torture and execution.

3.The SOE ignored the warnings of one of its own agents in France, Jack
Agazarian, regarding suspicions about Henri Déricourt

4.The chief of the SOE, Maurice Buckmaster, repeatedly ignored the the vital
fact that the communications received from France and thought to be Khan’s did
not contain the bluff security codes which would have proved that they were sent
by an SOE agent and not someone outside the agency . The absence of bluff codes
was a clear and unequivocal indication that the wireless transmissions the SOE
were receiving did not come from Khan.

5. On October 2nd 1943, French Resistance agent Sonia Olschanesky  cabled the
SOE: “Madeleine had serious accident and in hospital need to confirm on contact
if genuine or Gestapo will try to find more information.”  Buckmaster chose to
ignore this message.

6. Neither the nature nor the specific information – or disinformation –  sent
back to France, ostensibly to the  SOE agents but in reality to the Gestapo, has
ever been disclosed.

7. The eyewitness accounts of Khan’s ultimate fate were never corroborated, and
such hearsay accounts as we have contradict each other in material detail.

8. The SOE files on Khan have never been completely declassified, and I suspect
they never will be, because the information they contain will doubtless
completely undermine the confidence of future agents regarding the
trustworthiness of their commanding officers and the commitment of those
officers to safeguarding the lives of  non-uniformed agents in the field.

The facts suggest that the SOE had a reason for wanting Khan to remain in German
hands. Could it be that the SOE intended that with Khan, her code books, her
wireless equipment and records of all prior clandestine communications in the
hands of the Gestapo, they (the SOE) would be perfectly situated to feed
disinformation to the Germans?  Churchill  had begun planning for the allied
invasion of France as early as May of 1942. The invasion took place in June of
1944, and  between the time of inserting these agents, and the time of the
invasion, the SOE could have hoped to have passed an enormous amount of
disinformation on to the Germans. This expedient would have proved extremely
helpful to the allies. It would also have served as cover for the planned
invasion. If indeed it was employed, this strategy was, as the Allied victory
attests, successful. But one wonders at the extent to which the SOE was capable
of making decisions dependent on a cynical and reprehensible willingness to
deceive and sacrifice their own agents.

While these may seem to be  merely my own speculations, they are supported in
part by the failure of the British Government to declassify Khan’s files. The
only information that has trickled out piecemeal and that has been put forward
by former agents, supports the SOE version of the Khan mission, a version which
seems to be cunningly contrived to serve as a cover for  either one of the most
spectacular failures in the history of spying, or else a cynical attempt to
disguise the fact that the SOE sent its most vulnerable recruits as expendable
bait in order to trap the Nazis into committing the kinds of intelligence errors
that would lead to them lose the war. That the officers in charge were never
reprimanded or disciplined, let alone tried for their  gross negligence and
incompetence, and that this was permitted to continue unchecked is one of the
unexplained mysteries of WWII, unless this was not a case of incompetence, but
rather of design.  If so, in this, it must be admitted, the British effort was a
marked success. But the price paid for that success remains  at best
questionable, and at worst unforgivable. For there is a vast difference between
making the choice to sacrifice oneself for one’s country, and being sacrificed
by one’s superiours. The former we may laud; the latter we must, as honourable
and ethical beings, condemn.

 



 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Postscript

Renée Garry, who betrayed Noor Inayat Khan to the Gestapo for the sum of £500
and led them directly to her, was acquitted for ‘lack of evidence’. She defended
herself on the grounds that  the British authorities had awarded her a
testimonial.  She was also acquitted of  the crime of betraying her brother (who
was executed by the Germans in Buchenwald in 1944), on grounds of insufficient
evidence.


Hans Josef Kieffer, SS Oberbersturmbanführer, was tried and found guilty of war
crimes in the British Military Court in Wuppertal. He was interrogated by Vera
Atkins. He was executed in Hameln prison on June 26th 1947.

Friedrich Wilhelm Ruppert, the sadistic officer in charge of executing condemned
prisoners in Dachau, was tried by the American Occupying forces and executed on
May 29th 1946.

Henri Déricourt of the French Resistance was arrested by the French
Authourities. Despite evidence provided by the Abwehr and the Gestapo during his
trial that he had betrayed his SOE colleagues in the Prosper and other networks
and provided information which had led to their arrests and subsequent
executions, he was acquitted.





RATE THIS:

i

21 Votes



Posted in Non-fiction | Tagged Noor Inayat Khan, Nora Baker, SOE agents, WW2 | 7
Comments »


THE NIGHT WATCH: SARAH WATERS

12 November, 2012 by theinkbrain

Sarah Waters

The best novels are carefully and elaborately constructed deceptions, which
reveal a detailed, expansive and consistent version of the truth. The Night
Watch by Sarah Waters is such a book and one of the finest and most bitter
novels of this century.  The artful blending of distinct narratives which
describe the unravelling of a society that Petronius accomplished with so much
heart in The Satyricon, might compare with Waters’ account of London during and 
shortly after the Blitz, but Waters has none of Petronius’s picaresque
cheerfulness and humour: unlike the fragmented Satyricon, the bridges between
the narrative segments of this novel are subtle but sturdy and by this device
are brought across the small bits of information which tend to enhance and shade
the separate narratives in what might otherwise be too loosely connected.

The first time I finished reading The Night Watch I didn’t close it: instead I
went back to the very first page and began reading it all over again. It is this
unforgettable first page which has stuck with me all these years. The most
remarkably memorable works enter us in a way which deftly bypasses our critical
faculties. This is magic at its best. Without this singular element, books are
bad, or unimpressive, or merely good: we might stand on solid ground and see the
characters going about their business on a visible surface, but we do not feel
the curve of the earth or the forces beneath their feet, the hidden strata, the
underground streams and certainly not the tectonic plates. In the months after I
read this book, I attempted several times to analyse it, but every time I began,
I found I couldn’t go on. I could never find the clarity I needed to sort out
its elements in a way that made sense. With my second reading, I had the
chronology down, and recognised the hints and prefigurings of one section hidden
in another. But a third reading was required before I was finally able to put my
finger on the key that had eluded me before. The sense within it defied me until
I had read the book two more times.

Waters’ bag of writerly tricks includes an inordinate profligacy of sensuous
detail, a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, and the casual perfection of her
writing itself. Everything is fresh, right down to the coruscating horror of
war-ravaged London. Waters’ movable structure, in reverse chronology and with
its segments of overlapping narratives, pivots on a single axis like a live
insect spinning on its pin even as it is fixed to the wax board, but the careful
skirting of that impairment, the loss of memory, compels us to sleuth for
context. When Kay tells her friend Micky “I’ve got lost in the rubble… couldn’t
get over it” we might conclude that she is remembering the break with her lover
Helen. But the forfeiture of memory is a serious casualty in The Night Watch. It
means the excision of an interior space which gives people substance, and it
makes for a sense of deep disquiet. We all become dedicated drunks when we dream
every night. We go places and do things which are shameful, startling,
frightening, embarrassing or ill-advised, and when we wake up we don’t remember
them, but nonetheless we feel them, and some residue of the world we inhabited
while we slept remains. It can be conjured up in the way we recall an old tune
we haven’t heard in years, or the way in which a touch can set off a physical
memory. This absence more than anything else amplifies the emptiness in and
around Kay. It cuts a swath through her personality, because we are prevented
from seeing inside her, even to the extent of having a tissue of a dream. Kay’s
life is not so much a life as an afterlife: we stay in the present, we move
forwards into a past, which we then have to extrapolate and insert into the
puzzle, but there is nowhere that the pieces are permitted to rest in their
proper place and in this  respect, The Night Watch resists a satisfactory
disambiguation.

Kay Langrish, one of the characters in the dyads and triads around which The
Night Watch takes shape, and significantly the one with whom Waters begins her
book, stands out for me as the main character in this novel. She is at its heart
and soul. Her story demands more attention than all the rest.The other segments
of the book seem to be present in a supporting role but Kay is the vanishing
point that gives the whole novel its sense of perspective. The distant
secondariness of the other dyads were for me like the names one sees skimming by
after the movie has ended. We feel they should not be ignored, that we ought to
read them if only to recognise the hard work and talent and dedication that
helped make the movie possible, but nevertheless they seldom command our
attention: we just don’t care that much. I did not feel compelled by the other
two narratives.  I recognised that they supported the novel in important ways,
but they lacked suspense, and I could find no inducement to focus on them very
much. I did care about the Kay/Helen/Julia story. It caught my attention and
held it with the kind of buzzing insistence of a headache which demands the
pressure of hands in order to suppress its throbbing compulsion.



When we find her at the beginning of the book, Kay is a ruin. Our eyes skim over
the carefully faceted details of her little upstairs-room – no books, clothes
hanging on a wire, darned socks, cold-water bathroom down the hall, a sour
smelling bed – all instantly register as amounting to appalling conditions and
decidedly at odds with our instinctive sense of who this character is. We feel
the instant disconnect suggested by Waters, with something we cannot really
place. We know Kay was not always like this, that she was not always accustomed
to squalor and apparent, self-imposed impoverishment.

The third September after the war – September of 1948 – finds Kay unable to
adjust to a post-war existence. She no longer wears her uniform and a tin hat,
no longer drives an ambulance, no longer has a purpose in life. Old-maidish Mr.
Mundy, a character in another segment, rather unflattering refers to Kay as
‘Colonel Barker’, but for Mr. Mundy’s young gay protégée Duncan, ‘the bold cut
of her hair, her mannish clothes, her sharp, distinguished-looking profile’
makes him think ‘she might once have been a lady pilot, a sergeant in the WAAF’.
She looked to him ‘like a handsome young man.’ It is a profound irony that the
littered externalisation of Kay’s dreariness and fatigue lies inescapably
reflected all around her. She herself is out of step, out of sequence. She
prefers to watch the second part of a movie before the first: she engages in a
tawdry grope and kiss with a tipsy girl in a cinema restroom: she seems to try
to pick up strangers on her walks, and on an occasion buys a blond girl a drink
in a bar. All this is so far removed from the way she was before, when she would
have spurned such crumbs as these out of hand when she was intact, and more than
equal to the challenge of driving an ambulance through the pitch-dark streets
during the black-out. Then she had been able to face danger and horror, as when
she and her friend Micky extricated the body of a woman who had been tossed by
an explosion and impaled on a railing. She stamped out the stray fires caused by
incendiary bombs and braved the bombs themselves to rescue strangers. Her senses
were fully alive to the significance of the things she saw in the ruins – the
glimpse of a box decorated with painted shells seen in the rubble – most likely
a child’s handwork project – a small jawbone still embedded with the eruptions
of its first new teeth – and no doubt she took in the hidden shape of the unseen
world beneath its chaotic surface, and always  managed to respond to tragedy and
exigency in the right way at the right time with the gift of her ever fully
present self.

One’s ear picks up the faint crepitations of Kay’s former life from which the
present is a fall from grace. We know something terrible has already happened.
We sense a past of strength, and of refinement even, and we feel as if we are
watching the impeccable cuff of a shirt being dipped in grime. Something has
happen to Kay which is so devastating, so fell, that she has been plunged into
an interiority which has detached  her completely from the outside world, even
as she compulsively moves around in it and minutely observes it. Life has taken
on a tinge of unreality, that seems to make everything in it go on at a
distance. Nothing extends beyond the mere band of murky light that her own
dullness seems to exude within the small, blear circumference surrounding her.
We may rush to call it depression, but this bland and dismissive word does not
begin to encompass or even describe the horror of Kay’s existence. Her ability
to be a part of life, or to interact with it, disappears, while her compulsion
to observe persists in the most acute manner possible. Whatever has happened to
her has created a kind of insuperable severance from life and the living.

What was the distortion in Kay’s vision that caused her to idealise her lover
Helen? Did Kay see potential lovers as being either virgins or whores? She was a
woman of the world: the liaison, casually referred to, with a high-class
prostitute who gave Kay her flat attests to a certain lack of squeamishness with
regard to dissolute women, and certainly her witty comment about “the deep peace
of the marital bed” compared to “the hurly-burly of the sapphic chaise lounge”
shows, if nothing else, a deep sense of irony with respect to relationships. It
could not be that Kay had a masculinist view of female virtue. I gave this
question a great deal of thought. I wondered if Kay was in fact aware of Helen’s
moral and other inadequacies: if indeed she may have picked Helen in an effort
to force a happy ending out of unpromising material, in order to prove to
herself that it could be done – that one could pull a pure young girl out of the
ruins of the world, and that she, Kay, even as a social outsider, could aspire
to and achieve a conventional domestic happiness regardless of the odds. This
streak of utter conventionality in Kay’s make-up is one of the things I found
naggingly inconsistent about her character. It would seem that Kay may not have
loved what Helen was, but rather what she represented. It was not perception but
something else, perhaps resembling recognition. The image of something already
known and conceptualised in the mind is projected upon something that seems like
it, or close enough. But it seems that the seeds of Kay’s dissolution were
already planted in the distant past. Helen’s defection simply gave them the
nourishment they needed in order to flourish with an unimpeded vigour and
malignity. Kay seems to sense this when she says “We never seem to love the
people we ought to, I can’t think why.”



At first it seemed to me that Kay provided the only evidence of love, and was
the only one capable of it, and of devotion and constancy and marital probity.
But I cannot avoid the suggestion of a darker motivation in Kay’s choice of
Helen might not have been the awareness of her own superiority. She was
upper-class, she was older, she owned the flat, she may even have had access to
her family’s wealth. She was certainly better situated than Helen, and in this
respect the relationship between her and Helen could never have been that of
equals. I wonder if Helen fell in love with Julia, Kay’s former girlfriend,
because of an unconscious desire for some sort of parity between herself and
Kay: there could have been for her a twisted logic in making a sexual conquest
of Julia, who Helen thought had rejected Kay, and thereby securing a position
for herself in winning something she thought Kay had wanted and lost. Of course
Helen was wrong about everything. Julia used Helen as a pawn: Julia was under no
illusion about Helen. She did not think Helen was particularly interesting, or
intelligent or even beautiful. The love-triangle is operatic in the way a
version of Otello would be, where Otello is an English public-school educated
lesbian of impeccable probity, the villainous Desdemona a bargain-basement Greta
Garbo from Worthing, and Iago an elegantly aristocratic writer of lurid
detective novels, who is in fact in love with Otello and could only say of
Desdemona that she ‘resembled a lovely onion.’

Julia Standing and Helen Giniver are a couple entangled in a thorny and
contentious relationship which appears at times to be unravelling. Helen works
in what might be called a Pleistocene version of a modern dating agency, and
Julia works with her architect father to assess bomb damage in buildings which
have not been completely destroyed and are still standing. She does this mostly
on her own, and displays an astonishing sang froid about the real dangers she
confronts when she enters these unstable structures, which may collapse at any
moment. Helen is a middle class girl and Julia is unmistakably upper-class: her
grubby working clothes gainsay it, but her speech, despite the occasional
affectation of slangy locutions, clearly affirms it. Helen is attracted by
Julia’s natural hauteur and elegant beauty, but also by something hidden but
sensed, about Julia’s past relationship, only mentioned in passing, with Kay.

At some point the secret that Waters almost conceals within the Helen/Kay/Julia
triangle and which makes it so dynamic begins to emerge. I had become distracted
by the intensity of Helen’s affair with Julia, begun within three weeks of their
meeting. My eye was fixed on Helen because her emotions  were in such active
ferment. There was a past in which Kay adored Helen: when she was almost
tediously uxorious, in which she treated this chipped ceramic mug of a woman as
if she were a perfect Sèvres tea-cup, and with never the slightest
remonstration. Kay precisely fitted the role of the devoted ‘husband’ of an
unsympathetic wife. She loved Helen, but her emotions seem to have reached a
point of equilibrium. But in this past there is a triangle – Kay loves Helen
loves Julia, whereas Julia who seems at worst cold and unloving, or at best
simply removed, loved Kay.

Waters does not permit her readers to probe Julia’s inner workings as she does
to a limited degree with Kay and rather more so with Helen. But Julia is the
key. Hidden from me at first was that Julia and not Helen, was at the apex of
the triangle. Julia and Kay have much in common – their handsome good looks,
their social class, but more than any thing in either the social or cultural
antecedents they have in common, they share a fundamental likeness of something
resembling an existential orientation, even a condition. Though Kay strives
mightily to reject and extinguish such a realisation under the illusion of
security provided by her relationship with Helen, both Kay and Julia are
fundamentally solitary creatures who each carry an unfathomable loneliness
within themselves, and for such a sense of isolation there could be no possible
remedy.  Even Helen notices “what is it about Julia? Why is she always alone?”

Kay and Julia are both women with vaulted interiors, each in her own way utterly
inconsolable. Julia knows this about herself – but Kay believes she might be
consoled.  Julia, despite her apparent flintiness and her cool exterior, has
also failed to adapt to her losses in the ways that she would wish. She is just
as much a victim of disappointed love as Kay.  Julia emerges as a character with
not much feeling, without much ability or desire either to love or be loved or
to connect.  But what Waters hides in plain sight, is that an open secret is
fully present in that upwelling of  infinite sadness which we are allowed to
glimpse when Julia’s tells Helen that she was in love with Kay for years. The
sense of ruefulness, and  chagrin, even bitterness,  which surfaces in that
moment when Julia tells Helen it was Kay who ended their relationship, more than
suggests that Julia is still in love with Kay. This is the point at which my
question about what Julia could possibly have seen in Helen begins to be
answered. Julia admits to Helen that she (Julia) began her pursuit of Helen in
order to see what Kay saw in Helen. But it was more than that.



The obvious explanation here, is that Julia wanted to get back at Kay for Kay’s
rejection, but it seems rather that she wanted to reach Kay by a sort of proxy.
How difficult to accept that ‘misaffection’ (but not disaffection – Kay’s very
intelligent and subtle distinction.) Helen was the closest Julia could get to
Kay, and rather than being pleased to give Kay some of her own back, it seems
more likely that Julia was deeply conflicted. She must have known, even as her
involvement with Helen deepened, that she had permitted impulse to lead her into
a situation not of her choosing or desiring, with a woman she did not and could
not ever love. In seeking to be free of Kay and taking up with Helen,  Julia
appears to have renounced the received standards of behaviour of her class as
well as its tacit protocols, but she is never quite free of them, as evidenced
by her shocked disapproval of Helen’s lapses from propriety, as when Helen
eavesdrops on the sordid conversations of the squabbling tenants in the basement
apartment below them. Kay might have been able to overlook or even transcend the
difference in class and upbringing between herself and Helen, but Julia, despite
her best efforts, never could.

Julia gave Helen plenty of cause for jealous suspicions about Julia’s
involvement with other women, or rather with another woman, Ursula Waring, and
Helen is ripe for suspicion. She has permitted her voyeuristic imagination to
range over the intimacies engaged in by Kay and Julia, and perhaps she will do
the same with Julia and Ursula if and when her suspicions are confirmed. It
could be that Helen might have fared better with someone to knock her about and
give her the excuse she needed to vent her suppressed plume of volcanic
emotions. Instead she cannot prevent herself from grinding away at Julia, whose
enthusiasm for their affair seems to diminish by marked degrees. Julia is
withheld and hesitant – this plays well to Helen’s insecurity and her need.
Helen seems to be the kind of woman who will always be the inferior in any
relationship, and perhaps the origin of her splenetic rages lie in an occluded
awareness of this fact. Helen’s authenticity as a character seems to come from
her deficits, her youth, her class, and the inner demons of jealousy and
insecurity and possessiveness that consume and torment her. There is nothing
inconsistent about Helen. She is entirely of a piece. Helen has an instinct for
survival. In her second miraculously narrow escape in two years, when the flat
where she and Kay live is bombed,  she was spending the night with Julia, and
her life is saved as a result of her infidelity. What are we to make of the
kernel that might be hidden within that shell?

The  troubling complexity and contrariness of human relations and human desire,
their insubstantiality, and brevity, their inherent susceptibility to blight,
the unresolvable nature of attraction and repulsion, of hunger and satisfaction,
are all found within the bounds of this  sardonic, ironic, and indeed tragic
triangle. The bitter truth about relationships is that the one who wants the
least comes off best. In a sense Julia is as wounded as Kay. She is certainly as
lonely and as isolated. But she has come to terms with her predicament. She has
a self-awareness about her suffering, whereas Kay just suffers. Julia’s
accommodation of chaos and disorder, her personal slovenliness, the disorder of
her flat, all suggest that in her way she had given up long before Kay. She had
succumbed in the same way Kay would later on, to the loss of love. In Kay’s
case  love was ventured and lost, in Julia’s case, ventured but never gained.
Julia cannot forget hat near miss, that relationship that just might have been:
the only time she speaks of love plausibly and convincingly is in when she
speaks of Kay. Julia’s wartime job repeats the symmetry of her own interior
isolation found reflected in the ghosts of shattered buildings where she spends
her days. To have arrived at a place after having endured our way to the end of
all our disappointments and find nothing there, that might be as close to hell
as it gets.

Helen’s wide masochistic streak, and Julia’s coolness and detachment, her  terse
refusal to engage in Helen’s choleric manipulations, and the natural lack of
polarity of their within-gender dynamic, spells disaster from start to finish.
There can be no natural chemistry here, and the fact that Julia has any reaction
at all to Helen is due, I think, in large part to the element introduced by
Helen in her function as a thread connecting Julia to Kay. Helen’s insecurity
will not permit her to accept love where it is given, but to desire it only
where it it withheld or absent. Julia’s engagement with Helen is characterised
by a sense of aloofness and detachment. She does not need Helen’s love, and
resents Helen’s clingy possessiveness, her tendency to behave like a shrew. It
struck me immediately that Helen Giniver’s name carried the ominous echo of two
of the most renowned adulteresses in literature. At first, Helen appeared to me
to be at the apex of the Kay/Helen/Julia love-triangle. The knot holding that
particular entanglement in place was Helen’s masochism, and Julia’s almost icy
reserve and unreachability, her apparent imperviousness, her refusal to engage
in Helen’s tantrums. The fact that there is any reaction at all is due to the
element introduced by Kay. The troubling complexity and contrariness of human
relations and human desire, their insubstantiality, and brevity, their inherent
susceptibility to blight, the unresolvable nature of attraction and repulsion,
of hunger and satisfaction, are all found within the bounds of this  sardonic,
ironic, and indeed tragic triangle.

Julia tells Helen“Kay wants a wife, you see…. She wants a wife – someone good, I
mean someone kind, untarnished. Someone to keep things in order for her, things
in place.…. And elsewhere. “Kay wants a wife: she always has…… one must be the
wife with Kay or nothing.”
Julia’s tragedy is that she does not in the least resemble a wife, and could
never be one in the conventional sense. Perhaps this is the reason for her
bitterness. Julia is correct when she characterises Kay as ‘a gentleman’, and it
is this quality which makes Helen so ‘other’ to her, creating the sexual
polarity, as well as the incomprehension which is at the base of a certain kind
of lesbian relationship. Kay’s particular mix of gender chemistry puts her at
the opposite end of the lesbian continuum from Helen, and far enough from Julia
to spark an attraction, whereas for Julia there does not appear to be a similar
dynamic with Helen.  There is for some of us a peculiar and potent chemistry of
the upper-class British butch lesbian of a certain era: that marvellous
admixture of gender indeterminacy and incorruptible propriety that is
personified in Kay. There is an superiority in that which Julia would
undoubtedly be able to appreciate, and it is very likely to have been at the
root of her attraction to Kay. Julia admits to Helen that she had loved Kay. She
does not appear to have loved anyone else. Julia and Kay would have suited each
other perfectly, but for that little glitch – an insufficiency of the polarity
required by Kay: and all for the want of a horse-shoe nail.

The accidental attractants we call chemistry which lead to couplings are just
fuses that connect to the bomb, and when we light the match we have to not let
ourselves know what we are doing. And so we wonder how Kay might have tolerated
Helen’s capriciousness, her lack of refinement. Was it sufficient that Helen’s
merely corresponding to Kay’s image of what a wife could be, would seem like  it
might have sufficed? Did the rescue from the rubble create a script which played
straight to the heart of Kay’s sense of knight-errantry? That Julia has forsaken
the contextual associations of her class, more than anything else, makes her
seem to have rejected her inherited moorings. It seems she has rejected them
because she was rejected by Kay. I don’t know if Americans relate very well to
this understated but very unshakable code of behaviour and character, and in
fact ethics. Kay’s self-deprecating nobility, her conspicuous bravery, her
untainted sense of honour, her gallantry towards women, her inexhaustible
generosity, so heretical in the the face of fervent belief in mere survival, is
what makes her so admirable. This constellation of traits is all the more
remarkable because of her extreme emotional fragility.

Kay’s loss of Helen does not adequately explain the depth and extent of her
grief and devastation, her sense of unbelievable desolation and how completely
undone she is: the unrelenting and insuperable sense of doom and brokenness
beyond all fixing that clings to her like a shadow. Helen is really no great
shakes. She is too wounded and insecure herself to do anyone any good. She is
driven to hide her attraction to women, and is paranoid about public displays of
affection. She is unstable and shallow and immature. Even so, for Kay, such a
‘wife’ as Helen was might well have provided the perfect antidote for her
insubstantiality. Women like Kay need such an anchor to keep them from drifting
off into the vast uncharted expanses of their lonely interior oceans. The world
becomes for them a featureless place, except for its patches of shifting
darkness, and there is no torment quite like being trapped in such an existence.
Though her values were far from bourgeois, her domestic expectations were
beautifully conventional. Perhaps the absence of family in her life may have
something to do with this. What was needed for the healing of Kay’s wounds was a
stable, untroubled domesticity, but some irony of fate makes of her a ‘Samson
Agonistes’ with perfect public school politesse.

The world of the London Blitz and the black-out was a world of almost primordial
darkness, a world without street-signs, and of obliterated landmarks. Its
inhabitants were cut loose from their accustomed moorings in the past
‘normalcy’, and order was something which had to be imposed by acts of will and
ingenuity. This material darkness has its counterpart in another which can
extend into the soul as insidiously as an invading mould. While Kay is intrepid
in the manner in which she faces the outer darkness, she seems to have avoided a
descent into her own inner darkness. Kay gives definition to an existential
version of our fear of the dark: it is not a monster lurking under the bed or a
vampire who comes flying in at night through a window that has carelessly been
left open. These fears in us may be faced with an effort of reason and
commonsense, but it is not quite as easy to dismiss the  abysmal fear of the
unrelievable isolation to be found when one confronts the truth about the human
condition. The unforgettable lines with which Dante began The Inferno exactly
describe Kay’s predicament: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I found
myself in a dark wood, where the right way was lost. Oh how to speak of it, it
was a thing so severe, that savage wood, and strong and harsh, the thought of it
renews my fear, so bitter did it seem that death could scarce be more.”

The purpose and courage with which both Kay and Julia responded to the high
degree of danger in their jobs, suggests they were at once resisting and
succumbing to the same cause with a similar effect. Danger gives them a kind of
focus, and each of them faces a different but equally significant encounter with
devastation in the performance of her duties. It is an enormous irony that the
Kay/Julia relationship did not work out, because they are a match in depth, and
both of them are much deeper than Helen could ever be. They possess a more
complex capacity for life experience and for confronting and adapting to its
exigencies with a touch of graceful irony. But they belong to a class of women
who are not whole in themselves. Though the absence of love clearly outlined its
negative space in Julia’s life, she was able to face and accept it, whereas Kay
attempted to fill the space imperfectly. It seems ironic that  Julia, who speaks
with apparent dismissiveness about Kay being a ‘sentimentalist’ and a
‘gentleman’, could have been in love with her, but then, Julia always seemed
able to downplay her emotions and take her medicine straight.

So little about why anyone falls in love is visible to anyone else on the
outside of the experience. The real causes and effects, and reasons, all unfold
on the inside. When Kay, on one of her nightly ambulance runs, rescues Helen out
of the rubble of a recently fallen bomb, the biggest shock is finding that she
is still alive, and miraculously unhurt. This is probably the moment when Kay
begins to fall in love. Why this could be we may infer, but never know for
certain. We sense this is a moment in life when what happens in the material
world imprints itself on us in such a way as to alter the inner mechanism of
perception. The moment when Kay finds the still-living and improbably intact
Helen partially encased in a tomb of crumbled brick and plaster, might be just
such a moment when the element of shock and joy wipes the mind clean of present
awareness and replaces it with something enormously new and strange, and the
rescuer and the rescued emerge from the immediate past in a mutual silence and
reenter the world together. There was another Helen, who was born from an egg, 
whose adulterous love brought ruin to all around her. But Kay was probably not
thinking about that.

There is in Helen, for all her ability to go after what she wants, something of
“a second-former swooning over a prefect”, a degree of immaturity, of
heedlessness and impulsivity. She is so gripped by her passion for Julia that
she cannot deduce on the basis of their characters, what might have transpired
to end the relationship between Kay and Julia. The clues are all there in Kay’s
nature, and Julia’s repeated mentions about Kay’s insistence of having a ‘wife’
and Julia’s repeated demonstrations that she would not fit that role. This
should have made Helen pause and give the matter some thought. But Helen’s
desire was really an insatiable hunger to devour the hidden parts which Julia
might have previously ceded to Kay: parts which were given but refused. Helen
wanted what she could never have. When it came down to it, Kay’s gallantry and
refinement played just as badly to Helen’s romantic needs as did Julia’s
glamour, which came packaged together with her aloof indifference.

These three women are, in different ways, incomprehensible  to each other, but
any woman she loves it seems, will always be an unsolved mystery to Kay. This
weakness, this inability to understand the way in which, as well as whom, she
loves, is always likely to come between her and her happiness.  The reason for
this disconnect becomes slightly more clear when we set aside our identification
of Kay as a woman and lesbian when in fact, more than either of these
designations of gender, she more accurately conforms to an older and now
dismissed concept – Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness definition of the
invert. Kay, (who by my calculation was born in 1910) would have been 18 when
Hall’s book was published. She might have seen herself  as a sort of Steven
Gordon, a person at odds with the world, and one who could not be made to fit in
it. That was a perception that may have undergone some modification in the
danger and uncertainty of the Blitz, but which could not be altered at a more
fundamental level.

The fascination we have with novels about broken and damaged people comes from
being shown in a vivid and inescapable way the specific parts of the human
machine which have broken down and ceased to function because they have been
smashed against the unyielding surface of the world. Through such novels, and in
the reflection of their characters, we are able to take a tentative scalpel to
our own psyches and check our own working and non-working parts, in an attempt 
to either reassure or terrify ourselves with questions about our own soundness –
or the lack of it. Such novels are themselves like incendiary bombs, burning
directly downwards as if with the able collusion of gravity, through time,
unstoppably and with a sinister purpose.

The mood in which I read The Night Watch had been set when my ear caught and
held a subtle note of weariness in its lucid, beautifully ordinary language,
innocent of all rhetorical flourishes and artifice. It is of course the
weariness of wartime, the unrelenting and insuperable sense of doom and 
brokenness, beyond all fixing, the nightly danger posed by bombs and fires and
collapsing buildings, the cheerless, inedible food, the vitiated air, the
predominant shabbiness of everything, the scarcity or even absence of hot water.
Language itself must be pruned where there is no excess energy to be squandered.
An economy of words takes hold when economy prevails in all else. But Waters’
economy is deceptive, and it deceived me, and its perfect balance, so poised
between skillfully arranged complexity and intuition, defeated the part of my
brain dedicated to critical analysis and caused it to recede and disappear. I
was forced to surrender to the sense that I was playing blind-man’s buff in an
unlit room. This, I think, is due to the unique fashion in which time is
represented in this novel, and not just that the arrow is flying backwards.
Waters’ inclination is to reveal without confiding, and to delineate detail by
vivid detail, such as the small but ominous symbols which signal a seismic
shift. On Helen’s birthday,Kay takes enormous care over the presents: an
extravagant and exquisite pair of pearl-coloured satin pyjamas bought on the
black-market, an orange carefully pricked over with ‘Happy Birthday’, coffee….
but while Helen rather uneasily accepts these tokens of love, she rebuffs all
Kay’s gestures of tender affection. Helen’s irritability, the absence of warmth,
her aversion to Kay’s touch, all signal the retreat and withdrawal of love. It
is reminiscent of  a scene in an old movie version of Dracula, when a crack
appears and rapidly spreads on the surface of the castle courtyard. It presages
the presence of the vampire, and one cannot interpret it as anything but a sign
of impending disaster.

The withholding of information is a device vital to carrying a plot forward. It
creates suspense, and gives the reader an active role in solving a riddle. But
when a novel proceeds in an opposite trajectory to the arrow of time, how can a
writer create suspense with the ending already revealed on the very first page?
Waters does it from the first instant, by counting on the reader’s inexperience
with such a reversal, and his or her failure to grasp its significance. We enter
the novel stumbling in a moment of blindness and it takes a while to begin to
get oriented. I felt I was forced by Waters to care deeply about Kay in this
instant of disorientation and confusion, but along with that confusion was
implanted the desire to dispel and resolve it.

Waters maintained her unique purpose of temporal distortion by not permitting
her characters to recall their pasts. It is not that they had amnesia, but they
could not dwell on what had brought them to the present. They could  stand at
the river side and gaze at the opposite bank, they had to avert their gaze from
the bridge, nor could they walk across it. But The Night Watch is itself a
backward glance though the characters are never permitted to recall and
remember. Kay, like Orpheus, walks through the underworld with the faint echo of
footsteps in her wake, but when she emerges it is not into sunlight, but into
unutterable bleakness. Because the narrative recedes in time, each segment of
the present is as clearly crystallised in its place as an egg in aspic. The
implications of this literary device are not noticeable at first, but its
consequence, the absence of past memory in the minds of the characters, creates
a sense of inexplicable unease. The past is there, but it is locked fast in the
future. That in itself creates a sense of helpless imbalance in the mind of the
reader, which taken together with the immediate, preternaturally detailed
ordinariness of the narrative, persistently denies a handhold or a foothold on
its surface. Readers often sense it when information is being  gratuitously
withheld, but even though Waters had tied one hand behind her back when she made
the rules, it was worth it, because it worked.

Distortions in the sequencing of time are inherently confusing to a reader. A
still more subtle way in which Waters manipulates time, is the accretion of
detail itself – one simply does not catch that much detail in a state of normal
awareness. This device distorts the perception of time by altering the speed at
which time travels to something resembling slow-motion. But fortunately for us,
the ‘past’  of the narrative is always consistently present in some form or
another. We cannot reclaim the past in order to fill in the gaps Waters is
compelled to create in the story, but neither are we exactly removed from it,
because its hold on us is  never entirely absent: it never leaves us entirely
alone with the present: its intrusions never cease. It did occur to me that the
remedy might be to read the book backwards, or to tear it into its segments and
separate the pages within each segment and rearrange them in a different order,
but I was prevented by a powerful taboo in me having to do with the destruction
of books.

In a sense, The Night Watch is a study of unwholesome relationships and
decadence lurking beneath the smudgy ordinariness anxious to disguise and deny
it. The absence of love is starkly delineated throughout. The mass of sensuous
detail relentlessly adumbrates and underscores the feeling of decay both within
and without the characters. Still there are almost Zen-like moments, as when a
flash of irrepressible beauty intrudes and Waters’ prose simply takes flight.
The fox encountered by Julia and Helen on a walk through the bombed-out streets
at night, when “they watched it dart, as quick and fluid as racing water” and
the distant sound of a band “swelling and sinking on impalpable gusts of air,
like washing on a line”, evoke by a few deft, suggestive strokes an almost
unearthly beauty. In the immediacy of this writing, our nostrils are filled with
the odour of burning feathers, when a pigeon, its wings on fire flies through
the darkness in the aftermath of a bomb, a rabbit-meat sandwich is described as
being ‘sweet’, we almost see the aged ruin of a ninety-year-old woman in a
yellow nightgown, sleeping in her bed in her bomb-damaged house, and  the school
girl joke I remember about the top hat and the bra (still in currency when I was
in First Form.) But occasionally and unexpectedly, the detail seems false, as
when the voice of the woman in the basement apartment resembles ‘gnat-like
whining’ as it insinuates itself through the floor. Do gnats really whine, or
are they are a quiet race of creatures who go about their gnat-like business in
total silence? And did people in war time Britain say “wow”? Did they ‘press’
rather than ‘iron’ their clothes?

Both World Wars, but more dramatically the second, caused the collapse in
England of the old social contact between men and women. The lull of 22 years
which lasted  between the first and second wars, was still a time during which
the frayed fabric of the old social order refused to give way completely. A few
strong threads of former entrenched restrictions on the freedom of women to act,
to be independent and autonomous, continued to hold. But both wars afforded
unexpected new opportunities to women of a certain metal and calibre. During
both wars, lesbians took to the new conditions with immense alacrity and
purpose, and chaos itself became the climate in which these freedoms were
enthusiastically embraced by women who carried their latent heroism within them
like a recessive gene. Chaos and danger were exactly the conditions they needed
to come into their own.

The Night Watch has an earlier ancestor in a short story entitled “Miss Ogilvy
Finds Herself”, written by Radclyffe Hall about two weeks before The Well of
Loneliness. Hall has always (somewhat unjustly in my view) been derided  by her
literary peers – or at least contemporaries –  such as Virginia Woolf, for her 
flights of undisciplined and sentimental excesses, but her significance for me
is not related to her writing, but to her successful effort to end lesbian
invisibility. Her highly-charged, and yes, overwrought short story is about a
woman who was the head of a French ambulance service in WWI. After the
armistice, Miss Ogilvy’s unit is demobilised, her world dismantled, and her
place within it effaced with a total and irreversible finality. The Red Cross
Ambulance Brigade in Calais, France, and the vehicles she so competently
‘manned’, are lost to her forever. There will be no longer any scope for her
bravery and gallantry. The qualities she so conspicuously possessed as the
natural inheritance of her specific gender, as well as her sacrifice, are
forgotten when she comes back to England alone and without a purpose to her
life. She was used, and discarded when she was no longer needed, and  in the
aftermath of this rejection her mind unravels in its effort to reestablish
itself in a way which would accommodate its intrinsic wholeness. In order to
find herself, the ‘invert’ Miss Ogilvy has to bypass recorded history and all
traces of civilisation to enter a time in prehistory and  recreate her shattered
psyche as a man in the Neolithic era, but even there, she cannot imagine that a
durable happiness could be within her grasp.

In my mind, crop-headed Miss Ogilvy is in a very real sense Kay Langrish’s
lesbian ancestor, and their post-war lives seem to me to be echoes of each
other. Like Miss Ogilvy’s in WWI. Kay’s deracinated existence in a shattered and
exhausted post-war London is merely the encompassing reverberation of her far
greater psychic devastation. And a similar devastation to what appears in
Radclyffe Hall’s short story lies at the heart of The Night Watch. The
inescapable dreariness of life to which Kay gives herself over in resignation
and  mute surrender seems very much like the conditions faced by Miss. Ogilvy in
the loss of  a world in which she had temporarily fit. These two things
together, the loss of that world, and the meaning it gave to a life,  in their
perfect synchronicity amplified the wave of ruin to such a degree that nothing
else could be audible above their sound.

It is a great tribute to Waters’ skill that her narrative ellipses tend to go
unnoticed in the spell cast by the plethora of atmospheric detail. We are never
shown how Kay’s break up with Helen unfolded, though we may deduce that the
denouement took place on the night a bomb hit Kay’s flat in Pym’s Yard. Waters
sets the scene and  glosses over the details, and we get only the briefest
glimpse of Kay and Julia unexpectedly appearing together out of the darkness.
When Kay’s relief that Helen has survived the bomb blast  had slightly subsided,
and she recovered herself  sufficiently in order for her rational mind to
reassert itself, we may suppose that she realised the reason for Helen’s escape
was that she was away from her own home, and had spent the night with Julia. The
happy ending is sometimes just a heightened irony in disguise, a fine coat which
may easily be turned inside-out to reveal its shredded lining. One moment we
share Kay’s desolation at the thought of Helen being killed when their flat was
hit by a bomb, and next we share her sigh of relief at the sight of Helen
returning to her home with Julia. A few pages later we are back at the
beginning, with Kay as she sees Helen for the first time, trapped in the rubble
in the aftermath of a bomb and so we come full circle with the beginning and the
end of an affair. Waters teases and disconcerts by waving in front of us an
ending of the novel, which for a moment we confuse with the ending of her story,
but no sooner have we read it than we realise this is only the beginning of what
was to be a tragic ending. It strikes us like the bombs Kay’s friend Micky tells
us landed in a cemetery and burst open the graves, shattering the coffins.

The manner in which Waters creates a ghostly echo of her novel in a reader’s
mind is something which has a durable power to fascinate me. Meaningful stories
for me are those that don’t just end at a literary stopping point which
sometimes seems both inevitable and arbitrary, but then keep on going. They can
move backwards and forwards in time, into our present thoughts, but also into
the echoes that already existed before the book was read. The stories proceed in
an out-of-sync disjunction like a solid universe emerging out of the ineffable
and in time transforming into a swarm of massless photons which rush headlong
into darkness. We are compelled as readers to inhabit the strange space of the
writer’s mind and submit to its its inexplicable laws.  It is this contract that
leads us by the hand and compels us to live lives which are not ours, but which
nonetheless resound with a startling echo, so that they may as well be ours.

In delving into the manner in which Waters constructed her novel, I remembered
that one of my very favourite books, ever since I read it decades ago, has been
Edward Abbots’s Flatland.Though I didn’t know it at the time, it taught me to
think in a completely different way. The way in which a book represents itself
to me has always been at the foundation of how I perceive it, understand it and
remember it. Abbot’s superbly written gem, a treatise on dimensions and how we
perceive them, has come to deeply inform my understanding of what I read. Life
happens in three dimensions, four if you count time, though this, being a
temporal dimension, is quite different from the other three, which are spatial.
Books, which are not strictly speaking life, have to represent the dimensions of
life in a way which admits that hidden dimension. We learned as children how
this could be done with three dimensional object such as a cube. A cube has
parallel sides and perpendicular angles, but when we represent a cube in two
dimensions, its missing dimension can be revealed, but only if we use additional
angles besides right angles. We have to off-set opposite surfaces by drawing two
overlapping squares, and then joining their corners in ways that do not exist in
the original cube. The additional ‘dimension’, time, which gives an object its
reference in ‘reality’, is really a very secret player, and one which has to be
handled carefully and creatively if life, which is the object we are attempting
to pin down in a novel, is to be convincingly conveyed. The cube drawn on a
sheet of paper overrides our knowledge about what cubes really  are, but
nonetheless it leads us to correctly identify an image as a cube with a missing
dimension. Without the ‘false’ angles we are unable to see the cube. The
illusion must be created in accordance with the rules of perception, and this
requires a brilliant imagination.  In order to make use of the referential
nature of time in her narrative without actually unravelling it, Waters has to
make a casualty of memory. When done correctly in a novel or a story, the hidden
and absent dimensions of life erupt on the page. Luckily for us, we are able to
manipulate time in this way as well. And time is often the key to the way in
which the characters in a novel make their secret way off the page and into our
minds.

Another thought that lingered after I read The Night Watch was to wonder why
lesbian writers don’t write more lesbian novels. Waters has paid her dues, so to
speak, with two well-written and unabashedly concupiscent lesbian novels,
Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, and flirted with a character of ‘lesbian
sensibility’ in Affinity.  Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet most probably had
lesbians rushing book-store counters in droves, but with The Night Watch Waters
made her unfaltering way into the middle of main stream fiction. The Night Watch
may or may not be a lesbian novel, but the lesbian content in it was the
centrepiece for me, and I rather think it was intended as such. I will not hold
it against Waters if she never creates another lesbian character. I think I
understand why lesbian writers don’t go on writing lesbian books: perhaps they
get tired of the subject, or perhaps it exhausts itself for them, or perhaps
they feel they might not want to go on writing the same book under a different
cover. What I don’t understand is how heterosexual writers go on writing
heterosexual books without ever seeming to run out of  heterosexual material or
tiring of heterosexual themes and subjects. Is this because a largely
heterosexual reading public demands, and will pay for, an endless stream of
fiction to which they can ‘relate’ and which caters to their particular literary
needs? Or is it perhaps because there are more heterosexuals who want to read
about other heterosexuals than there are either lesbians and gays or
heterosexuals who want to read about homosexuals?  It is a vexing question and
one without an immediate answer.

In the almost-historical past, the publishers of lesbian novels required that
stories about lesbians end in disaster. The scripts demanded that lesbian
characters had to see the error of their ways and acknowledge the superiority of
heterosexual relationships, go mad, lose the girl, commit suicide or be
murdered. No matter how sophisticated a reader was, and no matter how well she
understood the reasons why this had to be so either from a literary or
censorship requirement, the residue of hopelessness tended to linger. There were
of course a few notable exceptions. I congratulate the late, great Jane Rule for
her focus on lesbian subject matter. We need the Jane Rules of the world, and it
is our misfortune that there could only ever be one of her. I don’t fault
Patricia Highsmith for her one-off, The Price of Salt, the first lesbian novel
with a happy ending, because it was a huge landmark for its time, (1952) and
will continue always to be regarded as such. But I do wish there were more
well-written lesbian novels by writers who are capable of taking on the subject
truthfully and competently. I wish I could find more novels in which lesbians
are primary and not secondary characters, and which do not end in the way the
tradition has required of them for so many years. Waters has done it before, and
one hopes perhaps she might do it again.

I don’t like much to think of psychology outside the reliable framework of a
literary or operatic context, and as I got to the end of my own erratic progress
through this rambling analysis, it suddenly came to me that Kay was, above all,
a Faustian figure, but only as in Berlioz’s opera La Damnation de Faust and not
as in Goethe’s original. Berlioz, I think, is more hopeful and optimistic, and
if one wishes for a psychological connection, his work could well be seen as a
prefiguring of Jung. Kay’s entrance at the beginning of the novel echoes the
Faustian predicament, the alienation from the world, the failed search, the
moment of despair, and of being on the verge of disintegration. The
recapitulation of the events leading to this moment in Kay’s life, her dedicated
search for fulfillment and the contract required in order to achieve it, runs
parallel to Faust’s journey. Alas, the first Marguarete was false, and the true
Marguarete is nowhere in sight, but where we find Faust and Mephistopheles she
cannot be far off, and is fated to appear. What is now needed to set the
inevitable in motion is merely the sound of the Easter Bells. We fervently hope
that one day soon, when Kay is standing at her window, or when she is on one of
her solitary walks through the city, or just watching a movie in the darkness of
a cinema, she will hear them ring out loudly, clearly and unmistakably.


RATE THIS:

i

15 Votes



Posted in Authors, Books and Reviews | Tagged Sarah Waters, The Night Watch | 13
Comments »


EILEEN NEARNE: S.O.E HERO OF WWII

21 October, 2012 by theinkbrain

Eileen Mary (Didi) Nearne (March 15th 1921 – September 2nd 2010)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was my initial idea to precede a commentary on Sarah Water’s remarkable novel
The Night Watch with a true story of a WW2 hero, because

Eileen Nearne’s Finishing Report

the post war life of  Water’s character Kay connects in my mind with this true
story, but I subsequently decided I could not properly begin an article or an
essay or indeed any piece of writing with a digression. Instead, I decided this
post could stand on its own merits, to be followed later by another on The Night
Watch.

This post is about the life of a remarkable woman. Her name was Eileen Nearne.

I obtained the digital facsimiles of her S.O.E Finishing Report and other
documents  shown here from The British National Archives.

This story, like The Night Watch, began in a backwards chronological direction
when the neighbors of an 89 year old woman who had been living in a flat in
Torquay became concerned about her welfare and alerted the authorities on
September 15th 2010.

The woman, Eileen Nearne, was found dead the same day, though her body was
supposed to have remained undiscovered for an unspecified length of time before
that, perhaps as long as two weeks. The cause of death was determined to be
‘natural causes’ – the particular cause which precipitated the fatality being
deemed ‘a heart attack’.

Nearne had never married, and she had no friends or family. She had lived in her
Torquay flat for two decades, during which time she  had been intractably
reclusive. When the occasion arose of disposing of her remains, the authorities
found that they had to  step in, because Nearne had no living relatives, and
therefore no one  who could be found to foot the cost of a funeral.

I suppose it was in the course of this pecuniarily inspired investigation that 
the facts about Nearne’s remarkable past were uncovered.

When council workers found obsolete French currency, old correspondence and
military medals among her effects, it was determined that Nearne was a decorated
war hero, who had served her country as a radio operator the U.K. Special
Operations Executive during WW2, in occupied France. In 1944, at the perilously
tender age of 23, the fluently bilingual Nearne had worked as a wireless
operator under the nom de guerre of Mademoiselle du Tort, and the code name
‘Rose’.  She also used the names of Jacqueline Duterte (coincidentally her older
sister’s name was Jacqueline) and ‘Alice Wood.’

The S.O.E  parachute-dropped  Nearne behind enemy lines in France on March 2nd
1944.  Soon thereafter she was captured by the Gestapo, but managed to convince
them she was an ordinary shop-girl. She was found out and arrested again four
months later, on August 15th 1944, when her transmitter was detected by the
Gestapo. The Gestapo then tortured Nearne in order to extract information about
her mission.

A report made by  the BBC after Nearne’s death states that she “survived in
silence  the full revolting treatment of the baignoire” (probably a practice
that resembles what we know of today as  ‘water-boarding’) in the torture
chambers of the Gestapo on the Rue des Saussaies.

Nearne was then sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp and from there to a
forced-labour camp in Silesia where she was again tortured. Here her head was
shaved, and she was threatened with shooting for refusal to follow work orders.
The sheer beastliness of the Germans has been extensively documented in
innumerable other instances, but suffice it to say that camp life was barely
survivable. The prisoners were forcibly subjected to 12 hour work-days on a diet
of acorn coffee, turnip soup, and a little dried bread, and were expected to
work until they died of exhaustion.

On April 13th 1945, Nearne, while on a forced night march from Ravensbrück,
managed to escape with two other French girls who were her fellow prisoners and
members of a camp work gang. The trio hid in the forest, and made it all the way
to Leipzig, a distance of 213 km, before being arrested by the S.S.  Once again,
Nearne, an accomplished linguist, managed to talk herself and her fellow
escapees out of potentially deadly situation by convincing the Germans that she
and her friends  were ordinary Frenchwomen who had lost their papers. They
managed to reach Leipzig where a priest hid the unconscious Nearne in a bell
tower until the Germans had been defeated.

Nearne (described by some as Anglo-Spanish but elsewhere as the youngest of four
children of an English father and French mother),moved to France in 1923 when
she was two years old, and this might explain how her British origins came to be
nearly undetectable.

Nearne and her family fled through Spain in 1942 on the way back to England two
years after the war in France began. Her two older siblings, her sister
Jacqueline who was the oldest and her brother Francis, were also S.O.E
operatives. There was another brother Frederick, about whom nothing is known.

After the war was over the Nearne sisters (there is no further mention of
Francis) returned to England by way of Portugal and Gibraltar. It is an irony
that Nearne was at first ‘identified’ by American Intelligence as a Nazi
Collaborator! An American interrogator stated  “Subject creates a very
unbalanced impression. She often is unable to answer the simplest questions, as
though she was impersonating someone else. Her account of what happened to her
after her landing in Orleans is held to be invented. It is recommended that
Subject be put at the disposal of the British Authourities for further
investigation and disposition.” But doubts were set aside when London confirmed
Nearne’s statements.

Nearne was awarded an M.B.E on the14th of February 1946 by George VI for
‘services in France during the enemy occupation.’ The sisters lived in London
until Jacqueline’s death in 1982. Eileen moved to Torquay in 1990. She had been
devastated by the death of her sister, and was said to have ‘suffered
psychological problems resulting from her wartime service’ – but more properly
as a result of being tortured by the Germans.

What are we to make of this amazing story? Nearne’s heroic past was discovered
only because among her possessions were found several medals (one of them the
French Croix de Guerre with Palm which was awarded to her on the 16th of January
1946), old devalued French currency and some French correspondence. There was
talk of the medals being buried with her – but we are not told what eventually
became of them. The currency was no doubt discarded, and ‘documents relating to
the war’ were was claimed by MI5.

This leaves the fascinating question about the nature of the French
correspondence. What could those letters have been about? Who was the other
correspondent? Did MI5 take them as well?  It has been claimed that some of the
information regarding Nearne’s wartime experience is still classified.

It is likely that there may have been many heterosexual women who were war
heroes, who never married and lived in lonely seclusion with no friends or
family, but in my personal (and I admit, possibly biased) calculus, Eileen
Nearne was probably a lesbian, and if she wasn’t, she may as well have been.

There are many considerations that lead to this conclusion, based in large part
on Nearne’s reclusiveness. If she was indeed a lesbian, she would have had
several compelling reasons to remain incognito, the most significant to me being
that the British Government did not prove to be particularly grateful for even
the most exceptional services rendered to them by its non-heterosexual and
non-male citizens.

The harassment suffered by Alan Turing, (the man who cracked the Enigma Code,)
which culminated in his suspicious ‘suicide’ – or probably  murder –  is a
testament to the fact that the British Government did not feel obliged to honour
the service and sacrifice of its gay subjects, even if their service was
critical in winning the war. It did not matter to the British government that
the war would certainly have been prolonged, if not lost, without Turing’s
code-cracking genius. He was charged and convicted of  gross indecency for a
private consensual homosexual act, and subsequently forced to take synthetic
estrogen for the period of one year.  His mysterious death by ingestion or
inhalation of cyanide about a year after he had served his ‘sentence’, when he
was said to be in good spirits, suggests that he was murdered by his former
employers in the British Secret Service, who after the war was over, may have
concluded he was disposable.

Nearne’s habit of enforced secrecy – vitally essential to her  wartime survival
– may have been a hard one to break. But she may have wisely decided that as a
lesbian, her post-war survival and possibly her pension, might have depended on
her continuing to keep below the radar.  Secrecy might indeed have become a
life-and-death imperative, for her, not only in war-time, but afterwards, for a
this different reason. It may have been impossible for her to overcome what
might have grown to be a pathological reticence.

What was considered criminal and what was not, in those days, as now, was fairly
arbitrary. During and after WW2, the British committed many shameful acts in
order to protect members of the aristocracy who were enthusiastically pro-Nazi.
One should not forget that Edward VII and his wife Wallis Warfield were keen
admirers of Hitler. British wartime Nazi sympathizers included Admiral Sir Barry
Domvile, head of the the British naval intelligence, who was a friend of
Goebbels and Himmler. Domvile, who was in favor of an alliance with Germany, was
detained by the British government at the beginning of the war, but many others
remained in power, and retained their positions of influence, and were never
disciplined either for their actions or for their views.

This pro-Nazism may not have seemed criminal in those days, but lesbianism,
while not explicitly criminalized, received the treatment more suitable to
criminal activity. Given the atmosphere of intense homosexual repression in that
time, Nearne might have come to the conclusion that secrecy was the price she
had to pay for her survival.

One can get a very vivid impression of this era from lesbian pulps of the
‘Fifties – conditions that are almost impossible to imagine for those who have
not lived through them: Being gay was considered evil, sinful, pathological and
criminal. Any intelligent lesbian might well have felt that God, the state, the
medical/psychological establishment, society and family together were
colluding to extinguish her life.

While it is true that the gallant example offered by Nearne’s older siblings
alone might have been sufficient inducement to her to join the S.O.E, if Nearne
was a lesbian, this might have been all the more reason that she was receptive
to the S.O.E.’s recruitment efforts. She probably decided that the only useful
thing to do with her life (if other ‘normal’ and ‘human’ choices were denied
her), would have been to throw caution and all else to the winds and risk
everything in order to find a niche and a purpose in life, regardless of the
dangers involved.

But the Ravensbrück experience may have depleted her of whatever emotional
strength she had left at the end of her ordeal. While living with her sister
Jacqueline, Nearne is said to have painted violent pictures in an effort to
exorcise her horrific wartime experiences at the hands of the Germans. She must
have yearned desperately for peace; hence the quiet –  almost silent – remainder
of her life.

Nearne was grossly underestimated by her S.O.E recruiters, and her character,
and abilities were described by them in vividly derisive terms, as shown in the
document at the top of this page. One wonders now how these recruiters, whose
reports of Nearne were so  cruelly scathing – and so wrong –  might themselves
have fared if subjected to the tortures Nearne suffered at the hands of the
Gestapo and the S.S.  Nearne, after all, was a woman who received distinguished
awards for her “cool efficiency, perseverance and willingness to undergo any
risk.”

When the news about Nearn’s death made its way into the media, and it was made
public that what lay in store for her body was either a cremation or what was
known as  a council funeral (in other words a pauper’s grave), Torquay citizens
were indignant and outraged. Offers of money to cover the cost of a funeral
service and a decent burial for Nearne poured in. A local funeral service
offered to defray the expenses for the obsequies.

The government, however,  made no such offers, though the British Royal Legion
(or the Royal British Legion, the Daily Mail article from which I gleaned my
first bits of information has it both ways) magnanimously offered  – rather than
a genuine acknowledgment of of services – to to place a flag on her coffin,
which might have been in any case the minimum required gesture owed to someone
who served her country. The funeral was scheduled to be held  on September 21st,
three weeks after Nearne’s death.

Nearne’s neighbors had no idea whatsoever about her spectacular wartime record.
They had not the slightest notion that they were living next to a war hero.

The Daily Mail quoted Nearne’s neighbor Steven Cook as saying “She was very
reclusive: I was very surprised at the extent of her heroism. You would never
have thought it, as she never spoke of it. I just want everyone to know what she
had done in her past.”

An unnamed neighbor describes Nearne as being a contributor to animal charities,
who sat outside her flat with her ginger cat, and read the newspaper. The
neighbor states that Nearne never talked about herself but only about the cat! I
am sure she would have wanted a good home to be have been found for the animal,
but I have not been able to find any mention of him.

Another interviewee,  Jane Roberts of Oxford, made the poignant statement “How
sad, and how dreadful that a woman who served her country with such courage
should have died alone.”

An article in the New York Times states:

> Friends said that she withdrew into herself and shunned all opportunities to
> earn celebrity from her wartime experiences. In 1993, she returned to
> Ravensbruck for a visit, but otherwise she cherished her anonymity. As she
> told a television interviewer several years before she died: “It was a life in
> the shadows, but I was suited for it. I could be hard and secret. I could be
> lonely. I could be independent. But I wasn’t bored. I liked the work. After
> the war, I missed it.”

The Daily Mail article, which was the first to report Nearne’s death, was
probably written by an inexperienced stringer, who nevertheless seems to have
done a very creditable job. However, it contained several statements that simply
did not add up.

The article stated that:

> The funeral director has offered to not only pay for the service but to move
> it to a larger church to accommodate the members of the public who wish to
> attend.
> 
> …The lack of any next of kin means that Torbay council will now pay for the
> funeral next week.
> 
> The Torbay council had been contacted by various organizations offering to pay
> the funeral expenses.
> 
> The public was informed that their donations were no longer needed.
> 
> We (the Torquay Council) are liaising with the Royal British Legion regarding
> a protocol for the service so Ms Nearne can be laid to rest with the dignity
> and respect she deserves.
> 
> The daring British Second World War spy who died alone in her flat earlier
> this moth will receive an all-expenses paid funeral following public outcry
> that she was to be cremated unmourned.
> 
> (…A  spokesman) added that the funeral will be arranged by the authority (MI5)
> who will claim the money back from her estate.
> 
> The original funeral was due to be held on September 21st but a new date will
> now be found.
> 
> The funeral service will be held at Drake’s Chapel in Hele Road, Torquay, on
> September 21st at 11 am.
> 
> But finally The Torbay & District Funeral Service of Torquay footed the bill
> for Nearne’s funeral, which was held  as scheduled on September 21st 2010 at
> Our Lady Help of Christians and St Denis Roman Catholic Church, Torquay.
> 
> In accordance with her wishes, (apparently made known by Nearne to a niece who
> lived in Italy) Nearne was cremated rather than buried, and her ashes were
> scattered at sea.


RATE THIS:

i

13 Votes



Posted in Stories | Tagged Eileen Nearne, Female S.O.E Agents, Female Secret
Agents, Special Operations Executive, WWII Heroes | 10 Comments »


DELMIRA AGUSTINI, ALFONSINA STORNI, FÉLIX LUNA, AND MERCEDES SOSA

29 September, 2012 by theinkbrain

Delmira Agustini (October 24, 1886 – July 6, 1914)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

El Nudo

Su idilio fue una larga sonrisa a cuatro labios…
En el regazo cálido de rubia primavera
Amáronse talmente que entre sus dedos sabios
Palpitó la divina forma de la Quimera.

 

 

En los palacios fúlgidos de las tardes en calma
Hablábanse un lenguaje sentido como un lloro,
Y se besaban hondo hasta morderse el alma!…
Las horas deshojáronse como flores de oro,

 

 

Y el Destino interpuso sus dos manos heladas…
Ah! los cuerpos cedieron, mas las almas trenzadas
Son el más intrincado nudo que nunca fue…
En lucha con sus locos enredos sobrehumanos
Las Furias de la vida se rompieron las manos
Y fatigó sus dedos supremos Ananké…

 

 

 

Delmira Agustini

Los cantos de la mañana, 1910



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Knot

Their idyll was a smile of four lips…                     
In the warm lap of blond spring
They loved such that between their wise fingers
the divine form of Chimera trembled.

 

 

 

 

In the glimmering palaces of quiet afternoons
They spoke in a language heartfelt as weeping,
And they kissed each other deeply, biting the soul!
The hours fluttered away like petals of gold,

 


Then Fate interposed its two icy hands…
Ah! the bodies yielded, but tangled souls
Are the most intricate knot that never unfolds…
In strife with its mad superhuman entanglements,
Life’s Furies rent their coupled hands
And wearied your powerful fingers, Ananké*…

 

 

 

*Ananke: Goddess of Unalterable Necessity

Translation Valerie Martínez



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Al Claro de Luna

La luna es pálida y triste, la luna es exangüe y yerta.    
La media luna figúraseme un suave perfil de muerta…
Yo que prefiero a la insigne palidez encarecida
De todas las perlas árabes, la rosa recién abierta,

 

 

En un rincón del terruño con el color de la vida,
Adoro esa luna pálida, adoro esa faz de muerta!
Y en el altar de las noches, como una flor encendida
Y ebria de extraños perfumes, mi alma la inciensa rendida.

 

 

 

Yo sé de labios marchitos en la blasfemia y el vino,
Que besan tras de la orgia sus huellas en el camino;
Locos que mueren besando su imagen en lagos yertos…
Porque ella es luz de inocencia, porque a esa luz misteriosa
Alumbran las cosas blancas, se ponen blancas las cosas,
Y hasta las almas más negras toman clarores inciertos!

 

 

 

Delmira Agustini 
El libro blanco, 1907



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Light of the Moon

The moon is pallid and sad, the moon is bloodless and cold.
I imagine the half-moon as a profile of the dead…
And beyond the renowned and praised pallor
Of Arab pearls, I prefer the rose in recent bud.

 

 

In a corner of this land with the colors of earth,
I adore this pale moon, I adore this death mask!
And at the altar of the night, like a flower inflamed,
Inebriated by strange perfumes, my soul resigns.

 

 

 

I know of lips withered with blasphemy and wine;
After an orgy they kiss her trace in the lane.
Insane ones who die kissing her image in lakes…
Because she is light of innocence, because white things
Illuminate her mysterious light, things taking on white,
And even the blackest souls become uncertainly bright.

 

 

 

Translation Valerie Martínez



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alfonsina Storni (May 29, 1892 – October 25, 1938)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Palabras a Delmira Agustini

Estás muerta y tu cuerpo, bajo uruguayo manto,
Descansa de su fuego, se limpia de su llama.
Sólo desde tus libros tu roja lengua llama
Como cuando vivías, al amor y al encanto.

 

 

Hoy, si un alma de tantas, sentenciosa y oscura,
Con palabras pesadas va a sangrarte el oído,
Encogida en tu pobre cajoncito roído
No puedes contestarle desde tu sepultura.

 

 

 

Pero sobre tu pecho, para siempre deshecho,
Comprensivo vigila, todavía, mi pecho,
Y, si ofendida lloras por tus cuencas abiertas,

 

 

Tus lágrimas heladas, con mano tan liviana
Que más que mano amiga parece mano hermana,
Te enjugo dulcemente las tristes cuencas muertas.

Alfonsina Storni



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Words to Delmira Augustini

You are dead and your body under an Uruguayan mantle
Rests from its fire, cleansed of its soul
Since now solely from your books does your red tongue call
As when you lived, to love, and to enchant.

 

 

 

If today, a soul among the many judgmental and dark
Comes to bleed your ear with ponderous words
Huddled in your poor crumbling little casket
You cannot answer it, from your grave.

 

 

But upon your breast, undone forever                  
My breast ever keeps tender vigil
And if offended your empty sockets should weep
Your frozen tears such a delicate hand.
A hand more than that of a friend, but the hand of a sweetheart*
Will wipe them sweetly away from the sad dead hollows.

 

 

 

*The word hermana used here indicates a relationship deeper than friends but not
quite that of lovers.

Translation Dia Tsung



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alfonsina y el mar

Por la blanda arena que lame el mar
su pequeña huella no vuelve más,
un sendero solo de pena y silencio
llegó hasta el agua profunda,
un sendero solo de penas mudas
llegó hasta la espuma.

 

 

 

 

Sabe Dios qué angustia te acompañó
qué dolores viejos calló tu voz,
para recostarte arrullada en el canto
de las caracolas marinas
la canción que canta,
en el fondo oscuro del mar, la caracola.

 

 

 

 

Te vas Alfonsina con tu soledad

qué poemas nuevos fuiste a buscar,
una voz antigua de viento y de sal,
te requiebra el alma y la está llevando,
y te vas hacia allá como en sueños,
dormida Alfonsina, vestida de mar.

 
Cinco sirenitas te llevarán
por caminos de algas y de coral,
y fosforescentes caballos marinos
harán una ronda a tu lado,
y los habitantes del agua
van a jugar pronto a tu lado.

 

 



Bájame la lámpara un poco más
déjame que duerma, nodriza en paz,
y si llama él no le digas que estoy
dile que Alfonsina no vuelve
y si llama él no le digas nunca que estoy,
di que me he ido.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Te vas Alfonsina con tu soledad              
qué poemas nuevos fuiste a buscar,
una voz antigua de viento y de sal
que requiebra el alma y la está llevando,
y te vas hacia allá, como en sueños,
dormida Alfonsina, vestida de mar.

 

 

 

 

Félix Luna lyrics

Ariel Ramírez music

Ariel Ramírez (4 September 1921 – 18 February 2010)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Félix Luna (September 30, 1925 – November 5, 2009)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alfonsina and the Sea

To the soft sand which is lapped by the sea
your little footprint return no more,
only  a path, a trail of pain and silence
reaching  up to the deep water,
only a path of silent torment
reaching up to the foam.

 

God knows what anguish accompanied you
What ancient suffering silenced  your voice,
to lean back, lulled in the song
of the  seashells
the song which they sing
on the deep darkness of the sea, the conch.

 

 



You went, Alfonsina with your solitude
To find what new poems are left to be found,
An ancient voice of the wind and the salt,
to shatter your soul and convey you,
and you go yonder as in dreams,
Alfonsina asleep, adorned with the sea.

 

 

 

 

 
Five little sirens will bear you
on paths of algæ and coral
and phosphorescent sea horses
encircle  your side,
and the inhabitants of the water
soon come to sport beside you

 

 

 

 

Lower the lamp for me, slightly
Let me sleep, o nurse, in peace
and if he calls, tell him I’m not here
tell him Alfonsina will not return
And if he calls, tell him nothing about me
simply say I have gone away.

 

 

 
You went, Alfonsina with your solitude
To find what new poems are left to be found,
An ancient voice of the wind and the salt,
to shatter your soul and convey you,
and you go yonder as in dreams,
Alfonsina asleep, adorned with the sea.

 

 

 

 

 

Translation Dia Tsung



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alfonsina y el mar, sung by Mercedes Sosa


 



 

 

 

 

These ripples of remembrance and commemoration, are tributes which spread out
from the life of Delmira Agustini, an Uruguayan poet of Italian descent, who was
murdered by her husband Enrique Reyes, a month after she had divorced him.
Agustini had been married to Reyes for a month when the divorce was granted.

Agustini was emphatically a modern poet, who asserted her female voice in a time
and place when women were not supposed to publicly assert either themselves or
their work.  Her poems were powerful, personal and lyrical, and brought her both
fame and notoriety. Fortunately many of her poems, together with English
translations, can be found on the web,  and they are well worth finding and
reading.  This is a list of her published work.

1907: El libro blanco
1910: Cantos de la mañana
1913: Los cálices vacíos, pórtico de Rubén Darío
1924: Obras completas “Complete Works”: Volume 1, El rosario de Eros; Volume 2:
Los astros del abismo, posthumously published, Montevideo, Uruguay: Máximo
García
1944: Poesías, prologue by Luisa Luisi Motevideo, Claudio García & Co.
1971: Poesías completas, prólogue and notes by Manuel Alvar, Barcelona:
Editorial Labor

Alfonsina Storni, an Argentinian writer and poet of Italian descent, commited
suicide by walking into the sea (the Mar del Plata) in 1938, a year after the
suicide of her close friend and fellow writer, the Uruguayan/Argentinan (both
countries claim him) Horacio Quiroga. She had been suffering from breast cancer.
There are many articles on her work and life to be found on the web. This is a
link to the Britannica thumbnail listed under her name.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/567660/Alfonsina-Storni

Félix Luna is listed in Wikipedia as “a prominent Argentine writer, lyricist and
historian.” Luna was born on September 30th 1925, Happy Birthday five hours from
now Mr. Luna.

I don’t know how coincidences occur, but when I decided to post a couple of
poems by Delmira Agustini today, I was led to a tribute to her written by
Alfonsina Storni. From there I was led to the poem dedicated to Storni written
by Félix Luna. I then found the poem had been set to music by Ariel Ramírez, and
found the beautiful version of the song sung by Mercedes Sosa.


RATE THIS:

i

7 Votes



Posted in Poems, Poets and Poetry, Translations | Tagged Alfonsina Storni, Ariel
Ramiréz, Delmira Agustini, Félix Luna, Nana Mouskouri, South American Poetry,
Spanish Poetry | 10 Comments »


THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON: F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

25 September, 2012 by theinkbrain

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Birthday Mr. Fitzgerald! It has always pleased me that we share this date
in common!

 

As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I
am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the
young shall be uttered upon the anæsthetic air of a hospital, preferably a
fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of
style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby
should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon them
astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known.
I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.
The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and financial, in
Antebellum Baltimore. They were related to the This Family and the That Family,
which, as every Southerner knew, entitled them to membership in that enormous
peerage which largely populated the Confederacy. This was their first experience
with the charming old custom of having babies–Mr. Button was naturally nervous.
He hoped it would be a boy so that he could be sent to Yale College in
Connecticut, at which institution Mr. Button himself had been known for four
years by the somewhat obvious nickname of “Cuff.”
On the September morning consecrated to the enormous event he arose nervously at
six o’clock dressed himself, adjusted an impeccable stock, and hurried forth
through the streets of Baltimore to the hospital, to determine whether the
darkness of the night had borne in new life upon its bosom.
When he was approximately a hundred yards from the Maryland Private Hospital for
Ladies and Gentlemen he saw Doctor Keene, the family physician, descending the
front steps, rubbing his hands together with a washing movement–as all doctors
are required to do by the unwritten ethics of their profession.
Mr. Roger Button, the president of Roger Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware, began
to run toward Doctor Keene with much less dignity than was expected from a
Southern gentleman of that picturesque period.
“Doctor Keene!” he called. “Oh, Doctor Keene!”
The doctor heard him, faced around, and stood waiting, a curious expression
settling on his harsh, medicinal face as Mr. Button drew near.
“What happened?” demanded Mr. Button, as he came up in a gasping rush.
“What was it? How is she? A boy? Who is it? What – ”
“Talk sense!” said Doctor Keene sharply, He appeared somewhat irritated.
“Is the child born?” begged Mr. Button.
Doctor Keene frowned. “Why, yes, I suppose so – after a fashion.” Again he threw
a curious glance at Mr. Button.
“Is my wife all right?”
“Yes.”
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
“Here now!” cried Doctor Keene in a perfect passion of irritation,”
I’ll ask you to go and see for yourself. Outrageous!” He snapped the last word
out in almost one syllable, then he turned away muttering:
“Do you imagine a case like this will help my professional reputation? One more
would ruin me–ruin anybody.”
“What’s the matter?” demanded Mr. Button appalled. “Triplets?”
“No, not triplets!” answered the doctor cuttingly. “What’s more, you can go and
see for yourself. And get another doctor. I brought you into the world, young
man, and I’ve been physician to your family for forty years, but I’m through
with you! I don’t want to see you or any of your relatives ever again!
Good-bye!”
Then he turned sharply, and without another word climbed into his phaeton, which
was waiting at the curbstone, and drove severely away.
Mr. Button stood there upon the sidewalk, stupefied and trembling from head to
foot. What horrible mishap had occurred? He had suddenly lost all desire to go
into the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen – it was with the
greatest difficulty that, a moment later, he forced himself to mount the  steps
and enter the front door.
A nurse was sitting behind a desk in the opaque gloom of the hall. Swallowing
his shame, Mr. Button approached her.
“Good-morning,” she remarked, looking up at him pleasantly.
“Good-morning. I – I am Mr. Button.”
At this a look of utter terror spread itself over girl’s face. She rose to her
feet and seemed about to fly from the hall, restraining herself only with the
most apparent difficulty.
“I want to see my child,” said Mr. Button.
The nurse gave a little scream. “Oh – of course!” she cried hysterically.
“Upstairs. Right upstairs. Go – up!”
She pointed the direction, and Mr. Button, bathed in cool perspiration, turned
falteringly, and began to mount to the second floor. In the upper hall he
addressed another nurse who approached him, basin in hand.   “I’m Mr. Button,”
he managed to articulate.  “I want to see my – ”
Clank! The basin clattered to the floor and rolled in the direction of the
stairs. Clank! Clank! I began a methodical decent as if sharing in the general
terror which this gentleman provoked.
“I want to see my child!” Mr. Button almost shrieked. He was on the verge of
collapse.
Clank! The basin reached the first floor. The nurse regained control of herself,
and threw Mr. Button a look of hearty contempt.
“All right, Mr. Button,” she agreed in a hushed voice. “Very well! But if you
knew what a state it’s put us all in this morning! It’s perfectly outrageous!
The hospital will never have a ghost of a reputation after – ”
“Hurry!” he cried hoarsely. “I can’t stand this!”
“Come this way, then, Mr. Button.”
He dragged himself after her. At the end of a long hall they reached a room from
which proceeded a variety of howls – indeed, a room which, in later parlance,
would have been known as the “crying-room.” They entered.
“Well,” gasped Mr. Button, “which is mine?”
“There!” said the nurse.
Mr. Button’s eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he saw. Wrapped
in a voluminous white blanket, and partly crammed into one of the cribs, there
sat an old man apparently about seventy years of age. His sparse hair was almost
white, and from his chin dripped a long smoke-colored beard, which waved
absurdly back and forth, fanned by the breeze coming in at the window. He looked
up at Mr. Button with dim, faded eyes in which lurked a puzzled question.
“Am I mad?” thundered Mr. Button, his terror resolving into rage. “Is this some
ghastly hospital joke?
“It doesn’t seem like a joke to us,” replied the nurse severely. “And I don’t
know whether you’re mad or not – but that is most certainly your child.”
The cool perspiration redoubled on Mr. Button’s forehead. He closed his eyes,
and then, opening them, looked again. There was no mistake – he was gazing at a
man of threescore and ten – a baby of threescore and ten, a baby whose feet hung
over the sides of the crib in which it was reposing.
The old man looked placidly from one to the other for a moment, and then
suddenly spoke in a cracked and ancient voice. “Are you my father?” he demanded.
Mr. Button and the nurse started violently.
“Because if you are,” went on the old man querulously, “I wish you’d get me out
of this place – or, at least, get them to put a comfortable rocker in here,”
“Where in God’s name did you come from? Who are you?” burst out Mr. Button
frantically.
“I can’t tell you exactly who I am,” replied the querulous whine, “because I’ve
only been born a few hours – but my last name is certainly Button.”
“You lie! You’re an impostor!”
The old man turned wearily to the nurse. “Nice way to welcome a new-born child,”
he complained in a weak voice. “Tell him he’s wrong, why don’t you?”
“You’re wrong. Mr. Button,” said the nurse severely. “This is your child, and
you’ll have to make the best of it. We’re going to ask you to take him home with
you as soon as possible – some time to-day.”
“Home?” repeated Mr. Button incredulously.
“Yes, we can’t have him here. We really can’t, you know?”
“I’m right glad of it,” whined the old man. “This is a fine place to keep a
youngster of quiet tastes. With all this yelling and howling, I haven’t been
able to get a wink of sleep. I asked for something to eat” – here his voice rose
to a shrill note of protest – “and they brought me a bottle of milk!”
Mr. Button, sank down upon a chair near his son and concealed his face in his
hands. “My heavens!” he murmured, in an ecstasy of horror.
“What will people say? What must I do?”
“You’ll have to take him home,” insisted the nurse – “immediately!”
A grotesque picture formed itself with dreadful clarity before the eyes of the
tortured man–a picture of himself walking through the crowded streets of the
city with this appalling apparition stalking by his side.
“I can’t. I can’t,” he moaned.
People would stop to speak to him, and what was he going to say? He would have
to introduce this–this septuagenarian: “This is my son, born early this
morning.” And then the old man would gather his blanket around him and they
would plod on, past the bustling stores, the slave market–for a dark instant Mr.
Button wished passionately that his son was black – past the luxurious houses of
the residential district, past the home for the aged….
“Come! Pull yourself together,” commanded the nurse.
“See here,” the old man announced suddenly, “if you think I’m going to walk home
in this blanket, you’re entirely mistaken.”
“Babies always have blankets.”
With a malicious crackle the old man held up a small white swaddling garment.
“Look!” he quavered. “This is what they had ready for me.”
“Babies always wear those,” said the nurse primly.
“Well,” said the old man, “this baby’s not going to wear anything in about two
minutes. This blanket itches. They might at least have given me a sheet.”
“Keep it on! Keep it on!” said Mr. Button hurriedly. He turned to the nurse.
“What’ll I do?”
“Go down town and buy your son some clothes.”
Mr. Button’s son’s voice followed him down into the: hall: “And a cane, father.
I want to have a cane.”
Mr. Button banged the outer door savagely….

2
“Good-morning,” Mr. Button said nervously, to the clerk in the Chesapeake Dry
Goods Company. “I want to buy some clothes for my child.”
“How old is your child, sir?”
“About six hours,” answered Mr. Button, without due consideration.
“Babies’ supply department in the rear.”
“Why, I don’t think – I’m not sure that’s what I want. It’s – he’s an unusually
large-size child. Exceptionally – ah large.”
“They have the largest child’s sizes.”
“Where is the boys’ department?” inquired Mr. Button, shifting his ground
desperately. He felt that the clerk must surely scent his shameful secret.
“Right here.”
“Well –– ” He hesitated. The notion of dressing his son in men’s clothes was
repugnant to him. If, say, he could only find a very large boy’s suit, he might
cut off that long and awful beard, dye the white hair brown, and thus manage to
conceal the worst, and to retain something of his own self-respect–not to
mention his position in Baltimore society.
But a frantic inspection of the boys’ department revealed no suits to fit the
new-born Button. He blamed the store, of course – in such cases it is the thing
to blame the store.
“How old did you say that boy of yours was?” demanded the clerk curiously.
“He’s – sixteen.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought you said six hours. You’ll find the youths’
department in the next aisle.”
Mr. Button turned miserably away. Then he stopped, brightened, and pointed his
finger toward a dressed dummy in the window display. “There!” he exclaimed.
“I’ll take that suit, out there on the dummy.”
The clerk stared. “Why,” he protested, “that’s not a child’s suit. At least it
is, but it’s for fancy dress. You could wear it yourself!”
“Wrap it up,” insisted his customer nervously. “That’s what I want.”
The astonished clerk obeyed.
Back at the hospital Mr. Button entered the nursery and almost threw the package
at his son. “Here’s your clothes,” he snapped out.
The old man untied the package and viewed the contents with a quizzical eye.
“They look sort of funny to me,” he complained, “I don’t want to be made a
monkey of – ”
“You’ve made a monkey of me!” retorted Mr. Button fiercely. “Never you mind how
funny you look. Put them on – or I’ll – or I’ll spank you.” He swallowed
uneasily at the penultimate word, feeling nevertheless that it was the proper
thing to say.
“All right, father” – this with a grotesque simulation of filial respect –
“you’ve lived longer; you know best. Just as you say.”
As before, the sound of the word “father” caused Mr. Button to start violently.
“And hurry.”
“I’m hurrying, father.”
When his son was dressed Mr. Button regarded him with depression. The costume
consisted of dotted socks, pink pants, and a belted blouse with a wide white
collar. Over the latter waved the long whitish beard, drooping almost to the
waist. The effect was not good.
“Wait!”
Mr. Button seized a hospital shears and with three quick snips amputated a large
section of the beard. But even with this improvement the ensemble fell far short
of perfection. The remaining brush of scraggly hair, the watery eyes, the
ancient teeth, seemed oddly out of tone with the gaiety of the costume. Mr.
Button, however, was obdurate – he held out his hand. “Come along!” he said
sternly.
His son took the hand trustingly. “What are you going to call me, dad?” he
quavered as they walked from the nursery–”just ‘baby’ for a while? till you
think of a  better name?”
Mr. Button grunted. “I don’t know,” he answered harshly. “I think we’ll call you
Methuselah.”

3
Even after the new addition to the Button family had had his hair cut short and
then dyed to a sparse unnatural black, had had his face shaved so close that it
glistened, and had been attired in small-boy clothes made to order by a
flabbergasted tailor, it was impossible for Button to ignore the fact that his
son was an excuse for a first family baby. Despite his aged stoop, Benjamin
Button – for it was by this name they called him instead of by the appropriate
but invidious Methuselah – was five feet eight inches tall. His clothes did not
conceal this, nor did the clipping and dyeing of his eyebrows disguise the fact
that the eyes under were faded and watery and tired. In fact, the baby-nurse who
had been engaged in advance left the house after one look, in a state of
considerable indignation.
But Mr. Button persisted in his unwavering purpose. Benjamin was a baby, and a
baby he should remain. At first he declared that if Benjamin didn’t like warm
milk he could go without food altogether, but he was finally prevailed upon to
allow his son bread and butter, and even oatmeal by way of a compromise. One day
he brought home a rattle and, giving it to Benjamin, insisted in no uncertain
terms that he should “play with it,” whereupon the old man took it with a weary
expression and could be heard jingling it obediently at intervals throughout the
day.
There can be no doubt, though, that the rattle bored him, and that he found
other and more soothing amusements when he was left alone. For instance, Mr.
Button discovered one day that during the preceding week be had smoked more
cigars than ever before – a phenomenon, which was explained a few days later
when, entering the nursery unexpectedly, he found the room full of faint blue
haze and Benjamin, with a guilty expression on his face, trying to conceal the
butt of a dark Havana. This, of course, called for a severe spanking, but Mr.
Button found that he could not bring himself to administer it. He merely warned
his son that he would “stunt his growth.”
Nevertheless he persisted in his attitude. He brought home lead soldiers, he
brought toy trains, he brought large pleasant animals made of cotton, and, to
perfect the illusion which he was creating–for himself at least–he passionately
demanded of the clerk in the toy-store whether “the paint would come off the
pink duck if the baby put it in his mouth.” But, despite all his father’s
efforts, Benjamin refused to be interested. He would steal down the back stairs
and return to the nursery with a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, over
which he would pore through an afternoon, while his cotton cows and his Noah’s
ark were left neglected on the floor. Against such a stubbornness Mr. Button’s
efforts were of little avail.
The sensation created in Baltimore was, at first, prodigious. What the mishap
would have cost the Buttons and their kinsfolk socially cannot be determined,
for the outbreak of the Civil War drew the city’s attention to other things. A
few people who were unfailingly polite wracked  their brains for compliments to
give to the parents – and finally hit upon the ingenious device of declaring
that the baby resembled his grandfather, a fact which, due to the standard state
of decay common to all men of seventy, could not be denied. Mr. and Mrs. Roger
Button were not pleased, and Benjamin’s grandfather was furiously insulted.
Benjamin, once he left the hospital, took life as he found it. Several small
boys were brought to see him, and he spent a stiff-jointed afternoon trying to
work up an interest in tops and marbles – he even managed, quite accidentally,
to break a kitchen window with a stone from a sling shot, a feat which secretly
delighted his father.
Thereafter Benjamin contrived to break something every day, but he did these
things only because they were expected of him, and because he was by nature
obliging.
When his grandfather’s initial antagonism wore off, Benjamin and that gentleman
took enormous pleasure in one another’s company. They would sit for hours, these
two, so far apart in age and experience, and, like old cronies, discuss with
tireless monotony the slow events of the day. Benjamin felt more at ease in his
grandfather’s presence than in his parents’–they seemed always somewhat in awe
of him and, despite the dictatorial authority they exercised over him,
frequently addressed him as “Mr.”
He was as puzzled as any one else at the apparently advanced age of his mind and
body at birth. He read up on it in the medical journal, but found that no such
case had been previously recorded. At his father’s urging he made an honest
attempt to play with other boys, and frequently he joined in the milder
games–football shook him up too much, and he feared that in case of a fracture
his ancient bones would refuse to knit.
When he was five he was sent to kindergarten, where he initiated into the art of
pasting green paper on orange paper, of weaving colored mats and manufacturing
eternal cardboard necklaces. He was inclined to drowse off to sleep in the
middle of these tasks, a habit which both irritated and frightened his young
teacher. To his relief she complained to his parents, and he was removed from
the school. The Roger Buttons told their friends that they felt he was too
young.
By the time he was twelve years old his parents had grown used to him. Indeed,
so strong is the force of custom that they no longer felt that he was different
from any other child–except when some curious anomaly reminded them of the fact.
But one day a few weeks after his twelfth birthday, while looking in the mirror,
Benjamin made, or thought he made, an astonishing discovery. Did his eyes
deceive him, or had his hair turned in the dozen years of his life from white to
iron-gray under its concealing dye? Was the network of wrinkles on his face
becoming less pronounced? Was his skin healthier and firmer, with even a touch
of ruddy winter color? He could not tell. He knew that he no longer stooped, and
that his physical condition had improved since the early days of his life.
“Can it be––?” he thought to himself, or, rather, scarcely dared to think.
He went to his father. “I am grown,” he announced determinedly. “I want to put
on long trousers.”
His father hesitated. “Well,” he said finally, “I don’t know. Fourteen is the
age for putting on long trousers–and you are only twelve.”
“But you’ll have to admit,” protested Benjamin, “that I’m big for my age.”
His father looked at him with illusory speculation. “Oh, I’m not so sure of
that,” he said. “I was as big as you when I was twelve.”
This was not true-it was all part of Roger Button’s silent agreement with
himself to believe in his son’s normality.
Finally a compromise was reached. Benjamin was to continue to dye his hair. He
was to make a better attempt to play with boys of his own age. He was not to
wear his spectacles or carry a cane in the street. In return for these
concessions he was allowed his first suit of long trousers….

4
Of the life of Benjamin Button between his twelfth and twenty-first year I
intend to say little. Suffice to record that they were years of normal ungrowth.
When Benjamin was eighteen he was erect as a man of fifty; he had more hair and
it was of a dark gray; his step was firm, his voice had lost its cracked quaver
and descended to a healthy baritone. So his father sent him up to Connecticut to
take examinations for entrance to Yale College. Benjamin passed his examination
and became a member of the freshman class.
On the third day following his matriculation he received a notification from Mr.
Hart, the college registrar, to call at his office and arrange his schedule.
Benjamin, glancing in the mirror, decided that his hair needed a new application
of its brown dye, but an anxious inspection of his bureau drawer disclosed that
the dye bottle was not there. Then he remembered – he had emptied it the day
before and thrown it away.
He was in a dilemma. He was due at the registrar’s in five minutes. There seemed
to be no help for it– he must go as he was. He did.
“Good-morning,” said the registrar politely. “You’ve come to inquire about your
son.”
“Why, as a matter of fact, my name’s Button –” began Benjamin, but Mr. Hart cut
him off.
“I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Button. I’m expecting your son here any minute.”
“That’s me!” burst out Benjamin. “I’m a freshman.”
“What!”
“I’m a freshman.”
“Surely you’re joking.”
“Not at all.”
The registrar frowned and glanced at a card before him. “Why, I have Mr.
Benjamin Button’s age down here as eighteen.”
“That’s my age,” asserted Benjamin, flushing slightly.
The registrar eyed him wearily. “Now surely, Mr. Button, you don’t expect me to
believe that.”
Benjamin smiled wearily. “I am eighteen,” he repeated.
The registrar pointed sternly to the door. “Get out,” he said. “Get out of
college and get out of town. You are a dangerous lunatic.”
“I am eighteen.”
Mr. Hart opened the door. “The idea!” he shouted. “A man of your age trying to
enter here as a freshman. Eighteen years old, are you? Well, I’ll give you
eighteen minutes to get out of town.”
Benjamin Button walked with dignity from the room, and half a dozen
undergraduates, who were waiting in the hall, followed him curiously with their
eyes. When he had gone a little way he turned around, faced the infuriated
registrar, who was still standing in the door-way, and repeated in a firm voice:
“I am eighteen years old.”
To a chorus of titters which went up from the group of undergraduates, Benjamin
walked away.
But he was not fated to escape so easily. On his melancholy walk to the railroad
station he found that he was being followed by a group, then by a swarm, and
finally by a dense mass of undergraduates. The word had gone around that a
lunatic had passed the entrance examinations for Yale and attempted to palm
himself off as a youth of eighteen. A fever of excitement permeated the college.
Men ran hatless out of classes, the football team abandoned its practice and
joined the mob, professors’ wives with bonnets awry and bustles out of position,
ran shouting after the procession, from which proceeded a continual succession
of remarks aimed at the tender sensibilities of Benjamin Button.
“He must be the wandering Jew!”
“He ought to go to prep school at his age!”
“Look at the infant prodigy!”
“He thought this was the old men’s home.”
“Go up to Harvard!”
Benjamin increased his gait, and soon he was running. He would show them! He
would go to Harvard, and then they would regret these ill-considered taunts!
Safely on board the train for Baltimore, he put his head from the window.
“You’ll regret this!” he shouted.
“Ha-ha!” the undergraduates laughed. “Ha-ha-ha!” It was the biggest mistake that
Yale College had ever made….

5
In 1880 Benjamin Button was twenty years old, and he signalized his birthday by
going to work for his father in Roger Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware. It was
in that same year that he began “going out socially”–that is, his father
insisted on taking him to several fashionable dances. Roger Button was now
fifty, and he and his son were more and more companionable – in fact, since
Benjamin had ceased to dye his hair (which was still grayish) they appeared
about the same age, and could have passed for brothers.
One night in August they got into the phaeton attired in their full-dress suits
and drove out to a dance at the Shevlins’ country house, situated just outside
of Baltimore. It was a gorgeous evening. A full moon drenched the road to the
lusterless color of platinum, and late-blooming harvest flowers breathed into
the motionless air aromas that were like low, half-heard laughter. The open
country, carpeted for rods around with bright wheat, was translucent as in the
day. It was almost impossible not to be affected by the sheer beauty of the sky
– almost.
“There’s a great future in the dry-goods business,” Roger Button was saying. He
was not a spiritual man – his aesthetic sense was rudimentary.
“Old fellows like me can’t learn new tricks,” he observed profoundly. “It’s you
youngsters with energy and vitality that have the great future before you.”
Far up the road the lights of the Shevlins’ country house drifted into view, and
presently there was a sighing sound that crept persistently toward them – it
might have been the fine plaint of violins or the rustle of the silver wheat
under the moon.
They pulled up behind a handsome brougham whose passengers were disembarking at
the door. A lady got out, then an elderly gentleman, then another young lady,
beautiful as sin. Benjamin started; an almost chemical change seemed to dissolve
and recompose the very elements of his body. A rigor passed over him, blood rose
into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a steady thumping in his ears. It
was first love.
The girl was slender and frail, with hair that was ashen under the moon and
honey-colored under the sputtering gas-lamps of the porch. Over her shoulders
was thrown a Spanish mantilla of softest yellow, butterflied in black; her feet
were glittering buttons at the hem of her bustled dress.
Roger Button leaned over to his son. “That,” he said, “is young Hildegarde
Moncrief, the daughter of General Moncrief.”
Benjamin nodded coldly. “Pretty little thing,” he said indifferently. But when
the Negro boy had led the buggy away, he added: “Dad, you might introduce me to
her.”
They approached a group, of which Miss Moncrief was the center. Reared in the
old tradition, she curtsied low before Benjamin. Yes, he might have a dance. He
thanked her and walked away – staggered away.
The interval until the time for his turn should arrive dragged itself out
interminably. He stood close to the wall, silent, inscrutable, watching with
murderous eyes the young bloods of Baltimore as they eddied around Hildegarde
Moncrief, passionate admiration in their faces. How obnoxious they seemed to
Benjamin; how intolerably rosy! Their curling brown whiskers aroused in him a
feeling equivalent to indigestion.
But when his own time came, and he drifted with her out upon the changing floor
to the music of the latest waltz from Paris, his jealousies and anxieties melted
from him like a mantle of snow. Blind with enchantment, he felt that life was
just beginning.
“You and your brother got here just as we did, didn’t you?” asked Hildegarde,
looking up at him with eyes that were like bright blue enamel.
Benjamin hesitated. If she took him for his father’s brother, would it be best
to enlighten her? He remembered his experience at Yale, so he decided against
it. It would be rude to contradict a lady; it would be criminal to mar this
exquisite occasion with the grotesque story of his origin. Later, perhaps. So he
nodded, smiled, listened, was happy.
“I like men of your age,” Hildegarde told him. “Young boys are so idiotic. They
tell me how much champagne they drink at college, and how much money they lose
playing cards. Men of your age know how to appreciate women.”
Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal–with an effort he choked back
the impulse. “You’re just the romantic age,” she continued – “fifty. Twenty-five
is too wordly-wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of
long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is – oh, sixty is too near
seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.”
Fifty seemed to Benjamin a glorious age. He longed passionately to be fifty.
“I’ve always said,” went on Hildegarde, “that I’d rather marry a man of fifty
and be taken care of than marry a man of thirty and take care of him.”
For Benjamin the rest of the evening was bathed in a honey-colored mist.
Hildegarde gave him two more dances, and they discovered that they were
marvelously in accord on all the questions of the day. She was to go driving
with him on the following Sunday, and then they would discuss all these
questions further.
Going home in the phaeton just before the crack of dawn, when the first bees
were humming and the fading moon glimmered in the cool dew, Benjamin knew
vaguely that his father was discussing wholesale hardware.
“…. And what do you think should merit our biggest attention after hammers and
nails?” the elder Button was saying.
“Love,” replied Benjamin absent-mindedly.
“Lugs?” exclaimed Roger Button, “Why, I’ve just covered the question of lugs.”
Benjamin regarded him with dazed eyes just as the eastern sky was suddenly
cracked with light, and an oriole yawned piercingly in the quickening trees…

6
When, six months later, the engagement of Miss Hildegarde Moncrief to Mr.
Benjamin Button was made known (I say “made known,” for General Moncrief
declared he would rather fall upon his sword than announce it), the excitement
in Baltimore society reached a feverish pitch. The almost forgotten story of
Benjamin’s birth was remembered and sent out upon the winds of scandal in
picaresque and incredible forms. It was said that Benjamin was really the father
of Roger Button, that he was his brother who had been in prison for forty years,
that he was John Wilkes Booth in disguise – and, finally, that he had two small
conical horns sprouting from his head.
The Sunday supplements of the New York papers played up the case with
fascinating sketches which showed the head of Benjamin Button attached to a
fish, to  a snake, and, finally, to a body of solid brass. He became known,
journalistically, as the Mystery Man of Maryland. But the true story, as is
usually the case, had a very small circulation.
However, every one agreed with General Moncrief that it was “criminal” for a
lovely girl who could have married any beau in Baltimore to throw herself into
the arms of a man who was assuredly fifty. In vain Mr. Roger Button published
his son’s birth certificate in large type in the Baltimore Blaze. No one
believed it. You had only to look at Benjamin and see.
On the part of the two people most concerned there was no wavering. So many of
the stories about her fiance were false that Hildegarde refused stubbornly to
believe even the true one. In vain General Moncrief pointed out to her the high
mortality among men of fifty – or, at least, among men who looked fifty; in vain
he told her of the instability of the wholesale hardware business. Hildegarde
had chosen to marry for mellowness, and marry she did….

7
In one particular, at least, the friends of Hildegarde Moncrief were mistaken.
The wholesale hardware business prospered amazingly. In the fifteen years
between Benjamin Button’s marriage in 1880 and his father’s retirement in 1895,
the family fortune was doubled – and this was due largely to the younger member
of the firm.
Needless to say, Baltimore eventually received the couple to its bosom. Even old
General Moncrief became reconciled to his son-in-law when Benjamin gave him the
money to bring out his History of the Civil War in twenty volumes, which had
been refused by nine prominent publishers.
In Benjamin himself fifteen years had wrought many changes. It seemed to him
that the blood flowed with new vigor through his veins. It began to be a
pleasure to rise in the morning, to walk with an active step along the busy,
sunny street, to work untiringly with his shipments of hammers and his cargoes
of nails. It was in 1890 that he executed his famous business coup: he brought
up the suggestion that all nails used in nailing up the boxes in which nails are
shipped are the property of the shippee, a proposal which became a statute, was
approved by Chief Justice Fossile, and saved Roger Button and Company, Wholesale
Hardware, more than six hundred nails every year.
In addition, Benjamin discovered that he was becoming more and more attracted by
the gay side of life. It was typical of his growing enthusiasm for pleasure that
he was the first man in the city of Baltimore to own and run an automobile.
Meeting him on the street, his contemporaries would stare enviously at the
picture he made of health and vitality.
“He seems to grow younger every year,” they would remark. And if old Roger
Button, now sixty-five years old, had failed at first to give a proper welcome
to his son he atoned at last by bestowing on him what amounted to adulation.
And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it will be well to pass over as
quickly as possible. There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button; his
wife had ceased to attract him.
At that time Hildegarde was a woman of thirty-five, with a son, Roscoe, fourteen
years old. In the early days of their marriage Benjamin had worshipped her. But,
as the years passed, her honey-colored hair became an unexciting brown, the blue
enamel of her eyes assumed the aspect of cheap crockery – moreover, and, most of
all, she had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too
anaemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste. As a bride it been she
who had “dragged” Benjamin to dances and dinners – now conditions were reversed.
She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that
eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to
the end.
Benjamin’s discontent waxed stronger. At the outbreak of the Spanish-American
War in 1898 his home had for him so little charm that he decided to join the
army. With his business influence he obtained a commission as captain, and
proved so adaptable to the work that he was made a major, and finally a
lieutenant-colonel just in time to participate in the celebrated charge up San
Juan Hill. He was slightly wounded, and received a medal.
Benjamin had become so attached to the activity and excitement of army life that
he regretted to give it up, but his business required attention, so he resigned
his commission and came home. He was met at the station by a brass band and
escorted to his house.

8
Hildegarde, waving a large silk flag, greeted him on the porch, and even as he
kissed her he felt with a sinking of the heart that these three years had taken
their toll. She was a woman of forty now, with a faint skirmish line of gray
hairs in her head. The sight depressed him.
Up in his room he saw his reflection in the familiar mirror – he went closer and
examined his own face with anxiety, comparing it after a moment with a
photograph of himself in uniform taken just before the war.
“Good Lord!” he said aloud. The process was continuing. There was no doubt of it
– he looked now like a man of thirty. Instead of being delighted, he was uneasy
– he was growing younger. He had hitherto hoped that once he reached a bodily
age equivalent to his age in years, the grotesque phenomenon which had marked
his birth would cease to function. He shuddered. His destiny seemed to him
awful, incredible.
When he came downstairs Hildegarde was waiting for him. She appeared annoyed,
and he wondered if she had at last discovered that there was something amiss. It
was with an effort to relieve the tension between them that he broached the
matter at dinner in what he considered a delicate way.
“Well,” he remarked lightly, “everybody says I look younger than ever.”
Hildegarde regarded him with scorn. She sniffed. “Do you think it’s anything to
boast about?”
“I’m not boasting,” he asserted uncomfortably. She sniffed again. “The idea,”
she said, and after a moment: “I should think you’d have enough pride to stop
it.”
“How can I?” he demanded.
“I’m not going to argue with you,” she retorted. “But there’s a right way of
doing things and a wrong way. If you’ve made up your mind to be different from
everybody else, I don’t suppose I can stop you, but I really don’t think it’s
very considerate.”
“But, Hildegarde, I can’t help it.”
“You can too. You’re simply stubborn. You think you don’t want to be like any
one else. You always have been that way, and you always will be. But just think
how it would be if every one else looked at things as you do – what would the
world be like?”
As this was an inane and unanswerable argument Benjamin made no reply, and from
that time on a chasm began to widen between them. He wondered what possible
fascination she had ever exercised over him.
To add to the breach, he found, as the new century gathered headway, that his
thirst for gaiety grew stronger. Never a party of any kind in the city of
Baltimore but he was there, dancing with the prettiest of the young married
women, chatting with the most popular of the debutantes, and finding their
company charming, while his wife, a dowager of evil omen, sat among the
chaperons, now in haughty disapproval, and now following him with solemn,
puzzled, and reproachful eyes.
“Look!” people would remark. “What a pity! A young fellow that age tied to a
woman of forty-five. He must be twenty years younger than his wife.” They had
forgotten–as people inevitably forget–that back in 1880 their mammas and papas
had also remarked about this same ill-matched pair.
Benjamin’s growing unhappiness at home was compensated for by his many new
interests. He took up golf and made a great success of it. He went in for
dancing: in 1906 he was an expert at “The Boston,” and in 1908 he was considered
proficient at the “Maxine,” while in 1909 his “Castle Walk” was the envy of
every young man in town.
His social activities, of course, interfered to some extent with his business,
but then he had worked hard at wholesale hardware for twenty-five years and felt
that he could soon hand it on to his son, Roscoe, who had recently graduated
from Harvard.
He and his son were, in fact, often mistaken for each other. This pleased
Benjamin–he soon forgot the insidious fear which had come over him on his return
from the Spanish-American War, and grew to take a naive pleasure in his
appearance. There was only one fly in the delicious ointment – he hated to
appear in public with his wife. Hildegarde was almost fifty, and the sight of
her made him feel absurd….

9
One September day in 1910 – a few years after Roger Button & Co., Wholesale
Hardware, had been handed over to young Roscoe Button – a man, apparently about
twenty years old, entered himself as a freshman at Harvard University in
Cambridge. He did not make the mistake of announcing that he would never see
fifty again, nor did he mention the fact that his son had been graduated from
the same institution ten years before.
He was admitted, and almost immediately attained a prominent position in the
class, partly because he seemed a little older than the other freshmen, whose
average age was about eighteen.
But his success was largely due to the fact that in the football game with Yale
he played so brilliantly, with so much dash and with such a cold, remorseless
anger  that he scored seven touchdowns and fourteen field goals for Harvard, and
caused one entire eleven of Yale men to be carried singly from the field,
unconscious. He was the most celebrated man in college.
Strange to say, in his third or junior year he was scarcely able to “make” the
team. The coaches said that he had lost weight, and it seemed to the more
observant among them that he was not quite as tall as before. He made no
touchdowns – indeed, he was retained on the team chiefly in hope that his
enormous reputation would bring terror and disorganization to the Yale team.
In his senior year he did not make the team at all. He had grown so slight and
frail that one day he was taken by some sophomores for a freshman, an incident
which humiliated him terribly. He became known as something of a prodigy – a
senior who was surely no more than sixteen – and he was often shocked at the
worldliness of some of his classmates. His studies seemed harder to him–he felt
that they were too advanced. He had heard his classmates speak of St. Midas’s,
the famous preparatory school, at which so many of them had prepared for
college, and he determined after his graduation to enter himself at St. Midas’s,
where the sheltered life among boys his own size would be more congenial to him.
Upon his graduation in 1914 he went home to Baltimore with his Harvard diploma
in his pocket. Hildegarde was now residing in Italy, so Benjamin went to live
with his son, Roscoe. But though he was welcomed in a general way there was
obviously no heartiness in Roscoe’s feeling toward him–there was even
perceptible a tendency on his son’s part to think that Benjamin, as he moped
about the house in adolescent moodiness, was somewhat in the way. Roscoe was
married now and prominent in Baltimore life, and he wanted no scandal to creep
out in connection with his family.
Benjamin, no longer persona grata with the debutantes and younger college set,
found himself left much alone, except for the companionship of three or four
fifteen-year-old boys in the neighborhood. His idea of going to St. Midas’s
school recurred to him.
“Say,” he said to Roscoe one day, “I’ve told you over and over that I want to go
to prep, school.”
“Well, go, then,” replied Roscoe shortly. The matter was distasteful to him, and
he wished to avoid a discussion.
“I can’t go alone,” said Benjamin helplessly. “You’ll have to enter me and take
me up there.”
“I haven’t got time,” declared Roscoe abruptly. His eyes narrowed and he looked
uneasily at his father. “As a matter of fact,” he added, “you’d better not go on
with this business much longer. You better pull up short. You better – you
better” – he paused and his face crimsoned as he sought for words–”you better
turn right around and start back the other way. This has gone too far to be a
joke. It isn’t funny any longer. You– you behave yourself!”
Benjamin looked at him, on the verge of tears.
“And another thing,” continued Roscoe, “when visitors are in the house I want
you to call me ‘Uncle’ – not ‘Roscoe,’ but ‘Uncle,’ do you understand? It looks
absurd for a boy of fifteen to call me by my first name. Perhaps you’d better
call me ‘Uncle’ all the time, so you’ll get used to it.”
With a harsh look at his father, Roscoe turned away….

10
At the termination of this interview, Benjamin wandered dismally upstairs and
stared at himself in the mirror. He had not shaved for three months, but he
could find nothing on his face but a faint white down with which it seemed
unnecessary to meddle. When he had first come home from Harvard, Roscoe had
approached him with the proposition that he should wear eye-glasses and
imitation whiskers glued to his cheeks, and it had seemed for a moment that the
farce of his early years was to be repeated. But whiskers had itched and made
him ashamed. He wept and Roscoe had reluctantly relented.
Benjamin opened a book of boys’ stories, The Boy Scouts in Bimini Bay, and began
to read. But he found himself thinking persistently about the war. America had
joined the Allied cause during the preceding month, and Benjamin wanted to
enlist, but, alas, sixteen was the minimum age, and he did not look that old.
His true age, which was fifty-seven, would have disqualified him, anyway.
There was a knock at his door, and the butler appeared with a letter bearing a
large official legend in the corner and addressed to Mr. Benjamin Button.
Benjamin tore it open eagerly, and read the enclosure with delight. It informed
him that many reserve officers who had served in the Spanish-American War were
being called back into service with a higher rank, and it enclosed his
commission as brigadier-general in the United States army with orders to report
immediately.
Benjamin jumped to his feet fairly quivering with enthusiasm. This was what he
had wanted. He seized his cap, and ten minutes later he had entered a large
tailoring establishment on Charles Street, and asked in his uncertain treble to
be measured for a uniform.
“Want to play soldier, sonny?” demanded a clerk casually.
Benjamin flushed. “Say! Never mind what I want!” he retorted angrily. “My name’s
Button and I live on Mt. Vernon Place, so you know I’m good for it.”
“Well,” admitted the clerk hesitantly, “if you’re not, I guess your daddy is,
all right.”
Benjamin was measured, and a week later his uniform was completed. He had
difficulty in obtaining the proper general’s insignia because the dealer kept
insisting to Benjamin that a nice V.W.C.A. badge would look just as well and be
much more fun to play with.
Saying nothing to Roscoe, he left the house one night and proceeded by train to
Camp Mosby, in South Carolina, where he was to command an infantry brigade. On a
sultry April day he approached the entrance to the camp, paid off the taxicab
which had brought him from the station, and turned to the sentry on guard.
“Get some one to handle my luggage!” he said briskly.
The sentry eyed him reproachfully. “Say,” he remarked, “where you goin’ with the
general’s duds, sonny?”
Benjamin, veteran of the Spanish-American War, whirled upon him with fire in his
eye, but with, alas, a changing treble voice.
“Come to attention!” he tried to thunder; he paused for breath – then suddenly
he saw the sentry snap his heels together and bring his rifle to the present.
Benjamin concealed a smile of gratification, but when he glanced around his
smile faded. It was not he who had inspired obedience, but an imposing artillery
colonel who was approaching on horseback.
“Colonel!” called Benjamin shrilly.
The colonel came up, drew rein, and looked coolly down at him with a twinkle in
his eyes. “Whose little boy are you?” he demanded kindly.
“I’ll soon darn well show you whose little boy I am!” retorted Benjamin in a
ferocious voice. “Get down off that horse!”
The colonel roared with laughter.
“You want him, eh, general?”
“Here!” cried Benjamin desperately. “Read this.” And he thrust his commission
toward the colonel. The colonel read it, his eyes popping from their sockets.
“Where’d you get this?” he demanded, slipping the document into his own pocket.
“I got it from the Government, as you’ll soon find out!” “You come along with
me,” said the colonel with a peculiar look. “We’ll go up to headquarters and
talk this over. Come along.” The colonel turned and began walking his horse in
the direction of headquarters. There was nothing for Benjamin to do but follow
with as much dignity as possible – meanwhile promising himself a stern revenge.
But this revenge did not materialize. Two days later, however, his son Roscoe
materialized from Baltimore, hot and cross from a hasty trip, and escorted the
weeping general, sans uniform, back to his home.

11
In 1920 Roscoe Button’s first child was born. During the attendant festivities,
however, no one thought it “the thing” to mention, that the little grubby boy,
apparently about ten years of age who played around the house with lead soldiers
and a miniature circus, was the new baby’s own grandfather.
No one disliked the little boy whose fresh, cheerful face was crossed with just
a hint of sadness, but to Roscoe Button his presence was a source of torment. In
the idiom of his generation Roscoe did not consider the matter “efficient.” It
seemed to him that his father, in refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a
“red-blooded he-man” – this was Roscoe’s favorite expression – but in a curious
and perverse manner. Indeed, to think about the matter for as much as a half an
hour drove him to the edge of insanity. Roscoe believed that “live wires” should
keep young, but carrying it out on such a scale was – was – was inefficient. And
there Roscoe rested.
Five years later Roscoe’s little boy had grown old enough to play childish games
with little Benjamin under the supervision of the same nurse. Roscoe took them
both to kindergarten on the same day, and Benjamin found that playing with
little strips of colored paper, making mats and chains and curious and beautiful
designs, was the most fascinating game in the world. Once he was bad and had to
stand in the corner – then he cried – but for the most part there were gay hours
in the cheerful room, with the sunlight coming in the windows and Miss Bailey’s
kind hand resting for a moment now and then in his tousled hair.
Roscoe’s son moved up into the first grade after a year, but Benjamin stayed on
in the kindergarten. He was very happy. Sometimes when other tots talked about
what they would do when they grew up a shadow would cross his little face as if
in a dim, childish way he realized that those were things in which he was never
to share.
The days flowed on in monotonous content. He went back a third year to the
kindergarten, but he was too little now to understand what the bright shining
strips of paper were for. He cried because the other boys were bigger than he,
and he was afraid of them. The teacher talked to him, but though he tried to
understand he could not understand at all.
He was taken from the kindergarten. His nurse, Nana, in her starched gingham
dress, became the center of his tiny world. On bright days they walked in the
park; Nana would point at a great gray monster and say “elephant,” and Benjamin
would say it after her, and when he was being undressed for bed that night he
would say it over and over aloud to her: “Elyphant, elyphant, elyphant.”
Sometimes Nana let him jump on the bed, which was fun, because if you sat down
exactly right it would bounce you up on your feet again, and if you said “Ah”
for a long time while you jumped you got a very pleasing broken vocal effect.
He loved to take a big cane from the hat-rack and go around hitting chairs and
tables with it and saying: “Fight, fight, fight.” When there were people there
the old ladies would cluck at him, which interested him, and the young ladies
would try to kiss him, which he submitted to with mild boredom. And when the
long day was done at five o’clock he would go upstairs with Nana and be fed on
oatmeal and nice soft mushy foods with a spoon.
There were no troublesome memories in his childish sleep; no token came to him
of his brave days at college, of the glittering years when he flustered the
hearts of many girls. There were only the white, safe walls of his crib and Nana
and a man who came to see him sometimes, and a great big orange ball that Nana
pointed at just before his twilight bed hour and called “sun.” When the sun went
his eyes were sleepy – there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him.
The past – the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first
years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy
city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat
smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with
his grandfather – all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as
though they had never been. He did not remember.
He did not remember clearly whether the milk was warm or cool at his last
feeding or how the days passed – there was only his crib and Nana’s familiar
presence. And then he remembered nothing. When he was hungry he cried – that was
all. Through the noons and nights he breathed and over him there were soft
mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, and faintly differentiated
smells, and light and darkness.
Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him,
and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind.


RATE THIS:

i

4 Votes



Posted in Authors, Stories | Tagged American short stories, American Writers, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button | 8 Comments »


SEPTEMBER SONG AND JAZZ IN PARIS:THE CHET BAKER QUARTET PLAYS STANDARDS.

20 September, 2012 by theinkbrain

Chesney Henry “Chet” Baker, Jr. (December 23, 1929 – May 13, 1988)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

September Song



 

 

 

Summer is slowing down and easing its way into fall, though the dates on the
calender don’t seem to be in synch with the world outside. The time seems right
for a little time with the icon of West Coast Cool, Chet Baker. There is nothing
fussy or over-done in Chet’s music, and always one finds an inwardness, and a
communication with the real feelings at the heart of each song. There is a
wholeness and integrity of expression and delivery, rarely found elsewhere, even
with the best musicians. This is where Chet’s  unique genius is most evident,
and it is what makes him unforgettable for me.

And here is the late, great Chet Baker at his best, with an extravaganza of
cool, moody standards, in a recording made on October 24, 1955 at the
Pathé-Magellan studio in Paris.

 

 

 

 



 

 

 
This comment accompanied the original Youtube upload:

This was a re-scheduled recording, as the original pianist (and also Chet’s best
friend and mentor) Dick Twardzick died in his hotel room from a drug overdose as
Chet and the rest of the quartet waited for him at the studio. Chet then fell
out with his drummer, and two little-known European musicians were hastily
recruited for the re-scheduled session three days later.
This beautifully crafted recording reveals a depth of emotion and character that
had not previously existed in his playing.

The other musicians in the quartet are Gérard Gustin -piano, Jimmy Bond -bass
and  Bert Dahlander-drums.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Musicians like Chet Baker are miracles of their own genre, in Chet’s case, Cool
Jazz, and no one can express a moods embedded in these rich compositions quite
like he can. He crafts and composes each phrase, each line, each note,
connecting them seamlessly, with just the right length of a pause to permit the
ear to absorb and the mind to integrate the sounds and feeling. It really feels
like pure magic to me. I feel the ethos of his era, and movies languidly spool
out their visual accompaniment in my compliant imagination.

It is a spell, an enchantment to which surrender is the best response – where
sounds and images and only a mere smattering of almost unneeded words serve to 
effect the communication. The result is a feeling of internal fullness, of
spilling and swimming in a re-emergence of impressions, dreams and daydreams, of
filtered sunlight, print dresses,  absorbing novels, cold beer, the smell and
feel of summer, sidewalks damp from watering, rustling leaves, stillness, blue
sky….

It is well known that Chet, like many of his fellow musicians like Bill Evans,
used drugs, and it is likely that drugs were a part of their creative process.
The ordinary consciousness with which we go about our daily business is not
usually supportive of the creative process, which requires inwardness, and
freedom from business and routine. Our daily tasks are firmly rooted in the
domain of unconsciousness and distraction, and in the capable hands of what
Colin Wilson referred to as our robot consciousness.

Musicians in particular know this, and since the creative state cannot easily be
entered ‘at-will’, it must often be induced, and this is something drugs are
known to facilitate. There is a balancing point to be found between the outright
endorsement of drug-use and the moral judgements passed by society on addicts. I
think it is important to find this place, and to try and understand perhaps why
so many musicians and performers use drugs. Performers do not have the luxury of
scheduling gigs and performances when they are in an optimum creative state. It
is imperative that they be able to switch it on in time for a performance or a
recording session, and drugs may provide an easy short-cut.

I am not a musician, but I know that the wonderful music I often hear in my
dreams, comes from a part of me I am unable to access when I am awake. Even when
music does come to me, I am only able to ‘go along’ with it while it is actually
unfolding, and I can never recall it, though I know it to have been unique and
wonderful, and a true expression of my own inaccessible creativity.

Chet paid an enormous price for his creativity, and his music. Addiction can be
brutal, and Chet lost his front teeth and his embouchure when he was assaulted
by thugs. One of his girlfriends, the singer Ruth Young, implies that Baker
might have brought this misfortune on himself by antagonising someone who then
hired people to rough him up, but we will never know  the truth with any degree
of certainty, in part because of Young’s own reason for  believing such a story,
and in part because of Chet’s own tendency to embellish incidents in his life so
as to present the kind of image he wished to project.

Nevertheless, the assault was followed by a very dark period in Chet’s life.
Unable to play the trumpet, he spent five years between the time of his assault,
and his next gig  (which lasted for two weeks and was set up for him by Dizzy
Gillespie) pumping gas and doing other menial jobs. Eventually Chet re-emerged
from his fog, and taught himself  to play again, and eventually to recover his
sound.
To my ear, at least, the appeal of Chet’s unique sound, is due in part to how
beautifully he sustains his phrases. Even his speech was slow and measured. The
sound is unforced, perhaps because it is so much like breathing. The romantic
fluency and flowing lyricism with which he imprints his music, and the style
referred to as West Coast jazz or ‘Cool Jazz, is at the heart of this genre, 
‘Cool’ has the mood of warm beaches and breeze, and the moods they induce, but
of course much more than the lazy carefree feeling of ease and openness. There
is the slow savouring of thoughts and emotions, dictated by a pace which matches
that of unhurried reflection. Cool gives our feelings their due. Chet’s music
had a universal appeal.

Chet’s music was loved and admired in Europe, even though a supposed drug-bust
in Italy resulted in a 16-month jail term, (its never a good thing to run afoul
of the authourities in Italy) and being treated persona non grata in several
European countries.  Chet spoke French and Italian with a remarkable degree of
fluency. He sand in Italian, and starred in a movie Hell’s Horizon.

Shortly before Chet’s death Brice Weber was making a semi-documentary film of
Chets life called Let’s Get Lost. By that time, Chet had begun to resemble a
beautiful ruin, his movie-star good looks long since having given way to a face
on which his difficult history was uncompromisingly recorded. Still, he never
lost his touch, and continued to sing and play right to the end of his life.

In May of 1988, Chet was found dead outside his hotel room in the Netherlands.
The autopsy revealed traces of drugs in his system. The death was ruled
accidental, the official view was that he fell out of his second storey window.
A friend who checked the room after the ‘accident’ remarked that the window was
old, and did not open far enough to allow someone to fall out of it.

Weber’s film was completed shorty after Chet died. It is an astonishingly
beautiful movie, filmed in lush black and white, and featuring recreated scenes,
as well as scenes from Chet’s movies, in-depth interviews with Chet’s friends,
associates, fellow-musicians, girlfriends, ex-wife Carol Baker, his mother and
his children. It is worth watching, for anyone who would wish to know more about
the life of this very human and very flawed man, who was despite all his
tragedies and set-backs, nevertheless an astonishingly wonderful musician.


RATE THIS:

i

3 Votes



Posted in Music | Tagged Autumn In New York, Chet Baker, Chet Baker Quartet,
Cool Jazz, I'll Remember April, Lover Man, Summertime, Tenderly, There's A Small
Hotel, These Foolish Things, You Go to My Head | 11 Comments »


AWAKENING: A STUDY IN DOUBLED TIME

18 September, 2012 by theinkbrain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“… the idea of time recedes with the expansion of consciousness.”
P.D. Ouspensky.

“For a believing physicist like myself, the separation between past, present,
and
future has the value of a mere, albeit stubborn, illusion.”
Albert Einstein.

“The lack of an absolute standard of rest meant that one could not determine
whether two events that took place at different times occurred in the same
position
in space.”
Stephen Hawking.

“Most people believe that time passes. In fact it stays where it is.”
Dogen.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She awoke from a dream, of a field of ripening grain which seemed to her like a
field of yellow hair undulating in all its glorious opulence. The sight stirred
her quiescent blood like a memory, she remembered someone had called it the
colour of torch-light. She had buried her lips in that memory. She knew it would
pass in a moment. She gathered her moments now with a greater urgency. Now the
twilight was deepening ever faster and darkness with its smattering of stars
chased away the last glimmers of her youth. Her chair on the shadowed front
porch was more frequently occupied, and chores formerly attended to with such
sedulous purposiveness, now tended to be forgotten. She was otherwise engaged.
Only the cat by dint of its unremitting importunities broke into her reveries,
contriving in the instinctual manner of animals to secure for itself a daily
saucer of near sour milk. But the silent potted poinsettia and ficus in the
living room expired in a prolonged dry attenuation, all unnoticed.

She liked the front porch. The porch swing, the small gate-legged table piled
high with yellowing journals covered with the indecipherable script she had so
long affected as a guardian to her privacy, all lay fallow, trapped with her in
a long suspension. It was a privacy no one had bothered to invade in all these
years. She gazed at her chair, an overstuffed phenomenon of patchily fading
claret, so solid and unmoving.

The chair connected her to the past. It had been a gift from an old friend,
delightful and epicene, whose friendship had been a casualty of her marriage.
Her friend had made his living in ‘home-furnishings.’ She laughed mirthlessly,
recalling the phrase. He had now long since turned to dust, who in his way had
tried to warn her. But she hadn’t listened, had she? His cautionary tale had
missed its mark, as had that of the first Christian missionaries who described
the terrors of hell to the inhabitants of Iceland, which then caused the doughty
natives to respond “We shall be warm! We shall be warm!”

But he would have understood her sense of urgency about the present and the
effort she was making now. He would have understood her sense that the clock
hanging on her wall, a plain Seth Thomas (“What sayeth Thomas?” she mumbled,)
now silent from her neglection, still slyly indulged  its devouring predilection
in the secrecy of a parallel universe. “What is time?”– She answered herself:
“Just something a clock measures.”

She had hidden her husband’s prized Hunter under a pile of rags in the walnut
wash stand (he had loved watches, as she despised them now), but the clock
defied her efforts to lower it from its accustomed place above the dusty
whatnot. What did it matter. She could avoid its bland and frozen gaze by
averting her own whenever she made her way through the house. Her gaze was
turned more and more inward now. The cost of looking outside she disbursed
prudently and with a calculated thrift.

Her old black dress grew shabbier and fustier, taking on a rusty sheen like the
patina of ancient metal. She didn’t seem to notice. She was trying to notice
other colours; the colours in her rioting untrammeled garden; the magenta
cosmos, the violent yellows of the marigolds bordering the fence, planted years
ago and persistently self-seeding. They were put there to deter the aphids from
her prized roses. No matter that the roses, neither pruned nor divested of their
hips for several seasons, had succumbed to their own dilatory expression of
blooming, in a recalcitrant rhythm rather resembling her own. She noticed the
passage of time as an interlocution – the drab sparrows chirping in the gnarled
branches of her ramblers, saying “Why? why?”, and the silent swarms of gnats
hanging suspended  in the air offering their tacit answer after the passing of a
sprinkling rain.

The mint patch spilling over its nominal boundary of stones was frequented by
swarms of paper wasps, who, having constructed a sinister convolution under the
dove cote, had forced the doves to move elsewhere. She noticed all these
intrusions of the natural world with a vague tolerance, as a reverberation of
vitality allowed to impinge on her thoughts. Yet she was busy recording her
moments. She was occupied. It was her time of expurgation.
She had dragged her bed into the parlour because the path of the moon in summer
traversed the arc of its window during the night. She extinguished the porch
light because it pained her that so many fragile visitants, drawn irresistibly
to it, met their desperate ends against a treacherous illumination. No lesser
lights competed with the milky effusions she so loved to study. She welcomed the
encroachments of clouds in the night sky, as they hung suspended over the
tree-tops, and described to herself the colours of the gauzy shadows. Sometimes
they made her smile pensively.

Summer was now like a woman, who after having played out her passion lies still,
her eyelids closed, her heartbeat slowing to a quieter rhythm, letting her skin
cool to the touch of a lover. She loved and feared this season with its hint of
death in the yellow tinted leaves. Its cooling breezes rattling the branches of
her elm and the world, filling with a sibilant echo, were tinged with a hint of
menace, malevolence and dread. She was receptive to their suggestion.

A long time ago before she had married and made this her home, she had lived in
a far larger and more ancient house. The scenes of her childhood had been played
out on balconies where the moonlight splashed like cool water on old stone
ledges, and where mosses and creeping vines hid amongst the deeper shadows
visible from her window. In rooms above the stairs, the skylights wantonly
admitted the moon, and the walls were scattered with the  shadowy fluttering
shapes of leaves and branches, which sometimes suggested themselves into
intuitions. There she had watched with someone, waiting and awaiting her time.

The name she searched for was elusive. She had forced herself to forget that
name, and now her memory stubbornly persisted in retaining its obsolete
instruction despite her repeated promptings. Perhaps she had forgotten the name,
but the rest she could not forget.

There had been someone, bright and quick, who slipped easily into being
imperious, and who had not a trace of melancholy. This other was full of
youthful enthusiasms, affectations of the decadence of most things French,
Baudelaire, “Gaspard de la Nuit,” Ravel, flirting with the romantic darkness
which youth prefers to the plain good sense of older folks. She read “Undine”
aloud: she refused to let the time merely pass. She made the moments urgent, as
if she had known there was a reason to. But she had also known how to speak
softly, and wait for her words to sink in.

But it was all so long ago. A vagueness and disquiet still overcame her when she
tried to remember. The cat stared at her with his yellow eyes:  Yellow as the
moon, as the marigolds, as the hair she remembered. She had read an old poem
once, written by a woman, about hair yellower than torch light. She must
remember: Something important depended upon it.

She walked urgently to the empty bedroom, hurriedly searching among the things
in the unlit closet. She delved feverishly in its recesses, amongst the folds of
the dark and musty garments of another time, plundering their secrets for the
thing hidden from herself. Yes, now she remembered. But now she almost did not
wish to remember. She grew faint with the remembering, sitting with her head
bowed, on the cool floor amongst the old dresses.

So these were the memories she had evaded. She remembered. She remembered the
garden:

The garden was strung with Japanese lanterns shedding their intimate light on
the leaves and grass, and, preeminently for her, on the women, beautiful,
strange, alluring, and exotic: women of unassailable poise and elegantly
travested sex.
She looked at the picture in her hand; at the sleek head, the clear and deeply
thoughtful gaze.
She remembered.

“Walk with me in the garden. I want us to disappear for a moment. I’ll introduce
you to everyone later.”
“Shouldn’t we do that first? Don’t you think they might find us rude?”
“Who? these women? Heavens no! They only observe proprieties in the breach: If
they notice we’re missing they’ll know why!”
“And what is why? – I’m afraid I’m not as sophisticated or bohemian as you are,
and I can’t tell at all if I’m behaving strangely or simply fitting in!”
“Oh you fit in all right. All that is needed is that you be beautiful, and you
are!”
Are you teasing me by quoting Baudelaire again?”
“Oh that! ‘What do I care if you be wise, be beautiful, be melancholy’?”
She paused to turn and look over the hydrangea bush at some couples dancing in
the punctuated light,
‘Why, no, not entirely: I could never be so rash as to discount wisdom – and I
wouldn’t ever wish you sad.”
“I am not reassured. I suddenly feel as if I’m in another world.
She looked at the tall woman standing next to her in the suggestion of light as
a match flared, a cigarette lit.
“I suddenly feel that I don’t know you, and that its you I need introducing to.”
“You do know me. You’ve always known me – and if you don’t you shall! – But
you’re right. This is another world. It’s a world that I’m making mine, and
Darling, I do so want you in it. And you needn’t worry about meaningless
conventions, they’re not needed here.”
“But I was brought up to be conventional, and surely we still need to be
polite!”
“But that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you. Everyone here has made
either a career or a religion of breaking the rules anyway, and I’ve already
told them this is your first party – of this sort. They expect you to behave a
little strangely.”
“I’ll hold you responsible for any faux pas I might happen to make; since I
don’t  know which rules I’m supposed to break, I might break all the wrong
ones!”
“It won’t matter, and  then you could blame me for any lapses. Its rather
expected of me I’m afraid! But look, how busy with each other they all are. No
one is looking at you – at us.”
She had continued her halted thought –
“I’m afraid I would be stupid – not melancholy or sad – but I think I’m just a
little afraid.”

They had moved away from the intimate conspiratorial voices of the revelers, as
they sat talking in convivial groups on the lawn and away from the sporadic glow
of cigarettes and the fading sound of the gramophone, its needle  now suddenly
stuck persistently in the groove of some repeated phrase in the smoky rendition
of the love song which had been drifting over to them in tinny fragments.
She felt, rather than knew, that something culminal was about to happen.
Something in her quickened.

She was pressed against the trunk of an elm. She felt its corrugated bark stick
to the backs of her arms and her summer dress and she felt the bruising
intensity of hands. She was being kissed.

She felt like a drunken moth pinned to the wax board, but she didn’t care. A
heady reckless excitement overtook her in the darkness. The glint of fiery hair
against a dark fabric seemed like a lapse of memory, or a flaring of unbidden 
imagination, she wouldn’t know which; but somewhere there was the image of a
pale wrist and long blunt fingers poised on the dark wool of a thigh, and then
the alchemical transmutation of her “No, no” To a gradual “Yes,” in a sudden
rush of love or need, or a desire she never guessed would haunt her in the years
to come. No names or words or concepts seemed as if they could intrude, but
there was improbably imposed on her impressionable mind, a night with the
association of a sonnet.

That was what she remembered. That in summary was the recapitulation of her
brief capitulation.

And this was the part she both must remember and needed to forget: No matter
that it might have been that her hand was forced, or that she might have been
tipped out of the boat before she had learned to swim. What mattered was the
flash of instant and incontrovertible recognition, of her utter familiarity with
the element, regardless of how deep or disturbing, regardless of how much
unanticipated.

What followed was by any standard a craven repudiation.

For later, she had again returned to ‘No’.

Some hidden demon in her of obduracy and panic brought the new, fragile world
down around them both in sharpened splinters. She ignored the anguished  “Don’t
do it.” The passionate admonitions, the “What profiteth a man” – or a woman for
that matter. She resolved her dissonances in  an oracular fashion, based on a
reading of the splinters of signs, and so she could not, would not, know the
full extent of what she must keep hidden.

She had been driven home in a sober, fractured silence. She had had a total
failure of nerve: And of something else.

She could now see that there could have been no gracious introduction possible
for a mind caught in the vice of a fearful conventionalism drawn to masquerade
itself in injured modesty, and weeks later, alone in her room, she had succumbed
to a fit of silent panic. The terrifyingly personal events of that night,
indistinguishable to her from what she had chosen, in her confusion, to think of
as negligently cruel, blotted out her senses as surely as a powerful surge
overwhelming a delicate circuit.

She chose Edwin, chose him deliberately as a dubious refuge; but from what?
Perhaps she had sought to lay her secret self where she was certain  it would be
unassailably safe; in the hands of someone who was  incapable of receiving it.
Edwin, she thought, and his preoccupations with ledgers, profits, bonds and
emoluments, with actuarials and compounding interests – Edwin would  suit her.
Perhaps he had laid his devotion at her feet for the same reasons.

She laughed a cracked laugh remembering. She had excised a part of her soul, and
a scar had grown around the gash, which in some strange way had proven itself
more tender than the wound, but she had done her best to see to it that there
was no longer anything she could cut or burn herself upon.

There had been nothing fiery about Edwin. His sparse demonstrations, as most
other things about him, left her unmoved. His smell not her smell. She bore his
fumbling excursions into a self, whose inviolability he could not fully
perceive, borne with a knowledge of her deservedness.
The marriage had been not so much a marriage as a misunderstanding: a false
agreement. It had not been a fair exchange: Oh no, not at all.

But somehow the years passed in a paradox of ever deferred and ever elusive
resolution, and somehow, this thing in her, all mixed with pain and love, death
and remembrance, refused to diminish. Now it was all so finally and beautifully
clear.

She stood up and gazed in the mirror, at her reflection, her extreme
slenderness, her fading hair, her delicate neck, her declivity of cheek, her
full lips. Her eyes filled with derision. She felt a long exhalation. She knew
what she most had wanted; most had feared.

She walked into the garden, picking the marigolds, filling her bosom with their
bitter scented pungency until they spilled unheeded onto the long grass. She
returned to the bedroom and severed the stout sash from the dusty blinds. She
poured all that was left in the bottle of milk  into a blue  mixing bowl and set
it before the cat, watching him taking pleasure in the simple act of feeding.
Then, surrendering to a sudden impulse, she wound the clock.

She took the journals from the table and marked a page she remembered with a
photograph. The wind chimes stirred in a sporadic murmur, and she suddenly
yearned for music. She wound up the gramophone and put on a record.

The sash brought down a shower of dust upon her as it snaked over the beam. The
wind chimes stirred again, in what seemed like the commencement of a sacred
liturgy. The arced sliver of moon followed its nightly purpose.
“I’ll only be a moment”, she thought.

The table wobbled, but held her weight for a moment before it crashed against
the porch railing, then fell its splintering way to the grass below.

The gramophone needle continued its fallow hiss as she smelled the marigolds,
remembering their colour.

The clock began to strike.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The plangent sounds of the clock rang suddenly out, almost causing him to spill
his coffee. It brought him back to the present in the unavoidably disturbing way
clocks have of intruding into inner lives; disrupting them, taking them over and
loudly asserting that the tyranny of the here-and-now could never be broken.  He
wished it could:  that time could somehow be turned back on itself, and life
remade simple. He struggled with a welter of emotions; fragments of the previous
night, a persistent sense that something was going wrong and slipping out of his
grasp, and the disturbing thought that perhaps his wife did not find him to be
entirely agreeable.

Breakfast had been served, eaten, and its remains cleared away, but he still
continued to sit at the table. He seemed absent; his mind elsewhere, not so much
assailed by as imbued with impure thoughts, which he sought ineffectually to
brush aside as he did the crumbs on his linen waistcoat. He wadded the table
napkin in a sweaty hand, fingering the letter which lay beneath it. A slight
sound escaped him, of displeasure at his internal disquiet, of sour denial. But
the thoughts reoccurred. Strangely, in an ironical twist of uxoriality gone
awry, his wife was the object of his prurient ruminations. He watched her
secretly as she went about her business, tidying and cleaning, putting up and
putting by. He had his secret speculations with regard to the cause of her
imperviousness to his attentions, but they did not fit themselves neatly into
any reconstruction of her past, at least not as he knew it. He knew she was
chaste. His misgivings did not  include any speculations about her frames of
reference and never extended to the unsafe ground of objective comparison.
Still, it irked him fiercely that while he was transformed by ardour to
gibbering puerility she remained poised and dignified. She seemed to succumb to
his invasive attentions with a secret grace and an unassailable dignity.

The years since their marriage had not dimmed her loveliness, and instead of the
pall of familiarity which customarily infects unruffled connubial arrangements,
a certain withdrawal, a subtle imposition of distance had ‘leant enchantment to
the view.’ Her eyes and skin retained the brilliance of youth, but now an
additional depth, something he had not seen before, enhanced the currency of her
ordinary beauty.
“Edwin, are you staring at me? Have I spilled something on my dress?”
He struggled for a semblance of composure, mumbling something about her brooch
as she turned to lift the sash which opened the window.

He loved his wife. Didn’t he? He stood in secret awe of her. She spoke French
with an old-fashioned propriety, played the piano with a personal delicacy, and
sang in a slightly husky voice which, though it would  assuredly forfeit a
purist’s approval, retained in charm and appeal what it lacked in training. He
loved his wife, but he could not fathom why she had chosen him for a husband,
and he could never tell if she loved him, though he had come to assume it.

If he had been more emotionally gifted, more perceptive in the area of the
female psyche, or more experienced with women, he might have apprehended the
elemental incongruity of her choice, but he was none of these. He was not
romantic, or temperamentally disposed to romance. He was merely heir to a
species of disturbance which  perhaps in other men might have evoked a more
surreptitious expression of concupiscent impulse, or a weakness for drink, but
in him only caused a deepening of gruffness and an undue emphasis on his already
unappealing habits of physicality, his involuntary grunts, untimely sighs and
persistent indigestion.

“You have a letter from Vivian.”
She stopped her wiping of the whatnot and stood motionless for a moment.
“Yes I know. It’s an invitation to tea this afternoon. She was expecting some
new gramophone records to arrive in the mail last week – We were going to listen
to music.”

He struggled with the upsurge of ire which threatened to choke him, dumbly
suppressing it, absurdly wounded by the unconscious intimacy of that ‘we.‘ She
caught his look and looked away. He managed to speak. “Will you be home for
dinner?”
“I might be, but if  I’m not you needn’t worry; I’ll leave you a casserole and
some dessert in the oven.”
It was not his dinner he was worried about. It was her. But what could he say?

He detested that woman and thought her ‘unnatural’. And he was right, at least
based upon his limited suppositions of what was to be deemed natural in women.
She was all that made him uneasy: a childhood friend of his wife’s, and
therefore claimant to a deeper and longer standing intimacy than he suspected as
being his own, a bluestocking, someone who read Latin, Greek and French!,
someone he supposed his parents would have referred to as being “upper-crust.”
Above all, she was a woman of independent means: a thoroughly bad influence.

He was completely unable to voice his thoughts. If he were so imprudent as to do
so, his wife would then accuse him of trying to start a quarrel, and with her
characteristic deftness of speech, convert his innocuous words into some bitter
thing with a lingering aftertaste. She would by effortless implication make  him
feel as if he’d misread his lines and committed a ghastly violation of his
prescribed role. He would then find himself entangled in an intractable net of
resentment and inexpressible frustration. He felt his stomach begin a symphony
of disquiet against the background of his angry thoughts. He glanced at his
Hunter in an effort to compose himself and began readying himself to leave the
house.

He had heard about this woman, his wife’s newly returned friend, from his own
friends, the ones he played poker and billiards with. He had been told of a very
uncertain past, of outlandish dress, of books and pictures delivered – French
novels, lithographs. His queasiness increased at the thought of a French novel
he had read: One about a besotted husband and an uncontrollably romantic wife
who deceived  him, exulting in her deception, “I have a lover! I have a lover!”

It didn’t bear thinking about. He knew he must not speak. To do so would mean to
admit that he allowed himself to be the recipient of indiscreet garrulosity and
gossip; that his friends in the post office steamed open letters and packages,
and that he had let himself be informed by a cleaning lady who had been
persuaded by one of their wives to inspect bookshelves and somewhat else besides
in that house she was being paid to clean.

His wife would not fail to appreciate the irony if he complained about her
friend’s questionable morality, thus laying his own vulnerabilities unacceptably
bare. She would not fail to use her rebarbative wit in a devastating riposte. He
was not her match. He knew it.

This was new in their marriage. This unsheathed display of sharpened wit and
mental acuity. It disconcerted him. It showed up his own species of intelligence
– so aptly suited to bureaucracy and accountancy and fiduciary administration –
as meagre,  and exiguous, which is to say, to no advantage at all. He rather
felt as if he had suddenly found a kitten, who had hitherto only purred by the
fire, to be possessed of an uncalculated yet devastatingly effective atavism.
His own primitive instincts, if he had ever had any to begin with, had been
dulled by generations of placid good breeding between sober clerks and the dull
daughters of others such. He was about to give voice to some uneasily shaping
thought, which had to do with his antipathy. It had something to do with her
manner when she returned from these visits;  her accentuated thoughtfulness and
inwardness, as if she were visibly infected with a reflectiveness he could not
hope to penetrate. He could not abide this mood of hers, this unilaterally
imposed sense of privacy, of exclusion. It peeved him and increased his anxiety
and his irascibility. Why did she always send notes? Why didn’t she use the
telephone like normal people? He could then at least have heard half the
conversation. But he felt his thoughts to have ventured out too far, and
retreated.

As he left the room he saw her pick up the letter and raise it to her lips.

She settled herself down from the aftermath of a squabble, no less real for its
invisibility, its unexpressed animus. It had upset her surprisingly little. In
five years she had come to know her husband as one might an intimate associate.
She had set aside her feelings when she married him, resolving never to venture
into the depths she knew to exist behind her ordinary thoughts. She had ignored
the advice of friends, one in particular, who had himself succumbed to marriage
despite misgivings and who had told her of his regrets.

She brushed the nap on the arm of the chair she sat in as she tried to recall
the details of a conversation. Charles had been a mutual friend of all three of
them, Vivian, Edwin, herself, but Edwin had discouraged the friendship, stopping
just short of forbidding it, and she had given in, sensing that once having
chosen, she could no longer waver. Still, it had seemed a prudent decision to
marry, and marriage had enabled her life to go on smoothly, if not indeed so
placidly, for the past several years: Until this one; until now.

Now she had the feeling that her life was about to change. She felt something
struggling within her, trying to escape its inner bounds, like a thin shaft of
grass, a plumule emerging irresistibly from a tiny crack in the pavement, its
impetus for growth unimpeded by any discouraging thought of an uncertain future:
In darker moments it hovered like an unseen presence in the house, lurking
behind the heavy furniture, the clock, the curtains; waiting to spring forth in
an unexpected and unguarded moment. Her gaze wandered over her garden, at the
roses in the first stage of their summer bloom; old fashioned  Albas, their pink
and white delicacy somehow resisting the onslaught of the fierce May sun, the
tender petals refusing to shrivel and droop, to die until they had lived out
their season.

And perhaps she too had refused to wilt and droop under the stultifying
depletion of her marriage. There were books to be read, journals to be kept up
with, and evenings to be whiled away in light conversation, card games,
knitting, embroidery. She had managed by a sheer persistency of effort to engage
herself in an unremitting busyness, and to defer this day by polishing her
housewifely skills to a high lustre. She had contrived to deflect and postpone
the very thing which was happening to her now: but now it was here. The thoughts
which arose in her mind in the middle of the night when the world receded, the
thoughts which haunted her like unquiet souls tapping on the lids of their
coffins, were now oh so close to emerging. She was no longer toying with the
idea, but entertaining the prospect of their rupture, to wreak havoc on her
ordered existence, with a sense of anticipation and even joy. She imagined
vaguely how the carefully crafted edifice of her matrimonial endeavours might
crumble. She examined her thoughts for a trace of unacknowledged fear. She found
a trace of it, but no more.

She had thought that her marriage might be undertaken in the pioneering spirit
of an ancestral sort she had read about in novels, in which home, even homeland,
relatives, and close family – everything beloved and familiar – had to be left
behind in order to start a new life. She had thought to arrive at a place where
the old no longer impinged upon the new, except in the form of a harmless
nostalgia, and then only at a great distance. But she had failed to take into
account the hardships and tedium of the journey, the toll it would take on her.
She had utterly failed to grasp or gauge the extent of her feelings. She could
not know of the irrepressible alchemy of thought and sensibility left to ferment
in the sealed recesses of her psyche, of the sterility and privation visited
upon the remainder of her life by an unnatural sequestration of her natural
vitality.

Yet she had felt herself helpless to unstop the lid. She looked at the letter
again; at its angular script, and felt herself begin a slow emergence from the
fog of her old habits of thought, into a strange place; greener, wilder, and
less known in its dangers and delights, than the safe well-ordered pastoral of
her history up to the present.

So in the late afternoon, she drove the lovely open miles to Vivian’s house,
recalling the past, and realigning it with the present.  a bunch of
freshly-picked roses on the seat beside her. She rolled all the windows down,
unmindful of the dust, knowing only that the illimitability of the sky must not
be denied, and that all her senses must be prevailed upon to bear witness to her
slowly  yet irresistibly coalescing resolve. She heard with delight the sound of
her gears shifting from a minor to a major key as she drove past the houses,
copses, fields and tobacco sheds she had now come to recognise.

She paused in the driveway, still a distance from the front porch, allowing the
sound of the engine to die away, waiting for her own thoughts to still. There
was that ordinary house, hollyhocks blazing in the last light, a trumpet vine
draped thick and sturdy over the side fence, the front door wide open – the
sound of summer insects. She waited  for the sight of that figure to emerge and
walk towards her, in a choreography her mind had rehearsed for endless moments
past.

The evening did get on to a propitious start with strong, cold martinis and the
conversation they were intended to facilitate.
“Why did you do it? Why did you run away?”
“I don’t know – I think I was terrified.”
“Of what?”
“Of that world – those oh-so- assured women – of you even. I was shaking inside.
You had suddenly become like them, and I felt you had gone on without me.”
“But surely –”
“Of drowning. I knew I couldn’t swim. I couldn’t keep up – I could hardly even
speak! It was all to much for me – I couldn’t do it.
“Couldn’t do what? What was there to do?!”
“Those people – you had crossed over from my world to theirs – I felt as if you
had left us and gone over to their side, and I could never follow. Those women…
I would never have been able to understand them – That world…. I wouldn’t have
known what to say – they were all so clever and sharp and – Oh I suppose I felt
like an idiot – a child. I felt – I felt you had done that – made me feel like
that, like a child who is suddenly made to have dinner with the grown-ups, and
who knows she still can’t eat without spilling!”
“But they were just people – not at all like that! And they were my friends –
they had invited me!”
“Oh but they weren’t – just – well, just anything – they seemed older, and
sophisticated – they danced with each other! They were unreachable, and unreal –
they seemed as if they were from another planet! And then…”
“And then?”
“And then…”
Her voice seemed to lose its footing and stumble against an invisible object
which blocked its path.
The whirring of the cicadas grew louder.
“And then – you know ‘and then.'”
“No I don’t! I was there, and I loved you! I told you!”
“Yes you were – but where was I? I felt as if I was somewhere else – maybe
floating above the trees with the cicadas.”
She emptied her glass and asked for it to be refilled. The sound of the ice
crashed loudly against the shaker.
“You know, here in the South cicadas swarm every 13 and 17 years – its because
there are two kinds of them, and since they only swarm together twice every
hundred years they don’t get mixed up and breed with each other.”
What are you talking about? I don’t know what you mean –  and you’re doing it
again. You’re making me dizzy.”
“That’s what you’re doing now.”
“No I’m not. And its only been five – not 13 – or God forbid! 17 years.”
“Only?” It never felt like only to me. And you were my first.”
“Or to me. And you mine. But you had gone so far ahead of me. And I wasn’t your
only, was I? There have been others.”
“Not like this, and they are all in the past.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. And I am here now. I didn’t change.”
” I have, but I’m still the old-fashioned sort.”
“Yes, that’s why you married – and I didn’t.”
The words shocked her in the way that ordinary things sometimes do when one sees
them in an unexpected way.
“I didn’t know that world – you wanted that world – you already belonged. So I
knew you had to be there, and I knew I couldn’t. I knew it was too much for me.”
“You didn’t choose me, you rejected me – and you chose that stodge Edwin! God! I
couldn’t believe it – I still can’t.”
“Darling, I couldn’t do it then, I knew it would be too much for me. I couldn’t
understand. I was lost. I didn’t want to be made known that way. At least
marriage is anonymous. You can say that much for it. I didn’t want to be  made
public – to be talked about in whispers and discretely pointed at – Oh I know
you wouldn’t have seen or heard anything, but I would have. I would have felt as
if I was being stared at and and whispered about as I walked down the street. I
didn’t want private parties, and to have my secrets known.”
“I never guessed … It was not at all that way for me. I felt it was a place I
could go to from the world, away from it – where I could be myself – with women
like me.”
“It wasn’t like that for me. I was terrified. Anyway, its different now isn’t
it?”
“Let’s go inside. I’m cold, and we can pick over the rubble some more.”

The talk quickened inside.Their words seemed less spread-out than before, and it
seemed as if they talked for hours, picking a careful path to the present,
sweeping aside the bits of treachery and cowardice and misunderstanding and of
course the pain. They came to a shared moment. They discovered to their delight
that all there seemed to be to anybody’s salvation, and certainly to their own,
was just a second chance.

It was late, and very dark. Vivian was quietly smoking a cigarette.
“Were you happy – at all –  these last years?”
“Happy? hardly happy. I used to think I could be content, but I couldn’t be that
either. No; not happy.” She considered the implications of  this seemingly
unnecessary question: The reason for it, its unasked counterpart, and searched
for both answers. She started to explain how she  had thought of herself as
being more like a corpse lodged in some underwater tangle, which might at any
moment have risen unbidden to the surface, refusing any longer to hide its
gruesomeness in the weeds, than anything remotely resembling happy. She
expressed herself in words to that effect, sensing that she made an act of
contrition in so doing. She drew tight the cord between her mistake, and her
remorse.
“God! that sounds terrible.”
“It feels terrible – even now. I felt like a sinner who wanted to be saved, from
my transgressions, because I felt that all my choices had been wrong, and that I
was doomed – What could I have chosen anyway? There were no choices left – Until
you came back. Why did you?”
“You asked, so I had to.”
“I merely ‘asked,’ and you ‘had to’? God! I wish I had ever been capable of such
clarity. I’ve never been able to read my own heart – until now that is.
Everything about it used to elude me; its needs, its desires, its very voice;
all mysterious and unknown. That’s why I still can’t trust myself entirely. I’ve
been a coward and a fool, and the choices I made, which I thought would keep me
from pain, were the very ones which plunged me deepest into the pit.”
“And now?”
“And now, I still don’t trust myself to know – Her voice grew clouded, and she
felt her eyes turn moist. “I am afraid that I might plunge both of us, all three
of us now, into another terrible mess.”
“But you must choose! Remember how you used to quote Pascal? ‘Il faut parier. 
Cela n’est pas volontaire: Vous êtes embarqué…'”
“You know that meant something else, and not this – and I did choose, though
disasterously. But you should have explained my choices to me when you quoted
Pascal to me a  long time ago – when we were at that party. You should have
explained….”
“How could I have? You didn’t let me. You seemed as if you were about to shatter
– and  you wouldn’t have understood then. You still might have chosen other than
I would have wished.”
“I might  have understood more – if you had tried.”
“You made it clear you didn’t want me.”
“Yes – perhaps I did, but you should have known even if I didn’t. You might have
been able to make me see…”
“But this is now – so what about now? – Imagine if you could choose now. What
would you choose?”
She paused for a moment before answering. The sound of a cricket inside the room
grew suddenly and feverishly loud.
“I would choose another life – away from there, away from everything: from
Edwin.”
“And where would that be”?
“I don’t know – but somewhere far away I think, maybe back in California – and I
think it would have to be with you.”
“With me!”
“Yes. You would have to be a part of any complete life I could ever have.”
“Darling, you know the kind of life I have chosen – or has chosen me – It’s not
a part of the sane and ordinary world you live in. And I can tell you now about
that evening: you were right, you might have been a fish out of water, for all
your accomplishments. There were movie actresses there – two in particular whom
I’m sure you must have recognised– and a director and a singer, and a famous
photographer. I think we were the only ordinary people there. No one there lived
– lives – a settled life.”
“But my world is not any longer settled, or ordinary. Its rough and bloody
unpredictable and full of gaps and nasty pitfalls, and running into things in
the dark.”
“And you think another kind of life, a life with me, would be simpler?”
“Not simpler, but  – more whole – more of a piece – more… put together. It would
be more natural.”
“Oh God! natural! That’s priceless! How ironic! You thought Edwin was natural!”
“I know I deserved that, but you don’t have to remind me. But I did; and he is –
but not as I  am. I don’t care much anymore about what that the rest of the
world might think, and that they will doubtless see things his way and not
mine.”
“And I am not merely a bitter – or even a convenient – pill to be swallowed so
that you might be cured of a bad marriage?”
“I know. I never meant that you were.”
“Then what did you mean?”
Only that I can no longer be other than myself, even though I don’t quite know
what that is, and that I want to find myself there with you – if you let me. I
thought I could go to sleep and wake up and leave it all behind me like a dream,
but I couldn’t, and I can’t.”
“Are you saying you love me?”
“Yes. That is what I am saying. I have felt like a glass you let fall, and I
want to be put back together. I feel I must, because another future might be
fatal to all that I am.”
“And are you sure this time?  You’re not going to lose your nerve again?”
“No. I know now what I didn’t know before.”

She drove home in the darkest part of the night. She knew herself to be no
longer willing to simply succumb to the minatory passage of time: To arrive at
senescence a dried up husk, doing a grotesque shuffle in the middle of the dance
floor, after the band had left and the music died. She might have gone on
protecting what she dared not risk, long after she had ceased to be desirable,
shriveling and hardening in odd places, and learning too late that there would
be no takers of the sort she had dreamed about, and that she would die with the
mouldering hoard of her faded youth and rapidly decomposing beauty. But now she
would not. Her memory of the previous hours, slow, halting, tentative then
rapturous, electrifying, and ineradicable, would ever mean that she would now
choose again.

The stars had advanced in a perceptible slice of arc when she pulled into to her
own driveway. For the second time that day but in what seemed an indescribable
age ago, she sat and waited, listening for her inner clamour to subside and 
silence to descend. The darkness seemed impenetrable in the moments after she
extinguished the headlights. She noticed that the porch light was out, but the
window of the bedroom upstairs glowed ominously. She dreaded going inside. As
her eyes adjusted she noticed how the outline of the elm tree made deeper
incursions into the darkness. She let something in her be invaded by that
soothing blackness. She felt the glory of night, its newness to her, its
resonance with what was beginning to be fully and quietly infused in her
thoughts.

She left Vivian, reluctantly, to return to her own home, still thinking of this
place as home, and now she wondered at the word, at its meaning.  The house
outlined itself against the night like a hulk; a boulder. She had tried to find
a place for herself within its walls, within its shelter, but it had turned on 
her, constricting and suffocating. Something had gone awry, like a bit of grit
caught under an eyelid, and had gone on and on tearing and grinding away at her
soft tissues. She had not noticed till this moment how she had felt  herself to
be both grit and eye.

He was awake, waiting for her as she had expected. At first their words came
measuredly, then erratically, as the bitterness and truth of a conversation long
deferred flew about the room like crazed birds beating themselves against
invisible panes. She was amazed at how unprepared he was for what he saw his
life becoming; at how disabled he was in the unperceived privilege, which had
masqueraded in his thoughts as unquestioned as the laws of nature. She pitied
him, and was thus rendered impervious to his invective, unwittingly inflicting
upon him an unforgettable and unintentioned mortal wound. All of life had seemed
unexpectedly to become a weapon leveled him and everything about life that
before had been merely ordinary. He stared at her, his lips bursting with
unspilled words. She felt his bitterness about to overflow.

There was a moment when he struggled for control. He turned out the light. She
could feel him willing her to get into the bed beside him, to take her
accustomed place by his side. Disgust mingled with her pity: for his unclouded
assumptions regarding the marital servility he had grown to expect and which had
made him an unwitting victim to her unexamined, by him, submission. But it
lasted only a moment. Sadness, generosity, and again pity, swiftly reasserted
themselves within her. She stood silent for a moment, seeing before her a fellow
spirit, embarking as she was, albeit along a vastly different path, upon a
journey, a destination which only she now wished to reach.

She stooped swiftly to kiss him, then left the room, closing the door gently
behind her.

She heard the clock striking as she slowly walked down the stairs.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by Dia Tsung.

Audio Player
https://theinkbrain.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/02-time.mp3

00:00
00:00
00:00

Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.


Time: Chantal Kreviazuk


RATE THIS:

i

2 Votes



Posted in Stories | Tagged Lesbian Love Stories, Original Fiction, Short Stories
| 8 Comments »

Older Posts »


 * AUTHORS
   
   * Maureen Duffy
   * Sylvia Townsend Warner


 * BLOGS
   
   * Dove Grey Reader
   * Ellen
   * Ellen and Jim


 * LITERARY REVIEWS
   
   * London Review of Books
 * 


 * BLOG CATEGORIES
   
   Blog Categories Select Category Authors Books and Reviews Music Non-fiction
   Poems Poets and Poetry Stories Translations


 * ARCHIVES
   
   * April 2013
   * January 2013
   * December 2012
   * November 2012
   * October 2012
   * September 2012
   * August 2012
   * July 2012
   * June 2012
   * May 2012
   * April 2012
   * March 2012
   * February 2012
   * January 2012
   * December 2011
   * November 2011
   * October 2011
   * September 2011
   * August 2011
   * July 2011


 * 
   
   Adelaide American Poetry American Poets American short stories a synopsis of
   Schubert's Winterreise Autumn Leaves Barbara Baroque Poetry. Best short
   stories Bill Evans British Writers Bruno Brighetti Chet Baker Cool Jazz David
   daniels dream and reality in romantic poetry English poetry. English Writers
   Estate fragmented narrative and the romantic imagination French Music French
   Poetry German Opera Giacomo Leopardi glbt Greek Poetry italian poetry Italian
   Short Stories Jacques Prévert Jazz Piano Jazz Trumpet Jazz Vocals Journal
   entries Juana Asbaje Juana Inés de la Cruz katherine mansfield key
   masterpieces of romantic music Latin poetry Lesbian Archives Lesbian Love
   Letters Lesbian Love Stories lesbian novels Lesbian Poetry Lesbian Poets
   Lesbian Short Stories Lesbian short story Lesbian writers LGBT Love poetry
   masterpieces of leider by Schubert Mexican Poets Mozart Muse Poetry New
   Zealand writers Novels patricia highsmith Poetry Rabindranath Tagore Robert
   Browning robert graves Saki Schubert's great song cycles Schubert's
   Winterreise in English Short Stories Spanish Poetry Spanish Sonnets Stream of
   consciousness sylvia townsend warner the narrative thread in Winterreise the
   romantic idea of the wanderer translation of poems by Wilhelm Muller virginia
   woolf what poems are suited to music Women Poets WW2
   
   

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

WPThemes.



theinkbrain
Blog at WordPress.com.
 * Subscribe Subscribed
    * theinkbrain
      
      Join 138 other subscribers
      
      Sign me up
    * Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.

 * Privacy
 *  * theinkbrain
    * Customize
    * Subscribe Subscribed
    * Sign up
    * Log in
    * Report this content
    * View site in Reader
    * Manage subscriptions
    * Collapse this bar

 

Loading Comments...

 

Write a Comment...
Email (Required) Name (Required) Website


Advertisements
Powered by wordads.co
We've received your report.

Thanks for your feedback!
Seen too often
Not relevant
Offensive
Broken
Report this adPrivacy