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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
PART FOUR, AS CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/27208-2/
My other reviews of Walter de la Mare: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/my-reviews-of-walter-de-la-mare-in-alphabetical-order/
My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read this novel, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
PART TWO – CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/29/the-collected-stories-of-bernard-maclaverty/
My previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read these collected stories my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
PART TWO – CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/29/the-collected-stories-of-bernard-maclaverty/
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A PORNOGRAPHER WOOS
This is in many ways a prequel to ‘AT THE BEACH’ — the first story I read by this author — and it melds somehow with the previous story ‘HUGO’ reviewed above of a writer self-consciously writing (now experimenting with soft and hardening pornography) the story you are reading? But who are you? The freehold author? The leasehold narrator? The narrator’s wife or a woman he visualises with breasts and pubic hair poking into ogling view? One of your naked children playing on the beach while you glimpse your mother’s pink bloomers? The sea-mat or brown ogee these children find? Or are you the reader?
“You lean on your elbows, your shoulders high and, I see, shaking with laughter.”
cf my review of THE ONLY STORY by William Trevor here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/17/the-only-story-by-william-trevor/
ANODYNE
“‘Mother,’ he yelled. ‘Did you throw my Death in Venice in the bin?’ He held up the book.”
…because she had squashed a fly with it!
A bookish young man who has just lost the ‘neverness’ of his mother, and now needs to approach life without her. He is advised by the doctor to take break… and here it is again by the seaside. A subtle, tranche-like story, a confused balance between opposite proclivities, and the underage girl he meets sketching, and he invites her for a date, thinking she was older, and later making bookish friends with her literary academic father… The blatant strength of understatement and the subtle? Religious thoughts, too. Balance and confusion, confusion and balance, need to be balanced, too. The ‘glue-gold’ that Hopkins might have written.
“Frost says that poetry is ‘a momentary stay against confusion’.”
THE DEEP END
“One boy in raggy jeans, both elbows out of his sweater climbed to the top of the turnstile gate, almost to the ceiling and slopped his wet togs down onto the back of his friend’s neck.”
Elbows from deep beginning to shallow end, or vice versa. This is a wondrous evocation of possibly diseased swimming pools and boys’ puberty, reflecting the times when both things happened in my own life. A story prefigured by its own recent past as his mother asks — what’s wrong? She never wanted him to go to such places. And what did happen there that day of dares with his friend, a fitter swimmer than him, is the story itself not to be imparted here. The “crude guitar shapes of women with split and tits” carved on changing boxes, notwithstanding.
“If you only wore the Corporation ones your thing kept showing.”
“He walked jerkily down to the three foot end, holding his elbows.”
FATHER AND SON
“…an empty lunch box in the crook of his arm, looking at me.”
Poignantly, both points of view of the title tell us much of the emotions in Belfast during the troubles and the precarious fears, as the father wants to love his grown-up son as he did when he took him fishing as a boy, but the son is embittered, caught up in his own version of troubles, I guess, with hints of various orientations. And the equivalent trajectories, who knows, of what towards whose pre-empted or co-opted death?
A TIME TO DANCE
“On tip-toe he could see out.”
This is an eyepatch story of a 12 year old boy called Nelson who has a patch on one eye. There is much about this eyepatch but it is never made exactly clear why. A lazy eye? He and his mother are Irish but live in England in feel of the 1960s. She has to make ends meet by …doing what?….I do not wish to create a spoiler here — but one day when playing truant (again!) from school (here called ‘skiving off’ amid his experimenting with bubble-gum, as an image of what?), she catches him, and she has to take him to her workplace and she needs to put an enforced plaster patch on his other eye, too! A story that wonderfully makes me think of many works by William Trevor over the years.
“Standing on tip-toe for so long, Nelson’s legs began to shake.”
Coincidence here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/19/the-best-horror-of-the-year-volume-fourteen/#comment-26299
See in next story below…
“Silhouettes, she called them. Jet black outlines of composers she had named. Beethoven, Mahler on the tips of his toes, Schubert.”
MY DEAR PALESTRINA
“‘Music is why I do not die. Other people – they have blood put in their arms,’ she stabbed a fingernail at the inside of her elbow, ‘I am kept alive by music.’”
“Silhouettes, she called them. Jet black outlines of composers she had named. Beethoven, Mahler on the tips of his toes, Schubert.”
This work somehow represents a sort of epiphany for my rite of story reading. In many ways, the connections, for example, the colour ‘orange’ in several contexts, even vomiting orange juice, are often a bit forced, but never simplistic. The opposing politics of a blacksmith and Danny’s father. The two Christianities of Ireland. Danny’s mother and Miss Schwartz. Haydn and Winifred Atwell. Sight of the historic Russian satellite among the stars and the inchoate emotions between Danny and the gaping dressing gown of his teacher. Elvis Presley and Rupert the Bear. A story of my own boyhood era, if placed slightly elsewhere.
This work tells of Danny growing up, via puberty, and brought up Catholic, I think, and his Protestant piano teacher Miss Schwartz. His Albanian bully of a friend called Mingo, also her pupil.. But, in essence, it distils the power of the music that I love alongside the Schubert and Palestrina apotheoses of its climax…
“She sat like a man, her knees wide apart, her elbows resting on them.”
“Do you know what a frisson is?”
I do now!
“He liked listening to things. In the room with the two clocks he liked to hear how the ticks would catch up with one another, have the same double tick for a moment and then whisper off into two separate ticks again.”
An unforgettable story that has dark blisses. And clumsy one-way kisses.
I put on one of my Spotify mixes soon after writing above review, and it immediately played John Field!
(Not Joe Green!)
Dross and melody: “The melody, more sombre than he had played it before, flowed out over the rippling left hand. Then came the heavy base like a dross, holding the piece to earth.”
The horseshoe (of the backsmith) hair of the organist who replaces Miss Schwartz when she is ‘indisposed’.
LIFE DRAWING
“He sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward. ‘How do you feel?’ The old man made no response and the question echoed around and around the silence in Liam’s head. Maisie brought in tea on a tray, closing the door behind her with her elbow.”
A man is summoned by the two ladies next door because his father is dying, the other son, still miles way abroad. Brought back to Yesterday Street (see my review synchronously an hour or so ago here), and recovers youthful memories, his own belongings, his old pastels and charcoals, before leaving home, against his father’s wishes, to go to art school. Meagre success eventually wrought sufficient to be tepidly reviewed in prominent art journals. He now sketches his father’s evolving real-time death. Remembers the fork tines planted into his hand in his father’s temper, and even two of his memories are as if planted, too, just for me:
“Two old radios, one with a fretwork face, the other more modern with a tuning dial showing such places as Hilversum, Luxembourg, Athlone; a Dansette record player with its lid missing and its arm bent back, showing wires like severed nerves and blood vessels;”
— memories like animals drinking and looking up between gulps. Rodding drains. Megaphoned jokes. Memories, even short-term memories from reading something a short while ago, can get confused in readiness for being lost altogether? Towards a new geography, a new perspective he recalls from playing upside down faces with his brother. As for me, I was an only child, so there you go. Drawing life is like drawing tepid water to drink? One last gulp before the jaw is tied. So much more to be sucked from great short stories than was drained into them.
“He felt it was unfair to be criticised for succeeding in his aims.”
From the peach tree roots and peach stones ritual in a Strantzas story only an hour or so earlier today here to a newly bought ‘peach rig-out’, a peach dress in a self-revealing M&S bag as potential mock-jumble, in the MacLaverty below as part of a sad but hopeful ritual of destined happenstance…
THE DAILY WOMAN
“The cold of the lino made her walk on tip-toe and and she stood on the small mat, holding her bare elbows and shivering…”
A young woman, religiously non-committal, with a knuckly baby and toddler, her own body bruised by a Provo Catholic brute of a husband during the Irish Troubles, later paid good money by her Protestant employer as a daily woman for him to grope her small breasts et al. She, all knuckles, too. He kisses her bruises one by one.
Touched again by a female security checker at a posh hotel (affordable because of the cash thus given to her for her body), checked out in this way because of her M & S bag and no other luggage. She could have been an IRA terrorist. She meets a man she chooses to chat up in the posh hotel bar……..
Some of the early to late stages of this involving, evolving gestalt of cause and effect…
“a small scribbled clot of his black hairs”
“He probably saw right into her pants. Let him. She turned round, her elbow resting on the lavatory seat.”
“There was a hole in her pants stretched to an egg shape…”
“He was fascinated by her bruises and kissed each one of them lightly. Spoke to her bruises.”
“This woman was groping her as if she expected to find something beneath her skin.”
“Maybe she looked high-class in her peach rig-out.”
Never had a shower before.
Not forgetting the cigarettes everyone smoked those days, the test card on the Tv, and bow-tied Frank Muir on Call My Bluff….
THE BEGINNINGS OF A SIN
“…he never scolded them with words but instead would nip them on the upper arm.”
Although an agnostic, and married to someone brought up a Catholic, I found this story — of an altar boy and his factoring in and out with the priest he served — fascinating and true. And it seems to fit the day when a Pope Emeritus has died in my own real-time!
“Normally when people wear beautiful things it is to make their personality stand out. With a priest it is the opposite. He wears so much to hide himself. And the higher up the Church you go, the more you have to wear. Think of the poor Pope with all that trumphery on him.”
The boy’s older brother with sin between his elbows:
“He was disturbed one night to see Michael kneeling at the sofa saying the prayers with the Sunday paper between his elbows.”
The boy doing the dishes and thoughts of Christ’s flesh and a priest’s fingers and selling ballots with ticket stubs to keep the priest in whiskey, all for the boy’s choice of a couple of biscuits and an ORANGE juice; my memories of Radio Luxembourg on the wireless, the boy having sold 42 books of ballot tickets, 42 being Douglas Adams’ answer to life, the universe and everything, even God?
“Holy Saint Christopher. Forty-two?”
EELS
“One night she had taken a step to the side and stood on something that made her whole head reel, something taut and soft at the same time – something living. An eel. Eels. […] She had stepped back but another squirmed under her heel.”
Reel, heel, eel, this old widow woman farmed out from her cottage to a bungalow, I think, by son whom she remembers changing nappies for and his wife, but, when they are not there, the oldster travels to her old cottage now done up in her daughter in law’s taste; the old woman has her own key to its lock and and she sits playing solitaire by means of playing cards that I used to call patience. The patience of time that she feels. Her journey, when they return, of fleeing in the dark where the eels are crossing the potholes to the lough or loch, and tonight she may step on one and feel its bite, and the old woman’s slow swallowing thrapple, not lockjaw, I say, nor laughter, I guess. The eels are what her late husband and son farmed and traded — and much of the eel-like in the words describing their fishing trips, one of which the old woman once shared.
Death already in the throat of time, I feel.
“All her life she had wanted to halt the time passing but she never felt like that until afterwards.”
i genuinely had not looked ahead in this book when I referred to ‘lockjaw’ in the previous review above!
LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND LOCKJAW
“…talking a lot of hot Ayer and of being easily Ryled.”
“Patricia, if you can’t put a thing into language, it doesn’t exist.’”
It was why Ayer created a Drogulus, so important to me. Meanwhile, this is a hilarious holiday on an island of a man and woman, a fading marriage with two children, both on this holiday, too, and suffering the man’s rainphobia when they wanted to go out and do things. He is also a hypochondriac, a philosophy academic working under a silly-jokey professor, and the man has a toothache, finds a dodgy dentist on the island, and later spends time tussling with the pain of a philosophically absent tooth to talk about and a sporadic jaw locked! And they are in a house next to six noisy and visible institutionalised ‘loony’ men. Perhaps more, if you count the Droguli billeted there, too, I say!
“She set the book on the Vanitory unit, stood on tip-toe, still consulting it over her shoulder, and took his jaw firmly in her hands.”
WORDS THE HAPPY SAY
“A summer insect flew into the metal dome of the Anglepoise and knocked around like a tiny knuckle.”
A story about the beauty of silence embodied in a four line poem from a woman’s magazine that a woman brings to a calligraphist to inscribe on decent paper and to frame for hanging. We gradually know more about him, but not all, amid tactile scratching of his pen and memories of his mother’s once asking for the time upon the point of death. Does he feel sorry for the woman and lower his price, or is there an element of unrequited love when he sends her off with the framed words? And then he…”…punched the table hard with the knuckles of his fist so that the radio at his elbow bounced and gave a static crackle.” A heretofore silent but already switched on radio. My reviews are not intended to replace your reading the works being reviewed. You really need to break for yourself this work’s static silence on the page. Ironic in view of the woman’s cherished poem.
Cross-referenced with DUSKY RUTH by A.E. Coppard here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/10/03/the-field-of-mustard-by-a-e-coppard/#comment-26410
THE BREAK
“…I’ve my nails ate to the elbow.”
For a non-religious person, as I am (other than the religion of literature, of course), I found this work intensely poignant and meaningful, as a Cardinal receives his ailing father, brought by his secular brother (a doctor?) in increasingly deep snow, and he gives his father his favourite beer stout, and listens to how his cigarette non-smoking was proceeding, much about hands and knuckles, and eating his nails to the elbow, which is staggering how an elbow moment can be thus utilised to its optimum meaning. And the Cardinal’s father confessed to his son that he has not believed in God for at least 25 years and only attends Mass and takes its sacraments, for the son’s sake as Cardinal, for the way it would look, if he didn’t.
A childhood memory intervenes…
“‘Here is the church, here is the steeple.’ The thumbs parted, the hands turned over and the interlaced fingers waggled up at him. ‘Open the doors and here are the people.’”
And the trope of two letters, in the past, one meant to be read , the other not, by particular people.
“It was a bad time. Every time I smell garlic I remember it.”
Vampires? Or merely a dislike of Rome? Lol.
“‘If I may stand Pascal’s Wager on its head,’ said the cardinal, ‘if you do not believe and are as genuinely good a man as you are, then God will accept you. You will have won through even though you bet wrongly.’”
And the ending, when his father is taken home early enough hopefully to beat the snow, is the culmination of this great story of the Cardinal’s wrestling with faith and filial love…
“He sat for a long time with his elbows on the desk and his head in his hands. He blessed himself slowly as if his right arm was weighted…”
But what is the break?
THE DRAPERY MAN
“I see the way Beethoven heard. For that reason alone we must continue.”
Blank canvases as signed blank cheques preempting future Blank Pages?!
This is the story of a famous Irish ageing conceptual artist in Portugal, now blind, once using tennis balls as cricket ones in childhood, now as paint brushes, together possibly with his own hair or tears, worthy of literature by Beckett if not Flann O’Brien. And ‘me’ as a sort of catamite, who is also neutrally non-artistic as assistant for art and sex, as well as describing scenes for a blind genius to paint. I won’t describe the backstories, such as ‘my’ mother, nor what the painter says. But this is surely a great pen portrait by a great writer whether it is an non-artistic ‘me’ who channels it here or just someone who knows where his white bread is buttered or charcoaled with an unseen signature, “scumbling with the sap green”. Drapery can be as important in painting as anything else, I say. As for reviewing books, they need signing, too? Can critiques have posterity like the art itself that it critiques?
MORE THAN JUST THE DISEASE
“Some of the sand went into Neil’s eyes, making him cry. He knuckled them clear and blinked, watching Michael jump, his elbows up, as each glass wave rolled at him belly-high.”
Waves within curved waves, carved balls within balls, leading to thoughts of forbidding cricket balls (cf the tennis balls in the previous story above), and Neil is an adolescent schoolboy, a scholarship or ‘fundament’ boy at the same school as non-scholarship Michael, a posher boy from a large, if rented, house, Neil, who is like a fish out of water, ogling Michael’s older sister, and stroking a cat’s tail similar to an erecting preventing him swimming or is it the secret rash on his chest, this jigsaw of a story indicating, right to the story’s very end of waves, and night swimming, after getting to know the woman who owns the house, a duchess called Mrs Wan linked to those oriental balls within balls, and many cats, who stays in a caravan nearby when letting out her house. Each event on the brink of something else. Yes, a wondrously telling jigsaw or quilt of a story full of the era when I, too, was an adolescent boy….
“The question is how did they carve the one inside. It’s all one piece.”
Another story with another displaced owner, this time, a hut, not a caravan…
IN THE HILLS ABOVE LUGANO
‘He owns the place. Lives in a hut at the back during the summer.’
So unbelievable, but stories can be larger than life full of symbolism just for its own sake, and there is something definitely menacing about being invited to a continental villa by an acquaintance from years ago who now thinks you have always been fast friends; such a ‘friend’ is not only a Mad Scientist with rat experiments, but also with beautiful wife in a bikini who once auditioned for the same part in ALIEN as Sigourney Weaver, which brings me to the only elbow trigger that is a real SF elbow trigger, a giant insect in the villa’s pool, a helicopter like creatures that the author tries to palm off on the reader as a locust…
“I sank the net and held the insect under the water. Its elbows and knees made frantic rowing motions and its wings twitched.”
Leading to the inevitable sex between the visitor and the wife…
What oblique and pretentiously scryable motives we weave, we readers, from the dysfunctional or simply drunken purposelessness of fiction characters, whatever their supposed backstories, characters who mistakenly think they know each other, but know even less about themselves! (It was only the man in the hut with his tragic backstory that I truly believed in.)
I wondered why he did not stay and live in the heavily mortgaged extension to the house while Mary dithered! —-
END OF SEASON
“She elbowed her way out of the door to the kitchen, leaving Mary and the stranger in silence.”
Tellingly, telling us which of the two spinster sisters in a seaside resort similar to mine was who attracted the widower Mr Maguire the most, he once being a guest with his wife on honeymoon who stayed years before in their bed and breakfast place (the family home), a business now no longer conducted by the sisters, Mary being a teacher. Strangely, he was surprised they were still there, and equally surprised it was no longer a B& B, despite the slump caused by the Troubles… Linen carried like a white accordion.
He was meticulous about polishing his shoes, and mouth-popping around his pipe. Readerly man, too. Broken light bulb that was not broken. Mary’s car serviced by Mr M in a boiler suit he took everywhere. And even though I didn’t really care whether Mary accepted his proposal or not, I did care about this story being one of the very best seaside resort stories from the middish-20th century… a light bulb moment.
For you, an inscrutable sequel to Kandersteg.
“Mary asked, ‘What do you like to read then?’
‘The classics. Fiction. Good stuff.’”
MONK’S HILL
Chapters Forty-Four and Forty-Five
This is the crux or epiphany of M’s Memoirs, I sense, having read them once before fifty plus years ago. It seems appropriate that I now re-read these chapters on this Christmas Day, as M is reborn within a dream as a soldier on a battlefield. Also, she has been exiled in shame to countrified Monk’s Hill from the social heights of No. 2, because of her behaviour at her own coming of age banquet, and the ‘green stuff’ she had imbibed as spiked by Percy. But from bad things a resurrection happens, as she comes to terms with her own feelings for Fanny and crude Adam Waggett. But what of Mr Anon, I ask myself?
It is the circus — so evocatively, almost frighteningly described by the God’s Eye of Wanderslore’s WDL(M) — that trundles by her new abode, with all its caged and freakish accoutrements, and her sudden realisation that she herself could be a ‘gold mine’ for such a scenario, as she is told. This is the epiphany itself, I guess, and I think again of Angela Carter’s ‘Lizzie’s Tiger’ that I first read and reviewed here only a comparatively short while ago.
Meantime, just two of my takes from a choice of many, in these passages from the two chapters…
“In that sheltered half-light I stood myself before a down-tilted looking-glass. If I had been malshapen, limbless, contorted, I would have drowned myself in mud rather than feed man’s hunger for the monstrous and obscene. No, I was a beautiful thing, even if God had been idly at play, when He had shaped me, and had then flung away the mould; even if to Mrs. Monnerie I was nothing much better than a disreputable marionette. So I boasted myself. Percy’s Chartreuse had been mere whey compared with the fleeting glimpse of a tame circus elephant.”
“I was but a kind of infinitesimal will-o’-the wisp gliding from peak to peak of an infernal mausoleum of which every eye, though dead, was watching me. But there was one Eye …”
Chapter Forty-Six
“In the attitude of Madame Recamier in the picture, I reclined on a lustrous spread of crimson satin and rabbit skin draped over a small lump of wood for bolster to give support to my elbow.”
It is tellingly Adam W who takes, in Chakka’s cage, M the ‘me’ of these entrancing memoirs to the circus, and she negotiates a fee for her future work as exhibit and living doll upon a pygmy steed, And I am indeed more than entranced at her entrance to this world. And her eye to eye empathy with some of her public. Her subsumption of self at some sort of fulfilment of process as initially triggered by the above elbow moment.
“And a peculiar rapturous gravity spread over me. When one’s very self is wrapt in the ordeal of the passing moment, is lost like that, out of time and space, it seems, well – another presence had stolen into my mind, had taken possession. I cannot explain.”
Chapters Forty-Seven and Forty-Eight
“Isn’t half the world kicking down the faces of those beneath them on the ladder?”
Quiz question for the future: who said that in this book? Who spins the truth in these chapters the most?,
Another turning-point for M, as her love-hate relationship with Fanny crystallises, and she is determined to wreak some crux from her circus showmanship. One more show to do and earn some crowns? To and fro wherever in Kent the circus winds in a cage wielded by Adam W? She lists, amidst her plight of aloneness in this world, some of the characters we have met…
“Mrs. Monnerie there; stepping into her brougham, ebony cane in hand, Marvell at her elbow; Mrs. Bowater languishing on board ship, limp head in stiff frilling; Sir Walter dumb; the showman cursing his wretched men; the bills being posted, the implacable future mutely yawning, the past unutterable. Everything in its orbit. Was there no help, no refuge?”
She also thinks of Anon’s consumption, while she dallies with a blue butterfly, and is determined to return to him, or is she not? But she does also glimpse another, presumably full-sized, man in the audience of her circus show…
“Aloof, his head a little bowed down, his face in profile, he stood there, framed in the opening, dusky, level-featured, deep-eyed – a Stranger. What in me rushed as if on wings into his silent company? A passionate longing beyond words burned in me. I seemed to be carried away into a boundless wilderness – stunted trees, salt in the air, a low, enormous stretch of night sky, space; and this man, master of soul and solitude.”
WDLM?
“What was the meaning of it all – this enormous ocean of time and space in which I was lost? Never else than a stranger. That couldn’t be true of the men and women who really keep the world’s ‘pot boiling’.”
Chapter Forty-Nine and Fifty
“There is our beloved Sovereign on her throne; and there the last innocent little victim in its cradle; and there’s the old sun waggishly illuminating the whole creaking stage. Blind beggar and dog, Toby, artists, authors, parsons, statesmen – heart and everything else, or everything else but heart, on sleeve – and all on show – every one of them – at something a look. No, my dear, there’s only one private life, the next; and, according to some accounts, that will be more public than ever. And so twirls the Merry-go-Round.”
That is said by Mrs M, that we are all on stage, said amidst mild ‘midget-baiting’, with Susan, Fanny and M herself, debating M’s concern for another midget on circus-show called Angélique. None of us unique.
And so to a new section between these two chapters: WANDERSLORE and to Mr Anon. A chance deliberate encounter of sorts as he rescues her from passage around quagmire and over stile. An escape, a fear of claustrophobic life, but also fear of escaping it? Death or a fairy tale eternity?
“Shouldn’t life be a High Road, didn’t he think; surely not a hot, silly zigzag of short cuts leading back to the place you started from, and you too old or stupid, perhaps, to begin again?”
Chapter Fifty-One and Fifty-Two
“The old pony plodded up yet another hill; we went clattering down its deep descent; and there, in the green bowl of a meadow sloping down from its woody fringes above, lay scattered the bellying booths, the gaudy wagons and cages of the circus. All but hidden in the trees above them, a crooked, tarnished weathercock glinted in the sunset afterglow. Lights twinkled against the dying daylight. The bright-painted merry-go-round with its staring, motionless, galloping horses was bathed in the shine of its flares, a thin plume of steam softly ascending from its brass-rimmed funnel. A knot of country boys, gabbling at one another like starlings, shrilled a cheer as we came rattling over a stone bridge beneath which a stream shallowly washed its bank of osiers. I laughed at them, waved my hand. At this they yelled, danced in the road, threw dust into the air. Not, perhaps, a very friendly return; but how happy I was, all anxiety and responsibility gone now. The faint, rank smell of the wild beasts mingling with the evening air was instilling its intoxication in my brain. I longed for darkness, the din and glare; longed for my tent and the gaping faces, for the smoky wind to fan my cheek as I bobbed cantering round the ring.”
This is literature’s apotheosis of light and dark circus, the freeing of Midgetina’s spirit, the painted masquerade in the living transmigrated role of Angélique for greedy eyes, even Mrs M and the gentry turn up to gawp at this tableau, crucially…
“Mrs. Monnerie had paid for elbow room.”
Mr Anon and M merged, as a further transmigration? …as he clumsily fills in for her on the horse act, before the elephant comes on. No way to do justice to these two chapters and their interlinking tensions, glances, mergings, imprisonings and freedoms. ‘The showman’, too, who might be the man too mean to be me, who is WDLM.
“Would he not realize, too, that even my small body had its value, and was admired in a dismal world that cared not a jot for the spirit that inhabited it?”
“‘I dreamt that I dwe-elt in mar-ar-ble halls,’ I piped out in a quavering falsetto. The folly of taking things so solemnly. What was humanity but a dressed-up ape?”
“Yet so much alone were she and I in that last infinite moment that we might have been whispering together after death.”
“…the watching multitude beneath the enormous mushroom of the tent,…”
We have all paid for ‘elbow room’, I say!
More than just elbow, more a mortal pain to supplant those now vanished mergings and circus smells… three very short chapters… and beware SPOILERS galore below while the last chapter of these memoirs is writ under the heading LYNDSEY, but still writ, it says, by M herself? Or by WDLM in hope at what might have been?
Fifty-Three, Fifty-Four and Fifty-Five
“‘My shoulder,’ he answered thickly, as if the words came sluggishly and were half-strange to him. ‘I fell …Nothing: nothing. Only that I love you.’”
Both Anon and M by pony trap back to Wanderslore and Beechwoood…
“I realized how sorely he was hurt, yet not then in my stupidity and horror – or is it that I refused to confess it to myself? – that his hurt was mortal.”
Anon he was, now Nemonymous he shall remain.
“I crouched on the ground, elbows and knees, and now kept steady watch upon those night-hung upper windows.”
An old woman who had hung herself now returned?
“All that day I spent in the neighbourhood of the water, overhung with the colourless trumpets of convolvulus.”
“He was dead; and I had killed him – pride, vanity, greed, obstinacy, lovelessness. Every flower and fading leaf bore witness against me.”
“…a self sat at the windows of my eyes gazing heedlessly out over that peace and beauty without consciousness even of grief and despair.”
“At last, a continuous churring, like the noise of a rattle, near at hand, betrayed them, I lay in my solitude in the midst of a whirling flock of nightjars,…”
Then poised to be poisoned: an ‘evil bush’ of nightshade, or something far more personal?
“– a voice like none I had ever heard in the world until that moment. Yet I raised the fruit to my lips. Its bitter juices jetted out upon cheek, mouth, and tongue, for ever staining me with their dye.”
“A gigantic nightjar swirled on me, plucking at my hair.”
“A piercing, vindictive voice was calling me. No hope now. I was damned. In senseless hallucination I began systematically, laboriously, a frenzied search. Leaf, pebble, crawling night-creature – with slow, animal-like care, I turned them over one by one, seeking and seeking.”
“…and that wildest, happiest, cruellest, dearest, blackest twelvemonth of my life?”
“That is so; and so I must leave it, hoping against hope that one friend at any rate will consent in his love and wisdom to take me seriously, and to remember me, not with scorn or even with pity, but as if, life for life, we had shared the world on equal terms.”
I am that friend, I hope, at last. To wake this book to its due acclaim without any woke fears for its entitlement as midget!
end