On Not Frightening the Horses

The Frightened Horse by Nykos Furcic

As one grows older, one's appreciation for etiquette and decorum - for acting in public at all times with propriety - grows ever more pronounced. Unseemly behaviour now seems uncalled for as well as uncouth.

Indeed, I find myself moving ever-closer towards the sophisticated position adopted by the aristocracy and memorably articulated by the English stage actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell: It doesn't matter what people do so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses. In other words, public appearance matters more than private behaviour.       

This isn't - as some commentators mistakenly insist - a sign of bourgeois hypocrisy. It is, rather, an affirmation of hypocrisy as a noble value and social necessity (albeit rooted in performance and pretence).   

The British aristocracy never embraced 19th-century ideals of domestic respectability and sexual morality with the same enthusiasm as the middle-classes, tending to favour libertarian permissiveness over authoritarian puritanism.   

Perhaps that's why the British working class have always loved toffs and why the latter often make such fine actors ...

The Scent of a Woman Called Gwyneth

goop.com

One of the questions that many of us have pondered in recent times is: What does Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina smell like?

Well, thanks to LA perfumer and alchemist Douglas Little - founder of the fragrance brand Heretic, that seeks to develop unique products based upon the mysterious, sensual and feral aspects of nature - now we know!

For Little, in collaboration with Miss Paltrow, has created a provocatively scented candle made with geranium, citrusy bergamot, and cedar absolutes juxtaposed with Damask rose and ambrette seed, to capture the very essence of Gwyneth's sophisticated and warmly seductive vagina.    

Not surprisingly, despite what some cheapskates might regard as a rather expensive price tag ($75), the candle has already sold out, adding a few more pennies to the pot in which Goop has already amassed an estimated 250 million dollars.

So, those critics who like to mock Miss Paltrow had better just "light that candle, breathe deep and accept the facts: this is Gwyneth's vagina. And the rest of us just live in it."*

* This amusing line is by the American journalist Hadley Freeman writing in The Guardian (13 Jan 2020): click here.

The Doll, the Joker, and the Man Who Laughs

Oh, you fools! Open your eyes! 

I am a symbol of your humanity!

As many fans of Batman will know, the appearance of the Joker owes a good deal to Conrad Veidt's astonishing portrayal of the facially mutilated figure of Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs (1928); a silent romantic drama-cum-horror movie directed by the German Expressionist filmmaker Paul Leni (and an adaptation of Victor Hugo's 1869 novel L'Homme qui rit).

But what many readers of Daphne du Maurier don't realise is that her description of Julio - a creepy sex doll in one of her earliest short stories - also appears to be modelled on the above* and anticipates Gotham's most notorious supervillain, right down to the cocked eyebrow:

"His face was the most evil thing I have ever seen. It was ashen pale in colour, and the mouth was a crimson gash, sensual and depraved. The nose was thin, with curved nostrils, and the eyes were cruel, gleaming and narrow, and curiously still. They seemed to stare right through one - the eyes of a hawk. The hair was sleek and dark, brushed right back from the white forehead."

Heath Ledger as the Joker in  

The Dark Knight (2008)**

Notes: 

* Unfortunately, this cannot be the case; the film was released a year after du Maurier wrote 'The Doll' (aged twenty, in 1927).

** Heath Ledger's Joker - unlike Joaquin Phoenix's more recent (equally brilliant) portrayal - makes the relationship to Veidt's Gwynplaine clear by suggesting that the crimson-mouthed smile is the result of disfigurement rather than merely an expression of underlying madness.    
 

See: Daphne du Maurier, 'The Doll', in The Doll: Short Stories, (Virago, 2011), p. 23.

Supermassive Maternal Bodies (With Reference to the Case of Old Granny Saywell)

Fay Compton as Granny (aka The Mater) 

in The Virgin and the Gypsy 

(dir. Christopher Miles, 1970)

I.

It's not only stars that can collapse and form black holes: there are elderly women at the end of their natural life - pushing, eighty, ninety, and beyond - who can also wilfully exert a gravitational pull so strong that nothing and no one can escape from it.

Who knows, perhaps these supermassive maternal bodies exist at the centre of every family (even when bed-ridden or endlessly sitting in an arm-chair); feeding off the energy of their adult children until the latter are burnt out and exhausted, or sent spiralling into depression and thoughts of murder. 


II.

We find one such malevolent matriarch at the dark heart of a family only nominally headed by the forty-seven year old rector, Arthur Saywell, in D. H. Lawrence's short novel The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930).

Granny, "who was over seventy and whose sight was failing," [6] became the central figure in the household after the vicar's wife had scandalously run off with a young man, leaving her husband with two young girls and an ageing parent to care for (a task in which he was helped by Aunt Cissie, a pale and pious woman, also over forty, who was "gnawed by an inward worm" [6]).      

They called her The Mater - granny, not Aunt Cissie - and she was "one of those physically vulgar, clever old bodies who had got her own way all her life by buttering the weaknesses of her men-folk" [6], particularly her son, the rector. Maternal instinct provided her with the great clue to his being and she was able to exploit and manipulate him to maximum effect - though always, of course, in the name of Love.*

With her delinquent daughter-in-law - She-who-was-Cynthia - out of the picture, The Mater "climbed into the chief arm-chair in the rectory, and planted her old bulk firmly" [6] into it, determined to never again be dethroned or to see her son remarry.

Not only did the silver-haired Mater tremble with hate at the thought of She-who-was-Cynthia, so too did she secretly despise her granddaughters, Lucille and Yvette; "children of that foul nettle of lust" [7]:

"Her great rival was the younger girl, Yvette. Yvette had some of the vague, careless blitheness of She-who-was-Cynthia. But this one was more docile. Granny had perhaps caught her in time. Perhaps!
      The funny thing was, Granny secretly hated Lucille, the elder girl, more than the pampered Yvette. Lucille, the uneasy and irritable, was more conscious of being under Granny's power, than the spoilt and vague Yvette." [7-8]
   
So, Granny - The Mater - was not a warm, kindly soul: she only pretended to be. And gradually, having left school and returned home, the girls realise that under her "old-fashioned lace cap, under her silver hair, under the black silk of her stout, short, forward-bulging body, this old woman had a cunning heart, seeking forever her own female power" [8].

Nor was it physically pleasant to be around the old woman, particularly at meal times when Granny - who loved a bit of pork - would quickly devour her special dishes of "beef-tea and rusks, or a small savoury custard" [10], half-spilling the food as she did so. "The girls ate with repulsion [...] Yvette's  tender nose showing her disgust" [11]. 

And, of course, when you live with the old - as with cats - the rooms are never fresh, no matter how many windows you open; everything smells of Granny and cabbage and "degenerated comfort which has ceased to be comfortable and has turned stuffy, unclean" [10]. Home is where the heart is, they say, but it's also where you'll find that awful domestic sordidness which is so fatal to any joy in life.  

No wonder poor Lucille and Yvette can't stand being at the rectory, The Mater presiding from her arm-chair "with her stomach protruding, her reddish, pendulous face, that had a sort of horrible majesty" [13] like Queen Victoria, or an old toad.

What the girls minded most, however - even more than her gross physical complacency - "was that, when they brought their young friends to the house, Granny was always there, like some awful idol of old flesh, consuming all the attention." [14]

But what could be done? You couldn't actually say to poor old Granny: "'lie down and die, you old woman!' She might be an old nuisance, but she never really did anything. It wasn't fair to hate her" [17].

Having said that, Yvette can't help imaginging Granny being strangled by a wolf-like gipsy woman, putting an end to her horrible persistence and parasitic agedness.** Fortunately, however, it doesn't come to this - The Mater meets her Maker after a terrible flood washes her away, the waters advancing upon her "like a wall of lions" [69] roaring.

Her gipsy lover, Joe Boswell, saves Yvette - but poor Granny has no one to pull her to safety; she is last seen in the hallway "her hands lifted and clawing, as the first waters swirled round her legs, and her coffin-like mouth was opened in a hoarse scream" [70].

The next time Yvette sees her, Granny is bobbing up "like a strange float, her face purple, her blind blue eyes bolting, spume hissing from her mouth" [71]. The gipsy also looks at her with contempt and thinks her not deserving of help: Lebensunwertes Leben, as some would say ...

Even, surprisingly - but, then again, not so surprisingly - Aunt Cissie is there to cry out at the end: "'Let the old be taken and the young spared!'" [77]

David James Gilhooly:  

Frog Queen Victoria (1989)

Notes

* It's important to note that The Mater exerts her malevolent will over other women too and not just the men-folk within her circle. Thus, Aunt Cissie - her daughter - is also a victim:

"Aunt Cissie's life had been sacrificed to The Mater, and Aunt Cissie knew it, and The Mater knew she knew it. Yet as the years went on, it became a convention. The convention of Aunt Cissie's sacrifice was accepted by everybody, including the self-same Cissie. She prayed a good deal about it. Which also showed that she had her own private feelings somewhere, poor thing. She had ceased to be Cissie, she had lost her life and her sex. And now, she was creeping towards fifty, strange green flares of rage would come up in her, and at such times, she was insane.
      But Granny held her in her power. And Aunt Cissie's one object in life was to look after The Mater." [8]

** And, later in the story, Yvette openly admits her true feelings for Granny:

"It was Granny whom she came to detest with all her soul. That obese old woman, sitting there in her blindness like some great red-blotched fungus [...] her Yvette really hated, with that pure, sheer hatred which is almost a joy." [63]

"The look Yvette most hated, was the look of that lower jaw pressing relentlessly up, with an ancient prognathous thrust, so that the snub nose in turn was forced to press upwards [...] The will, the ancient, toad-like obscene will in the old woman, was fearful, once you saw it: a toad-like self-will that was godless, and less than human! It belonged to the old, enduring race of toads, or tortoises. And it made one feel that Granny would never die. She would live on like those higher reptiles, in a state of semicoma, forever." [63]

Again, this seems harsh - until, that is, you have first-hand experience of such old people oneself ...  

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin and the Gipsy', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 5-78. All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

On Genetic Sexual Attraction (With Reference to the Case of Jinnie Blair)

Image: someecards.com

I.

The tale of Shelagh Money, the nineteen-year-old actress who goes by the stage-name of Jennifer Blair, is another of Daphne du Maurier's short stories that continues to intrigue long after it's been read.

Particularly as it anticipates the (pseudoscientfic) idea of genetic sexual attraction, a term coined in the late 1980s by Barbara Gonyo, an American woman forced to give up her baby son for adoption, but who developed amorous feelings for him when, twenty-five years later, she tracked him down.

Wishing to understand (and justify) her incestuous urges - that she describes as wonderful and frightening - Gonyo came up with the concept of GSA and even though there's very little hard evidence for this as an actual phenomenon, Greek myth, psychoanalysis, and pornography all attest to the fact that sexual attraction can (and does) occur between individuals who are related in some manner.

As does 'A Border-Line Case' ...


II.

Shortly before his death, Shelagh Money's father expresses a wish that he might see his estranged friend, Nicholas Barry, once more, in order to shake him by the hand and wish him luck in the future.

In order, also, that he might be forgiven for not recommending his pal for promotion when he had the opportunity to do so and thus inadvertently playing a part in Nick's decline in later years; years spent as a recluse living in Ireland and soured by disappointment.  

Despite having been told that Nick was "mad as a hatter" [108] and a border-line case, Shelagh decides to track him down in order to inform him of her father's death and of his regret that their friendship had ended in acrimony.

"Shelagh had acted on impulse. She knew she always would. It was part of her character, and had to be accepted by family and friends. It was not until she was on her way, though, driving north from Dublin in the hired car, that her journey, hastily improvised, took on its real meaning. She was here on a mission, a sacred trust. She was carrying a message from beyond the grave." [111]

When Shelagh finds herself at Nick's island home and is waiting in his study to meet him, she notices a photograph in a blue leather frame. It was a photograph of her mother on her wedding day:

"There was something wrong, though. The groom standing beside her was not Shelagh's father. It was Nick, the best man [...] She looked closer, baffled, and realised that the photograph had been cleverly faked. Nick's head and shoulders had been transposed on to her father's figure, while her father's head [...] had been shifted to the lanky figure behind, standing between the bridesmaids. It was only because she knew the original photograph on her father's desk at home [...] that she recognised the transposition instantly. A stranger would think the photograph genuine." [125]

Naturally, this is rather disconcerting to the young woman. Why - and who - was Nick hoping to deceive? If the answer was himself, then, thinks Shelagh, he must be at least a little crazy: "What was it her father had said? Nick had always been a border-line case ..." [125]

Shelagh feels a strange sense of revulsion and apprehension come over her: "The room that had seemed warm and familiar became kinky, queer. She wanted to get out." [125]

Unfortunately, before she can leave, in walks Nick - or the Commander, as his staff refer to him. When he asks her name she instinctively replies Jinnie, even though nobody except her father had ever called her that (presumably as a dimunitive of her stage-name, though one might have expected that to be Jennie, rather than Jinnie, which is usually short for Virginia): "It must have been nerves that made her blurt it out now." [127]

They talk - some might even describe their exchange as a flirtatious form of banter. She notices he has an attractive smile; not in the conventional sense, but in her sense, and she recalls her mother saying that Nick was always great fun at parties. He reminds her of someone: and she reminds him of someone.

The next day, she decides that Nick is very different from the resentful figure her father described. They have a little picnic together, sat side by side on his boat - hard-boiled eggs and chicken - and she's relaxed enough to discuss her sex life with him: "'I'm not really permissive. [...] I don't strip down at the flick of a hat. It has to be someone I like.'" [139]

Well, Shelagh must have really liked Nick, because shortly after this she finds herself with her shoes off and drinking whiskey with him in the back of a grocer's van, where they have a highly charged sexual encounter amongst the loaves of bread and tinned goods.

"It's body chemistry, she told herself, that's what does it. People's skins. They either blend or they don't. They either merge and melt into the same texture, dissolve and become renewed, or nothing happens, like faulty plugs, blown fuses, switchboard jams. When the thing goes right [...] then it's arrows splintering the sky, it's forest fires, it's Agincourt." [148]

Shelagh decides that she has, in fact, just experienced the fuck of her lifetime: "'I shall live till I'm ninety-five, marry some nice man, have fifteen children, win stage awards and Oscars, but never again will the world break into fragments, burn before my eyes [...]'" [148]

She only hopes that her father's ghost will forgive her for what she's done - and hopes to do again before the night is over: "'It was one way to settle your last request, though you wouldn't have approved of the method.'" [150]

Shelagh also realises that she's fallen hook, line and sinker for Nick. He sees their relationship, however, more in terms of love-hate: "'Attraction and antagonism mixed. Very peculiar.'" [152]

In fact, their relationship is more peculiar than either yet know: for it turns out that shortly after her parents were wed, Nick called one evening, unexpectedly. His friend was out, so he got his friend's wife - Shelagh's mother - drunk and "'had a rough-and-tumble with her on the sofa'" [153].

Being, perhaps, a bit naive or slow on the uptake, Shelagh still doesn't grasp what this might mean. Indeed, even though she describes this act of adultery as revolting, she still wants desperately to stay with Nick in Ireland: "'What I really want,' she said, 'deep down, is stillness, safety. The feeling you'd aways be there. I love you. I think I must have loved you without knowing it all my life.'" [154]

She says this, fearful that Nick will kick her out of the van and effectively abandon her by the roadside - which is pretty much what he does: "'I sacrifice the lamb that I do love to spite my own raven heart [...]'" [155]. Having made his poetic farewell, he does invite her to visit him again, any time she likes ...

Heartbroken back in London, she throws herself into rehearsals for a production of Twelfth Night. A package arrives from Ireland, containing an old photograph, of Nick, in costume as Cesario. An accompanying letter explains:

"'I have been burning some papers [...] and came across the enclosed photograph amongst a pile of junk in the bottom drawer of my desk. I thought it might amuse you.You may remember I told you that first evening you remided me of someone. I see now that it was myself!'" [161]

"She looked at the photograph again. Her nose, her chin, the cocky expression, head tip-tilted in the air. Even the stance, hand on hip. The thick cropped hair. Suddenly she was not standing in the dressing-room at all but in her father's bedroom [...] He was staring at her, an expression of horror and disbelief upon his face. It was not accusation she had read in his eyes [shortly before he died], but recognition. He had awakened from no nightmare, but from a dream that had lasted twenty years. Dying, he discovered truth." [161]

Now she had discovered it also: but she doesn't seem to find anything very wonderful or liberating in it. On the contrary, she stares at herself in the mirror with horror and rips the photograph apart, throwing the pieces into the waste-paper basket:

"And when she went back on to the stage it was not from the Duke's palace in Illyria that she saw herself moving henceforth [...] but out into a street [...] where there were windows to be smashed and houses to burn [...] where there were causes to despise and men to hate, for only by hating can you purge away love, only by sword, by fire." [162]

See: 

Daphne du Maurier, 'A Border-Line Case', in Don't Look Now and Other Stories, (Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 101-162. All page references given in the text refer to this edition. 

For those who would like to read more on GSA, see Alix Kirsta's piece in The Guardian (17 May, 2003): click here. 

Ailurophilia: On Baudelaire's Erotic Fascination with Cats

Théophile Steinlen's 1896 design for the famous 
Parisian nightspot Le Chat Noir

Poets, like witches and philosophers, love cats and many have written odes to their mysterious companions, including Rilke, who imagines himself suspended like a prehistoric fly in the golden amber of his cat's eyeball.* However, it's Baudelaire who is perhaps most famous for his obsessive love of cats.**

And it's Baudelaire who best understands not only their Satanic-nocturnal nature, but also their undeniable eroticism, equating the feline with the feminine (and vice versa) until it becomes impossible to know at times if he's writing about his favourite pet or his favourite mistress.

Either way, both seem to promise those things he valued most: poetic truth and sensual pleasure; the former being something that develops out of the fleshy materiality of the latter, rather than pre-existing as some kind of disembodied ideal.      

Here's one of Baudelaire's cat poems that hopefully illustrates what I've been attempting to say, followed by my own attempt at a translation into English that invariably loses something in the process, but which, hopefully, adds something that isn't found in other translations ...

Le Chat

Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d'agate.

Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s'enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun.


The Cat

Come not with claws, beautiful cat,
As you leap into my affection;
Allow me to plunge into your eyes
Of metallic crystal.

When my fingers gently stroke along
Your head and supple spine,
My hand thrills with the pleasure
Of touching your body electric.

I sense the same spirit as in Her: her gaze
Like yours, dear creature, is one of cold
Intensity, piercing like a banderilla.

And, from head to toe,
A subtle yet dangerous perfume,
Envelops her dark skin.


Notes

* See Rilke, 'Black Cat' in Duino Elegies (1923): click here to read online. 

** If memory serves me correctly, Baudelaire devoted no fewer than three poems to cats in Les Fleurs du mal (1857) and they make appearances in many of his other poems too. As might be expected, therefore, the theme of Baudelaire's cats has proved a popular - and fertile - one amongst literary critics and theorists (Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss famously co-authoring a structuralist reading in 1960, for example).

To read an online edition of Les Fleurs du mal provided by Project Gutenberg, click here. 

Alternatively, visit fleursdumal.org - a site dedicated to Baudelaire and his work that not only contains every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal, but a selection of English translations (for those, like me, whose French isn't very good). 

For another post on the love of cats, click here.  

Ailurophilia: The Case of Gary Seven and Isis

Robert Lansing as Gary Seven holding his familiar Isis the Cat

April Tatro as Isis in her human form

One of the strangest and most amusing episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series, is 'Assignment Earth' - the 26th and final episode of season two.*

There are several reasons for its queer likeability; the fact that it's set on Earth in 1968; the performance of its two guest stars, Robert Lansing as the interstellar agent Gary Seven and the lovely Terri Garr as Roberta Lincoln; and that it features a black cat called Isis who works her feline charms even on Mr. Spock.**

Whilst appearing at first to be an ordinary cat, Isis is revealed not only to possess great intelligence, but the ability also to take on human form (and what a form it is, as played in the episode by the (uncredited) actress, dancer and contortionist April Tatro). She is Mr. Seven's constant companion and can communicate with him via a form of interspecies telepathy.

Whether he engages in sexual activity with Isis whilst she's in her human form isn't made clear, but it certainly seems likely and Miss Lincoln displays clear signs of sexual jealousy towards Isis (in her human form) at the end of the episode, even though at this point she has no real relationship of any description with Mr. Seven. 

Quite a lovely animal ...

I find myself strangely drawn to it. 

Notes

* 'Assignment Earth', written by Art Wallace (based on a story by Wallace and Gene Roddenberry) and directed by Marc Daniels, was first broadcast on 29 March, 1968. 

Further adding to its uniqueness as a Star Trek episode is the fact that it essentially functioned as a backdoor pilot for a projected new series starring Lansing and Garr as Mr. Seven and Miss Lincoln (a series that, alas, was never to be made).     

** As the following short scene from the above episode demonstrates: click here.

Readers who like this episode, might also find the seventh episode of season two of interest; entitled 'Catspaw', it was written by Robert Bloch (i.e, the writer of the novel Psycho (1959), upon which Hitchcock's 1960 film was based) and featured another shape-shifting alien woman (Sylvia, played by Antoinette Bower) with a fondness for taking the form of a black cat. Directed by Joseph Pevney, this episode was first broadcast on 27 October, 1967, in order to coincide with Halloween. 

For another post on the love of cats, click here.  

The Gods Have Become Our Diseases

Cover image - by the author's daughter, Flavia Tower - 
to the first UK edition (Victor Gollancz, 1971)

I.

"We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases."  

- C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (Collected Works, Vol. 13)

  

In this crucially insightful passage, Jung provides the key to understanding Daphne du Maurier's short story 'Not After Midnight' - a tragic tale of two ruined lives: by Silenian dipsomania in the case of a brutish American collector of antiquities, Mr. Stoll; and by pederastic satyrism in the case of the English schoolmaster and amateur painter Timothy Grey.

II.

Grey, who narrates the tale, begins by informing us that he has, in fact, recently resigned from his teaching post at a boy's prep school, "in order to forestall inevitable dismissal" [56].

The reason he gave for his resignation was ill health. But Grey doesn't specify what the nature of his sickness is, or why it should make his dismissal inevitable. He simply says that it was caused by a "wretched bug picked up on holiday in Crete" [56]. Clearly, however, it's more than a funny tummy ...

Has he, perhaps, caught some kind of sexually transmitted disease? Is that the universal complaint from which he suffers? A dose of the clap would seem to be a possibility, but Grey is keen for us to know that the bug he caught "was picked up in all innocence" and was not due to "excess of the good life" [56].     

It also seems possible that Grey is, in fact, referring indirectly to what some consider a perverse disorder; did he resign because repressed homosexual desire had manifested itself and become known to his fellow teachers and pupils? The following statement lends credence to this:

"My complaint is universal, and has been so through the ages, an excuse for jest and hilarious laughter from earliest times, until one of us oversteps the mark and becomes a menace to society." [56]

Actually, this explanation - although mistaken - is nearer the mark. But what Grey suffers from is not the flowering of an all too human sexual predisposition; his erotomania is the result, rather, of divine madness - or what Grey describes as a form of insidious evil.

In other words, he's in the process of becoming-satyr, rather than merely coming out - and that's a much more problematic proposition within modern European culture; for whilst homosexuality has been decriminalised (and is, in fact, now thought of as something to celebrate), paedophilia certainly hasn't (and isn't).

III.  

Grey's problems begin when he bumps into the physically intimidating and drunken figure of Stoll, who gives him a gift; a drinking vessel which, whilst empty of libation, was nevertheless still able to intoxicate:

"It was a small jug, reddish in colour, with a handle on either side for safe holding. [...] The body of the jug had been shaped cunningly and brilliantly into a man's face, with upstanding ears like scallop-shells, while protruding eyes and bulbous nose stood out above the leering, open mouth, the moustache drooping to the rounded beard that formed the base. At the top, between the handles, were the upright figures of three strutting men, their faces similar to that upon the jug, but here human resemblance ended, for they had neither hands nor feet but hooves, and from each of their hairy rumps extended a horse's tail." [88]

That night, Grey has queer dreams from which he struggles to awaken; dreams that "belonged to some other unknown world horribly intermingled with [his] own" [89]:

"Term had started, but the school in which I taught was on a mountain top hemmed in by forest [...] My boys, all of them familiar faces, lads I knew, wore vine-leaves in their hair, and had a strange, unearthly beauty both endearing and corrupt. They ran towards me, smiling, and I put my arms about them, and the pleasure they gave me was insidious and sweet, never before experienced, never before imagined, the man who pranced in their midst and played with them was not myself, not the self I knew, but a demon shadow emerging from a jug [...]" [89]

Grey decides the rhyton is a source of magical malevolence and that the terrible dreams which it induced were utterly foreign to his nature - but one can't help wondering about this; perhaps it simply enables one to become who one is ...

Later in the tale, we discover that Stoll has also left Grey a bottle of home-brewed drink, which, surprisingly, he agrees to try:

"It was like the barley-water my mother used to make when I was a child. And equally tasteless. And yet ... it left a sort of aftermath on the palate and the tongue. Not as sweet as honey nor as sharp as grapes, but pleasant, like the smell of raisins under the sun, curiously blended with the ears of ripening corn." [91]

He even drinks the stuff for a second time; from the demonic jug, which, on reflection - and under the influence of Stoll's home-brew -, now appeared rather beautiful:

"I don't know how it was, but somehow the leering face no longer seemed so lewd. It had a certain dignity that had escaped me before. [...] I wondered whether Socrates had looked thus when he strolled in the Athenian agora with his pupils and discoursed on life. He could have done. And his pupils may not necessarily have been the young men whom Plato said they were, but of a tenderer age, like my lads at school, like those youngsters of eleven or twelve who had smiled upon me in my dreams [...]" [97]

Grey continues:

"I felt the scalloped ears, the rounded nose, the full soft lips of the tutor Silenos upon the jar, the eyes no longer protruding but questioning, appealing, and even the naked horsemen on the top had grown in grace. It seemed to me now they were not strutting in conceit but dancing with linked hands, filled with gay abandon, a pleasing, wanton joy." [97]

It is only upon discovering the body of Stoll beneath the waves - "grotesque, inhuman [... swaying] backwards and forwards at the bidding of the current" [99] - that Grey, with understandable panic, decides to fling the jug into the sea:

"Even as I did so, I knew the gesture was in vain. It did not sink immediately but remained bobbing on the surface, then slowly filled with that green translucent sea, pale as the barley liquid laced with spruce and ivy. Not innocuous but evil, stifling conscience, dulling intellect, the hell-brew of the smiling god Dionysus, which turned his followers into drunken sots, would claim another victim [...] The eyes in the swollen face stared up at me, and they were not only those of Silenos the satyr tutor, and of the drowned Stoll, but my own as well [...] They seemed to hold all knowledge in their depths, and all despair." [100]

IV.

The point of the tale is this: becoming-Greek in a Classical sense certainly opens up a whole new way of life and a whole new world of experience, but from the moral-legal standpoint of today it spells trouble, putting you at risk of a lengthy prison sentence and of having your name added to the sex offenders register.

Those who romanticise the pre-Christian past in all its pagan splendour and think the gods of Olympus were a splendid bunch, should maybe read a bit more history and acknowledge the tragic nature of Greek mythology in which incest, rape, murder, and sodomy (in its widest sense) were the norm.*

*Note: Some readers - with knowledge of my background in Dionysian philosophy and an openly pagan past - might be surprised (even disappointed) by this conclusion. But I would remind them that even a youthful Nietzsche, writing in The Birth of Tragedy, wasn't for frenzied excess and promiscuity overriding every form of law; he warns against the savage urges of lust and cruelty and advocates for their aesthetic sublimation.  
 

See: 

C. G. Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 13: Alchemical Studies, ed. Gerhard Adler, trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Princeton University Press, 1983), 'Commentary on "The Secret of the Golden Flower"', para. 54. 

Daphne du Maurier, 'Not After Midnight', in Don't Look Now and Other Stories, (Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 56-100. All page references given in the text refer to this edition.

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (Penguin Books, 1993).

This post is for Maria Thanassa.

Don't Look Now - Because This is the End

Adelina Poerio as the homocidal dwarf in 
Don't Look Now (dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

He felt himself held, unable to move, and an impending sense of doom, of tragedy, came upon him. His whole being sagged, as it were, in apathy, and he thought, 'This is the end, there is no escape, no future.'

- Daphne du Maurier, 'Don't Look Now'

 
I suppose we've all felt like that on occasion (if not daily). But from out of such despair great art - including great pop music - is born. Indeed, the last line seems to invoke the 1967 track by The Doors ...


Initially written about a failed romance and the pain of saying goodbye to a loved one, 'The End' evolved into something much more grandiose, to do with the loss of childhood innocence, death, and Oedipal fantasy.

Some critics have described it as Sophoclean. Others have said it's more Joycean in its lyrical playfulness and eclectic frame of reference; that Morrison demonstrates what happens when the stream of consciousness is tainted with acid.

For many people, me included, the song is forever linked with the movie Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), which brilliantly remixed the track from the original master tapes, bringing to the fore Morrison's astonishing vocals (including his liberal use of scat and expletives that are almost inaudible in the '67 recording).

In sum: great tale; great track; great movie. And one can't help wondering what (if anything) Miss du Maurier made of the latter works? I know she liked Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film Don't Look Now, based on her short story, but what of The Doors epic and Coppola's masterpiece? I think we should be told ...*

See: Daphne du Maurier, 'Don't Look Now', in Don't Look Now and Other Stories, (Penguin Books, 2006), p. 14.

It's interesting to note that the line quoted also uses the phrase no future, as if anticipating the punk nihilism of the Sex Pistols and not merely recalling the psychedelic nihilism of The Doors. 

Play: The Doors, 'The End', from the album The Doors (Elektra, 1967): click here. And to hear the remixed version used in Apocalypse Now, click here. 

*Although we can't be sure, I doubt that Miss du Maurier would've been a fan of Jim Morrison and The Doors, as a scene in 'Not After Midnight', possibly indicates. The narrator of the tale, Timothy Grey, who is on holiday in Crete, sits outside a café savouring what is known as local colour and amused by the passing crowd; "Greek families taking the air, pretty, self-conscious girls eyeing the youths [...] a bearded Orthodox priest who smoked incessantly at the table next to me [...] and of course the familiar bunch of hippies [...] considerably longer-haired than anybody else, dirtier, and making far more noise. When they switched on a transistor and squatted on the cobbled stones behind me, I felt it was time to move on." See Don't Look Now and Other Stories, p. 73.

Clothes Maketh the Woman (With Reference to the Queer Case of Nellie March)

Anne Heywood as Ellen (Nellie) March in The Fox (dir. Mark Rydell, 1967)

Image from Twenty Four Frames: Notes on Film by John Greco: click here

I.

Nellie March is an interesting character: I'm not sure it's accurate to describe her as a dyke, but she's definitely a bit more robust and mannish than her intimate friend Miss Banford, who was a "small, thin, delicate thing with spectacles" [7] and tiny iron breasts.  

Unsuprisingly, therefore, it's March who does most of the physical work on the small farm where she and Banford live. And when she hammered away at her carpenter's bench or was "out and about, in her puttees and breeches, her belted coat and her loose cap, she looked almost like some graceful, loose-balanced young man" [8].

It's interesting to consider this: that outward appearance plays such an important role in the construction of gender; that clothes maketh the man, even when that man happens to be a woman.


II.

For all his essentialism, Lawrence is acutely aware of this. Which helps explain why he frequently gives detailed descriptions of what his characters are wearing and seems to have an almost fetishistic fascination with both male and female fashion. In the Lawrentian universe, looks matter and the question of style is crucial.

It also explains why later in the story, when March has decided to affirm a heterosexual identity and give her hand in marriage to a foxy young Cornishman named Henry, she undergoes a radical change of image. All of a sudden the heavy work boots and trousers are off and she's slipping into something a little more comfortable, a little more feminine, and she literally lets down her thick, black hair.

Henry, who has been dreaming of her soft woman's breasts beneath her tunic and big-belted coat, is astonished by her transformation:

"To his amazement March was dressed in a dress of dull, green silk crape [...] He sat down [...] unable to take his eyes off her. Her dress was a perfectly simple slip of bluey-green crape, with a line of gold stitching round the top and round the sleeves, which came to the elbow. It was cut just plain, and round at the top, and showed her white soft throat. [...] But he looked her up and down, up and down." [48]       

By his own admission, he's never known anything make such a difference, and as March takes the teapot to the fire his erotic delight is taken to another level:

"As she crouched on the hearth with her green slip about her, the boy stared more wide-eyed than ever. Through the crape her woman's form seemed soft and womanly. And when she stood up and walked he saw her legs move soft within her moderately short skirt. She had on black silk stockings and small, patent shoes with little gold buckles.
      She was another being. She was something quite different. Seeing her always in the hard-cloth breeches, wide on the hips, buttoned on the knee, srong as armour, and in the brown puttees and thick boots, it had never occurred to him that she had a woman's legs and feet." [49]

Not only is March born as a woman thanks to putting on a pair of black silk stockings and a (moderately) short skirt, but Henry too feels himself reinforced in his phallic masculinity:

"Now it came upon him. She had a woman's soft, skirted legs, and she was accessible. He blushed to the roots of his hair [...] and strangely, suddenly felt a man, no longer a youth. He felt a man, with all a man's grave weight of responsibility. A curious quietness and gravity came over his soul. He felt a man, quiet, with a little heaviness of male destiny upon him." [49]

It's writing like this that sets Lawrence apart, I think; writing that will seem pervy and sexist to some, but full of queer insight to others. Writing that, in a sense, undermines his own essentialism by showing the importance of costume and perfomativity when it comes to gender roles, sexual identity, and sexual attraction.     

III.

And does it end well once they are married, Henry and Nellie? A 20-year old youth and a 30-year old woman used to living an independent life (and sharing a bed with another woman)? Not really: something was missing. 

The problem is, he wants her submission: "Then he would have all his own life as a young man and a male, and she would have all her own life as a woman and a female. [...] She would not be a man any more, an independent woman [...]" [70]

But March, of course, doesn't want to submit; she wants to stay awake, and to know, and decide, and remain an independent woman to the last.

So it's hard to believe they're going to find happiness. But then, as Lawrence writes:

"The more you reach after the fatal flower of happiness, which trembles so blue and lovely in a crevice just beyond your grasp, the more fearfully you become aware of the ghastly and awful gulf of the precipice below you, into which you will inevitably plunge, as into the bottomless pit [...]
      That is the whole history of the search for happiness, whether it be your own or somebody else's [...] It ends, and it always ends, in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall [...]" [69]

And on that note, Happy New Year to all torpedophiles ...

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Fox', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1992). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.