Greer Gilman's Blog, page 50

No Mad Hatters

Just the loveliest, liveliest tea party ever this afternoon.  Conversationalists:  me; the wise and wonderful sartorias , too rarely seen in these climes; the ivory-tickling negothick ; rushthatspeaks , in their new skirt printed with the map of Middle Earth, the radiant skogkatt and her mother, on loan from New Mexico.  Cakes:  chocolate bundt, cranberry crumble tart, almond macaroons, anise tea-cookies, little chocolate sandwiches, with the last of the autumn raspberries and crème fraîche.  The china, as ever, was blue-and-white, and the tea was Earl Grey from the shop of many drawers.

Perfect.

It's been a good year for leaves.  I saw the loveliest of fleeting things:  from a moving window, trees on fire in the rain.

The third of the Sirenaiad stories is underway.  Let it not end up in a ditch with its wheels spinning.

Nine

Of the Genders there are sixe

First, the Masculine; Second, the Feminine; Third, the Neuter, or feined Gender: whose notion conceives neither Sexe; Fourth, the Promiscuous, or Epicene, which understands both kindes; Fift, the Common, or rather Doubtfull gender, wee use often. and with elegance; Sixt, is the Common of three Genders...

Isn't that lovely?


It's actually Ben Jonson, circa 1617, trying to bend English grammar on the anvil of Latin:

First, the Masculine, which comprehendeth all Males, or what is understood under a Masculine species: as Angels, Men, Starres: and (by Proso[po]paeia) the Moneth's, Winds, almost all the Planets.

Second, the Feminine, which compriseth Women, and femal species: I'lands. Countries. Cities. And some Rivers with us: as Severne, Avon, &c.

Third, the Neuter, or feined Gender: whose notion conceives neither Sexe; under which are compriz'd all inanimate things; a ship excepted: of whom we say, shee sayles well, though the name be Hercules, or Henry, the Prince. ...

Fourth, the Promiscuous, or Epicene, which understands both kindes:  especially, when we cannot make the difference; as, when we call them Horses, and Dogges, in the Masculine, though there be Bitches, and Mares amongst them. So to Fowles for the most part, we use the Feminine, as of Eagles, Hawkes; we say, shee flies well; and call them Geese, Ducks, and Doves, which they flye at.

Fift, the Common, or rather Doubtfull gender, wee use often, and with elegance: as in Cosin, Gossip, friend, Neighbour, Enemie, Servant, Theefe, &c. When they may be of either Sexe.

Sixt, is the Common of three Genders: by which a Noune is divided into Substantive, and Adjective. For a Substantive is a Noune of one only Gender, or (at the most) of two. And an Adjective is a Noune of three Genders, being alwayes infinite.


from THE ENGLISH GRAMMAR. MADE BY BEN. IOHNSON.
For the benefit of all Strangers, out of his observation of the
English Language now spoken, and in use.
Nine

"To a loud triumphant music..."

Rejoice!




There the whole palace opened, and the nation of
Faies were discovered, some with instruments,
some bearing lights, others singing ; and within,
afar off in perspective, the knights masquers sit-
ting in their several sieges : at the further end of
all, OBERON , in a chariot, which, to a loud tri-
umphant music, began to move forward, drawn by
two white bears, and on either side guarded by
three Sylvans, with one going in front.

SONG.

Ben Jonson has written the part of a lifetime for the Prince of Wales:  he will play Oberon, the King of Faerie. It’s only theater. What could go wrong?

Welcome to Ben Jonson’s second adventure, courtesy of none other than Greer Gilman. Her first exceptional Jonson adventure, Cry Murder! in a Small Voice, was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist. As with Cry Murder!, Exit is available as both a print chapbook and as an ebook.  (The
* "We can imagine, in this uplifting and eclectic celebration of dance, the principal masquing revellers led by the 16-year-old Prince Henry and his troupe of Hoorays."

Writer at work

Rain or no rain, I was bent on one last day in London—we're skipping wildly here and will go back—and thought that the National Gallery and NPG would do splendidly.  I wanted to look at Jacobethan portraits.  Train to Marylebone; tube to Trafalgar Square, and Bob's your uncle.  What could possibly go wrong?  As it turns out, lots of infuriating little things, with flashes of serendipity.

We open with a Nine with an open umbrella, saluting the wet lions, singing I Live in Trafalgar Square to an upclack of pigeons.

After that, I wanted breakfast, and indeed the NG does a fine cup of Darjeeling.  But the sandwich they sold me as egg and cress was cheese and pickle, which I didn't at all want.  Courteous complaint.  Polite apologies: of course we'll replace it.  Lugubrious wait.  First messenger: Just bringing them out...Another cup of tea, a nice tzatziki and a Bakewell tart.  Second messenger:  Won't be a minute now, we're just doing the eggs...Which was sweet of them, but took ages.  And having put them to the trouble (inadvertently), I couldn't say, Oh, never mind. I mean, they could have just said, Eggs are off.

Never mind. I do so love the National Gallery, and spent a few blissful hours revisiting old friends:  the Wilton Diptych, with its exquisitely epicene Richard II and its lapis lazuli angels, all wearing his badge like a fan club; the Ucello clash that Lorenzo de' Medici coveted and nicked; the Fra Lippo Lippi Annunciation, with its perfect gravity of sweetness; the ecstatic Botticelli, men and angels in embrace; the Arnolfini portrait, bathed in miraculous light  (the lashless bridegroom looks reptilian, but O! that mirror, and those oranges)...And of course, their two Vermeer young women at the virginals, seated and standing.   Here's a squint through their 17th-century perspective glass:




To my delight, the giftshop had a lovely set of little books, A Closer Look, "on topics ranging from colour to conservation, and from allegory to angels."  All on sale at half price.  Couldn't resist.

But my object all sublime was the Portrait Gallery next door, unrecognizably revamped since my last visit.  Up, up, up I went, on my mission to the Jacobethans—and found the whole wing shut for re-hanging.  'Sknuckles!   'Stits!  Farewell, Elizabeth, in all her bone-white and bedizened glory.  Farewell, Ben Jonson and John Donne.  Only Will Shakespeare was left watching at the boarded door, enigmatic as always.  Oh, and Villiers had strayed into a roomful of Kings' favourites, in his long long long white stockings, like a streak of the Milky Way:  this way to bliss.

But damn.

Not that the collection isn't endlessly fascinating—so why did Fiona Shaw chose to have herself painted in a bra and rumpled slip?  What on earth was she thinking?  And I've always adored the statue of Albert and Victoria as Anglo-Saxons.  Chinstrap whiskers and cross-gartering—what's not to like?

Besides, there was a most excellent Virginia Woolf exhibition;  portraits, diaries, first editions, and Lady Ottoline Morrell's snapshots of Garsington house parties, Crome Yellow being far less outré in fading black and white.  There were intensely dreamy photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron; there was a grim book issued by the National Socialists, a hit-list of those people to be killed first on invasion; there were cheerful nursery newspapers by the Stephen children; there were—good heavens—fashion pictures, from a midlife makeover.  And almost unbearably, there were Woolf's last notes, to Leonard and Vanessa  ("I begin to hear voices..."), and her walking stick, left on the riverbank.  Brr.  What I loved best was the Bussy portrait of Hope Mirrlees in her kingfisher stockings, and the first (and until now the only) edition of Paris, that "obscure, indecent, and brilliant"  poem, in its harlequin-bright wrappers.  With Woolf's marginalia.  There was even a diary open to Jane Harrison's funeral, which alas! between the case, the dimness, the scrawl, and the throng, was impossible to read.

All quite excellent, but I still felt thwarted of my Jacobethans.  Never mind, I'll get postcards, I thought.  There were none.  I went up and asked forlornly, "John Donne?"  "Oh, surely, madam.  Why, he's one of our bestsellers!"  (Not surprising.)  But after she'd hunted through the racks and then the database, he proved to be on order.  (There's a metaphysical poem in that.)  Crushed again!

Harumph.

All right then, I thought:  Westminster Abbey.  I'll go visit Ben's grave.  And look at the Palace of Whitehall on the way.  Sadly, the hall is gone where Shakespeare acted, where the Masque of Oberon was played, and two white bears drew Henry, Prince of Wales, to loud triumphant music and an early grave.  (Zeugma.) But the 1622 Banqueting Hall built by Inigo Jones (the man gets in everywhere) is standing, and Ben's late masques were performed there.  I could at least get a sense of the space.  The Rubens ceiling of the Caroline apotheosis goes well beyond flamboyant. HRP has very sensibly provided not only wheeled mirrors to admire it in, but heaps of faux-leather beanbags to lounge on, looking up, like a cold seraglio.  I had a nice chat with the guard about which window Charles I stepped out of to the scaffold.

Wetter and wetter.  Just opposite Big Ben, in a welter of black taxis and red buses, my bag from the National Gallery--which had appeared to be plastic—just dissolved, and all my lovely little books went splat! into a puddle.  What, all my pretty chickens and their dam? At one fell swoop?  Some awfully kind American tourists helped me gather them up, solicitously wiped them with a great big red bandanna (that swift attention and their very glossy bindings saved them from absolute ruin).  Nice folks.  They even turned out their own souvenirs—sure, no problem—to present me with a gold plastic bag that says Buckingham Palace.  It looks like it ought to be the Queen's Balloon in Mary Poppins.  I thanked them fervently.  And a certain well-known bell bonged five.  Oh, my ears and whiskers!

At the door of the Abbey, a verger with a flaming sword said, "Closed for Evensong."  "I'm coming to Evensong," I said.  This thwarting thing was getting ridiculous.  So he marched me like a prisoner down the north aisle, making sure I didn't gaze.  By some miraculous flash of serendipity, we walked straight past Ben's gravestone, and by chance I spotted it at ankle-height, even in the churchly dimness.  So I scandalized the verger by blowing Ben a kiss.  I then endured what I regret say was the dreariest Anglican service ever.  Feeble French anthems of the 19th century; a listless priest with a dying fall; and some damned alternative Prayer Book.  No "Lighten our darkness"!  Crushed yet again.  I would have liked a bit of Cranmer, after all my tribulations.  Dull as the service was, a fervent high-churchwoman—a Miss Climpson—knelt throughout with upturned hands, not folded:  as if Christ rained on her.  Is that a thing?  And all around stood elder statesmen wrapped in marble sheets, as if the Abbey were a Turkish bath.

The organ died away; the vergers herded us—no looking!—to the great west doors; and I held my phone behind my back, so not looking at Ben's stone, and snapped.  Truly a shot in the dark.  A talisman.

There was a sort of eddy at the door, where a Minor Canon was working the crowd—hand in both hands, deep sincere gaze.  So eddying back with a straggled shoelace, I peeked at King Edward's Chair—behind glass now—with a space where the Stone of Scone was, and is not.

Nine

P.S.  Everything went really pear-shaped with the train...

Idyll

Norfolk was perfectly lovely, like a Wodehouse without aunts or entanglements.   There were the joys of conversation and cookery.   Fish chowder; Moroccan lamb stew; summer pudding; greengages out of hand.  And most gloriously, damsons and cream.  (The plums are very early this year.)  There were books floor-to-ceiling, chairs and couches made for reading in, and in the great barn, a windowsill of books chosen just for me—Wodehouse, of course, and philology.  There was tea-making gear in the guesthouse, and a thoughtful packet of dark chocolate digestive biscuits.

Idling was pleasant.  So was gadding about.

We went to a concert by the Classic Buskers at Binham Priory:  they’re Michael Copley on over “40 woodwind instruments ... ranging from recorders, flutes, panpipes, crumhorns and ocarinas to a Pico Pipe and a rubber trout” and “Ian Moore on one small but perfectly-formed accordion, either pink or yellow."  They played serious and silly musics with Flanders-and-Swannish patter, as the windows drowned in blue.

The Priory itself is flint.  It has benches with poppyheads, handworn through centuries of sermons; an elegantly sinister parish bier—pure Edward Gorey—and marvellous fragments of a rood screen, a palimpsest of brilliant mediaeval saints, painted over in 1539 with texts from Cranmer’s Bible, and upwelling through the Word.



Strolling about the town carnival, I particuarly enjoyed watching the collectors for charity dressed up as cows on stilts.  Eight-foot (vertically not Sleipnirically) skinny Holsteins, complete with udders jiggling like pink jellyfish.  No one does silly like the English.  Bless.

One afternoon, we visited a local workshop of glassblowers, and I got to try my lungs at the blowpipe.  I blew a lump of molten glass—just turning barley-gold—into a vast eccentric sphere, an ill-tuned planet.  Alas, it had a bubble’s life.  It shattered.  I so wanted to blow a keepsake piece—my own bauble—but that would have taken several days to cool and temper, and packing would have been unfeasible.  Ah well.

Then we prowled about a most enjoyable restoration scrapyard, in search of windows for the barn.  Anyone want a toad-crossing sign?

East Barsham Manor is so very very Private Property, overgrown as Aurora; but one can try to catch glimpses of a rose-red Tudor hall adream amid deep foliage.  The leaves are very much awake:  they dance and sparkle.  But the great house sleeps, as in legend.




If you have £2.75 million, it’s yours.

Then home by a whirl past Walsingham and the little round jam-pot jail that I put in Cloud & Ashes.

Even on my last day, on the way to the train, we picnicked at Castle Rising, and saw Seahenge (or at least its black timbers) in King’s Lynn.




It dates to the spring or summer of 2049 BC, to very threshold of the Bronze Age:  the timbers were felled by over 36 bronze blades, among the first on these islands.  I love that there’s just one forked bole in the circle, like a Gothic door; and that it had a second tree before it, like a watcher or a sported oak.  All fantastically writhen, all black as time.  Does Gormenghast have a seacoast?  The great upturned oakstump at the heart of it, roots writhing at the sun, looks as if it were executed by a paranoid Bright Carver.

What I loved most was Blickling Hall.  There are stories in that.  I’ve long mourned that J. and S. can’t read my books with any pleasure:  they’re fantasy-allergic.  But to my great delight, they really liked Cry Murder! and fell eagerly on Exit. At long last, I'm writing in a style and genre they can thoroughly enjoy.  S. (who taught me at Cambridge) always thought that Hopkins was my fatal Cleopatra.  Ben is an excellent corrective to my preciosity, she said:  the first Horatian among English poets.  So for Ben’s sake, we thought we’d do a Jacobean house, and chose Blickling Hall, which was fabulous.

And so not Augustan.




Its magnificent yew hedges have secret paths inside, so that small children (or an acrobatic adult) could wriggle down endless tunnels in the green dark, and emerge Elsewhere, fiercely scratched.   There are portraits; parterres; a branching staircase, grandiloquently heraldic (Boleyn bulls rampant); kitchen premises, worthy of a mini-series; oak overmantels with carven grotesques and flights of blue-and-white china; a Dutch marquetry cabinet in a bedroom with Chinese wallpapers.

Beyond all, the Long Gallery is a library.



It shelves ten thousand books, which the National Trust is only now cataloging--who knows what might be found?  And just as we came in, a careful volunteer was dusting a map of Ben’s Paris, which I took as a sign.  (She had no end of trouble folding it back into its folio—which I hope is not an omen.)

Above all, that Long Gallery has the absolute best plaster ceiling that I've ever seen, 123 feet of emblematic iconography.  It wove itself zodaically into the story that I had in mind; it echoed and re-branched.  Sheer ecstasy.

There was even a rhinoceros for Ben!



I want this as a shortbread cookie.

Nine

Wainscot worlds

After that, I went to stay in Norfolk with my Cambridge friends, now modestly eminent.  (S. taught me in my thankless youth:  and a scowling, gibing, contrariwise, paronomasian, ill-read, rhapsodic thing I was.  But she coached me to a starred First on the Practical Criticism paper.  She’s that good.)

J. and S. have a genius for houses.  I remember their old cottage (alas, not near enough Cambridge), with its paradisiacal garden, in which every fruit and flower grew:  a great Morello cherry tree, cloaked like an empress in harvest, and crowned with marauding birds; gooseberries; currants (black, white, and red); damsons; quinces; even figs, which they coaxed to ripen.  We used to play crazy croquet in the garden, where J. had built himself a study from the old two-seater privy.  There were donkeys in the field across.

After that, there’s been a series of very small city houses—more or less vertical apartments—overflowing with books and Morris fabrics and their clavichord, and always the small house in Norfolk, very near the golden sands which played Viola’s brave new world in Shakespeare in Love.  (That beach is the only place I’ve ever played cricket {badly}.  S. is a demon bowler.)  The cottage is a glorious conglomerate pudding of stone and brick and tile and timber, with odd polygonal cupboards, non-Euclidean passage rooms, and Moebius stairs.  It must date to the dissolution of the local priory, whose stone it filched; but there’s a tiny Georgian bedroom (with authentic shallow cupboards full of P.G. Wodehouse), and a 1920s shop window in the sitting room.

And books.  And books.  And books.

Back in Cambridge, J. and S. had no space at all for guests, so they acquired a Wendy house, just across the street.  (They were outbid on the crotchety Gothic chapel round the corner:  it’s about the size of a piggy bank, with one room and an organ loft.)  All you can see of the Wendy from the street is a narrow door with a lion’s head knocker.  Through that, you’re faced with a ridiculously broad and stately inner door—and through that, just one room:  a grey-green, panelled, neo-Georgian formality.  There are French windows, opening on a tiny brick-walled secret garden.  Oh, yes, and a loft bedroom and provisional bathroom, up a sort of carpeted ladder.  And a tiny tiny kitchen, suitable for washing brushes in.  The Wendy used to be an artist’s studio, freestanding in the garden of a villa, long since vanished. 

I loved that place.

Ah, but this year, just before I came, it had to go.  After tense negotiations, J. and S. landed the place they’d been coveting for 30 years:  the 17th century sailmaker’s barn behind the Norfolk house.  (It belongs to the house, properly.  It dwarfs it.  Long ago the two were offered as one, but J. and S. couldn’t afford both at the time:  they’ve always regretted their cold feet and mourned for its loss.)  I got to be the first person who stayed there.  Like all their properties, it’s an endearingly eccentric patchwork with authentic bones.  Timbers!  Space!  (There’s an actual kitchen, better kitted-out than mine.)  And a tilted balcony looking out over their latest secret garden.  Time will tell what’s in it through the year, but in August it was crammed with roses (scented roses, if you please) and hollyhocks.   There are cyclamens springing up in odd corners, elfishly.  There are mossy stone figures—an angel from Autun, a lion's head—in the crevices of old brick walls.  You can carry out your morning tea to the balcony, and drink it, looking out above a pocket paradise, a quilting of butterflies.

Nine

Well, I'm back

Today devoted mainly to sleep and (properly torrential) showers.

Nine 

Saints and strangers

Fast forward in a blur, with faint twittering from the soundtrack.

After Paris, I went to stay in Normandy with writing friends: excellent company and cookery. (Klages's pork shoulder with oranges was a masterpiece.) There was a spotted pig to give strawberries to (they smeared him like lipstick, Betty Boopishly); there were cows with the breeze; there were long bibulous evenings in blue dusks; there was serious marketing; there was Mont Saint-Michel. Twice. Rising from its froth of pilgrims, much as it has always risen. Only the tchotchkes have changed. The Virgins and Michaels now glow in the dark, alongside La Sainte Hello Kitty, over keyrings and bobbleheads and stacks of cider bowls painted with names like Zaza, Fifi, Balthazar, and P'tit Chou. The abbey is a stunner, with gull-haunted, giddying views. Whichever way, there's a tumble of rooftops down to sheer rock; grey-green ocean riffling gold-grey sands. Earth, water, air. The abbey still has the great winch and wheel by which the stones were hauled up from the causeway. With a steadying hand here and there, I managed not to freak out on the stairs. Winding helps, as you can't see what's coming next: it's the cataracts downward that I balk at, "Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight / Topple down headlong."

Back to Paris for one other gaudy night. It poured tempestuously, but I did get back to Shakespeare & Company, and to the most excellent Musée de Cluny, to pay homage to the Lady and her Unicorn, in their rose-red, rabbit-strewn otherworld. I did think of finding some nice bistro to dine in for my last night in Paris, but somehow never quite shifted mode into epicurean idleness. The feet and eyes were still restlessly greedy. Hey, the Musée d'Orsay was open until 10 (and still right next to my hotel), so I finished up there, with Art Nouveau and Van Gogh. Among others, they have the earlier, serener Starry Night and that turbulent grey-green self-portrait, with its terrible eyes. A Charybdis of the soul.

In the morning, I embarked for England. On the Eurostar. Golly. I settled back to enjoy the luxury of being wafted, then slapped everywhere and panicked, thinking I'd left my nice camera--with all those lovely pictures!--on the security belt in the Gare du Nord. At least it wasn't on its strap round my neck. But after much ransacking in close quarters--much to the displeasure of affronted travellers--I found it sensibly zipped in one of my 87 dozen secure inside pockets. I wish I could remember when I'm being prudent. Nothing much to report otherwise. The train passes through Paris and suburbs and the vasty fields of France; then rather a long tunnel; then green fields with hedgerows and dissimilar suburbs and London. The paper napkins in the buffet car read "Je ne regrette rien. Calories don't count when you're crossing time zones." So I had creme brulée for breakfast.

Nine

L'heure bleue

After that, Impressionism was invented...

And then Van Gogh began scribbling on the water with a brush of gold.

As a comic afterpiece, a Dalek poked its head above the skyline, jabbing with an angry beam of light. Took me a few seconds to realize that was the Eiffel Tower, illuminated.

Nine

After the rain...

I walked.  Evening in Paris.

Nine