By HP Tinker.
“You dead ones – I lay with you under the unbroken wires …”
(Ivor Gurney, “Farewell”)
Today I glimpsed Esther Williams riding a unicycle through Bloomsbury, dressed in the glorious raggle-taggle gypsy apparel of the wayward daughter of the Lord of Bostick. I gazed at her for several seconds half-transfixed, quasi-perplexed, semi-tantalised by her kerchiefed head, tattered petticoat, bare legs, vagabond sandals… between stiff doses of Benzedrine and tales of her savage Apache lovers, we talked of memory and truth and observed the polite etiquette of consuming good salad.
“You eviscerated lately?” she asked, between forkfuls.
“Yeah,” I admitted, knifing sub-zero lettuce. “There have been some small moments of quiet evisceration.”
She drew in her legs and raised my eyebrows with an emphatic emphasis on the inclusiveness of the first-person plural.
“The struggle for life is exhausting!” she cried. “This is a time of war! We are the fighters of the war! This, finally, is our war! Let’s fight it then! Fight it and fight it and fight it some more with all the passion we have and all the resolve we can summon and/or muster… You see, a bit of action is required every now and again, and in a time of war action is so precious, especially to younger people with nothing to do… We must face our destiny shoulder to shoulder, you and I. Embrace the void. There is nothing to fear here anymore. The conflict shall be cathartic. We will force them to be free!”
Then she removed her dress to reveal a gleaming metallic bathing suit beneath.
“I may look like Henry James,” I told her, reaching for an electric can opener. “But I feel more like Robert Frost…”
Of all the 3,000 girls of the uprising, she remained my favourite by far. As soon as she left, everything looked immediately bleak again. Like Walt Whitman’s New York, George Gissing’s London, Philip Larkin’s Hull, this city was dying, frozen in the icy grip of the contemporary literary novel. I knocked on Wittgenstein’s door. A former lawyer with extremely bad luck, he was encountering various difficulties with his significantly younger wife. Yet still he managed miscellaneous comic asides about Modernism, even mentioning the likelihood of a future uprising…
“It may well prove a fine example of generational revolt against ascendant liberalism and hegemonic conservatism,” he explained, “but any future uprising should not be interpreted as absolutely oppositional in nature. All bourgeois art has become an escape, a refuge from the unpleasant world of increasingly threatening political reality, culturally compelling, gargantuan construction, monumental manifestations. This new generation has no alternative but to seek the sympathy and support of an older generation inclined to take an interest in literary and artistic developments. Like the intimate correlation of a dysfunctional family, the Oedipally rebellious sons depend on the abusive patronage of elderly paternal institutions and an ambivalent maternal public …”
Wittgenstein spoke with the apocalyptic fervour of a sixteenth-century court jester receiving medication.
“What is this conversation about?” I asked myself later.
Time-rich, I telephoned Hilda Doolittle, a beautiful but emotionally fragile spy rumoured to be a former bookshop owner.
“Do you remember a similar time when we were young and the world was a much sunnier place?” I asked.
“No,” she hissed.
Where clerks and aristocrats had previously failed, I rebuked her with the words: “Tandis que je suis, moi, à bûcher comme un nègre, vous vous repassez du bon temps…”She fluttered her false eyelashes down the line and hung up.
Cash-penniless, I decided to go outside, disguise myself as an artist, see what was going down in China Town. Nothing much, it transpired. So, pasting a grossly exaggerated flannelette goatee onto my chin with a beeswax-based adhesive, strapping on a prosthetic penis, as a precaution, I entered the semi-dark indifference of a bourgeois lounge bar decorated in the appalling semi-dark indifferent style of a bourgeois lounge bar. As I was wearing my frayed 19th-century coat, ruffled vest and extravagant silk cravat, I passed unnoticed amidst the tangled ephemera of earnest aesthetes in velvet jackets, stern lesbians in pinstripe suits, male models in monocles, kohl-eyed beauties adorned by chiffon and beads and feathers and emeralds. Many fallen bohemians had taken refuge here, happy, it seemed, to take their chances amongst the financially diseased, the sexually bankrupt, the sartorially dispossessed, and Wallace Stevens. I spent much of the evening drinking contaminated burgundy with WH Auden, discussing Freytag’s Triangle, Krafft-Ebing, mutual masturbation and Proust.
“I’ve recently noticed that my memories are peculiarly Proustian,” Auden confessed. “They nearly always take me back to another time and place where my younger self was previously present…”
I ate my hat and showed myself out.
You came to me then, cool and flower-like at the zebra crossing. You smelt of Carthage. A Prozac addict, obsessed with cleanliness, your conversations revolved around disease and the inevitable deterioration of all human home furnishings. Among the behemoths, we sat in adjacent deckchairs and drank tall white coffee, surrounded by unholy saints and scholars. “What do you want from the future?” you asked. “Are creativity and cookery truly compatible? What is the real purpose of city breaks? How can you entertain yourself without money? Is it necessary to stay sober? Is any of it worth it in the end? How can you live beautifully and cheaply? Do you really need furniture? What is the point of wallpaper? Must women wear skirts? Is jewellery ever right on a man? Must men be clean-shaven? What does an artist do when they run out of money? Is homosexuality wrong? Is marriage meaningful? What is wrong with sex outside marriage anyway? Is there such a thing as free love? Does humanity have a function in the universe? Why is poverty so romantic? How can you survive producing something nobody wants? And do so with good grace and self-contained interior mental resilience?”
I jumped to my own defence.
“The price of freedom is poverty,” I admitted. “But although I am always starving, I never actually starve…”
You banged my head tenderly, many times, and told me to shut up and sit down and stand up for myself. (NOTE. It was you, then, who I turned to during the intermediate phase of my struggle for personal freedom. You drew me a map to your door and I grabbed my passport, caught a slow train, and travelled to Vienna where the scenery changed around me. I buried my feelings there — all 18 of them — and dared you to follow.
Instead, April came.
And still I waited for you to come.
Then May came.
And still I waited for you to come.
Soon after, I found myself embracing June wholeheartedly. And still I waited for you to come. When June found out about April-Louise and Betty May she slapped me in the face and I never heard from her again. Once I had condemned Viva King for having an illegal relationship with a blind priest named Igor who had been disfigured in a house fire.
Now I realised she had been perfectly within her rights.
It was in Vienna, as I lay — still waiting for you to come — that I was overtaken by a rare moment of weakness. I took off my clothes and climbed on top of Betty May again. A dirty porn star with dwarfism, after a period in the Prussian army and posing as a drapery assistant for Jacob Epstein, Betty May had become a cocaine enthusiast, converted to Roman Catholicism, and was currently working as a PA for Aleister Crowley. Having made my hasty ascent to the uppermost peak of her highest pinnacles, the moment passed more swiftly than I had anticipated and I was left up there, stranded, feeling faintly foolish.
She ordered me to climb off and sit in a corner.
I waited there in warm silence, a kind of liquid running between both buttocks. Under duress, I admitted that my name was Hugo von Hofmannsthal and that I was secretly an underground novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, and essayist. Other memories and thoughts flowed into my mind, a visit to Oscar Peterson’s speakeasy with Max Reinhardt, and Arthur Schnitzler’s strange encounter with Iris Tree in Leningrad.
I wondered to whom these memories originally belonged.
Betty May departed to appear in an all-nude production of Summer Holiday and was knighted for services to nudity. She eventually moved to Cornwall, became an opiate gardener and shot herself. She survived but became over-fashionable in Paris where she succumbed to sex addiction and contractual disappointments. Then she fell from the Eiffel tower restaurant and strangled herself in her own scarf after it became entangled in the wheels of the oncoming ambulance. Alone, in corridors of gold and blue, I wept, briefly… and still I waited for you to come.)
You never came, of course. Had my penis not been quite so putrid and foul-smelling, perhaps you might have found me irresistible…
May 11. Back in the hubris of the city, I heard talk of the new Modernist movement. There were social rumblings underfoot, like ideological indigestion. The old regime was cracking and crumbling; akin to the very flags of pavement I was standing on, the fractures were severe. An imbalance of bohemianism and big business held the city in a magical thrall precipitating a hostage-situation in the form of young, idealistic balladeers, leather caps in hand. I found them lurking in the underground attics of crowded pop cafes where I grew amused by the over-arching earnestness of the new generation, cabaret singers mostly, who expressed themselves in decadent and melancholic verse attuned to a sense of collective Oedipal revolt:
“There is a discreet
But very tender
Sense of symbiosis
Now in operation”
sang one small child who had only begun writing cabaret songs at the turn of the century. Indeed he wore a wide-brimmed moustache to disguise his acute naivety. I realised he was warning of a strange time to come when even slightly annoying people who had previously failed badly would rise up from their sofa beds and achieve some kind of unwarranted success…
I spent the next three months in the Caf é Royale, sharing coffee and narcotics with Enid Bagnold and Tom Petty, formerly of The Heartbreakers. We could hear modernism rising from our gravy and mashed potatoes in an audible sound slightly reminiscent of Dvořák. How I survived during this period I am not certain. I had only a small attic room at L’Apartments Rue Morgue, near Queer Street, and made a meagre living painting indifferent watercolours for the local rappers and drug dealers. My room was furnished sparsely, the empty sense of my own worthlessness punctuated by busts of Wagner and Beethoven, owl effigies, ivory Buddhas, Chinese fertility goddesses, small Greek gods of gold, silver, brass, iron, wood, plastic, stone and colour pictures of wild daisies torn out of Sunday supplements. This period passed largely without incident. Then, one morning, from outside came a loud thud, smack, belch. I realised it was Virginia Woolf and opened the door immediately. We exchanged good-natured banter, the word “bugger” never far from her lips. Then, suddenly dramatic and overtly tomboyish, she came flying at me with a razor blade, threatening to write a sequel to Mrs Dalloway.
I saw at once she was deadly serious.
We glared at one another, neither daring to blink.
Eventually it grew dark and she left down the fire escape.
The next day I woke to a sound not unlike elliptical gunfire.
A cock was crowing rowdily on a rooftop and the city below was in a bit of a fever. The entire metropolis was under concerted attack from a pan-generational troupe of sequined belly dancers prancing in the late style of Isadora Duncan. Some gallant Arabs detonated themselves dutifully. The streets were quickly barricaded with protective copper wire, the perimeters patrolled by pimps, wastrels, vagabonds, gypsies, actors, prostitutes, thieves, beekeepers, filmmakers, picture-house pianists, watchmakers and a one-armed chef.
After breakfast, I read in the Morning Star that the terrible forces of embourgeoisement had swept into the East, pursued hotly by the deafening sound of Fidel Castro’s brother reciting the Iliad. Meanwhile, the Midday News reported that a consortium of hirsute guitar wizards was defecating on Primrose Hill. Then I learned from the Evening Standard that a group of radical poets were reading Spinoza by candlelight and abstaining from shaving. Excited by the prospect of my own undeserved success, I could not sleep. Wearing a pair of the tightest underpants known to man, I sought out these radicals, discovered them gathered beneath the colossal inflatable beard of Karl Marx: Guillaume, Albert, Brett, Iris, Jean, Ginger, Walter, Kurt and Basil, bright young people, impossibly languid, lazing amidst the crazy pavements and skewed Doric towers. Huddled together they masturbated quietly, deep into the following afternoon. I was disappointed by their tremendous ordinariness and became confused and as I attempted to leave was struck from behind by a copy of Simulacra and Simulation, hurled at distance, with much precision…
I came round in a scholarly office suffused with the scintillating scent of stale mint tea. I glanced up to see Pierre Reverdy wearing a gold lam é suit, engaged in the difficult process of sprinkling brown sugar over his bacon. The walls were faded and pink academic papers piled up ceiling-high, dusty and apparently unthumbed. A stringless cello sat alone in a corner.
“You wanted to see me,” said Pierre, not looking up.
“Not really,” I said.
He threatened me with a warm embrace.
I shook him by the arm instead.
Although his face had been skin-jetted recently, beneath his Beatnik facial hair lay a craggy, visionary poet who had learnt the secrets of love and art and war and then forgotten them again.
“Oh, it’s all true,” he said, still not quite looking up. “I am one of the very earliest founding Beatniks. My short verse never received the same recognition as other later Beatniks, largely because it was so good. Now I am very old. I have spent 70 years mixing the poetic with the domestic in my search for the truth — and so far I have yet to find out anything very specific. I fear it is too late to tell you of my many failed attempts at falling in love and becoming world famous disguised as Ezra Pound. I think I was trying to subvert the entire Corporate Universe, trying to create a whole new Empire … unfortunately, it never quite happened …”
Pierre then began arguing about the increasing power of the “object” over the “subject” in modern society. Blood dribbled out of my nostrils. When I regained my senses he was giving a grand account of the last siege of Paris: “… with the last revolution ending so badly things just weren’t the same. The timbre of the times was different, new post-war days where it seemed that unbeknownst to me much of modern culture contained an alarming course of visceral indoctrination…”
After a number of gratuitous meetings in strip clubs, I eventually believed in the cause and signed some papers and was issued with my own battalion comprising a bisexual army deserter, a damaged ex-Spitfire pilot, a young Arabian rentboy, a French transsexual prostitute, a clumsy American college girl, a best-selling Egyptian writer left blinded from an operation and suffering from an acute mental illness because his child was stolen by childless bandits after his wife left him for a much less well-endowed man, and my former gay flatmate, Gustav. Two weeks later, to Gustav’s and everybody else’s surprise, the uprising began.
In the northern district, a heavy bombardment of angry penguins fizzed snakily through the streets. Captain Yates gave the signal with his tin whistle and we ran, as quickly as we could, in the opposing direction, across relentless plains of cement, beneath falling towers, the city bursting into scalding fragments and burning ruins like a cracking Bartok cacophony. Back at base, we cordoned off Phil Spector’s hair and inoculated all surviving modern artists against various vacuous strains of Cuban cubism. Then we tied young Merrick to a lamppost, his grotesque, bulbous appearance frightening the frontline of nervous young women.
Captain Yates asked, “What is he doing there?”
“He has been usually blue of late, sir,” I explained. “He needs some restraint in his life.”
An out-of-work narrator approached and reported that the first wave of children’s authors had been repulsed from the rear by a team of monks, bloggers, and scantily-clad showgirls. Yet many more were coming from other directions. On the horizon, an army of glamorous businesswomen appeared dancing alongside gigantic golden coins, using Nelly Furtado’s bisexuality as a cynical marketing ploy. Wittgenstein fired a salvo of ball bearings over their heads. Yeowling rat-a-tat-tat into a sudden BLAST! The afternoon exploded into a joyful kind of inane apocalypse. The women tumbled. Many began to sob uncontrollably; others were overcome by fitful fits, giggling, guffawing, the furious sound of a laughter epidemic. We were pelted with rotten apples and Ivor Gurney fell, wounded, gassed, most probably shell-shocked or at the very least half-drunk. The Oedipal Light Infantry sank to their kneepads, sobbing at the feet of Ida Nettleship.
In the confusion, I set a big chair on fire.
Somehow we muddled on until morning. Amidst the thick cigar smoke, it was difficult to tell what had happened, why it had happened, or who had won, but all the worst passages of violence seemed to be over. I had wounds on my arms and resignation over my face. I kicked down Wittgenstein’s door and he greeted me tersely. He had been watching the whole thing through binoculars from his loft conversion.
“The uprising has failed fairly badly,” he told me.
“Yes, I guessed as much,” I said. “Will there be other uprisings?”
“Most likely,” said Wittgenstein. “Uprisings come and go quite frequently these days. Though unsuccessful, this uprising will ultimately pave the way for a second uprising and then a third and then a fourth.”
“And then?”
“Very likely a fifth.”
I sat down on a gloomy leather sofa and aged, experiencing broken-hearted existentialism until late into the afternoon. How my feelings at that moment were exacting, exigent, like a late night stabbing in an artificial leg…
The coldness of war soon giving way to a grey new world of utility. As a warning, Vita Sackville-West was hoisted onto a plinth and paraded in a spinning birdcage. Many disillusioned survivors lined the graveside of Gertrude Stein to watch Noam Chomsky’s fantastic firework display. Overhead the stars had vacated the sky, the faceless moon was fading and several men who couldn’t grow full beards were lurking in artistic berets, beside bodegas. Next to me, a smiling poet in a tuxedo was carrying the bleeding heart of Ern Malley.
“The day of my eventual death,” announced Gertrude Stein from a marble lectern, “will be a tremendously sad day for all of you…”
Over on the corner, a disturbance was threatening the commerce of polite society. Eschewing the elegant restraint of Mies van der Rohe in his prime, Richard Ellmann was making a rambling admission about the inadequacy of biography to get to the truth of any given situation and, having drunk too much Spanish wine, had picked a fight with Augustus John over the size of each other’s biceps. Many similar conflicts remained unresolved, several involving my former landlady Mrs Equitone (1). In this context of post-war austerity and rampant hedonism, I wrote Esther a letter. Esther!
Time has drowned you in unfair obscurity! I think of you quite often. The uprising failed and as I write this, Rob Lowe’s sadness hangs thick over the city, the steady accumulation of a small career blighted by massive misfortune. I remain immune to it all (having been vaccinated on the back of a Triumph motorcycle by Egon Schiele.) Esther! I heard you contracted incurable gonorrhoea from a 50s fairground operator and have become involved in the women’s suffrage movement. Are you feeling better? Well, I remember what you once told me (2) and have subsequently come to realise you were absolutely right. Dear Esther! How is your disease today? Do not think harshly of me. I was caught in a tangled web but was not responsible for the majority of the weaving. I merely embroidered a little at the margins. When I removed myself from the situation it was due to swamps of middle-class realism, disorientated members of the upper classes, the low-dimensional topology of Thurston Moore’s geometrization. Esther! I miss you! I do! But the feelings involved were too large and entangled and the death of language eventually occurred in a tiny village of naked gardeners, soulful beekeepers. I thought I was at my lowest ebb there, in the village, but soon discovered there were other, even lower ebbs. In fact, there seemed no end to the depths an ebb could lower itself. Modernism had been my future, you see, but perhaps it is time to begin again. Now that the past is gone, I have eschewed domestic violence and begun exchanging letters with a filthy woman named Martha, who lives near Copenhagen. Esther! Won’t you come back to Bloomsbury? All the friends I ever had are gone. How I pray hourly for a new Modernist uprising of an entirely younger generation…
and that winter, brand new Modernists began arriving, dewy-eyed, malnourished, draped in raggedy rags like small hopeful Third World children. As I lay bedridden, paranoiac, underwhelmed by the unprecedented idiosyncrasies of the new metropolis, precocious cultural modernism was being openly touted by effete students in caf és and paraded by bearded professors in bandanas. Just as I had completely lost the ability to speak or write or think of anything coherently, down in the working-class streets, the controversial theme of sexual deviance permeated a landscape largely being held together by wishful thinking: Tim Robbins was completely exonerated, Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević joined a rejuvenated Take That and the reconstruction of Will Self’s ego began in earnest. Mean American memes flourished alongside other kinds of permissiveness: silly symphonies, risible harmonies, gloopy yellow sound…
I put on a natty trilby and married Mrs Equitone, that fine-looking divorcee with most of her own teeth still intact. Although many people immediately threw their hands up in horror and wept for me, I was determined to regard it as a happy ending.
Outside St. Paul’s, nothing but mouldy Edwardians pervaded the proceedings. After the quickest of ceremonies, Charles Pierre Baudelaire stood up and polemicised contemptuously against cars, Walter Gropius recited a rousing showtune about the marvellous breasts of Bavarian women, while Walt Whitman whistled random names and addresses from the telephone book.
“Which side are you on?” I asked Mrs Equitone, who had been drinking quite heavily since noon.
“Weialala leia,” she cried.
I spilled wine down my pants nine times in the course of the same evening.
“Weialala leia,” Mrs Equitone cried again, a little later, as we were about to consummate our married union for the first time. “Wallala leialala.”
I plunged my fingers into my ears and thought of Bloomsbury.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HP Tinker is a Manchester-based short story writer whose avant garde fiction has frequently been compared to Borges and Donald Barthelme. In 2007, Time Out called him an “unsung comic genius” and he has famously been referred to as “the Thomas Pynchon of Chorlton-cum-Hardy”. His collection of short fiction, The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity (2007), became an instant underground classic and has now been translated and published as La Ostentosa Bodeguita Bisexual de la Modernidad by progressive Spanish publisher El Tercer Nombre. In 2010 HP Tinker appeared in the 200th edition of Ambit magazine alongside Sir Peter Blake and Jonathan Lethem, from which this story is taken.
1. A fine-looking divorcee with most of her own teeth intact.
2. “The struggle for life is exhausting! This is a time of war! We are the fighters of the war! This, finally, is our war! Let’s fight it then! Fight it and fight it and fight it some more with all with all the passion we have and all the resolve we can summon and/or muster… you see, a bit of action is required every now and again, and in a time of war, action is so precious, especially to younger people with nothing to do… we must face our destiny shoulder to shoulder, you and I. Embrace the void. There is nothing to fear here anymore. The conflict shall be cathartic. We will force them to be free!”
