OK OK, I'll do it - but I shall stand firm for the wainscotting

You know how tiresome even our best friends can be, when they know some-thing before we do. Ever since our giving up riding for mah jongg, they've been upon me to redo the tackroom - Bring it, Ingrid implores, at least to the 90s. Mm, I don't know that I'll go that far, but I do see the point of a D ring looped to one's Légion rosette, should a stray bridle surface on a South Wind. Then the lanyards from summer camp, nos-talgically adapted for coasters, could also be fetched into the renovation. And with the saddles, of course, we shall have belts for simply days. It's not as though the project were entirely silly ..

You'd think, I know, Why not auction off the saddles - a few of them, rather decent - for some equine charity? But the equine charities are into us all for enough as it is. Besides, one is somewhat sentimental about who rode where and how and when; and you know, it's just going to be some parvenu software guru who uses sharp practice to pay not a penny more than necessary to outbid our loyal farrier. I'd end up paying for them all again, you see; and one can never have too many belts these days. I can scarcely forgive myself for not making provision for chauffeur, who had to improvise with neckwear when the cleaners lost his uniform.

I think the renovation will afford us all some fun, but I have had to make it known, that upon Aunt Dinny's wainscotting I shall have to stand implacably firm. I happen to know that behind the 3rd and 5th panels from the bell tower window, she laid up her pre-war magnums of St Émilion; and the risk of their movement at this stately phase of their progress is quite insupportable, decanting excepted, of course. 

It's why I happened to accept the place, and certainly she was entitled to one's promise to adopt this house-hold tradition. Hence the chauffeur's new duties (even uncravated, now), are to guard this quaint corner of her quite merrily distributed cellar, pending bringing in those wicked paintergoddies of Ivan's, for a yummy trompe l'oeil from Puccini.


I do worry, but only a little, that someone is going to want me to re-do the floors. How shall I be able to confess, that I just did; and I know where my box of crayons is kept, 2nd plank in from the Cheval Blanc.




The gentlemen's apartments, too, must remain as they are. What was good enough for me, on summer visits to the dear and knowing lady who became my Aunt, is certainly fine enough to see me out. And how else, may I ask, should the succession to this pleasant patch of peace be settled, if not by the way it came to me?

Tonight, Georgia wants to kill a man, Texas killed another

What shall we

discuss this

evening,

my darlings?

Rooms? 

Neckties?

Waitresses 

who don't

know spoons?

I'd like 

to know.

I went to

Yale Law;

I went to

Stanford

Law.

No one

ever said

to me, what

I want to

know:

What

do I

say

to my

dog?

You know

spoons:

tell me,

please.

Charon, you know, is the satellite of Pluto

I was glad when they named this satellite, discovered only in 1978, for our oarsman to the next world. Its diameter is half of Pluto's, which I can well believe, with such constant deltoid work the very nature of its circuit. Imagine the responsibility, of being an only satellite. Solac-ing, to know he's up to it.

You will remember, I think, Banquo?

You know: the fellow the Macbeths had to dinner, unexpectedly, having observed the precaution of assassinating him that afternoon? The guy who braved the witches with his host, and whose heir would reign if steps were not taken? Before Coppola and Puzo, there was Shakespeare; and guys, already leaping into the plays because they must, will find they are always with them as they read their governance. But for me, Banquo means another thing, primordially.

Has anyone not noticed, that the postings since our farewell to the Hotel Albemarle have borne the theme of betrayal? As in Banquo's appearance at the feast, this was completely subconscious and unexpected. What does it mean, for a parting from a great attachment to turn upon one's own choice? We had scarcely begun to draw the bath of that poem; and as we closed the tap and sat there, the poem rising by itself, I wonder if it was shame of our displacement, and not the indifference of the invisible hand of readership demand that drew us from the bath. Maybe, guys will understand our example. I do not.

   HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

   If you don't like it, you can get on with it, I said.

   Others can pick and choose if you can't.

        

T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land

  II A Game of Chess

      ll 152 - 154

op. cit.

Morning coffee

Of all the assumptions which bring people together in the kitchen with-out prior notice, or even much acquaintance, morning coffee seems to place its preparation among the most laconic in our experience. We will be more loquacious on routes to the corner cab stand than we are in awaiting this expectation's fulfill-ment. I know a distinct resistance toward that precipitous boil to which the water is bound to come, in these circumstances - as, on a ruthless treadmill, I allow inertia to impose its percolation; and I know I prefer to will what little I may do at home. We could speak freely, but what good would it do? 

Leaving via the service entrance

       

        yes but I 

        wouldn't know

A swim before breakfast

or music?

Everything inscribes.

Saturday commute xli: Au revoir, Hotel Albemarle

Mr T.S. Eliot's first meagre volume of twenty-four poems was dropped into the waters of contemporary verse without stirring more than a few ripples. But when two or three years had passed, it was found to stain the whole sea.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. ..

1921 was not a good time to be Thomas Stearns Eliot. In 1921 he was 33 years old and it had become impossible for him to write in his own home, which had reduced his health to a shambles. Lloyds gave him 3 months' leave, and he went down to the sea, to the Hotel Albemarle.

He would move on to Lausanne, and would substantially complete the poem we have been reading this week. Cited above, in the periodical which ultimately publish-ed it, Edmund Wilson does not exaggerate the effect of his first work. Now there came a poetic shore without a shoreline.

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole. ..

I, too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

.. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you,

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

What is constant in this poem is a dearth of water; Wilson's comment is titled, The Poetry of Drouth. You and I know what the water is, and why there is a title set aside for it in Matter, here. The poem casts a light in it, we recognise. 

Now he says, the dust doesn't hold one's shadow, and for an Eliot this is considerable news. For the dar-ling of the Harvard establishment and a good bit of London, too, it's not the nicest thing one could observe: there is no water; the water is dust. As my embarcadero, wherever I go wading now, I recall the Albemarle with cognitive as-tonishment, and thanks.

Edmund Wilson

The Dial, 73

December, 1922

The Norton Critical Edition©

op. cit.

T. S. Eliot

The Waste Land

  I    The Burial of the Dead

        ll 19 - 24

  III The Fire Sermon

       ll 207 - 214

          230 - 234

 I    The Burial of the Dead

       ll 24 - 30

op. cit.

i         Beggars would ride

ii iii Balcon 6