Bonjour Tristesse as told in Villanelle form:
By Mary Franklin
In the year in question I was seventeen and perfectly happy. I was still like the others and it was summertime.
The others were my father, and Elsa, his mistress, and his dear friend Anne.
He was weak-willed, frivolous, at times supine.
The first few days were glorious. We spent hours on the beach,
Overwhelmed by the heat and gradually acquiring a healthy golden tan,
Except for Elsa, who was having a terrible time.
She was holding forth about the various festivities taking place on the Rhine,
But my father was not listening to her. From his position at the apex of the triangle formed by their bodies, he kept looking at Anne.
Elsa was out and Anne was in. He was weak-willed, frivolous, at times supine,
But I would reach my full potential and so would my father, Anne would be our guide.
I would be intelligent and cultured and a bit detached, like Anne.
That would all have been perfectly fine, except for the fact that it was summertime.
I made a mess in Anne’s fast car. The next day I awoke feeling perfectly fine.
But my father went to the pines and lay on the grass with Elsa, and along came Ann.
She got in her car and drove off fast. She knew now he was weak-willed, frivolous, at times supine.
The funeral took place with a crowd of curious onlookers and much black, in fine sunshine.
My father and I shook hands with the elderly relatives who belonged to Anne.
In the year in question I was seventeen and perfectly happy. I was still like the others and it was summertime.
He was weak-willed, frivolous, at times supine. He was mine.
A Game of Chess
By Sarah Hopkinson
I took a section of Eliot’s The Wasteland (from Part II. A Game of Chess, l.139-161) and re-wrote it into prose. However, my prose is structured in the style of a sestina, where each paragraph equates to a stanza. Each paragraph is therefore composed of six sentences, each sentence ending with one of my six words. The first sentence of the second paragraph ends with the final word of the first paragraph, and the second sentence of the second paragraph ends with the final word of the first sentence of the first paragraph, and so on. I decided to do this for a few reasons. The first is that, in the original Eliot poem, the phrase ‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME’ is repeated four times, hence I wanted to use these five words (in addition to the word(s) good/night) as the words I repeated in my version to see how, when separated, these words changed and took on new significance. Secondly, the way in which it is structured in the Eliot poem as a strangely ambiguous conversation seems similar to Empson’s reading of Sidney where, in Sidney’s sestina, meaning seems to diffuse rather than crystallise. This seemed particularly relevant considering that The Wasteland is about fragmentation of society, of consciousness and also of means of communication. Lastly, these two women in the original – Lil and the ‘I’ – seem to be caricatures of real women, serving a purely symbolic and therefore reductive (?) role in Eliot’s larger wasteland. By reallocating them to the realm of prose, I was trying to make them characters who could exist both in the realm of the abstract and the concrete – could play between the two?
It was the milk boy who told me, clattering his way back down the street with a pocketful of glass, it was him who told me that Lil’s husband got demobbed and I thought to myself, about time. Later that day, I went round to see Lil and found her there, with the youngest of the brood swaddled around her neck, its face all red and good. I said to her, ‘Now Albert’s coming back, it’s time to rustle up. He’ll want to know what you done with the money he gave you to do it. You know, the teeth, and you might want to hurry. Those rotten ends of yours need to be fixed now please.’
‘My teeth are just fine I’ll thank you, and I’ll say yours aren’t bright and shimmery either please. And if you’re here to ask me about that church event of yours, then right now I just don’t have the time.’ I sighed heavily and she looked at me with her brow a crevice and her eyes as black as night. ‘And,’ she continued with her voice moving an octave higher to rise above the low wailings of the bundle, ‘I’ll ask you not to bring that money up. It’s that what I told you in strictest confidence, not to be bandied around like a van in a hurry. Besides, it’s–’
‘Lil, it’s only for you and your Albert that I’m bothering to mention it. And I was there when he said it, when he said to you, you have them all out Lil and get a nice set please. He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you with that set, even at night. And no more can’t I,’ I said and seeing the bottom of her mouth begin to quiver and her flushed face curdle, ‘think of poor Albert, he’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time. If you don’t give it him, there’s others who will, so you best hurry. There’s others who will give him a good time and set him up.’
At that, her face turned as red as the sprawling bug in her arms and she turned ferociously, upending the teapot on the table and making streams of greying water beam up. ‘Oh is there,’ she said, ‘there’s others that will give it? Then I’ll know who to thank when he stops coming home at night. Please! You aren’t exactly one to talk, with your man who couldn’t get out in enough of a hurry. No wonder you’re always around here, badgering me, remembering what Albert’s said and hasn’t said, what with an empty house you’ve got all the world’s time.’
This struck a nerve as I knew what it was to live in a house that echoed, to be jealous of wives whose husbands never came home from the war because grief meant lost time. ‘Well,’ I said with my voice slender now, ‘if Albert does make off, it won’t be for lack of telling, of warning you not to give it up. Sometimes I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself, of looking so antique, as though you’ve cobbled yourself together in a hurry. And with you only thirty-one, I would give anything not to have to undress only at night.’ I looked at the child in her arms, at her ancient face, thought about my own heaving, restless body and sighed then, an enormous, animalistic thing that was about nothing really, only about it being a Tuesday afternoon in Stepney, about the widows in black, the dirty feet, Lil’s rotting teeth, my own rotting soul, about nothing really and, yet, about all of it.
‘I can’t help it. It’s them pills I took,’ she said, pulling a long face, one that showed the damage done by time. ‘It’s them pills the chemist gave me to bring it off in a hurry. I couldn’t have any more, not with the five of them and Albert going off, for all I knew, for good. I couldn’t bear another one, not with George who nearly killed me, so I asked the chemist for something, please, I said to him, please. The chemist said it would be all right, the pills would be all right, but I’ve never been the same since, never been able to get back up.’
Later, as I left Lil’s house in the budding darkness, as a boy ran past me along the sodden floor, shoeless, torn, I heard a mother shouting from up the alley, shouting into the gloom, perhaps to the boy, HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME, and as her voice rose and fell, clattering against the muddied brick, I thought I heard Lil behind me. I thought I heard her voice softened and sweetened whispering to me, perhaps, or to the child in her arms or perhaps only to herself. Good night, ladies, the voice said, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.
Through flat windows
I decided to write a short prose sketch using the sonnet form of E.E. Cummings’ poem ‘the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls.’ Cummings’ sonnet is structured as an octave and a sestet with the following rhyme scheme: abcddcba, efggfe. To me, this seemed to mimic the claustrophobia of the Cambridge ladies, this internal entrapment, with the turn (maybe?) coming at the beginning of the sestet with the word ‘perhaps.’ – a crack in the sonnet form and a crack in their armour, the ladies who are ‘comfortable’ in their own minds and don’t often confront uncertainty. Anyway, I tried to re-write the form but instead of using a rhyme scheme to create claustrophobia, instead used line length with the shortest two lines at the centre of each paragraph. (First paragraph: 16, 8, 4, 2, 2, 4, 8, 16; Second paragraph: 9, 6, 3, 3, 6, 9)
The Haggerston artists, who live in warehouse lofts and privatised council flats, are having a show. They believe in non-conformity, socialism, cocaine, armpit hair. Their minds are satisfied. What patriarchy? Not here. The show, titled ‘solipsism.’ They are interested in so many fashionable things. By the window, a piece entitled ‘deprivation’: a woman, naked, on a rock, no pubic hair.
Meanwhile, the room once a home to a Mrs. Ibrahim. She lives now in Park Royal. Twelve miles away. It is far. The Haggerston artists do not know. One is ‘interested’ in the Anti-Islamophobia march on Facebook.