sperm came hissing down …
That was not it, the rhythm was wrong, it was not couplets. The couplets came from the doves in the Queen’s speech in
Hamlet
. Doves, loves, leaves. Enderby clomped down the steps and up the steps to the up-train platform. The train was just arriving. There was an -
eave
rhyme somewhere. Enderby boarded the train. There were few passengers at this hour – women going up to fight in the January sales, a scholarly-looking police-inspector with a briefcase, two men looking much, Enderby thought distractedly, like himself – smart, normal, citified. Doves came from dove, dove meant paraclete. A dove in the leaves of life. Eve, leave, thieve, achieve, conceive.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said a woman sitting diagonally opposite to Enderby. They were the only two in the compartment. She was thin, blonde, washed-out, fortyish, smart with a mink cape-stole and a hat like a nest. ‘Peeve,’ said Enderby the city-man. ‘Believe. Weave.’ The train began to pant north-east with urgent love of London , a sperm to be swallowed by that giant womb. ‘Swallowed,’ announced Enderby, with loud excitement, ‘by the giant stomach of Eve. I knew Eve came somewhere into it.’ The woman picked up her folio-sized handbag and silver-grey couplet of gloves and left the compartment. ‘Eve leaves,’ said Enderby. Where was paper? None. He had not expected this to be a working day. Inkpencil he had. He rose and followed the woman out to the corridor. She scampered, with a kitten-scream, to the next compartment, which held a trio of talking and nodding wives drably dressed for sales-battle. Enderby, a homing dove, went straight to the lavatory.
5
In this spinning room, reduced to a common noun,
Swallowed by the giant stomach of Eve,
The pentecostal sperm came hissing down.
Enderby sat, fully dressed, on the seat of the W.C., swaying as on a father’s rocking knee, a cock-horse to Charing Cross. No, London Bridge. No, Victoria. An electric sperm plunging towards Our Lady of Victories, Enderby astride. He had removed the toilet-roll from its holder and scratched away on panel after panel of paper with his inkpencil. The poem was definitely a song for the Blessed Virgin.
Whence this Marianism? Enderby knew. He remembered his bedroom with its devotional pictures by Italian commercial artists: Pius XI with triple tiara and benedictory gesture; Jesus Christ with radioactive heart exposed and – for good measure – indicated by a divine delicate index-finger; saints (Anthony, John the Baptist, Bernadette); the Virgin Mary with tender smile and winsome wimple:
I was nowhere, for I was anyone –
The grace and music easy to receive:
The patient engine of a stranger son.
Outside the bedroom door had been a holy-water stoup, dried up with the drought of Enderby’s boyish disbelief. All over the house, as far as the frontier of the shop’s neutral or Protestant territory, there had been other stoups, also crucifixes, plaster statuettes, withered Holy-Land palm-leaves, rosaries blessed in Rome, an Agnus Dei or two, decorative pious ejaculations (done in Dublin in pseudo-Celtic script) as brief as snarls. That was his stepmother’s Catholicism, imported from Liverpool – relics and emblems and hagiographs used as lightning-conductors; her religion a mere fear of thunder.
The Catholicism of the Enderbys had come from a small Catholic pocket not far from Shrewsbury, a village which the Reformation had robbed only of its church. Weak in the tobacconist-father (his pan scraped on Holy Saturday, a drunken midnight Mass at Christmas – no more), it had died in the poet-son, thanks to that stepmother. It had been too late now for more than twenty years to look at it afresh – its intellectual dignity, its cold coherent theology. He had struggled out of it with bitter tears in adolescence, helped by Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Rousseau, and the struggle to create his own myths had made him a poet. He
That was not it, the rhythm was wrong, it was not couplets. The couplets came from the doves in the Queen’s speech in
Hamlet
. Doves, loves, leaves. Enderby clomped down the steps and up the steps to the up-train platform. The train was just arriving. There was an -
eave
rhyme somewhere. Enderby boarded the train. There were few passengers at this hour – women going up to fight in the January sales, a scholarly-looking police-inspector with a briefcase, two men looking much, Enderby thought distractedly, like himself – smart, normal, citified. Doves came from dove, dove meant paraclete. A dove in the leaves of life. Eve, leave, thieve, achieve, conceive.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said a woman sitting diagonally opposite to Enderby. They were the only two in the compartment. She was thin, blonde, washed-out, fortyish, smart with a mink cape-stole and a hat like a nest. ‘Peeve,’ said Enderby the city-man. ‘Believe. Weave.’ The train began to pant north-east with urgent love of London , a sperm to be swallowed by that giant womb. ‘Swallowed,’ announced Enderby, with loud excitement, ‘by the giant stomach of Eve. I knew Eve came somewhere into it.’ The woman picked up her folio-sized handbag and silver-grey couplet of gloves and left the compartment. ‘Eve leaves,’ said Enderby. Where was paper? None. He had not expected this to be a working day. Inkpencil he had. He rose and followed the woman out to the corridor. She scampered, with a kitten-scream, to the next compartment, which held a trio of talking and nodding wives drably dressed for sales-battle. Enderby, a homing dove, went straight to the lavatory.
5
In this spinning room, reduced to a common noun,
Swallowed by the giant stomach of Eve,
The pentecostal sperm came hissing down.
Enderby sat, fully dressed, on the seat of the W.C., swaying as on a father’s rocking knee, a cock-horse to Charing Cross. No, London Bridge. No, Victoria. An electric sperm plunging towards Our Lady of Victories, Enderby astride. He had removed the toilet-roll from its holder and scratched away on panel after panel of paper with his inkpencil. The poem was definitely a song for the Blessed Virgin.
Whence this Marianism? Enderby knew. He remembered his bedroom with its devotional pictures by Italian commercial artists: Pius XI with triple tiara and benedictory gesture; Jesus Christ with radioactive heart exposed and – for good measure – indicated by a divine delicate index-finger; saints (Anthony, John the Baptist, Bernadette); the Virgin Mary with tender smile and winsome wimple:
I was nowhere, for I was anyone –
The grace and music easy to receive:
The patient engine of a stranger son.
Outside the bedroom door had been a holy-water stoup, dried up with the drought of Enderby’s boyish disbelief. All over the house, as far as the frontier of the shop’s neutral or Protestant territory, there had been other stoups, also crucifixes, plaster statuettes, withered Holy-Land palm-leaves, rosaries blessed in Rome, an Agnus Dei or two, decorative pious ejaculations (done in Dublin in pseudo-Celtic script) as brief as snarls. That was his stepmother’s Catholicism, imported from Liverpool – relics and emblems and hagiographs used as lightning-conductors; her religion a mere fear of thunder.
The Catholicism of the Enderbys had come from a small Catholic pocket not far from Shrewsbury, a village which the Reformation had robbed only of its church. Weak in the tobacconist-father (his pan scraped on Holy Saturday, a drunken midnight Mass at Christmas – no more), it had died in the poet-son, thanks to that stepmother. It had been too late now for more than twenty years to look at it afresh – its intellectual dignity, its cold coherent theology. He had struggled out of it with bitter tears in adolescence, helped by Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Rousseau, and the struggle to create his own myths had made him a poet. He
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