The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross by David Foster (1986)

When is an allegory only a partegory? Or even just a bitegory? This manages to be all three. The overt story is one of a young man of the Middle Ages searching for alchemical furtherance - becoming an initiate of an order, undertaking all sorts of mentorship, experimenting with mercurial and other combinations in the quest for gold. He travels east to Damascus via Venice and discovers something called the Vegetable Stone which leads to more questing fomentation. He gets caught up in a helix of political vying, spouts a great deal about wise ways, and finally is 'reformed', becoming an inquisitor and travelling back to Europe to flush out heretics and teach what he has learnt. The covert story can be seen as a drug parable, but it slips in and out of vision. Its main period of clarity occurs while Christian, the young man, is in Damascus and using the Vegetable Stone. It takes him to Damcar, a dream-version/enlightened-state chemical edition of the city. The Vegetable Stone is presumably hash. Those around Christian loom up out of the fug as potential covert characters, too - the Gatekeeper might be a common or garden drug dealer, or he might be a supplier cum experience-leader. The Viceroy and the master of the brotherhood Christian joins appear also to be contrasting pathways to experience, either personified or more notional. All of this is couched in Foster's predictably louche, modern terminology, slangy and comically immediate, nothing to do with the historical period. It is also melded and folded with his trademark intellectual swagger; philosophical points made every few lines, ideas traded generously. As usual with this author, clarity is the loser: to return to the terms at the start - this is rarely if ever an allegory, occasionally a partegory, most of the time a bitegory. The focus is dim. And, also as usual with this author, he's already realised that, and allowed himself an out in the introduction - apparently it's 'very ambiguity conforms to the Hermetic tradition'. That smacks to me of those knowing squeaks most first year literature students will remember from often drug-addled conversations at 3am: "Exactly! This book is boring! But it's supposed to be! Because the author is slyly commenting on exactly that subject! Boredom!" Yeah, sure. Well, nah. Though it may conform to the Hermetic tradition, it doesn't to the best allegorical one. But I still can't help feeling admiration for the ideas in this, as in most of Foster. They're in the cauldron with a lot of other stuff which needs refining out or distilling up, though.

One of Cleopatra's Nights by Theophile Gautier (1839)

This originally appeared with other novellas in a collection called A Tear of the Devil. In it Gautier reveals himself as a voluptuary. It is a classic reaction to what he calls the 'long fast of Christianity'. A handsome but insignificant young man, Meiamoun, has taken an enormous fancy to his queen, Cleopatra, following her whenever he can, watching from the shadows and on the edge of crowds, as she presides over national celebrations and important events. He knows his passion for her is ridiculous and that he has no business with her at all - she's so far above him as to be of another plane entirely, but he can't help himself and sees no other path. He follows her cangia down the Nile on his small foot-craft after a panegyris in the temple of Hermonthis. Watching her disembark up gigantic steps into a palace from the waterside, he decides that nothing else matters - he must make contact somehow. Meantime, Cleopatra is bored, hankering after something more, some meaning to which she can attach herself. She becomes increasingly bad-tempered, seething with dulness. That night Meiamoun takes his crazy chance - he fires an arrow through her window with a note attached which simply says 'I love you'. The queen and her chief maid, Charmion (no doubt the origin of the character of the same name in Mankiewicz's Taylor-Burton 1963 epic), scan the waters below the window fascinatedly, and Cleopatra's boredom is temporarily alleviated. She sends a trusted slave to find the bowman - he searches all over the Nile without result as Meiamoun manages to evade him, much to the queen's irritation. Next morning he has entered an underwater vent which leads up into the baths of the queen. As she bathes naked (dribblingly described by Gautier) she spots Meiamoun hiding in a corner behind some trees and cries out, outraged. This is it. Meiamoun assumes that, as he has been caught, especially in these circumstances, he will be executed. Cleopatra, quickly over the surprise, confirms that this will be the case, but recognizes him from the background of recent celebrations, and clearly likes what she sees. Here is a perfect boredom-alleviator. She lets him know that she will spend the day and night with him before he will be required to die. Gautier, as he has done all through, takes us lovingly through the sensuous orgiasticism of a huge banquet and private celebration with choreographed fires, lights, foods and experiences mingling in a heady, drug-like miasma. Then Meiamoun, now a satiated votary, willingly slugs down his bubbling poison. This is sensualism, impure and simple, but elegantly limned.

Commonplace Book

'"According to the statistics I've got about another sixteen days of life," he observed, as we left the Admiralty and walked along the Mall to the Club. "Second Lieutenants seem to last as much as a fortnight sometimes."

"Then I hope you'll get rapid promotion," I said. "The sooner you cease to be a Second Lieutenant the better."

He laughed a little bitterly.'

from Sonia by Stephen McKenna (Chapter IX, Part II)

Commonplace Book

'"Take no notice of what other people think" says Christian. "That's what the Gatekeeper says."

"Is that so? Well you tell the Gatekeeper I think he's greedy. Then tell him I've halved his salary. Mind you, he needn't take any notice of what other people think."'

from The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross by David Foster (Chapter 19)

A House and its Head by I. Compton-Burnett (1935)

This starts like many of her others. One is trapped under a too-tight bedspread, locked into a Victorian family's bitter, swiping atmosphere under a patriarch who is all-outdoing: "you may have an objection, or a comment; I know that you have no right to either, and don't know yourself sufficiently well to be able to make it. I know you far better, and understand that this attempting to comment or object is just a function of your needlessness" is how I'd put it, summing up Compton-Burnett's lead character here, Duncan Edgeworth. This feels surprisingly like a retread of previous efforts for the first half of this book - for the first time reading this author a slight sense of boredom overcame me. His daughters are struggling under him, as is his tired wife, and an orphaned male cousin who lives with the family. The people of their very tight village are similarly caught in the web of Duncan's all-requiring hyperattention (and a few other toxic webs of their own). But of course, the author, in her usual way, has them all react in ways in which they attempt to gain liberation - bitching, contesting, attempting to intimidate each other as well as him. Very few of these attempts succeed, because most of these people are extraordinarily hardy, necessarily so, in these super-accentuated circumstances. These stymied mutual harrowings, though now familiar, are still entertaining, and as usual expressed in terms of profound politeness on the whole, though occasionally they have a startling directness, just to mix things up. The veiled fight travels through a lot of plot: the wearing-down death of his wife; the surprise selection of a new young one; the birth of a son; the discovery of the new wife's mutiny with the orphaned cousin of which the son is the result; her banishment; the taking on of a third wife, an older woman who has lived with the family as governess and help for most of the daughters' lives; her pregnancy; the gas-death of the first son in sinister circumstances; the suspicion that Duncan and his third wife may have done away with the boy, who, after all, was not either of their child, in order to guarantee succession rights to their as yet unborn one; the marriage of the orphaned cousin and the youngest daughter; the extraordinary revelation, to us as readers, but otherwise only between a tough village matriarch and this youngest daughter, that the youngest daughter has conspired with a disaffected maid in the murder of the boy; Duncan is in the room when this revelation is embarked upon - has he heard?; the splitting of the youngest daughter and the orphaned cousin's marriage because of a lesser misdemeanour of hers; its eventual reconstitution for monetary reasons only with the family all coming together again under one roof. And everyone lived happily ever after! By the time this astonishing ground is traversed in the second half, Compton-Burnett has gripped the reader thoroughly, completely re-establishing her power of compulsion in the mind.

Commonplace Book

'"...You see, when ancient chemists decided to conceal their nomenclature, the favorite and natural butt for their spleen were their bitter antagonists, the mystics. Out of context, it's almost impossible for us to understand their satire. What was meant as parody is often taken for the Real Thing, and vice versa. That strike you as paradoxical?"

"Yes and no" says Christian.'

from The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross by David Foster (Chapter 10)

Commonplace Book

'"...Yes, Almeric writes that all is well with them. To us it can only be well in a certain sense. We do not identify ourselves with their course."

"It is a pity you cannot have them to stay : I see it is hardly possible."

"I know you do feel it a pity. But it is not in the question in your father's lifetime."

"We could tell you when he is going away, to save you the tedium of waiting for his death."'

from A House and Its Head by I. Compton-Burnett (Chapter XVI)