Yet you see civilization as an unfinished story the Athenians started and which a few well-chosen words will help to a satisfactory finish! You are wrong. The best state in the world was that primitive matriarchy which the Athenians were foremost in dismantling. Men were happy and peaceful when women ruled them, but so naturally wicked that they turned our greatest strength (motherhood) into weakness by taking advantage of it and enslaving us. Men have made hell of the world ever since and are now prepared to destroy all life in it rather than admit they are wrong. Masculine foresight cannot help our civilization because it is travelling backward. Even our enemies realize this. In the last fifty years they have driven us to the brink of the dark age. The rational Greek foundation of things has been unbuilt, unlearned. And you did not notice! My poor dwarf you are the last nineteenth-century romantic liberal. That is why a corrupt government wishes to make you a national institution.
Which brings me, beloved, to what you really want from me: cunt. In your eyes it probably looks like an entrance to the human race. Believe me, you are human enough without. No good was ever done by those who thought sexual pleasure a goal in life. I speak from experience. I divorced a perfectly nice husband who could only give me that stultifying happiness, that delicious security which leads to nothing but more of itself But if you require that delight you can have it by merely relaxing. As a national institution — a blend of tribal totempole and pampered baby — you are ringed by admirers you have so far had the sense and courage to ignore. Weaken, enjoy your fame and get all the breasts you want: except mine. When I first spoke to you I accused you of impersonating a dead man. That was jealousy speaking. I admired you then and I regret I unhinged you so easily. I did not want to do that. I love you, but in a way you cannot perceive and I cannot enjoy. So I also hate you.
I am a monster. The cutting words I write cut my heart too. I am under unusual strain. I am about to do something difficult and big which, if discovered, will end my freedom forever. My friends will think me insane, an unstable element, a traitor if they learn I have told you this. But you love me and deserve to know what I am leaving you for, and I do trust you, my teacher, my liberator.
Adieu.
Is printing the above letter for the world to read a betrayal of her trust? Is a secret police computer, as a result of this story, stamping the card of every female, blonde, brown-eyed, snub-nosed poet with a number which means suspect political crime investigate? No. This story is a poem, a wordgame. I am not a highly literate French dwarf, my lost woman is not a revolutionary writer manque, my details are fictions, only my meaning is true and I must make that meaning clear by playing the wordgame to the bitter end.
Having read the letter I sat holding it, feeling paralysed, staring at the words until they seemed dark stains on a white surface like THIS one, like THIS one. I was broken. She had made me unable to bear loneliness. And though we had only met twice I had shown the world that women could approach me. I sat at the table, drinking, I suppose, and in the evening a girl sat opposite and asked what I thought of de Gaulle’s latest speech? I asked her to inform me of it. Later we were joined by another girl and a young man, students, all of them. It seemed we were on the brink of revolution. I ordered wine. Said the young man, “Tomorrow we will not protest, we will occupy!”
“You must come with us, Mister Pollard!” cried the girls, who were very excited. I agreed and laughed and bought more wine, then grew enraged and changed my position. I quoted Marx to support de Gaulle and Lenin to condemn the students. The uselessness of discourse became so evident that at last I merely howled like a dog and grew unconscious. And awoke with a bad headache, in darkness, beside a great soft cleft cliff: the bum of my manageress. I had been conveyed into her bed. I was almost glad.
In the morning she said, “Mister Pollard, you know I have been a widow for seven months.”
I said nothing. She said, “Some years ago you made to me certain detailed proposals which, as a respectable, newly-married, very young woman I could not entertain. What you suggested then is now perfectly possible. Of course, we must first marry.”
Lucie, you have made me need you, or if not you, someone. Lucie, if you do not return I must fall forever into her abyss. Lucie, she makes me completely happy, but only in the dark. Oh Lucie Lucie Lucie save me from her. The one word this poem exists to clarify is lonely. I am Prometheus.
I am lonely.
* M. Pollard clearly wishes to consign to oblivion his translation of Carlyle’s French Revolution into heroic Alexandrines, published privately at Dijon in 1927.
*An insult to the home of the Academie Francaise.
*Charles de Gaulle, with no declared political programme, was ruler of France.
THE END OF THE AXLETREE
The emperor died, and his tomb was built in the centre of the capital city, then enlarged to enclose everything he had wanted. His suggestions for the name were also adopted. The inhabiters called it the work, outsiders called it the axletree. People travelling there saw it for a fortnight before arriving and I speak of the work itself, not the pillar of cloud overhead, creamy-gold on bright days, thunder-black on dull ones, and flickering with reflected orange light in the hours of darkness. As the traveller drew near, the huge solitary bulk so filled his mind that sometimes he grew frightened and turned back before seeing the canals and merchant navies entering the artificial sea around the foundation. The roads bridged this by viaducts sloping up to market-gallery-level, a full mile above sea-level, yet rising so easily that blind travellers thought they were flat. It was a safe structure in those days and foreign kings bought shares in it as a way of banking their wealth. The construction company became the government of the empire — our emperors dropped their ancient title and were known as company chairmen. The first of these was a man of simple tastes who had a farm near the top of the work where he grew his own vegetables. He liked to feel he did not need the earth below, but everyone else in the axletree was fed off that. People in the nearest provinces usually looked thin and glum. It must also have been very depressing to live where half the world bent up to shut you out. Dwellers in remoter provinces saw us as a steep-sided mountain on the horizon, but to insiders we were not one thing but many: our living rooms and the rooms of friends, some connecting galleries lined with shops and parkland, the offices where we calculated or the scaffolding where we laboured. The simplest thing we knew was the world spread below like a map. Merchants, soldiers and tax-collectors had to visit that. Most of us were luckier.
Not everyone inside the great work was happy there. When the structure was repaired the masons found odd cavernous spaces full of mummified bodies. These had been slaves who died while putting the building up. They were buried this way because it did not interrupt the labour, and because the founding emperor wanted everyone who worked on his tomb to end up inside. But the re-opened crypts held signs of life: rough tables with winestains and cheap candlesticks on them, and there were gaps in the surrounding stonework just big enough to admit people on their hands and knees. The police discovered that these crypts were used by a society of slaves, labourers and women who met there once a week to exchange subversive gossip. The society was co-operative. Members paid small sums to an agent who cooked them a communal meal and guarded their articles of association. These articles set out the wildest hopes of uneducated people in the language of company law. They said: