Chapter Four. Elaine.

Elaine Pritchard, you will recall, was one of the persons who was deeply affected by my untimely death. I haven't been able to determine why that would be, however; despite the fact that I can read my author's mind. I take it that he didn't know either. Another reason for not bringing us to life.

Elaine and I weren't the best of friends. Actually, she and Arthur weren't the best of friends, and I went along with Arthur in everything, having no will or personality of my own. Arthur thought Elaine was artsy-fartsy with her Mexican poncho which she wore year round - over her winter clothing even. She also sported a jaunty beret, which led Arthur to give her the nickname "Brownie Laureate". Elaine in her turn was wary of Arthur (with good reason I guess). She had difficulty appreciating irony and had no idea of camp. She was one of those feminists who really don't approve of homosexuals but feel they mustn't say anything against them because it would be letting the side down. (I, of course, was not gay but she didn't know that.)

However, it was this character, not Arthur or myself, that my author intended to be central to his novel. I think he felt he needed a heterosexual heroine whom his audience could identify with. And it had to be a heroine, not a hero, for like many gay men, my author thinks that he understands and sympathizes with women better than with straight men. I wouldn't dispute that.

Arthur and I used to have riotous fun mocking Elaine's poems, regularly published in the monthly university newspaper and later in the magazine that she edited, Breakwater.


Here's a mercifully brief example:

My radio's a seashell
Lying on the nightshore
I listen for what is lost in its twistings...

I leave it to your imagination what Arthur and I, the notorious campus crypto-queers, were able to do with all those s's.

Like Margaret Atwood, who was her idol, Elaine liked to use words like "systole" and "diastole" in her poems. For instance, further on in the above poem she wrote:

Waking and sleeping:

The systole and diastole of

These cavernous oceanic hearts

Of duration and longing.

If she ever had been given a chance to read her poems aloud on CBC Radio, I'm sure she would have delivered it in the dry, flat deadpan style that seems to be the house style for poetesses on that network. Pioneered by Margaret Atwood.

A major subplot of my author's novel concerned a series of short poems of Elaine's, satirizing people we knew, that were "accidentally" published, such as this one, that I think deserves to be quoted in full:


NINETEEN SEVENTY-NINE

To our polite post-Christian party
Where all our guests tend to be arty
Let us come then you and I
Before the punchbowls all run dry.
And all are drunk and all's awry.

Here the women still come and go
But no more Michelangelo.
Tonight they will talk
Of the glory of rock
Contra that dismal disco.

The hostess takes us on a tour.
It's quite a place you've got, for sure
Two floors, four bedrooms, shared by six,
Whose temperaments completely mix.
There's nothing here you couldn't fix.

There is a room that we won't see
It isn't right for you or me--
The Venusberg of Blomidon,
Where mattresses are spread upon
The floor for folk to sport thereon.

A poster from Victorian days,
Attracts the English majors' gaze.
It shows five nixies and a knight.
We speculate on what they might
Be thinking. How polite.

The scandal of the day we touch on,
The blot on Blomidon's escutcheon --
Professor G. and her amor.
One of her students, no less. Or more.
We've left all judgments at the door.

Look, and there go Bill and Ken
Into the extra-special den
Preceded there by Lynn and Pat
And Alice, too, and her friend Matt
Now, not everyone is welcome though:
You need to be - sympatico.

But all of the rest of us do know
Where Bill and Ken and Matt did go
Along with Alice, Pat and Lynn
And what they meant to do within.

And certainly we always knew
What Lynn and Alice meant to do
With Ken and Bill and their friend Matt.
This is the seventies. It's all old hat.

It's an ordinary orgy,
And no one minds it a bit,
Except for an ardent Baptist lad,
Who still maintains that sex is bad:
But for the likes of him who gives a shit?

He has his snippy say and leaves us.
"It's safe to say he's gone with Jesus,"
Quips one of us. We laugh awhile,
And stop, and then just smile and smile.

Hush! Whisper! Who screams?
Little Bill Taylor is creaming his jeans..

Well, I kind of like that, I must admit. I was an English major too, if only for a brief time, and I know that the rhyme scheme and meter leave a lot to be desired. "Jeans" and "screams"!

(Besides, wouldn't little Bill Taylor have been out of his jeans well before his climax? Unless Bill just liked to watch. Yes, I think he did.)

But on the whole I think it's o.k. doggerel - good bad doggerel. Elaine, a tip of the jaunty beret to you. Why would I have thought you didn't understand irony?

And it's all true! This was what was going on in this staid Baptist university in the late seventies! My author found it all quite disturbing at the time, despite his rich sexual fantasy life and his addiction to onanism. I suppose it is troubling to find out that what goes on your head actually goes on outside it as well. Now, Arthur and I would never ourselves be found in the "extra-special" den, though I can't speak for our originals. On the other hand, the original of Leonard - the hapless guy Arthur and I were to humiliatingly out in the climactic pages of the novel - he was in that room on a number of occasions. Elaine has even included him in her ditty - he's Ken.