69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess

by Stewart Home

  Between leaving the Jewel In The Crown and arriving at Union Grove, I asked Alan what he’d read about Grampian stone circles apart from 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess and The Stone Circle: Gordon’s Early History. Once we’d carted Dudley up to his flat, Alan showed me A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany by Aubrey Burl and The Modern Antiquarian by Julian Cope. Alan said he was working on a bibliography of books about stone circles in north-east Scotland and would provide me with a copy once he’d made a few additions.9 That night he restricted himself to being scathing about Julian Cope’s contribution to deforestation. It wasn’t difficult to see why Alan disliked the faded pop singer’s hippie mysticism and obsession with the Mother Goddess. The book was filled with snapshots of Cope and his family standing by stones in leopardskin dresses and other inappropriate gear, the pages were luridly coloured and the author’s drug-addled brain appeared incapable of producing coherent thought. Worst of all, Cope included a chapter entitled ‘Fifty-Nine Stone Circles in Aberdeenshire’ and not only were several of the sites he mentioned actually located in Banffshire, he rated Dunnideer above Bennachie simply because this poxy hill reminded him of Glastonbury Tor! All things considered, The Modern Antiquarian was a dog’s dinner of a book.

  Alan read me numerous examples of Cope’s inept prose, chuckling along as he did so. Growing bored, I exposed and then fingered my cunt. Eventually Alan pushed his prick into my dripping wet hole. He evidently had great experience in fucking. I never knew anyone to fuck with such scientific deliberation. He made every stroke tell to the uttermost. He would slowly draw out his prick until the tip of the glans only rested between the lips, and then with equal deliberation drive it slowly back, making its ridge press firmly against the upper creases of my vagina as it passed into my cunt. Then when the whole length was enclosed, and my belly seemed full of it, he would gently work it about from side to side causing the big round head to rub deliciously on the sensitive mouth of my womb.

  On reaching orgasm, we both groaned with excess of pleasure and my cunt tingled round his palpitating tool as the life flood darted from the opposite sources of delight in reciprocating streams of unctuous spunk. Alan lay back to recover his breath and rest himself after his exertion, but when he saw me wiping my wet receiver with my handkerchief, he asked me to perform the same kind office for him. I willingly complied, and kneeling at his side, took his soft and moistened prick into my hands and tenderly wiped it all round, then stooping forward, I pressed my lips on its flowing tip. This position elevated my anus, and Alan proceeded at once to avail himself of it. Throwing my dress over my back, he moved me towards him until my naked bum was almost opposite his face, then spreading my thighs, he opened the lips of my quim with his fingers, played about the clitoris, and having moistened his finger in my cunt, pushed it into my arsehole. I rather enjoyed this display of my anal charms. So while I fondled Alan’s prick and moulded his balls, he played with the crannies and fissures of my backside.

  Then getting me to straddle directly over him, Alan made me stoop until my cunt rested on his mouth. All the lustful feelings of my nature became excited as I felt his warm breath blowing aside the hairs of my sex, and his pliant tongue winding around my clitoris, playing between my nymphae and exploring the secret passage inside. But when he went on to the nether entrance, and I felt the titillation of his tongue amid its sensitive creases, the sluices of pleasure burst open and I became conscious of that melting sensation that told me I had come once again.

  Soon after my second orgasm I fell asleep on the sofa. At some point Alan led me semi-conscious through to the bedroom where I was undressed and ushered beneath the sheets. That night I dreamt that I was back in Budapest. Dudley took me to a gypsy bar called The Blue Elephant. Inside the air was thick with smoke. There were guys sitting around broken tables on broken chairs. Some of them were singing, others were playing chess. The place wasn’t crowded. There weren’t many women although the two bar staff were female. Dudley ordered Cselenye. Cherry brandy. His Hungarian accent was very good. I stared vacantly at some stained wall tiling and a huge poster of a holiday resort I couldn’t identify. I didn’t particularly care for Cselenye but I guess the regulars did since it was a staple of the sparsely stocked bar. Alan was standing outside on the street. When we left the bar he assaulted his dummy, overcame all resistance and left Dudley lying in a pool of vomit.

  Alan took me to the airport and we caught a plane to London. We weaved through passport control without a hitch but got held up by Dudley as we went through customs. The dummy had assumed a military bearing and took great exception to the books stuffed into Alan’s suitcase. A copy of Compton MacKenzie’s Whisky Galore was held aloft and loud demands were made as to why it had not been declared. Alan explained that he’d only used the book as a counterweight to his interests in the east, that MacKenzie was a beacon from the past whose Highland and Island romps provided a perfect counterpoint to contemporary East-Coast writers like Duncan McLean. Of course, MacKenzie’s narratives were sentimental and rambling but they had a certain chutzpah. Alan said he’d long puzzled over why the Western Isles had remained bastions of Bible-bashing fundamentalism while in Orkney and Shetland people had become more easy-going about religious observance. MacKenzie had given Alan the key to this enigma. The rivalry between Catholic and Protestant islands fuelled the religious impulse in the west.

  As Alan stood and argued with the dummy over the rights and wrongs of failing to declare Whisky Galore, visions were flashing through my mind. It was not so much I as Alan who was back in Budapest. He was wandering through Gozsdu udvar, a series of linked courtyards running between Dob utca and Király utca. The architecture was decaying but these courtyards gave an authentic taste of the old Jewish quarter. At ground level the buildings were still in use as shops and workshops but the apartments above were deserted, their windows smashed. The occupied premises were shuttered against the twilight and rain was falling. Alan was walking in slow motion through the smell of decaying plaster. He was examining old bricks, peering through barred windows. The dummy emerged dressed in a black flight jacket from the night watchman’s office, a guard dog straining on the lead he held in his plastic hand. Alan unbuttoned the fly of his black Levi’s and pissed on the hound’s snout. When the urine hit the dog it dissolved. I was back at customs and Alan countered the dummy’s claim that MacKenzie was an anti-modernist by pointing out that the author had been an early enthusiast of the gramophone. Dudley confiscated Alan’s books but let us go.

  The dream ended with images of Dudley’s body bobbing about lifelessly in the Danube. Alan was lurking in the shadows and when I tried to escape from him the streets transformed themselves into a stone labyrinth. Alan chased me through winding alleyways and whenever I succeeded in running far ahead, I’d be confronted by the water with Dudley bobbing in the churning foam.

  EIGHT

  I DON’T remember when I woke up, how many cups of coffee I drank at breakfast or whether Alan and I made love before we rose. However, I do know that Alan drove me out to the university and waited for me in the canteen while I had a tutorial. At first my professor was angry with me for skipping classes but through an astute use of the conversations I’d had with Alan about literature, I managed to convince him that I hadn’t been wasting my time. I imagined the professor laying a hand on my leg and running it up under my skirt. Daydreams of this type helped pass the time, although my tutor was actually far too staid to even consider being unfaithful to his wife. Eventually I escaped from my professor’s office and Alan drove me to the Donside Tesco superstore. With Dudley seated mutely between us, we had a fry-up in the café. We trailed around the store and Alan grabbed a bag of donuts.

  Having disposed of my tutorial as a topic of conversation in the car, our verbal exchanges in Tesco were devoted to other subjects. I suggested that we should visit all the supermarkets in Aberdeen and treat these excursions in much the same way as our trips to stone circles. Ala
n insisted that it would be difficult to have sex in those stores that lacked customer toilets. I told him that he was missing my point, which was poetic, he had to imagine himself living 3000 years from now and pretend he was visiting ruins. My companion complained this was an impossibility since the logistics of supermarket construction meant the buildings would not survive for this length of time. Such an over-literal response was uncalled for and I eventually persuaded Alan that after leaving Tesco we should travel on to Norco in Kittybrewster. In the meantime, as we queued to pay for the donuts, we talked of books.

  Alan insisted that if I was to continue reading the contemporary literature he was rapidly discarding, I should give The Biography of Thomas Lang: A Novel by Jonathan Buckley some serious consideration. This text, Alan added slyly, cried out to be described as a work of literature. Taking the form of a series of letters, the novel demonstrated – in a manner not entirely dissimilar to some of the essays in Derrida’s Writing and Difference or certain works by Wyndham Lewis such as Enemy of the Stars – that in order to approach truth, one must simultaneously appear to veer away from it. It should go without saying that language is a tricky thing and that honesty has always hidden itself in lies. Alan praised Buckley for abandoning 19th-century notions of literary depth and said that like many famous modernists and post-modernists, this author’s prose was the return at a higher level of pre-modern forms.

  Buckley’s book is only a novel if one accepts the contradiction of giving this title to a prose work whose central subject eludes it, and not only because the Thomas Lang of the title is dead. As I have already said, the book takes the form of a series of letters, the majority of them being between Michael Dessauer and Christopher Lang. The former is the would-be biographer of a concert pianist called Thomas Lang, the latter the dead man’s brother. From the start the book is dialectical in structure, but this is a dialectic of lack. Michael Dessauer is quite unable to make a harmonious whole out of the contradictory testimony he gathers about his subject. Indeed, even the reliability of this material is brought into question since at one point Christopher Lang admits to pranking his correspondent by fabricating letters in his brother’s hand.

  At times Buckley’s game of hide and seek with the reader becomes tiresome and Alan insisted the novelist clearly intended to exhaust his audience. Viz expedients such as providing descriptions of a series of banal photographs allegedly taken by Thomas Lang. These prosaic transcriptions so selfconsciously recalled techniques deployed in the French nouveau roman that Alan didn’t hesitate to cite them as absolutely his favourite sequence in the book. Alan was predisposed to seek out the unoriginal in any work and I strongly suspected it was the fact that he could compare various literary biographies unfavourably with Buckley’s novel that led him to praise Thomas Lang as a book. Alan’s most immediate targets in regard to this were The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography by A. J. A. Symons and Frank Harris by Hugh Kingsmill.

  Baron Corvo, aka Frederick Rolfe, was a Grub Street hack and shameless paedophile. Although Rolfe received praise from the likes of D. H. Lawrence, book sales long eluded him. Alan liked the first seven chapters of Symons’ biography of Corvo, which provided a series of contradictory portraits from different pens. Corvo the brilliant but unrecognised novelist, Rolfe the impostor and con man who’d falsely assumed an aristocratic title, Corvo the dissolute pederast and pander, Rolfe the high-minded inventor and convert to the Catholic faith. After a brilliant opening section Symons attempted to resolve the contradictions he’d so breathlessly delineated. To Alan this was worse than simply tedious, it was a capitulation to the bourgeois notion of a centred subject. His problems with Hugh Kingsmill’s Frank Harris were of the same order. Alan loved the early parts of the book where Kingsmill relied on Harris’ unreliable and often quite contradictory accounts of his life. He particularly relished the account of Harris travelling home to Europe from America, both westwards across the Pacific and eastwards over the Atlantic, so that he might meet himself in Paris. But once Harris had achieved fame and there were reliable sources for the life of this liar, braggart, charlatan and bon viveur, Alan found the sense of certainty that crept into Kingsmill’s account mind-numbingly boring.

  Nevertheless, Alan considered comparisons of the careers of Frank Harris and Baron Corvo instructive. Harris, Alan was convinced, proved that those afflicted with a bourgeois mentality read books on the basis of who the author was rather than what they wrote. Following Hegel, this was a vice that my companion viewed as more common among critics than the general public. Both men saw the latter as being more generous in their outlook and attitudes. Harris was a literary success as long as he was able to make a go of his society marriage, an alliance to which he’d also hitched his ambition to become the English Bismarck. Inevitably, Harris attached himself to the wrong members of the Conservative Party. Kingsmill correctly characterises his subject’s views as those of a Tory anarchist and Harris got no further in politics than various other reactionary scribblers who posed as men of action. Although a sad skunk like Ernst Jünger was both younger than Harris and to the right of him politically, it is not simply coincidence that the ‘intellectual’ Führer of national bolshevism has been insightfully described as a Prussian anarchist.

  By the time Alan got around to discussing this with me, we were buying a pint of milk in the Co-op Superstore in Kittybrewster. As we rolled through the check-out the conversation moved on to the fifth volume of My Life and Loves by Frank Harris. Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press in Paris had acquired the rights to this book from the author’s widow for a considerable sum. Alexander Trocchi was employed to rewrite what there was and construct the rest of the book. Sixty-five per cent of the final text was original prose by Trocchi and the rest notes by Harris worked up into a publishable form. Trocchi completed the book in ten days and since he considered Harris bombastic, used it as an opportunity to lampoon and parody the Tory anarchist. The result was good enough to fool all the literary experts who’d gone over the book in the five years before the hoax was revealed. Alan considered this faked autobiography to be the best of Trocchi’s porn novels and the only work ‘by’ Harris that he would even consider recommending to a friend. It certainly bettered Kingsmill’s biography in giving a truly fictional portrait of the man.

  However, Alan did not consider My Life and Loves: Fifth Volume to be Trocchi’s best literary hoax, despite greatly appreciating the fact that this activist hipster had notched up seven porn books against only two ‘serious’ novels. Trocchi created his best fakes in the 60s, when he turned to book dealing as a means of supporting his smack habit. Since by this time there was a demand for his ‘original’ manuscripts, Trocchi met it by copying out his already published books in longhand. Alan thought this was an excellent jape and it helped him forgive if not entirely overlook the lapses into conventional literary tropes in Trocchi’s porn books. According to Alan, Trocchi was at his best in Cain’s Book and the faked final volume of My Life and Loves. In Cain’s Book Trocchi had expended a great deal of effort and created a genuinely experimental work of literature, whereas the Frank Harris hoax rocked because it was as badly written and sloppy as the gibberings of any other hack pornographer. Working for money, Trocchi had achieved the genuine pulp writer’s trance, something infinitely superior to the automatic writing of the surrealists.

  As he drove me to the Safeway on King Street, Alan was ranting about Thongs, another of Trocchi’s dirty books. Thongs was set in Glasgow and at its worst came across as the last gasp of the proletarian novel. Trocchi’s depictions of razor kings and Gorbals slums substituted the rhetoric of realism for the strange alchemy of the word and in this fashion patronised the working class. As the story progressed, it degenerated into a litany featuring all the usual claptrap about secret societies dedicated to dominance and submission. Alan insisted that if one really had to read this type of crap it was much better to stick to The Story of O. Thongs reveals Trocchi himself as a masochist, not bec
ause of his loving descriptions of cunnilingus or the fact that his narrator ultimately submits quite willingly to being crucified, but because enough craft has gone into the prose to exorcise the repetitious frenzy so beloved by sadists. Masochists of Trocchi’s type are drawn towards art with its frozen tableaux, the sadist prefers the banality of the truly pornographic.

  Alan bought some chocolate biscuits in Safeway and got very angry when I said we couldn’t go across the street to my bedsit for refreshments. I was embarrassed, my pad was overflowing with the books Alan had been off-loading. At the time of the incidents I am relating I didn’t have Alan’s old Trocchi books but they are before me now and as literary remains they really are very instructive.