Nicolas Robertson

For a general introduction to the series, click here;
for Nick’s sad demise, here.

Prelude—SJ
Having posted nine of Nick’s extraordinary anagram tales, we thought we’d give the reader [still singular, eh?—Ed.] a bit of a break, but now that he has, alas, become “late and lamented”, I find a couple more of his stories that I think I can lick into shape. They will have to stand as a posthumous tribute to his brilliant mind. Here’s the first, with Nick’s own introduction:

ALCESTE
Opera by Gluck. Staged performance in the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, 1999, staging by Robert Wilson, with soloists, Monteverdi Choir (offstage, in the pit) and English Baroque Soloists, directed by John Eliot Gardiner. CD recording, and TV and DVD film directed by Brian Large.

This is the last of the “anagram stories” I compiled before the watershed year of Bach’s 250th commemoration year, 2000, and arose from a substantial residence in Paris (we also performed and recorded Orphée et Eurydice, the choir this time on stage); which accounts for the strongly French admixture in the anagrams.

I always hope that these exercises can speak for themselves, as it were. I would like to mention though that the “tsetse éclat escale” image of a clambering insect on a barred jersey was inspired by one of the most beautiful passages of prose I ever read, in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister; and that Nathan Astle, in 2002 (thus after I wrote the anagrams and the story), surprised the world, and perhaps himself, by scoring the fastest Test match double century in history, against England in Christchurch. Looking him up now, I see this is not the only prescience among the anagrams: another of Astle’s records is for the most ducks (5) in World Cup matches—it’s not said if any of them were wild. (Nabokov preferred tennis; Ibsen’s preference is unknown, to me anyway.)

“Alceste” provided the least number of letters I’d elected to work with to date, which posed different challenges, and led me to think it could be worth including a list of the resulting anagrams, in exactly the order used. There are 91 (92 if you include the name “Alceste” itself). I must add, again, that I didn’t use, have never used, any artificial aid, such as a computer programme, in deducing the anagrams, that would be to undermine the whole idea, which is meant to be the exemplification of chance (perhaps not entirely chance) within a random (well, not quite random) set of coordinates.

SELECT A CAST

“Lee, cas télé: Lee scat, EEC lats, le acest.”
Clea? “T’es sec late, ’élas”, etc.
“Cale? – est ‘le Astec’, L*tèce as.”
“Ale sect, ’élas” (etc.).
“EEC salt!”
“Stale EC” – slate CE.
“Cal? Tees ace.”
“Let’s act. Else Elsa, et C.. – ”
“–Claes?”
“–et‘alc’Este –”
“Least! C’è l’ascète!”
“ – steal ce castle.”

Este??
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ALEC:                    Tae slec. Elastec. Set lace, cast eel. Celt sea, celte as ce à l’est,
Sète lac, cet Alès.

CELESTA (sec):    ’Alte ! Scélé’at! Sâle ’tec! Tel cas elects ease –

     ÉCLAT

’ÉCATE [LSE] :     L’ecstase – ÉCLAT – et secla [aet. CL] est ce seal,
La’ Tse, ce stèle act.

[Escale; ecseat L.]

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Las, ce été, LA sect elates Cal secte, ‘el caste’, acelets lactées (case let see talc, l’été sac caselet, saclet e cesta). Le eel sac taste clé, sleet, ace cleats. Ecsel at easel, TC, sat Clee (teasle ç’a clé: tsetse éclat escale – scale ‘te’ – et escalate le scale → C).

“Est-ce Sal? et Léa? C’est Astle?”
“C’è else cat, Elsa, cette – ”
“Las! Ecce–’elastteal!”

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Ces EC tales.

* * *

How does one set about choosing the line-up for an international opera production? The minutes of a recent committee meeting have been passed to me, and confirm that the criteria are more mixed than might, idealistically, have been expected. Here’s an excerpt:

“I’d say we go for Lee, in case the TV recording goes ahead. He can vocalise very convincingly without the words, and has terrific torso muscles, as good as any in Europe. He’s got to be the number one choice.”
“Okay. Now, do you think I – can take on Alceste?”
“Oh, Clea, I wish I could say yes – but you’re always a fraction behind the beat.” (An example of the speciously ‘objective’ excuse.)
“I think we might try bringing in an old rock star from Velvet Underground as Charon, que tel ? He’s a bit of a Central American god here, in fact a star in Paris – ”
“But he drinks beer as if there were no tomorrow” – and other stock denigrations are brought out (see above).
“No, but he’s really the best in Europe!”
“Europe’s old hat.” And so the Church of England is written off.
“What about Cal? He sweeps the board on Tyneside.”
“It’s time for decisions. Otherwise Elsa, and the sculptor whose name I can’t pronounce, Oldenburg, thank you, he and his ‘soft harps’, as well as that Ferrara girl whose yard-arm is always well below the sun – ”
“ – Hang on! Beatrice? But she’s the most spiritual being I know! – ”
“ – will come and storm our citadel, our châtelet.”

What on earth did he mean, talking like that about Beatrice?

Portrait of a woman, inscribed Beatrice d’Este, c1500–10,North Italian artist (Uffizi). Source.

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We were filming on the Breton coast. Alec had done his research, of course, so knew that this bitter moorland, with its marshy sedges which gave the technical team such trouble in achieving the mobility they needed, was supposed to hide the “Youdic”, one of the entrances to Hell. Or perhaps he only thought of this in terms of metaphor. At any rate, even during the takes he seemed to half wish we were somewhere else. That last afternoon he complained abruptly, in his raw Glasgow accent, about our work—too loose, pulling apart then coming together again too sharply. “This is being filmed through a muslin filigree, remember?Is it in place? Cal–throw the bait into the sea, so that the shadow falls on the menhir behind you. Think of Melusine, if you like, calling to you from the waves—but I don’t want a Celtic twilight, people are the same here or anywhere, this scene could be set in the blue basins of a Languedoc fishing-port, or under the ashlar of the Pont du Gard – ”

Celesta’s voice cut across the sea-washed stillness, dry and harsh: “Stop! You retch! You’re like some sort of sordid private eye! The way you lump all these together just shows how lazily you – ”

An incandescent flash split open the earth and for a moment fixed the grey sky as if in negative. The calvary poised at the intersection of the three paths above le Yeun Elez (“le marais des roseaux”, the marsh of reeds) flung its arms backwards as the setting sun caught the bones of its carved face skull-like in a spiralling cartwheel, and from where it had stood arose a creature which sucked in the elements spinning around it, and from the vortex (which reminded me of the impasse I faced in my finals exams at University) seared us with a voice unspeakably beyond our imagining,

<The bliss you seek > – another shattering burst of lightning – <is made up of centuries> (I thought stupidly, this Hecate’s face looks about 150 centuries old) <and each one bears my mark. It’s written in the Tao (in James Thurber’s version) [1] No, o ! the words are graven in stone! >

[1] I understand the reference to be to “The Wonderful O”, where the letter is banned owing to the sad fate of the principal’s mother, who became stuck in a porthole : ‘They couldn’t pull her in, so they had to push her out’. The prohibition had horrible effects, not least for Ophelia Oliver, everyone’s sweetheart hitherto. [Add to Perec’s Oulipian category of “Plagiary by anticipation”.]

The rocks at our feet suddenly tipped up, and as I sprawled amongst the armeria and sea fennel and samphire the earth gaped open to reveal a dizzying stairwell, down which Hecate plunged, disappearing south-east, in the direction of Carnac. Alec was nowhere to be seen.

Hecate, Attic red-figure lekythos, 5th century BCE (Hermitage Museum). Source.

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We were tired, that last summer in California, of trying to feel different. The weight of what seemed to us to be history, or rather the end of it, the inevitable progression from the luxury of striking individual poses to the acceptance of group mores, vitiated our tentative forays into anything that could pass for independent thought. We felt obscurely guilty about this, and thus some of us, anyway, were thrilled when a new Los Angeles group seemed to offer ready-made the transcendence our own mental ambitions shied at. Unashamedly elitist (though not of their own volition: they had been “chosen”), these Hispano-Franco-Americans saw themselves, and thus us, as every one a single star in the Milky Way, powdered with a celestial shimmer we should each carry with us, in a little French pouch and a Portuguese wicker basket.

So far, so exquisite, but the angel was in the details. For, following the divinatory rituals of a Greek tribe in iron-age Thessaly, whose priest-queen Alceste, it seems (the legend has come down to us in a jumbled form), had for the first time defied the ancient rigid formalities and refused the seven-yearly sacrifice of the young king, Admète, the clan had located the essence of rejuvenescence not in the shed blood of a royal representative, but in the organs of the lamprey, a cyclostome much appreciated by gourmets and whose formidable richness in nutritional terms can see one safely through the coldest of winters as if clad in 7-league boots. (Part of their lore also included the folk-memory of how it was that Apollo, protector of Alcestis, came from Thessaly to dispossess the earth-mother/serpent cult at Delphi, replacing her with his own oracle—in short, the worship of sky-gods which accompanied the Achaean invaders from Central Europe into Greece, ousting the old chthonic deities: [2] hence the specific emphasis on summer, “l’été sac”, and celestial phenomena, “acelets lactées”. And underlying this, it struck us, the first tentative emergence of the individual, as if from the chrysalis of uniformity, realising the possibility of asserting individual choice in the face of tribal orthodoxy …)

[2] See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths.

But the members of our sect were clever enough to leaven their powerful teleology with art. The boss, known as Top Cat, was a brilliant painter and had even done a portrait of Paul Klee (TC’s spelling was all over the place, it only endeared him to us all the more, as if proof of his sincerity) in Tunisia. He used to point proudly to a burr on his Breton mariner’s top, which he said had been stuck there ever since his visit to North Africa—and this was the key to his and our undoing, for one weird day we saw the “burr” set off shakily up the staves of his striped shirt, at the same time shouldering away its tufty carapace, until with an almost audible crack the chrysalis shattered and a gleaming mature tsetse fly sidled with its smugly crossed wings into TC’s world, pricked his throat and took him down, leaving us lost, into the long sleeping sickness. I will never forget his cry, indignant at first – “Is it a bee?” – then higher pitched, “Oh, see –”. And I can never again think of a rising semitone as optimistic.

“Is that you, Sally? and Léa? is that Nathan? We need a good number 7,” murmured TC, softly, from a deep, dark maze—somehow, in extremis, reaching out to the memory of a hero from his native New Zealand cricket team.
“No, but instead we’ve got the cat who walked by herself, the lioness Elsa, born free like all the sons of Adam. There’s nothing for you to fear –”
“Alas, but look: he’s become at the end like the wild duck!” – pure symbol of freedom, brought low by stupid material ‘reality’ …

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[One in a series of recastings of European traditional stories: No 91]

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Paris – London, September–October 1999
slightly revised 2015 and 2021
Nicolas Robertson

Ankou, messenger of death, Notre-Dame de Bulat, Côtes d’Armor, Brittany.