I laughed. ‘I know what you mean. I have to read rather more than I want.’ I took a copy of
She glanced at the title page, her manner moody and autocratic. I wondered why she had bothered to ask me over. ‘Yes, I have. Appalling, isn’t it? “Paul Ransom” ’, she noted. ‘Is that you? You’re the editor? How interesting.’
She said it with a peculiar inflection, apparently considering some possible course of action. For a moment she watched me reflectively. Her personality seemed totally dissociated, her awareness of me varying abruptly from one level to another, like light-changes in a bad motion picture. However, although her mask-like face remained motionless, I none the less detected a quickening of interest.
‘Well, tell me about your work. You must know so much about what is wrong with modern poetry. Why is it all so bad?’
I shrugged. ‘I suppose its principally a matter of inspiration. I used to write a fair amount myself years ago, but the impulse faded as soon as I could afford a VT set. In the old days a poet had to sacrifice himself in order to master his medium. Now that technical mastery is simply a question of pushing a button, selecting metre, rhyme, assonance on a dial, there’s no need for sacrifice, no ideal to invent to make the sacrifice worthwhile –’
I broke off. She was watching me in a remarkably alert way, almost as if she were going to swallow me.
Changing the tempo, I said: ‘I’ve read quite a lot of your poetry, too. Forgive me mentioning it, but I think there’s something wrong with your Verse-Transcriber.’
Her face snapped and she looked away from me irritably. ‘I haven’t got one of those dreadful machines. Heavens above, you don’t think
‘Then where do the tapes come from?’ I asked. The streamers that drift across every evening. They’re covered with fragments of verse.’
Off-handedly, she said: ‘Are they? Oh, I didn’t know.’ She looked down at the volumes scattered about on the floor. ‘Although I should be the last person to write verse, I have been forced to recently. Through sheer necessity, you see, to preserve a dying art.’
She had baffled me completely. As far as I could remember, most of the poems on the tapes had already been written.
She glanced up and gave me a vivid smile.
‘I’ll send you some.’
The first ones arrived the next morning. They were delivered by the chauffeur in the pink Cadillac, neatly printed on quarto vellum and sealed by a floral ribbon. Most of the poems submitted to me come through the post on computer punch-tape, rolled up like automat tickets, and it was certainly a pleasure to receive such elegant manuscripts.
The poems, however, were impossibly bad. There were six in all, two Petrarchan sonnets, an ode and three free-form longer pieces. All were written in the same hectoring tone, at once minatory and obscure, like the oracular deliriums of an insane witch. Their overall import was strangely disturbing, not so much for the content of the poems as for the deranged mind behind them. Aurora Day was obviously living in a private world which she took very seriously indeed. I decided that she was a wealthy neurotic able to over-indulge her private fantasies.
I flipped through the sheets, smelling the musk-like scent that misted up from them. Where had she unearthed this curious style, these archaic mannerisms, the ‘arise, earthly seers, and to thy ancient courses pen now thy truest vows’? Mixed up in some of the metaphors were odd echoes of Milton and Virgil. In fact, the whole tone reminded me of the archpriestess in the Aeneid who lets off blistering tirades whenever Aeneas sits down for a moment to relax.
I was still wondering what exactly to do with the poems – promptly on nine the next morning the chauffeur had delivered a second batch – when Tony Sapphire called to help me with the make-up of the next issue. Most of the time he spent at his beach-chalet at Lagoon West, programming an automatic novel, but he put in a day or two each week on
I was checking the internal rhyme chains in an IBM sonnet sequence of Xero Paris’s as he arrived. While I held the code chart over the sonnets, checking the rhyme lattices, he picked up the sheets of pink quarto on which Aurora’s poems were printed.
‘Delicious scent,’ he commented, fanning the sheets through the air. ‘One way to get round an editor.’ He started to read the first of the poems, then frowned and put it down.
‘Extraordinary. What are they?’
‘I’m not altogether sure,’ I admitted. ‘Echoes in a stone garden.’
Tony read the signature at the bottom of the sheets. ‘“Aurora Day.” A new subscriber, I suppose. She probably thinks
I smiled at him. Like most other writers and poets, he had spent so long sitting in front of his VT set that he had forgotten the period when poetry was actually handspun.
‘They’re poems, of a sort, obviously.’
‘Do you mean she wrote these herself?’
I nodded. ‘It has been done that way. In fact the method enjoyed quite a vogue for twenty or thirty centuries. Shakespeare tried it, Milton, Keats and Shelley – it worked reasonably well then.’
‘But not now,’ Tony said. ‘Not since the VT set. How can you compete with an IBM heavy-duty logomatic analogue? Look at this one, for heaven’s sake. It sounds like T. S. Eliot. She can’t be serious.’
‘You may be right. Perhaps the girl’s pulling my leg.’
‘Girl. She’s probably sixty and tipples her eau de cologne. Sad. In some insane way they may mean something.’
‘Hold on,’ I told him. I was pasting down one of the Xero’s satirical pastiches of Rupert Brooke and was six lines short. I handed Tony the master tape and he played it into the IBM, set the metre, rhyme scheme, verbal pairs, and then switched on, waited for the tape to chunter out of the delivery head, tore off six lines and passed them back to me. I didn’t even need to read them.
For the next two hours we worked hard. At dusk we had completed over one thousand lines and broke off for a well-earned drink. We moved on to the terrace and sat in the cool evening light, watching the colours melting across the desert, listening to the sand-rays cry in the darkness by Aurora’s villa.
‘What are all these streamers lying around under here?’ Tony asked. He pulled one towards him, caught the strands as they broke in his hand and steered them on to the glass-topped table.
‘“– nor canticles, nor hollow register –” ’ He read the line out, then released the tissue and let it blow away on the wind.
He peered across the shadow-covered dunes at Studio 5. As usual a single light was burning in one of the upper rooms, illuminating the threads unravelling in the sand as they moved towards us.
Tony nodded. ‘So that’s where she lives.’ He picked up another of the streamers that had coiled itself through the railing and was fluttering instantly at his elbow.
‘You know, old sport, you’re quite literally under siege.’
I was. During the next days a ceaseless bombardment of ever more obscure and bizarre poems reached me, always in two instalments, the first brought by the chauffeur promptly at nine o’clock each morning, the second that evening when the streamers began to blow across the dusk to me. The fragments of Shakespeare and Pound had gone now, and the streamers carried fragmented versions of the poems delivered earlier in the day, almost as if they represented her working drafts. Examining the tapes carefully I realized that, as Aurora Day had said, they were not produced by a VT set. The strands were too delicate to have passed through the spools and highspeed cams of a computer mechanism, and the lettering along them had not been printed but embossed by some process I was unable to identify.
Each day I read the latest offerings, carefully filed them away in the centre drawer of my desk. Finally, when I had a week’s production stacked together, I placed them in a return envelope, addressed it ‘Aurora Day, Studio 5, The Stars, Vermilion Sands,’ and penned a tactful rejection note, suggesting that she would feel ultimately more satisfied if her work appeared in another of the wide range of poetry reviews.
That night I had the first of what was to be a series of highly unpleasant dreams.
Making myself some strong coffee the next morning, I waited blearily for my mind to clear. I went on to the
