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Note on La Belle Lectrice

This was first cast in August 1994 at Burton Bradstock in Dorset, then radically changed in June 1999. I’ve had to work out the connection between the winged insects, the human barflies, and the beautiful reader (‘la belle lectrice’). In the reworking, it is she, not I, watching the flies. The barflies are human no-hopers in a book she is reading. One comparison I kept: that between the hopeless struggle of the flies and the resigned frustration of humans, barflies or better, fictional or real. I still had to work out what her reaction was, and indeed who she was. The other work I was doing helped. She turned out to be an incarnation of Nature, somewhat like my ‘goddess of the garden’:

Now that her babes are here, the pigs and plants,

she rations them her hand, gives them a share

of what is good for them, but saves herself

for what her nature needs, the later dance

of life becoming autumn everywhere,

when she will look into its other half.

Would facts and fictions have anything to do with it? I decided that fictions weren’t that different from reality to matter. What would be her reaction to these insects and to these old lags? My first ending was:

Dying little bags of squelch, aren’t you? she murmurs,

focused on the sand and the foam with a blush of pleasure.

But I wasn’t convinced. Why would she see the insects as less worthy, as just pitiful ‘Dying little bags of squelch’? Did my ‘god-dess’ care that the old lags at the bar could be seen as an evolutionary advance, in that they knew more and accepted their limitations more? Is my incarnate Aphrodite omniscient or one of us? If she is Nature, I’d already claimed a non-awareness, a lack of consistency, for her. She can do many things but not feel, think or intend. She can accidentally make the window vanish, freeing the insects. She can close the book, trapping the characters. To her, people and flies are the same. Facts are no more important than the fictions we weave from facts. Does the poem include all this information? I’m not sure that it does, so here’s ammunition for those against notes.

Think of a painter who says, of a canvas, ‘It doesn’t mean anything, it just is; that’s the way it had to be; you tell me what it means.’ I’ve nothing against the approach, now well matured, even old hat, which speaks of our alienation from art-in-itself. But it can go too far. It helps if artists explain, even when they don’t remember, after drink, drugs or the years, what they’ve done or why they did it. No one ever has the last word. But, though it’s not common, it’s enlightening, I think, when an author gets in the first word. As for the last word, my explanation of La Belle Lectrice is not intended to be that. Those who know all the words can look away now. Birth-caps: birth cauls; fly-pats: like cow-pats but smaller; vitrine: strictly a glass showcase, it refers to the window but links up with the later metaphor of a showcase (the bar in which the barflies hang out); Diptera: the order of insects to which flies and mosquitoes (though not ladybirds) belong.

Alan Marshfield

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