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Note on Striptease

I’ve had several stabs at presenting this story, an incident in a Simenon novel—I forget which one. This is fairly close to my first version. In the re-writes, anything more drastic than slight jigging with the details have dragged the essence into a mire and lost it. I’m clearly not being ironic, nor do I show the amateur stripper as pitiable victim. When I show my stripper enjoying her act I’m not indulging a fantasy either—or not just indulging. From when I first wrote the poem I’ve kept a mysterious male figure in the background, singled out from the other watchers. Who is he? Her husband? Did he encourage her to have a go? Is it a psychotic stalker who’s going to trail her home? Or a projection of her own that she’s doing this for? Or a tabloid reporter wetting his pencil?

I’ve invented to nude (v.tr.); bestrid: I was surprised to find this not archaic but would have used it anyway, in memory of Julius Caesar 1.2.134, Cassius: ‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus.’ There’s a lush music half-way between Belloc and early Eliot, and the ‘A smile glides from her into herself /... / an insect from its chrysalis’ is Rilke again. I couldn’t seem to get shot of him, even back when I wrote this, which must have been in the mid-1980s.

Alan Marshfield

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