So ‘Rikki don’t lose that number’ song from 1974 (Steely Dan) is about Rikki Ducornet whose book ‘The Jade Cabinet’ I have been reading having being steered there by my instructor in the avant garde, the youtube book blogger ‘Leaf by Leaf’. I need help in that region. I don’t keep up. What really took me to the book was his inclusion of it in a post on great openings.
“Memory, wrote Mr. Beattie, presents us with thoughts of what is past accompanied with a persuasion that they were once real.”
Oddly enough Google can’t find that quote from Beattie nor is to be found where you might expect it in his ‘Dissertations Moral and Critical’ which has a section on Memory which proves perhaps the fallibility of Memory the presenter of this text. She is a daughter of Angus Sphery. His other daughter is Etheria a creature of air and ethereal beauty. “She grew up speechless and yet for all that tremendously clever.” This is in contrast to Father’s quest for the proto language which would be divine is conjuring up the real. I have posted on the Vedic words theory of Shankara or the power which underlies mantra to cause to irrupt from the noumenal that which it mentions.vedic words
Adam and Eve thought Angus:
“stumbling from Eden as dumb as stones, had tediously to reconstruct a language which, in fact, could only be a pale copy, a simpleton’s stuttering - compared to the Divine Original which Father claimed was so powerful as toconjure the world of things. All of Adam and Eve’s needs were seen to by this language of languages which was also a species of magic.”
Intimations of this perfect language might be found in the secret scripture of nature -
“the shells of winkles, on the hides of panthers, tigers, zebras, llamas and giraffes at the London Zoo, goats and cows of the field, cats in kitchens, dogs in alleys, turtles sleeping in gardens. ........the Primal Language was spelled out phonetically by the planets.”
In this novel esoteric lore ebulliates and not always to the furtherance of the central narrative viz. the fraught relationship between Radulph Tubbs and the airy Etheria. I would consider the Egyptian interlude might well have been volatilised, fractioned off by the alembic of Ducornet’s mind leaving a pure essence of obsessive lust that destroys the monster of vulgarity, Tubbs.
That rabbit hole she should have filled in and speaking of which Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll is one of the dramatis personae which bring to our attention the striving between the two hebephiles. When Tubbs first spots Etheria she is but ten years old so he must wait for seven long years to consummate his febrile lusts. Angus Sphery’s love of jade is the engine of this consummation. Tubbs has a very fine collection:
“The cabinet was Ming and of sober elegance, and the jade of such rare perfection that as he fingered them our father trembled. Again and again he returned to a piece that Radulph disliked particularly, and although he really could not have cared less, Angus Sphery informed him that the jade represented an insect, a cidada.”
Angus admires unto ownership and lays thereby a path to the construpation of his beautiful daughter. The invitation to dinner as the fee for the jade piece is the start of Radulph’s courtship. Etheria is now thirteen. Another friend of Dodgson was the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson. Mary Sidgwick, sister of Henry the Ethics man, was eleven, proposed to at twelve, married at eighteen.
The mother as ever has to be won over if the daughter is to be transferred to Tubs and the problem is that she despises this dragon of industry, this myrmidon of mammon and his factories which grind to dust hapless orphans. Having invited her to his Grimswick manufactury he now must bring it up to a sanitary condition. However the cucumber sandwich and the strawberry tart which she accepted from the matron must have had lurking germs of the cholera that lately had eliminated a third of the orphans. “I believe her appetite proved ruinous."(Memory) Fine acerbic satire in this Potemkin factory sanitation passage.
Interspersed in the novel are the memoirs of Tubbs who relates how he fails to answer a riddle set by Etheria who demands as forfeit whatever she wants. The chimera and her pup two priceless pieces of jade that he does not even know that he posses he gladly surrenders.
“She shall have it.”
“It’s not for her! The precocious brat bounced up and down in her chair with excitement. “But for Papa! It is to be his birthday, Saturday. He wants it badly.”
The frightful Tubbs gets his prey but of course it is elusive for who can hold the subtle air.
There are many fine things in this book and a certain amount of dross which for me stands out more in a very short book which a longer one might have absorbed. It's beautifully written, She is a superb stylist and manages the idiom of Victorian English literature beautifully which is not an easy thing to do. A very good read and I shall revisit her book cabinet again.
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