Deal Writers

Paul Curd's Challenge Winner

 Alan writes:

The challenge was to produce a short story inspired by a classic novel.  Of course, a great masterpiece cannot be directly copied: it was more a matter of writing at a kind of ironic tangent, redistributing the sympathies, emphases, and perhaps even the “message” of the original. Our Challenger, the professional short story writer and creative writing tutor, Paul Curd, took us through Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Small Dog” (a  response to “Anna Karenina”) and de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” ( a rejoinder to “Madame Bovary”), and opened up many intriguing literary possibilities.
My own choice of “model masterpiece” was easy, not to say inevitable: though I believe I have read some possibly greater books since, Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” enthralled me as a very young reader, and I have re-read it regularly over the years. However, I am now too far gone in life to believe in undying romantic love (if I ever did!), and wanted to incorporate something of the “twist in the tail” technique of de Maupassant’s story. I also wanted to incorporate the technique of the unreliable narrator, following the example of Nick Carraway in “Gatsby.”  Finally, as Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is known as one of the contenders for the title of “The Great American Novel” laying bare the soul of the Great American Dream, I at least wanted to have my tuppance worth of comment on the Great New Labour Nightmare!

Prickly Holly’s Party Days
by Alan Gleave

If I really mean this memoir as an affectionate tribute to the man whose  recent exit from public life has occasioned the usual coarse valedictions and cries of “good-riddance” from the press, I can do nothing better, or more honourable, than begin with his first words to me.  Everything he ever said was remarkable for its candour, though the code through which he expressed his candour may have become increasingly… baroque. In his beginning, his candour was free, and fresh, and frech, as the Germans say. Frech means “cheeky.”  He was a cheeky boy.
Well, we were all essentially boys at that time, though the girls – it is a law of nature, perhaps? – were essentially already women.  Actually, when I first encountered the hero-villain of this account, there was only one girl-woman present – a composed-seeming PhD student in a rippling yellow silk dress, and white headscarf, interwoven with fine red and blue threads. We were all trying  to study her not too closely – not too grossly – and she, embarrassed by our communal social ineptitude, was half turned away from us, bravely resisting the temptation to swig her champagne. After all, there was little hope of a speedy refill from the College servants, who hovered at the dons’ loud end of the hall, dexterous and absorbed in the handling of sherry and silverware. If I described us young men as a posse of trolls, turned to stone by blundering into the civilised enchantments of Cambridge, it would be an old man’s romantic sentimentality; we felt more like sheep, lost on one of my native Welsh hillsides and persisting in existing out of the sheer obtuse inability to do anything else.
We were “the grammar school intake” comprising five of the College’s six freshmen in PPE: various in height, gaucheness and degrees of dishevelment, but robust enough peasants, ruddy-faced (that may have been the champagne flush) and most kitted out, to our absent mothers’ satisfaction, in tweed jackets and woollen ties. We had triumphed in combining Beatle-mania and John Lennon-esque sociological cynicism with extreme and pious swottishness and here we were, in Cambridge, comprehensively ignored, and suffering from a feeling of anti-climax already.
Between sessions of staring gormlessly at the serene beauty of the PhD student, I looked around vaguely for our sixth man: he was to be in the room next to mine, and his name I read on the door, was Leopold von Prickelhohlig. I was intrigued: he promised to be a one-man sociological study: aristocratic? German? Jewish?  And where the hell was he?  Why wasn’t he showing worker’s solidarity in suffering social oppression and martyrdom with the rest of us?
In the light of Prickelhohlig’s later career, it is not altogether fanciful if I speculate that at that very moment he read my mind. A loud cawing laugh rose like a flock of scattering starlings above the polite hubbub of the dons’ converse, and out of the academic melee, a rangy young man loomed, striking in a green corduroy suit with mauve polo-neck shirt, hair centre-parted and pinned behind his ears in lustrous black strands, and sporting a thick bristly moustache which gave him the air of a First War subaltern, mature beyond his years from living through experiences beyond our imagining.
He marched steadily towards us, beaming. Then his gait became a balletic swaying motion.  Then it turned into a quite outrageous camp mincing.  His eyes flickered over us; he consciously chose me. He made the ghost of a Prussian bow and hissed a stage whisper which must have carried through most of the hall.  “Von Prickelhohlig.  But you can call me Prickly Holly, darling.”  He gestured towards the dons, who were now placidly self-absorbed once more. He pursed his lips, and a look of judicious calculation passed over his face; then he bent forward in a confidential leer. “Only about twenty-five percent of them, I should say – low for Cambridge…”   He considered the five of us briefly, one by one, with an intensifying grimace of theatrical disappointment. “And there’s none here… or possibly just one…”  He strolled back to his dons, easy, athletic, his shoulders swinging.  
I felt my red face growing redder, in a sudden gust of anger…  But then my mood was saved by a giggle close by.  The PhD student was looking up at me, all merriment, her hand on my arm. “Don’t get upset…  He was only joking…” Her clear grey eyes narrowed. “Surely he was only joking.”  

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The Von Prickelhohligs had migrated to England in 1895, disgusted by the Kaiser’s crass militarism, and had done a good job for generations marrying into the lesser branches of the English aristocracy. They were also related to Karl Marx through his Christian wife, and Prickly Holly’s grandfather had died heroically in the Spanish Civil War, falling on the socialist side, as it were.  That is all we were given to know. Ever the politician, he would say no more to questioning, his long face creasing into his wan boyish grin, then lolling to one side, in a kind of beatific boredom. Socially – to use Orwell’s term – he had “vaporised” us.
By day, Prickly drifted and mooned, pacing the College lawns in intricate patterns, was observed in shadowy corners, but mostly withdrew to the utter, awe-inspiring silence of his room (when the sounds of the Stones, Pink Floyd, or showy Beethoven concertos were cannoning out of ours). Work, ambition, animated him, however. In College seminars, he was showed himself to be egregiously well read, pithy and incisive in his comments, his intelligent prose relentlessly clear. He was marked for a Double First from about the third seminar: this was signalled by the way that his tutor actually listened to him, betraying a slightly anxious, compulsive interest:  here was an undergraduate who had things to say which were both novel and reasonable…
But the world knows the young Prickly best (or thinks it does) for the wild, esoteric, Gatsbyesque organisation of the May Ball of our last year. My view of it was literally and figuratively distorted, I confess: I only caught glimpses from my narrow window, when taking refuge from a chronic social confusion of my own: I was on that evening making another of my sporadic attempts to seduce the PhD student, now completing her doctoral thesis entitled: “Fiction: the Opium of the Bourgeoisie,” and whom I was attempting to embroil in my own early attempts at fiction.  While she gave my scrawl her flattering, exaggerated attention, I stood at my window above the quad, peering through the luminous early summer midnight to catch sight and sound of the strange festal skirmishes being conducted below.
They began with a scurrying and a snorting sound; there seemed to be an enormous, baggy badger on the smooth sward; except that the shape was much more white – ghostly white – than black, and the snorting was much more suggestively human than animal. The thing reared up on two legs with sudden grace: of course it was Prickly, enveloped in two or three bed sheets, cut to give the impression of a Greek chiton or a Roman toga, the material straining down from the shoulders, as if weighted down with enormous stones. Then came a glassy clink from bulging inner pockets. Prickly’s fine tenor voice rang out, as he turned to face his guests, mostly out of sight, briefed to wait in various doorways and shadowy corners.  “Once more, out of the cradle of classical civilisation, the new age is born … The age of the Gay Champagne Socialist! Do you believe in the Gay Champagne Socialist?”  Apparently many did: there was a roar from the four quarters of the quad and many stations in between, and Prickly was off at the double, eager to pour the best Bollinger into the eagerly held out glasses of young men, enchanted at this way of making new sexual and social contacts. But as the party spilled from recess and cloister back on to the quad, it was apparent that, as ever, the heterosexual contingent would predominate, decorous, unflappable, earnest even in their taking of this frivolous pleasure. Before the phalanx of impeccable dinner jackets, the barrages of well-bred laughter from sylphs in floaty taffeta, Prickly was suddenly ignored and in retreat, trying to find refuge with the kitchen staff. They, middle-aged, white-aproned, broad and worn in physique, bore Prickly’s rather desperate social slumming with foot-shuffling impatience, glugged his champagne from tea-cups – and made obscene gestures at him before he had quite turned his back.   
What happened next, strange as it was, I more or less expected – but not the violence, or the national consequences. Prickly burst into the room, drunk, furious, his toga diminished to a sagging, barely adequate loin-cloth. I soon realised that Prickly was still more acting than not, but I am not sure that Sarah did.  She had the decency not to care.
“Sorry to interrupt your paper thing,” he quite openly sneered, indicating the scattered pages of my manuscript with a large gesture of his champagne bottle, which foamed on to the dingy carpet. “Your little bourgeois dream of how life out there should be lived in here instead.   Moral victory to chaste heaving bosoms, and personal rectitude in …” (he burped) “genital arrangements; and then by sympathetic magic – squeezing the goolies off bare-arsed tribesmen Africa - the capitalist fruit machine will disgorge wildly as wedding bells!  Well then, Sarah, have I summed up the Victorian novel for you?”
I had my chance to push him out there and then.  Instead, out of nervousness – no, bourgeois moral cowardice – I just laughed instead. Sarah first looked at him coldly, then at me with a long stare that became icy.  “I wouldn’t say you were wrong, Prickly. But I thought that Eddy and I were working on our own solution.  But even Dorothea Brooke gets tired of waiting.  He’s all yours, Prickly. Perhaps he always was.”  She walked out, unhurried, without looking back.
Suddenly I was standing there in a transforming rage, white with frustration, self-knowledge, self-loathing, my head ballooning through the cage bars of its habitual inhibitions.
Prickly had turned to watch her go.  “She’s quite something…”  His face still averted, he nodded his tribute. “Well, you must prefer me after all.  Here I am…” 
When he turned, his eyes were already blind with blissful anticipation. I punched him so hard that he staggered backwards through the open door and collapsed slowly against the corridor wall, so much blood spurting from his nose on to his bedsheet toga that he most resembled Julius Caesar sprawled in the forum, as thoroughly done in as only friends can do you.  

                                                                                                                
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It was thirty years before I spoke to Prickly again – or rather, he spoke to me.
I was in the Gents’ at the Labour Party Conference, when I heard my name called in those mannered but melodious tones that the nation has learned to respond to. “Eddy! Turn round! Is it really you?”
I fumbled and zipped as quickly as possible, but already he had me in a kind of ecstatic hug, and was leading me back into the light, back to the tea-room…
Two steaming mugs and two inedible rock cakes in front of us (for any passing “Daily Mirror” photographer), he beamed at me, laughed aloud in his joy and his fame. “Eddy, I never thanked you – and I can never thank you enough. When you punched me, I was reborn! I learned at twenty-one what my rivals took years longer to learn.
There is no such thing as love; don’t waste your time looking: there’s only politics, politics, more and more ruthless politics! As a young man, I had all the knowledge, all the skills, but no had shown me that truth!  The whole nation owes you a debt of gratitude, Eddy…  By the way, we have a vacancy for a good, loyal, candidate in a northern constituency…”