The Fox's Tale

The lady said: "I'm afraid my tale for today is rather lengthy."

 

"This all took place in a town not unlike Mantua in its dimensions and its population, surrounded on three sides by artificial lakes, just as Mantua is, though I must make it clear the town was not Mantua. Not in a thousand years could a tale like the one I am about to tell happen in Mantua; the tale happened in one town and one town only, and nowhere else, at least as far as my meagre knowledge of the history of the world and its geography will allow me to perhaps ignorantly aver.

"The town was perhaps the tenth most significant town of its nation, and though it had its fair share of boosters who'd ever plan events that would draw the surrounding regions into its streets, none of these schemes ever seemed to quite work out, for the simple fact is that the citizens did not care in the least their town was only tenth or so in the nation, and they felt no need to become suddenly overnight the ninth. They had their own locally celebrated merchants and bankers and singers and painters and so on, and that was quite enough for everyone.

"However, as is always the case, whenever one has a hierarchy of status incentivizing the show of genius, there is always for every apex of any craft some twenty-five second-raters, some hundred-and-one third-raters, and also some thousand-plus fourth-raters; and one such fourth-rater—erstwhile, one might say—is the subject of my tale for today. He'd received when young some accolades for some of his verse-writing. Buoyed by what he perceived to be a touch of a singular musicality, he toiled nightly in the after-hours, going through a lot of candles in the process, to perfect his art, while during the day he would submit his works to all and sundry, always groping for the brass ring but never quite reaching it ... until he reached it, oddly enough.

"Where to pick up his story? Where to begin? The day of his birth was an ordinary day, so say the chronicles of the weather: sunny in the morning, clouding over in the late afternoon; and the wind picked up slightly during the over-night. As for his personal nativity, he wrote: 'She heaved me forth onto a wildly woven rug / My pa, on hearing, merely sighed a shrug' which may or not be accurate. Who is to say? How could we verify, now that it's all over with save for the bounce of the rubble?

"In any case, we can pick the story up at the point of his education, at his school, for which we have or had a certain number of eye-witnesses. He is described as clownish and impractical and not especially enthused by the courses he took. None recall any romantic attachments until later, during his vagrant days. He was not into sports; in fact, he wasn't much of a 'joiner' at all; and he never became one.

"I don't suppose there's any point in not giving our hero his name. Perhaps you've heard it, perhaps not. Wilso Donqueway, son of Henry Donqueway and Eleanor Flack, brother to Helen and Charles. Wilso, as you shall hear, had his life changed entirely on a single afternoon some sixty years ago, in a class, aet. seventeen, a forced class, a class he had no choice but to attend, between two o'clock and three-ten. The weather did not matter in the least, and has gone unremarked. However, it was spring, so you can bet on buds and birds and lust in the air.

"The assignment had been to write a short poem, no more than twenty lines, using whatever rhyme scheme one wished. Several of Wilso's peers chose the sonnet form since that was one of the few forms they'd actually seen in action, in Petrarch naturally. Wilso, however, chose his own, entirely of his own invention, that ran A-B-A-C-B-C-D-D-E-F-F-E-A-B-B-A-D-D. It is a scheme for which there was no name, nor does a name for it exist now, mainly because there's little point to it other than as an arbitrary structure of mostly simple rhymes.

"However, as the teacher read aloud a small selection of the poems she preferred the most to hold them out for commendation, she arrived at Wilso's scrawled sheet, saying: 'Now everyone. This is very special. I've never read anything as remarkable as this poem, which was written by our own Wilso Donqueway.' She proceeded to read the poem, which it must be noted no longer exists in any shape or form, having been lost sometime during Wilso's many relocations over the following quarter-century, and so we have absolutely no way of knowing if the verse was of the high quality vouched for by his teacher. Perhaps some day it shall be unearthed, but that day has not yet arrived.

"The class broke into something of an applause, ambiguous enough for skepticism, seeing as how a classroom of tortured adolescents is rarely an audience free of petty grudges and broiling hormones, yet it was quite enough for our Wilso to feel as if he had something of a special gift, or talent, or genius, or what you will. That was the day that determined his life. He knew he would be spending the rest of his life writing verses as often as possible, and in as many forms as possible, and everything else could be damned to hell.

"(And, my circle of listeners, listen to me. Wilso that night had a dream, a dream of which we have a record, in an extant poem some forty-five lines long. He dreamed he was in a wide hallway with exits in opposite directions, and he was facing cedar shelves smelling of bath oils, and on the shelves lay clean white virginal towels, towels which he had been sent to fetch by an exterior or interior compulsion, he did not know which. The towels had to be taken up quickly, for there was danger in the air.

"(The danger lay in one direction or the other, but Wilso couldn't tell which. Towards one lay safety, while towards the other lay danger and probably death. He took three towels‑they were large towels apt for a beach‑and stood, listening in both directions. He turned and noticed the other side of the hallway was also lined with shelves and towels. Had he chosen the wrong shelves? Apparently he awoke at that moment, with a parcel of anxiety, and proceeded to write a poem over the next few days. It was a pseudo-metaphysical poem, fit for a seventeen-year-old mind.)

"Wilso started writing daily, trying to see things‑everyday objects and so on‑clearly and without distraction. The poems of those early days were admittedly not of any especial calibre; in fact they can rightly be consigned to juvenilia. And yet he kept at it, day in and day out, seeking the words that got right to the heart of things, all the while shutting out everything that could be dubbed prosaic."

 

 

To her nine auditors, she continued: "Where was I? Oh yes."

 

Let us let some time pass in our narrative. Yes, let us move along through some six years. Although one might believe that the six years between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three would be a monumental time for any normal victim of the vicissitudes of normal hormonal urges‑indeed, these are the significant years of most narratives seeing as they usually involve marriage and childbirth in one way or another‑our Wilso appeared to all to be not at all concerned with the practicalities of the romantic endeavor. He pursued noöne, and noöne pursued him. He seemed happy enough‑as did the rest of the world, concerning him‑to visit the world of nature, translate it into verses, and submit the results to printers and binders who universally told him: "No, but thank you for your time."

You want to know:

Did he pursue a trade?

Did he gain an education?

Did he live off his parents?

Did he turn to a life of crime?

Did he become a ward of the state?

Did he succumb lamely to being a teacher?

Did he have amassed some untold $$$ in property?

Did he have a brass and oriental lamp containing genius?

Did he become a titan of merchantry, banking, singing, painting?

None of the above, I am afraid to tell you. He picked up jobs here and there, choosing carefully the jobs that he could take or leave. He did some tavern work, some scrivening work, even some gruntwork in house-roofing and house-painting. He took these jobs because he knew that any ordinary occupation would become a trap that would keep him from seeing things as they really are, in order to record them in verse, and so on and so forth &c &c. But then something occurred, and it was an extraordinary occurrence, and it changed the shape of the whole world, and the whole world came to know about it ... some time later.

The Prince of Mantua some place that is not Mantua held a jubilee year, and during that jubilee year (in which pardons were in many cases granted, debts in many cases forgiven, and indulgences in many cases waived), the Prince held a festival in the mirthy month of May. All were welcome to sign up to give performances, no questions asked and no auditions required, and thus our hero Wilso signed on the dotted line and got a spot on the fourth evening, scheduled between two jugglers and a lutenist, before the Prince in all his grave majesty.

And what an effort he made of it! He read five of his finest rhymes which he believed to have the most widespread appeal, being as the were concerning the natural world to which all could easily relate. He spoke of babbling brooks and o'er-arching oaks, of gold-green grasses and whispering water-falls. The audience, restless though they were under the spell of a festival licence, paid something close to attention and applauded each of his verses. Wilso, stepping off the dais, felt like he had finally "made it," and thus positioned himself in plain view for all the printers to approach.

However, no printer approached. Maybe they were plotting something, a behind-the-scenes bidding war may-haps, and instead gathering some information about his life and expectations. But then he heard a voice say: "I quite enjoyed your poems," and Wilso turned and gazed upon a young woman with dark hair and a dark brow, a couple inches shorter than himself, with a small smile whose delicacy was not unlike a small lozenge of a confection and whose eyes glittered like polished onyx untouched by human hands. (Or at least that's what my sources have written.)

¶That's nice of you to say. I haven't heard anything like that in quite some time. ¶I'm only saying it because I truly think so. ¶So, why aren't any of the printers and book-mongers approaching me? ¶I don't know. Maybe they can't figure out where you, ah, fit in. ¶Fit in, where? ¶Into their printing schedules? They've probably already got enough to print, for now. Maybe they'll come to you later. I'm sure your address can be found through the court. ¶Yes, that's true. I should give it some time. ¶Give it some time, yes.

They found a place to sit and drink a little beer or mead or whatever; I know it was alcoholic, since it's mentioned they both got tipsy enough to go out walking together and to even fall into a little bit of dancing in the fountain in the middle of the town before being chased away by a law-man of some sort. Once out of sight they continued to walk for some time, and before parting he found out what street she lived on (Cutter) and who she lived with (her grandmother) and most importantly her name (Adriana).

Could they meet next afternoon? Yes, they could. Would they continue seeing one another through summer and fall? Yes, they did. As for the wintertime, did they have playful snowball fights? That is all too true. Did Adriana's grandmother like or hate Wilso? She liked him well enough. And how about the other way around? Wilso's family thought her to be quite the catch, all things considered. So what was the problem, what stood in their way? Nothing stood in their way. It became spring again, and wedded they became on the anniversary of the day they'd met.

But before they tied the knot, he spoke to her from the heart, in a despairing tone, "Know, my darling, that I am already married. No, don't run away! You see, I am wedded to my art and craft, and there is little either of us can do about it. I will do my best, I will do my damnedest, to create a happy home and have a happy life with you: but I swear to you I will earn my bread through the application of my craft. Do you believe in me? You do? I knew it! I knew it! Then let us go to the chapel in all haste."

They had pre-arranged the rental of a small hovel on the outskirts of town, a real fixer-upper, you might as well say, with leaks everywhere save for the spots where the wind blew through. Two small rooms joined a larger space, and one of the small rooms was the room for the loss of their virginities forevermore, while the other was to be his composition room, and the larger room was their kitchen, dining room, salon, what you will.

He carried her over the threshold. They went into the former of the smaller rooms and disrobed, facing in different directions. They closed their eyes and climbed into the bed. They put their arms around one another. "My darling! Are you comfortable?" "My darling! Yes, and ready when you are!" Their tussling legs kicked his hat off the bed and onto the floor. I believe it's time for the interval.

 

 

"Two goblets of wine on an empty stomach can really go to a girl's head!" she said, "but let's continue."

 

Wilso, with new will and resolve, plunged into composing verses on all possible subjects. He no longer let himself be reigned in with base and bare rhymed descriptions of the natural world, no, but rather he expanded his palate and palette to include the noises of the agriculturalist, the builder, and the blacksmith. The sounds of metal on anvil, of adze along plank, and of scythe through wheat became new colours which he employed liberally alongside the natural harmonies that interleave the earth and the air. It was a real advance, let me tell you. A real advance.

Of the afternoons he would leave his sweetheart Adriana, new sheets in hand, and battle his way to the marketplace with its trade of all things both material and intellectual. He would ask around to see if there was any solid trade in poetry new or forthcoming, and sometimes he would either corner a 'publisher' and foist upon him some of his notables only to be rebuffed, or he would espy a visitor from distant lands who might, though never did, give him connections to other pamphlet-markets. Alas, he was not doing too well! Neither am I with this booze in me!

"Keep trying, my love," Adriana would say to him in his perpetual despair. "You cannot but get it right one day! You are not for all markets, admittedly, but you could perhaps grow an audience, by giving away small samples of your work; say, 10% or so. Then word will spread, and the mass-producers in the Capital will come a-running. They'll say: 'Who's this now, this new voice? How have we been so blind all this time?'"

These words reassured Wilso for a couple weeks or maybe a month I don't know as he worked on his rhyme schemes and metres to make something really new out of ancient ideas going back to the Persians and the Greeks. It was at this point that he started to include dialogue in his poems as he was interested not simply in the natural and the artificial but also in the social. How do people talk to one another? he wondered. What's hidden and what's spoken? he theorized. And How do we know when an idea has gotten across? he thought. But still: no buyers for his letters, and the rent was way overdue.

By great misfortune, it was around this period that his Adriana began to feel sickly. She described it, at first, as a nausea that kept her awake by night and nervous by day. Perhaps there were medicinals that could have an effect, but how to afford them? Wilso found his purse madly lacking, and these healers wanted cash on the barrelhead, or so I believe the phrase goes. How to make ends meet? There was only one way. With cap in hand he went to his landlord and humbly explained the situation. Their landlord took pity, erased the accrued debt, and discounted the quarterly payments by some 33%, I think.

So then with a sick wife as a dependent, Wilso had to give up the small piecework through which he had been making ends meet. Oh dear, haven't I been mentioning that? I don't quite recall, and I can't go back. This isn't like a print, you know, that I can go back and revise. This is pure oral culture I'm setting here‑hic!‑forth. Anyway, he couldn't take up the little jobs he'd used to make ends meet. Oh, wait maybe that hasn't happened yet. Maybe he is going to give up those jobs.... Yes, he is going to give up those jobs in perhaps three minutes or so.

Wilso picked up some odd jobs, here and there, but meanwhile his beloved wife continued being sick‑‑‑and she was deteriorating. She was nearly incapable of getting out of the bed, save for some one or two hours a day during which she would manage some hussifery with the odd meal here or there or perhaps a sweep of the grounds. On a day Wilso would return from a shingling job to find her entirely incapacitated by a labour. It was not at all what he had expected, and it broke his heart.

He wrote and he wrote. He wrote about how the ever-changing colours of the sky were not unlike the motions of the sawblade across wet pine, and he wrote verses comparing certain forms of animal husbandry were not that much different from the haggling ever-present in the town's square. Given the chance he would cart his works out to the market, but then ... but then ... he found no takers. Listeners, can you understand the bind he was in? It was much worse than what we have in this castle. No thank you, I've had quite enough.

He had to cut back on his remunerative activities to stay house-close in order to tend to his beloved Adriana, which oddly enough gave him more time to write poems. Though they were poorer, they were closer than ever, naturally enough. He went off to the landlord to explain their irregularities, and the landlord, Christian enough, reduced the rent even further, and practically eliminated it altogether. So Wilso tended to his sickly sweetheart, all the while managing to steal away some time for his compositions.

For some years they stayed in this pitiful situation. Adriana managed to get some house-labours done, but she would become fatigued every half-hour and would have to rest for an equal amount of time. Wilso, meanwhile, did most of the work and for money picked up some coin tutoring the neighbourhood urchins in languages. Of course, he kept at the verse-writing, day in, day out, though little came of it. Once he had a ballad in a broadside, but the printer went broke and the plates were destroyed.

Adriana's condition worsened. (How did it worsen?) Her humours became dangerously unbalanced. (How did this manifest itself?) Some nights she would wake up screaming and clawing at the sky. (What was she imagining?) She could only say that it was Death himself coming for her. (Did she describe him?) No. (Too bad!) Meanwhile, during the day, haggard-looking and rail-thin, she would sit on the porch to enjoy fresh air. (Fresh air does wonders, or so I've heard.) Unless it's late summer, when the miasmas come up from Africa. (Yes, watch out for those miasmas.)

It is to be wondered at that Wilso's verses reflected none of this. His output at this time consisted of long narratives concerning imaginary places not found on any maps, as is often the case with imaginary places. That's an inappropriate joke. It bears repeating that his private despair and worry appeared nowhere in his work of that period, or perhaps he destroyed it later. It was a loss to the world, and a loss to me. I wish I knew what he was thinking then.

 

 

"This is the final part of the story," she said, "where it all comes together.

 

One afternoon a stranger showed up at their hovel. He seemed to be rather a fancy man, rather a cultured man, and rather a rich man. He said he'd gotten word there was a 'poetic diamond in the rough' lurking thereabouts and he wanted directions. Wilso pondered the question for what seemed to be three moments before pointing behind him and saying: "I hear there's some such a versifier about five miles that way. Follow the gorse bushes." The stranger thanked Wilso with a pleasant smiling tip-of-his-hat and whistled along his way. Of course, no-one ever identified the stranger, and there was no-one around to hear this exchange.

Ariana was by then fully bed-ridden. She slept the days through, awakening only for the special broth that Wilso prepared for her every other day in the main room. He would sit by her bedside and they wouldn't talk, for it weakened her so. Rather, Wilso would gently hum some of her favourite tunes, and she would smile as she looked back upon her brief life and her childhood that seemed like a bundle of florid yesterdays. She would close her eyes and appear to be sleeping, though actually she was picturing the meadows and streams of Wilso's verse.

The poems, of course, had to be written. Language, syllables, diphthongs, words, notes, rhymes, consonants and vowels, commas, parentheses, semicolons, lines, stanzas, spaces, titles, capitals, suspensions, quotation marks, onomatopoeia, harsh sounds, soft sounds, sibilants, clucks, gags, narratives, images, all had to be tended to tenderly. He would revise old material going back decades and, reinvigorated, rush again into the woods to recapture the trace of the spirit he had once been touched by. And yet he could see he was missing the passions that made the greatest difference, at least as far as human relatability goes.

Finally, it happened. Wilso came back from a walk along the nearby stream to find Adriana in bed, in an unusual position. He spoke some words to her, but received no response. Knowing the matter, he went through the motions. He listened for her breath. He listened for her heartbeat. He checked for her pulse. Nothing. Nothing! Wilso put the cover over her face and walked slowly into town, in search of the priest and the grave-digger and last but not least his grandmother-in-law.

The funeral was not by any means a lowly affair. In fact, it was quite the crowd, numbering into the hundreds. Almost the entirety of the able-bodied community turned out, and Wilso received condolence upon condolence. Some dared to ask what he would be doing next, and Wilso would respond: "I will stay where I am, living as I am. Though there is little left for me to do in this world, there is one thing I must do, and I will begin it soon."

So: what did he do? (He went back to his hovel.) What was it like there? (It was uncannily quiet, with not even a ghost.) Was he alone? (Pshaw, he was entirely alone.) I suppose he wandered from room to room. (He wandered from room to room, yes, for quite some time.) What was he thinking about while he did so? (No-one knew for quite some time what he was thinking about but, even then, only guesses could be hazarded.)

He spent two years almost entirely isolated, broken only by quick forays into town every seven or eight weeks or so, and thus there were only gossips and rumours to go upon. Some said he had taken up the black arts, though to what effect no-one knew: If it were for some revengeful purpose, why were those years so meteorologically peaceful? The crops grew well, and no-one died unnaturally. Perhaps he had rather taken up the white art, and thus the crops grew well and no-one died; that, too, made little sense to anyone with head enough to hang a hat upon.

Finally, one day, Wilso came to the town that was not Mantua with a thick bundle and a valise. He booked a coach destined for the greatest city in the whole kingdom, and went off immediately, leaving a crowd of idle gawkers in his dust. Some figured he was gone for good. Others thought an assassination was planned. Regardless, three days later he returned without the thick bundle (though still with the valise) and journeyed again to his hovel. Something had happened, but none had the guts to make inquiry. You know how that sometimes happens.

About a month later, all became known as information trickled in via a printed book that bore the name Wilso on its leather cover. It was a mighty poem‑an elegy to his Adriana‑that apparently had set the whole world ablaze. Strangers came through town to get close to the poetical prophet, and thus Wilso was feted mightily, and praised all over the place, and all wondered how they could not have known about the genius who appeared more worthy of pity than anything. The poem about his deceased love brought him riches and fame beyond measure, and the whole of Christendom wanted to touch the hems of his garments.

Goodness, I'm running shy of room for tricks. These days, in this age of the aeroplane, the phonograph record, and the person-to-person call, to run shy of trickery is simply not the done thing. I'll simply ... continue. Wilso was praised far and wide, and feted, and greeted, and rewarded, and given a place of honour aside the King as Court Versifier. It appeared to all to be akin to the fable of the tortoise and the hare, for Wilso had proceeded slowly and had managed to win the race, for so all thought it to be, i.e. a race.

It all ended quite by accident, literally. Wilso, who'd been working on a follow-up to his elegy, was wandering the streets of an afternoon and he happened to absent-mindedly step onto the road in front of a courier's wagon of a considerable mass. Pulverized beneath its wheels was he, and there was no hope for anyone with anything but a romantic nature to expect. Wilso received a hero's funeral, and he entered the annals of his language as the one who had 'made it new.'

I recall the day I went to the archives to look through his neglected household papers. All his verses had been combed through, and all a scholar had left to pick amongst were the household papers. That's where I found a chart, or calendar, some eight years' worth, with each square filled with alchemical symbols that turned out to signify arsenic along with other compounds most readily associated with rat poison. It seems he had been using these, on a daily basis, for *some* purpose. His rent reduced‑‑from his wife's sickness; his elegy written‑‑from his wife's death. Of course, it was all a product of my fancy. It couldn't have been so. How could such a monster exist, and still write such sublime poems?

O! There's the bell for supper! Just at the right moment!