Read Online Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks by Alan Coren - Free Book Online
Authors: Alan Coren
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existential wardrobe, and sent me to my room. By drawing the curtains, lighting a candle, releasing my white mice from bondage, and scattering mothballs around to give the place the camphorated flavour of a consumptiveâs deathbed, I managed to turn it into an acceptable condemned cell. Every evening after school (a perfectly acceptable dual existence this; the Jekyll-and-Hyde situation of schoolboy by day, and visionary nihilist by night appealed enormously to my bitter desire to dupe society) I wrote an angstvoll diary on fragments of brown paper torn from my erstwhile undershirt, and tapped morse messages on the wall (e.g. âGod is deadâ, âHell is other peopleâ, and so on) not, as members of the Koestler fan-club will be quick to recognise, in order to communicate, but merely to express. I got profound satisfaction from the meaninglessness of the answers which came back from the other half of our semi, the loud thumps of enraged respectability, unable to comprehend or articulate.
However, the self-imposed life of a part-time recluse was growing less and less satisfactory, since it wasnât taking me any nearer the existential nub which lay at the centre of my new idols. I was, worst of all, not experiencing any suffering, but merely the trappings. True, inability to cope with what the romantic novelists variously describe as stirring buds, tremulous awakenings, and so on, was what had initially nudged my new persona into life, but this paled beside the weltschmerz of the literary boys. Also, suburban London was not nineteenth century St. Petersburg or Prague, 1952 wasnât much of a year for revolution, whaling, or the collapse of civilisation, I was sick of faking TB and epilepsy, and emaciation seemed too high a price to pay for oneâs non-beliefs. Pain, to sum up, was in short supply.
It was The Sorrows Of Young Werther which pointed the way out of this slough of painlessness. Egged on by a near-delirious schoolmaster, I had had a shot at Goethe already, since a bit of Sturm und Drang sounded just what the doctor ordered, but Iâd quickly rejected it. I wasnât able to manufacture the brand of jadedness which comes, apparently, after a lifetimeâs fruitless pursuit of knowledge, and the paraphernalia of pacts with the devil, Walpurgisnachtsträume , time-travel, and the rest, were not really in my line. While I sympathised deeply with Faust himself, it was quite obvious that we were different types of bloke altogether. But Werther, that meisterwerk of moonstruck self-pity â he was me all over.
The instant I put down the book, I recognised that what up until then had been a rather primitive adolescent lust for the nubile young bride next door had really been 22-carat sublime devotion all along. It was the quintessence of unrequitable love, liberally laced with unquenchable anguish. Sporting a spotted bow, shiny shoes and a natty line in sighs, I slipped easily into the modified personality, hanging about in the communal driveway for the chance to bite my lip as the unattainable polished the doorknocker or cleaned out the drains. I abbreviated the mirthless chuckle to a silent sob, cut out the spitting altogether, and filled the once-tubercular eyes with pitiable longing.
The girl, who must have been about twenty-five, responded perfectly. She called me her little man, underlining her blindness to my infatuation with exquisite poignancy, and let me wipe the bird-lime off her window-sills and fetch the coal. What had once been Kâs cell, Raskolnikovâs hovel, the Pequodâs poop-deck, now took on the appearance of a beachcomberâs strongbox. My room was littered with weeds from her garden, a couple of slats from the fence Iâd helped her mend, half-a-dozen old lipstick cases, a balding powder-puff, three laddered stockings (all taken, at night, from her dustbin), a matted clot of hair Iâd found in her sink, an old shoe, a toothless comb, and a
However, the self-imposed life of a part-time recluse was growing less and less satisfactory, since it wasnât taking me any nearer the existential nub which lay at the centre of my new idols. I was, worst of all, not experiencing any suffering, but merely the trappings. True, inability to cope with what the romantic novelists variously describe as stirring buds, tremulous awakenings, and so on, was what had initially nudged my new persona into life, but this paled beside the weltschmerz of the literary boys. Also, suburban London was not nineteenth century St. Petersburg or Prague, 1952 wasnât much of a year for revolution, whaling, or the collapse of civilisation, I was sick of faking TB and epilepsy, and emaciation seemed too high a price to pay for oneâs non-beliefs. Pain, to sum up, was in short supply.
It was The Sorrows Of Young Werther which pointed the way out of this slough of painlessness. Egged on by a near-delirious schoolmaster, I had had a shot at Goethe already, since a bit of Sturm und Drang sounded just what the doctor ordered, but Iâd quickly rejected it. I wasnât able to manufacture the brand of jadedness which comes, apparently, after a lifetimeâs fruitless pursuit of knowledge, and the paraphernalia of pacts with the devil, Walpurgisnachtsträume , time-travel, and the rest, were not really in my line. While I sympathised deeply with Faust himself, it was quite obvious that we were different types of bloke altogether. But Werther, that meisterwerk of moonstruck self-pity â he was me all over.
The instant I put down the book, I recognised that what up until then had been a rather primitive adolescent lust for the nubile young bride next door had really been 22-carat sublime devotion all along. It was the quintessence of unrequitable love, liberally laced with unquenchable anguish. Sporting a spotted bow, shiny shoes and a natty line in sighs, I slipped easily into the modified personality, hanging about in the communal driveway for the chance to bite my lip as the unattainable polished the doorknocker or cleaned out the drains. I abbreviated the mirthless chuckle to a silent sob, cut out the spitting altogether, and filled the once-tubercular eyes with pitiable longing.
The girl, who must have been about twenty-five, responded perfectly. She called me her little man, underlining her blindness to my infatuation with exquisite poignancy, and let me wipe the bird-lime off her window-sills and fetch the coal. What had once been Kâs cell, Raskolnikovâs hovel, the Pequodâs poop-deck, now took on the appearance of a beachcomberâs strongbox. My room was littered with weeds from her garden, a couple of slats from the fence Iâd helped her mend, half-a-dozen old lipstick cases, a balding powder-puff, three laddered stockings (all taken, at night, from her dustbin), a matted clot of hair Iâd found in her sink, an old shoe, a toothless comb, and a
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