Here the focus must be on the reconstructed story: the history, prehistory, and two births of the artefact itself, the Pulvadmonitor. Or, in the name given it by Lambshead’s acronym, about the deep understanding that seems to slide with appearance, and so on: the Dust’s Warning.
will you your will?
will it to me.
I will you mine.
—UNKNOWN, “ODE TO EVERYTHING”
2. The First Birth
The professor, though a man of science, was a polymath. He enjoyed the company of, and endeavoured to participate in salons and discussion groups with, artists, writers, poets, and various other representatives of La bohème. One from such a milieu was the literary critic Thomas Thomas. It was to Lambshead that Thomas came in 1952, begging his help, bearing a large box and several books. Lambshead was surprised to see him, as their particular circle had mostly attenuated by the mid-1940s, and it was some years since he and Thomas had been in each other’s company.
After abbreviated pleasantries, Thomas explained his message and presence. He had been put in an awkward position, he explained, by Xanthe Serkis, and seeking Lambshead’s advice. Serkis was a critic, known to the professor, but only very slightly, a good decade previously. When he had met her, she had been working on a book about David Gascoyne and other British surrealists.
“That’s correct,” Thomas told him. “She still is. That’s rather the point.”
In a pre-echo of Thomas’s approach to Lambshead, Serkis, who had absented herself from the poetic and critical scene for several months, had recently and aggressively contacted Thomas, demanding to see him. Some months earlier, Serkis had received, she told him, a copy of Gascoyne’s Man’s Life Is This Meat, preceding the 1936 Parton Press edition. She had shown it to him, and he described it to Lambshead: imperfectly printed, the publisher Down-Dandelion Press, its colophon showing a stylised upside-down flower, its roots above the earth, its bloom below. In content, it was largely the same as the later official editions, except for a few differences of punctuation, and, the one substantial difference, a whole extra poem inserted into the text. Its title was “Ode to Everything.”
Serkis had received the book in the post. That she did not remember ordering it did not surprise her overmuch: as a critic of solid though unorthodox reputation, she received a good deal of material unsolicited, most of it from small presses anxious to gain her mention. There was, however, no return address, no covering note, no enclosure of any kind. She could find no details on DownDandelion Press from any of her usual sources, and later and exhaustive searches failed to turn up any more copies of the book. Gascoyne himself, whom she knew though not well, denied any knowledge of the copy or the poem, and seemed mildly amused but not very interested by them.
In truth, Serkis hadn’t felt much different at first, thinking the book some illicit curio, a mischievous thing put together from a proof, leaked to her with, she vaguely assumed, the “Ode . . .” inserted to draw attention—camouflaged by Gascoyne’s minor but real reputation—to another, shyer poet’s work. “She told Thomas,” Lambshead’s journals read, “that she had included a one-line mention of the odd edition in her monograph. Then padded that one line with another. Returned again, to add some few words, on the subject of the ode itself, interpreting it, with a tendentious and provocative heuristic, as if it were, in fact, one of Gascoyne’s, to see what it told us about the rest of his corpus.”
The teleology is clear. Lambshead recounts Thomas’s recollections. “What started as that mention became a paragraph, then a chapter—a chapter devoted to an interloping poem!—then a whole section. Abruptly, it was the subject of her book, still at first, in an increasingly absurd pretence, discussed as if Gascoyne had written it, until the title had been changed to Anon’s Ode. But that was not the end of it, either. Her focus did not stop. Had continued down like the switching and switching of a microscope’s field of focus, probing no longer the whole poem but one section, stanza, on down.”
Thomas had brought a copy of the “Ode to Everything,” the initial stanzas of which read to Lambshead, he tells us, like a rather too-unreconstructed riff on one thing or another, though here and there, a turn of phrase—“this minatory summer,” he mentions; “your felt-silenced castanets”; “the slander that a lizard feels no love”—startled him. (The few snips and stanzas that he reproduces, in passing praise, reproduced again here, are all we have. The poem, indeed the book, the few details available, are untraceable. Nor does the Internet help us, whatever the search string.)
Months of research, she had told Thomas; hundreds of pages of notes; reams of started, interrupted, and restarted chapters—all of which she brought out in sheaves and bundles and laid across his desk to prove her point—and Serkis had been moved to write her monograph entirely on one line: “What does the dust wish to tell us?”
“That’s the question,” she told Thomas. “That’s the only question.”
Thomas, quailing, had gently prodded, offered to read her book, and she had
looked at him with bewildered anger. She swept her papers off his table. Forget the book, she said. The book, she assured him, was no longer the focus of her work. Thomas had understood abruptly that what had been a project of interpretation had become one of lunatic detection. She was not, as he had thought at first, applying her considerable critical skills to the eight-word question: she was, rather, attempting to answer it. What does the dust wish to tell us?
She had opened her box. She had brought out for Thomas a glass dome, its base connected to that mockery of a battery. From the front of the dome jutted a flared tube, and rattling around within the glass, unsecured, were a pair of dentures. The two of them had regarded the collection of equipment for some time, in silence. “It took me three years of physics,” Serkis said, “but I worked out how to build it.”
“I need you to look after it,” Serkis said. “I have a fear.”
“ ‘By this time, old man, as you can imagine,’ Thomas said to me, ‘I had my doubts about poor old Xanthe’s sanity,’ ” Lambshead wrote. “ ‘And where are you going?’ I asked her. Answer, as she left, came there none.” Thomas, aware in vague terms of his friend’s interests and predilections, had immediately decided to bring it to Lambshead. As for Xanthe, neither Thomas, nor Lambshead saw her again.
What would have looked to the nonspecialist like a disconnected pile of rubbish was not something Lambshead, with his considerable experience, would ever dismiss out of hand, of course. For two weeks, he fiddled. He put his ear close to the speaking tube. He tinkered with the battery. When one combination of switches were switched, he records, he heard a tiny hiss: pushed another way, he heard nothing. What the dials measured remained opaque to him, but measure it they did, tweaking and jumping in response to he knew not what. He, attuned to the importance of time, left the bell jar alone for several days. He waited, one of his assistants reported, “with more than mere patience.” On his return, all was as it had been.