The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

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.”