The Tarses of Sodom

A fourth indelicate frivolity
By Mihangel

Segment 3

Promptly at ten, carrying a folder full of everything, I knocked on Prufrock's door for my supervision. I hoped that my essay, with which I was not best pleased, would take a back seat.

"Good morning, Sam. Your essay, yes. I have it somewhere here." He scrabbled among the chaos of paper on his desk.

"Before we get on to that," I said, "I've got some interesting things to show you." I laid Edward Finch's paper under his nose. "Rob and I found this behind a panel in Finch and Baines's room. It's Henry More's draft of the inscription on their tomb, amended by Edward Finch. Look at the end."

He peered at the end, instantly absorbed the meaning, and beamed hugely. "O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" he chortled -- it was even stranger to hear him quoting Carroll than Kipling. "Long have I awaited something like this! Not in this particular form, nor in such a depository. Just something to confirm their relationship. But what," he asked, suddenly looking up at me, "makes you ascribe this to Edward?"

"This. It was with the paper."

I put the book on his desk, open at the flyleaf. He peered again and goggled, mouth agape like a codfish. This was the second time in a year that I'd witnessed the phenomenon. Unbelievingly he turned to the title page. A shudder ran through him and he leapt to his feet, his glasses bouncing clean off his nose.

"Come to my arms, my beamish boy!" he boomed as he stumbled round the desk and headed in my direction.

Alarmed, visualising the headlines ('Student ravished by don'), I none the less stood my ground. He lunged wildly, pulled me into a bear-hug, and kissed me. Luckily, if he was after my mouth, his aim was bad and it landed, loud and wet, on my cheek. While not the most delectable experience of my young life, it could have been much worse. He let go and stepped back, bumping into the desk. Without his specs, I realised, he was as blind as a bat.

"Sit down," I said and guided him, still beaming and still quivering with emotion, to his chair. "I'll find your glasses."

Find them I did. They had landed not on the thick cushion of papers but, by gross misfortune, on the metal base of his desk lamp. Both lenses were shattered. His euphoria, when I broke the news, subsided like a balloon with a terminal leak. He was instantly helpless. My frustration with the old buffer turned to pity.

"Do you have a spare pair?"

"Errr . . ." I could see him trying to concentrate on mundane practicalities. "Errr, no."

"Then you'll have to order new lenses. Which optician do you go to?"

"Errr . . ." He was at a total loss.

"Is it nearby?"

"Errr . . . I believe it is."

I consulted my mental map for nearby opticians. The nearest I could think of was at the top of Petty Cury, not a hundred yards from the college gate. What was its name? Yes . . .

"Goggles?"

"That's it!" he cried. With the prospect of salvation he began to revive. "How could I forget it? Run there, dear boy, I beg you."

"Best if you phone first and authorise them."

I found his Yellow Pages, found Goggles, tapped the number into my mobile because I didn't know how the college system worked, and put it in his hand. First he tried to hold it upside down, but when that was rectified he quite competently ordered new lenses in the old frame which Mr Furbelow would immediately bring in, and please would they (I paraphrase) pull out all the stops.

So I grabbed the old frame and ran to Goggles, who assured me they should be ready tomorrow evening, and ran back to report. Prufrock was sitting exactly as I had left him, staring unseeingly into space.

"Show it to the Librarian," was all he said. "Now."

Exactly what I was intending to do. I put book and paper into my folder. "Would you like some music while I'm gone?" Prufrock was a fan of old music and had a good collection of CDs. "Purcell? Right for the period."

"Yes. Please."

I riffled, lit on Oedipus which seemed to fit the bill, and put it on.

The Librarian I found busy preparing an exhibition for the quatercentenary next year of the King James Bible, which was translated under the care of Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury and another son of the college. But she welcomed me as always and even asked my opinion on one or two matters. With that out of the way, I tentatively embarked on my mission. I hadn't a clue how this staid and homely person would react. Best to kick off with Finch and Baines again. I showed her Edward's paper.

"This," she said having read it, "answers a question often wondered but rarely asked out loud. The gloss was written by a nephew of Finch. I wonder which one. Daniel?"

"No. Edward."

"How do you know?"

"That paper was behind a panel in the Finch and Baines room. So too was a book that Edward had had printed. This."

I laid it before her. She opened it at the title page. Like Prufrock, she instantly saw what it was and what it implied.

"Oh my dear paws!" Her glasses nearly suffered the fate of Prufrock's, but she managed to keep them on board. And two Lewis Carrolls within half an hour! "I've heard of this," she admitted. "Now I must read it." With that, I felt confident she'd take it in her stride. "But Rochester's authorship is disputed, isn't it?"

"Look at the flyleaf."

She did. "Oh my fur and whiskers! 1680! There's no other surviving copy, is there? No printed copy?"

"Not that I can find."

"May I borrow this?"

"Keep it. It's yours. I mean, it's obviously college property. But I was wondering about the watermark, as a check on the date. And the place of publication. Is The Hague a cover-up?"

She held a page over a light-box. "I think this is going to be easy. GG. George Gill, I'd say." And a few reference books confirmed it. The paper was made by George Gill at Turkey Mill near Maidstone in Kent between 1676 and 1680.

"That clinches it," she said. "The date's all right, and no Dutch printer would use English paper. This was printed in England. I'm wondering . . ." She pondered. "Oughtn't we to get Professor Prufrock in on this?"

"He's seen it. Briefly." I told her about the disaster with his glasses.

"Oh, poor dear. Well, we ought to get the Master in too."

She rang him up, and he came round at once. He was, from what little I'd seen, a nice old boy. And being an eminent economist -- and more of a human being than many economists I've met -- he didn't pretend to know anything about Restoration pornography. To cut a long story short, he was put in the picture and read a number of pages with a raised eyebrow and a faint smile.

"Interesting," he said. "And if this is the only known copy, have you any idea what it might fetch on the open market? Not that I'm in the least suggesting it should go on the market."

I hadn't the foggiest. The Librarian pursed her lips. "I can only guess an order of magnitude," she confessed. "Ordinarily, with a unique book of this date, maybe £100,000. But its notoriety might push it up to £200,000, should the buyer be a rich and dirty old man."

"Do I take it, then, that this discovery will cause a stir in the literary world?"

"Undoubtedly."

"In that case," said the Master, "we ought, at our leisure, to prepare a press release and consider how best to handle the resulting furore. How many people," he asked me, "have you and Mr Nethercleft told about it?"

"Outside this room, only Professor Prufrock. He would be here, but . . ." Again I explained the disaster. "He can't see a yard. I must go and check that he's all right."

"Oh dear. This has happened before. I will send my secretary to see if she can help with his paperwork, and alert the college nurse to assist him with his, ah, personal hygiene."

That was a relief. Myself, I really didn't want to assist in that department.

"You go ahead then," the Master said, "and I will follow shortly. Meanwhile, may I commend both you and Mr Nethercleft for your serendipity, and your public spirit, and your discretion? And would you contain the secret until we give the word? Thank you."

"Oh, Sam!" the Librarian called when I was at the door. Never before had she called me Sam. "I've just remembered there's something in the library store which really ought to be in your room. I'll get it to you later today."

Back to Prufrock. The CD was playing a number from Oedipus, 'Music for a while shall all your cares beguile.'"How true," he said. "How very true . . . Sam, I have not thanked you for your compassion to an old man who is almost as eyeless as Oedipus. For beguiling his cares."

"That's all right," I mumbled. I might have said 'One good turn deserves another' but, mindful of Emma's warning, I did not dare.

"Meanwhile," he said, "Sodom. What news?"

I brought him up to date. "The Master will be here soon."

"Sodom . . ." Prufrock began again. But at that moment the Master came in. Prufrock was less than warm in his welcome. "Master, we are in the middle of a supervision."

"My apologies. But, having heard mention of Sodom, I will, if I may, sit in." He found a chair.

"Sodom," Prufrock repeated. "How does the new text compare with those hitherto known?"

"I haven't had time to check. Not in detail. Trouble is, there's no critical edition. Just eight manuscripts, all but one unpublished, every old where. Two at Princeton." I looked at the ceiling to refresh my memory. "One each in the BL, V&A, and BN. One each at Nottingham, Vienna and Hamburg . . . Professor, I've got a suggestion to make. I've finished my first-year dissertation, the critical edition of Gammer . . ."

His eyebrows went up. "So soon? I was not expecting it until May."

"Here it is." I laid on his desk, neatly held together by a plastic binder. "Look at it when you get your glasses back. What I suggest is that I do another dissertation, this time a critical edition of Sodom. Provided I can find funding for microfilms or photocopies of all the manuscripts."

His watery eyes, normally invisible behind thick lenses, lit up. "My dear boy! But . . . but . . ."

"Lancelot," the Master broke in. "Is this not precisely what the Firkin Fund is for? Should we not, at its meeting next week, ask the Governing Body to release some money?"

For the first time since the disaster, Prufrock beamed. But with the loss of his specs he had somehow lost his authority.

"And how much," the Master asked, "would cover it?"

Prufrock confusedly did sums in his head. "Eight short microfilms . . . £3,000 should be ample."

I breathed a big breath. It had been as easy as that! Provided the Governing Body played ball.

"Thank you," I said. "But you were asking about the new text. My impression is that it's very similar to the Paris edition. Except that its prologues and epilogues are fewer and far shorter."

"Excellent, most excellent!" said Prufrock with renewed enthusiasm. "I have always suspected the authenticity of the Paris versions. They are inartistic, and Rochester was never inartistic. Consider the poetry of the rest of Sodom!"

"Oh, come on, sir," I protested, dropping instinctively into the tone I'd used with Old Persimmon when I didn't see eye to eye with him; which, great man though he was, was quite often. "Poetry? It's verse. Hack verse at that. It's burlesque, to be hammed up like a pantomime. There's only one couplet of poetry in the whole thing."

Prufrock tried to bristle. But minus his specs he was too jellylike. Jellies are not good at bristling. "And which couplet is that?" he asked mulishly.

"Swivia, describing her . . ." With Prufrock alone I might have used the word, but the Master was here. "Er, describing female genitals -

"This is the warehouse of the world's chief trade.
On this soft anvil all mankind was made."

The Master had been regarding me with approval. "I like that," he said. "I like that very much." And Prufrock did not argue. Perhaps he saw that his enthusiasm had over-ridden his judgment. He relapsed into thought, and suddenly barked out the most unexpected of questions.

"Sam, why are you at Cambridge?"

For a moment I floundered. Then, in a flash of what must have been telepathy, I saw what he was getting at. "To push boundaries," I declared confidently. "Such as staging Sodom." Until that moment it hadn't even crossed my mind.

Prufrock smiled. "Can you, Master, see any cause or just impediment?"

The Master blinked and deliberated. "If you mean in our theatre, no, I can't. Not in principle. Certainly not as far as language is concerned . . . these days, anything seems to go. As for nudity . . . these days, actors seem to strip off at the drop of a hat. But there are still limits, are there not? In a sexual context like this, I feel nudity would be going too far. Just as would real sexual acts. Simulated phalluses, yes, such as were employed -- am I not correct? -- in ancient Greek comedy. But not real ones. Lancelot, would you agree?"

Prufrock, with more than a touch of reluctance, agreed.

"Sam?" The Master was calling me Sam too!

"Absolutely." Depraved I might be, as Rob had said, but not as depraved as that. Left to myself, those were exactly the parameters I would follow. "There's an overkill of bad language, to the point where it becomes meaningless. If you censor that, though, the play loses its whole point. But turn the explicit sex into comedy, and it gains. It's bold enough without hardcore realism."

"Agreed, then. Bawdy, but without overstepping the line into the offensive."

My mind roamed off. A year from now I was due to produce a play. Shakespeare or something. Sodom surely qualified as 'something.' It would be a real challenge to lift it above mere crudity. Emma would jump at it. I would be Bolloximian. Hugo and Alex would, please God, be with us. Hugo would be Pockenello and young Alex was made for Pricket. Plenty of competent CADS members to supply the other parts. As for Rob . . . the technical demands would be many, but he would rise to them. Rise to them? Hmmm . . . Simulated phalluses, rising . . .?

I was brought to earth by the Master. "I hope your plans prosper, Sam." He was smiling at me. "Lancelot and I have been working out our own plans for the press release and the resulting invasion. We intend to go public a week today, almost at the end of term. Will that be convenient for you and Rob? For you must both be involved."

I escaped from my supervision without my essay being mentioned. At lunch I told Rob what had happened. He was happy for me, as he always was when there was anything to be happy about. He was also concerned about Prufrock. "Anything I can do to help?"

"Go and see him after lunch. Briefly. Just to make sure he's OK. He'd appreciate that."

Later I, myself, dropped in on Prufrock, who seemed to be under control, and spent a while reading him the prologues and epilogue as they appeared in our printed version.

As I headed back to B4 with the satisfying feeling that my duty had been done, I overtook Rob. He was trundling the porters' trolley which carried a lumpy load wrapped in a dust sheet.

"What on earth have you got there?"

"Search me. The Librarian said it was for B4."

With difficulty we heaved it up the stairs and undressed it. It was a life-sized bust in terracotta of a somewhat stodgy gent in clerical garb.

"Who is it?" Rob asked. "She said something about . . . what was the name? Rubik? No, he's a cube."

I was enlightened. "That'll be Rysbrack. The sculptor. The most fashionable of the day. This must be Edward Finch himself. Well, well! Nice to have him back in B4."

We put him on a little table in the corner by the door, where he gave Mrs Button a severe shock when she rolled up on her next cleaning day.

After dinner, Rob and I chewed over preliminary plans for Sodom. I had the feeling that Edward's ears were flapping with nostalgic interest. Maybe memories were being revived of his youthful escapades with Rochester.

"Only once has it been produced," I said. "I gather it is staged in The Libertine, or a bit of it is, before Charles storms on and stops it. But that isn't historical. The only actual production I've found was a very short run in New York in 1999, put on by the Dysfunctional Theater Company . . . Another trouble is, it's a closet drama. Not written for the stage. Only for reading. Alone. Or aloud, between friends. Consenting adults in private, as it were. So there are too many walk-on parts. I mean, we can't possibly rustle up forty striplings. We'll have to cut back severely there. And double up dancers and demons. Another thing, there isn't much action in Sodom."

"Not much action? What about all the ladies frigging? Pricket and Swivia's incestuous love-in? Cunticula wanking Pricket? And Virtuoso coming?"

"But they're the only ones. All that your filthy mind remembers. The rest's pretty static. Bolloximian and his mates don't actually do anything, not on-stage. OK, there are the entr'actes -- those in-between bits where the six men and six women have it off, and where the men play dulcimers with their pricks. God knows how we're going to stage that."

"What is a dulcimer?"

"Sort of xylophone thingy. Wooden bars you hit with a hammer."

"Let's get this straight, Sam. You're not suggesting full nudity, are you? Real pricks? Real sex?"

"God no! I wouldn't even if I were allowed. The Master . . ." I relayed the Master's limitations. "And he's absolutely right. No more than simulated phalluses, as he put it."

"Rather than stimulated phalluses? Maybe you could play a xylophone with a stimulated phallus. Or even a simulated stimulated one. Of the right sort."

"The New York ones were made of foam," I said. "But they ought really to be adjustable, oughtn't they? I mean, Pricket gets a hard-on, and loses it, and gets it again. How the hell do you simulate that?"

"Leave it with me. I'll brood. And what about simulated cunts?"

"They had them in New York, apparently. Dunno how they were attached. But I don't much like that idea. I don't in the least mind making fun of pricks. But cunts seem more taboo, somehow. Is that because I'm gay? Or just because I'm a bloke? . . . Look, the women will be in long dresses. What if they lift their skirts so high but no higher, and all the action happens out of sight? Whether it's with pricks or dildos."

"I do agree. With all of that. Anyway, a concavity is much harder to simulate than a convexity."

I worked that out. "OK. And we've got to think about scenery too. At least there's plenty of time. And we're going to need dildos. Lots of them. Big ones."

Next day we checked Prufrock several times. He had still not recovered his self-assurance. Finally, at half past four, I led him from his room. Like a racehorse spotting the finishing post he sailed blithely out of the college gate into St Andrew's Street and straight across the pavement. Had I not hauled him back by brute force he would have been slaughtered by a passing bus. Thereafter I kept my arm firmly through his. At Goggles he joyfully donned his refurbished specs and instantly reverted to normal, to the tune of trying to walk out without paying for them.

The day after that, my two cheap editions of Sodom arrived. Both, as I feared, were nothing but shoddily printed texts without even an introduction or notes. I gave one to Rob as a guide to his thoughts about props. And the DVD of The Libertine arrived, which we watched on our computer. It tinkered with the facts, which niggled my geeky -- no, my scholarly -- historical soul. But it was a good plot, very good, which delighted my artistic soul. It caught the spirit of the age, and the spirit of Rochester. It started off with Johnny Depp's face, full-screen, saying 'You are not going to like me!' Absolutely right. Even by the end you did not like him.

There was a friendly note from the Master. The Governing Body had sanctioned the purchase from the Firkin Fund of copies of the manuscripts, up to a limit of £3,000. It had further authorised an honorarium of £1,500 to each of us, in recognition of our public-spirited actions. Well! I immediately sat down to order the necessary from the libraries concerned.

Prufrock's last sherry session of the term fell due. He had told us that he was a fan of malt, and of Islay in particular, and of Bruichladdich above all, and had lamented its strange unavailability in Cambridge. That being the brand which Rob liked least, we readily agreed to give him a bottle as a Christmas present. It was a good thing we took a gift. Prufrock, having accepted it almost tearfully, presented each of us with a case of good claret. Well! We had already moved into academic realms for which we had longed but hardly dared hope. Now we were moving into realms of good living to which we had never aspired. And he gave us something else even better, the wonderful news that both Hugo and Alex had been accepted to enter Christ's next autumn. To them we drained our glasses.

The college released its factual and sober statement, and the media had their salacious field day. Rob and I featured on television news. A photo of us, with Prufrock leering over our shoulders, adorned the national and local press under such devastatingly witty headlines as 'Ye Olde Porn.' That, we decided, must refer to Prufrock. We talked at length by mobile to Hugo and Alex and congratulations flew both ways. Complimentary messages arrived for us from Rob's parents, Charlotte, Old Persimmon, the Headmaster, and other old friends. Messages containing deviant proposals arrived from persons we did not know and did not want to know. A peevishly querulous message arrived from my parents. Freed from the vow of secrecy, I broached my suggestion to Emma who, as expected, jumped at it. She was on a four-year course and would still be around.

And so our first term drew to a close. It had, we agreed, been interesting.