I've been searching out some of the source material in Carson's
Red for some time now, but tripped over this one completely unawares. In the fragmentary propendix "Red Meat"--the very best part of the book, if you ask me (but then again I'm so modernist I'm modernest)--we get this:
III. Geryon's Parents
If you persist in wearing your mask at the supper table
Well Goodnight Then they said and drove him up
Those hemorrhaging stairs to the hot dry Arms
To the ticking red taxi of the incubus
Don’t want to go want to stay Downstairs and read
Geryon, of course, is about to be tediously molested by his older brother. Turn to
The Waste Land, 215ff:
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting ...
Eliot's meaning here is double--he's referring to the idle end of a workday when the body waits out the timeclock while the soul tenanting it fidgets homeward; at the same time he has something more sordid in mind, the vile tryst that follows to line 256 and the semi-automatic lusts that animate it. The image here is of the body on autopilot, soul wandering elsewhere: a psychosomatic helplessness. Now, "ticking" is the
vox propria of taxi meters, and Eliot's language is rather different from Carson's; still, I think there's good reason to believe that she was receiving Eliot here. Have a look at some
comparanda--In Eliot (235-38), the clerk makes his move at the end of the evening meal:
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired;
Endeavors to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
The parallel to Geryon's situation doesn't need much explanation--we see plenty of his passivity in the opening movements of the verse-novel, and though "unreproved" isn't exactly right the general sense is exact: unwanted after-dinner caresses at the burnt out end of the day. Now I'm not so confident about this one, but compare Eliot 223f,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins,
with the odd image at the end of Carson's fragment V:
Behind her red right cheek Geryon could see
Coil of the hot plate starting to glow[.]
I'm certain something else is going on--I have to confess that, semi-literate hack that I am, I haven't yet done the brainbreakingly obvious thing and
actually compared the fragments of Stesichoros with Carson's text--but I wonder whether this image isn't a bit of subtle signposting to direct us back to Eliot? In fairness, Eliot's kitchen runs on gas and Carson's is electric and--as far as I can tell--these fragments are otherwise unrelated; but I'll take what I can get. One more thing: Geryon's brother is in early puberty when he starts to molest him, so Eliot's epithet for the clerk--"the young man carbuncular" (231)--is appropriate to teenage acne as well. This is fairly weak stuff, of course, but I hope you'll accept it as ancillary for the moment and follow me back to Eliot's taxi. What business does Carson have with a poem so different from hers in ethic and style?
