Briar Rose & Spanking the Maid

by Robert Coover

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  Briar Rose and Spanking the Maid

  Robert Coover is the author of some twenty books of fiction and plays, his most recent being Noir and A Child Again. He has been nominated for the National Book Award and awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, including the William Faulkner Award, the Rea Lifetime Achievement Award for the Short Story, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and elsewhere. At Brown University, he teaches ‘Cave Writing’ (a writing workshop in immersive virtual reality), and other experimental electronic writing and mixed-media workshops, and directs the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write programme. Coover currently splits his time between the United States of America and London. Pricksongs & Descants, Gerald’s Party and Briar Rose and Spanking the Maid are all published in Penguin Modern Classics.

  John Banville’s novels include The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable and, his latest, The Infinities. He won the Man Booker Prize 2005 for The Sea. He has written screenplays, has adapted three of Heinrich von Kleist’s dramas into English, and reviews for, among others, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian and the Irish Times. He lives in Dublin. Awards include the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tate Black Memorial Prize. He has also received a Lannan Foundation fellowship.

  ROBERT COOVER

  Briar Rose and Spanking the Maid

  with an Introduction by John Banville

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Briar Rose first published 1996

  Spanking the Maid first published 1982

  Published together in Penguin Classics 2011

  Copyright © Robert Coover, 1982, 1996

  Introduction © John Banville, 2011

  A different version of Briar Rose appeared in Conjunction 26

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-19300-7

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Briar Rose and Spanking the Maid

  Introduction

  Robert Coover is one of America’s finest stylists, a master of elegant nuance, subtle intent and darkly subversive humour. His abiding theme, strongly discernible in these two wonderful novellas, is the gap that lies between our notions of the world and the world’s stubborn and consternating reality, and, further, the way in which that reality keeps on slyly asserting itself through the intricate elaborations of myth and fairy tale. A self-conscious artist, fully aware of his vocation and ruefully accepting of its demands, he is that rarest of things, a poet in an age of prose.

  Nowhere is his artistry more in evidence, and the price it exacts more amply accepted, than in Spanking the Maid. Fashioned in the form of an eighteenth-century handbook of sado-masochist techniques –‘There are manuals for this’– it is a metaphor, exact and exhausting, of the long and painful process by which a work of art is brought into quivering existence. Any reader who cares to know just what it is like to write a novel will be well instructed here, and will come away from the experience suitably chastened, cheeks aglow from a lesson expertly administered.

  As with writing, it is the relentlessness of the chastiser’s enterprise that impresses, the grinding daily repetition of an action that may have started out in frenzies of desire and delight but that has hardened into the dull toils of a duty deeply resented but wholly unshirkable. The maid enters her master’s bedroom anew each morning with her ‘mop and bucket, broom, rags and brushes’, determined that today she will perform every last little chore correctly, with rigorous exactitude, so that the man waking groggily in his bed from yet another night of confused and painful dreaming will be pleased with her, entirely pleased, and this time will not have to make her bend over and thrash her bared bottom until the welts spring up and blood is drawn.

  ‘How did it all begin, he wonders. Was it destiny, choice, generosity? If she would only get it right for once, he reasons, bringing his stout engine of duty down with a sharp report on her brightly striped but seemingly unimpressionable hinder parts, he might at least have time for a stroll in the garden.’

  But perfection, as we know, is not of this world, and probably not of any other, either. The master as much as the maid is a captive of dire circumstance. ‘He is not a free man, his life is consecrated, for though he is her master, her failures are inescapably his.’ As Samuel Beckett, surely one of Coover’s exemplars, has it: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

  Coover has much fun with his long-suffering pair, master and maid, writer and writing, artist and artefact. He has discerned the comical absurdity that is the worm in the bud of all erotic works, and tweezers it out for our amused inspection. The very idea of the artist belabouring the backside of his cowering, flawed creation is a cause for laughter, not all of it unkind, for even as we laugh we cannot but feel for the poor fellow, harassed, still half asleep and plagued by the monstrousness engendered by his unceasing struggle to get it right. The fleurs de mal of his creation are discovered each day when the maid throws back the bedcovers: ‘Things that oughtn’t to be there, like old razor blades, broken bottles, banana skins, bloody pessaries, crumbs and ants, leather thongs, mirrors, empty books, old toys, dark stains.’ Just as daffodils and skylarks, so are such lowly things as these the stuff of art.

  In Briar Rose the hero, as we must call him, is also bound to an endless and thankless task. The work is a set of variations, Bachian in grace and Beethovinian in vigour, on the legend of Sleeping Beauty, called here Briar Rose. This time the subject is not art – although the art of story-telling is everywhere probed and tested, challenged and mocked – but the nature of romantic love. It is about much else besides, of course, much, much else, for all true works of art are myriad-minded.

  This obsessional roundelay too is funny, like Spanking the Maid, only funnier. Now the gap between what appears to us to be the case and what actually is becomes a chasm from which dark laughter rises. The hapless prince for all his energies is every bit as entranced and trapped as the sleeping object of his desire. Here we find him thrashing fruitlessly amidst the forest of briars that rings the castle where the enchanted damsel lies in expectation of his coming:

  ‘Though he no longer even wishes to reach her, to wake her, he continues, compelled by vocation, to slash away at his
relentless adversary, whose deceptive flowers have given the object of this quest the only name he knows. Though she remains his true love, salvation and goal, the maker of his name, jewel at the core, and all that, he cannot help but resent her just a little for getting him into this mess, which is probably fatal.’

  There is not one prince but many, all of them aspects of the dreaming girl’s hopes, desires, misgivings, fears. In one manifestation she cannot distinguish him from her father, in another he is the wicked fairy in disguise. In dream she senses his hands upon her, tenderly seeking out her secrets, then realizes that what she feels is not the touch of princely fingers but of the countless claws of the vermin that over the long years have come to nest in her chemise … And even when Charming does succeed in hacking his way through the walls of briar and penetrating the castle to where she lies, the momentous moment turns out to be a let-down. ‘My prince! You have come at last! Yes, well, it was a matter of honour, he said gravely, disappointing her. I did it for the love of love.’

  These two little texts, that bear themselves with such seeming lightness, have the dark resonance of folk-tales and the artful self-consciousness of modernist myth-making. The word ‘classic’ is much abused, but in this instance it is entirely apt. Coover is a magician, and these are his spells.

  John Banville

  for Pili & all her magic tricks

  He is surprised to discover how easy it is. The branches part like thighs, the silky petals caress his cheeks. His drawn sword is stained, not with blood, but with dew and pollen. Yet another inflated legend. He has undertaken this great adventure, not for the supposed reward – what is another lonely bedridden princess – but in order to provoke a confrontation with the awful powers of enchantment itself. To tame mystery. To make, at last, his name. He’d have been better off trying for the runes of wisdom or the Golden Fleece. Even another bloody grail. As the briars, pillowy with a sudden extravagance of fresh blooms, their thorns decorously sheathed in the full moonlight, open up to receive him as a doting mother might, he is pricked only by chagrin. Yet he knows what it has cost others who have gone before him, he can smell their bodies caught in the thicket, can glimpse the pallor of their moon-bleached bones, rattling gently when the soft wind blows. That odor of decay is about the extent of his ordeal, and even it is assuaged by the fragrances of fresh tansy and camomile, roses, lilac and hyssop, lavender and savory, which encompass him affectionately – perhaps he has been chosen, perhaps it is his virtue which has caused the hedge to bloom – as he plunges deeper into the thicket, the castle turrets and battlements already visible to him, almost within reach, through its trembling branches.

  She dreams, as she has often dreamt, of abandonment and betrayal, of lost hope, of the self gone astray from the body, the body forsaking the unlikely self. She feels like a once-proud castle whose walls have collapsed, her halls and towers invaded, not by marauding armies, but by humbler creatures, bats, birds, cats, cattle, her departed self an unkempt army marauding elsewhere in a scatter of confused intentions. Her longing for integrity is, in her spellbound innocence, all she knows of rage and lust, but this longing is itself fragmented and wayward, felt not so much as a monstrous gnawing at the core as more like the restless scurry of vermin in the rubble of her remote defenses, long since fallen and benumbed. What, if anything, can make her whole again? And what is ‘whole’? Her parents, as always in her dreams, have vanished, gone off to death or the continent or perhaps to one of their houses of pleasure, and she is being stabbed again and again by the treacherous spindle, impregnated with a despair from which, for all her fury, she cannot awaken.

  The pale moonlit turrets of the castle, glimpsed through the brambles, rise high into the black night above like the clenched fists of an unforgiving but stonily silent father, upon whose tender terrain below he is darkly trespassing, heralded by a soft icy clatter of tinkling bones. Unlike these others who ornament the briars, he has come opportunely when the hedge is in full bloom, or perhaps (he prefers to think) the hedge has blossomed tonight because it is he who has come, its seductive caresses welcoming him even as the cold castle overhead repels, the one a promise and a lure, showing him the way, the other the test he must undertake to achieve the object of his heroic quest. Which is? Honor. Knowledge. The exercise of his magical powers. Also love of course. If the old tales be true, a sleeping princess awaits him within. He imagines her as not unlike this soft dew-bedampened wall he is plunging through, silky and fragrant and voluptuously receptive. If she is the symbolic object of his quest, her awakening is not without its promise of passing pleasures. She is said, after all, to be the most beautiful creature in the world, both fair and good, musically gifted, delicate, virtuous and graceful and with the gentle disposition of an angel, and, for all her hundred years and more, still a child, innocent and yielding. Achingly desirable. And desiring. Of course, she is also the daughter of a mother embraced by a frog, and there has been talk about ogres in the family, dominion by sorcery, and congress with witches and wizards and other powers too dark to name. If there be any truth in these century-old rumors from benighted times, this adventure could end, not in love’s sweet delirium, but in its pain, its infamous cruelty. This prospect, however, does not dissuade him. On the contrary. It incites him.

  There is this to be said for the stabbing pain of the spindle prick. It anchors her, locates a self when all else in sleep unbinds and scatters it. When a passing prince asks who she is, she replies simply, having no reply other to offer, I am that hurts. This prince – if prince he be, and who can truly say as he/it drifts shapeshifting past, substantial as a fog at sea? – is but one of countless princes who have visited her in her dreams, her hundred years of dreams, unceasing, without so much as a day’s respite. None remembered of course, no memory of her dreams at all, each forgotten in the very dreaming of them as though to dream them were to erase them. And yet, so often have her dreams revisited fragments and images of dreams dreamt before, a sort of recognizable architecture has grown up around them, such that, though each dream is, must be, intrinsically unique, there is an ambient familiarity about them all that consoles her as memory might, did she know it, and somewhat teaches her whereto to flee when terror engulfs her like a sudden wicked spell. One such refuge is what she sometimes supposes to be a kitchen or a servery, else a strange gallery with hearth and wooden tub, oft as not at ground level with a packed earthen floor and yet with grand views out an oriel’s elevated bay. Sometimes there are walls, doors, ceilings, sometimes not. Sometimes she drifts in and out of this room alone, or it appears, in its drafty solitude, around her, but sometimes familiar faces greet her, if none she knows to name, like all else ever changing. Except for one perhaps: a loving old crone, hideously ugly and vaguely threatening, yet dearer to her in her dreams than any other, even courting princes.

  Well, old crone. Ugly. Thank you very much. Has that smug sleeper paused to consider how she will look and smell after a hundred years, lying comatose and untended in an unchanged bed? A century of collected menses alone should stagger the lustiest of princes. The curse of the bad fairy, yes. She has reminded the forgetful creature of this in her dreams, has described the stagnant and verminous pallet whereon she idly snoozes and croned her indelible images of human decrepitude, has recounted for her the ancient legends of saints awaking from a hundred years of sleep, glimpsing with dismay the changes the world has suffered, and immediately crumbling into dust. Her little hearthside entertainments. Which are momentarily disturbing perhaps, causing her charge’s inner organs to twitch and burble faintly, but nothing sticks in that wastrel’s empty head, nothing except her perverse dream of love-struck princes. Or maybe she knows, instinctively, about the bewitching power of desire, knows that, in the realm of first kisses, and this first kiss firstmost, she is beautiful, must be, the fairy herself will see to that, is obliged to, must freshen her flesh and wipe her bum, costume and coiffure her, sweep the room of all morbidity and cushion her for he who will come in
lustrous opulence. Alone, the fragrances at her disposal would make a pope swoon and a saint cast off, his britches afore, eternity. No, all these moral lessons with which the fairy ornaments the century’s dreaming are mere fancies invented for her own consolation while awaiting that which she herself, in her ingenerate ambivalence, has ordained.

  Though proud of the heroic task set him (he will, overcoming all obstacles, teach her who she is, and for his discovery she will love and honor him forever without condition) and impatient with all impediment, he nevertheless does feel impeded, and not so much by the heady blossoms’ dense embrace as by his own arousal which their velvety caresses have excited. They seem to be instructing him that the prize here without may well exceed the prize within, that in effect his test lies not before him but behind, already passed, or, rather, that the test is not of his strength and valor but of his judgment: to wit, to choose an imagined future good over a real and present one is to play the fabled fool, is it not? Perhaps that tale the countryman told that put him all on fire to engage upon this fine adventure was but a subtle ruse to lure him to the briar hedge and thus into this profounder examination of his maturity and aplomb. All about him, the swaying remains of his anonymous predecessors clink and titter in the moonlight as though to mock the naive arrogance of his quest (who is he to seek to ‘make his name’ or to penetrate the impenetrable?) and to call him back to the brotherhood of ordinary mortals. If it feels good, do it, he seems to hear their bones whisper in wind-chimed echo of that ancient refrain, and for a moment the hostile castle turrets recede and his eyes, petal-stroked, close and something like pure delight spreads outward from his thorn-tickled loins and fills his body – but then, pricked not by briars but by his own sense of vocation, his commitment to love and adventure and honor and duty, and above all his commitment to the marvelous, his passionate desire to transcend the immediate gratifications of the flesh and to insert himself wholly into that world more world than world, bonding with it indissolubly, his name made not by single feat but by forever-aftering, he plunges forward again (those turrets: where have they gone?), wide-eyed and sword raised high.