"DELITE IN SWYNES DRAF": Husks and Lees, Sugarbeet Pulp and Roses in Samuel Beckett's

"Draff"
Author(s): Chris Ackerley
Source: Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, Vol. 22, Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies
(2010), pp. 39-50
Published by: Brill
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25781914
Accessed: 15-02-2018 07:59 UTC

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 "DELITE IN SWYNES DRAF":
Husks and Lees, Sugarbeet Pulp and Roses in Samuel
Beckett's "Draff

Chris Ackerley

This essay argues that "Draff," the final story of More Pricks than Kicks, by
taking its title from the De Imitatione Christi of Thomas a Kempis, relates the
latter's metaphor of the fallen angels delighting in empty husks of grain to the
wider literary tradition and also to Beckett's own writings, all mashed with
apparent coarse disregard for tonal unity. This constitutes both a critique of
that literary tradition and a new way of handling in art the traumatic impact of
the recent deaths of Peggy Sinclair and Beckett's own father. The seeming
casualness of style works by indirection to achieve a new aesthetic that is both
satisfying swill and an unexpected reconciliation of sorrow.

Samuel Beckett concludes his 1934 essay, "Censorship in the Saorstat,"

his vitriolic attack on the Irish Censorship of Publications Board, with
the cynical reflection: "We now feed our pigs on sugarbeet pulp. It is
all the same to them" (Beckett 1983, 88). The metaphor may derive
from his short story, "Draff," written about one year earlier (Pilling, 43,
48), the title of which, drawn from Ingram's archaic EETS translation
of the De Imitatione Christi of Thomas a Kempis, invokes the lees of
grain left after brewing, husks fit only to be fed to swine. The original
refers to the fallen angels: "I sawe them delite in swynes draf' (Thomas
a Kempis, 83). In "Draff," the sentiment implies Beckett's scorn of the
verbiage that he casually throws before his readers, and, equally, a
disdain for any readers content with such slops. But where there are
swine there may be pearls, "pretiosa margarita, a multis abscondita"
(Thomas a Kempis, 108), "a precious margaret & hid from many," in
Beckett's translation (qtd. in Ackerley and Gontarski, 574), or, as the
protagonist of How It Is might say, crawling through the mud, "a little
pearl of forlorn solace" (Beckett 1964,43).
"Draff," like the later Watt that it in many respects heralds, has
"its place in the series" (Beckett to George Reavey, 14 May 1947; qtd.
in Ackerley 2005, 12), with respect to both the antecedent stories of

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 40 Chris Ackerley

More Pricks than Kicks and the broader trajectory of Beckett's writing.
"Draff," the tenth and final pricksong, concludes (albeit posthumously)
the romantic entanglements of Belacqua Shuah, and in so doing
farewells the several narrative traditions that inform the earlier stories.
Beckett suggested to his editor, Charles Prentice of Chatto and Windus,
that "Draff might be a suitable title for the whole, but Prentice
demurred, considering it too obscure. He suggested "Another 10,000
words, or even 5,000" to help the book out, but when Beckett came up
with the long short story entitled "Echo's Bones" he was suitably
appalled, and chose to publish the sequence without it (Beckett 2009b,
172-73).
"Echo's Bones" deals with the "post-obit" misfortunes of
Belacqua redivivus, the story largely set in the graveyard of "Draff
(Redford Cemetery, where William Beckett was interred on 28 June
1933). Should it appear in some future volume of More Pricks, "Echo's
Bones" would still, in Beckett's phrasing, be "recessional," a coda to
rather than an integral part of the sequence, wherein "Draff is clearly
the finale. This is not to deny "Echo's Bones" its rightful place in the
"series"; for it returns to Ovid's tale (Metamorphoses III.395ff) of the
nymph Echo, who, rejected by Narcissus, pined away and turned to
stone, permitted only a fading, imitative voice. The myth offered an
image, both visual and aural, for the poems Beckett published as Echo's
Bones and Other Precipitates (1935) - conceived as the calcified
residua of feeling and experience. The story of Echo and Narcissus
would inform Beckett's work for decades, from the early poetry and
Dream of Fair to Middling Women to the late television plays, which
kept invoking the shades and echoes (however effervescent) of what
once was. Had it been included in More Pricks, "Echo's Bones" would
have helped define the "series" by clearer reference to an informing
paradigm, and would have extended the variety of literary forms
displayed by Beckett, to include a more explicit and intentional
surrealism. Even so, it remains (or would remain) a coda, whereas
"Draff more deliberately brings the sequence to conclusion.
The stories of More Pricks than Kicks do not appear in precisely
the order composed, but Beckett's sequencing is not random. "Dante
and the Lobster" (1932), the second written (I follow John Pilling's
chronology), conforms quite closely to the model perfected in Joyce's
Dubliners - significant detail leading to a final epiphany - though the
last line, "It is not," violates the master's doctrine of impersonality as if
to suggest that the disciple, his apprenticeship completed, is confident

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 'Delite in Swynes Draf' 41

enough to add his own signature to the finished work. Therafter,

Beckett offers arabesques on recognised literary themes. "Fingal"
(composed April 1933) parodies James Macpherson's pseudo-heroic
Ossian (1762) by infiltrating it with the cruelties of a psycho-historical
landscape where much (from Swift to Sholto and the asylum) has been
suffered secretly. "Ding-Dong" (early 1933) is based on Dante's
Paradiso, in much the way that Joyce's "Grace" had used the
scaffolding of the Divine Comedy to ironic effect. "A Wet Night" was
drafted in 1932, but assumed its final form in 1933 (cannibalizing much
of Dream); again, there is a Joycean element (most obviously, the
parody of the ending of "The Dead"), but the satire is shaped by the
picaresque (Beckett had been reading Fielding and Smollett). "Love
and Lethe" (1933) parodies Ronsard and Rousseau, and the excessive
sorrows of Goethe's Werther. The first story written, "Walking Out"
(1931), placed sixth, is a nasty little parody of the pastoral, which
Beckett described to Charles Prentice as a "whore's get" (Beckett
2009b, 82). At some point he called on one of Peggy Sinclair's letters
for "The Smeraldina's Billet Doux" (see Pilling, 32-33), the publication
of which would cause his beloved Aunt Cissie and uncle "Boss"
Sinclair much distress. "What a Misfortune" combines the ironic
detachment of Candide with a parodic inflection of the entire romance
tradition - though I would question Pilling's suggestion of July 1933 as
the date of composition on the grounds that the satire is more literary
than personal (I do not hear, as Pilling does [43], in the che sciagura of
the title the echo of Bill Beckett's "What a morning!"). The dates given
are estimates only, my point being that the conception and drafting of
these eight stories was roughly in hand by early 1933 (though there
were significant adjustments, most obviously to "A Wet Night," as the
full set was compiled in July and August that year).
The composition of More Pricks took a crucial turn in May and
June of 1933, when first Beckett's cousin (and lover) Peggy Sinclair
died (3 May), followed shortly by his father (26 June). These deaths
shook Beckett considerably, but his artistic response was, at first
glance, unfeeling: he wrote "Yellow," the dubious hero of which dies
under the anaesthetic (as he, twice hospitalized for a cyst on his neck,
must have feared he might). "Yellow" is a shaggy, perhaps a pariah-dog
tale, one bad joke made up of dozens of smaller ones, every line and
detail an irreverence or an impertinence; it was probably drafted in
December 1932 or early 1933, after his first operation, but key details
(Tess, and life's other little ironies) derive from his second stay, which

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42 Chris Ackerley

coincided chillingly with the death of Peggy (see Beckett's letter to

McGreevy of 13 May 1933 [2009b, 157-58]). And at some point in July
or August 1933, using and abusing techniques not unlike those of
"Yellow," Beckett wrote "Draff," in which the attendant circumstances
of his father's death are treated with apparent mockery and comic
detachment. This superficiality is, of course, misleading; the deeper
truth, reflecting a technique that Beckett had already utilized in Dream
to conceal the pain of various failed relationships, is a hard-bitten mode
of parody that deflects deeper feeling; and the major invective is finally
that directed by the protagonist against himself. In "Draff," this
defensive technique is honed to a polished perfection, taking the form
of a pitiless burlesque of much that Beckett held dear.
The mockery is evident from the outset, the grief of Mrs Shuah's
friends giving zest to their bacon and eggs as they turn (before looking
at anything else) to the obituaries. The mechanical manner by which the
Smeraldina's "wheels of mourning" are set in motion to give rise to "a
slush, a teary coenaesthetic" (Beckett 1972, 175) echoes the "good
bye" at the outset of Dream, when Belacqua (the cylinders of his mind
abiding serene) works himself up to a "little gush of tears" (Beckett
1992, 4) as he bids her farewell, the roles reversed and a pretentious
"coenaesthesis" (from Nordau's Degeneration, ticked off in the Dream
Notebook [Beckett 1999, 96 #666]) applied to one without much
cerebral sensation ("What's that," she might have said, "something to
eat?"). This Mrs Shuah is introduced, her rivals from the other stories
having succumbed (to sunset, decency, or in the natural course of being
seen home), as the only sail in sight (the suggestion of Tristan's Isolde
is ingloriously inappropriate). Then, the reader is referred to her
previous letter (the billet doux) as evidence of her "quasi-Gorgonesque
impatience" (Beckett 1972, 176): Medusa would not be amused.
An unflattering portrait follows, one that sets the "little emerald"
of the Smeraldina's name (from Dante's Inferno XXXI: "li smeraldi /
ond' Amor gia ti trasse le sue armi" [the emeralds from which Love
once shot his darts at thee]) against a corporeal mass of enormous
breasts, the wretched little wet rag of an upper lip, a wedge-shaped
skull, and shafts of reseda (green eyes) that bore into an oreless mine
[mind]. Then the narrator superciliously proclaims: "But what matter
about bodies?" (176-77; the implied pun is "immaterial"). This is in the
vein of misogynist medieval catalogues of the female body as an abode
of sin and depravity (there are similar portraits in "A Wet Night"), but
the effect is (intentionally) crass. Further, the description is derivative,

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 "Delite in Swynes Draf' 43

taken almost verbatim from two passages in Dream (Beckett 1992, 15,
68-69). Beckett by this point had given up hope of publishing Dream,
but the question abides as to why he should plagiarise himself thus, as
the description lacking its anchorage in his earlier writing is gratuitous
to the point of offense, vicious without being funny. Husks and lees: the
passage illustrates perfectly Beckett's modus operandi, a passage that
sets out to offend the gentle reader by virtue of its unsolicited crudity;
yet it is equally a private critique, the satire directed less against Peggy
Sinclair than against the self that might have considered her (now dead)
in such unflattering terms. This self-directed outrage finally compels
reluctant respect (or at least curious empathy) for the deeper feelings
behind the superficial abuse.
One problem with this, at least until 1992 when Dream was first
published, is that the material shaping this revaluation was not in 1934
in the public domain. However, Beckett's recycling of the poem
"Malacoda" (published a year later in Echo's Bones and Other
Precipitates) illustrates the process more clearly. In the story, feeling
and decency are blatantly assaulted with the arrival of "a fat drab
demon" (Beckett 1972, 178), a "Mr Malacoda" respectfully desirous to
measure. Pilling notes that both "Draff and the first draft of
"Malacoda" were written in August 1933, that is, between the burial of
Bill Beckett (28 June) and the submission (early September) of More
Pricks than Kicks to Charles Prentice (Pilling, 43, 44). The natural
inference is that they were written in tandem, but my suspicion, which
only a vague appeal to "tone" can substantiate, is that the poem surely
came first (satire more naturally derives from good poetry than poetry
from burlesque). The details in the poem and story are virtually
identical (whichever came first), and the story is in fact structured by
the poem's triad: to measure, to coffin, to cover.
However, what few critics seem to have noticed is the huge
discrepancy of tone between the poem and the short story. "Malacoda"
is a moving tribute in verse from the son to his dead father as he
endeavours to shield the mother from the indignity of the undertaker's
man who, kneeling among the lilies in his black-tailed coat,
surreptitiously breaks wind, like the eponymous demon of Dante's
Inferno (Canto XXI. 139): "Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta" (And of
his arse he made a trumpet). The lasting image is one of gross
irreverence, but the poem is an act of homage from a son to a dead
father (the "imago," or adult butterfly, as the son's idealised image of
the father); it is desperately funny, but in the end (as it were) it is not a

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44 Chris Ackerley

joke (Ackerley 1993, 63). The feeling of loss and the agony of death are
intensified by echoes of the end of "Dante and the Lobster" (Beckett
1972, 22), as Keats's "Take into the air my quiet breath" (the Liebestod
of "To a Nightingale") fuses in a Beethoven pause (the coda of his
Opus 135 quartet) the mutuality of death ("hear she must, see she must"
... "It had to") and the unavailing cries of anguish ("Nay"... "It is
not"). Beckett was later dismissive of the piece, writing to McGreevy
on 8 September 1935 that "The Undertaker's Man ... never was a
poem," yet noting that "it has something that will not let me leave it out
altogether" (2009b, 273). I would be more emphatic: "Malacoda" is, by
any criteria, a small masterpiece.
If the poem is a devotion in art from a grieving son to a dead
father, how then to account for apparently identical details in the short
story, where the tone is casual to the point of insensitivity? The central
jest (the farting devil, the point of the allusion) is crucially withheld,
and a driver named Scarmiglione is present for the sake of an oblique
joke: the "strongly worded message exhorting him to temper full speed
with due caution" (185) is a long-winded variant of the poem's "Stay
Scarmilion stay stay," which in turn transposes Dante's "Posa,
Scarmiglione, posa" (Inferno XXI. 105). The echo (184) of "assistant
ungulata" is gratuitous (the "joke" neither contextualized nor
warranted); as is the inclusion of the final lines of the poem (185): "All
aboard. All souls at half-mast. Aye-aye," while inexplicably omitting
the final "Nay" (in the poem excrutiatingly essential). Curiously, many
readers of "Draff," fail to hear how radically different the two accounts
are, despite (or because of) their close similarity in wording. It is an
easy matter to 'explain' the effect: Beckett's grief, in the short story,
has been translated into irreverence as the only possible response to the
intensity of a loss that could be portrayed in no other way. However,
this alone does not account for the complexity of the emotion of the
story, which can be fully understood (I contend) only by reacting
against the gratuitous draff of the appalling prose, the husks and lees of
empty words from which all emotion (so intense in the poem) has been
extracted. For one moved by the poem, the "Malacoda" echoes in the
story are trivial and irritating, unfunny and insensitive; in a word, draff
Yet by a curious mode of indirection, I suggest, by playing off one text
against the other, a complex depth of feeling behind the contemptuous
and casual prose can be discerned, a minor-key miserere, and from this
arises the unexpected artistry of "Draff."

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 "Delite in Swynes Draf' 45

Contempt and casualness are evident in other references, many

quite minor. The Smeraldina's thoughts "on opening telegram con
firming advance booking in crowded hotel" (175) imitate telegraphese;
"scissor" (178) is a pseudo-pedantry; the parson who pedals away like a
weaver's shuttle (179) leaves open the teaser as to whether he rides a
Raleigh ("his rustless all-steel") or a Swift (as in "Sanies I," with
reference to Job 7:6: "My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle"); the
"moneyed wether" whose tale is almost told (179) will reappear in the
drafts of Watt as "Pompette," a form formerly divine but now a has
been that once might have been (see Ackerley 2005, 206 #4); and the
gardener, dazed and hopeless because someone has stolen his rose
(Beckett 1972, 179), is referring not to a flower (nor his virginity) but
to the perforated nozzle of his hose: an irritation that will assume
unwarranted proportion as this, combined with the later loss of his
broccoli-line (186), causes something to snap in his brain (189). This
example neatly illustrates the manner in which Beckett in "Draff hints
casually at the deeper Freudian depths that trigger irrational behaviour,
but in a manner that is completely banal, thus deflating the
psychoanalytical speculation towards which others (readers and
theorists) might instinctively incline.
Another manifestation of draff is gratuitous obscenity, much
deceptively innocent, such as the innuendo of the folding of Belacqua's
hands "lower down" and the unstated ambiguity of his rigor mortis
(Beckett 1972, 177). Nor is the behaviour of Capper Quin altogether
free of scurrility: while his name echoes (if that is the word) a trappist
monastery in Munster, he is, like Blazes Boylan, a "hairy" man (indeed,
the man in the gap, to continue the Joycean jest); and when he breaks
away from Smerry (180) like "carrot plucked from tin of grease" he
enacts a recondite obscenity drawn from the Journal intime of Jules
Renard (2 May 1892), who used it of two dogs: "Le chien se retira de la
chienne comme un carotte rouge d'un pot de graisse" (Beckett 1999, 31
#219). As for darling Smerry: she quickly develops "secret thoughts"
(Beckett 1972, 184) about her viduity: her life has been "springing
leaks," she reflects, and a husband is but "oakum in the end" (in the
end!!); or prophylactic, "a wire bandage of Jalade-Lafont" - a chastity
belt to discourage the young from "cette funeste habitude" of onanism
(seul, rather than a deux: see Beckett 1999, 66 #465; and Ackerley and
Gontarski, 282). By the end of the story (190) she is "more than ever at
a loose end," an ambiguity that will recur in the drafts of Watt, when
breeding famished dogs, of the need for an equal number of dogs and

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46 Chris Ackerley

"female dogs" lest one be "at a loose end" (Ackerley 2005, 119
#111.1). And when the parson arrives all in a "muck sweat" (185), only
the innocent will not hear an unfortunate echo of Joyce's Ulysses,
words used of (and by) Bella Cohen, madam of the bordello (others
might ponder a link between "casting out devils" and the Gadarene
swine, Circe and the crew of the black cruiser [see below]).
Nor does Beckett spare his own writing. The "superb shrub of
verbena" (1972, 180), for instance, is that into which Belacqua plunges
his prodigal head when he returns home in Dream (145). The body of
Belacqua (1972, 180) lies between Hairy and Smerry "like the key
between nations in Valasquez's Lances" (a pretentious intimation of the
'surrender' of the Smeraldina, as that of Breda). It is also likened to the
water between Buda and Pest, a "hyphen of reality" that glances
mockingly back to Dream with its "hyphen of passion" (1992, 27).
Details from the Dream Notebook are scattered like chaff: the six
cylinder hearse of Malacoda and Co., "black as Ulysses's cruiser"
(184), is a detail drawn from Victor Berard's translation of the Odyssey
X.244 (Beckett 1999, 103 #714), though no author could expect a
reader to appreciate that. The allusion to Cain (Beckett 1972, 185):
"That is what he was there for, that was what he was paid for," echoes
Belacqua's thoughts of the fugitive in "Dante and the Lobster" (12), but
only through the mediation (not available to early readers) of Dream
(130): "That is what he was there for, that was what he was spared for."
Beckett's use of the erudite, of details that others could not be expected
to understand (lacking access to the unpublished Dream, his notebooks
or his letters), and that hence lie on the surface "like lumps of marl
upon a barren moor, encumbering what it is not in their power to
fertilize" (let me illustrate the point by withholding the reference - but
see Works Cited) constitutes an ongoing sub-voce self-criticism. A
more blatant instance is the reference to the "competent poet" (Dante)
and his "bella menzoga" (Beckett 1972, 187), which echoes Beckett's
"From the Only Poet to a Shining Whore" (1930), and defines the
Smeraldina's "clandestine aspect" (her face, rather than the privities
that a more obvious author might imply) in terms as much of Rahab as
of Beatrice; the allusion is extended (188), very self-consciously, to the
theatre nurse in "Yellow."
The stories of More Pricks than Kicks, with their undercutting of
traditional and accepted modes of narrative, reflect Beckett's lasting
distrust of what he called "jigsaw," a word used in a letter of 22 June
1933 to Thomas McGreevy (2009b, 168) of literary structures in which

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 "Delite in Swynes Draf' 47

everything works out, plots that slide into place with a tidy click, a
Hardy-like reliance upon excessive coincidence, and forms which
contain the chaos all too neatly. Yet "Draff as a whole is an
ostentatious manifestation of jigsaw, with respect both to the unsubtle
way that it engages with other stories in the volume, and in terms of its
own structure. Above, I discussed the casual identification of the
present "Mrs Shuah" and Beckett's blatant pilfering of his own Dream
material for her description; it should be added that once the
obviousness is acknowledged the wit arises from the fringe (Winnie lost
to decency is a particularly nice touch). Key phrases assume a
resonance that arises from the sense of deja-vu: when Hairy addresses
the corpse of Belacqua (1972, 181), he uses the phrase, "the bowels of
the earth," echoing the end of "Dante and the Lobster" (21), and, by
implication, the common bond between Belacqua and the boiled beast
(the "queer old lesson" is perhaps another such echo).
The most blatant click of the jig-saw occurs near the end of the
story:

Little remains to be told. On their return they found the house in

flames, the home to which Belacqua had bought three brides a
raging furnace. It transpired that during their absence something
had snapped in the brain of the gardener, who had ravished the
servant girl and then set the premises on fire. He had neither given
himself up nor tried to escape, he had shut himself up in the tool
shed and awaited arrest.
(189)

It is all so casual: a rape ("Mary-Ann" - what other name could a

servant girl have?), arson, and the inevitable consequences thereof, the
gardener, having "resisted arrest" (oh, yes), has been taken to hospital,
and the Tara Street Cossacks, aka the Dublin Fire Brigade, have not yet
ridden to the rescue ("antiphlogistic" is good). Yet this (in parody) is
the very scene that underlies "Dante and the Lobster," and thus, in one
sense, the matrix of the entire sequence, returning to, or rather forming
a prequel to the events that led to the arrest and trial of Henry McCabe,
who will soon "get it in the neck" (21). Thus the last pages, an
outrageous gloss on Marlowe's or Raleigh's shepherds to their loves -
but see also Beckett's poem, "Hell Crane to Starling," or Leopold
Bloom's reflection in the "Hades" chapter of Ulysses that a cemetery is
the best place to pick up a young widow) - is played out against a

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48 Chris Ackerley

backdrop already familiar to the reader, but in a more deeply tragic

vein, from the first story of the collection. The click of the jig-saw, as
the picture is completed, is metallic indeed.
The story ends happily ever after, as good stories should, in the
boneyard by the sea, but the lovers do not have the final word. Indeed,
neither can recall what the final word should be, the inscription that
Belacqua had once indicated that he "would have endorsed" (190) to
gratify his corpse. The missing words are, almost certainly, "vox et
praeterea nihil," a voice and nothing more, as (saith Brewer) the
Lacedemonian said of one who plucked a nightingale, the implied
epitaph neatly returning the ending to the story of Echo. Yet even that
is not the last word, for, in a ricorso of the gardener and his stolen rose,
a poetic resonance that is intentionally hollow, the final reflection is
that of the gravedigger (in "Echo's Bones" named Mick Doyle), his
meditation on mortality recalling (with an ostentatious comma)
Fontanelle's "storiette" as recorded in Diderot's Le reve de d'Alembert
(1769), that no gardener has died, comma, within rosaceous memory
(see Ackerley and Gontarski, 9). But (after the text falls silent) even
that is not the end of the echo: it recalls the whisky's grudge against the
decanter in Proust (21); and is heard in the Addenda of Watt (222)
where Watt is described as "an old rose now, and indifferent to the
gardener"; or, back to the rosa mundi, in Merrier and Cornier (34),
where the rain falls as from the rose of a watering pot.
"Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus" (to echo Eco);
in crude traduction, the old rose has been stolen, only the memory
remains. Prefering nominalist irony to piety and reverence as a way of
confronting the traumatic effect of his father's death, and passing, as it
were, through the looking-glass that remained after his father had gone
(a poignant image in the sixth of the later Texts for Nothing), Beckett
required in "Draff a new aesthetic to express by indirection both his
love for his father and the enormity of his going. The challenge had
been laid down in Chaucer's "Legend of Good Women," as recorded in
the Dream Notebook (Beckett 1999, 170 #1167):

But yit I say, what eyleth thee to wryte

The draf of stories, & forego the corn?

"Draff," in these terms, of grain stripped of moral goodness, is the

natural conclusion to More Pricks than Kicks. Having farewelled the
Joycean epiphany and other traditions of narrative, and preferring what

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 'Delite in Swynes Draf' 49

he had called in Dream an "involuntary unity" (132), Beckett's problem

was to find the form(s) to embrace the ignorance and impotence that
already he was beginning to own as his own. "Yellow" offered one
answer; "Draff implies another. It establishes its "place in the series"
as an ironic gathering of the stories before it (including the unbloomed
Dream) but also as a broccoli-line set for others as yet unsown. "Draff,"
then, is Beckett's considered response to Chaucer's challenge, and a
fine early example of what would be taken much further in Beckett's
fiction to come, namely what might be termed 'the aesthetics of the
shabby.' By this I mean the complex coenaesthesis that arises when
intimate care and loving attention is lavished and slopped on the
ostensibly unworthy, and where phrase-bombs fizzle {Murphy and Watt
would be the next recipients of the same grace). "Draff," like "Yellow,"
is a shabby little shocker (as Puccini's Tosca was famously dismissed):
casual, contemptuous, derivative, dyspraxic, irreverent, irritating,
obscene, obvious, scandalous, scurrilous, unfunny... [that's enough
adjectives - Ed.\ and as such simply sumptuous. Draff it may be, but
for some poor foolish fallen angels it remains an eternal delight.

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 50 Chris Ackerley

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