ATDTDA (18): 489-493 "Line and Staff"

[John Bailey]

A quick recap of this chapter’s first few sections:
 
Cambridge:
 
1) Nigel and Neville are lounging in Trinity’s Great Court baths discussing Yashmeen and her recent liaisons with Cyprian Latewood.
 
(Incidentally, googling “Great Court baths” gives you one result - 
http://tinyurl.com/229gfz - from the kinda uninteresting writings of eminent Cambridge mathematician John *Littlewood*. Too Little, (not) too Late?)
 
They call Yashmeen ‘Mahommedan’ – presumably Islamic, but the ‘well some sort of Eastern wog Nigel’ echoes AtD’s general ambiguity surrounding Miss Halfcourt’s identity. 
 
Cyprian is a ‘sod’, too, according to the lads – sodomite, obviously, (though these same passages make it obvious that his love of Yashmeen is as complex as any Mahommedanism on the part of Y) but also, perhaps, obliquely referring to the ‘sod’ of earth.
 
Neville and Nigel have both been rebuffed by Yashmeen. They speak resentfully of Cyprian, but quickly turn to the topic of drugs – opium beer, specifically – and the production thereof. These guys are decadent, through and through. That tends to mean something in Pynchon’s novels.
 
2) Cyprian and two friends (Reginald ‘Ratty’ McHugh and some clown called Capsheaf) are hanging out in Ratty’s room smoking Balkan Sobranie cigarettes (though Sobranies were also manufactured in London from 1879?) and affecting an air of Wildean decadence.
 
Cyprian is recalling his father’s militaristic vision of his work as head of Latewood’s Patent Wallpapers, and his paranoid notions towards traitors in the ranks.
 
Cyprian says he’s in love with Yashmeen and all point out the obvious issues: C is gay, Y, probably, too. Cyprian employs Walt Whitman to defend his position.
 
P decides to draw our attention to the reference. Is it just me who finds it irritating that AtD sometimes highlights its intertexts with a neon sign? Part of the fun is getting it, and a sentence later it’s explained to you just in case you missed out.
 
Capsheaf and McHugh compare Cyps’ love to that of one Crayke, who fell for and is trying to marry a Shetland pony. Interestingly, I remember reading an essay by academic Linda Williams on early pornography, in which she mentions that the first erotic photograph was of a woman and a pony, widely circulated. I might be misremembering that; I’ll dig it up.
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