Excerpt 2: THE BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BRIFFAULT

Robert Stephen Briffault (1876-1948), British anthropologist and novelist, was born in London and educated privately in Florence, Italy. He later studied medicine at the University of London. After World War I, Briffault began to establish his reputation as an anthropologist. His most notable anthropological work is The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions (1927), a controversial attempt to prove that all simply structured cultures are basically matriarchal. Briffault's other anthropological writings include The Making of Humanity (1919; revised, Rational Evolution, 1930) and Sin and Sex (1931).
Robert Briffault is also the author of The Decline and Fall of the British Empire; Breakdown: The Collapse of Traditional Civilization; Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions; Europa: The Days of Ignorance (novel); Europa in Limbo (novel); Marriage Past and Present; and Troubadors.
Briffault served as a physician at Gallipoli and Passchendaele (Ypres 3rd)

THE BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BRIFFAULT is an iambic dramatic radio play by the current editor of Ulysses' Friezes.
An excerpt:

O! might Callisto pine, and ever hight the microline!
the sheets are washed and washed again, once again, and once again,
to enwrap displacèd gores, misshapen skins,
the flaming rags and bones,
the farting heart which flat plops still,
while other boys wait for the dawning of dawn’s first light,
by which means of transport this one will perish and this one will see supper,
and this one will only know of living throbbing and grief
and the surest grasp of absent clemency,
three sorts of souls afried and poached,
and slurried off the table meal.

The songs came up from Spain,
in which crucible of contested courts of love
black gentlemen pled to sing of blackbirds and blooms,
the merry delights of unsophisticated gathering,
drinking, singing, and joys unnamed.
Night for days, festal feast of visions, bread and wine,
a russeted claret, the croissant,
crescented barged across the Mediterranean Sea.
Now the season leans to dimming,
and the leaves scape to earth;
the slanted sun steals light from sported vespers,
gloom hushes birdsong song and whistles,
we can but rest,
we can but convalesce,
we can but wake to snowy bullets raining.
We muse in gape and stupor,
that they have arms enough and man for drawing to the maelstrom,
for falling in the tempest,
and for laying out the casks of bleaching ire,
wrapped embalming,
bitt’rest blood.