Word: ellen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Ellen conceives of her story as a tribute to "my poor dear, dead dad," and that is pretty much what she provides. Billy Henshaw inherits sole responsibility for his young daughter after his wife and son die during the influenza epidemic that swept through Britain in World War I. "My dad always called himself not a pianist but a pianoplayer," Ellen recalls. "Pianoplayer gives you the idea of him and the instrument being like all one thing, jammed together." Billy makes his way by accompanying the silent films at a Manchester movie house during the mid-1920s. Unfortunately, he possesses...
...father next fetch up in the English seacoast resort of Blackpool, where Billy has caught on with a music-hall troupe. He gets in trouble there too, falling for the company's soubrette, stage-named Maggie Paramour, who is married to a violinist in the same motley ensemble. Ellen, by this time nubile and knowing beyond her years, sees trouble coming from several directions, but not the sexual ambush by Mr. Flushing, whose wife owns the boarding house where she and her father stay and where Billy has fallen a wee bit behind in paying the bills. After this rude...
That she does, later, as a lady of pleasure, madam and finally founder of an international chain of Schools of Love. But Ellen's experiences are no more colorful than her manner of reporting them. Burgess turns his heroine's "Uneducated English" into a marvelously supple and comic tool of exposition. When she recalls the job that finally did her father in, a pianoplaying marathon in Blackpool, Ellen tries to give some sense of Billy's repertoire during his last 15 days at the keyboard; several pages of song titles follow, including Beethoven's Mignonette in G, the Pilgrim...
Despite her little learning, Ellen is something of a student of the language. She ponders little oddities of British speech: "I wonder why everything always has to be nice, a nice cup of tea, a nice plate of bread and butter." Not surprisingly, the term brothel attracts her attention: "That is a terrible word and yet also a funny word, kind of domestic in a way, it always brings back my aunt saying when I was a kid living with her: Drink it all up now, that broth'll stick to your ribs." She looks at stale sayings with...
Best of all, she makes her disreputable old father seem oddly heroic and their life together, despite the troubles, a comic romp. To read The Pianoplayers is to understand Ellen's observation, gleaned from watching those music-hall routines at Blackpool, on the infectious quality of laughter: "Once an audience starts they'll go on all night...