Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 1958-1961 9781138841451, 9781315732206

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Puzzles and Epiphanies

This book, first published in 1962, is a collection of twenty-four essays written by Frank Kermode between 1958 and early 1961, and are all concerned with criticism and fiction. Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 1958-1961 includes essays on the works of James Joyce, William Golding, E. M. Forster, and J. D. Salinger, amongst many others. This book is ideal for students of literature.

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Puzzles and Epiphanies Essays and Reviews 1958-1961

Frank Kermode

First published in 1962 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd This edition first published in 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1962 Frank Kermode The right of Frank Kermode to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 62015618

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-84145-1 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-315-73220-6 (ebk)

PUZZLES AND EPIPHANIES

Essays and Reviews lY58-1YOl

by FRANK KERMODE

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL London

First published I962 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane London, E.C.4 Printed in Great Britain by Cox & W)man, Lid London, Fakenham and Reading © Frank Kermode I962 Seeond impression (with eorreetions) Ij6;

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form 'lVithout permission from the publisher, exeept for the quotation of briefpassages in erititism

To KARL MILLER MELVIN LASKY STEPHEN SPENDER begetters of these ensuing

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CONTENTS

page ix

PREFACE I

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

I

II

ON DAVID JONES

29

III

THE MYTH-KITTY

35

IV

HUNTER AND SHAMAN

4°

V

COUNTER-REVOLUTION

45

VI VII VIII IX X XI XII

SECOND NATURE

(Faul ValCry)

5°

EDMUND WILSON AND MARIO PRAZ

55

NORTHROP FRYE

64

SILLIES

74

THE ONE ORDERLY PRODUCT PUZZLES AND EPIPHANIES

(E. M. Forster)

(James Jqyce)

PASTERNAK

XIV

THE INTERPRETATION OF THE TIMES

Isherwood and Anthony Powell) vü

86 91

A SHORT VIEW OF MUSIL

XIII

79

108 (Christopher

UI

CONTENTS

xv

OLD ORDERS CHANGING

(Allen Tale and GillSeppe

di Lampedusa)

131

XVI

HENRY MILLER AND JOHN BETJEMAN

14°

XVII

BECKETT, SNOW, AND PURE POVERTY

155

MR. W AUGH'S CITIES

164

MR. GREENE'S EGGS AND CROSSES

176

XVIII XIX

xx

FIT AUDIENCE

(J. D. Salinger)

188

MR. WILSON'S PEOPLE

193

WILLIAM GOLDING

19 8

XXIII

DURRELL AND OTHERS

2.14

XXIV

NABOKOV'S BEND SINISTER

2.2.8

XXI XXII

viii

PREFACE

THE essays in this book were written between 1958 and early 196 I, and are all concerned with modern criticism and fiction. Only the first piece is much changed since its first publication, and that merely because it was abridged for The Partisan Review and here resumes its originallength. Comparing these attempts with other essays of the same years on subjects more frequently cultivated by men of my profession, I see that although they are much lighter in tone there is little room for doubt that they can easily be identified as-to borrowan unpleasant expression of Valery'ssales baisers du professeur de litterature. The collection itself has the unhy imposed upon it by a limited mind of promiscuous habit. On one of these essays I may allow myself a defensive word. The article on Dr. Zhivago appeared on the day of English publication, and there are certainly better introductions to the book by later writers who can read Russian. But I have included the review simply because it was written before the novel was obscured by storms of irrelevant comment upon its politics, and upon the award of the Nobel Prize to Pasternak. One could see it more steadily at that moment before the storm broke. The other essays on Pasternak were based on earlier works of his which were published here after the success of Dr. Zhivago. The last of them is an obituary notice written for The Spectator. It repeats some points made earlier, but I think with good reason; and I believe we cannot be too often reminded of them. I am most grateful to my wife and to Mr. Bernard Bergonzi; and to the editors of the following publications for permission to reprint essays which first appeared in their journals: Encounter, The Spectator, Thc London Magazine, Partisan Review, The Listener, Thc Review of English Studies, Tbe Review 0/ English Literature, The ix

PREFACE

International Literary Annual. To the editors of Encounter and to Karl Miller, sometime Literary Editor of The Spectator, I owe a special debt, since a large number of these essays were written at their express invitation; and in my dedication I do what I can to show gratitude. FRANK KERMODE

April, IgoI

NOTE TO THE SECOND IMPRESSION My essay on Musil contains a misleading passage, and I take this chance of correcting it. It occurs on p. 100, where I refer to extant parts of The Man Without Qualities not yet translated into English. I now leam from Musil's translators that the 'posthumous' part of the novel in Gesammelte Werke, Bd. I is largely an arbitrary compilation of miscellaneous work-sheets and obsolete drafts. Some of this never had any connexion with Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and the whole in no way represents Musil's intentions. I am greatly indebted to Miss Eithne Wilkins (Mrs. Ernst Kaiser) for this information. She and her husband are now editing the posthumous material.

x

Why, with the time, do I not glance aside To new-found methods and to compounds strange? SHAKESPEARE

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I POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

DIAGHILEV figures in the title simply as a terminus; he arrived in Paris in 19°9, and everybody knows what happened. ' Le rlve de Mallarme se rlalise', said Gheon. What dream of Mallarme? That which found a true theatrical sonority, a stage liberated from cardboard falsities; which emerged from a confluence of the other arts and yet remained, as Wagner did not, theatre. The Ballets Russes demonstrated the correspondence of the arts so wonderfully that in comparison Wagner's effort was, said Camille Mauclair, 'une gaucherie barbare'. Diaghilev arrived, not a moment too soon, in response to prayers from both sides of the Channel. One could trace the developments in taste which prepared his receptionnot only in the limited sphere of the dance, but in writings on actors (the cult of Duse, for example), in the fashionable admiration for oriental art and theatre, in avant-garde agitation for theatrical reform. In March, 19°8, The Mask, a quarterly dedicated to this end and strongly under the influence of Gordon Craig, prayed in its opening editorial for a religion that did not 'rest upon knowledge nor rely upon the Word' but rather brought together , Music, Architecture, and Movement' to heal 'the Evil ... which has separated these three Arts and which leaves the world without a belief'. The editor can hardly have expected his prayers to be answered so soon-not precisely by the theatrical reforms he had in mind, but by the Russian dancers, prophets of that Concord and Renaissance he so earnestly requested. Havelock Eilis, with his usual wide view, put the situation thus in The Dance of Life (1923): 'If it is significant that Descartes appeared a few years 1

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

after the death of Malherbe, it is equally significant that Einstein was immediately preceded by the Russian Ballet.' EIlis makes Diaghilev a John the Baptist of a 'classico-mathematical Renaissance', and the notion that this was a renaissance of some kind or other was evidently in the air. However, such credit as is due to its heralds should not all be awarded to the Russian ballet. There was, obviously, Isadora Duncan; but Isadora doesn't take us to the root of the matter. Where, for my purposes, that lies, I can perhaps suggest in this way: what Camille Mauclair said of Diaghilev was somewhat disloyally said, for he had used almost the same words years before of the American dancer Loie Fuller. Art, he declared, was one homogeneous essence lying at the root of the diversified arts, not a fusion of them; and Loie Fuller was it, 'a spectacle ... which defies all definition ... Art, nameless, radiant . • . a homogeneous and complete place . . . indefinable, absolute ... a fire above all dogmas '. The language is Mallarmean; as we shall see, it was all but impossible to write of Loie Fuller otherwise unless you were very naive. Still, not even Mallarme could start a renaissance single-handed, and there has to be a word or two here about whatever it was that predisposed everybody to get excited in this particular way about dancers. The peculiar prestige of dancing over the past seventy or eighty years has, I think, much to do with the notion that it somehow represents art in an undissociated and unspecialized form-a notion made explicit by Yeats and hinted at by Valery. The notion is essentially primitivist ; it depends upon the assumption that mind and body, form and matter, image and discourse have undergone a process of dissociation, which it is the business of art momentarily to mend. Consequently dancing is credited with a sacred priority over the other arts, as by Havelock EIlis (whose essay is valuable as a summary of the theoretical development I am now discussing) and, with less rhapsody and more philosophy, by Mrs. Langer in the twelfth chapter of Feeling and Form and (more flatly) in the opening essay of Problems of Art. In view of this primitivizing, it is worth remembering that the increase of prestige was contemporaneous with a major effort by anthropologists, liturgiologists, and folklorists to discover the roots of the dance in ritual of all kinds, and also with the development of a certain medical interest in dancing. We are all familiar with the interest shown by the generation of Valery and that of Eliot in z

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

these matters; and from Eliot, at the time when he was busy with Jane Harrison and Frazer we can get some notion of how they struck the literary imagination. Here, for instance, is a passage from an uncollected Criterion review of two books on dancing: Anyone who would contribute to our imagination of what the ballet may perform in future ... should begin by a elose study of dancing among primitive peoples .... He should also have studied the evolution of Christian and other liturgy. For is not the High Mass-as performed, for instance, at the Madeleine in Paris-one of the highest developments of dancing? And finally, he should track down the secrets of rhythm in the still undeveloped science of neurology. Mr. Eliot found the Noh plays exciting and praised Massine for providing in the ignorant modern theatre that rhythm regarded as essential by Aristotle. But the peculiar modern view could hardly have been developed before dancing became an accredited fine art; and the date for this seems to be 1746, when Batteux ineluded it among the five with music, poetry, painting and sculpture. The general and developing Romantic tendency was to give music pre-eminence as being non-discursive, 'autonomous' as the word now is, referring to nothing outside itself for meaning; poems would be like that if there were not a basic flaw in their medium, the habit that words have of meaning something in ordinary usage. But some of this prestige was undoubtedly captured by dancing; it is more 'natural' and more 'primitive' than music, more obviously expressive of what Mrs. Langer calls , patterns of sentience ' and ' the mythic consciousness ' . I use this late terminology because it is careful enough to avoid certain radical confusions. The dance, though expressive, is impersonal, like a Symbolist poem that comes off. Miss Deirdre Pridden1 finds the proper word to be Ortega y Gasset's ' dehumanization'; the dancer 'vide la danse, autant que faire se peut, de son humaine matiere'. Something might here be said about organicist theories of expressiveness in Modern Dance, opposed not only to conventional ballet (as Fuller and Duncan and Yeats were) but sometimes even to the use oE music as irrelevant to the Gestalt oE the dance; the source of these theories is Delsarte, but they have been much refined. However, there is no disagreement from the fundamental principle 1

The Art of the Dance in French Literature, 1952.

3

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

that dance is the most primitive, non-discursive art, offering a pre-scientific image of life, an intuitive truth. Thus it is the emblem of the Romantic image. Dance belongs to aperiod before the self and the world were divided, and so achieves naturally that 'original unity' which, according to Barfield for instance, modern poetry can produce only by a great and exhausting effort of fusion. The 'nineties poets wrote endlessly about dancers, welcomed foreign troupes and prepared the way for the serious impact of the Japanese Noh in the next decade. 1 But they also enjoyed the dancers themselves, and regularly fell in love with them. Symons and his friends would meet the Alhambra girls after the show and take them along to the Crown for drink and serious talk; serious not because of what Symons called the 'learned fury' of these 'ma::nads of the decadence', but in a humbler way. This was the epoch of the Church and Stage Guild, Stewart Headlam's club for clergy and actors. Headlam believed 'in the Mass, the Ballet, and the Single Tax' and such was his balletolatry that he wrote a book on ballet technique. But he also believed that the liturgy must not continue to be deprived of dancing, and so laboured to make the stage respectable, that the stigma on dancing might be removed. Among the membership girls from the Empire and the Alhambra preponderated. Headlam was not original in his liturgical views, which may have gained currency from AngloCatholic propaganda for ceremonies not explicitly forbidden;2 however, he gives one a pretty good idea of what must have been a common enough belief in this passage from an article he contributed to his own Church Reformer (Oetober, 1884) in aseries on the Catechism: ... to take an illustration from the art of dancing, which perhaps more than allother arts is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, ordained by the Word of God Himself, as a means whereby we receive the same and a pledge to assure us thereof; and which has suffered even more than 1 It is quite untrue, by the way, that Fenollosa and Pound' introduced' the Noh plays; interest in them is at least as old as this century. 2 Mr. Ian Fletcher directs my attention to Sabine Baring-Gould's periodical Thc Sacristy (1871-2) where liturgical dancing is discussed with other matters such as liturgical lights and symbolic zoology, and to later ecclesiastical contributions.

4

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

the other arts from the utter antisacramentalism of British philistia. Your Manichean Protestant, and your superfine rationalist, reject the Dance as worldly, frivolous, sensual, and so forth; and your dull, stupid Sensualist sees legs, and grunts with some satisfaction: but your Sacramentalist knows something worth more than both of these. He knows what perhaps the dancer herself may be partially unconscious of, that we live now by faith and not by sight, and that the poetry of dance is the expression of unseen spiritual grace. 'She all her being ßings into the dance.' 'None dare interpret all her limbs express'. These are the words of a genuine sacramentalist ..• Tbe poet is T. Gordon Hake. Headlam knew Symons well, and also Yeats and many other 'nineties poets and painters. He seems, in his Guild and in writing of trus kind, to reflect rather accurately the liturgical, poetic, and music-hall aspects of trus renaissance of dancing. Tbe liturgical ingredient developed luxuriously in the border country of Anglo-Catholicism; witness R. H. Benson's essay, 'On the Dance as a Religious Exercise', an account ofthe Mass as a dramatic dance: The Catholic • • . is not ashamed to take his place with the worshippers of Isis and Cybele, with King David, and with the naked Fijean, and to dance with all his might before the Lord. The antiquarian interest culminated in G. R. S. Mead's The Sacred Dance 0/ Jesus (published in The Quest in 1910, but long excogitated). Trus was Havelock Ellis's chief source, and it is a work of great and curious learning, written in a long tradition of attempts to explain Matt. xi.17, 'We have piped unto you and ye have not danced'. Mead was most interested in the second-century I!Jmn of Jesus, but he deals with the Fathers and with mediaeval church dancing, with the liturgies of the Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches, and so forth. I doubt if Mead is taken very seriously by modern historians-he isn't cited in the large bibliography of Backman's ReligiotlS Dances (1952.)-but for a while he mattered a lot. Yeats, for example, went to his lectures. He was by no means the only zealous dance-historian of the time. Toulouse-Lautrec, who was not interested in these matters, bad an English savant thrown out of a dance-hall for plaguing him about antiquity; this could bave been Mead, but not necessarily. At a 5

POE'!' AND nANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

time when it was relatively easy for a dancer to acquire a reputation for learning, Loie Fuller was said on high authority (Anatole France) to be wise in the history of dancing; she took as her prototype Miriam, who, according to Philo, as quoted by Mead, symbolizes perfeet sense, as Moses symbolizes perfect mind. The presence of the savant in the baI teIls us something about the seriousness with which musie-hall dancing was taken on both sides of the Channel. From Symons and Goncourt one knows that it was so; and of course this was aperiod of elose relations between London and Paris. Yvette Guilbert often appeared in London, Marie Lloyd and others in Paris; it was fashionable to treat them both as very great artists. This cult of the musie-hall has been persistent; there is a elassie statement of it in Mr. Eliot's essay on Marie Lloyd (1932), and it still goes on in a London which has only one or two feeble surviving halls, constantly threatened with demolition. Nothing distresses some English intellectuals more than the elosing of a musie-hall. This attitude is a weakly descendant of a positive avant-garde reaction against commercial theatre in the 'nineties; failing dance-drama or über-marionettes, there were still Marie Lloyd and Little Tieh, defying cultural and social division, freely satirical, speaking with the voiee of the belly. Y ou could talk of Yvette Guilbert, who, according to Andre Raffalovitch, sang' the sufferings of those the world calls vile', in the same breath as the Duse. The Parisian music-halls were certainly not short of a similar intellectual rlc!ame, and had their place, as part of the metropolitan experience, with all the other pleasures devised for an elite that took its pleasures seriously-fine elothes, Japanese prints, neurasthenia. They are as important in the early history of modern art as folk-musie and primitive painting, with which indeed they are obviously associated. Our received idea of this world owes more to Toulouse-Lautrec than anybody else, and there is no reason to think it very inaccurate. The circus, the vaudeville, the baI, were serious pleasures; the primitive, the ugly, the exotic were in demand. The brutal patter of Aristide Bruant, La Goulue coarsely cheeking the Prince of Wales, the emaciated and psychopathie May Belfort, the cherished ugliness of Mme. Abdala; all are characteristic. The mood is that of the violent Lautrec drawings of Guilbert and Jane Avril, of dancers calling themselves Grille d'Egout or La Goulue, of cafe-concerts with such names as Le

6

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHlLEV

Divan Japonais and prostitutes with such noms de guerre as Outamoro. In this atmosphere all the dancers I am concerned with did their work, and were treated very seriously. Of a good many of them it was enough to say, as Symons did in his excited lines on Nini Patte-en-l'air, that they possessed The art of knowing how to be Part lewd, aesthetical in part, And jin-de-siCcle essentially. Symons was one of those Englishmen whose solemn Parisian pleasures were the admiration of Lautrec-Conder, the strangest of them, he often drew, superbly drunk in his fine evening clothes. But Symons was building an aesthetic in which dancing was to have a central place-the climactic essay is called 'The World as Ballet'-and so his interest was slightly different from the painter's. Lautrec was equally absorbed by La Goulue and Jane Avri1; but for Symons the former, a Messalina who wore her heart embroidered on the bottom of her knickers, was less important than the latter, who demonstrated that the female body was 'Earth's most eloquent Music, divinest human harmony'. Some time in the 'thirties a French exhibition, devoted to life under the Third Republic, showed Jane Avril and Loie Fuller as representing the Dance, and most of what follows is concerned with these dancers. Like Fuller, A vril had the reputation of literacy, and enjoyed the friendship of Lautrec, Renoir, Theodor Wyczewa, Maurice Barres. It is clear from Lautrec's posters that what interested him was the lack of conventionality, almost the gaucheric, in her attitudes, her being set apart from all the other girls. She danced a good deal alone, and not only in the solo variations of the quadrille; she designed her own dresses, and got some of her effects by whirling movements possibly leamed from the English dancer Kate Vaughan, also perhaps a source of inspiration to Fuller-she was well thought of in the 'eighties and later for bringing back long skirts for dancers. Avril, again like Fuller, lacked formal training and mechanical predictability; Pierre Charron said she was like une fleur balancee, troublante Au soufHe du vent chaud qui l'endort doucement •.. 7

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

Avril had special privileges at the Moulin Rouge; she alone was not required to take part in the quadrille. In the poster ToulouseLautrec did for her London season you see her waving a thin leg at a different angle from the other three dancers '; in other drawings she is alone, one leg seemingly twisted, the other held clumsily up, or circulating skinny and solitary in the shadow of La Goulue. Symons saw her dancing before the mirrors in the Moulin Rouge and wrote of her 'morbid, vague, ambiguous grace' in a poem called 'La Melinite: Moulin Rouge', which Yeats in 1897 called 'one of the most perfeet lyrics of our time'. The only possible explanation of this enormous over-estimate is the irresistible appeal of a poem combining the Salome of the Romantic Agony with Pater's Monna Lisa: Alone, apart, one dancer watches Her mirrored, morbid grace; Before the mirror face to face, Alone she watches Her morbid vague, ambiguous grace, And enigmatically smiling In the mysterious night, She dances for her own delight. But she had talent. Whereas La Goulue and others gambolled, says Francis Jourdain, Avril danced. 'L'arabesque !racee dans l'espace par uneJambe inspirceJ n'es! plus un signe vain c'es! une c'criture,' he says, echoing, perhaps unconsciously, a phrase of Mallarme. There is small doubt-and here lies much of her interestthat this dancer owed most to the alr of morbidity of which Symoris speaks, and specifically to the long time she spent in her 'teens as a patient of Charcot at the Salpetriere. This hospital, and particularly the ward of the grandes hystlriques, in which A vril had been treated for her chorea, was used as a kind of alternative to music-halls; Charcot and his patients welcomed visitors, and the symptoms ofhysteria1 were well known to a large public. Charcot is celebrated for having turned Freud 'from a neurologist into a psychopathologist', but despite his discovery that he could 1 Still thought of as a female disorder; Freud's Vienna paper on a male hysterie brought him a reproof from a senior who said that if Freud had known any Greek he would have seen that male hysteria is an impossibility. (E. Jones, Sigmund Freud, Life & Work I (1953) p. 254.)

8

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

induce hysterieal symptoms by hypnotism, and hls observation that certain nervous disorders were always a question of' la chose genitale', Charcot hirnself did not know as much as Freud was to learn from watching hirn. 1 He was greatly impressed by the resemblance between the symptoms of hls patients and mediaeval descriptions and representations of demoniac possession and obsessive dancing. He seems not to have known the theory, now, I gather, beyond dispute, that the saltatory epidemics were caused by ergotism, a disease brought on by eating blighted rye. As early as 1877 he wrote of an hysteria patient who had hallucinations of serpents and exhibited 'in an embryonic state and sporadic form, a specimen' of mediaeval dancing mania, emphasizing that the symptoms appeared 'in a rudimentary state' and were arrested by compression of the left ovary. In 1887 he wrote, with Paul Rieher, a book called Les Demoniaques dans l'art, in whlch he tries to show that the convulsions and dances of the possessed are characteristic of various stages in the hysterieal seizures he had observed, and of whlch he shows sketches. AvriI was never permanently cured of chorea, and had ample opportunity to observe her fellow-patients; whether by accident or design she seems to have reproduced some of the symptoms of hysterical dancing, doubtless in a rudimentary form, and I have no doubt that Charcot would have found Lautrec's famous poster' Jane Avril aux serpents' characteristic of hysteria (compare, for example, the sketch from Mazza da· Bologna on p. 72 of Les Demoniaques). 'Ambiguous grace', certainly; but the ambiguity was agreeable to a public much interested in 'neurasthenia' (an American discovery, but rapidly naturalized in Paris). Considered in thls light, as combining certain powerful aesthetic and pathological interests of the period, it is easy to see how Avril produced a frisson nouveau and encouraged the literati to love the hlghest when they saw it in the Moulin Rouge. Under these conditions it is not surprising that a good many dancers came to be associated with avant-garde movements in the other arts, and there was to be an ideiste dancer, Valentine de 1 Jones traces the development of Freud's psychoanalysis from this point. By 1892 he knew that 'sexual disturbances constitute the sole indispensable cause ofneurasthenia' (1. 282) (he gave up this word later) and by 1895, nine years after his studies with Charcot, the pattern was taking psychoanalytical shape. It was formed by 1897 (1. 294).

9

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

Saint-Point, who performed against a screen upon which 'geometrie shadows' were cast, l and a Cubist and Dadaist dancer, Nina Payne, whose dancing to jazz music greatly pleased the fastidious Levinson. The Cubism, he said, must have something to do with a strange cylindrical cotlvrechef she wore. There were also vaguely Vorticist dancers in Mme Strindberg's Cave of the Golden Calf in London just before the first war; we know that cut-outs and shadows were used (see F. M. Ford's novel, The Marsden Case) but the memoirs of the period are hazy about what went on, and Miss Margaret Morris, who certainly knows, will not say. Isadora Duncan was a' symbolist' dancer; but it is sometimes forgotten that she derived much that was admirable in her dancing from Lote Fuller, and this brings me to the most important of all these names, to the woman who seemed to be doing almost single-handed what Diaghilev was later to achieve only with the help of great painters, musicians, and dancers. Many living people must have seen Loie Fuller, but there is no book about her, except her own autobiography, and no powerful tradition, as there is for Isadora Duncan. The standard reference books are scanty and inaccurate, and so should I have been, had I not had the good luck to encounter Mr. E. J. Nicol, a nephew of the Miss Nolan who not only backed Fuller but carried out the famous experiments in textiles and dyes which were associated with the dancer's vogue. Mr. Nicol also belonged to Fuller's company as a child, and knows all about a great many matters which were kept secret, mostly of a technical sort. For all correct comments on such techniques in what follows Mr. Nicol is responsible, and for none that is incorrect. The rest of the material comes from diaries, newspapers, theatre programmes, publicity hand-outs, and the like; and, of course, the autobiography, Pifteen Years of a Dancer's Life (French edition, 1908; English, 1913). Loie Fuller was born in Illinois in 1862, under trying circumstances: she claimed to have caught a cold at birth which was never cured. She used this claim in much the same way as Isadora insisted that her character was predetermined from the womb (' Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and 1 She was a friend of Marinetti and wrote on the place of women in Futurism. Like Florence Farr, she eventually retreated to the East.

10

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and iced champagne'). Throughout her life, Fuller made much of her congenital ill-health and demanded certain extraordinary attentions. Mr. Nicol does not think she was particularly frall. A talented child, she captivated audiences with her songs at the age of five, and at the age of thirteen with her temperance lectures, during which she exhlbited coloured illustrations of the liver. Later she went on the stage. Her early career was undistinguished, but she gave a hint of things to come by forming her own company and taking it on a long, but disastrous, tour of South America. In 1889 she made her first London appearance in Caprice, which opened on the 2,2,nd October at the Gaiety and closed almost at once. She went back to New York. At this time she had played everything from Shakespeare to burlesque but she had never danced. In the early days of what is called Modern Dance it seems to have been a convention that all the best things happened by accident, like Ruth St. Denis's getting the idea of her oriental dancing from a cigarette packet. Loie Fuller encouraged the idea that she developed from one happy accident to the next. The first radical bit of luck came when she was acting, at a small New York theatre, a part in which she was hypnotized. To get the atmosphere right the management arranged for the stage to be illuminated entirely by green footlights, while the orchestra played sad music. During this hurriedly mounted piece, Fuller found herself on stage wearing a gauzy Indian skirt that was much too long for her. She says in her book that it was a present from an heroic admirer who later fell in the Khyber Pass; and she told a French historian that she got it from another girl. Anyway, she hit upon the idea of gliding hypnotically about the stage, holding the skirt up. To her surprise there were pleased exclamations from the house: '!t's a butterflyI', 'It's an orchid!' She danced around amid applause and then dropped ecstatically at the hypnotist's feet, 'completely enveloped in a cloud of the light material'. Next day she put the skirt on again and was studying it in a looking-glass when she noticed that sunlight made it translucent. 'Golden reflections played in the folds of the sparkling silk, and in this light my body was revealed in a shadowy contour'. Thereupon 'gently, almost religiously', she waved the silk ab out, and saw that she had 'obtained modulations of a character before unknown .•. II

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

Finally I reached a point where each movement of the body was expressed in the folds of the silk, in a play of colours and draperies that could be mathematically and systematically calculated'.l Such was the basis of her original act. She whirled about with her arms aIoft-later she extended them with sticks concealed in the drapery-as shown in Toulouse-Lautrec's lithograph-and the resultant spiral or serpentine effect she differentiated into twe1ve characteristic motions or dances, each carried out with different lighting. The lighting was provided by an e1ectric lantern with coloured glasses, another device she was later to deve10p to an extraordinary degree. The final dance was performed in total darkness save for a single ray of yellow light crossing the stage. From the outset she invited attention to these optical effects; she was never beautiful, and even in these days too plump for her shadowy contour to be an important part of her appeal. Thls was new, though she admits modestly that at this stage she was' far from imagining that I had hold of a prindple capable of revolutionizing a branch of aesthetics'. Her very ignorance of dassical technique was to contribute, with the hypnotic attitudes, the resemblances to natural objects, and the optical illusions, to her establishment as a living emblem of a new aesthetic. The act was almost immediately successful. 'Three cheers for the orchid, the doud and the butterfly l' cried the New York audience. But the New York managers were full of greed and 1 This story may not be absolutely true. In the Magazine 01 Art for 1894 there is an article by Percy Anderson, a man so anxious to harry the short skirt from the English stage that he made, for an opera called The Nautch Girl (Savoy, 1889) a copy of an 'eastern dancing-dress' in the 'Indian Museum'. 'The great quantity of material used, in order that the dancers might envelop themselves in billowy folds of drapery, seemed to be an obstacle, but the result was curiously graceful. A clever American dancer, who was engaged at the Gaiety Theatre, saw that the idea might be even further developed; so, with the practical instincts of her race, she sped across the ocean and appeared at the New York Casino Theatre in the now famous" Serpentine" dance which has set the impressionable Parisians frantic with delight.••• All this was the result of one dress, which is lying hidden in the security (or obscurity) of the Indian Museum.' This seems a more likely story, though Mr. Nicol doesn't accept it, and Fuller was not appearing as a dancer at the Gaiety in 1889. The truth may be that her having such a good idea owed a little more than she admitted to other dancers (like Kate Vaughan) and their dresses. But she made it her own.

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duplidty; she was at once plagued by imitators, some even using her name (a trouble she was to have for many years) and after certain vidssitudes and wanderings she found her true home in Paris, where she arrived in October, 1892. She was engaged to dance at the Folies-Bergere, and with a programme of five dances including the Serpentine she achieved a fantastic success, which was augmented later in the decade when she returned with new items. All over Europe and America she was imitated, but never successfully, largely because of the care she took to keep secret the technical apparatus upon which she depended. She was not overstating her triumph when she said that the usual audience at the Folies-Bergere was every evening 'lost amid a crowd composed of scholars, painters, sculptors, writers and ambassadors'. Outside the theatre, students pelted her with flowers and drew her carriage; the police, about to take brisk action against a procession obstructing drculation at the Madeleine, held their hands when they discovered that all was in honour of La Loie Fuller. At the time of her first success she was taken up by Rodin, who declared that she was 'a woman of genius, with all the resources of talent' and 'a Tanagra figurine in action'. She painted Nature, he said, in the colours of Turner; she was the woman on the famous Pompeian frieze. Anatole France, who wrote apreface for her autobiography in 19°8, called her' marvellously intelligent' but added that it was her unconscious that really counted. 'She is an artist ... the chastest and most expressive of dancers, beautifully inspired, who reanimated within herself and restores to us the lost wonders of Greek mimicry, the art of those motions, at once voluptuous and mystical, which interpret the phenomena of nature and the life history of living things'. Other admirers were the Curies to whom she later dedicated a remarkable dance. She knew anybody she cared to know. Pretty weIl all the theatrical artists of Paris represented her at this time, notably perhaps Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec, whose lithograph is probably the best of all; but she asked neither Lautrec nor Steinlen for posters, preferring their imitators. A pretty poster drawing by Cheret hung in her dressing-room. Perhaps she supposed herself too far from the real centre of Lautrec's interests; anyway, he soon moved on to more congenial subjects. Loie Fuller undoubtedly enjoyed all this. In a Paris that paid her 12.,000 francs a month and was full of women wearing wide 13

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Loie Fuller skirts, she expected a lot of attention. There is a note of rare disenchantment in an entry in Renard's diary (1901) which tells how he met Fuller in an omnibus, a shapeless figure too highly painted, sausage-fingered, with only the rings to make any divisions, an intermittent smile, as if everybody on the bus was the Public; vague myopie eyes. She was turned off the bus for not having her fare; Renard wanted to say, 'Mademoiselle, I know and admire you; voiJa dix sous I' But he did not. It is surprising to hear of her using a bus; she lived extravagancly. Her well-publicized hypochondria did not diminish. She took elaborate precautions against headache, and informed journalists that she was threatened with paralysis of the arms. Every performance ended in what looked like total collapse. Isadora Duncan, who never forgave Fuller for launehing her, does nothing to spoil the picture of Fuller as agreeably mysterious, hypochondriacal and queer. She speaks of visiting her in Berlin, where Fuller sat in a magnificent apartment at the Hotel Bristol, surrounded as usual by an entourage of beautiful girls who were 'alternately stroking her hands and kissing her'. 'Here', says Isadora, 'was an atmosphere of such warmth as I had never met before.' Puller complained of terrible pains in the spine, and the girls had to keep up a supply of icebags, which were placed between her back and the back of the chair. Judge Isadora's surprise when, after an expensive dinner, Fuller went off and danced. 'Had this luminous vision that we saw before us,' asks Isadora, 'any relation to the suffering patient of a few moments before ?' Fuller was cleady one to keep separate suffering and creation. M. F. J ourdain also vouches for the ieepack, but remembers it as wielded by the faithful Gab, a Mlle. Bloch who was for many years Puller's companionmanager, and who kept the company going after Loie's death in 192.8. (It survived, though in decline, till 1940, when the Occupation put an end to it; but something called the LoIe Puller ballet turned up in 1958 in a Prench film called Femmes de Paris). M. Jourdain testifies that every noise made Puller suffer, even that of conversation; when the level of noise increased she would hastily apply the icepack to her neck, and, begging for silence with a gesture of supplication, she would stop her ears.' Once he saw her rehearse. She did not take off her coat, but sat on the stage, placed the icepack on her neck, stuck her fingers in her ears, and signalled the conductor to begin. She then followed his gestures 14

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with her eyes, taking care to hear as little as possible of the noise she had unleashed. Then she went back to her carriage. Naturally the performances were a little more tiring, and she was carried home to bed after every one of them. Mr. Nicol says she had sinus trouble and loved overheated rooms; she was capable of arranging the kind of tableau Isadora came upon simply to impress visitors. As to rehearsal, she treated her company less tenderly than herself, wearing them out with all-night sessions. Mr. Nicol was suspended from the company for inattention during a long rehearsal, at the age of five. Fuller remained for a great many years enormously popular in the music-halls ofEurope. She conquered London, as they say, in 1893, appearing during the interval of George Edwardes's In Town, a show distinguished by May Belfort's performance of 'Daddy wouldn't buy me a bow-wow'. But this did not prevent the English intelligentsia from taking her quite as seriously as the Parisian; for instance, there is an odd poem in French, in The Cambridge ABC of June IIth, I 894-it did not last long but had a cover by Beardsley-which refers to the ' Varicolore et multiforme ' Fuller, and uses such expressions as 'une volupte proJonde . • . inqui#ant mystere', etc. The popular press found her both amazing and moral-her Mirror Dance showed eight Loie Fullers 'dancing as if they were the fabled victims of the Tarantula, the whole forming an artistic spectacular effect that the world has never seen equalled'; yet she made no 'gesture or movement which would offend the susceptibilities of the most modest-minded of British matrons or maidens'. Her long skirts seemed to bring about a long-needed rapprochement of Art and Morality. Quite early in her career she had built up a company, and her shows grew more elaborate. She had her own theatre at the Paris Exposition, and in it she introduced Sada Yacco to the European public. Yacco's success unlike Fuller's was not unmixed. Eventually Fuller built around Yacco her' Japanese company'-I think Yeats had this company in mind when he spoke of her' Chinese Dancers' in 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen', for she seems never to have had a Chinese troupe-and took them, with Isadora Duncan, on a tour of Germany. (Isadora left this 'troupe of beautiful but demented ladies' and struck out on her own, without ever rebutting the charges of immodesty, ingratitude, and treachery which Fuller laid against her.) 15

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A Prench journal of the Exposition period describes her as 'par/aitement double . .. ala vi//e petiteJ a /a scene grande • .. a very pushing woman'. By this time Mr. Tindall of Pearson's Week[y was willing to claim that ' she had given the world such ideas of colour as had never been conceived before; look at the pictures in the Paris salons if you would see some of the more striking effects of Loie Puller's dancing ... she ranks with the great geniuses of the ages'. But she went on appearing at the Coliseum, in (for example) a variety bill called 'La Miraculeuse Loie Puller in the Grand Musical Mystical Dances " which was itemized as follows: (I) The Plight of the Butterflies (Radium) (2) The Dance of the 1,000 Veils, this in live tableaux: 'Storm at Sea-Wrecked, Lost'; 'The River of Death'; 'The Fire of Life'; , Ave Maria'; 'The Land of Visions'. How two famous dances, 'The Butterfly' (subject of many photographs) and 'Radium', a dance in honour of the Curies, came to be conflated, I do not know. 'The Land of Visions', Mr. Nicol surmises, was a way ofusing up some photographs she had had taken of the surface of the moon. As time went by, she depended more and more on her company, but also upon ingenious optical effects. Before 1909 she had founded her School, and by 1912 the best dancers were allowed to take over her Lily, Serpentine, and Pire Dances. But the new dances were more and more abstract. Her troupe had a great success in London in 1923 with a shadow ballet called Ombres Gigantesques. There are some splendid photographs in the Sketch for 13th December of that year, the eve of a charity performance to be attended by the King and Queen. An enormous shadow hand plucks at the cowering dancers ; a vast foot descends to crush them. In other performances, for example in a ballet using Debussy's La Mcr, the dancers were not seen at all, but simply heaved under a huge sea of silk. One late dance' consisted solely of silver-sequined tassels being "dabbled" in a narrow horizontal shaft of light-the background and the performers being veiled in black' (E. J. Nicol). Other performers-Maud Allen is a notable though forgotten Salome-came and went; but Puller remained in the front line till her death in 1928. The career of Puller is unintelligible without some reference to her technical repertory. She had, of course, her own aesthetic

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notions, and claimed to have brought about a revolution in the arts. At first she saw the dance as arising naturally from music, but expressing human emotion best when unimpeded by training. 'The moment you attempt to give dancing a trained element, naturalness disappears; Nature is truth, and art is artificial. For example, a child will never dance of its own accord with the toes pointing out.' Rodin expressly agreed, and Massenet was so struck with the doctrine that he gave Puller unrestricted performing rights in his music without royalty. Debussy was also interested, and Plorent Schmitt wrote Fuller's Salome music (1893). But she very often used commonplace music, and it is hard to believe that her mature doctrine was either musicalor expressive. The line of the body, never, as we have seen, the principal exhibit in her performance, grew less and less important, and in the end hardly counted at all-witness those dances in which no human figure was perceptible to the audience. The story she tells of her stumbling upon a new art of illuminated drapes in motion-and this at the outset of her career-has the germ at any rate of the truth. In a theoretical chapter of her autobiography she has some reflections on Light and the Dance; she was greatly concemed with the affective qualities of colour and its relation to sounds and moods (speculations much in vogue at the time) and was once thrown out of Notre Dame for waving a handkerchief in front of a sunlit window. She maintained the opinion that 'motion and not language is truthful', a view not likely to meet much opposition among the poets of the time, but she did not mean the simple dancer's motions or even those involuntary gestures organized into art which are the basis of Modem Dance; she meant the manipulation of silk and light. With them she could penetrate the spectator's mind and 'awaken bis imagination that it may be prepared to receive the image'. Puller used in her publicity a remark by Pierre Roche that she was unequaUed as an electrician and used her coloured lights on silk with a painter's art. In fact in the earliest days of theatrical electricity she seems to have gone a remarkably long way towards realizing that dream of a Farbenkunst which had been epidemie since the eighteenth eentury. She was given great credit for her skill at the time, not only by aesthetes who thought of the whole thing as a transeendent suceess for eosmetics, but by praetical theatre people. Sarah Bemhardt eonsulted her. There was growing 17

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interest in the spectacular possibilities of electric light on cheap materials, but nobody else brought off what Mallarme called the 'industrial achievement' of substituting coloured light for all other properties, 'instituant un lieu'. The means by which she did this were closely-kept secrets. She put it ab out that one very striking effect was discovered by accident, when an electridan 'the worse for strong drink, threw two lights of different colours on the stage together' (Pearson' s Week!J). In fact, of course, she was intensely preoccupied, and most ingenious, with light. She used the carbon arc-lights and coloured gelatines with which the theatres of the period were equipped, but with colours of her own specification. More important, she designed large magic-Iantern projectors with slides of plain or frosted glass. The slides, which she painted with liquefied gelatine, were the fundamental secret, and only Fuller and Miss Nolan had access to them. Theatre men were not allowed to work the projectors, and the Company had its own trusted electricians. It was on such slides that she printed the photographs of the moon for the 'Nuages' ballet. The bewildering 'Radium' dance was done by projecting iridescent colour on to silks using first one multi-coloured slide, then superimposing another, and then withdrawing the first. When one thinks of her influence on future stage lighting, one should remember not only the Lyceum pantomimes in which she was regularly copied, but also that, as Mr. Nicol says, 'our whole modern system of projected stage lighting owes its origin to her ingenious mind'. Experiments with coloured shadows on the cyclorama, and also with mirrors, were natural developments of such interests. Her innovations were not confined to the lighting. She also did surprising things with silk. 'The idea of dyeing and painting silk in terms of abstract colour and not of pattern seems, undoubtedly, to have been Fuller's own,' writes Mr. Nicol. The work was carried out by Miss Nolan, and the dyed silks became a commercial success, still remembered as 'Liberty' silks. Mr. Nicol would credit Fuller with an influence on Gordon Craig and others; certainly we have been underestimating her during all the years when her revolutionary innovations were forgotten. One has a clear picture of a performer who converted dancing into something quite other, whose scenes and machines were of a new theatrical epoch. and whose gifts lay primarily in such inventions. 18

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Writing of a performance at the Theätre Champs-Elysees in June, 1922, Levinson said, 'Even though she has the insipid primary plastique, the scholarly Jaux-hCllenisme of the Anglo-Saxon (which forms an apparent link between her school and Isadora's) her personality is none the less fascinating ... She is a great imaginative creator of forms. Her drapes animate and organize space, give her a dream-like ambiance, abolish geometrical space ... Whatever belongs to the dance is ordinary; but taut ce qui tient de l'optique est plein d'intiret.' Levinson had no doubt that this was another matter entirely than 'Ies enJantillages caduces de Duncanisme et ces vaines danses d'expression'. It is a little surprising, therefore, that much of Fuller's fame derived from her ability to represent natural objects-moths, butterflies, lilies, etc. Dances of this kind were frequently photographed, and she kept them in her repertoire right into the 'twenties. The serpentine dance is part of the history of art nouveau; it would be tedious to make a list of the compliments paid her by distinguished men on her power to reveal fugitive aspects of nature. Certainly some of the photographs are impressively moth-like and lily-like. With this strain of compliment there was mingled a persistent note of praise for her Orientalism and her Hellenism too. Such contradictions, if they are so, may be reconciled in the aesthetic of a Mallarme; he wrote that the dancer was not a woman dancing but a metaphor containing elemental aspects of our form, sword, cup, flower, etc. And Symons, in The World as Ballet, finds in the dance 'the evasive, winding turn of things . . . the intellectual as weIl as sensuous appeal of a living symbol'. She was apower like one ofNature's, and her creation had the same occult meanings. The heart of this matter is, indeed, the chorus of poetic approval, and the terms in which it was couched. Consider, for example, the 'Fire Dance', a popular item from early days. She told the credulous Mr. Tindall of Pearson's Week!>, that this dance had its origin in an accident: when she was dancing her Salome at the Athenee (1893) she danced before Herod as 'the setting sun kissed the top of Solomon's temple'. But it also kissed her garments, and the public, always vocal, cried out and called it 'the fire-dance'. In fact this was merely another attempt to offset the cold electric calculations of Fuller. The Danse du Feu was lit from below stage, by a red lantern directed through a glassed-in trap. 19

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The effect was striking (Pearson's Week[y has some lurid coloured photographs). Fuller appeared to the music of the 'Ride of the Valkyries " shaking, we are told, and twisting in a torrent of incandescent lava, her long dress spouting flame and rolling around in burning spirals. She stood, says Jean Lorrain, in blazing embers, and did not hurn; she exuded light, was herself a flame. Erect in her brazier she smiled, and her smile was the rictus of a mask under the red veil that enveloped her and which shook and waved like a flame along her lava-nakedness. Lorrain goes on to compare her with Herculaneum buried in cinders (it wasn't, of course), the Styx and its banks, Vesuvius with open throat spitting fire. Only thus, he argued, could one describe her motionless, smiling nakedness in the midst of a furnace, wearing the fires of heaven and hell as a veil. Gustave Freville called her a nightmare sculpted in red clay. 'The fire caresses her dress, seizes her entirely, and, inexorable lover, is sated by nothing short of nothingness.' Years later Yeats was pretty certainly remembering this dance as well as Dante and a Noh play when he spoke in his 'Byzantium' of the dance as an emblem of art, caught up out of nature into the endless artifice of his Byzantium, the endless death-in-life of the mosaic: ....blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave; Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve. The 'Fire Dance' had all the qualities Yeats asked of the art, for not only was the dancer unconsumed, but she also wore the obligatory enigmatic smile. 'From this flame which does not burn,' says Menil in his Histoire de la Danse (1904), 'there leaps, between two volutes of light, the head of a woman wearing an enigmatic smile.' Menil, as it happens, goes on-as J ourdain didto question whether all this trickery of silk and electric light was really dancing at all, and he wonders how, from the vulgarity of the cheap glare and waving skirt, there could come this hashishlike experience. Goncourt's reaction was similar: 'What a great inventor of ideality man is I' he moralized, contemplating this 'vision of what is strange and supernatural ' yet has its origin in common stuff and vulgar lights. 2.0

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Other dances were greeted with equal rapture. Georges Rodenbach draws wide1y on Fuller's repertoire in his poem' La Loie Fuller', first published in Figaro in May, 1896, and warmly praised by Mallarme. It has fifty-eight lines, and is too long to quote in full, but here are some sampies : Dechirant l'ombre, et brusque, elle est la: c'est l'aurorel D'un mauve de prelude enfle jusqu'au lilas, S'etant taille des nuages en falbalas, Elle se decolore, elle se recolore. Alors c'est le miracle opere comme un jeu: Sa robe tout a coup est un pays de brume; C'est de l'alcool qui flambe et de l'encens qui furne; Sa robe est un bucher de lys qui sont en feu ...• Or, comme le volcan contient toutes ses laves, Il semble que ce soit d'elle qu'elle ait deduit Ces rivieres de feu qui la suivent, esclaves, Onduleuses, sur elle, en forme de serpents ... o tronc de la Tentation! 0 charmeressei Arbre du Paradis OU nos desirs rampants S'enlacent en serpents de couleurs qu'elle tresse I ... Dn repos. Elle vient, 1es cheveux d'un vert roux Influences par ces nuances en demence; On dirait que le vent du 1arge recommence; Car deja, parmi 1es etoffes en remous, Son corps perd son sillage; il fond en des vo1utes ••. Propice obscurite, qu'est-ce donc que tu blutes Pour faire de sa robe un ocean de feu, Toute phosphorescente avec des pierreries? ••. Brunehilde, c'est toi, reine des Wa1kyries, Dont pour etre l' e1u chacun se reve un dieu ...• C'est fini. Brusquement l'air est cicatrise De cette plaie en fleur dont il saigna. L'etreinte De l'Infini ne nous dure qu'un court moment; Et l'ombre de la scene OU la fresque fut peinte Est noire comme notre ame, pensivement. 2.1

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What Mallanne liked about this was the recognition that Rodenbach restores to dancing its ancient character-it provides its own decor (elle s'etoffe). For Fuller's 'imaginative weavings are poured forth like an atmosphere' in contrast with the short-skirted coryphees of the ballet, who have no ambiance save what the orchestra provides. Everything conspires to bring Fuller's performance into the position of an emblem of the Image of art, 'self-begotten' in Yeats's favourite word; or like the body of a woman yet not in any natural sense alive (prodige d'irrlel), enigmatic, having the power of election. The darkness of the stage at the end of the performance is the natural darkness of the modern soul which only the Image, hardly come by and evanescent, can illuminate: 'the embrace of eternity lasts us only a short moment'. This power of fusing body and soul, mending all our division, is ce1ebrated even in Pearson's Weekty. More complete1y than any other dancer before her, Loie Fuller seemed to represent in visible form the incomprehensible Image of art in the modern world, l as Mauc1air said, 'The Symbol of Art itself, a fire above all dogmas'. And she remains the dancer of Symbolism, from Mallarme to Yeats; a woman yet totally impersonal, 'dead, yet flesh and bone'; poeme degage de tout appareil du scribe. 'Thanks to her,' said Roger Marx, 'the dance has once more become the "poem without words" of Simonides ... above all one is grateful to her for giving substance to that ideal spectac1e of which Mallarme once clreamed -a mute spectac1e, which escaped the limits of space and time alike, and of which the influence, powerful over all, ravishes in one common ecstasy the proud and the humble.' In February, 1893, Mallarme went to the Folies-Bergere to see Loie Fuller. It was an historie evening. Andre Levinson, complaining in the early 'twenties of the exaggerated deference paid in literary circ1es to the musie-hall, credits the Goncourts and Huysmans with beginning the vogue, but goes on: 'One day Stephane Mallarme, aesthetician of the absolute, was seen pencilling, in his seat at the Folies-Bergere, his luminous aperfus on the so-called serpentine dances of Loie Fuller, fontaine intarissable d'elle-mtme. Since then the whole world has followed .. .' What Mallarme was writing emerges as a passage of prose notably difficult even for 1 I ought to say that this passage will make more sense to anybody who has read my Romanik Image (1957)'

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him, but the centre, indeed the source in most cases, of contemporary poetic comment on Fuller. Concerning her, he says, and the way in which she uses the fabrics in which she is dressed, the articles of contemporary enthusiasts-which may sometimes be called poems-Ieave little to be said. 'Her performance, .rui generis, is at once an artistic intoxication and an industrial achievement. In that terrible bath of materials swoons the radiant, cold dancer, illustrating countless themes of gyration. From her proceeds an expanding web-giant butterflies and petals, unfoldings -everything of a pure and elemental order. She blends with the rapidly changing colours which vary their limelit phantasmagoria of twilight and grotto, their rapid emotional changes-delight, mourning, anger; and to set these off, prismatic, either violent or dilute as they are, there must be the dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.' He goes on to suggest that in this kind of dancing, in which the dancer seems to have the power infinitely to expand the dance through her dress, there is a lesson for the theatre, in which there is always a banality that rises up between dance and spectator. Loie Fuller makes one see how the subtleties inherent in the dance have been neglected. 'Some restored aesthetic,' says Mallarme, 'will one day go beyond these marginal notes'; but he can at least use this insight to denounce a common error conceming staging, 'helped as I unexpectedly am by the solution unfolded for me in the mere flutter of her gown by my unconscious and unwitting inspirer'. And he speaks of the dancer's power to create on the boards of the stage her own previously unthought-of milieu. The decor lies latent in the orchestra, to come forth like a lightning stroke at the sight of the dancer who represents the idea. And this ~ transition from sonorities to materials ... is the one and only skill of Loie Fuller, who does it by instinct, exaggeratedly, the movements of skirt or wing instituting a place.... The enchantress makes the ambience, produces it from herself and retracts it into a silence rustling with crlpe de Chine. Presently there will disappear, what is in these circumstances an inanity, that traditional plantation of permanent sets which conflict with choreographic mobility. Opaque frames, intrusive cardboard, to the scrap-heap I Here, if ever, is atmosphere, that is nothingness, given back to ballet, visions no sooner known than scattered, limpid evocation. The pure result will be a liberated stage, at the will of fictions, emanating from the play 2.3

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of a veil with attitude or gesture' . He sees the dance of Fuller as 'multiple emanations round a nakedness' which is central, , summed up by an act of will ecstatically stretched to the extremity of each wing, her statuesque figure striet, upright; made dead by the effort of condensing out of this virtual self-liberation delayed decorative leaps of skies and seas, evenings, scent and foam'. And he conc1udes, 'I thought it necessary, whatever fashion may make of this miraculous contemporary development, to extract its summary sense and its significance for the art as a whole.' There is dispute among students of Mallarme as to the place of dancing in his unsystematic system, and less attention than might be expected is paid to this tribute to Loie Fuller. But there seems to be no very good reason for discounting what it says: that she represented for him at least the spirit of an unborn aesthetic; that she offered a kind of spatial equivalent of musie; that she stands for the vietory of what he called the Constellation over what he called Chance, 'le couronnement du labeur humain', as Bonniet describes it in his Preface to Igitur. Like the archetype of Art, the Book, Fuller eliminated hasard. Thibaudet, indeed, believed that the whole concept of the Book owed something to Mallarme's meditations on the dance; so did Levinson, arguing that Mallarme glimpsed in the ballet' a revelation of the definitive CEuvre, which would sum up and transcend man'; sO,more recently, does M. Guy Delfel. The fitness of the dance as an emblem of true poetry is c1ear. Valery was expanding the views of Mallarme when he made his famous comparison between them (poetry is to pro se as dancing is to walking). Mallarme's growing concern for syntax, so irrefutably demonstrated by L. J. Austin, does not militate against this view that the dance took over in his mind some of the importance of musie; for syntax is the purposeful movement of language and such movement has, in either art, to be assimilated to the necessarily autonomous condition of the Image. The dance is more perfectly devoid of ideas, less hampered by its means, than poetry, since it has not the strong antipathy of language towards illogie; yet it is not absolutely pure; the dancer is not inhuman. Mallarme deals with precisely this point in the opening artic1e of Crayonne atI ThCt1tre (before 1887) when he discusses the ambiguous position of the dancer, half impersonal; very like the position of the poet C' The pure work requires that the poet vanish from the utterance' in so far as he can). But 2.4

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

Fuller was more purely emptied of personality: an apparition, a vision of eternity for Rodenbach ; for Mallarme ' I' incorporation visuelle de I' idee' • If it seemed necessary, as it did, for poets to reclaim their heritage from music, the dance provided something more exactly fitting as an emblem of what was aspired to; and in a sense Fuller can stand for the liberation of Symbolism from Wa gner. She is much more properly the Symbolist dancer than any orthodox ballerina; and there is a clear discontinuity between the general admiration for dancers of French poets earlier than Mallarme and his praise of Fuller. In Baudelaire the 'human and palpable element' counts for much; in Gautier also. But in the newage, the age of Mallarme and Yeats, what matters is that the dancer 'is not a woman'; that she is 'dead, yet flesh and bone'. The difference constitutes a shift inthe whole climate of poetry, represented by the shift in English poetic from Symons to Pound, from Symbolism as primarily an elaborate system of suggestion, of naming by not naming, to the dynamism of the Vortex and the Ideogram. For Fuller is a kind of Ideogram: I'incorporation visuelle de l'idle, a spectacle defying all definition, radiant, homogeneous. Such, at any rate, was the way those people saw Fuller who saw her with eyes opened to dance as a majestueuse ouverture on a reality beyond flux. They saw in her 'la voyante de l'infini'. When Diaghilev came, defying the genres, overwhelming the senses with music and colour and movement, one or two people perhaps remembered her as having been the first to do it. I am convinced that VaIery did. Again and again he returns to the dance as a satisfactory emblem of a desirable poetry. It best illustrates what he calls non-usage-' the not saying" it is raining" -this is the language of poetry; and movement which is not instrumental, having no end outside itself, is the language of dancing.' Poetry, like dancing, is action without an end.' As the dancer makes an image of art out of the quotidian motions of her body, so the poet must 'draw a pure, ideal Voice, capable of communicating without weakness, without apparent effort, without offence to the ear, and without breaking the ephemeral sphere of the poetic universe, an idea of some Self miraculously superior to Myself'. The Dance makes of an activity of the body-sweat, straining muscle, heaving chest-an idea, a diagram of a high reality. Valery called his dialogue, L'Ame ef la Danse, of 1921, 'a 25

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

sort of ballet of which the Image and the Idea are Coryphaeus in turn'. The dialogue embodies in language of refined wit and gaudy elegance the essence of our post-Wagnerian aesthetic. Athikte, the central figure, is usually thought of as a conventional balletdancer ; and she does dance on her points. But, as Levinson said in his pamphlet on the dialogue (Paul Valery, poOte de la danse, 192.7) the tourbillon, her ecstatic finale, is not merely a ballet step, it is the whirling of a mystic's dance. Though Valery collected ballet photographs, they were of a special sort, chronophotographies; the plates were exposed in darkness, the dancers carrying lights; and the result was a whirl of white lines, arecord of the pattern of aimless poetical acts. In any case, we need not suppose him so devoted to the ballet as to have forgotten Loie Fuller. He was on the point of refusing the invitation to write the dance dialogue because he 'considered . . . that Mallarme had exhausted the subject' and undertook it finally with the resolve that he would make Mallarme's prodigious writings on the subject 'a peculiar condition of my work'. So I believe that when he came to write the passage comparing the dancer with a salamander-living 'completely at ease, in an element comparable to fire' -he was remembering Fuller. The passage culminates in a long, rhapsodical speech from Socrates: 'what is a flame ... if not the moment itselj? ... Flame is the act of that moment which is between earth and heaven ... the flame sings wildly between matter and ether ... we can no longer speak of movement ... nor distinguish any longer its acts from its limbs '. Phaedrus replies that ' she flings her gestures like scintillations • . . she filches impossible attitudes, even under the very eye of Timel' Eryximachus sums it up: 'Instant engenders form, and form makes the instant visible.' And when the dancer speaks, she says she is neither dead nor alive, and ends: 'Refuge, refuge, 0 my refuge, 0 Whirlwind! I was in thee, 0 movement-outside all things .. .' A Bergsonian dancer almost, 'revetatrice du reet' as Levinson says. The propriety of yoking together Avril and Fuller as I have done here is now, perhaps, self-evident. Avril is a smaller figure altogether, but she demonstrates the strength of the link between dancing and poetry, as weIl as the important pathological element in the dancer's appeal. Fuller deserves, one would have thought, some of the attention that has gone to Isadora. Levinson, who repeatedly declares his faith in classical dancing as the one 2.6

POET AND DANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

discipline 'Jiconde, complete, creatrice', respected Fuller, but despised Duncan as having no technique, no beauty, no suppleness, her feet flattened and enlarged by years of barefoot prancing, her music primitive. The fact is that Duncan was much more the Tanagra figurine, the dancer from the Pompeian fresco, than Fuller, who earned these descriptions in her early days. And Duncan certainly did not submerge her personality in strange disguises and unnaturallights. The Modern Dance has developed theories sufficiently impersonal to make it intensely interesting to Mrs. Langer, creating a symbolic reality independent of nature. But it depends always upon the body-upon the power of the body not to express emotion but to objectify a pattern of sentience. Fuller with her long sticks, her strange optical devices, her burying the human figure in masses of silk, achieved impersonality at a stroke. Her world was discontinuous from nature; and this discontinuity VaIery, speaking of his Symbolist ancestry, described as 'an almost inhuman state'. She withdrew from the work; if to do otherwise is human, said Valery, 'I must declare myself essentially inhuman'. This is the doctrine of impersonality in art with which T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot among many others have made everybody familiar. 'The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality ... the more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.' Thomas Parkinson, commenting on Ortega y Gasset's 'dehumanization'-'a point can be reached in which the human content has grown so thin that it is negligible' -remarks acutely that the confused reception accorded to Pound's Pisan Cantos was due to critical shock at their identificaclon of the sufferer and the creator. Pound, in leaving offhis 'ironic covering', simply broke with a rule of poetic that he himself had done much to enforce. Mr. Parkinson is glad; he wants to let 'the Reek of Humanity' back into poetry, where he thinks it belongs, and he seems to regard the impersonality doctrine as a lengthy but temporary deviation from some true 'romantic aesthetic'. I am not sure that he is right, or how far he misunderstands the human relevance of what the impersonal artist attempts. Mrs. Langer could answer him, and I am quite sure that there Pound does not show the way back to reeking humanity. In Mr. Eliot, in VaIery, we surely are aware of what Stevens called 'the 2.7

POET .AND D.ANCER BEFORE DIAGHILEV

thing that is incessantly overlooked: the artist, the presence of the determining personality'. However this may be, Fuller's progressive extinction of the dancing body was a necessary component of her success as an emblem of the Image, out of nature. The imagination of the spectator fed upon her, independently of what she intended (she once caught sight of herself in a glass when dancing, and was surprised that what she saw bore no relation to her intention). She is abstract, dear of the human mess, dead and yet perfect being, as on some Byzantine dancing floor; entirely independent of normal action, out of time. It is a highflown way of talking about an affected music-hall dancer with an interest in stage-lighting; and, but for the example of Mallarme, we should hardly venture it. Yet she was not a mere freak; dancers are always striving to become, like poems, machines for producing poetic states; , they labour daily', as Levinson says, 'to prevent a relapse into their pristine humanity'. Only when the body is objectified in this way does it function, in the words of Whitehead, as 'the great central ground underlying all symbolic reference'. Also, it dies; and in so far as it is permitted to appear like something that does, it cannot represent victory over hasard, perfect being, the truth behind the deceptive veil of intellect. How is this to be overcome? , Slash it with sharp instruments, rub ashes into a wound to make a keloid, daub it with day, paint it with berry juices. This thing that terrifies us, this face upon which we lay so much stress, is something they have always wanted to deform, by hair, shading, by every possible means. Why? To remove from it the terror of death, by making it a work of art.' So William Carlos Wil1iams on primitive ways into the artifice of eternity. Fuller's dehumanization was another way; it is very dosely related to a critical moment in the history of modern poetic, but it is also, and this is as we ought to expect, rooted in the terror and joy of the obscure primitive ground from which modern poets draw strength for their archaie art. 195 8- 61 •

z8

11 ON DAVID JONES

I T is at first sight an odd world that welcomes Sir Charles

Snow's Rede Lecture and Mr. Jones's book1 almost simultaneousIy; for Sir Charles's scientist might be strongly moved to appIy to Mr. Jones the language ofPeacock: While the bistorian and the pbilosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowiedge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages.... A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past ... as if there were no such things in existence as mathematicians, astronomers, chemists ... who have built into the upper ait of intelligence a pyramid, from the summit of wbich they see the modern Parnassus far beneath them....

Yet the 'intellectuaI' will find it easy to take Mr. J ones seriously; and the cultural divide about wbich Sir Charles writes so weH seems to me to reflect a grand modern antinomy that is weH worth examining from a different viewpoint. Mr. Jones is not a crank; bis books are strongly marked by bis personality, but at the core bis thinking is founded on assumptions not onIy familiar but, so far as we know, essential to the production of the kind of art most peopie are prepared to call important. These attitudes are such that an unsympathetic student might describe them as morbid. They seem to indicate a kind of atavism, an inability to think, however sopbisticatedly, in any but primitivistic terms; and this, abating the pejorative expression, is on the whole an acceptable appraisal. The hostility of Sir Charles's 1

Bpoch and Artist (Faber & Faber).

2.9

ON DAVID JONES

scientists to modem art is based upon the suspicion, perfectly justified, that it encourages only the backward look; the appeal to, and the explanation in terms of, the primitive. They observe that this can be a great encouragement to self-evident mumbo-jumbo of all kinds, and to an illiberalism they find detestable. Most scientists are themselves what historians of ideas call 'hard primitivists'; they regard the past as something to be moving on from, and the state of nature, if they could be bothered to imagine it, as harsh and brutal; the notion of progress, so important to them, always involves a degree of this 'hardness', though most scientists seem to take a minimal interest in the past. The 'intellectual' finds this , rootlessness' repulsive (he habitually thinks of his own kind of work as 'organic', and lacks patience with others who are not under the influence of this myth). He prefers the backward look to a human condition in which the intelligence is not free (acting freely it makes, as with the scientist, a universe of death) but deeply involved with, and subordinate to, 'imagination'. He is certainlyanti-intellectualist, and might be called irrationalist; and the more he talks about his primitive criteria, his illiterate, unscientific golden age, the more he strikes the scientist as being wilfully self-retarded. But this charge troubles him as little as the scientist is troubled by the counter-attack. For it is virtually a condition of his activity that this mutual incomprehension should exist. Mr. Jones's primitivism is of the Romantic tradition; it would have seemed painfully odd neither to Joyce (whom Mr. Jones greatly admires) nor to Yeats, whose belief that art must be , constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times' Mr. Jones would fully endorse. He is a Catholic, and obsessed with the romanitas of the Welsh tradition. These and other interests give Mr. Jones's writing a personal flavour; he is almost as mannered as Yeats, though much less skilful, and sometimes negligent in exposition and ugly in style. His most important essay, 'Art and Sacrament', is, however, blameless in these respects, and at his best Mr. J ones is a remarkably powerful writer. He is weIl read in an artist's way-his reading is assimilated into a growing body of ideas and convictions, not judged but ransacked. His major source is Maritain, but Maritain thought and feit and disagreed with (on the relation between 'symbol' and 'sacrament', for instance). He holds that man, homo faber, is dis3°

ON DAVID JONES

tinguished from beast and from angel by his power to make intransitive[y and gratuitouslJ. The things he so makes are' laid up from other things', anathemata: 'things that are the signs of something other', With these things, their integrity, consonance, and clarity, the artist as such is alone concerned, for signs belong to the domain of Art, not Prudence; yet it is his human commitment to Prudence that makes the artist's work a sign of something other, an 'intimation of otherness'. Necessarily then, he will reject the view of the sdentist 'that particular things are no more than they are'. Also he will judge political systems not as the sdentist does, but by the ways to which they help or hinder this signmaking activity; the door is clearly open to illiberal opinions. The character of these signs is sacramental; there is 'in the trivial and the profound, no escape from sacrament'. It is our nature to make them, and theirs to suggest otherness, and to recaH; they are thus related to the Sacraments (compare the Eucharistic 'Do this for an anamnesis of Me '). Their significance depends upon historical 'deposits', upon an anamnesis of history, punctuated by , otherness': Christ, at the Last Supper, 'placed Himself in the order of Signs'. In the 'present dvilizational phase' the sacramental aspect of art is neglected; there has been a Break, and man-the-artist is estranged from his sodety. What we make weH (bombers, rockets) we do not make gratuitously, as anathemata. The sdentific activity which so absorbs us is for Mr. Jones, as it was for his master Eric Gill, a literaHy brutal activity; not being faber J homo is reduced to a beast. This doctrine suffers from its relative simplidty; Mr. Jones does not discriminate fuHy (as Maritain did) between different kinds of sign, or allow proper weight to what the scholastics called 'intention'. For him the word 'wood' will invariably, in a healthy sodety, evoke the Wood of the Cross, regardless of what is intended; for ' the arts abhor any loppings off of meanings or emptyings out, any loss of the totality of connotation, any loss of recession and thickness through.' It is less important to argue about this than to see that Mr. Jones is here objectifying in his own way the familiar feeling that the artist has lost permanent access to a rieh common 'mythus'; alone in the age of the Dynamo he worships the Virgin. He asks Yeats's question, 'How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call the progress of the word ... without becoming the garments of religion as in 31

ON DAVID JONES

oId times?' Answering it, the anti-intellectualism of the modern intellectual has, by ransacking the deposits-Welsh, Irish, NeoPlatonic, anthropological, and so forth-produced religions to fit the garments. To every man his own Vision, his own answer to Darwin, Huxley, and their successors. It would be misleading to suggest that onIy the artists produce such myths, for this scholarly primitivism is characteristic of all 'intellectuals '. Leaving aside such examples as the misguided Neo-Platonism of some Yeatsians, and a persistent Romantic mediaevalism, one can suggest the prestige and the authority of the attitude by referring to Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. This very learned book argues that the inception of Christianity superseded all previous modes of representing reality because thenceforth the most important events could, as in the life of Christ, combine tbe heroic and humble in such a way that an elevated style could absorb every kind of detail, and yet impose upon that detail a 'figural' interpretation, as if every particular event signified precisely 'something other,' yet 'without prejudice to the power of its concrete reality here and now.' And Auerbach goes on to show that modern' realism' lacks this 'figural' quality. Another writer of the critical avant-garde, very different in many ways but also essentially typological in approach, is Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism). There are many others, some of them less sophisticated, most of them less protected by learning; Miss Helen Gardner has lately made some cautionary observations on the modern taste for typology. It is a very civilized primitivism, devoted to the recovery of imaginative patterns and relations so subtle that we in our brutality have lost them. Maritain once distinguished between children and primitives by saying that the child believes the story of Alice but 'wakes up' and understands very weH that little girls do not go down rabbit-holes, but the primitive would always think they did, and never wake up, because 'he has not been dragged away from the world of imagination'. We are all prone quite uncritically to treat mediaeval men as primitive in precisely this way. An anatomy of modern primitivism would be a lifework. There would be many ugly categories of it: psychologistic, mythographie, imagistic, for instance. L'homme qui mMite es! un animal deprave. The development of intellect is the true Fall of Man. This is the basic Romantic primitivism: the high valuation of primitive 32

ON DAVID JONES

image-making powers. Under imagistic primitivism would be included all modern doctrines of symbol, image, ideogram,jigura, and type. If you doubt that they flourish, consider not only longestablished doctrines like Pound's, but also the success in America ofFeidelson's Symbolism and American Literature, or of the phllosophy of Cassirer, here known best in the version of hls disciple, Mrs. Suzanne K. Langer. Cassirer, in fact, represents thls variety of primitivisim in its purest and most self-conscious form; for, weIl aware of its origin in Kant and Herder, he develops it to the point where it becomes a phllosophy of symbolic forms depending upon a theory of pre-Iogical conception and expression. For hlm, human art, language, and science are the very organs of reality; they alone make it possible, by way of symbols, to apprehend 'anything real'. Science is posterior to the other symbolic forms, as logical relations are posterior to names; so science marks an emancipation of the mind. But art requires a step back to 'mythlcal thinking', in whlch the name and the object are the same, where there is no distinction between thought and emotion. The language of poetry has, of course, all the parts of speech, not only nouns; but it is obliged constantly to make the primitivizing leap back into mythlcal thinking. Lyric poetry is particularly concerned with the rendering of the sensible present, the ' momentary god' of the primitive; but just as such moments are rare in the civilized consciousness, so our language has grown less and less suited to expressing them. Cassirer here gives a very elaborate exposition of a doctrine whlch, especially in the versions of Bergson and Hulme, has had a strong influence of modern art; it is the central myth of ' dissociation' in its linguistic aspect. Art is essentially, an atavistic activity, seeking a temporary fusion of thought and feeling that is foreign to modern consciousness; yet it is justified as providing insights into the formal structure of reality not only different from, but richer than, those of science. Mrs. Langer, emphasizing the 'pre-rational' element in Cassirer's explanations, points out that in certain pathological conditions of the brain 'the power of abstraction is lost, and the patient falls back on picturesque metaphoricallanguage'; scientists who thlnk modern poets ought to have their heads examined are free to quote thls remark. They can add that the Paris in whlch modern poetry took shape was also the Paris of Charcot and the vogue of neurasthenia. The Romantic attack on intellect prepared thls 33

ON DAVID JONES

situation; mythical, imagistic, organicist thinking becomes as desirable for the artist as it is undesirable for the scientist; the first stands on the emblematic, myth-haunted mountain, the second on Peacock's intelligent pyramid. Since the artist's anathemata are also acts of anamnesis (to go back to Mr. Jones's terminology) the question of deposits are for him extraordinarily important; and deposits, historicalor psychic, are part of the problem of imagistic primitivism. They are usually occult; they may be the psychic residua of the Jungians, or the discrete Neo-Platonic texts of Yeats, or many other things. In fact the most interesting aspect of these deposits is this protean quality. The sapientia veterum was a complex Renaissance cult, but the wisdom concealed in ancient images was not, in the eyes of Spenser or Chapman, what it became for Blake, or for Yeats, with Blake and nineteenth-century French occultism as weIl as his own indefatigable reading and experiment behind him. Mr. Jones has his own highly individual Welsh-Catholic deposits, and there are many others. To argue for the absolute value of such systems, as some do, is manifestly absurd and harmful. They are not required to be valid in themselves, but to provide contexts for the antiintellectualism that modern art, for historical reasons, requires ; its character is such that it must be in conflict with a scientific world-view to survive at all. This certainly creates problems for a peace-maker, and for anybody accustomed to thinking of problems as soluble and obscurities as undesirable. The artist's habit of conceiving life as a tragedy, his air of living in a fallen world, will strike a Rutherford as mere posing. To get a eloser understanding between the two it would certainly be necessary to effect a major revolution in the arts; it is impossible, I think, to guess what the changes would be. Anyone who calls this an extravagant statement should try to find scientists who could take Mr. Jones's book seriously, or artists wil1ing to call it nonsense. 1959·

34

111 THE MYTH-KITTY

A YEAR or two ago, Mr. Amis told the poets to shut up ab out Orpheus, and Mr. Larlrin renounced his share of the ' myth-kitty'. 'The wit of the fables and religions of the ancient world is wellnigh consumed; they have already served the poets long enough, and it is now high time to dismiss them'-that seems to be Mr. Larkin's point, though the words are the words of the Bishop of Rochester in the 1660'S. He was not the first, nor will Mr. Larkin be the last, to make this highly conventional gesture. Each of them was writing at a moment when literature had been mythologizing rather copiously for a long time, and the protests were natural enough, though probably premature. We set great store by myth, and our mythologies are queerer and more complicated than any before them. It is not merely that we enjoy poets who deal in mythology, like Yeats and Rilke and Blake and Hölderlin; we have also accumulated an unmanageable load of archreological, anthropological and psychological theory about myth, and a lot of historical information about the quite different but still difficult mythography of the Hellenistic, mediaeval, Renaissance and Romantic epochs, as weIl as more exotic mythologies by the dozen. You will not fob off a mythhungry critic by saying that Keats got his out of Lempriere, or convince him that Yeats's 'Leda' sonnet can be expounded in under eighty pages: he knows that myth is still booming. There is the kind we must understand in Mr. Eliot, with Frazer, Jane Harrison and others behind it; or there is the Yeatsian Neoplatonic structure; or Mr. Graves's own universal mythology. There is also the newly created myth, the kind critics talk of them they wish to confer upon a fiction some of the prestige of these regular 35

THE MYTH-KITTY

myths and some of the authority of Aristotle (who meant something rather different by the word). Remarkable claims are made, especially in America, for mythic reductions of literature to a set of archetypal patterns. Myth is doing weIl; it seems to be patient of all our demands on it. This is, in fact, characteristic. From the start, Greek myths altered easily to accommodate new sociological needs; Hera was married and subjugated to Zeus because a patriarchal culture absorbed a matriarchal one. And even when they achieve personal stability and become recognizable Olympians, the gods are susceptible of allegorical interpretation; this happens equally to Homer and to the Old Testament, as a way of preserving their religious utility in a changed society. The success of Christianity in the ancient world complicates the position not only because of the differences, but also because of the similarities it presents: the possible contamination with Orphism, the links between Christ and Dionysos and Hercules. Such contamination might be condoned (as when the legionaries mixed up Celtic deities with Mithras) or not, in which case you labelled the pagan gods ' devils' and segregated them. This latter policy was not successful in Europe, and in very strange mutations, as Seznec shows in La survivance des dieux antiques, the pagan gods lived on through the Middle Ages. Zeus might be an abbot, Hercules a monk, and as the moralization of Ovid shows, all became useful to Christian instruction. The Renaissance, though it gave Hercules back his club and lionskin, could still see him as a Christ-type; he was once more absorbed and amended, just as Hellenistic mystical thought was absorbed by the Platonists into Christianity. All truth, though it could be perverted, had one source. Such views secured for modem Europe a second official theology, and transmitted a mass of mythological invention and exegesis unparalleled before our own epoch. We do not always remember that the ancient wodd as seen by the Cinquecento was full of inventions and, though very unlike our own, no more a static frieze of gods and heroes than it was to Frazer. This dynamism the eighteenth century partly lost, and those mythologists, called 'the visionaries ' by Mr. John Beer in his re cent enlightening book on ColeridgeL-shabby heirs ofPico and ancestors of George Eliot's Casaubon, in whose learning Cole1

Coleridge the Visionary. By

J. B. Beer (Chatto and Windus). 36

THE MYTH-KITTY

ridge himself was steeped-tried to recover it. But the differences between theirs and the Renaissance mythology are important. Spenser and Chapman though inventive were intellectually disciplined; but the 'visionary' mythologies always tend in the direction of Yeats's Vision. This is a still potent tradition and is found both as a competitor and as a complement to more scientific mythography. (Mr. Graves is both 'scientific' and 'visionary'.) The scientific approach was at first characterized by attempts to induce laws from the evidence of myth. Such mythologists were Max Müller, Frazer, and Freud. They had an influence comparable with that of the Florentine Platonists; yet it decayed, and the myths as usual survived. And if we ask what was in this instance the preservative, we find ourselves at once confronted by that anti-intellectualism which is so potent in modern thinking about the Arts. Nietzsche blamed Socrates for destroying myth, the province of human creative force. In the domain of myth we can shortcircuit the intellect and liberate the imagination which the scientism of the modern world suppresses; and this is a central modern position. Myth deals in what is more 'real' than intellect can accede to; it is a seamless garment to replace the tattered fragments worn by the modern mind, a hallowed and communal expression, as it were a liturgy, of the truths mediated by the modern artist. For Ruskin, the great myths were an early stage of the 'slow manifestation' of reality to human knowledge, and such a view is to be found in the Positivists. But for us myth is no longer an evolutionary stage but a terminus. The cult of it is an aspect of a great longing for primitive mentality, for unity of being, for the body that thinks, not deputing that function to a Cartesian mind. These expressions have a Yeatsian tinge; hut they are not freaks, and have scholady counterparts, for example in Cailliet's Symbolisme ef ames primitives (1936), which argues that the symbolists strive to achieve a condition elose to that of the pre-Iogical primitive mind. Mr. Eliot, who remarked that the artist 'is more primitive as weH as more civilized, than his contemporaries', publiely endorsed Cailliet's thesis. It is not surprising, then, that, with U!ysses in mind, he should have spoken of myth as 'a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense paradox of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history'. Myth, ritual dance, the desire for an 37

THE MYTH-KITTY

illiterate audience, even perhaps Anglo-Catholicism, are all aspects of a complex modern prirnitivism, recognizable in cognate forms in other influential modern artists. And if we seek the pre-logical and oppose the march of inteIlect, we are the enernies of sclenceat any rate as it is generally understood-and the worshippers of myth. The need for a change of attitude, for a modification of this myth-science antithesis, is pressing. Mythology, as it is now understood, raises the whole question of belief. This would scarcely be so if it was thought of only as a breeding-ground of images; in fact it is too often the anti-intellectualist substitute for science. That is why some of Yeats's interpreters urge us to neglect his own statement that his system merely gave him ' metaphors for poetry', and urge the acceptance of his ' subjective' philosophy as valid in itself. This is a narrow obscurantism that rnight do much harm; but such bad precipitates do show the degree to which our literary culture is saturated with mythological thinking. The present encyclopredia of mythologyl is very imposing-it deals, profusely illustrated, not only with Greek and Roman, but with Prehistoric, Egyptian, Celtic, Slavonic, Teutonic, American and Oceanic mythologies. Graves's preface 1S in his rapid-firing scientific manner. There is some variation in the standard of exposition-the Celtic section is learned but the Greek, apart from an odd word or two on meteorological origins and matrilinear societies, mostly just teIls the stories, like Lempriere. The standard of the illustrations also varies, more excusably, from wonderful photographs of Greek, Hittite and African objects to Romantic Teutonic sculpture and fairy-story drawings of Slavonic pucks. It is interesting to compare this large book with the vast mythological compendia of the seventeenth century, and those Renaissance handbooks for painters, on the appearance and attributes of the ancient gods. The old writers knew a great deal of the material in Larousse, for instance, about the connection between Greek and Oriental cults. Their illustrations are incomparably inferior; yet they served their turn magnificently. They provided artists and poets with a rich and subtle language; those elaborate programmes containing and concealing wisdom, on the basis of which a Botticelli or a Spenser could make his beautiful and enigmatic 1 Larousse Encyclopadia Graves.

0/

My/h%gy. With an introduction by Robert

37

THE MYTH-KITTY

images. The mythical material was devoted to purposes almost incomprehensible to the modern mind and yet here it is once more, highly relevant. Weil might Bacon remark, 'What pliant stuff fable is made of.' The myth-kitty is inexhaustible; the andent gods survive. 1959·

39

IV HUNTER AND SHAMAN

DURING the 'nineties the English kept a permanent avant-garde in Paris. On Tuesdays in the Rue de Rome you might meet not only Mallarme, Gide, Valery, Regnier, Louys, Rodenbach and Claude1, but Symons, Whistler, Wilde, Yeats and Moore. Except for Symons, and he was Cornish, there isn't, in fact, an Englishman among them; but they were there to collect the new doctrine for uso Symons explained it to Yeats, and his book taught it to our two other major 'English' poets of the period, Eliot and Pound. What did we give the French in return? Conder, dressed and drunk like a gentleman, and a few dancers and singers. On the whole we have always learned more from the French than we taught them; and until the end of the last war it was considered proper to dwell on this fact with what now seems to be an unnecessary degree of self-abasement. This was reflected in Mr. Connolly's Horizon editorials, and in Mr. Lehmann's recent autobiography one noticed several accounts of the genuine suffering of the e1ect at the inaccessibility of Paris. It now appears that young literary people have ceased to deprecate their own language and literature as a bad substitute for French. I do not mean that English susceptibility to foreign cultural influence has lessened -it is bred in the bone. But just as we have had bouts ofItalianism to break the rhythm of French influence, we are now having Americarusni. Miss Starkiel believes that Sartre means to our post-war youth what Gide meant after the first war; myexperience is that they prefer Faulkner, even Salinger. All the same, modern English literature is historically unintelligible without some knowledge of the French influences that 1

From Gautier 10 Eliot. By Enid Starkie (Hutchinson).

4°

HUNTER AND SHAMAN

helped to form it, and a book on this subject by a writer as eminent as Miss Starkie is welcome. But it is not the book we might have had. She has provided a 'signpost for those who are not well informed'; but the book is shallow and uninformative on matters she could have treated authoritatively, and it is occasionally illwritten. Perhaps her heart was not in it. She describes AngloFrench contacts mostly at the level of who influenced whom, and says too little of ideas. To understand twentieth-century English literature one needs some notion of the vague complexities of French Symbolism, and also of its relation to a kindred tradition that already existed in England, in itself very complex. Miss Starkie attempts only the first and easier half of this task. She provides an account of the ideals of 1886; she deals with correspondance, with Rosicrucianism, and so forth. Turning to England, she disposes neatly of the imported Decadence, and gives a good deal of attention to Symons; but without any adequate examination of his ideas. Symons's Preface to The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which is addressed to Yeats, speaks of a 'revolt against exteriority, against rhetoric, against a materialistic tradition'; of Symbolism as an 'endeavour to disengage the ultimate essence, the soul'. It announces a new duty for literature, which becomes 'a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of sacred ritual'. Yeats echoed Symons, seeking relief from 'externality', from the vice supreme of materialism, and finding in the symbol a religion to replace the old one destroyed by 'HuxIey and Tyndali '. This is the programme of one of the 'two cultures'-the anti-scientific one, revolting from 'exteriority' and 'materialism'. If art has access to a truth not available to the intellect, its apologists may weH be driven back, as Symons was, on occult science. They continue to be so driven, whether to Jung or to Zen Buddhism or other Oriental wisdom. Even during periods of minor revolt against mysterious or hieratic art we continue to have antiintellectualist art (action painting, plays of wild illogie like Zen koans, novels with occult structures, verse 'necessarily' obscure). Modem literature, and criticism, are in a sense occult sciences, mages and beats abound. The scientists are puzzled or bored. If we want to know how this situation developed we need to know about the deep dependence of Symbolist literary theory on the occult. This is one of the great subjects for modern literary

41

HUNTER AND SHAMAN

scholarship ; Miss Starkie does not here go into it; an American scholar, John Senior, has made a brave try.l Mr. Senior does not exclude all the wonderful gossip these matters engender, but his main business is with Symbolism as offering a view of the world more truthful than any other available-with Symbolism, in short, as a religion. Symbolist poets have almost always been interested in any other versions of the 'perennial philosophy' they could get at; the bewildering ubiquity of such siblings is part of the problem. The other part is even harder: to understand how the fundamental positions of such religions come to be available to certain visionaries working on their own. Hermetic, Cabbalistic, Rosicrucian, Buddhist texts may be available. One may fall under the mystagogic influence of Eliphas Levi or Mme Blavatsky (names which are certainly as important to English literature as that of Tom Taylor the Platonist, at present the object of a scholarly cult). The supply of enlightened Indians is adequate. But Mallarme arrived at le Neant without knowing about Buddhism; and Yeats, admittedly fortified by the labour of editing Blake, fared forward through the Golden Dawn into occultism of all kinds without discovering any need to make radical adjustments, even when he encountered Jung. The Way of Symbolism was discovered, not devised; sages exist to expound it and establish discipline, but it is engraved on the human soul. So the poet becomes the priest-sacerdos magnus according to Hugo-or an initiate or a mage or an Orpheus or an addict of hashish, the easy way to the necessary dereglement. Mallarme's 'Work' is a word borrowed from alchemy, and he called the alchemists 'nos andtres'; Yeats alludes continually to alchemy as well as astrology. All these sciences are basically the same science; and its truths are available to the imagination of the poet. He may make lucky dips into the ocean of occult knowledge; he may become an adept. (According to Yeats, Theosophy' did more for Irish literature than Trinity College in its three centuries.' But this is because Theosophy is concerned with the same material that the imagination can reach of itself by means of the Symbol.) The normal consequence of this privilege-membership of this priesthood-is tbe voyant's rejection by the unvisionary world; he is the ' Enfant desheritC' of Baudelaire. 1

The Way Down and Out. By John Senior (Cornell U.P.).

42.

HUN'I'ER AND SHAMAN

These grand claims are no longer so roundly made, and the Way has apparently divided; but just as Yeats spoke of Mallarme as following 'one of the legitimate roads', so we can say that Imagism and its descendants (including the occult science of modern criticism) are in the end legitimate roads, even that they are the same Way. With changes of vocabulary we hold to the same themes. Poets, not scientists, know truth; 'if they do not,' we ask withBlake, 'prayis an inferior kind to be call'dKnowing?' The pride of imagination came back with Blake and the Romantics and flourished among the disinherited children of Baudelaire. When we think of poems as 'nearly anonymous' we recall the mystical 'extinetion of personality' ; our 'unparaphraseable' poem is the irreducible auvre of the alchemist. Mr. Senior calls some of Mallarme's poems koans-' confusions of intellect deliberately induced ... in order to evoke that dizziness which Zen Buddhists say opens the mind to a perception of higher consciousness.' And he characterizes, accurately I trunk, aprevalent type of modern poetic obscurity as ' linguistic yoga'. We cannot escape the occult; all we can do is to give it a new vocabulary. The question, why does the Truth appear so universally under local or temporary guises, has usually been answered by an apparently unscientific theory-Yeats's Great Memory, for example, which is 'the foundation of nearly all magical practices' and also of Symbolism. All men share in the Great Memory; some men have the power to evoke it by symbols and so open doors in the mind that lead to truth. The theory got welcome support from Jung, and has been much elaborated. The wide distribution of some myths seemed to support it. Now, very opportunely, there comes a remarkable book by Joseph Campbell,l who may have more literary appeal than any mythologist since Frazer. It was Thomas Mann who pointed out that Romantic mythography entered a scientific phase with Freud. Mr. Campbell is a scientist, but provides arguments in support of the Great Memory and of the visionary sciences. The new-born chicken reacts with fear to the shape of a hawk; it has built into its nervous system an 'innate releasing mechanism' which enables it to respond to a circumstance never before ex:' perienced. 'The image of the hereditary enemy is already sleeping' in the chicken; 'the reacting, "knowing" subject is not the 1

Tb, Ma!k!

0/ God.

By Joseph Campbell (Secker & Warburg).

43

HUNTER AND SHAMAN

individual but the species.' With man the position is less simple; but there exists a biological community of images, shared ' stereotypes' which react to fixed sign stimuli. For many of these sleeping images-since they are as vestigial as the vermiform appendix -nature provides no 'releasers'; but art may do so. And, says Mr. Camp bell in one of his rapt conclusions, in these primitive images' there may be sleeping not only the jungle cry of Dryopithecus, but also a supernormal melody not to be heard for perhaps another million years'. The sensitive, over-protected, immature body of man has in a high degree the power to respond to 'supernormal sign stimuli' (artificial stimuli as in art or myth) more effectively than to natural release mechanisms. The Great Memory becomes a system of innate stereotypes acceptable to the biologist. Mr. Campbell is concerned with the species, not with the individual psyche; but his historical argument depends upon a distinction between two psychic types, hunter and shaman. For the first, the mythological image functions as an 'ethnic idea', a religion that binds him to his group or his family; but for the second it functions as a 'way', and leads him to some ineffable experience. It 'renders an experience of the ineffable through the loeal and concrete'. The 'mythological' or 'inherited image' is, according to Campbell, a biological fact; yet his account of itwould servefor the Symbol of the poets. Having examined many widely diffused myths, Campbell affirms the possibility of' a unitary mythological science' founded on the biological Great Memory. The antiscientists will hardly miss the chance of adding it to the great family of Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, and the rest. They will happily allow the term 'shaman' as a synonym for 'l' Enfant deshCrite', dnink with the Sun. Perhaps we should be less disturbed that we have our physicist-hunters and artist-shamans; the division of labour is an old one, palreolithic at least. Mr. Golding caught it exact1y in the Jack and Simon of Lord of the Flies. Perhaps the need is less to end it than to accept it. We need the hunter to go on living, the shaman to go on living according to the truth. 1960•

44

v COUNTER-REVOL UTION

men, no doubt, have long ago accepted the complicated din of modem criticism as one of the nuisances of an epoch of promiscuous communications, like the noise of helicopters. They may, in consequence, entertain with some scepticism the assertion that they might now, if they chose to listen, hear significant sounds, the noise of critics making up their minds about something of general interest and importance. Yet this is true; and so various are their methods of approach, and so harmonious their conclusions, that it really looks as if these critics may be inaugurating one of those periodic reappraisals of literary history which normally accompany some major alteration of taste. The latest and also in many ways the most civilized and well-informed of these pioneers is Mr. Graham Hough, and his book1 absolutely requires to be read by anybody who claims an interest in modem literature. If the achievement of ]oyce, Mr. Pound, Mr. Eliot and the others was a revolution, then this new movement is a belated reaction. Nothing radically new has happened since they founded , modern' literature all those years ago; and, as Mr. Hough says, we still think of their work as 'modem'. The word sticks to them because, however hard we try to see their innovations as profoundly related to the main body of European literature, we cannot quite get over the feeling that these writers did in fact break with tradition, that they are difficult in unprecedented ways. The real question is why we have so much wanted to accept what is evidently a dubious position-the traditional character of the modern poetic. Occasiona1ly it seems that we have enjoyed believing what is clearly absurd-the much-advertised affinity, for WISE

1

Image and Experienfe. By Graham Rough (Duckworth).

45

COUNTER-REVOLUTION

example, between 'modem' and 'metaphysieal' poetry. Whyhave we been so uncritical? Perhaps everybody was too busy working out the implications of the new doctrines (so many new poets to master, Provens:al to leam) and after a while deviation became a fatiguing and isolating activity. Anyway, for whatever reason, the Revolution has lasted remarkably, in an age which normally encourages premature obsolescence. The Waste Land is still a kind of test; those who think it amistake are branded as cranks or fools. Yet there are these obvious questions to be asked, so evidently legitimate that their suppression over all these years suggests a hystericalloss of the critical function. Now there are signs of returning power. Mr. Hough's book, admirable throughout, is dominated by its long opening section, 'Reflections on a Literary Revolution'. He is no less amiable than acute, and one hopes that his placid, rather donnish, wit will not conceal the almost explosive importance of what he has to say. Mr. Hough has come to believe that 'modem' poetry is the result of 'a few very powerful talents' which have 'succeeded in establishing idiosyncratic positions', and that it ought to be seen as a fascinating backwater, not as the main stream. He calls the revolution 'Imagist', a good enough name for it, and defines its programme as 'Symbolism without the magie' (but the magie creeps in again at the back door). Poetry was to be made of images (later called ideograms) juxtaposed without regard to rational connections, concrete in themselves but with suggestive powers borrowed from the older Symbol. Such a theory of poetry entails the anathematizing of a good deal that had formerly been regarded as legitimate: interest in the personality of the poet, for example; and concem for rational meaning, which becomes merely the meat brought by the burglar to keep the dog quiet, a mere sop to the reader's troublesome intellect. All this, says Mr. Hough, is related 'to the root idea that the substance of poetry is the image and its resonances '. Poetry proceeds by 'a logie of imagination', not by , a logic of concepts '. The words are Mr. Eliot's; they occur in an important and confused passage in his introduction to the Anabasis of St.-] ohn Perse, and with that passage Mr. Hough deals brilliantly. He also considers the possibility that this confusion and error is reflected in The Waste Land, a poem constructed in accordance with such theories. 37

COUNTER-REVOLUTION

It does not seem sufficient to say that the matter is of no importance since the poem has evidently succeeded; opinion has been extensively deluded before now, and the emperor was, after all, not decently dressed. What if Thc Wastc Land should be, after all, an extremely haphazard and incoherent poem, if it comes to be agreed that 'the collocation of images is not a method at all, but the negation of a method'? Can it be that the desertion of the , common reader' is partly the result of a 'wilful Alexandrianism', that there is a danger-made more acute by 'the c10tted rubbish of academic imagist criticism'-of poetry degenerating, perhaps for centuries, into 'a meaningless esoteric exercise'? Mr. Rough is eloquent and just on this topic; but he finds some hope in the enduring influence of Yeats, who never lost his faith in 'rational order'. Re might have added, what is too often ignored, that Mallarme, certainly in some ways the father of Imagism, never entirely lost his, either, and that intellect, like nature, has, in all but a few extreme cases, so far defined absolute expulsion by the theorist's pitchfotk. The remaining essays in Mr. Rough's book-especially the sturues of Free Verse and Psychoanalysis-are valuable in themselves as well as contributory to the force of his main thesis. If we were a truly lively litetary society, his argument, and its enormous implications fot past and future literature, would be for long the prindpal topic of debate. And should this unlikely debate evet take place, it will prove convenient that the work of Mr. YVOt Winters has at last been published in this country;l for Mr. Winters, the sttangest and in some respects the most rematkable of all modern American critics, has been for a generation a bitter and resourceful counter-revolutionary. Mr. Rough gives him brief but honourable mention; as a matter of fact he says nearly everything Mr. Rough says, though his manner is entirely different. (A good example of this is their handling of the same passage in the introduction to Anabasis: rarely has a critical pronouncement been riddled by such cross-lire.) Mr. Winters is, as a critic, both explidt and bitter. His critical position is c1ear enough for most readers to reject it out of hand, and he has made many enemies. Another idiosyncrasy militates against the success of his ideas: his preferences among modern poets are entirely inexplicable, even on his own theories. To call Sturge Moore and 1

In Defense oJ Reason. By Yvor Winters (Routledge & Kegan Paul).

47

COUNTER-REVOLUTION

Bridges superior almost beyond comparison to Yeats and Eliot, let alone Pound, for whom he has an implacable contempt-' a barbarian loose in a museum', 'a sensibility without a mind'may be called challenging; to stake out similar claims for Adelaide Crapsey and Elizabeth Daryush is simply eccentric. Hence his reputation for crankiness. But he is superbly serious; and any single-handed attempt to correct modern taste and rewrite the history of modern literature would look eccentric unless it turned out to be right. Of course it cannot be done and that is why Winters is so much less valuable as a discoverer of neglected talent than as an assailant of temporary orthodoxies. He lacks Mr. Hough's urbanity and is sometimes too evidently pleased by his own severity. But he remains serious. If he enjoys consigning Pound, Eliot, ]oyce, Tate, Ransom and others to limbo, he adds Hart Crane to the batch with obvious regret, for he knew and liked the man; yet he does even this duty with oracular zest. Winters is the lohn the Baptist ofthe Counter-Revolution. His critique is useful even if one dissents from his own programme. He defends reason, believing that literature communicates objective truth and 'is good in so far as it makes a defensible rational statement about a given human experience ... and at the same time communicates the emotion which ought to be motivated by that rational understanding of that experience'. A man holding this and related opinions is fundamentally hostile to what he regards as the revolutionary heresies of 'post-Romantic obscurantism', and Winters deals systematically with them, providing useful labels. One of these is 'pseudo-reference'-the device by which a poem preserves an air of coherence and also suggests a kind of hinterland of meanings without having either; a branch of pseudo-reference is 'reference to a non-existent plot', as when Burbank and Princess Volupine were together and fell, or when Tiresias, by undisclosed means, binds together the separate poems of Thc Waste Land. Another heresy is that of' qualitative progression'-more or less the result of Mr. Eliot's 'logic of the imagination', which produces a graduated progression of images owing nothing to the reason, instead of a normal plot. Re1ated to this heresy is the notion that the chaos of the world can and should be represented by formal chaos in art. By tracing this error-' the fallacy of imitative form'-to Henry Adams, Winters usefully associates it with another, the opinion that there was a time, 48

COUN'TER-REVOLU'TION

before the great 'dissociation of sensibility', when the world was not chaotic (though he is wrong in supposing that these are characteristically New England opinions). Another heresy is the modem cult of Laforguian irony, the 'double mood', which is found to be immoral, irrational and (in Winters's special sense of the term) decadent. All these heresies have been championed by Mr. Eliot, who is accordingly the main target of all the counterrevolutionaries ; Winters devoted to him a long, fierce essay, and holds him to be an urbane but utterly confused critic, and a poet who has wasted what was in any case a small talent. These books are not products of vulgar envy and the desire to be startling. Hough, like Winters, believes that the consequences of not going seriously into the questions he raises may be disastrous; he cares for the common reader, who cannot get on with , centripetal' art and who likes to think of poetry as having to do with matters of which he himself has some experience. But neither critic supposes that we can ever quite return to the times when nobody ever thought of calling poetry a kind oflinguistic algebra. If there is arestoration of that old regime its constitution will have to be modified by new experience. On the other hand, both agree that 'the men of 1914', as Wyndham Lewis called them, should not for much longer dominate our literature and our criticism. Perhaps we are approaching one of those critical phases thought by Arnold to be essential preliminaries to great creative epochs. Reason may return, and the common reader. But the revolutionary ideals are firmly entrenched. Not even Mr. Hough could hope to defy the habits and pleasures of years and act as a man who has rid himself entirely of a crippling delusion; and it seems improbable that even the very young could immediately resist the pressure of what is now conventional opinion. In the nature of things the change will come. But the days when U!ysscs and Thc Wastc Land will be regarded as curiosities for scholars, monuments to dead ideas, are presumably (and on the whole one confesses to being glad of it) some way ahead. 1960•

49

VI SECOND NATURE (VALERY)

MODERN poetry and criticism have made us all familiar with the notion that art is not so much an imitation of nature as another nature; and of this other nature criticism is perhaps the physics. Whitehead's observation that 'Nature is patient of interpretation in terms of laws that happen to interest us' seems to. have some application to the second nature and its interpreters. When the interpreters are also creators, making the nature which is required to suffer interpretation by laws already adumbrated, we have some thing like the situation of modem poetry. 'The truth,' said Whitehead again, 'must be seasonable'. What truth seemed so to the great creator-interpreters? 1t is because of our anxiety to know this that so many of Mr. Eliot's pronouncements have been regarded as axiomatic? But the whole of the seasonable truth is not to be found undistorted in the work of a single interpreter, or even in a single language; and that is a reason why Valery, considered as interpreter, has high interest for English readers. He is, as on the whole we prefer critics not to be, generally remote from texts; but this and other limitations help rather than hinder the clarity of his poetics. He gives us an unfamiliar but immediately recognizable diagram of this seasonable truth. In asserting that his value lies there, I differ, with respect, from Mr. Eliot, who, thirty years after his first essay on Valery, contributes a splendid preface to Volume VII of the Col/cetcd Works. 1 In it he 1 The Collected Works 0/ Paul Valiry. Edited by Jackson Mathews. Volume IV: Dialogues; Volume VII: The Art 0/ Poetry (Routledge & Kegan Paul).

5°

SECOND NATURE (VALERY)

suggests that Valery's major achievements in poetics were to invent a new conception of the poet as a kind of literary scientist, at once dreamer and algebraist, and to provide an apology for his own poetry. But ifValery did not also tell us something about, say, Mr. Eliot himself, it would be harder to justify the translation of all his works into English. In fact this enterprise deserves great praise. These are volumes of high value; they are beautifully made, and the quality of the translation is quite remarkable. Professor Stewart's version of EupaNnos has been famous for years, and now he has served the other dialogues with the same sinuous fidelity; Denise Folliot is a worthy coadjutor. And it was a happy chance that these volumes appeared first. They contain by no means all of Valery's pronouncements on art, but what is to come will often repeat what is here, and these volumes provide a clear sketch of the laws of the modern poetic world. Valery was an intimate of Mallarme, the Einstein of this world; but no one who thinks of the anti-intellectualism of modern verse will be surprised that he often represents himself as an ignorant man. He said he knew little of Plato, though he wrote Socratic dialogues; he professed an ignorance of Bergson which is hardly acceptable to scholarship. 'Being well read may spoil one's enjoyment of poetry,' he said. One thinks of similar statements by Eliot, by Yeats, by Stevens. Knowledge brought to the poem from Nature will be of the wrong kind; it will have little to do with the poetic Nature, 'all of whose forms and beings', says Socrates in Eupaiinos, 'are ultimately but acts of the mind, these acts being clearly determined and preserved by their names. In this fashion they (artists) construct worlds perfect in themselves.' This discontinuity gives rise to what Valery, commenting on his direct Symbolist ancestry, calls 'an almost inhuman state'. He touch es here upon what Ortega y Gasset called 'the dehumaniza~ tion of art', and on that doctrine of impersonality developed from Symbolist premises by Hulme and Mr. Eliot. The human author must disappear from the poem. He must not obtrude his suffering; if to do that is human, says Valery, 'I must declare myself essentially inhuman.' Poets must labour to make their poems as accurate as they can (Hulme's 'exact curve of the thing') and then leave them to be considered 'in complete isolation from each other and without reference to their authors'. A work has permanence in so far as it is capable of being something quite other than its 51

SECOND NATURE

(VALERY)

author intended; this denial of the relevance of the author's intention is a basic tenet of post-Mallarmean poetry. Furthermore the work, however patient of interpretation, can never be explained. VaIery frequently expresses his contempt for explaining critics, but allows the author himself no rights in the poem. The poet is not saying but making; the poem has not meaning but being. Valery wasn't even sure that one could properly read poems aloud without faIsifying them with meaning. And this is a very clear statement of that physical (as opposed to Platonic) quality in poetry which is a central requirement of much modern critidsm. Yet VaIery is famous for his stubborn celebration of the role of Intelligence in poetry; here is another central paradox of modern poetic. In VaIery it is easier to grasp than eIsewhere. First, there is the familiar distinction between vers dont/es and vers cakules; the for'ller somewhat contemptuously accepted, the latter passionately studied as the true activity of poets, the work of intelligence. Almost anyone can receive the vers donnes; Valery repeatedly describes how he was visited by a musical inspiration he was unequipped to develop. Only the poet can develop this raw material, through hundreds of drafts, towards the infinitely perfectible but infinitely imperfect poem, seeking the exact curve in language never to be made absolutely predse. To offer oo1y vers donnes is contemptible: rougir d'etre la Pythie! What count are the thousands of deliberate acts of choice and calculation, the conversion of 'confused arbitrariness' into 'explicit and well-defined arbitrariness'. This is the poem, the machine for producing in others poetic states. Intelligence prevents its sliding away into mere dreaming; it also encloses the poem, makes it resistant to the wrong kinds of knowledge. And here is another of our problems. Poems use words; the difficulty haunts poetics from Coleridge onwards. VaIery thought poetry a lucky survival anyway, the poet of today being an archaic figure using language for purposes to which it is no longer adapted. It seemed worth going on because now and then a man may still become sensitized to the value of a particular poem, and so partake of a pleasure forgotten in the modern world. But it is a daunting task, 'by means of a medium essentially practical, perpetually changing, soiled, a maid of all work, everyday language' to 'clraw a pure, ideal Voice, capable of communicating without 52.

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weakness, without apparent effort, without offence to the ear, and without breaking the ephemeral sphere of the poetic universe, an idea of some selfmiraculously superior to Myself'. The problem is to speak the speech of the poet, 'only a little of the tongue', in the language of the tribe. The poet's use of language is, says Valery, 'nonusage-the not saying "it is raining'''. In a famous analogy, which Mr. Eliot does not like, he says that prose is to verse as walking is to dancing; prose is instrumental, having an end in action, but verse, like dancing, has no end outside itself. Of course the analogy is unsound; but it is very revealing. The process of turning usage into nonusage Valery sometimes called musicalization. He refines the old Romantic-Symbolist yearning to have poetry as like music as possible. Musical discourse cannot be confused with non-musical discourse ; poetic language can be confused with the lingua franca, but music is not to be mistaken for natural noise. He probably contracted this deep envy of music from the Symbolist friends of his youth, and with it the desire to make poems which were re sonant only of themselves, without external reference. Also, of course, he envied architecture, the visible, serviceable structure almost independent of time; we like to think of poems nowadays as having a structure in space, and possibly music too, as Mr. Eliot argues in his Preface. But, like Mallarme before him, Valery found his most satisfying emblem of the desirable poetry in the dance. He returned over and over again to the dancer, notably in the magnificent dialogue here translated. It contains the essence of our post-Wagnerian poetic. Dancers had long been used for these putposes, and the formation of modern poetic owes a lot to certain dancers in Paris, up to the moment of Diaghilev's explosive arrival. But Valery modified the emblem in a characteristic way: he kept aseries of photographs, taken in darkness, of dancers carrying lights. They were a whirl of white lines, arecord of the pattern of aimless poetical acts-photographs of the second nature's lines of force, of what happens in the universe of modern art. What are the consequences of requiring art to be another nature? Valery once wrote beautifully of how, after being shown the Coup de Dis, he walked with Mallarme under a brilliant night sky. Looking up at the stars, he seemed to see what Mallarme had attempted: 'he has tried at last to raise a page to the power of the starry heavens'. Such attempts, in so far as they succeed, will 53

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certainly be difficult, inaccessible. And this would be a tragic story, were it not that, defying the lawgivers, we still sometimes love a poem as Phredrus loved the dancer-in a dream, as of enchantment by a woman; finding too difficult the way of Socrates, who loved her because she provided the antithesis of a dream: an absence of chance, a world of exact forces and studied illusions. 1959·

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Two of the fundamental books of modem literary history have recently been published in cheap paperback editions, l and, reading them, I remembered some of Amold's prescriptions for good criticism. He thought 'poise' was very important; critics should be undulating and diverse; their criticism should not hurry, but be 'patient' and 'flexible, and know how to attach itself to things and how to withdraw from them'. This is one requirement; another is that the critic should 'ascertain the master-spirit in the literature of an epoch'. Arnold, indeed, calls this second duty the highest function of the critic. Not everybody would agree, but it seems dear enough that the second of these tasks would come more easily to anybody who could manage the first, and also that whoever does both is a great man. Axcl's Castlc came out in 1931, Thc Romantie Agony two years later. A ho stile critic might argue that their continuing relevance is a matter of historical accident, 'modem' literature being very little changed from what it was thirty years ago, as Mr. Graham Hough and others have contended. Still, they do survive, Mr. Wilson's book under the usually fatal handicap that some of the authors he discusses have published books since he wrote it. 1t may be that modern criticism is an over-rated department of knowledge, but even if it isn't, these books maintain their place, and it seems worth asking how they measure up to Arnold's. criteria. 1

Axe!' s Cast/e. By Edmund Wilson. Thc Romanli& Agony. By Mario Praz.

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Mr. Wilson is a very productive author; I don't know if he would call Axel's Castle his best book, though he might agree that it is his most influential. If one wanted to get a complete view of his work on the authors discussed in it, one would need to consider later essays as weIl; but it is more to the present purpose to see Axel's Castle as it stands, unrevised, a testimony to the author's flexibility and diagnostic power at a time when his subject as a whole was considerably more obscure than it is now. The first powerful impression one receives on re-reading the book is that it anticipates a whole era ofliterary discussion; many writers, ineluding the present, might unworthily murmur over its pages, pereant qui ante nos nostra dixere. Naturally one soon rests in a more comfortable conviction that it also missed quite a lot, and left employment for Mr. Wilson's successors. But his real achievement was to identify, even ifhe could not completely describe, the master-spirit of an age. He grasped the relation between Romantic and Symbolist, the ivory tower and the cork-Hned bedroom; he understood the role of various substitutes for science, and the persistent anti-intellectualism of the whole tradition; he saw how the Romantic cult of personality was turned into its apparent opposite, a cult of impersonality; he understood why English seventeenth-century poetry took on a special importance in the age of Symbolism; and he perceived that the arts of post-Symbolism had a special survival problem. He was able to say new things of aperiod just past, and make intelligent guesses about the immediate future, because he was sensitively aware of the actual moment and its moods. For example, he is very shrewd about Mr. Eliot's effect on the sensibility of the period: 'the sound of jazz, which formerly seemed jo11y, now inspired only horror and despair' ; and this quality enabled him also to see that hope for the future of verse-drama must rest, as it still does, on 'Wanna Go Home, Baby?' (Sweenry Agonistes). The real donnle ofAxel's Castle is the perception that the literary history of our time is 'to a great extent that of the development of Symbolism and of its fusion or conflict with Naturalism'. In view of the elose relations of Symbolist and Romantic aesthetics, this can be taken to mean that modem literature is still working out the revolutionary theses of the first Romantics. The scope of the twentieth-century revolution is thus greatly reduced, and it is possible to see it as an effort to develop, almost to the point of 56

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mania, some elements of the earlier movement. Thus Wilson, who admires nearly all the authors he discusses, is nevertheless able to say that their works are greatly and unnecessarily at odds with the world they live in, that they neglect the purposes of art as he understands them, and that they may very well be cultivating powers which will destroy art. In short, he was patient and flexible; he knew how to attach himself and then withdraw; to ascertain and subsequently to comment critically upon the masterspirit of the age. In a lecture of 1940 Wilson says what he thinks literature is, and how the historical critic ought to deal with it. He is not a critic who finds literature all-sufficient; without mistaking it for another thing he is always asking whether another thing will tell him more about it. He uses Freud and Marx and the anthropologists; if a machine can be devised to give information about that emotional stimulus from which criticism begins, he will use that, too. He has no interest in any notion of literature as autotelic. All our intellectual activity, in whatever neld it takes place, is an attempt to give a meaning to our experience-that is, to make Me more practicable; for by understanding things we make it easier to survive and get around among them. The mathematician Euclid, working in a convention of abstractions, shows up relations between the unwieldy and cluttered-up environment upon which we are able to count. A drama of Sophocles also indicates relations between the various human impulses, which appear so confused and dangerous. . •• The kinship, from this point of view, of the purposes of science and art, appears very clearly from the case of the Greeks .... The experience of mankind on the earth is always changing as man develops and has to deal with new combinations of elements; and the writer who is to be anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something that has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena. . . . With each such victory of the human intellect . . . we experience a deep satisfaction; we have been cured of some ache of disorder, relieved of some oppressive burden of uncomprehended events. This is clearly the credo of a man with a deep theoretical hostility to Symbolism. Yeats. for example, would have found it 57

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almost entirely abhorrent. It emphasizes the intellectual aspect of art, treats the intellect as an instrument of biological adaptation; it speaks of man as developing, and of art as dealing in phenomena. How, then, does he come to write so weIl of the heirs of Symbolism? How does he avoid treating The Waste Land as a mere symptom of decadence, or-in the language of a celebrated contemporary review-as a terrible warning (' the ravings of a drunken helot')? The reason is simply that he has a powerful primary, undogmatic, response to poetry; he can attach hirnself and then withdraw, and on withdrawal feels free to disapprove. In fact this is the whole method ofAxel's Castle: passionate identification with the work under discussion; followed by detached appraisal; followed by historical inference, which does not neglect the primary response. Before asking whether the work is of any use to mankind, whether it will help us round the environmental obstac1es, he proves that he has, in any case, responded to it. Now and again there may be an apparent split down the middle of his criticism, self-contradiction almost ; but that is because he is working out in his own head the whole dialectic of Symbolist art and the world it inhabits. Mr. Wilson has one skill which may seem a very humble one, and does not occupy the attention of theorists; he is a master of summary. In this book he summarizes all the major works of his authors, sometimes at considerable length, as with UtysseJ and A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. This part of his work is exemplary, for he is patient and thorough, and never 'loads' his accounts to make his later withdrawal and appraisal simpler. The chapter on Yeats, a poet whose cast of mind is antithetical to Wilson's own, is in some ways inadequate (it ends, characteristicaIly, with a warm tribute to ' Among Schoolchildren', which he sees as a great poem without being able to say why) but it contains a very careful account of AVision, a good and simple explanation of the doctrine of the Mask; in short, the critic gave his mind patiently to matters which must in themselves have seemed sadly trivial. Similarly with Valery; without sacrificing his independence Wilson gives almost the account of a disciple, and then withdraws, complains that Valery is often platitudinous or affected, and sometimes makes a pretence of exactitude in order' to cover a number of ridiculously false assumptions', the chief of which is the assumption that 58

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verse is an intellectual product absolutely different in kind from prose. This method is most clearly perceived in the chapter on Proust, where twenty-three pages go by before we turn over and find this: 'The fascination of Proust's novel is so great that, while we are reading it, we tend to accept it in toto.' Then comes the withdrawal, the questions and qualifications. Throughout the remainder of the chapter the critic's admiration for Proust's novel has to contend with his disturbance at its contempt for those problems which, in his view, it is the business of art to solve. Proust, he decides at last, was the 'last great historian of the . • . Heartbreak House of capitalist culture'. So with J oyce; a full admiring account of U(ysses, and then the reservations: with so much vitality, why does Joyce have so little movement? Being 'the great poet of a new phase of human consciousness', why should J oyce have cultivated opacity where it could have been avoided? Instead of making his book as easy as possible for the ordinary reader, he often makes it harder than it need be, 'as if he were shy and solicitous about it, and wanted to protect it from us'. Even Gertrude Stein, nearer the pole of uncommunicativeness, gets a fair showing. For what reason, apart from his evident pleasure in the books, did Wilson think them worth his care, deplorable as their tendencies seemed to be? One answer is that he saw them as, almost in spite of themselves, closely related to modern scientific specu1ation, repeating the Greek pattern. Proust provides 'a sort of equivalent in fiction for the metaphysics' of Whitehead. In his world, 'as in the universe of Whitehead, the "events", which may be taken arbitrarily as infinitely small or infinitely comprehensive, make up an organic structure.' Joyce's world resembles those of Proust, Whitehead, and Einstein, in that it is 'always changing as it is perceived by different observers and by them at different times. It is an organism made up of " events"'. Wilson likes these authors, and would be happy to think they collaborated with the scientists and philosophers in developing a new and more useful world-view; in optimistic mood he dares to hope that Valery was wrong in his prediction that the arts and sciences would become infinitely specialized; perhaps, on the contrary, they will 'finally fall all into one system'. This indeed is the note upon which he ends, emphasizing the great gifts these authors have 59

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made to mankind: new flexibility, new freedom of movement in a better-understood world, the hope and exaltation of the untried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art. But the question remains, how is this hope compatible with what has been said of the antisocial assumptions of these writers? They belong to the cork-lined cell; they shun all experience except that which can be 'savoured in solitude'. When we read them, says Wilson, we are oppressed by a sullenness, a lethargy, a sense of energies ingrown and sometimes festering. Even the poetry of the noble Yeats, still repining through middle age over the emotional miscarriages of youth, 1S dully weighted, for all its purity and candour, by a leaden acquiescence in defeat. They saw the future as dark; art surviving only as agame, the ceremony of innocence drowned. They lived on the past and the primitive; on their own despair and isolation, and the poverty of the new world. They make Wilson wonder whether poetry is not destined soon to fall into complete disuse .... What I am pointing out in Axel's Castle is not a contradiction but a tension; the book contains in little whatever can be said for and against the kind of art we now have. In some ways the whole issue is now clearer, not because we are shrewder than Wilson, but because we have watched it develop. He saw it, and accurately described it, thirty years ago; and he did more, he put the tension into his book instead of merely talking about it. This is to ascertain the masterspirit of the age. For all that we need to supplement it with other and lesser books, Axel's Castle is very much alive, and everybody's business. Professor Praz is the greatest of foreign students of English, an authority in very diverse fields, and above all a man of power and originality. I hope somebody is translating his re cent autobiography; Professor Praz ought to be seen in his Roman setting. He has written many books, and The Romantic Ago'!)' is not his only 'standard work'; but it is the book he is best known by. It is strictly a work of literary history, though it can hardly help , casting some light upon the most profound instincts of

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humanity', or escape misuse by anybody who needs a florilegium of perversions. Praz foresaw this; from the outset-perhaps from that moment in a train in which he is said to have conceived the whole work-he knew that his book would be confused with works he despised, such as Nordau's Degeneration, and also with medico-scientific writings. There is no excuse for such mistakes. Life has tended to imitate the art he discusses, and he takes note of the fact; but he is not at all concerned to make Sade attractive, or even to claim literary merit for his books. He confines himself to literary tendencies without attempting the psychoanalysis of authors, and refrains from explicit estimates of literary value. The Romanik Agof!Y is long and sometimes repetitive, simply because the author decided to present all the necessary evidence, sketch in the historical pattern, and leave the rest to the reader. Only a remarkable critic would have been capable of the intuition which preceded the selection of the material; this is simply another way of ascertaining the master-spirit of an age. The book looks back to the pathological elements of early Romantic thought, and it looks forward to the twentieth century; but it balances on the Decadence. In a favourite figure of the author's, it is a two-faced herm, one face looking back to Sade, Shelley, and Byron, the other contemplating the new world. Its main object of study is the epoch of neurasthenia. This term, devised by an American doctor in 1868, was accepted by G. M. Beard as naming a characteristic modern stress disease; Freud adopted it but later gave it up. It is therefore specially appropriate to the period when literary men were doing the preparatory work of psychoanalysis ; it dropped out when their material drained away into the casebooks. In the neurasthenie period it became commonplace to proclaim the disintegration of society. The symptoms of collapse were 'hysteria, morphinomania, scientific charlatanism, Schopenhauerism d l'outrance'. At such a time the Primavera could strike a man as 'satanic, irresistible, terrifying'. Marcel Schwob said that the novelists had done much to bring about this condition by exposing aspects of human behaviour formerly hidden. Now there was adesire to escape from this too well-known world into occultism, into primitive art; a man might suffer from 'Je desir douJoureux de m'aliener de moi-mlme'. Professor Praz's problem was to remain aloof without being merely clinical. He keeps his balance admirably. For example, he 61

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writes calmly of Baudelaire, but qualifies as erroneous the tendency to play down the poet's satanic and algolagnic characteristics, a misguided attempt to establish his greatness by minimizing the frisson nouveau. His treatment of Pater is likewise admirable in its perceptiveness, but also in its detachment. One senses throughout-in the commentary, in the massed quotations, in the exhaustive notes-the play of a delicate historical intelligence. The material is very simply organized. Two chapters deal with early Romantic themes, the Medusa (' beauty tainted with pain, corruption, death ') which foreshadows the later triumph of similar themes, and Satanism, with special reference to Byron. There follows a study of Sade, the greatest single influence on the tradition that culminated in the art of Decadence. Then there is a chapter on the Decadent theme of the Fatal Woman, 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'; and finally a chapter called 'Byzantium', the crown of the book, and full of rich material on the cult of Salome, on Decadent occultism and the finis latinorum, with D' Annunzio as a climactic manifestation. Obviously many more cases might be added to the file, the theme of the book lends itself to indefinite extension. But The Romanlic Ago'D' amply proves its points, and as arecord of the pathology of art in aperiod so immediately relevant to our own it justifies the claim that its author contributes to an understanding of the master-spirit of his age. Professor Praz would probably argue that the main object of his book was to increase understanding of a past period, and he does not undertake prognoses. What is very surprising is that his emblems of Decadence-La Belle Dame and Byzantium-survived the period of neurasthenia and were transformed. A reading of The Romanik Ag0'D' can strangely illuminate Yeats. He was committed to the Decadence as Professor Praz is not, and some of the men who, in Praz's words, 'asked nothing better than to have their minds poisoned' by the Divine Marquis and others were Yeats's friends, and became his Tragic Generation-no longer deluded minor poets but vital elements of his Weltanschauung. In the same manner he transformed the Fatal Woman; Salome is for him no longer a passing fashion, but a central figure in his theatre and his thought. An even more remarkable example of this transmutation of decadent themes is afforded by a comparison between the Decadent Byzantium and Yeats's.

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Tbe period of antiquity with which these artists of the ftn dc siCclc liked best to compare their own was the long Byzantine twilight, that gloomy apse gleaming with dull gold and gory purpie, from which peer enigmatic faces, barbaric yet refined, with dilated neurasthenie pupils .... The Byzantine period was aperiod of anonymous corruption, with nothing of the heroic about it; only there stand out against the monotonous background figures such as Theodora or Irene, who are static personifications of the female lust for power. There is no need to explain what Yeats, after long study and meditation, made of this fashion. His love of the Decadence-of Moreau, for example-his habit of categorizing men he admired in terms of which the Decadence would have approved-Robert Gregory, for instance-is unintelligible if one does not see that in some ways the period was more closely related to our own than its habitual themes suggest; for that reason a great poet was able at least to give them a place in modern art. This is the kind of speculation Professor Praz denies himself. Wyndham Lewis claimed that Thc Romantic Ag0'!J was merely 'the historical dossier for my "Diabolical Principle"'. It is a dossier, certainly, but of something more than Lewis's polemic. It was equally absurd to speak ofPraz's 'diabolism'. He wrote as a detached literary historian, and even preferred to leave the reader to make his own inferences. He describes the fantasies of the cork-lined cell; he might have gone on to explain how these were related to more fruitful elements of Decadent-Symbolist thought, but that he refrained from doing so is further evidence for that disinterest he conceived to be proper, and which has, quite wrongly, been called in question. I think it true to say that anybody who had read Axel's Castlc and Thc Romantic Ag0'!J was, by 1933, in a position to command great tracts of modern literature, and also-despite the vast output of scholarship and criticism since then-that they continue to be essential aids. 1961 •

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F 0 R this extraordinary book, as for how few works of critical theory, one confidently predicts long life. It is wonderfully weIl written, and has such momentum that to disagree with it is almost physically painful, though very necessary. It has almost no repose, but makes up for that by being full of that seemingly inevitable wit that comes only of great intelligence-a little, if one seeks a comparison, like Shaw. And somewhere hidden, driving the book along, is ademon every bit as queer as metabiology. Only by standards which Professor Frye would not accept does it fall short of greatness in its kind: first, if it were widely accepted it would have no influence upon the course of literature itself, and the highest criticism has; secondly, it fails, or refuses, to convey anything of what might be caHed the personal presence of any of the thousands of works discussed. The reason for these shortcomings is not the author's incapacity but his devotion to duty. He deals with literature in terms of a specific conceptual framework derived from an inductive study of literature, hoping thus to avoid the 'fallacy of determirusm' exhibited in Freudian or Marxist criticism; and he is therefore conscious of his descent from Aristotle, as weH as of the analogies between his critical method and the sciences, particularly physics in its mathematical phase. Literature he treats as a second nature, vast, inexhaustible, and anol).ymous; as physics studies nature, criticism studies art. But if it is to be a progressive science like physics, criticism needs to be developed systematically; that this has never been done is most easily seen from the fantastic deficiency of the critical vocabulary, a deficiency which the author 1

Anatomy 0/ Criticism. Four Essayl. By Northrop Ptye (Ptinceton U.P.).

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labours fantastically to supply. As literature grew more and more complex, critical systematization declined, whereas the primitive formulations of physics gave way to complex mathematical symbolism. 1nstead of concluding, as I should, that the physicscriticism analogy breaks down here, Mr. Frye proceeds to invent a quasi-mathematical critical system. But if science and art are alike Symbolic Forms (which Mr. Frye at least in part believes) a criticism which objectifies art is astrange parasite, as if one were to invent a non-mathematical way of presenting mathematics. However, the author is committed to finding some central hypothesis which will allow one to treat criticism as totally coherent, and concerned with the phenomena of art as parts of a whole; to do for criticism what Darwin did for biology. Of the prescientific prejudices which have first to be exploded, two stand out: first, the 'fallacy of premature te1eology'-the notion that the critic's task is to get out of a work what the author put in, which corresponds, in the natural sciences, to the belief that a phenomenon is as it is because Providence inscrutably made it so. Secondly, valuejudgements must go; the assault on them is very live1y, but Mr. Frye admits that Milton is a more valuable poet than Blackmore, a fatal concession one would have thought, since it is not nobler to study stars than worms. Between the Polemical Introduction (which is all I have so far considered) and the Tentative Conclusion stand the four enormous essays which chart and classify the world of literature. 1t is like some strange unknown forest, where the trees grow in groups of four, five, six, or seven, and which is divided into four sections, with balancing subseetions, the numerological groups constantly re-echoing each other; ultimate1y the author reaches the heart of the wood, and finds what he knew was there, a central myth, inconceivably diversified throughout the body of literature. I have tried but failed to find .some way of abridging the scheme of these essays, and in what follows there is much distortion as well as omission. I have also emphasized the points which seem to me to show the degree to which this book suffers, in its own way, from the fallacy of determinism; this being so it is only fair to repeat at this point that the text is often brilliant with wit and penetrating in observation. The first Essay (Historical Criticism : Theory of Modes) classifies 65

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fietions by the degrce to which their heroes are spoudaios or phaulos. (Mr. Frye, in the modern American manner, transliterates all his Greek.) This yields five 'modes' of fiction, stretching from the hero as god to the hero as the reader's inferior (irony). European fietion has gravitated from the first to the last of these modes, from myth to romanee, to tragedy and epic (the 'high mimetic' modes), and to comedy and irony ('low mimetic' modes). In each mode there is to be distinguished a 'naive' and a ' sentimental' form (these terms are not used in the normal, not yet quite in Schiller's, sense, but a glossary is provided, ve1"Y necessary if 0l1e remembers that the dass of hero called alazon indudes Madame Bovary, Lord Jim, Heathcliff, and Othello, whereas the pharmakos dass indudes Hester Prynne, Billy Budd, Tess, and, one supposes, Mr. Waugh's heroes. This is very exerdsing. Who is the alazon in Emma, Mt. Elton or Emma herself? Is Lucky Jim an alazon or a pharmakos or possibly an eiron? Is he comic or ironie?) Frye goes on to study the tragic and eomic modes systematically, as demonstrating the tension between mimesis and mythos; in relation to the latter, the question to ask about Tom Jones or Oliver Twist is what are their relations with the birth-mystery plots of Menander, and with myths like those of Moses and Perseus. The most valuable part of this First Essay deals with 'Thematie Modes' and is a sort of extension of the Aristotelian dianoia. This is eoneerned not with the question 'How is this story going to turn out?', which relates to plot, and spedfieally to anagnorisis; but with the question 'What's the point of this story?' No work of fiction is totally fietional, none is totally thematic; but any work can have a bias one way or the other, as titles like The History of Tom Jones and Sense and Sensibility indicate. As in fiction the author imposes mythical form on life, so in 'thematic' writing he imposes literary form on thought. He does not imitate thought; to suppose that he does is to risk the fallacy of 'existential projection'-arguing back from the poem's theme to the poet's thought. The 'thought' that all thematic poetry projects-as Spenser projeets Platonism and Goethe 'organidsm'-is not the poet's 'philosophy'; and this is true whether this thought is theologically or philosophieally conventional or self-generated, as in Blake or Shelley. In placing 66

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this 'as if' before all poetie 'thought', Frye is as true to the broadly Symbolist view of literature as he was in declaring all works of art to be anonymous, placing precisely the same diffieulties of interpretation before their own authors as they do before independent erities. Even from this very inadequate aeeount it should be clear that the book is deeply eoneemed with mythieal and thematie recurrenee in literature, and henee with the schematization of the multitudinous ways in which the reeurrent may be embodied. The Seeond Essay, which is called Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols, assumes as a fact of literary experience the principle of 'polysemous meaning', adopts the four-Ievel Dantesque system of interpretation (though denying that one level is more valuable than another) and seeks not a sequence of meanings so much as of contexts in which the work of art ean be plaeed, each context having its own dianoia, mythos, and ethos. Literary meaning is always 'hypothetical' or 'imaginative'; questions of fact or truth are subordinate to the primary aim of producing a structure of words for its own sake. Wherever we have an autonomous verbal strueture of this kind we have literature. (This is again Symbolist; by 'hypothetical' Frye means what Mrs. Langer means by 'virtual', and this is not far, though the approach is so different, from I. A. Richards's 'pseudo-'. Indeed, this passage is a conspicuous clue to where we are going; for not only is 'autonomy' a reverend Symbolist concept, but the assertion of the diseontinuity of literature from assertive thinking supports the parallel with mathematics, and suggests allegiance to the latest manifestation of Symbolist aesthetics, the neo-Kantianism of Cassirer's Symbolie Forms. Thus, what is ealled 'discursive thinking' is ruinous to literature beeause it interferes with its 'centripetality': this is so whether the thought is of God or how to grow hops. I find some eonfusion in the argument here because I do not see why the poet, who can say so much without affirming anything, must be held to have chosen 'eentrifugal material' if he speaks of theology, simply beeause theology can be ealled tautological, whereas he can use jokes and puns and even myths which have not been existentially projected into dogma. Behind all this is the old Symbolist regret that words are used for other purposes

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than to make poems.) A consequence of this principle of autonomy is that the mediaeval ' literal' acquires a new sense; since a poem cannot be literally anything but a poem, what Dante thought of as the 'literal' meaning is in fact an 'allegorical' meaning, though a simple prose paraphrase. (This is attractive, because it removes the ground of the quarrel between those who contend, with Mr. Winters, that any good poem must have a paraphrasable meaning, and those who anathematize paraphrase; for Mr. Frye they are simply talking about two different phases of the poem's existence. The 'literal' meaning, in his sense, is nearly what Professor WiIson Knight calls the , spatial' interpretation. We listen to the poem, but we see what it means: we have a simultaneous apprehension of the whole, towards which all the words point, inwards. This 'hypothetical verbal structure' is the literal meaning. Frye duly acknowledges that nobody before Mallarme could have supposed this. From it follow a number of familiar consequences; thought in a poem is 'virtual thinking', the intention of the poet is only what is definitively described in this text, poetry is always ironical because it never means what it says. Nor, in the nature of the ..:.ase, is there any possible limit to commentary; we can talk about a poem, as ab out a tulip, for ever, always explicating (see Hulme and Bergson), or, as Frye prefers to say, allegorizing). But, if we must refrain from existential projections, there are nevertheless ways of talking about the work, however autonomous, in a context, the context of literary forms as a whole. On the assumption that 'literature shapes itself, and is not shaped externally', Frye proposes a new theory of genres. (Even here, though the author regrets that we are less dear about genre than Milton was when he sat down to write Lycidas, there is no escape from Symbolism. Frye will not allow that the poet is the 'father' of his poem; that would be to confuse a literary with a discursive verbal structure. He is ooly the midwife, or womb. This striking passage on p. 98 is, perhaps deliberately, an allegorization of Mallarme's sonnet, 'Don du poeme'.) In fact this is a theory of archetypes, mythic patterns inductively ascertained from a study of the secunda natura, art, regatdless of whethet the artist was conscious of employing them. These archetypes are so important to Frye's 68

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system that they must be distinguished from other hypotheses that go under the same name: they are not Jungian. Theyare a necessary corollary of the doctrine that the forms in which a poet organizes his work come out of poetry, not life. Their presence has nothing to do with value, and Prye deliberately draws many examples from cheap and superficial literature. Theyare quite distinct from Miss Bodkin's archetypes, because Prye is concerned only with the fact of recurrence, though to explain that recurrence it is necessary to descend to the primitive mythicallevel of seasonal recurrence and rebirth. In fact the archetypes provide the link between literature and life which makes literature an ethical instrument 'without any temptation to dispose of the arts in the process'. As an ethical instrument, art is 'disinterested and liberal', proper to cultl1re as distinct from civilization. Archetypes are therefore the agents which enable the fifth (or as Dante would have said, the fourth or anagogical) level of meaning; for at the heart of the archetypes there are 'universal symbols'. Literature, in this phase, becomes 'the total dream of man', not imitating but containing nature; and the poem is a microcosm, a monad containing life in a system of verbal relationships; it is the' epiphany' of J oyce, the 'inscape' ofHopkins. (Prye knows weH that this is Symbolist; like Pound, he identifies metaphor, one of these relationships, as juxtaposition without predicate, which is the ideographie version of the Romantic or Symbolist image. I cannot do justiee to this second essay, but it is fair to say that its structure, however weird it looks, is a considerable inteHectual achievement, being nothing less than the adaptation of an Aristotelian scheme to a Symbolist view of literature.) The Third Essay (Archetypal Criticism : Theory oJ J1yths) fuHy expounds the implications of these archetypes, and in doing so takes us to the heart of the wood, where we find the central hypothesis: it reminds one of Prazer's treatment of the sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, except that Prazer puts this at the beginning of his book and Prye, appropriately since he holds that the Quest-romance underlies aHliterature, seeks it through strange landscapes. If one regards myths as one pole, and naturalism as the other, of literary design, a theory of displacement will account for the degree to which the mythical pattern is obscured, in any given work, by the demands of plausibility. 69

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Undisplaeed myth is about gods and demons, heaven and hell, and may be divided into apoealyptic and demonic; at the other extreme realism plays down myth as far as possible. But the process is circular, and ironie literature, which starts from realism, tends to turn into undisplaced myth. (The circularity of Frye's diagrams is one aspect 1 have had to negleet. This passage on 'displaeement' is both central and subtle, though it must be said that its main purpose is to lower the author into myth, where all the answers are ultimately to be found. It sometimes appears that the answers to allliterary problems must at present be primitivistic, and this book is, under one aspeet, an immense structure of primitivizing devices, extremely sophisticated.) A general Theory of Mythos, isolating seven types of eategories of image, follows. Basically there are four pregeneric narrative elements in literature: Spring-Comedy, Summer-Romance, Autumn-Tragedy, Winter-Irony and Satire. Here, on the primitivisdc bedrock, we find the cleverest and most sophistieated part of the book, far too complicated to summarize, abounding with brilliant critical observation, and a perfect riot of terminological innovation. (For example, the eiron type, otherwise the Viee or the Golux, includes Leporello, J eeves, and Ariel; the agroikos Malvolio, Jaques, Bertram, Caliban, and Manly. Speaking of tragedy, Mr. Frye throws out the idea, new to me, that the two great periods of tragedy correspond to the rise of lonian and Renaissance science, which may help us to understand his point that all tragedy leads up to 'an epiphany of law'.) The book seems to me particularly good on tragedy, which it treats as apart of a total quest-myth of which the other pregeneric mythoi are constituents. Tragedy is itself divided into six phases, of which the last is set in a world of shock and horror (Oedipus Tyrannus), with central images of sparagmos; and this last phase shades into pure demonic epiphany (Inferno). For all its brilliance, this essay does not pretend to take us very far, and having mastered it one is stillleft without an answer to very elementary guestions. For example: everybody can see that Othello, Otello, and Cinthio's bloody little story are very different (even if we leave out of consideration that two of the works are sublime masterpieces and the third not) but so far Frye has only taught us clever ways of saying how they resemble each other; for 7°

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bis account of the position of Othel/o in the world of literature will serve without alteration for the other two works also. The Fourth Essay (Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres), though abstaining from judgements of value, provides some criteria for making the necessary distinetions. It opens with a flurry of triads, stemming from Aristotle's melos, lexis, and opsis, but settles down to a study of the radical ofpresentation as the differentia of genre (the radical of epos, as opposed to epic, is oral address; of ftction, the printed address to the reader. These two genres are flanked by drama and lyric). In connexion with epos, Frye studies the rhythm of oral verse, and finds the four-stress line to be inherent in the structure of English. Considering melos, he defines 'musical poetry' as poetry resembling the music contemporary with it, and having a predominating stress accent with free variation of the number of syllables between stresses. (Browning is a musical poet, Tennyson not.) Opsis is considered as imitative harmony, and the palm for this goes to Spenser, wbich is no odder than many other things in this chapter, of which space absolutely forbids me to say more. In bis Tentative Conc!usion the author insists on the utility of 'archetypal criticism' in breaking down the barriers between different critical methods. The mythic core of literature invites infinite explanation and allegorization; but so long as this effort is confined to individual works, we have chaos, as in Ramlet criticism. Archetypal criticism ends chaos, because 'things become more hopeful as soon as there is a feeling ... that criticism has an end in the structure of literature as a total form, as weIl as a beginning in the text studied '. But this is not all; Frye now sets bis theory in a wider context. He rejects as fallacious all doctrines of cultural dec1ine, but equally rejects all possibility of development in the arts; the best that can be done has already been done, though it may be repeated. What can be steadily improved is the understanding of the arts; and so the critic's task is associated with the ultimate purposes of civilization. In this way art, though without morality, is an ethical instrument, neo-Arnoldian and with a quite different interpretation of spoudaios. FinaIly, the analogy between criticism and mathematics becomes explicit. Literature and

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mathematics proceed not from facts but from postulates; both can be applied to external reality and yet also exist in a 'pure' form, etc. For Plato, the ultimate acts of apprehension were mythical or mathematical, and Frye says much the same thing. To remake the broken links between creation and knowledge, art and science, myth and concept-which Frye conceives to be the work of criticism-is, in the end, an attempt to understand that art is a symbolic form, like language, myth, and science. Once more we are in the domain of Cassirer; for ail his immense originality, Frye is in some ways a less original critic than, say, Mr. Yvor Winters. I have indicated in passing some of the elements of what may intelligibly be cailed 'Symbolist' doctrine in this book, and they add up to a total impressive enough to indicate that its author wrote it with much less freedom from prejudice than he supposed. A poem is an anonymous and autonomous verbal structure; literal meaning cannot be rendered in other words; literary form is spatial; the intention is defined in the text. Add to these beliefs a highly developed organicism, a primitivism which arrives at myth through archetype and, though rejecting the hypothesis of Mr. Barfield, accepts those of Cassirer and Mrs. Langer; and you have the latest, extraordinary development of Symbolist criticism. Perhaps the need for mythology has never been so rich1y expressed; yet this, like any other ' sentimental' revival of myth, is an ironical comment on the society which calls for it. I myself believe, with Mr. Forster, that one may 'introduce mysticism at the wrong stage of the affair'; for example, the doctrine of anonymity is a mystical doctrine, which serves to explain why St. lohn of the Cross or Dante were no better than they were at interpreting their own poems, but does not explain how severe must be the technical process by which Proust or Mr. Eliot or Mr. Forster reproduce, with eyes wide open, the relation between what Mr. Frye calls Augenblick and the ordinary business of living. It is very unfortunate that he has not yet allowed himse!f to study, in terms of his diagram, one single work of art. Everything in the book points downwards, to preconscious ritual, which is the necessary base of the structure. Mr. Frye's primitivism differs from that of less literary aestheticians in two ways: first, he is enormously weil acquainted with literature; 72.

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secondly, he is fascinated by ornamental design. The book sometimes looks like the work of an apocalyptic numerologist with a flair for Greek, and its threes, fours, fives, sixes, and sevens have a curiously centripetal effectj so has its general design, in which one can detect a peripeteia and finally, in the confrontation of mathematics by literature, a cognitio. If I were allowed to be diagrammatic, I should call Anatomy of Criticism a work of sixthphase Symbolism placed on the frontier of a purer Aristotelianism. Certainly it would be reasonable to treat this as a work of criticism which has turned into literature, for it is centripetal, autonomous, and ethical without, I think, being useful. As literature it has, if I may be permitted to say so, great value j and if this judgement seems to lack support in what I have said, I am perfectly content that this notice be regarded as a hideous example of sparagmos. 195 8•

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CAMBRIDGE at the tum of the century is increasingly weIl documented and endlessly interesting. There was an unusual concentration of great teachers, and their favourite pupils were abnormally clever young men who later became, to nobody's surprise, the inteIlectual leaders of their generation. Yet it is difficult, despite the memoirs and the novels, for the outsider to get a very dear picture of the University at that time. The sodal conditions are as nearly unimaginable as those of a Renaissance academy; the ethos, though it survived export from Cambridge, assumed misleadingly degenerate forms. Y oung people, presumably, did not need to be taught to take personal relationships seriously; but the gargoyle intensity with which they applied themselves to these matters in my own day was doubtless a distorted version of the cult instituted forty years earlier by persons of more talent and more leisure. That there was an interesting new development in the concept of gentleness-a modification of high bourgeois manners by men devoted to the arts-one need not doubt. But it could not survive without corruption in the extramural world; and it could not survive two ungentle wars. Even among the founders, when they ceased to be Cambridge and became Bloomsbury, the ethic became decadent, as Keynes testifies. The corruption of an elite is the generation of a clique. For an image of that society in ideal purity one reads Mr. Forster's novels. Cambridge is the context in which AnseH is credible. Is it not, in the ordinary sense, areal place at an. Mr. Forster once remarked upon the convention that in novels an the characters-even dun ones, and even in 'robust' writers-are more sensitive to each other than people are outside books. This

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sensitiveness, he says, 'has no parallel in life, except among people who have plenty of leisure. Passion, intensity, at moments-yes, but not this constant awareness, this endless readjusting, this ceaseless hunger. I believe that these are reflections of the novelist's state of mind when he composes, and that the dominance of love in novels is partly because of this.' Now the young men at Cambridge had plenty of leisure, and seem to have composed their lives in this manner; they lived in a fiction. Mr. Woolf, the first part of whose autobiographyl ends with his going down in 19°4 after five wonderful years of it, speaks of the power exercised over himself and his friends by the late novels of Henry James: they played 'at seeing the world ofTrinity and Cambridge as a Jamesian phantasmagoria, writing and talking as if we had just walked out of The Sacred Fount into Trinity Great Court'. The distinctions between life and art were obliterated; for a while it was not true that art was what Mr. Forster has called it, 'the one orderly product that our muddling race has produced'. Candour, sensitivity, love-however camouflaged by those teasing affectations Lawrence so abominated-were to redeem the usual muddle and make organic wholes of human relations. Perhaps this explains the eariy decadence of the ethic; for Mr. Forster is right in saying that if we are to comprehend a work of art we must Center an unusual state, and we can onlr enter it through love', and to do this in respect of other persons is possible only to the very young, at a time when life is a continual exercise in charitable expectation. Everything was new, anything might happen, and alllife was before uso . . . We lived in extremes-of happiness and unhappiness, of admiration and contempt, of love and hate. I might at any day or hour or minute turn a corner and find myself face to face with someone whom I had never met before but who would instantly become my friend for life. I might casually open a book and find that I was reading for the first time War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Madame Bovary, Hedda Gabler, Um Burial, or The Garden 0/ Proserpine. Such a society must soon pass, to borrow Knox's expression, from the charismatic to the institutional, from the joys of election 1

Sowing, by Leonard Woolf (Hogarth Press).

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to the restrietive snobbery of a clique. Knox was talking of heresies; and in asense, as Angus Wilson has argued, Bloomsbury was a sect, a late Vietorian heresy, a mysticism of godless common sense. Mr. Woolf's is a strong, lively book, notab1e as a self-portrait, but memorable as an account of this expensive experiment in civility. The social cost (for money, even if it is so p1entiful that it is never mentioned, has to come from somewhere) was a consideration that tumed Mr. Woolf into a Socialist, and prompts him to some grim allusions to the life of the London poor in those years. 'If nurse had read to me La Bruyere instead of de Quincey, I might have stood in the Earl's Court Road of 1885 .•• and murmured "en effil ils sanI des hammes." They were human beings but they made me siek with terror and disgust in the pit of my small stomach.' Mr. Woolf maintains that there has occurred in his lifetime an enormous increase in the civility of the poor, 'one of the miracles of economics and education'. And he will not claim that civility, spread thinner, has disappeared. And that is not the on1y way of estimating the cost of the experiment. It needed, if it were to take place at all, such apparatus as Trinity and King's, beautifully uneconomic equipment. It needed the 1uxury of access to the ancient world, and especially to Athens, upon terms acceptab1e to gentlemen; for their Greece was more like Jowett's than Jane Harrison's, though that had necessarily impinged upon them. It needed The Apostles, a society reserved on1y to the candid and the extraordinarily intelligent, and already almost a century old; it had already made its contribution to English 1etters, and was traditionally, in the words of Sidgwiek, intended to further 'the pursuit of truth with absolute devotion and unreserve by a group of intimate friends, who were perfectly frank with each other, and indulged in any amount of humorous sarcasm and playful banter'. Mr. Woolf is very clear that this society was of the greatest importance to him not only at Cambridge but throughout his life, even when, each man maturing in his own way, the old easy access to another's mind was ended. Among the Apostles of the time were J. T. Sheppard, Maynard Keynes and Lytton Sttachey. This last name is areminder of another costly ingredient. There had to be Stracheys and Stephenses, great Vietorian families in which intellectual eminence ran like red hair, through without inhibiting great variety in other

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characteristics. Leslie Stephen, eminent and very deaf, with an air of colossal authority and benevolence, appears in Mr. Woolf's book in the company of his daughters on a visit, or visitation. The Stracheys are remembered at home, squeaking and grunting numerously at dinner or at croquet. Mr. Woolf devotes a page or two to their caste, 'an inteIlectual aristocracy of the middle dass, the nearest equivalent in other countries being the French eighteenth-century noblesse de robe'. The importance of such families to the national1ife is inestimable; and the experiment also depended upon them. It depended, too, upon a tradition they cherished, a tradition of tolerance, and one of the products of this was the kind of person Mt. Woolf caIls a 'silly', using the word, one supposes, with much respect for its etymology, for these , sillies' are secular saints. For an understanding of the words he refers us to Tolstoy and Dostoievsky. 'There was something of the "silly" in Virginia ... and there was a streak of the "silly" in Moore.' G. E. Moore, presiding genius of the Apostles, the Socrates in whom common sense and silliness joined together, was one of the four great philosophers in the Cambridge of the period. Of the others, 'profound McTaggart', as Yeats called him (and what other poet could get away with it?), was also a silly; Whitehead and RusseIl were not. The defection of RusseIl and Moore from his strange neo-Hegelianism had already, in Mr. Woolf's day, undermined McTaggart's prestige (he was the oo1y one who did not get his OM). It may be that before we fuIly understand the civility and art of this period (and in particular Mr. Forster's) we shaIl have to understand McTaggart better, as weIl as Yeats did, anyway; for he brooded upon harmony, the dependence of meaning on oneness, the irrelevance of inductive thought. To visit him was in its way an education. Mr. Woolf remembers the long silences ; 'yet he did not seem to wish us not to be there·. G. E. Moore, on a similar occasion, felt obliged to challenge McTaggart's view that Time was unreal, which seemed to him then, and later, 'a perfectly monstrous proposition'. It was the combination of extreme precision of method with ordinary language that made Moore's philosophy so attractive to young men who thought themselves 'builders of a new society which should be free, rational, civilized, pursuing truth and beauty'. Many must have feit surprise that so dry a work as the 77

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Principia Elhica could have had the stimulating effect attributed to it by Keynes. The fact is that it treated personal reIationships as if they were subject to the same conditions as works of art; the fundamental principle of organic unity derives from resthetics. What the ethical treatise did was to release in the sphere of friendship all those emotion-fraught ideas, all the secular mysticism, that had become attached, in the tradition of Pater and the French, to the work of art. Mr. Woolf explicitly dec1ares Keynes to have been mistaken in attributing to this period of Moore's immediate influence a kind of heartless shallowness; he must have been thinking not of 1903 but of 1914, when they had lots 'the inexperience, virginity, seriousness, intellectual puritanism of youth'. In I903-the date of Principia-they were ready to revere silliness provided it enabled them to lead their lives as if they were writing, with love, some phantasmagorical great book. This mood passed, but the ghost of it survived in Mr. Forster, and A Passage 10 lndia is a view of the world that combines both common sense and 'silliness'-what Lowes Dickinson called Forster's 'double visionthis world and a world or worlds behind'. Mr. Woolf is not, and was never, a silly. The society of these friends at Cambridge and later has been the most important thing in his life; yet he had other friends and interests outside theirs. He is inteIlectuaIly tough as weIl as sensitive. He prides himself on a congenital absence of a sense of sin. He persists in thinking that our society has made progress in his lifetime. Though he was caught up in all that excitement, he is not a man to believe that a life can be a work of art; he calls himself, from the age of ten, 'a fully developed human being, mean, cowardly, untruthful, nasty and eruel.' But, cool and unillusioned as he is, he would not allow anybody to traduce that experiment in civility. We may look back to it, perhaps, as in its way one of those moments in which life, as in Yeat's Byzantium, takes on a formed, brimming perfection like that of art, and appears for an instant motionless before it flows over the basin's rim. For time, whether real or not, has elapsed, and although, in Lowes Dickinson's view, the springs of action' lie deep in ignorance and madness,' acts have occurred, acts unthinkable in Trinity Great Court in 19°3; yet this civility is also a matter of history, and it is a great pleasure to read Mr. Woolf's account of it. 1960. 37

x THE ONE ORDERLY PRODUCT (E. M. FORSTER)

'A l'RULY great novel is a tale to the simple, a parable to the wise, and a direct revelation of reality to the man who has made it part of his being': so Middleton Murry, in a piece called 'The Breakup of the Novel' which was published in 1924, the year of A Passage to India. A story, a parable, and at the same time an intuited truth, an image: anything less, it appeared, was only a bundle of fragments. Whether or not A Passage to India provides 'a direct revelation of reality', it certainly teils a story, and it also speaks, as it were in parable, for tolerance and liberalism. Indeed it does these things so weil that it is admired by people who regard talk of 'direct revelations of reality' as empty nonsense, and regret, as Roger Fry regretted, Mr. Forster's mystical tendencies. I think such readers are unlucky-I mean in their art rather than their religionbecause, like Mr. Forster's character Fielding, they have the experience but miss the meaning. They miss a designedly inexplicable wholeness. Having, perhaps, every other gift, they want love-which, for Mr. Forster, can mean the power to read a book properly. 'Our comprehension of the fine arts', he says, 'is, or should be, of the nature of a mystic union. But, as in mysticism, we enter an unusual state, and we can only enter it through love'. Love is the only mediator of meaning, because it confers and apprehends unity. The author in the act of composition is, according to Mr. Forster, in a condition of love. And clearly he had no difficulty in understanding the Rajah who said to him, 'Love is the only power that can keep thought out'. For 'thought' here

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means that which analyses in diseonnection, douses reality in time, and misses the meaning. To translate this into convertible eritical eurrency, Mr. Forster is a kind of Symbolist. He declares for the autonomy of the work of art; for eo-essenee of form and meaning; for art as 'organie and free from dead matter'; for music as a eriterion of formal purity; for the work's essential anonymity. Like all art, he thinks the novel must fuse differentiation into unity, in order to provide meaning we can experienee; art is 'the one orderly product that our muddling race has produced', the only unity and therefore tbe only meaning. This is Symbolist. But there are interesting qualifieations to be made; they bear on the question of differentiation, of stresses within the unity-a question that would have interested the Cambridge Hegelians of Mr. Forster's youth, when the enemy Bertrand Russell, was at their gates, brandishing what the Rajah ealled 'thought'. Tbe first qualification arises from Mr. Forster's eelebrated insistence on the point that the novel tells a story-a 10w, atavistie thing to be doing if you claim the power to make direct revelations of reality. In the novel, the matter which seeks pure form is itself impure. This sounds like the old Symbolist envy of music; but we soon learn that Mt. Forster really values this impurity. He dislikes novels of the sort H. G. Wells attributed to James; 'On the altar, very reverently plaeed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an eggshell, a piece of string'. He agrees with Wells that 'life should be given the preference, and must not be whittled or distended for a pattern's sake'. If 'life' in this sense is patternresisting, impure, nevertheless our direct revelation of reality, pure as it is, must somehow include it. One thinks ofValery, who said that no poem eould be pure poetry and still be a poem. Dnity implies the inclusion of impurity. The seeond qualifieation again brings the French Symbolist to mind. 'Organic unity'-art's kind ofunity-has to be produced by a process eoarsely characterized by Mr. Forster himself as 'faking'. 'All a writer's faculties', he says, 'including the valuable faculty of faking, do conspire together ..• for the ereative act'. 'Faking' is the power he so greatly admired in Virginia Woolf. From the author's point of view the organism ean look rather like a machine-a maehine, as Valery said, for producing poetie states. Eventually the author withdraws and lets the work lead its own 80

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anonymous life; but he must not do so too soon. The burden of Mr. Forstet's critidsm of Gide is that one can withdraw too soon, 'introdudng mystidsm at the wrong stage of the affair'. Later, the author may stand back and see what he has said; but first he must do his faking intelligently. Faking is what VaIery did in his multitudinous drafts; it is what makes the work of art different from oracular raving. 'How shameful to write without a conception of the work's structure, caring little for why and stilliess for how I Rougir d' eire la Pythie!' Organic and free of dead matter this direct revelation may be; but it contains impurity, and intelligence helped to make it. It is faked. In this sense of the word, a novel not only fakes human relationships but also, working against muddle and chance, fakes an idea of order without which those relationships could have no significance. The fraud committed is, in fact, a general benefaction of significance. Nowadays, so far as I know, nobody attempts faking on anything like Mr. Forster's scale, and to this difference between then and now I will return. But first I must have some sort of a shot at the task of illustrating how, in A Passage to India, where it is almost inconceivably elaborate, the faking is done. The events it describes inelude the coming ofKrishna, which makes the world whole by love; and the novel's own analogous unity is achieved by faking. One can start at the opening chapter, indeed the opening sentence. 'Except for the Marabar Caves-and they are twenty miles off-the dty of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary'. Easy, colloquial, if with a touch of the guide-book, the words set a scene. But they will reach out and shape the organic whole. Or, to put it another way, they lie there, lacking all rhetorical emphasis, waiting for the relations which will give them significance to the eye of 'love'. But they are prepared for these relations. The order of prindpal and subordinate elauses, for instance, is inverted, so that the exception may be mentioned first - ' except for the Marabar Caves'. The excepted is what must be ineluded if there is to be meaning; first things first. First, then, the extraordinary which governs and limits significance; then, secondly, we may consider the dty. It keeps the caves at a distance; it is free of mystery till nightfall, when the caves elose in to question its fragile appearance of order-an appearance that depends upon a sodal conspiracy to ignore the extraordinary. SI

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Henceforth, in this novel, the word 'extraordinary' is never used without reference to the opening sentence. It belongs to the caves. The last words of the first chapter speak once more of 'the extraordinary caves'. Miss Quested's behaviour in relation to the caves is 'extraordinary'. It is a characteristically brilliant device; the word occurs so naturally in conversation that its faked significance cannot disturb the story. The characters say 'extraordinary' but the novelist means 'extra-ordinary'. In asense, Fielding can measure the extraordinariness of Marabar by the Mediterranean, the norm of his civilization. But nobody can actually say in what this extraordinariness consists. 'Nothing, nothing attaches to them, and their reputation-for they have one--does not depend upon human speech. It is as if the surrounding plain or the passing birds have taken upon themselves to exclaim "extraordinary", and the word has taken root in the air, and been inhaled by mankind '. Perhaps Professor Godbole can explain in what they are extraordinary; Miss Quested asks him at Fielding's tea-party: 'Are they large caves?' she asked. 'No, not large'. 'Do describe them, Professor Godbole'. 'It will be a great honour'. He drew up his chair and an expression of tension came over his face. Taking the cigarette box, she offered to him and Aziz, and lit up herself. Mter an impressive pause he said: 'There is an entrance in the rock which you enter, and through the entrance is the cave'. 'Something like the caves at Elephanta?' 'Oh not, not at all; at Elephanta there are sculptures of Siva and Parvati. There are no sculptures at Marabar'. 'They are immensely holy, no doubt', said Aziz, to help on the narrative. 'Oh no, oh no'. 'Well, why are they so famous? We all talk of the famous Marabar Caves. Perhaps that is our empty brag'. 'No, I should not quite say that'. 'Describe them to this lady, then'. 'It will be a great pleasure'. He forwent the pleasure ... We find out why he had to. The caves are the exception that menaces the city, the city of gardens and geometrical roads made 8.2.

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by the English, the Indian city of unholy muddle. And sometimes it is possible to exclude them, to ignore them like the distance beyond distance in the sky, because, like God in the song of the beautiful ecstatic girl, they are without attributes. In asense, theyare God without attributes; because his absence implies his presence. Therefore, says the Professor, we are entitled to repeat to Krishna, 'Come, come, come'. Without them there is no whole by which we may understand the parts. FieIding rejects them, and will never understand; he believes in 'thought'. Mrs. Moore accepts them, seeing a whole, but one in which love is absent; all distinctions obliterated not by meaning but by meaninglessness, the rumble of the Marabar echo. Including the excepted does not necessarily result in felicity. But when we know the worst of Marabar-that it is of the very stuff of life, flesh of the sun, thrusting up into the holy soi! of Ganges-we still have to observe that the last explicit mention of Marabar in the book, at the end of a petulant remark of Aziz, is drowned in the noise of rejoicing at Krisbna's coming. An ordinary conversational remark, of course, with its place in the story, bears the weight of this piece of faking. Similarly, in the last pages, the rocks which, as in a parable, separate the friends Aziz and Fielding, are thrust up from the Indian earth like the fists and fingers of Marabar. Story, parable, coexist in the wholeness of the reveIation. Privation, the want of wholeness, may entitle us in life to say 'Come, come, come'; but in the noveI this appeal has also to be faked. Godbole first uses the words at the tea-party, after his statement concerning Marabar. In his song, the milkmaid asks Krishna to come; but he neglects to come. At Marabar the need of him is absolute; and even the road to the caves, where everything calls out' Come, come', remains what it is because 'there is not enough god to go round'. Resonant with the absence of Krishna, it confuses distinctions like that between love and anima! feeling; so Miss Quested discovers. But it is not only Marabar; nothing is proof against the god's neglect, not even Aziz' poetry, for all it says about the Friend who never comes. What comes instead is the sun in April, the source of life and of Marabar; and the sun spreads not love but lust and muddle. Or, instead of Krishna, a British magistrate arrives: 'He comes, he comes, he comes', says a satirical Indian. The lack of this coming is feIt by the guests at the party who heard Godbole's song; they are unwell, 83

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with some malaise of privation; they are suffering from a deficiency of meaning, which cannot be cured until Love takes upon itself the form of Krishna and saves the world in the rain. The unity he makes is an image of art; for a moment at least all is one, apprehensible by love; nothing is excepted or extraordinary. The novel itself assumes a similar unity, becomes a mystery, a revelation of wholeness; and does so without disturbing the story or the parable. But after this, does it, like the rejoicing at Krishna's coming, 'become history and fall under the rule of time'? Like the birth of the god, the novel is contrived as a direct revelation of reality, of meaning conferred by a unifying and thought-excluding love; as -leaving gods out of it-the one orderly product. But does it still fall under the rule of time? Perhaps this mystical conception of order in art was more accessible to Mr. Forster than to his younger contemporaries. I rather bluntly called him a Symbolist; in fact the doctrines of that great sect were mediated to him in a peculiar way. Think how valuable, for instance, to a writer with this idea of order, was the ethics of G. E. Moore I I mean, in particular, the notion that significance in personal relationships depends on a sense of overall unity analogous to that which gives significance to art; without such unity friendship itself is mocked by exception-beyond and beyond-and is only dwarfs shaking hands. All that civilization excepts or disconnects has to be got in for meaning to subsist. Moore calls this unity , organic '-an analogy that surely reached ethics through aesthetics. Perhaps the Principia are never realizable except in novels; however this may be, a belief of this sort about human life as dependent on the orderly inclusion of the extraordinary, is clearly valuable to a novelist who holds the analogous aesthetic doctrine. The 'one ordedy product' can include life entire; good and evil, privation and plenitude, muddle and mystery-seen, for amoment, whole. The wholeness is made by love; nothing is excepted except what the Rajah called 'thought'. The feeling that a work of art, a novel for instance, must be in this exalted sense orderly, survives; but, for whatever reasons, it seems less potent now. Perhaps you cannot have it very fully unless you have that 'conviction of harmony' of which the Cambridge phllosopher McTaggart used to speak in Mr. Forster's youth. For him, too, all meaning depended upon oneness. He had 84

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an argument to prove that it could never inhere in inductive thought; on the contrary, it depended upon what he cal1ed 'love', meaning not sexual love nor benevolence nor saintliness nor even the love of God, but something like full knowledge and the justice and harmony this entails. McTaggart even allows the possibility of one's experiencing a mystic unity which is not benevolent, not indeed anything but 'perfectly simple Being'without attributes-' difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish from Nothing'. He is thinking of Indian mysticism. Marabar is perhaps Being under that aspect; however, Godbole can distinguish between presence and absence, and it is Mrs. Moore who cannot, and who therefore becomes a saint of Nothingness. These remarks about the intellectual climate at the relevant period are meant to be suggestive, but not to suggest that Mr. Forster as a novelist is a conscious disciple of any philosopher. I do think, though, that the wonderful years at Cambridge enabled hiln to prepare the ground for a creation of order-gave him the secure sense of organic unity that made possible those feats of faking, and allowed him to see that, properly viewed, the human muddle could itself be mystery. Only in some such way can I account for the marvellous ease with which story, parable and image here coexist. There was a 'conviction of harmony', a belief in order. Perhaps that has fallen under the rule of time. We, in our time, are, I think, incapable of genuinely supposing a work of art to be something quite different from A Passage to India; it is, in this sense, contemporary and exemplary. In another sense, though, it does fall under the rule of time, because any conviction of harmony we may have will be differently grounded. Of these two facts, the first seems to me of incomparably greater importance. It is a consequence that we cannot know too much ab out the remarkable inclusiveness of the book. We continue to have our illusions of order, and clever faking; but this book reminds us how vast the effort for totality must be; nothing is excepted, the extraordinary is essential to order. The cities of muddle, the echoes of disorder, the excepting and the excepted, are all to be made meaningful in being made one. This will not happen without the truth of imagination which Mr. Forster cal1s 'love'; love cheats, and muddle turns into mystery: into art, our one orderly product. 195 8•

37

XI PUZZLES AND EPIPHANIES (JAMES JOYCE)

RICHARD ELLMANN, the author oftwo good books on Yeats, has written a superlatively good biography of Joyce.1 It assembles, with a mastery Joyce himself would have admired, a great mass of published and unpublished testimony; it proceeds without the least fuss or affectation; and it is informed by critical comment of high quality, all the more effective for being sparingly inserted. Joyce himself onee tried to explain how difficult everything must be 'when your life and work make one', and couldn't even finish his sentence. Here, in 800 pages of remarkable authority, Mt. Ellmann finishes it for him, and fixes Joyce's image for a generation. This service was needed. The power of U(ysses to possess a man's mind seems to have flagged; the book has dated. I read it last summer on a fairly Nausicaan beach, surrounded by Cissies and Edies (new style) and Jackies and Tommies, for whom I gallantly retumed the ball. It is certainly a better book to read at Bloom's age than at Stephen's; but when I mentioned this to friends they thought me old-fashioned or posing. If you were ever flushed and exdted by U(ysses you are probably now over forty; if you ever tried to live by it, over thirty. Under thirty, people seem to be a little bored by Joyce's endless experimentation, and also by the setting up of a polarity between prose and poetry which is rendered in terms of straight talk about the genitals or swooning pre-Raphaelite rhythms. Also Joyce exaggerates the remoteness of his soda! context by pushing it back to 19°4, so 1

Jame.r Joyce. By Richard Ellmann (O.U.P.). 86

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that some of the naughtiness about 'drawers' and the like is of merely archreological interest. But far more important than this kind of fading is the obsolescence of an aesthetic; the young are not much interested in the vast ambition of Joyce, his desire to make of a book an entire self-supporting world, a reality which, like normal reality, is a paradigm of some inaccessible truth. Dublin, 19°4, was his Vision. One reads U(ysses as on the cosmic scale or not at all; and life-crippling attempts to make it new and make it whole are not fashionable just now. There is, nevertheless, a J oyce industry; witness Mr. Magalaner's scholarly collection,l and the James Jqyce Quarter(y. Joyce foresaw this when he kept adding to his puzzles, sayingthat he would ensure his fame by keeping the professors happy; and, sure enough, they now know so much about U(ysses that they call 'the oider studies ' merely , the work of cultivated amateurs'. The articles in such amiscellany, some dry some brilliant, are not in need of defence. At worst they contain useful hints; or they are part of a very intelligent game like that played by the Austenite elite who send each other incredibly difficult questionnaires about the auvre. The underlying assumption is that the books involved are ful(y meaningful, that the reality of each is confirmed by occult relations and laws that often wait long for discovery. Such a questionnaire on U(ysses might ask: 'Who was the man in the macintosh?' (a question asked by Joyce himself, to start the ball rolling, and answered by a contributor to the Miscellany). Why had Mulligan an affiicted mother? Why was the hangman called Rumbold? Why did Simon Dedalus dislike Reuben J. Dodd? For some of these, Ellmann only can provide the answer ; but his primary concern is nobler than this. He is a J oycean holist himself, and presents the whole man; not only the puzzles, but the world in which they became valid, the creating mind of Joyce. Joyce didn't make things up; he compared himself to the demiurge, working in pre-existent matter, but getting, he claimed, more order into the product that his divine counterpart. If he could ensure that 'the traits figuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated " joy would come of it. Hence his cult of coincidence, very well described by Ellmann. He associated his name with joy (and thought Jung disliked him because he had the same name as Freud). He made a lot ofhis birthday (Candlemas) 1

A James Joyce Miscellany (Second Series) (S. Illinois U.P.).

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and strangely pursued James Stephens with a view to making him responsible for Finnegans Wake should the original author be unable to finish it-this because Stephens was born on the same day as Joyce, combined his two names, and resembled him in other ways nobody else would attend to. He chose June 16, 1904, because that day he walked out first with Nora, because the day belonged to a saint associated with the reclamation of prostitutes, because it is a good day for a Black Mass: for some or all of these reasons. His picture of Cork was framed in cork. The world being like this, Joyce put into Utysses all those 'unexpected simultaneities' that hint at an order in a world. Without order, no integrity, consonance, clarity-no epiphanies. Unless the world is a network of correspondences there is no joy. And the entire business of the artist is with 'the holy spirit of joy'. All the banalities and complexities of Utysses are there for the sake of joy; Joyce calls it a comic book, says it is intended 'to make you laugh'. But 'joy' is not an easy word in Romantic resthetics; and I suspect people who don't find Utysses fairly grim of getting the word wrong. From the start he held that the artist could find his epiphany in a vulgar or commonplace speech or gesture as weIl as in more 'eucharistie' moments; and the bulk of Utysses is about the former. He combined a fuHy Romantic view of the artist with what he called 'a grocer's assistant's mind.' His beliefs and attitudes, so far as normallife was concerned, froze in his early twenties. He was, as Gillet found, almost totaHy indifferent to worldly affairs, and as EHmann brings the Joyce family into vivid life we see every one of them suffering as a result of what Stanislaus (a most intelligent man and a good critic of his brother's work) called his 'proud, vicious selfishness'. He treated Stanislaus with arrogant ingratitude; he squandered Miss Weaver's money. He shared his ragged fortunes with, and was wholly dependent on, a woman who was without the means or desire to understand his work; she never read Utysses, and once asked him why there were celebrations on June 16. (He did, however, once implore her to 'read that terrible book that has broken the heart in my breast'.) The sufferings of his family seemed not to touch him except when they affected his work. In the interests of that work, he played the devil with them all, and even seems to have conducted small experiments in self-cuckoldry. He was always alert for a betrayer. 88

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His power to love went mostly into his book; onlya shock of the sort administered by Nora's supposed infldelity re1eased much emotion into life. Yet he was pacific, humane; like Bloom, gutmütig if not gut, in many ways the burgher manque not the alienated artist; domestic, amiable, charitabIe, liking a joke. The Artist and the grocer; or, better, Stephen and Bloom. The truth seems to be that the normal process of maturation went on not in life but in books, especially in Utysses. 1t is hard to imagine a more' adult' book, but its author often seems in life not to have grown accordingly. This has a pure1y tragic aspect. The young man who said the artist should expect only misery and affiiction became the old man exhausted by the weaving of a Iife and a work out of one fabric, writing a post-adult book in which few had any confidence, more than half-blind, his daughter sinking into schizophrenia, his affairs in fantastic disorder, dependent on his own reserve of power and the fidelity of new friends. It has a comic aspect, too: Ellmann's book is full of sheer lived farce. But the important thing is, how did this unusual maturing affect Utysses? It is, notoriously, a yea-saying book; but its 'yes' is less positive than is sometimes supposed. In so far as it is a work of real consonance and c1arity and integrity, it says its 'yes' for order against mess. But what of Ulysses himse1f, the hero whose name derives from nobody and God, ou/is and Zeus? His' yes' is simply to the question, can such a man live with things exactly as they usually seem to be? Above aH, what about Molly, speaker of the world's most famous affirmative? 1s she really an earth-goddess? 'The last word (human, all too human) is left to Penelope,' said Joyce. 'It must end with the most positive word in the hUffi'lO language.' But to Gillet he wrote: 'pour peindre le balbutiement d'une femme qui s'endort,j'avais eherehe aftnir par le mot le moins fort qu'il m'etait possible de decouvrir. j'avais trouve le mot "yes", qui se prononce apeine, qui signijie I'acquiescement, I'abandon, la d#ente, la ftn de toute resistance.' And this feeble expiring 'yes' is, if one remembers Molly's unsatisfactory sexuality, her deploring the Purefoy baby, her prudery, her dislike of flowers, nearer the mark than any more spectacular affirmation. MoHy is the 'perfect1y sane fuH amoral fertilizable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited prudent indifferent Weib,' as Joyce said. Whatever she may think or do, her very existence is a 'yes', as the Liffey flows into the sea; not a

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grand special' yes' but a perfectly normal one. And this normal affirmation is Joyce's mature 'lesson'; the qualified acceptance of all the banal flux of reality, the middle-aged answer to the best of all possible or, as Finnegans Wake puts it, pensible worlds. To receive this revelation there had to be, in the book, a fusion of Stephen and Bloom. The last word of the Wake is 'the', standing for all the definite artic1es out of which such epiphanies must come. Joyce once said to Beckett that he might have 'over-systematized' U!ysses. But nobody knows how many puzzles make a world, and demiurges are professional systematizers. Sending Budgen the fantastic scheme of Thc Oxen of the Sun, Joyce asked, , How's that for high?' but he also told him, 'the thought is always simple'. This is true; U!ysses is only a world in which nobody-god and the protomartyr walk together, a world like ours. It was after U!ysses that the balance of the two worlds grew precarious. 'Since 19zz,' said J oyce, 'my book has been a greater reality for me than reality. Everything outside the book has been an insuperable difficulty.' With a lot of reality Nora dealt for him, or Miss Weaver, or (if he gat inta a fight) Hemingway. (' He couldn't even see the man so he'cl say, "Deal with him, Hemingway I Deal with him! "') He fought off reality almost to the end. Of course it was incredibly heroic. Ellmann's book is about a giant, his white stick tapping ceaselessly along the kerbs of a world, remembering their obduracy, divining their congruence. 1959·

37

XII A SHORT VIEW OF MUSIL

WITH the publication of the third instalment of the WilkinsKaiser translation,! The Man Without Qualities is once more, and this time with a certain casualness, as if the battle were won, being referred to as one of the great novels; Musil, we are told, is of the company ofProust and Joyce. Formerly his reputation had seemed to be, like the lights sailors call occulting, characterized by periods of total darkness. Be was famous in Germany for a while, around 1930, when the first volume of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften appeared, but ·the second came out just as the German-speaking world suffered a transference of attention to Bitler, who could easily be presented, if anybody wanted to do it, as the anti-mask of Ulrich, the Man Without Qualities, the active passivist, the perceiver of modern consciousness as so delicately dissociated that the combination of an inferior intellect and a fixed idea could bring us all to barbarism. On Musil's sixtieth birthday, in 1940, no one paid any attention; after his death in 1942 his widow with the help of the' Musil Gesellschaft' (a group which contributed to a fund for the writer's support) brought out the remainder of the work, so far as it had gone, in a privately printed edition. In the fifties there was a revival of interest, though still of somewhat fluctuant quality. Nobody is ashamed, yet, of not having read the book. The campaign continues, and by now the whole 2,000 pages (there is no way of knowing how long the work would have 1 The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil. Translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Vol. I (1953); Vol. !I (1954); Vol. !II (1960). Vols. I and !I correspond to Vol. I of the original; Vol. III to Vol. Ir. The unfinished part of the work will be Vol. IV in the translation. My references are to the volumes of the translation.

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been had Musi11ived) are available in German, and four fifths of it have appeared in English. So it ought to be possible to make up one's mind. I myself knew nothing of Musil except Young Tifrless (1906) a gloomy, impressive, cerebral first novel about physical and metaphysical misbehaviour among students at a military academy in Bohemia, translated by Wilkins-Kaiser in 195 5. Consequently some of the reports on the big book surprised me, especially the publisher's claim that it was 'extremely funny', which some reviewers endorsed. Now that I have read the first three volumes I am still inclined to take issue with this and other judgments, for example Mr. Toynbee's 'It is an integrated, minutely planned book.' How could he tell after one volume? Even after three it is impossible as it were to cash the story; we have seen the beginning of a change of state, of characters in the process of significant collapse, of ironical developments which will give substance to the huge gas-clouds of argument which billow round the narrator; but they haven't got far, and some of them were prevented from ever doing so by the death of the author. And he wasn't, in any case, in any ordinary sense, aminute planner; and, finally, the first volume taken alone gives an entirely misleacling impression of the whole. So Mr. Toynbee seems this time to be as far off the mark as Miss Wedgwood, who unintelligibly refers to the book as 'picaresque'; perhaps she means only that it is not 'minutely planned'. On the other hand Mr. Toynbee is quite right, I think, in saying that Musil was often very boring, purposely, and would not, I suppose, be put out to find that his belief in the virtue of this is not universally shared. The fact is that he started with a narrative plan that would enable him continuously to perform certain acts not very intimately related to narrative. This plan he of course modified as time went on; there was a certain cross-influence between the story and the theme as each burgeoned. But having got the main outline settled he was free to compose his vast interstitial essays, to devise his prolonged metaphysical conversations, in the confidence that he knew exactly where he was, and what was the exact nature of the reIationship between these static passages and the forward-moving story. He could even, up to a point, do them in whatever order he liked; thus, the extant chapters of the last volume are not consecutive and there are large gaps between the 92

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complete sections. So you could speak of careful, indeed of elaborate, but not of minute, planning. And you might reasonably go on to infer certain qualities and defects in Musil as a novelist. One such inference would be that he is not likely to acrueve much narrative tension, density of plot, or economy of structure. And this is useful information to anybody starting on Musil. Whether or no one counts the absence of these qualities as a defect depends on whether one is of Erskine's or Johnson's opinion concerning Richardson. Erskine, it will be recalled, found him 'very tedious'; but J ohnson replied: 'Why, sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.' Musillooks right back to those early days; the form of his novel is, in this sense, atavistic. Yet it is so in a most sophisticated way; and that at any rate aligns him with thc contemporary avant-garde. It was mechanical form he disliked, though he had much too critical a mind to accept any organidst theory; he was indeed extraordinarily acute about the place of concealed metaphor in thought, and this is one such. Musil, therefore, regarded himself as free of these categories and quantities; he was the man without them, the artist, like Ulrich, on holiday from reality or what passed as reality with others. He was quite open ab out his contempt for narrative; at the outsetor anyway on p. 199, for Musil is a slow starter-he assures us that no ' serious attempt will be made to ... enter into competition with reality'. And he was explicit about his lack of interest in stories as such, exhibiting, when he spoke of his novel, what we at once identify as the ' oh-dear-yes' response to the question ' does it tell a story?' In the course of the novel this reaction is given some philosophical ballast when Ulrich, the Man Without Qualities, has the following chain of thought: we live in a time when life, both as lived and as taken up into propositions about itself, has undoubtedly grown more abstract; I would not have it otherwise, since out of this abstraction grows power; with an intellectual leap I hence come upon another important abstraction, namely that: the law of this life, for which one yearns, over-burdened as one is and at the same time dreaming of simplicity, is none other

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than that of narrative order. This is the simple order that consists in one's being able to say: 'When that had happened, then this happened.' What puts our mind at rest is the simple sequence, the overwhelming variegation of life now represented in, as a mathematician would say, a unidimensional order. And this the novel has tumed to account; we do not like what is intensely here and now; the most complexity we can comfortably bear is a very little 'because' or 'in order that', such as goes to a novelist's plot. We like a straightforward sequence of facts because ' it has the look of necessity', and this gives an impression of order-as well, of course, as the sense that nothing need be done about it. But Ulrich had 'lost this elementary narrative element' and saw things more as they were; 'in public life every thing has now become non-narrative, no longer following a "thread", but spreading out as an infinitely interwoven surface'. As a matter of fact, Musil's views on how this came to be so, on what one's abstractive powers are called on to do about it, and on aseries of loosely related subjects, are clearly more important to him than the rendering of the texture ; and, of course, since that texture has lost its narrative character-which was after all what made novels possible-this was the only way he could see to write about it at all. Some of his characters might be stupid or ignorant enough to behave as if the old narrative way of thinking, and all the un-fluid attitudes that went with it, still worked, and this would give the oh-dear-yes story something to bite on; but for Ulrich and Musil such behaviour simply created a loose textural mesh in which their volatile opinions would be beneficently trapped, like warm air in a string vest. One of those characters, Clarisse, has a brilliant thought out of Nietzsche, and Musil's comment upon it is a good negative indication of the way both he and Ulrich do their thinking: The ready-for-use or 'applied ' philosophy and poetry of most people who are neither creative nor, on the other hand, unsusceptible to ideas consists in just such shimmering coalescences of another man's great thought with their own small private modification of it. Musil has no interest in great thoughts, only in what might be called the activity of consciousness; an activity paralysed in most

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people because of their willingness to inhabit the she1ters provided by a multitude of metaphysical fictions. And these are the very things that have set up the frontier posts between mind and reality, on the dangerous ground between which Ulrich operates; and are responsible for the curious solemn apathy with which the world faces the uncategorizable catastrophe of the 1914 war. His business, Musil's business, is not with truth. I state my case, even though I know it is only part of the truth, and I would state it just the same although I knew it was false, because certain errors are stations on the road to truth. Musil had been a soldier, an engineer, a mathematician and a philosopher before, under the pressure of a 'ruthless impulse'as the English translators put it-he became an artist. If I say this is very unlike the career of our own James Joyce it is not simply because the comparisons between these two strike me as absurd, but because Joyce once said, with a certain weird accuracy, that he had the mind of a grocer's assistant, and one can see in his works such a mind transformed by a manie literacy. Musil's is a mathematician's mind similarly transformed. There is an interesting scene in Tiirless where the young man is troubled by imaginary numbers like the square root of minus one, and the mathematics master can't get outside his familiarity with them to explain, out of his own made up mind and body, to Törless in his adolescent indefinitiveness, how they can be re1ated to anything describable as truth or order: 'we have not the time ... a little beyond you'. 1t was the end of instinctive youth: 'tomorrow I shall go over everything very carefully and I shall get a clear view of things somehow'. Somehow, by rejecting the made-up mind, the great thought, by evading the patterns that mesmerize others, Musil tries for his clear view of everything; and a lot of his trouble is to ensure that this includes the square root of minus one, an imaginary, useful quantity which facilitates movement about a whole world. When they sack Törless at the end, his peculiar curiosity is called 'morbid' by the maths master and 'sensitive' by the chapplain. The Head gives him his chance; is the chaplain right, is Törless especially sensitive to 'the divine essence of morality that transcends the limits of our intellect?' Is he, in short, seeking religion? No, says Törless, and begins a stumbling explanation of his own consciousness that approaches the frontier of mysticism; 95

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and that is the end of him. In so far as he was Musil, however, it was only the beginning; and the really curious thing about the structure of The Man Without Qualities is that, in the manner of mathematics, it domesticates the irrational and the imaginary, describes the failures and successes of a consciousness that depends in part upon both. As to reality, Ulrich can only represent it ironically, since he has dissociated hirnself from the usual ways of knowing it. Reality has sacked him, 'daylight mystic' as he is, and like Coriolanus he turns round and sacks rcality. Musil in his turn thought thc novel as a form corresponded to a failed myth of reality and so he sacked it, writing instead essays with a narrative binding. The novel fights back, and it is Musil who fails. This he admitted, for in spite of his contempt for narrative he saw that he had provided it too sparingly in the first two volumes; and there is no doubt that the third volume, which opens with significant events occurring in reasonably rapid succession, is altogether more successful than the first two. Indeed, its first third has a persistent, surprising novelistic brilliance which convinces the reader that Musil was, or could have been, a novelist of quite extraordinary power. For the most part, however, The Man Without Qualities is written as if to illustrate one of Ulrich's theories, called 'Essayism'; just as ordinary novels reflect the myth of narrative, this one reflects the theory of the essay. Ulrich is thinking of hirnself, in his relation to the world, as 'a stride that could be taken in any direction, but which leads from one instant of equilibrium to the next'. These balanced moments are not hypotheses but ess'!J's-because an essay in the sequence of its paragraphs, takes a thing from many sides without comprehending it wholly-for a thing wholly comprehended instantly loses its bulk and melts down into a concept. This is using the word ' essay' metaphorically; but when the novel itself assurnes this quality of Ulrich's mind, the figurative significance of the ward disappears and it is transformed into ordinarylanguage 'essay' again. It is as if a man who argued that Sir Winston Churchill's view of life, which he endorsed, could only be called 'epic', felt obliged, on writing Sir Winston's biography, to do it in blank verse. Musil, as it happens, is extremely interested in metaphor; the mental breakdown of one of his characters,

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Clarisse, is heralded by a failure to dissociate certain metaphorical significations from the basic meanings of words. So one doesn't, of course, accuse him of not knowing what he was doing; nothing could be more ridiculous; but it is possible nevertheless to say that an essay is an essay. Indeed there are large tracts of the book which remind one of an Addison liberated from conventional morality and a respect for great thinkers, fitting Sir Roger and the others more subtly into his moral disquisitions, and endowed with a degree of intellectual agility he might formerly have thought unseemly. My emphasis on the essayism of the book may sound strange to anybody who has heard only that it is a satire on the AustroHungary of 1914, and that it helps to explain the war. It is easy enough to see how this got about, but it is a very partial and distorted account of the book, based on the opening thousand pages, which are merely a prologue to the real story. They do say quite a lot about' Kakania', as Musil calls the Empire, and ab out its ruling class; as his main point is that they were all hopelessly out of touch with contemporary reality, it is also true that the presentation is frequently satirical. But it is precisely in this connexion that he claims not to be competing with reality. He is not writing what Mary McCarthy recently called the only proper kind of novel, one with historical people and issues in it. (This is true regardless of the fact that he drew on actual persons, places, and issues.) He certainly thought that all these people, while they were being noble and clever in absurd and archaic ways, were leaving the subman to flourish unobserved: and that this was astate of affairs out of which the catastrophe of 1914 would issue quite naturally. But their antics, and indeed the war itself, interested him only as illustrations of an abstract notion that the modern mind generally was unable to grasp its environment. And that is a matter not of high comedy but of essayism. Each of the principal characters represents aversion of this mental failure, and is thus related to the essayistic flow. For all that, there is a sense of time and place, communicated with considerable and characteristic indirectness. This makes for bulk. The sheer size of the book is naturally the first thing one notices. Musil's whole method makes bulk inevitable, not because, as with Tolstoy, the population of events increases in geometrical

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progression, but simply because there is no event that can ever be finally dealt with. Each chapter has an old-fashioned humorous heading, and the first one is: 'Which, remarkably enough, does not get anyone anywhere.' The first useful statement of the novel, 'It was a fine August day in the year 1913,' is preceded by a mediaeval chronography of about 150 words. The first direct speech ('" Frog-prince I" she said') is on page 51. There's nothing wrong with size, even if one disagrees that its function is to give the writer room to be boring in; but it is worth considering the contrast between this kind of thing and the brisk opening of Anna Karenina-on which Miss McCarthy recently commented in the same brilliant lecture-' Everything was upset at the Oblonskys.' Indeed it is hard to think of any good, let alone great, novel, that begins so uneconomically. The loose volubility of those opening words, considered in relation to what comes of them in terms of narrative, is typical of the relation between essay and narrative in the book as a whole, and one is always struggling to see the activities of the characters as embodying rather than merely exemplifying, as doing more than providing texts for secular sermons. The story concems Ulrich, the Man Without Qualities, and his dealings with various groups of people in Vienna just before their spiritual and intellectuallimitations met a proper requital in the war of 1914. Ulrich, ex-engineer, mathematician, officer, having tried and failed to see the relevance of the particular myths of order enjoined upon him by these professions, is on a holiday from all such, and is undertaking a sort of reappraisal of the metaphysical problems their failure evidently raises. That is, he is temperamentally and intellectually distanced from all that goes on, and always ahead of the game, whether that is big business, thinking, diplomacy, or sex. At the instance of his father he becomes involved in the Collateral Campaign, an aristocratic but vague attempt to make plans for the celebration in 1918 ofthe seventieth anniversary of the Emperor's accession. Everybody concemed with this is an example of a particular kind of failure to treat dosely with reality. Count Leinsdorf has hopes that there may be a fusion of the races in the Empire, and re-birth of national energy from bourgeois culture. Amheim, a tycoon of lofty moral tone and a bit of a 98

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spellbinder, who, as a German, should not be on the Committee at all, is working for a union of economics and the soul. General von Stumm, another who is there by mistake, and a very engaging figure, wants a bit of military common sense in the Campaign, and draws up staff college plans and lists of Great 1deas. The spiritual leader of the campaign is a cousin of Ulrich's nicknamed Diotima, wifeof ahigh Foreign Office official, whose castof mind is very sceptical, in a traditional way; Diotima is a noble spirit, and engaged in a profound but innocent affair with Amheim. Tbe Committee meets from time to time, every crank in Austria sends it some infallible and absolute remedy for all the nation's ills; at one point it almost provokes public disturbances. Ulrich abandons it for various reasons, and in the end Diotima's dream is reduced almost to ridicule before the war wipes it all out anyway. A secondary group of characters is headed by Walter and Clarisse, friends of Ulrich, she a wild Nietzschean, he an artist manqul, not permitted to sleep with her and soaking himself in Wagner as a compensatory indulgence. They have on the premises a fake sage called Meingast. The other most important character is the sexual murderer Moosbrogger, in whom nearly everybody is forced to take an interest: even Ulrich's father, concerned with the legal issues of the case, the Austrian equivalent of the MacNaghten roles. Clarisse is especially concerned, and as her own madness grows, arranges through Ulrich to visit the madhouse where Moosbrugger is kept, pending adecision. There are other minor figures, doctrinaire anti-Semites, bankers, poets, all held together by Ulrich. But two more must be mentioned before one can ask more generally what Musil does with all this: the woman nicknamed Bonadea, charming but nymphomaniac wife of a legal official and Ulrich's mistress; and Ulrich's sister Agathe, whom he meets at the start of the third volume when he travels to his father's funeral, not having seen her since she was a child. All these people are posed in a pretty static way, and the collateral campaign is naturally given satirical treatment, even if the satire is often toothless. At the end of the first volume one is incllned to ask, 'ls this all?', because as sttaightforward social and political satire it is simply not sharp enough. But of course the real point is slowly crystallizing out of the essay-cloud: the Campaign is a useful example of that intellectual futility, that uncritical adherence to insufficientIy examined absolutes, ideas of 99

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order, panaceas, of which Ulrich's agile scepticism is the antithesis. 'Without doubt he was a man of faith, though one who believed in nothing! This antithesis occupies Musil throughout most of the first two volumes; only with the third, after the encounter with Agathe, does he begin seriously to move forward. 1t is like one of those chess-games when the masters for an incomprehensibly long time make fiddling little moves at the back of the board, and then suddenly a queen leaps out. The queen is Agathe. The love between Ulrich and Agathe is what gives, or was to have given, the story sublime sense. But as it is, the reader is not, even at the end of Book Three, in possession of an extremely important fact. Ulrich we have seen in various sexual situations, but in bed only with Bonadea; before it is all over he has slept also with Diotima, Clarisse, and Agathe. So far as the novel has got in English, these events, among others, have occurred: Diotima has developed sexological interests, greatly to her husband's concern, and is consulting Bonadea on the practical side. Clarisse has been to the asylum and seen the patients, though not Moosbrugger. Agathe has forged a codicil to her father's will, in order to cheat her husband (a lot of essayism about this). Befote the end Diotima will overcome her highminded objections to adultery; Clarisse will herself go mad and procure the escape of Moosbrugger, who will kill another woman befote recapture; the Christian thinker Lindner, whom we see btiefly consoling Agathe as she contemplates suicide, will take a hand in the plot; Arnheim will acquire a non-platonic mistress; the Campaign will collapse. These, of course, among many other matters. Now it is dear that the two poles upon which the whole narrative turns are Moosbrugger and Ulrich. Moosbrugger-and it would be impossible to overpraise the imaginative achievement of Musil in the rendering of his mind-has the double function of pharmakos and symptom. He can be held to be a case of victimagean idea taken up by Clarisse-expiating the sins of others; or his condition and his escape can signify those atavisms which we are intellectually impotent to contain, and the catastrophe of their enlargement. Around him rages the question of' responsibility', but it is treated in the absurd jargon of academic lawyers, not as a problem demanding all the freedom and power of a mind such 100

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as Ulrich's. Moosbrugger is the subman, guiltless but fatal to society; if a whore irritates him he kills her, and supposing you make a Moosbrugger powerful he will kill all the people who irritate him, for example, by being Jewish. 'If mankind could dream collectively, it would dream Moosbrugger.' His escape coincides with the collapse of the Collateral ideals. He thinks, when he is not killing, that he is holding the world together by his own gigantic strength; he is dazzled by insights of order, calm, and beauty. Ulrich, who sawas a schoolboy that the world's mood was the subjunctive of potentiality, calls himself a possibilitarian, being easily aware of the well-known incoherency of ideas, with their way of spreading out without a central point, an incoherency that is characteristic of the present era and constitutes its peculiar arithmetic. As a person he is as far removed from any legal or conversational category as Moosbrugger, and it is immediately after a long satirical treatment of the lawyers' argument on responsibility that he is arrested and reflects with some annoyance on police descriptions, which somehow enable him to be identified, even when he feels quite different, being sometimes taU and broad (when angry or making love) and sometimes slim and soft (when floating jellyfish-like in a great book). But what distinguishes him from Moosbrugger is the mobility of his intelligence; and what makes him different from all the others is his awareness of the disappearance of the old patterns oE knowledge, the penetrability of all the old Eortifications by which we keep reality out oE our daily lives. And this is the main intellectual impulse oE The Man Without Qua/Wes: it begins with aseries oE statements conceming the modem Eailure to contain reality, and proceeds tentatively to examine causes and deride eures: but it also gropes towards some positive therapy. This may not seem an enticing topic for a novel, and I myself, though confident that another reading would be very illuminating, have Erankly finished with this book for ever; but it may be helpful anyway to abstract its programme and set it baldly down. In the first place, knowledge itself is a disease: 'the compulsion to know is just like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania 101

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... it is not at ail true that the scientist goes out after truth. It is out after him. It is something he suffers from. The truth is true and the fact is real without taking any notice ofhim.' But we can't hope for a quietist solution; we live in aperiod of transition (this Rat, irritating remark actuaily means more in Musil's context than usual) and must adjust ourselves before the horizon rushes upon uso Ulrich agrees with the passionate Hans Sepp (though deploring his Germanic mystery-religion) that we cannot afford 'character', that acting by settled conviction is the death of knowledge. He teils Agathe that ' on' the frontier between what goes on inside us and what goes on outside there's some communicating link missing nowadays, and the two spheres only transform into each other with enormous losses in the process'. What with external changes and wild alterations in human conduct, 'reality is abolishing itself', says Ulrich; and he even declares a will to abolish it finally, or to settle for a life that is to reality as metaphor to truth, or literature to fact. 'You are the kind of person,' says Walter, 'who declares that the meaning of fresh vegetables is tinned vegetables.' 'I dare say you're right. You might also say I'm the sort of person who will only cook with salt,' Ulrich replies. The relative importance of different aspects of reality is determined in an entirely arbitrary way by the degree of attention given them; and in this chaos it is impossible for an intelligent man to be convinced of anything, so that-and this is one of Musil's profoundest observationsthe vigour required to believe in new movements in art and literature, and countless other things [is] whoily founded on a talent for being at certain hours convinced against one's own conviction, for splitting a part off from the whole content of one's consciousness and for spreading it out to form a new state of entire conviction. In the domain of morality this mental condition produces a great many problems, notably that 'the distinction between Good and Bad loses all meaning when compared with the pleasure to be got from any pure, deep, and spontaneous mode of action-a pleasure that can leap like a spark, both from permissible and from prohibited actions'. Hence the sheer pleasantness of Bonadea as she moves, by a funny, inexorable law, from habitual respectability to bed; hence too the huge, subtle, ethical issues raised by Agathe's forgery and her incestuous affair with Ulrich. 'Iodi102.

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vidual cases cannot be decided morally.' ' All moral propositions refer to a sort of dream condition that's long ago taken wing and flown away out of the cage of rules in which we try to hold it fast.' In the wonderful twelfth chapter of the third volume Ulrich delivers hirnself of a credo, ending: I believe that some day before very long human beings will be-on the one hand very intelligent, on the other mystics. Perhaps our morality is even to-day splitting into these two components. I might also call it: mathematics and mysticism -practical amelioration and adventuring into the unknown. It is hardly surprising that the General finds difficulty with these ideas. 'The Minister wants to know what an ethos is.' 'An eternal verity . . . that is neither eternal nor true, but valid only for a time so that the time has a standard to diverge from.' Stumm can make his own adjustments; Ulrich's way of' dethroning the ideocracy', of getting away from what are satirically called 'structive conceptions of the world' (as exemplified by Expressionism), is to move out into new, exciting, dark territory, the borderland of mind and reality, where dweIl high intelligence and intuition also; where metaphor and univocality, literature and life, dream and waking, march with each other on a wild frontier ; where he is 'inconclusively at horne in two worlds at once'. This 'borderline' Musil had sketched as early as Tijrless; it has nothing to do with the supernatural, but a great deal to do with the power of the intelligence to understand that it always has with it as a permanent problem, of which the contours perpetually shift, the fact that there exists what it is unadapted to grasp. When Ulrich and Agathe begin to grow to their union, Musil warns offthe profane: he is starting on 'a journey to the furthest limits of the possible and unnatural, even of the repulsive .. .'a 'borderline case', as Ulrich was later to call it, 'one of limited and specific validity, reminiscent of the freedom with which mathematics at times resorts to the absurd in order to arrive at the truth'. And the study of this borderline involves, as a first requirement, explanations of the natural limits of modern consciousness. 102.

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Here Musil displays a qualified orthodoxy. A fmitful, unitive attitude to reality can, like Paradise, only be imagined as something once possessed and now lost. In language that reminds one of Cassirer, Ulrich explains to Agathe that the power to identify oneself with the object belongs to dream, myth, poetry, childhood; it would be in our world a step back into an old symbolic mode, and it would involve 'a reduction in reality'. If 'nothing is any longer entirely there', there is no way back except by a sacrmce of intelligence he is not prepared to consider. And the way forward is also hard. Agathe has a Yeatsian vision of unity of being, of a sainthood like water gently welling over the tim of a fountain. But before one goes on to the subject of Musil's mystical interests, there is an important and saving qualification to be noted. From the start he will have nothing to do with that potent modem myth which goes in this country under the name of 'dissodation of sensibility'. He deals with it very early, jeering at those who 'were prophesying the collapse of European dvilization on the grounds that there was no longer any faith, any love, any simplicity, or any goodness left in mankind '. 'It is significant', he continues, 'that these people were all bad at mathematics at school.' The development of purely intellectual disdplines (' the wicked intellect') he will not allow to be a disaster; and one of the jokes about Diotima is that she talks about 'a unity of religious feeling in all human activities that has been lost since the Middle Ages'. On the contrary, Musil rejoices in the unparalleled 'predsion, vigour, and sureness' of mathematical thinking, and is harsh on all kinds of wanton primitivism, all the proposals for improvement submitted to the Committee which can be c1assmed as 'Back-to' this, that, and the other. The innocent proto-Nazi, Hans Sepp, is significantly assodated with this kind of thinking, and indeed its irruptions into politics are usually the occasion for violent unpleasantness of one kind or another. No, Musil-Ulrich was not a 'back-to' man, andindeed enjoyed modern life, New Men, and especially New Women. He shows a nice sense of the curious period immediately preceding that with which he concerns himself, when, out of the established attitudes of the dying century, rose the ghosts of their antiselves. The decadence of Europe was not to be explained in these sentimental ways, but grappled with, an almost impossibly elusive fact. 1°4

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Yes Musil was admittedly interested in mysticism; he kept a notebook on the subject. This was a 'daylight' mysticism, concemed with 'the becoming one ofthis and that' (Miss Wilkins's phrase) as it actually occurs, subject and object, intellect and imagination, male and female. This is an old theme; as Aquinas put it, sensus est quodammodo ipsa sensibilia. Yet the failure of modem consciousness, for Musil, is precisely a failure to give it the right treatment. Hence this notebook on mediaeval mysticism, headed 'Border-line Experiences'. He argues ingeniously that a great deal of the energy required for the handling of these experiences now goes into sport, 'a contemporary substitute answering to etemal needs: and calls boxing a kind of theology because it places within a cage of rules a number of reactions so complex as to defy analysis. Another usurper is art, and especially music, Walter's escape route. And what is really to be leamed from the mediaeval mystics is that they are not in the least vague and warm, but write of the phenomena with the analytical ruthlessness of Stendhal; of the direct experience of God they can, however, say nothing except metaphorically, and the usual source of their metaphors is extreme sexual pleasure. Their example may be of assistance in the business of grasping that mysterious moment in normal perception 'before vision and feeling separate and fall into the places we are accustomed to find them in'; what is certain is that we cannot find a bettet metaphor. Ulrich is even willing to accept the myth of a sexual offence or change of attitude as the explanation of the fragmentary nature of our truth; he can, in asense, accept the Fall and Original Sin. Musil's continuous interest in various aspects of sexual play (the Majot's wife, Gerda, Clarisse, Rachel, Diotima's maid, the exhibitionist outside Clarisse's house, the prostitute who accosts Ulrich, above all his sexual relations with almost every important female character) seems somehow not to have attracted much attention. Yet it is central to his whole idea. There is an early chapter called 'Explanation and interruptions of anormal state of consciousness' which describes Ulrich's reflections after he and Bonadea have made up a quarrel and gone to bed. The incredible swiftness of such transformations, which a sane man into a frothing lunatic, now became al1 too strikingly dear.... This erotic metamorphosis of consciousness

turn

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was only a special case of something far more general; for nowadays all manifestations of our inner life, such as for instance an evening at the theatre, a concert, or a church service, are such swift appearing and disappearing islands of a second state of consciousness temporarily interpolated into the ordinary one. And with the Major's wife he experienced, as a young officer, 'an unutterable state of being', explicitly analogous to that of the mystic. There is a notion, also, that anything like intellectual equality, and so tension, between lovers, is destructive of love; and a somewhat Shavian suggestion that man might be capable of a condition of permanently heightened consciousness exactly analogous to the sublime pleasures of the bed. But what is certain is that the dividedness of the modern mind is constantly, in this book, expressed in terms of sexuality, so that dis orders of consciousness become dis orders of love. And this is where Ulrich's sexual activities, with whatever degree of seriousness he takes them, become significant. With the third volume sex assumes everincreasing importance, with Diotima's researches and the coming together of Ulrich and Agathe; and, as we have seen, before the end this element will predominate. This is a development, therefore, from an epistemological to an amative interest; and this gives the story altogether more suggestive power. The erotic lives of Arnheim and Tuzzi, for example, the sexual limitations of Moosbrugger and the poet Feuermaul, make sense in relation to their public faces. And a topic so thoroughly mythologized as love breeds myth. Diotima, so nicknamed because ofher high ideals oflove, looks throughout the static part of the book like a slightly comic but charming Aphrodite Ourania; Bonadea, called after the goddess whose ritual developed into erotic orgy, is Aphrodite Pandemos. But Diotima's Campaign collapses, and she herself, having acquired a lot of equivocal information about love-making, takes Bonadea's place in Ulrich's bed, a terrestrial Venus after all. Ulrich's desire for his sister represents another kind of love, what the Platonists would call an urge to identify oneself with the beautiful as wen as desirable, and there is that conformity between them, represented as a striking resemblance, which is indispensable to the union of knower and known. Clarisse, in her madness--even her T06

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language is 'borderline'-seeks union with a symbol of union, a Greek homo sexual whom she thinks of as a hermaphrodite. Operating on the borderline between subject and object, Musil uses, as an illustration of this suspicious frontier-fdendship, the inexhaustible metaphor of sex; great myths that are older than Plato break into the fiction. In this aspect of Musil's art one sees yet another scrap of evidence that he was astonishingly weIl equipped to wdte a great and coherent novel; the very story that he somewhat despised begins to assume in his mind an incalculable profundity. He has other qualifications: great gifts of metaphor (the detection of resemblances, Aristotle's cdtedon for genius), and these are extremely important in a novel so much concerned with the relation of metaphor to fact; the power of being unexpected, yet delightfully right; a gift of aphorism. All this could be illustrated over and over. And yet, in the end, one's reaction to the claim that his stature is comparable to that of Proust and Joyce is simple incredulity. If we were speaking of the men themselves, I suppose it would be reasonable to say that Musil had as much sheer brain as the two of them together. As a novelist, he is simply not to be thought of in their company. The reason is that they were also working on a borderline, one that Musil, in his preoccupation with others, gave too litde Care to: the vast, vague frontier of fiction. The operations ofProust and Joyce caused no breach; those of Musil do so. He was a great man, and everybody should find out why; but he is also the interesting limiting case, for if ever, to change the figure, if ever we supposed that there was no limit to looseness and bagginess in the novel, this protean and apparently boundless monster, Musil proves the contrary. There is a point at which a novel turns into something else: a metaphysician's miscellany, interspersed with subtle exempla. 1960.

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I-PASTERNAK'S NOVEL OF this book,l which will never cease to engage the minds of all who care for literature, the early reviews are unlike1y to say much of permanent interest. All that is immediate1y clear is that Doctor Zhivago is an accession to that small group of nove1s by which all others are, ultimately, judged. It was already before publication a famous book, but it is to be hoped that this fortuitous political celebrity will not predispose readers to treat it as primarily a brave piece of propaganda. Certainly it include.r politics; and it also testifies to an integrity of intellect which is not only heroic but has obvious political implications. Revolutionary politics, the diminution and corruption of the Revolution's gods and its slaves, are measured against natural plenitude and true human liberty; but this is oo1y an aspect of the whole vast work, which is in itself a protest against partial interpretations. Doctor Zhivago is an historical nove1; the comparison with Tolstoy is inviting, but it will deceive as much as it illuminates. Pasternak's methods are, in fact, very original. He traces the significant passages in the lives of his characters from childhood in the early years of the century tbrough the revolutions and wars that followed; and his control of the historical, geographical and sodal material, his accumulation of authentie detail, the feeling conveyed, quite simply, of living thus and there, invites the highest comparisons. The barricades of 1905 are hastily cemented with ice; a suspect commissar leaps bravelyon to a dustbin to 1 Do&tor Zhivago. By Boris Pasternak. Translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (Collins-Harvill).

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harangue his pursuers, falls ludicrously in and is shot by a laughing man; neglected comfields are horribly deluged with mice. There is an epic attention to detail, for example to the railway system which bears the characters on their appalling joumeys across Russia. And the lovingly exact accounts of the physiognomy of dawn and spring, snow and forest have extraordinary beauty. The great muddled campaigns roll on, the great muddled Revolution bears down upon every individual, throwing each into some strange posture of pain or cruelty. But it is not the great scope, the merely 'wide canvas', that counts; it is the precision and originality of the design. Everything in this design is controlled by the faith that 'the whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning,' a meaning conferred by the free action of individual consciousness. That freedom is corruptible; historically considered, it was the gift of Christianity, and later history could destroy it. The function of the free man, even at a time when this is happening, is to call things by their proper names and perceive the relations between them. This faith-here so baldly stated-has two immediate and inevitable consequences: the novel is a complex of quasi-occult relations; and its central character has to be an artist. The first of these consequences explains not only the originality and power of the book, but also what may be its deepest flaw. All events, all personalities, from the most momentaus to the most trivial, are caught up into patterns, given the density that imagination confers upon the slackly woven texture of life. The book is punctuated by moments of stasis, small narrative or emblematic centres of meaning: a candle melting the frost on a windowpane; a quick, comptehensive perception in a dissecting-room. There are hundreds oE these, and sometimes, as with the candle emblem, you would have to unravel the whole novel to unpick a single thread. But this device is also used for the interaction of characters; coincidence is used on a vast, un-Tolstoyan, scale, both to forward the plot and-most arbitrarily-to arrange the characters in significant groups. Thus, at the outset, many important characters are placed in quite fortuitous proximity to the train in which Zhivago's father kills himself. Another group converges, without mutual recognition or benefit to the story, on a man killed in battle. Zhivago himself dies, by a fantastic chance, in arented 1°9

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room formerly occupied by Strelnikov, a man with whom he has been in a strange, antithetical relationship. There is so much of this that some strain is unavoidable; it is the price of so heroic an effort to impose upon the matter of realist fiction the form of a post-Imagist poem. The second consequence of Pasternak's symbolist faith is that Zhivago, at the centre of the book, must be an artist. By profession he is a doctor; his interest in the physiology of sight is related to his concern for 'the relation between imagery in art and the logical structure of ideas', and he excels in diagnosis precisely because health and disease in significant formations of matter are also his business as a poet. He is healer, magician, contemplative; he is a philosopher of such a kind that he might, like Pasternak, have been taught at Marburg by Hermann Cohen, whose other famous pupil Cassirer became the philosopher of symbolic forms; above all, he is a poet in love with life and minute particulars and with the accuracy of the common speech. He sees art as another nature, whole and organic, and is quick to detect the corruption that destroys it. The Revolution at first deceives him, appearing as a natural force, violent as spring, clean as a good poem; butand there is an obvious parallel with Thc Preludc-he comes to see it as a process of relentless abstraction, corrupting nature, language and personality, distorting life and making art impossible under the imposition of its mechanical patterns. The 'textbook admirations' and 'forced enthusiasms' of the Revolution 'are propagated by countless workers in the field of art and science in order that genius should remain extremely rare'. It is typical of Pasternak that immediately after the early symptoms of this disease have been described his best suddenly flowers with natural images as exquisite as they are abundant. Although we see the Revolution through the eyes of a poetoutsider, there is no dishonest indirection in its treatment. The Revolution corrupts life by making it illustrate a partial, political thesis. Of intellectuals who speak sanctimoniously about their 'political re-education' it is observed that 'men who are not free always idealize their bondage'. The gods of the Revolution are men 'in whom everything alive and human has been driven out by political conceit'. Zhivago moves on to disaster, believing in the 'compatibility of the whole', the subordination of man to nature: seeing the anthropocentrism of the regime as pointlessly 110

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crue1 and stupid; and making poems to affirm the supremacy of what cannot be tamed by ro1e or jargon. For a comp1ementary image of revo1utionary virtue there is the remarkab1e figure of Strelnikov, the husband of Zhivago's mistress, who from some motive strange1y compounded of love and 1eaming deserts her in order to fight, and becomes a Red Army general. He is a great man, devoted to 1arge ideas of order; but with power he grows a little abstract and co10ur1ess, 'as if a living face had become the embodiment of a princip1e, the image of an idea . . . he was marked with a sign'. The nove1 with all its passionate, inexplicab1e tragic comp1exities, asserts Zhivago's who1eness against the partiality of even Stre1nikov. In this nove1 of a hundred memorable characters there is a third whose significance is central, a woman named Lara Guishar. Among the figures who converge in the opening pages are Pasha Antipov and Lara. When still a schoo1girl she is seduced by a rich 1awyer, Komarovsky, a man who was also, by a coincidence, partly responsib1e for the death of Zhivago's father. It is difficult to speak of Lara without vu1garizing the conception. She evades Komarovsky, tries to shoot him at a party where Zhivago (who doesn't yet know her) is also present, and marries Antipov, who later changes his name to Stre1nikov. A union between Zhivago and Lara is written into the pattern from the start, and their life together is all hunger, illegality and anonymity, a sort of holist Resistance against revolutionary abstraction. For Lara assumes a vast burden of meaning. She is life, the principle Zhivago worships, and thence she is Russia, betrayed in different ways by the Komarovskys and the Strelnikovs; she has a simple, direct relationship with reality or God, and is capable of a beautiful repentance when her demon is exorcised. Pasternak lovingly en1arges the Magdalen theme. None of this is as erode as I have to make it sound; there is here and e1sewhere an element of parable, and Pasternak believes that a story becomes valid on1y when it aequires the qualities of myth. The wholeness he tries to achieve must carry its own explanations ; and he succeeds so far that the terrib1e history his book contains becomes, like death in tragedy, apart of the comp1ex and irreducible beauty of the who1e image. Those of us without Russian (how great is our debt to the modest but exeellent translators of this book l) have known III

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Pastemak darldy as a poet of originality and power, with a philosopher's mind and a painter's eye; looking back at the poems, one now sees them as models, preparations for this work. Doctor Zhivago eams the epithet 'heroic' in several different ways, and one of them is that its author has remained untouched by the abomination he describes. His book is written with so great a confidence in life that it is entirely without hatred, and with a compassion great enough to include the demon that must be exorcised. Its rejection in Russia is melancholy proof not only of his courage but of the correctness of his diagnosis ; far more surprising than the rejection, and in an obscure way encouraging too, is the fact that at one moment the book came so near to publication. There is no false dawn without the possibility of a true one. September, 1958. II-ANlMAL SYMBOLICUMl does not exalt,' says Pastemak in one ofhis poems, and the wild success of Dr. Zhivago is tending to confirm this. Because its farne has so little to da with its merits as a novel there are many who think that the whole chorus of delight with which it was greeted can be dismissed as hysteria; and the celebrity which makes it desirable to get every available sentence of Pastemak translated into English mayaiso help to depress rather than to exalt him. Yet Dr. Zhivago is a very great book (anybody who had the luck to read it before all the fuss began must remember that unmistakable shock of recognition) and this would remain true even if all the minor Pastemak now coming at us were worthless, even if it tums out that the lucid though inexplicable world-view of Zhivago is 'really' only a variety of Marxism too pure for politicians. In fact, however, this new collection is of high literary interest, whatever may be said of its politics. There is a quartet of stories (Mr. Alec Brown, the translator, explains the musical analogy) which contains 'subtle symbolical expositions' of Marxist concepts-Mr. Brown vouches for these in aseries of terse and brilliant editorial comments. These stories seemed to me marred, like 'The Last Summer', by excessive rhetorical posturing, especially by catachresis '(the hues of the sunshine stuck so 'CELEBRITY

1

Safe Conducl, and olher works. By Boris Pasternak (Elek). II2

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firmly to the walls with their glue-paint wash that it was only with blood that the evening could tear off the past day, it stuck so'). There are a good many poems, including' 1905 '; Mr. Brown gives one a powerful notion of the translator's difficulties here, and he seems to succeed wonderfully with 'Themes and Variations', which have the air of distinguished poetry. But the item that makes this book important is Safe Conduct, an autobiography of the poet up to the death of Mayakovsky. This is a poet's work, as all Pasternak's is; the method is Goethe's, for what we get is not primarily a narrative but an imaginative projection of isolated events as symbolic. We jump from one period, one crisis, to another, interested less in the development of a personality than in a pattern of events thus accorded symbolic force. Time is not so much regained as defeated, extinguished by flares of figurative language, in what Mr. Brown calls the 'crucial stretto passages'. Pasternak's subject is not an ageing individual, but man considered as animal symbolicum. Even the great men who influenced him in his youthRilke, Scriabin, Mayakovsky-serve as determinants in this pattern. Here, as in Zhivago, the aim is to transpose what is represented from ' cold co-ordinates' to 'burning' ones. As if to provide a hint of' cold co-ordinates' in work that transcends them, Pasternak scrawls railways all over his books; at times one feels that everything of any importance happens in trains. This satisfies our esprit de geometrie; even these important things have to happen according to the roles. Obviously there is no sharp difference, when this method is used, between autobiography and fiction. However, we do learn something about Pasternak's own life. He might, thought Scriabin, have been a great musician; but he gave up his studies for no good reason immediately after he was told so. A memorable portrait of Hermann Cohen emerges, as if by accident, in the pages on the poet's philosophical studies at Marburg; he gave these studies up just as he was on the point of being accepted, because he found he was using learning in a poet's and not a philosopher's way. Love moved him both to poetry and wild train journeys; in the end everything did. In some ways the most remarkable aspect of the autobiography is the short and straightforward statement of Pasternak's aesthetic; it is similar to what may be inferred from Zhivago, but

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here he thought it fitting to be fairly unequivocal ab out his position, and one is grateful. It is a symbolist aesthetic; art depends upon the 'brilliance and unimperative quality of its images', indeed it consists of their ' mutual interchangeability '. It is essential that this symbolic form, this way of knowing, should remain absolutely free and undirected, even though in a modem society the artist is necessarily 'different' and disobedient and might therefore seem to need correction. 'The most lasting images are composed by the iconoclast in those rare cases when he was not born empty-handed.' Thus the suicide ofMayakovsky, whom Pasternak regarded as the type of the modern romantic genius, was a completely symbolic event. Pasternak traces these ideas from German romanticism through the Symbolists and Blok to Mayakovsky, who intensifies them; in the poet's assumptions that he was a criterion of life (compare Dr. Zhivago) and that he would have to pay with his own life for this honour, Pasternak sees a truth 'devastatingly vivid' and 'incontrovertible'. Clearly you do not say the last word about Pasternak when you talk of his moving from neo-Hegelianism to Marxism; he belongs to a different tradition. There is a superb passage in his account of Mayakovsky's death which exactly distinguishes between reality, apprehended by the artist, and the ersatz reality of others. The mass conception of tragedy had swiftly excluded the firearm freshness of the sheer fact. There, as if of saltpetre, the asphalt yard had reeked of worship of inevitability, that is, of that false urban fatalism built on monkey mimicry, representing life to be a chain of obediently recordable sensations. There too people were sobbing, but that was because with animal mediumistic response the shocked gullet had reproduced a spasm of dwelling blocks, fire escapes, revolver holsters and all that turns one queasy with despair or makes one howl murder. There is some avoidable clumsiness in the translation here, but one can still see what Pasternak's rhetoric is at its best; the concrete 'firearm freshness' opposed to the abstract 'urban fatalism', and lying between them all the gulf of the difference between a fuH intuitive response and mere animal mimicry, between the artist and l'homme machine. The passage rings with the familiar claim of the great modern artist to special and authoritative sensibility; Pastemak is always on the side of life, but it is II4

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not a generally accessible life. And if we are ever foolish enough to think him unlucky to be in Russia, we should remember that he would certainly find our own society profane and vulgar; he would be the enemy here, or anywhere. April, 1959.

ill-PASTERNAK'S LIFE A GOOD deal ofPasternak is now available in English, and it will be useful to start with a word about the contents of these books. 1 The Esscry in Autobiograp0 is a new work, not available in Russian; it was first published, like Dr. Zhivago, by Feltrinelli. The Last Summer is a reprint of George Reavey's translation, published earlier this year in the miscellany Noondcry. Prose and Poems is a paperback and incIudes Safe Conduct, an earlier autobiography, in a translation by Beatrice Scott, first published by Lindsay Drummond in 1945; Alec Brown's version of the same work was published by Elek. Prose and Poems also incIudes the four novelle of the Elek volume, and aselection of poems translated by J. M. Cohen for another Lindsay Drummond volume of 1945. FinaIly, there is Gerd Ruge's pictorhl biography, translated from the German; this gives a detailed account of Pasternak's life with a great number of illustrations incIuding many of the poet's contemporaries, and of the historical scene. The oudine ofPasternak's life, until recently somewhat obscure to the non-specialist, is now familiar, and is traced several times over in these books. The new autobiography, weIl produced in a translation by Manya Harari, with ample annotation and a first-rate biographical appendix, is pretty nearly indispensable. Pasternak wrote it as an introduction to a projected edition of his collected poems in the early days ofthe 'thaw' (1954), though he may have made notes for it earlier, since he refers to the death in 1938 of the philologist Troubetskoyas 'recent'. As a whole, however, it belongs to the period when he was working on Dr. Zhivago, and is intended to supplement and correct Safe Conduct (1931), a book he describes as 'spoilt by its affected manner, the besetting sin of those days'. The new work attempts none of those complex imaginative 1 An Essay in Autobiography. With an Introduction by Edward Crankshaw. The Last Summer. Prose and Poems. Edited by Stefan Schimanski, with an Introduction by J. M. Cohen. Pasternak. A Pietonal Biography. By Gerd Ruge.

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patterns which are the rum of the earlier books; the Symbolist ambition, ru'um videre formas, has given way to a simpler intention, rerum cognoJCere causas. Pasternak repeatedly condemns his earlier affeetations, and he told Gerd Ruge that he was grateful to the Soviet State for converting him from 'an esoteric poet, lost in fantasies and sensations,' into a 'realist', though not a 'socialist realist'. Very remarkably-unintelligibly, indeed-he speaks of Dr. Zhivago as a 'simple document, understandable to aIl', and compares it to Unc!e Tom' s Cabin. The truth is rather that Paster· nak is talking about himself when he says of Yury Zhivago that it was 'the dream of his life to write with an onginality so covert, so discreet, as to be outwardly unrecognizable in its disguise of current, customary forms of speech'. That remark explains the change in his manner between the early stones and the great novel. As for the two autobiographies, the first is a conscious work of art, the second is more simply intended as an account of events and causes. Life, however, imitates art, and imposes significant patterns. Thus Pasternak isolates the precise moment at which his early childhood ended, on an evening when there was music downstairs, and Tolstoy was a guest; and later he delivered his important, but lost, lecture on 'Symbolism and Immortality' on the day Tolstoy died in the station at Astapovo. Thus, by chance as weIl as by choke, Tolstoy is part of the fabnc of Pasternak's life. And there are other, more sinister patterns, patterns of suicide and loss. Suicide seemed almost normal fot Russian writers: Yesenin, a poet with whom Pasternak had much sympathy-a most engaging figure, who married his 'Firebird', Isadora Duncan-cut his wrists at thirty; Mayakovsky, the strongest link between poetry and revolution, shot himself at thirty-seven C' the boat of love has crashed on the rocks of everyday life '); Tsvetayeva, whom Pasternak regards as very great poet, returned from a long exile in Paris to face a senes of disasters that culminated in her suicide in the early days of the war; Yashvili, a Georgian poet who helped Pasternak at a time of personal trouble, killed himself at fortytwo; and, to complete a pattern, Fadeyev, the favourite of Stalin and Zhdanov, took his life in 1956, after bitter cnticism from his feIlow-writers during the 'thaw'. It is characteristic ofPasternak that in his meditations on the peculiar agony of these suicides he does not exclude Fadeyev, whom he had no reason to love: they II6

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all invite compassion. The artist has a duty 'not to distort the living voice of life'; whether he succeeds or fails in this his calling is likely to be a dangerous one. All this makes it much easier to understand why, at the time of the Nobel Prize crisis, precautions were taken against Pasternak's own suicide. The pattern of loss in Pasternak's life is ultimately religious. He has lost many of his works-a volume of verse, a novel, the early lecture mentioned above-in various circumstances of war and peace. Of these he says he regrets nothing written before 1940; since it was all flawed, composed in 'disintegrating forms'. But he refuses to lament even the successful work he has lost; 'it is more important ... to lose than to acquire'. Of one book only does he speak with pride: Dr. Zhivago 'is the onIy work of which I am not ashamed and for which I take full responsibility.' Yet he was prepared to see it expurgated, and even to suppress it altogether. All this may help to explain his attitude to authority. As an artist he is as unpolitical as a man can be, but some actions inevitably have a political sense. They are not intended in this sense, and so may appear inconsistent. Thus his reaction to the attack on Zhivago was, finally, to withdraw; yet in another crisis he was positively heroic, for nothing less can be said of his refusal to sign, at the instance of Stalin, a document approving the execution of Tukhachevsky. These acts are consistent with each other only from Pasternak's point of view. When Brecht insisted that only Pasternak should translate his speech of thanks for the Stalin Prize, the poet complied with the air of one rendering Cresar his due; but when Cresar suggested that he might leave Russia, he was quick to reply tivis Romanus sumo He cannot identify Russia with the government of the day. The Revolution, he said, 'broke out willy-nilly, like a breath that's been held too long'; but in denying that 'everyone's life existed in its own right' it was false, at any rate temporarily, and the artist's whole truth is the norm by which such falsity is known. Political fluctuations are not 'events in the realm of conscience'. In Pasternak, humility and aloofness, resistance and compliance, are aspects of the same integrity. The new autobiography tells us more about Pasternak's debts to Scriabin, Rilke and others, but is most illuminating on Tolstoy, as in this passage: 'Throughout his life he could always look at an II7

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event and see the whole of it, in the isolated, self-contained finality of its moment ... see it as the rest of us can oniy see on rare occasions, in childhood, 01' at the crest of happiness which renews the world, or in the joy of some great spiritual victory.... The genuineness of his vision is so outside our normal habits that it may strike us as strange. But he did not look for this strangeness... .' The whole of this fine passage is central to an understanding of Pastemak as an artist. He was, of course, 'lucky' to be so elose to Tolstoy, lucky to enjoy in his youth the daily intercourse of other distinguished artists and philosophers. He was lucky to find hirnself starting work in an atmosphere of fruitful experiment, when modem literature was being created. His lecture of 1910, on' Symbolism and Immortality', weIl illustrates his special historical position. It proposed a theory that was in the air at the time, of a common mcial consciousness, a 'universal area of the soul' like Yeats's Great Memory, to which all art, regarded as essentially symbolic, appeals without the intervention of intellect; an important idea for modem art. Mter the lecture he rushed to Astapovo, where Tolstoy, who had understood and practised this art as no other, had died. Not long after that Pasternak was in Marburg, at the only school of philosophy where aesthetics could grow to this view of art. 'Lucky' is of course a preposterous word to use; Zhivago is not lucky. Like Tolstoy, Pastemak and his hero must forgo partiality and expediency in their pursuit of the whole; 'the commuruon between mortals is immortal, and the whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning'. This involves, quite incidentally, the condemnation of all that is partial and mecharucal, such as State Socialism. Zhivago cannot see why he is applauded as a diagnostician (whose power-a Tolstoyan power-is 'the immediate grasp of the situation as a whole ') and condemned as 'obscurantist' when he applies the same power to life at large. This is what Pastemak does in his novel, and thus he enlarges our experience of the truth. He complains with justice that his novel is being read oniy partially in the West; but on his view of history this is only a temporary aberration, and one can only hope he is right. May,1959· u8

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IV-PASTERNAK T HE refusal of the Russians to moum the death of Pastemak was as mean and as predictable as the reinstatement which will follow at some convenient time in the future. In his determination' never to distort the living voice of life' he represented a criterion by which the Soviet, or indeed any other, State was base and corrupt. In Dr. Zhivago this judgment became explicit and historical; the Revolution, which 'broke out willy-nilly like a breath held too long' and was healthy, on the side of life, became a prison for men who 'idealized their own bondage' and distorted the texture of life and art by imposing upon them their base and cruel abstractions. Zhivago could not see why he was applauded as a diagnostician (for having the power, in medicine, to grasp a situation as a whole) and condemned as obscurantist when he applies this power to life at large. This is what Pastemak does in the novel, in which the State appears as a disorder in the total pattern of life. This is the true politics of an artist, who becomes accordingly an enemy of what passes for order, and must be removed from the record. Pastemak was a man of real humility, and his life was punctuated by loss and disaster that seem to have left him his calm conviction of their ultimate lack of importance. His dying under a cloud of official disapproval would not have seemed to him a singular misfortune; the friends of his youth-Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Tsvetayeva, Yashvili-all took their own lives, and genius (under State socialism 'extremely rare') is practically a guarantee of non-acceptance. But it is 'the whole of life' that has meaning; sense is not to be expected from the part pretending to be the whole. Casuistry will, in the end, provide the justification for Pasternak's reinstatement. He paid his dues to the State, and even said he was grateful to it for converting him from 'an esoteric poet, lost in fantasies and sensations', into a 'realist'. But this is the realism of Zhivago, possible only to one who had been an esoteric poet. The remarkable blend of historical narrative and occult image-relations was made possible by the slow maturation of a man educated in a poetry that despised reason. Perhaps, in calling his novel 'the only work ofwhich I am not ashamed', Pastemak exaggerated its realism; he described it as 'a simple document, 119

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understandable to all'. It is certainly not that, and not even the book Yury Zhivago dreamed of writing, of 'an originality so covert, so discreet, as to be outwardly unrecognizable'. Hence the 'partial' readings given the book in the West, ofwhich Pasternak himself complained. The tone of certain obituaries here suggests some regret about the reception given Zhivago in this country, as if the Russians were right and we were all blinded by its propaganda value. This is untrue; the greatness of the book is as independent of political circumstance as that of Anna Karmina. To say otherwise is to endorse the lie that Pasternak was nothing but a malcontent survivor of a dead regime; worse, it is to damage what reaHy needs protection, the dignity of modern letters. June.19 60.

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XIV THEINTERPRETATION OF THE TIMES (ISHERWOOD AND POWELL)

ONE of the characters in The World in the Evening quotes the old saying about the Austrian situation: 'desperate but not serious'. It will serve as a working description of Mr. Isherwood's own manner. Few writers have been more persistently anxious about themselves, their contemporaries, or the times they lived in, and those who have seemed not to have wanted to state their anxiety so obliquely. He is a little like St. Augustine deploring in conceited Latin the depravity of another evening world. He studies our amusing, apparently self-willed deformities almost as if what mattered was their intrinsic comic value, almost as if he did not know that the pressures that create them are beyond the control of the individual will; yet his whole way of looking at them is ultimately conditioned by the political and psychological preoccupations of his contemporaries, and that to a degree most unusual in English intellectuals. On the face of it nothing could be more dispiriting than an (Cuvre of which the main theme is escape from Mother, enacted against sketches of a decaying continent. But Mr. Isherwood is not serious, and so the Berlin stories, conceited variations on adesperate theme, are read by everybody in paperback editions. I remember the excitement when Sally Bowles came out, and my despondency when it lasted no longer than the lecture during which I read it. It is still read in the same way, for fun. And Mr. Norris is, so far as I know, the only character of 'thirties fiction with any of the old Dickensian extra-fictional prestige. 1.11

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Being farcical about desperate matters is a trick associated with cabaret, especially German cabaret of the Norris epoch. It has never been naturalized here, except momentarily by Isherwood himself; it would be an entertaining though pethaps not very rewarding enterprise to revive The Dag Beneath the Skin, and see if Destructive Desmond has lost his punch. The whole idea of jocular desperation lies also behind Auden's ballads. These are highbrow solutions to the big problem of how to achieve specifically literary effects without shutting out life and politics. For the Freudian artist it is a problem complicated by his own alienation from society. Without it he wouldn't be an artist, but it comp1icates his way of looking at public events, especially at a time when, in the language of Mann's famous pronouncement, 'the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms'. The answer of artists big enough to ignore the charge of irresponsibillty is Yeats's, or later Nabokov's; they convert all into the materials of their own heterocosms. The most comp1ete answer is Pastemak's. Recently I was looking at an artic1e written by Stephen Spender in 194Z, called 'Literature and Public Events'. He was unhappy about the gulf between literature which ignores these events but tries to treat offundamental human issues, and the frank but superficial propaganda-writing of the previous decade. The first takes no account of forces which threaten its own existence; the second sacrifices itse1f to an immediate and ephemeral effect. What was needed, Mr. Spender thought, was' a kind of writing which is conscious of the temporal as weIl as the etema1, the revolutionary as weIl as the traditional'. He could hardly have guessed that the on1y work that truly answers this need should come from Russia; he was very likely thinking of Mr. Isherwood -though his American activities were aheady puzzling and worrying his friends-as its most probable author. Those 'considerable literary currents of opinion anxious to wash away the stain of public life from literature' still flow, but the difficu1ties involved in keeping a work of art moderately impure were in a way at their most acute when Isherwood was writing. How to keep public events in a work of art? It torments the technique as weIl as the conscience. The issue is presented in an apparently relaxed fashion in The WarM in the Evening (1954). Gerda, the refugee help, stands fot 122.

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total acceptance of our condition as good-intemment camps, bedpans, love, everything understood and ineluded. Stephen, the hero, is cut off from precisely this, and his relationship with Gerda is one of those sex-free affairs between tormented men and lifeaccepting women that recur throughout Isherwood's work. Stephen's dead wife Elizabeth was a highbrow novelist whose work Gerda dislikes. Her characters seem not to care for what happens in the world outside. They are in this beautiful house, with these beautiful speeches and feelings. They make each other happy and unhappy. But it is like agame. Without heart, and so elever. They are quite safe, really. They are comfortable, in spite of all. They weep and are sad. But the servants bring them tea. "But, Gerda, what do you expect them to do? Sit around discussing politics?" "Politics I" Gerda's eyes flashed. I had never seen her so passionately indignant before. "People are taken in concentration-camps and beaten and tortured and bumed like the garbage in ovens-you call that politics?" Stephen protests that Elizabeth's book doesn't pretend to be about Hitler and the Nazis. 'But,' answers Gerda, 'it is published first in thirty-four. I took specially notice of the date. How could one write then, and not speak of the Nazis? This I do not understand.' On her view of the world, there is no room for purely metaphysical distress. Her protector is the Quaker Aunt Sarah, whose spiritual energies flow outward to the relief of suffering; and in the same house with them lies Stephen, physically and mentally encased in pIaster, and smelling. Elizabeth, in this strange, tense book-for the appearance of relaxation is entirely superficial-is representative not merely of a style to be escaped from, but also of a mother to be defeated; and the whole work is really a literary battlefield upon which the political and the psychological interests fight it out. The result is not always happy; the passage I have quoted comes from an episode that nobody would attribute to a master of dialogue, and there are a good many like it. Yet the opening chapter is a superb beginning to a book in which sexual failure and irresponsibility are indices of a general collapse of communication between persons: the Hollywood party, all white tuxedos and moireS cummerbunds, money and ennui, and Stephen ready to bellow IZ3

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with despair, 'like an animal trapped in a swamp'. He finds his wife making love with a man who has already made a pass at him; they are in a hideous children's hut-'two mating giants filled the dwarf world of the doll's house'. He batters on the roof, then rushes home to tear her clothes and scrawl dirty words on her mirror. He is beset with the feeling that he does not exist; then he flies to Aunt Sarah, and has his Groddeckian road accident. Excused from participation in life, he talks to Gerda, to Sarah, to two homosexual lovers. Quaker 'togethemess' enfolds him; he measures and admits the impurities of the past. Stephen, at the end, is celebrating an asexual reconciliation with his wife, and waiting for a convoy to the European war. The World in the Evening is a much more elaborate book than this suggests. People found it disappointing because it was as unlike the Berlin books-and Prater Violet-as it could weIl be, coming out of the same skulI. Yet it is by no means so unlike The Memorial l (1932) which has just been re-issued. Here also Isherwood, with a different diagnostic method, explains the time's deformity. Such aetiological inquiries impose upon the novelist, as upon the physician, a technique of flashbacks, confrontations of cause and symptom. This necessity happens to have made The Memorial a more difIicult book than The World in the Evening, but the two books are as it were linked behind the backs of the Berlin stories. (Mary Scriven carries on into the second book, still dressing up as Queen Victoria.) The later book is less ambitious and more expository in method, certainly; it came after the flight from art, from the EHzabeth kind of novel, in the Berlin books. The Memorial is altogether more serious, and equally desperate. The best way to put this is in terms of 1sherwood's theory of High Camp, as expounded by the doctor, Charles, in The World in the Evening. True High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is largely camp about religion. The Ballet is camp ab out love. . .. 1t's terribly hard to define. You have to meditate on it and feel it intuitively, like Lao-Tze's Tao. 1

Th, MImorial. By Christopher Isherwood (Hogarth Press). 12 4

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The Berlin stories are High Camp about dvilization; Thc World in the Evening is decadent Camp; The Memorial was written while the idea was germinating, and is pre- or proto-Camp. This isn't quite accurate, since The Lost cannot, in its unfinished state, quite qua1ify as High; High demands not only unclassical tumult and asymmetry but the full basic pattem. But everybody knows how elose it comes, even now, to establishing recondite harmonies between the absurd and the desperate, between private posture and public disaster. Even in Sal!J Bowles there is a run on the banks; as the funeral of Herman Müller passes endlessly but, it seems, irrelevantly by, Christopher merely reflects that both he and Sally are lost. Nazis and Communists dispute possession of a city full of amusing perverts. The ptindpal characters are all dlclasses, even Sally. Their deaHngs with the poor are ambiguous, sexual as weIl as soda!. Christopher is a camera; but Mr. 1snerwood was not a camera so much as a choreographer, so much 'on the side of the forces that make a work of art'-we leam from Mr. Spender's autobiography-that he made reality dance to his orders. He wanted a work of art, but the High Camp kind, not the Elizabeth kind, or The Memorial kind. Yet The Memorial is certainly a work of art. Tbe central event is the erection in 1920 of a war memorial in a small town deep in Manchester's Cheshire fringe. (1sherwood is deftly convincing about this locality; he even gets Stockport right, which I suppose nobody else has ever done. 1t is probably worth remembering that he comes from the GaskeIl country, thinking not so much of Cranford as of North and South.) Some of the people who come to the ceremony we have met before, though eight years later, in the first section of the book, which has a somewhat Conradian time-scheme. But the main group consists of gentry from the Hall: Mrs. Vemon, widow of the heir, and her tormented son Erie; the old Mr. Vemon, helpless from a stroke, fat, mindless, happy, much too far gone to care a damn about the memorial. They arrive in a carriage. Mrs. Vemon, in her black, is full of a grief in which the genuine and the bogus are hopelessly mingled. Eric, coping with his stammer and his mother, belongs nowhere, is equally at a loss in the Hall, at school, at Cambridge; a true 1sherwood character, with no way in. The Bishop offidates, and Ramsbotham, an aspiring member of the manufacturing elasses, sees to the Vernon wreath, As they get into their archaic carriage

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after the ceremony they are observed by a friend of the dead Vemon, who thinks, 'seeing the doll in her black, the slobbering old man, the gawky boy .. " This is what we've got left ofRichard.' This friend, Edward Blake, is a shell-shocked pilot, who eight years later, we know, tried to kill himself in Berlin. He is homosexual and alienated, except in so far as his friend Margaret holds him in. He is with Mary Scriven, a Bohemian daughter of old Vernon, to whom the ceremony also means very little. We know her as she is to be, as we know Mrs. Vemon, still enjoying her bereavement, and Eric, busily engaged in good works. But the gap between 1920 and 1928 is filled by another seetion, dealing with Cambridge, with Erie, and Mary Scriven's rootless son, who takes up with Edward Blake. Finally, in 1929, Mary and Edward, with friends, drive down to the old house overnight. 1t is owned by Ramsbotham, and has nothing whatsoever for them. There follow two exempla of post-war impotence: Mrs. Vernon, utterly submerged in her role as war widow, with Major Charlesworth her admirer, who is lost in his delusions concerning her grief and purity; then Edward, living asexually with the understanding Margaret. Lastly we see Edward, exiled again in Germany, now with a boy who knows only by hearsay ab out the war, the fall of modern man. It is difficult to give much idea of The Memorial, of the careful structuring and the compulsive stresses. It is, however, a book of enormous skill, heavy but without redundancy. 'lt was to be about war,' wrote lsherwood, 'not the War itselfbut the effect of the idea of "War" on my generation.... 1 was out to write an epie; a potted epic; an epic disguised as a drawing-room comedy.' The determination, epie though it may be, to drape everything round a few central episodes involves having people remember rather than act; this becomes notieeable and irritating. And there is a tendency to slide over the sill of irony into identification with the manner criticized: ' Anne was plunging into a simple but very smart frock,' or, 'Oh, it was cruelly unjust, it was fiendish that she should have so many sorrows to bear'. Yet The Memorial is the best completed novel of a most distinguished writer: a genuine interpretation of the times. Mr. Anthony Powell is about the same age as Mr. Isherwood and had written several novels before the war; these, though weil 126

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spoken of, seem never to have had their full due, and one hopes that the prestige of his post-war series will not permanently obscure them, for Afternoon Men and From a View to a Death are among the best work of the period. Granted so great a gift, he could hardly fai!, when he applied himself to an elaborate interpretation of the times, to produce a fiction of extraordinary quality. Mr. Powell's farce is more relaxed than Isherwood's, and he has not the dedicated intellectual's fierce submission to ideas; but his business is simi1a:r, having to do with lost souls and disordered times. I do not see why critics, like everybody else, may not sometimes like the good better than its enemy the best, and I fess to a preference for the prewar Powell, without denying the interesting continuity between early and late or the difference in the size of the achlevement. But even if one has this preference it remains true that with the publication of A Question of Upbringing and A Bl!Yer's Market (1951, 1952) one feit the presence of something new and distinguished, a manner not only individual but potent enough to provoke involuntary imitation. For a while one saw people in a new way; they behaved like acrobats in a slowmotion film. The absurdity of these people was suddenly enriched when one imaginatively slowed down their behaviour. The famous business of Widmerpool and the sugar-sifter is not, at normal speed, very funny. You have enormously to prolong its running time to make it so. This is one of the basic Powell devices; another is the fardcal extension of a simple event or remark by means of some unpredictably remote but apt analogy or illustration. There are a few examples oE this in the new book,l but not enough to keep one really happy. Lady Warminster accepted St. lohn Clarke's hand carefully, almost with surprise, immediateIy rellnquishing it, as if the texture or temperature of the flesh dissatisfied her. A variation of this is prolongation by absurd inference. 'People like myself look forward to a sodal revolution in a country that has remained feudal far too long,' said St. lohn Clarke, speaking now almost benignly, as iE the war in Spain was being carried on just to please him personally, and he himself could not help being flattered by the fact. 1

Casanova' s Chinese Restaurant. By Anthony Powell (Heinemann). 12 7

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These are choreographical quirks in the huge circular dance, to use the figure in terms of which Mr. Powell asks us to understand his scheme. His characters are like the Seasons in Poussin's picture, 'moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape: or breaking into meaningless gyrations'. More and more dancers crowd in; this new book has many of the familiar figures but has much to say of two entirely new ones, the musician Moreland and the music critic Maclintick, whose marriages are the main interest of this instalment. Stringham and Widmerpool whizz into view, each performing a brilliant comic pas seu! before vanishlng. Dne hopes that somebody will reprint over here Arthur Mizener's recent artic1e on Powell in Kenyon Review; it has a fault often to be found in sensitive criticism, the taking of the will for the deed, but it has the great virtue of c1arifying the design and the proportions of Powell's enterprise. Mizener indicates, for example, the antithesis between two important groups of characters, roughly speaking the men of will and the men of imagination. Widmerpool, though consistently absurd, heads the first, and the delightful disintegrating Stringham the second group. A second valuable insight defines the novelist's trick of focusing a situation in terms of a work of art. There are a great many such moments, and of course the Poussin dominates them all. Mizener has little but praise for work he calls 'enormously intelligent but completely untheoretical', and for the rendering of 'experience undistorted by doctrine'. All these qualities are to be found in Casanova' s Chinese Restaurant. The dance continues 'slowly, methodically, a trifle awkwardly'. A trifle too awkwardly, perhaps. There is a certain lack of grace in the episodie construction; the dancers shuffie or are pushed towards the dinners and the parties where the choreographer wants them. Mr. Powell's prose has a very individual gait, but at times one feels its feet get in the way: Ahabit of Moreland's was to persist etemally with any subject that caught his fancy, a characteristic to intensify in him resolute approach to a few things after jettisoning most outward forms of seriousness. 12.8

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This I find obscure, and the observations of Jenkins, though frequently unexpected, are dearly not intended to be gnomic. In this book there is reinforcement for the party of the men of will, the Widmerpools and Quiggins, new men, mechanical men who dank absurdly around a changed world and scoop the prizes. In the corridors of a nursing-home there is a chance meeting between a number of characters touched in one way or another with sterility: Moreland, whose wife is ab out to bear a child that dies, Jenkins, whose wife has had a miscarriage, and Widmerpool, who is suffering from boils. An obstetridan, a Widmerpolitan figure, is also of the group; he lectures them on abortion and is excessively respectful to the most powerful man present, Widmerpool, whose way of life is apparently affecting the professions. Tbe disordered times of which these people are symptoms are deftly and undemonstratively sketched; there is a faint ostinato of Spanish War and Abdication, but the dancers vary the rhythm with awkward, self-destructive freedom: Moreland with his actress wife, Maclintick with his shrew, Mrs. Foxe and her dancer friend. Yet 'most things turn out to be appropriate', as we are told at the outset. Tbe book is planned-however untheoretical its author-after the manner attributed by the schoolmen to God: absolutely, but allowing for contingency. It concentrates on marriage, and even if marriage is bound to be disastrous no one can absolutely foresee, out of the million possibilities, exactly how any particular union will decay. The restaurant of the title, and the conversations held there, suggest that modem marriage is significantly messy, the sensuality of the imaginative and the power-Iongings of the men of will exceptionally difficult to reconeile. Moreland, the composer, marries his princesse lointaine. Maclintick binds himself to a fountain of perpetual recrimination and commits suidde when cut off from it. Stringham's only valid relationship is with a terrible female keeper. Widmerpool has abandoned the whole idea. Nobody has children except the previous generation (Lady Moreland has seven). These sterile marital agonies assume unpredictable comic forms-indeed, the scene in which Stringham and Mrs. Maclintick discuss marriage is as good as the best Powell (' I shall never listen to an orchestra again without the most painful speculations ab out the home life of the players '). But underlying these antics are hard-headed, predestined 12.9

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patterns, suggested for example by the image of the Ghost Railway, the train 'fingered by spectral hands, moving at last with dreadful, ever-increasing momentum towards a shape that lay across the line'. And to set us all at a distance where the pattern and the antics are simultaneously perceptible, there is the emblem of the opening page, 'the mystery which dominates vistas framed by a ruined dom'. Whether the distance is made great enough is the problem; for sometimes the discrepancy between the general and the particular movement is so wide that the dance seems not to be a dance. There are moments when awkward hurly-burly, or some exquisitely absurd gesture seen in slow dose-up, diminish the sense of design, the feeling that everything is appropriate. But as yet it is impossible to say whether these failures are attributable to the author or to the reader. What is dear is the status of this attempt to interpret the times. Mr. Isherwood, one can hardly doubt, would admit its right to belong to that very exalted style, High Camp. 1960.

12.9

xv OLD ORDERS CHANGING (TATE AND LAMPEDUSA)

Ir 18 an ancient and productive literary habit to compare things as they are with things as they used to be. 'We are scarce our fathers' shadows cast at noon.' Decisive historical events, types of the ab original catastrophe, acquire the character of images upon which too much cannot be said, since they sum up our separation from joy or civility. So, in Imperial Rome, men looked back to the Republic; so to this day they look back past the Reformation or the Renaissance or the Civil War, the points at which our characteristic dis orders began. The practice has its dangers ; the prelapsarian can become merely a moral and intellectual deep shelter, and there is some difficulty in drawing the line between the good old days of the vulgar myth and the intellectual' s nostalgia for some 'organic society'. The lost paradise lies archetypally behind much worthless historical fiction, and agreeable though it may seem that the community as a whole appears to share the view that the second Temple is not like the first, the fact is that the first can be reconstructed on the South Shore, or on a Hollywood set, far more comfortably than in a work of imagination. The first requirement for such a work, on such a theme, is dry intelligence working on real information. To be obsessed by the chosen historical moment, as a theologian might meditate the Incamation, sothat one shares it with everybody yet avoids all contamination from less worthy and less austere intelligences-that is the basic qualification. Put another way, it is apower of self-criticism perhaps found only in an aristocratic, but not barbarian, sensibility. A few modem historical 13 1

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novelists have this quality. The authors of these two books! have it to an extraordinary degree, especially Mr. Tate, whose theme, the break-up of the Old South, is known to be unusually productive of gushing nonsense. If, as we are told, many Americans have a confused and erroneous idea of the Old South, it is not very likely that we, founding ours on Uncle Tom's Cabin and Gone with the Wind, can avoid mistakes. Mr. Tate, of course, is thoroughly informed, but it is not his business to impart information. His novel is Virginiacolour, steeped in the province, but ifhe mentions, say, Helpera book studied by his principal character and locked away from other members of the houschold-he will not add that this book was called The Impending Crisis in the SOl/th (1857), or explain its importance. And this necessary reticence extends to matters more subtle: to the lands cape and the climate, still to the European and the Yankee surprising, exotic; to the Jeffersonian politics of the old Southem aristocrat; to the archaic manners of the South and particularly to its views on personal honour, which make credible the violence of Mr. Tate's climax. In fact, as presented, this climax is hardly violent at all; Mr. Tate's strategy requires the maintenance of a very even tone and the preservation of the reader's distance from the events described. All the meanings are qualified by this calmness and this distance, and at certain crucial moments, narrative and symbolic, one senses the huge invisible effort the feat required. Explanation, discrimination between fact and myth, would have falsified all this, but their absence makes the work a delicate undertaking for English readers; for the tension between fact and myth is essential to the novel. The myth of a valuable and archaic southem civilization is not without basis. Crevecoeur could call Charleston the most brilllant of American cities. The antebellum South thought of itself as in a great tradition, the heir of Greece and Rome; and if its account of its aristocratic provenance was largely spurious, it was for all that essentially aristocratic in its structure. Yet it was a perversely democratic aristocracy, if only because of the slaves, whose very existence made it impossible to set difficult barriers between different classes of whites. In any case, the population was bound together by blood, by a network of cousinships that took no 1

The Fa/her,. By Allan Tate. The Leopard. By Giuseppe di Lampedusa. 13%

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account of status and even included slaves. The Negro was not feared or hated in the antebellum South, and he was not-effectively at any rate-exploited (all parties, including Mr. Tate's Agrarians, seem to be agreed that the slave system was extremely, perhaps disastrously, wasteful). Any civilization is buHt on paradoxes, but few so curiously as this one. These backward-Iooking, fine-mannered men had the activity of pioneers and hunters, and their natural violence was fostered by the alternately languid and vehement climate. Civic and personal pride coexisted with a central hedonism, a passion for gaming, drinking, love-making, talking. It was a world no outsider could improve, and one could represent the Yankee attack on slavery as directed not only against one's way of life, but against civility itself, even against God. The emphasis on personal honour is a feature of societies which feel themselves highly privileged; and South had its duelling, and was strong on the honour of women-the 'fragile membrane' as Faulkner calls it, that needs so much male blood to protect it. At the climax of Mr. Tate's novel a Negro enters a girl's room and attacks her; the consequences are death, madness, sterility. But what seems a myth-the revival of some incredible tabu-is a matter of fact. Such tabus are protection from what Mt. Tate calls the abyss, essential though atavistic elements of civility. An image of civility so distinctive, and so decisively destroyed by war, can stand quite as weH as that of England before its Civil War for the vanquished homogeneous culture that preceded some great dissociation, the effects of which we now suffer. It had all the gifts save art; and that, as Henry James said, is a symptom of the unhappy society. What the English Civil War meant to Mt. Eliot the American means to Mr. Tate; the moment when the modern chaos began, though it cast its shadow before. His book is about the antebellum South under that shadow. The war, so considered, is also a myth with correlative facts. It is commonplace that one thing more than any other sets the Southerner apart from other Americans: he is the only American who has ever known defeat, been beaten, occupied and reconstructed, seen his society wrecked and had no power to rebuild it on the old lines. Hence, as Cash said in The Mind of the South, a division developed in the 'Southern psyche'-the old hedonism warred with a new puritanism, old loyalties with new destinations. A tolerant society became bigoted. The Klan attacked not

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only the now-hated Negroes but Jews, atheists, fornicators. And Yankee culture moved in. The link", ith the past, the ' traditional men', was gone. In Mr. Tate's poem the Confederate graveyard stands, in his own words, for 'the cut-off-ness of the modern "intellectual man" from the world'. Could anything be saved? Mr. Tate and his friends in the 'twenties proposed and developed an Agrarian solution for the South, and were accused of sentimental organicism, of nalvely hoping to revive the virtues of the antique world by restoring its economic forms. What they really wanted was a new society uncontaminated by the industrial capitalism of the North, a society living elose to life in a manner made impossible by the great dissociation. 'I never thought of Agrarianism as a restoration of anything in the Old South,' Mr. Tate says explicitly, 'I saw it as something to be created ... not only in the South ... but ... in the moral and religious outlook of Western man'. He sought a way of life having the kind of order that is now found only in art; an order available to all, and not only to the estranged artist. Mr. Tate also proposed a theory of 'tension' in poetry (an extensive literal statement qualifies and is qualified by intensive figurative signmcances) which is a translation to aesthetics of this view of life. And his meditations on the South, or the image of it he has made, inelude these complementary literal and figurative aspects. Finally, in 1938, in this novel, he presents the image itself at its most complex, containing the maximum tension between letter and spirit, fact and myth. Thus the calm of the book is not merely a matter of Southern dignity (though that has its place in the effect) but of intellectual control, the tightened bow. The South is matter of fact; but it is also a pleasant land Where even death could please Us with an ancient punAll dying for the hand Of the mother of silences. The 'place' of the Buchans is called 'Pleasant Hill',1 in recognition of the basic myth; but it is not Paradise, it is merely a place where the radical human values are recognized, where the community and not the individual owns the myths which fence off 1

Mr. Tate teils rne his own farnily horne was called 'Pleasant Hili'. 102.

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the abyss. The time is just before the War. The narrator is Lacy Buchan, now old, speaking of the pleasant land as he saw it in boyhood. Memory works on aseries of images: the death of Lacy's mother and the mourning ofthe 'connexion'; a cbivalric toumament; the beginning of the fighting; a Faulknerian family disaster; the buming of Pleasant HilI by Union troops. It would be difficult to exaggerate the skill and integrity of the presentation, the slow unfolding of figurative significance. The principal characters are Major Buchan and bis sons and daughter; George Posey, caught between the Old and the New South, who becomes Buchan's son-in-Iaw; Yellow Jim, a Negro half-brother of Posey's. The basic fable is virtually Greek; rarelyoutside Greek drama is there to be found this blend of civilization and primitive ritual, the gentleman who is euphues but at home in actua1life, and with bis roots in immemorial custom. Major Buchan's mistake-bis hamartia-is the honourable one of backing the wrong version of bistory ; he finds bimself giving bis daughter to Posey, whom he cannot understand, and adhering to the Union when bis family yields to the overwhelming emotional attraction of Confederacy. All depends, in the book, upon the successful rendering ofbis dignity and authority, the order of bis house. But the detail that shows bis life and bis house to be in some ways less than great-archaistic revivals of a dead past, like the splendours of the jousting-is also important. Woven into the myopically rendered texture of the book are the qualifying facts: Mr. Broadacre forgetting to spit out bis tobacco before making a formal oration on Southem chiva1ry, unsurpassed in the world; Lacy's mother conducting a household task as a little ritual 'not very old to be sure but to my mother immemoria1'; the revived custom of duelling. These are the newly created traditions that Posey, the new man, dishonours. He is stronger than bis opponent in the duel but will not fight it; he cannot be disarmed by the on1y weapon Major Buchan uses against bim, a subtle withdrawal of courtesy. But bis disregard for the absurd forms of bis society is a symptom of bis estrangement. He fears the dead, is embarrassed by the sight of a bull mounting a cow. The nature of the Buchan commitment to life he does not understand. 'They'll al1 starve to death,' he says. 'They do nothing but die and marry and think about the honour of Virginia.' He sells Yellow Jim, bis halfbrother, treating bim as 'liquid capital', and so precipitates the 135

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domestic crisis of the attack on his sister. Even then Posey is half-hearted about the obligation to kill Jim, and the job is done by Semmes Buchan, Lacy's elder brother, whom Posey kills instead. He also kills his enemy Langton, a man as representative of the Old South in his corrupt activity as Semmes is in his archaic sense ofhonour. Posey's position in the War is ambiguous; he smuggles arms, carrying the carpet-bag which a few years later was the hated emblem of Yankee exploitation. Posey destroys the Buchans as surely as the War, and he does it out of a modem confusion, doing evil 'because he has not the will to do good'. The Old South is the Major, disowning his son for choosing Confederacy, but surrendering his house and his life rather than tell a Yankee officer that he himself is not' seecesh'. As Lacy and Posey leave his grave, Lacy to return to the fighting, Posey to disappear on his own occasions, we leam of the last Buchan victim: Lacy. We know what to make ofPosey, but there is always more to be made; as when Lacy, in his last sentence, declares his allegiance in the remarkable sentence, as rich a sentence as ever ended a novel: 'If I am killed it will be because I love him more than I love any man'. This is the reward of Mr. Tate's method: his images, though always sufficient, accrete significance as the narration develops, so that the whole book grows steadily in the mind. The dignity and power of this book depend upon the power of a central image presented with concreteness and profundity, and not upon one's acceptance of Mr. Tate's history. But without his integrity of intellect and imagination the image would have been false and imperfect in ways that might have exposed it to such disagreements. By a bold device, the intervention of a ghost, Mr. Tate hands on this image to us through three generations of Buchans ; it is as if ratified by a time-defeating community of sentiment, and the life in it is good and transmissibl~ as weIl as tragic. If we could rescue the w01d 'civilized' from the smart and fashionable, we could apply it, in deep admiration, to this book. The Leopard is also a deeply meditated book, extremely original and possessing an archaic harshness of feeling, more alien and more ancient than the civilized calm of The Father.!. It is, however, a less-consistendy weIl made work; there are one or two sermons, points where the exposition of ideas gets the better of the total figuration of the image; there is also an episode (Father Pirrone's 1;6

OLD ORDERS CHANGING

intervention in a peasant marriage dispute) which makes a relevant point but which adheres much more loosely to the main body of the novel than anything Tate would permit. It is also, of course, an aristocratic novel, but with a very different heritage from that of The Fathers. If it has the brilliant intelligence of Stendhal it has also something of his superior carelessness. But only a little; it is a work entirely worthy of that master (whose admiration for Ariosto Lampedusa evidently shared) and it is also in many ways a work of this century. The coincidence of theme with Tate's is remarkable. A Southern world is changed by soldiers from the North; but now the South is Sicilyand the soldiers Garibaldi's. The time (1860) is the same. The theme-the break-up of a civilization-is the same, though what is lost here is, for all its power, a world of death. And at a level not far below the surface the theme of The Leopard is death, the conditions under which men as weH as societies long for it. The novel opens with a wonderful scene; the Prince of Salina at his devotions, surrounded by his family. The women rise and expose the wall-paintings, the mythological gods of a religion that dominated Sicily before Christianity and still lends it life. The Prince, physically vast, sensual, irresponsible, walks with his dog Bendico in a garden full of the nauseating rich scents of a Sicilian summer, the European flowers tormented by the heat into giving Eastern odours. He scratches some lichen off a decaying Flora, and remembers the smell of a soldier's corpse found rotting in the garden. He thinks of his king, of a monarchy with death in its face. Mter dinner, at which the family retreat into silence from the mere threat of his irritability, he takes himself off to Palermo (forcing his Jesuit chaplain to accompany him) in order to obtain from Mariannina the satisfactions not to be had from his pious wife. But he lives for his astronomical studies, associated in his mind with the calm, as women are associated with the pleasure, of death. He is the old order, arbitrary, cruel, careless, yet in sympathy with the country and its peasants; above all in love with death. The rise of the dass which threatens the supremacy of Sallna's is represented by such men as Calogero, who arrives at the Prince's dinner-party in tails, when the Prince has, out of consideration for him, not dressed. Tancredi, the Prince's nephew, is the Posey of the book, a penniless, charming, trimming aristocrat, who 137

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fights with Garibaldi-herald of the new order in which Calogero is the equal of Salina-but does so only in order to save what ean be saved of the old ways. For the same reason, though also for love, he marries Angeliea, Calogero's daughter. It is Taneredi's way to get the girl and the money and the Prinee's favourite peaches into the bargain. But the old order does change. The Prinee bettays the past. (He has wine-glasses with the initials F.D. engraved on them, gifts of the King; but when he drinks Tancredi's health in a single gulp, 'the initials, which stood out clearly on the golden eolour of the full glass, were no longer visible'.) He changes his manners to fit the needs of survival in the new world. But as he watches a shot rabbit die in landseape that had not changed sinee the Phrenicians laboured aeross it, observing the paws uselessly mimieking the eonttactions of flight, he knows that it is hopeless; the Southem wish for death is near fulfilment. He is the last of the Leopards. In a remarkable appendix we hear ofhis barren daughters surrounded by bogus religious relies and throwing away the stuffed body of Bendieo, the last relie of the Prinee. His death-another extraordinary passageis like the death of a world. The eorpse of the soldier sends its sweet, rotten smell through the book. The languor and the violenee of this more desperate South is beautifully eonveyed; the book is held in the grip of its opening sentenee-Nunc ct in hora mortis nostrae-throughout. Always associated with this knowledge of death are the Prinee's love of the undisturbed stars, and a pervasive sensuality made civil by easy autocratie wit. The wit of Lampedusa is equal to the demands of a erucial dinner-party; and in describing the sensuality of Tancredi's wooing in the great house at Donnafugata-a newstyle eourtship stained with the dead dust of eenturies-he aehieves something absolutely original, a kind of erotie fugue. Lampedusa's talent was clearly enormous; Mt. Colquhoun's translation has immense resouree; and the book is, as it stands in English, worthy of all the admiration that it has reeeived. The civilization that ends with Salina is greater and darker than Major Buchan's; and Lampedusa has got its presenee into his book, which therefore is a bigger book than Tate's. There is nothing that a Major Buchan ean do whieh has the sheer historical weight of signifieanee that Salina's dealings with the Jesuit, in part submissive, in part insulting-as when he makes the priest help to 13 8

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dry his magnificent and recently sinning body-have as a natural right. Yet of the two books Mr. Tate's is the more perfeet. It cannot be more than once or twice in a lifetime that a critic might have on his table, at the same time, two new novels of such rare quality. 1960.

12.9

XVI HENRY MILLER AND JOHN BETJEMAN

A PRETTY PAIR indeed; but other reasons may be adduced for bringing them together. They are both, in wonderfully various ways, laudatorcs temporis acti, seeking to free themselves from the hated present and establish contact-whether in the tremendous vagueness of Agamemnon's tomb or in a City church-with das Heilige. Proc1aiming wisdom from these unfrequented sanctuaries, each has attracted a great many disciples, noisily or whimsically passionate in their devotion. Two sages, one a destroyer from the Brooklyn back streets, the other, mere upper-class, mere English; and both are among the most widely-read 'serious' writers of their day.l Mr. Durrell's selection is evidently made on the highest authority, and contains not only the editor's adulatory introduction but apreface by the author, who also contributes an off-hand commentary and abrief account of his own life-or so one supposes, for the 'he' of the earlier passages modulates into 'I' later on. This appendix is useful because Miller writes about himself and nothing else; an earlier English selection called Thc Cosmological Eve (1945) included a different account ofhis life, and I mention that book because anybody getting to grips with Miller would do weH to use it as well as Mr. Durrell's selection. This new book contains one inMit, an inferior piece about a Paris whore called Bertlle-a good example, if one were needed, of how Miller writes when he writes badly; which is interestingly similar to the 1 Thc Best 0/ Henry Miller. Edited by Lawrence Duttell (Heinemann). Summoned by Bellt. By John Betjeman (Murray).

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HENRY MILLER AND JOHN BE1'JEMAN

way he writes when he writes well. !t's all one to him, and you can guess what he will tell you to do if you don't like it. There are extracts from the famous inaccessible books, but as Miller himself says, 'these are, of course, innocuous, and therefore misleading'. More of the Trapie! and Blaek Spring could have been induded at the cost of omitting a few words and phrases (the course adopted by the 1945 English editor). Although this volume tells one a good deal about Miller, it falls far short of providing all that a serious inquirer would need to make up his mind. Possibly he could not do so without the Trapie! in their entirety, and what are the prospects of their being licensed?l The recent D. H. Lawrence proceedings would look like tea at the vicarage compared with a Miller case. Would the dons queue up for the defence? Should they? It is, after all, a question of literary merit. One thing is certain, if the critics were to testify on Miller's behalf they would be exhibiting more nobility of mind than they are usually credited with. Miller is dear enough about them, the critics, with all their talk about mesure (' what a mean little word ') and 'form'-'that perennial jackass which is always kicking up its heels in the pages of literary reviews'. He hates critics. Except for Blake, Lewis Carroll, D. H. Lawrence, and Lawrence Durrell, he also dislikes Englishmen; so English critics can expect little quarter. It is often said that Miller and critidsm are mutually repellent, and this view accounts for the way critics have left him alone, an extraordinary neglect considering his reputation and readership and the endless flow of sophisticated comment on modem, and espedally modem American, literature. The main exception is George Orwell's famous essay Inside the Whale-but Orwell spedalized in critidzing what others wouldn't touch. Of more recent studies I know only two of merit, by Philip Rahv and Alwyn Lee. Mr. Rahv says that the highbrow critics snub Miller because 'he makes bad copy for them', and that the author's admirers are bad witnesses because of their cultist attachment. The trouble with the critics is rather, I think, that they see no way of getting a firm grip on Miller without seeming to identify themselves with his view of literature. But if critidsm is worth anything, as they presumably believe, even if he does not, they ought to feel obliged to try; whether or not he is listerung is 1 Cancer has recently been published unexpurgated; so much for rhetorical questions (1961).

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unimportant. The whole question is whether Miller has any significance outside the cult, and it is for critics to say, regardless of the reaction. The position is, in a different degree, like that of a man writing about Durrell: if he says he likes some of it, or even all of it with reservations, the cultists react with insults: provincial! puritan! critic I The critic has, in fact, two answers to the devotees. The first is spirited but not very useful; he can borrow Miller's admirable vocabulary of abuse (which is roughly the same as his sexual vocabulary) and apply it to the worst of the sage's writing. Secondly, he can show that the anti-critical attitude of Miller is only an aspect of his profound but very conventional distrust of literature. 'I am not interested in literature,' he says in his Open Letter 10 Surrealists Everywhere; and in Capricorn he discourses, qwte in the mediaeval manner, on the two kinds of book: one the sort men write, the other made up of 'things like toe-nails, hair, blood, ovaries, ifyou will'-the book oflife; and this is his option. When he turns critic it is either to write rave notices for his friends or, in a tone of considerable critical solemnity, to explain artists who treat art as 'a substitute for life'-Joyce in whom he observes 'a dervish dance on the periphery of meaning, an orgasm not of blood and semen but of dead slag', and Proust, 'in his classic retreat from life the very symbol of the modern artist'. These views are expressed with clarity and force, but in the last analysis are designed for 'the maudlin boosting of the ego' (Philip Rahv's phrase) only less directly than usual; theyamount to criticism turned against literature, the suborning of a servant. What never seems to have occurred to Miller is that this disgust with litterature is very literary, a tired posture at best; and part of the central muddle in this writer is that he makes his nihilistic gestures from a pulpit of very commonplace design. He entirely underestimates the penetrative power of literary tradition, and imagines hirnself an inspired autodidact, when he is merely an uncritical and random student. The critic can at least say what is commonplace in Miller's anti-literature. Orwell did this, and called Miller a belated member of the lost generation, a Bohemian lapsed into total proletarianism-not in the garrets of Mürger's Paris but in the Streets Orwell knew well, 'the cobbled alleys, the sour reek of refuse, the bistros with their greasy zinc counters', etc. Miller, to start with, lives a literary 142.

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myth, and he neglects no aspect of it in his books. He is a literary person, offering no special stumbling-block to routine critical procedures. The vie de Boheme is set in a corrupt metropolis with a literary equivalent that might be called l'immonde cite. The population of Paris, the Paris of the myth, has not changed between Baudelaire and Miller: L'hOpita! se remplit de !eurs soupirs. Here, then, is the artist in his corrupt city, the man of free spirit defying a 'Faustian culture'. The city is not only Paris, which Miller liked because the mud was deeper and the divers more numerous, but the whole U .S.A. and the other' puritan cultures' of the North. There are vast tracts of lively writing about this and occasionally they are magnificent-for example, the attack on American bread in Remember to Remember, which starts from the loaf and passes on to account for everything that has gone wrong and why in the history of civilization, describes a scene of wild comic frustration in a restaurant, and ends like this: Accept any loaf that is offered you without question, even if it is not wrapped in cellophane, even if it contains no kelp. Throw it in the back of the car with the oil can and the grease rags; if possible, bury it under a sack of coal, bituminous coa!. As you climb up the road to your home, drop it in the mud a few times and dig your heels into it. When you get to the house, and after you have prepared the other dishes, take a huge carving knife and rip the loaf from stem to stern. Then take one whole onion, peeled or unpeeled, one carrot, one stalk of celery, one huge piece of garlic, one sliced apple, a herring, a handful of anchovies, a sprig of parsley, and an old toothbrush, and shove them in the disembowelled guts of the bread. Over these pour a thimbleful of kerosene, a dash of Lavoris, and just a wee bit of Clorox.... and so on. All this is Miller kicking around the American way of life-' cancer, syphilis, arthritis, tuberculosis, schizophrenia are so prevalent that we accept them as part of the bargain-i.e., the American way of life'-l'tmmonde cite corrupts even the staff of life. Of course he manages to be gay or boisterous about it; that is part ofthe artist's bargain; and he adds to an absurd savagery of expression a capacity for falling in love with the hated object, as in the brilliant automobile passage in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. But the basic situation is: artist in slum civilization. 143

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And very much in it; the hero of Caprieorn, seen from the outside, is oo1y a madder version of Mr. Eliot's carbuncular clerk. Tbe obscenity which keeps so much of Miller under the counter is an element of this city-myth. He himself defends it like an old literary hand. I am in the tradition ... a list of my precursors would make an impressive roster.... In the not too distant past there was one who was given the cup of hemlock for being 'the corrupter of youth'. To-day he is regarded as one of the sanest, most lucid minds that ever was. (Or, as Mill put it, 'Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and public opinion of his time, there took place a memorable collision'.) 'How,' Miller continues, 'can one guard against evil ... if one does not know what evil is?' (Or, as l'vfilton might have said, the obscenities are there 'that we may see and know, and yet abstain'.) Perfectly orthodox; obscenity is merely a matter of technique, of establishing the need of the artist to escape from l'immonde eiN. The Tropie of Cancer, says Miller, is concerned. not with sex, nor with religion, but with the problem of selfliberation ... a b100d-soaked testament revealing the ravages of my struggle in the womb of death. You can almost hear the expert witnesses talking about Miller as if he were Baudelaire, or invoking the 'puritan tradition'. But these words of his seem on1y very 100sely applicable to his texts, which do not seem to me to make it clear that random copulation is a terminus a quo rather than ad quem. He dweIls on the details of love-making with dwarf or mental defective, on randy car pick-ups, on the sheer Fun of having Rita in the vestibu1e. People do, of course, live like the hero of the Tropies, but he is given a legendary Paul Bunyan-like potency, and sometimes the point made by a sexual adventure is precisely that of the fabliau (there is an example in Caprieorn of extreme antiquity), or the tall story, or the Rabelaisian fantasy-his meditations whi1e in conjunction with the mental defective have the true Rabe1aisian range of vocabulary and 1earning. But what has all this 'lucubration', as he calls it, to do with rebirth, the escape from a debased sexuality? 144

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1t is the work of a vqyou with logorrhea. The one thing Miller has in common with Lawrence is his high valuation of sex as an indication of cultural dilapidation, and of primitive sexuality as a criterion; but they could hardly be more different in their application of these beliefs, which take Miller into Juanist fantasy and, weirdly, into comedy; the farcical vision of love in the world's infancy (Capricorn) is, though unquotable, probably the finest passage he ever wrote. Lawrence would probably have called it obscene, an urban dirty joke. Miller's relations with l'immonde eite are, then, ambiguous, but what he sqys they are is dear enough, and perfectly orthodox. He often writes ab out the artist in society, and what he says bears out this statement. The artist, or even the man who produces nothing but lives like an artist, may daim special privileges: the ultimate defence of Bohemianism. The life of the artist is the highest and the last phase of egotism in man. . . . The goal is liberation, freedom, . . . to continue writing beyond the point of self-realization seems futile and arresting ... one is absolutely alone. But this is a costly privilege and costly achievement. No man wants to be an artist-he is driven to it. The agony of a Christ on Calvary illustrates superbly the ordeal which even a Master must undergo in the creation of a perfeet life. Now this image of the artist' crucified and marked by the eross' has a venerable plaee in Romantic iconography, and goes back through Lawrenee and Yeats and Wilde to Kierkegaard. And it will eome as no surprise that Miller worships Rimbaud. 1t is the ritual-torture element in the big nineteenth-century myth that fascinates him; his variation is a simple conversion of guilt into defianee. 1nstead of the old vision of the gibbet and the old cry:

Ab! Seignekr! donnez-moi Ja force et le courage De contempler mon cr:eur et mon corps sans degout! he offers the guttersnipe ecstasies of Capricorn, eopulation performed as an act of vengeanee: 'somebody had to pay for making 145

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me walk around in the rain grubbing for a dime. Somebody had to pay for the ecstasy produced by the germination of all those unwritten books inside me'. The visionary artist modulates into the shouting figure in search of ecstasy or a girl, with Creative Evolution under his arm, composing his own historia calamitatum and ignoring everybody else's; living inside the whale. Orwell's admiration for this characteristic of Miller's was in part areaction from what he regarded as the pert and immature political opinions of the 'thirties poets, and he over-estimated what he called the American's power of not being frightened. But he was much too sruewd not to notice that the force which kept Miller out of politics was a very literary primitivism; he saw that all the 'change-of-heart' men were fundamentally pes simistic because what they have is a wish that things would happen in a way in which they are manifestly not going to happen. . . . Our eyes are directed to Rome, to Byzantium, to Montparnasse, to Mexico, to the Etruscans, to the Subconscious, to the solar plexus-to everywhere except the places where things are actually happening. And although he sees some good in this so far as Miller is concemed, he correctly associates these views with prevailing literary fashion which the 'thirties merely interrupted for a while. I don't know of any better way to 'place' Miller for outsiders than to catalogue briefly some of the ways in which he is in thrall to the conventions of modem Romantic primitivism, wherever he may have encountered them; characteristically he thinks his views may have welled up from 'the universal memory'. I have already mentioned the hatred of litterature, so I don't inc1ude that, or the related fondness for illiterates, which he shares with otherwise diverse figures such as Yeats, Eliot, Valery, Lawrence, and Wallace Stevens. First, and this is the radical one, is Miller's anti-intellectualism. The position is stated with extreme naivete in the story Picodiribibi, reprinted by Mr. Durrell. When man ate of the Tree of Knowledge he elected to find a short-cut to godhood. He attempted to rob the Creator of the divine secret, which to him spelled power. What has been the 146

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result? Sin, disease, death. Eternal warfare, eteroa1 unrest. The little we know we use for our own destruction. Consequently he has an extreme but conventional contempt for sdentific thought, for ail kinds of abstraction; and a respect for 'things'. In Capricorn the logos is described as the root of evil, and rejected in favour of the 'worthless thing' that contains 'the secret of my own regeneration'. 'If you can't give the is-ness of a thing, give the not-ness of it,' he advises; and appears (ignorantly, in my view) to praise Swift for doing so. There is no need to dweil upon the antecedents and analogues of this attitude. From it there flows naturally two consequential doctrines: a straightforward chronological primitivism, and a fashionable occultism. As to the first of these, 'savages' have a ' greater hold on reality' than we; they are more intelligent, too. Miller's own intelligence is 'savage'. There was a time when everybody was savage, and the world had a fiercely-co10ured priapic beauty. But there has been a catastrophe, a dissodation of man from the world, reflected in 'the 10ss of sex polarity'. When did this occur? 'The great Shakespearian dramas were but the announcement' of it. We have certainly been here, or hereabouts, before. Why do people who think along these lines almost a1ways take up with the occu1t? Because it has been since the Romanti~ movement (what it was for a time in the seventeenth century) the seductively obvious alternative to Sdence. 1t is an inexhaustible study, fuH of fasdnating analogies and sudden confirmations, and very congenial to the generally syncretic cast of the literary mind; there is no end to its platonic, cabbalist, hermetic, theosophical, and Buddhist ramifications. Among the smail group of Americans Miller admires is a learned Freemason, who says: religions decay into idle forms and the mum.mery of meaningless words. The Symbols remain, like the sea shells washed up from the depths, motionless and dead.... Shall it always be so with Masonry, likewise? Or shall its andent Symbols, inherited by it from the primitive faiths and most andent initiations, be rescued from the enthralment of commonplace and trivial misinterpretation, be restored to their andent high estate and again become the Holy Orades of philosophical and religious Truth, their revelation of Divine Wisdom to our thoughtful ancestors? 147

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Miller marvels that in an age given over to 'erass materialism' there should survive so great a scholar, sage, Cabbalist, Hermetist, ete. By the same token his favourite nineteenth-eentury Freneh thinker is Eliphas Levi, and he hardly needs to add that he also admires Balzae-the Balzae of Louis Lambert and SeraphiM. Among the photographs on his wall are those of Khrishnamurti and Rimbaud. (He is remarkably like Yeats in these matters, though less learned and less diseriminating.) Another hero is Rider Haggard. The link between modern art and oecultism is strong and obvious; Symons made it plain in the dedication of The Symbolist Movement. Art works like 'magie' or ' mysticism '-terms that are not dearly distinguished. Like them it is independent of intellect and deals in a superior kind of reality, where spirit and sense are not dissociated. Like magie, art depends upon symbols, and upon the common stock of symbol and myth, to which it achieves a non-intellective access. 'I prefer musie above all the arts .... I believe that literature, to become truly communicable . . . must make greater use of the symbol and the metaphor, of the mythologieal and the archaic.' (How's that for commonplace?) Art must be freshened up like the Masonic Symbols. The reward of the artist who works in this way is precisely that of the mystic; he penetrates the flux, achieves union with reality. Miller often teIls us what this feels like, but his terms are not unfamiliar in other artists. 'Walking back and forth over Booklyn Bridge everything became crystal dear to me.' It is not necessarily a pleasant experience; there may come 'a sense of desolation truly unprecedented.... 'I' was absent ... .' But sometimes it is: 'I was standing in my own presence bathed in a luminous reality' . Sometimes Miller talks like a Baroque saint of 'the miraculous wound which I received, the wound which killed me in the eyes of the world and out of which I was born anew.' This is again an aspect of a familiar myth, but it is unusually important to Miller, and the book which says most ab out this kind of experience is, in my view, also his best: The Colossus of Maroussi. The expression of mystieal experience is in this book sometimes so old-fashioned that it reminds one of The Prelude. 'Certain spots stand out like semaphores ... provided ... they are approached with utter purity of heart'-topographieal loca148

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tions, not spots of time as in Wordsworth, because Miller found in Greece a place he could associate with bis special mystical experience. It is what one would expect of bis sensitivity to wellestablished currents of thought that Miller's Greece is not the early-Romantic Greece of Shelley or of Byron but a later, post-Jane Harrison and also post-Otto version. In it he can feel most strongly the lost power of 'seeing past and future as one'. (His respect for scholarsbip is shown in a list of the 'courageous pioneers' who helped to 'break the speil of defeat and paralysis' imposed by nineteenth-century rationalism: Sehliemann, Sir Arthur Evans, Frazer, Frobenius, Annie Besant, Madame Blavatsky, Paul Radin, carrying on the work of Henty, Bulwer-Lytton, Marie Corelli, and Rider Haggard.) In the passages on Eleusis, Poros, and Epidaurus, Miller certainly achieves a kind of magnificence, and a familiar sense of regeneration: This is the first day of my life ... that I have included everybody and everything on tbis earth in one thought.... I bless the world, every inch of it, every living atom, and it is all alive. Even at bis finest and most individual Miller reminds us of finer artists, artists who do not despise mesure. I do not suggest that this survey of the conventional elements in Miller has any very direet bearing upon bis quality as a writer, or as a sage. It is merely a matter of saying, for outsiders, what sort of a writer he iso The question of bis merit is the one that his admirers will never allow a critic to settle. It will, however, be agreed on both sides that bis gift depends on the power to depose intellect, to frighten away mesure; hence his uneasy relation with surrealism and the respect with wbich he quotes Dadaist speIls. The price he pays, in the words of Alwyn Lee, is that he abandons the power to distinguish between art and piffie, in others as weIl as in bimself. Eve-rybody agrees that Miller can write; bis is a curious gift, incapable of any kind of rest, dependent on continuous movement. Tbe torrent, brilliant or piffiing, rolls on; at its best it has the surge and glitter of-Crashaw, a name that suits the Baroque cast of bis spirituality: blood pours, eyes roll, the angel plunges bis weapon into the saint, whose draperies defy the law of gravity. Miller throws bimself on the language, as upon books and people. He is as he describes Katsimbalis in the Colossus, 149

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alive and flourishing like a smoking dung-heap. He could galvaruze the dead with rus talk. It was a sort of devouring process, when he described a place he ate into it, like a goat attacking a carpet. If he described a person he ate hirn alive from head to toe. What, as one rolls down the stream, tells one whether trus time it is art or piffie? It is the question that Miller claims to be unanswerable; he wants only surrender to the current. Joyce made great demands too, but the qualities that make us respect rum as an artist are the same that made Miller speak ofrum as in love with death. Life, and therefore Miller, deny 'form' and mesure. So the critic labels rum a minor figure and stands by for perfectly predictable insults. Mr. Betjeman also, but by more subtle methods, prevents the question wruch is art and wruch is piffie. He busies himself in concealing the difference. In the same poem he puts tremendousstatement lines about God and the Faith, and obsolete-gesture lines like 'Deepfy I loved thee, ]I West HilI!' and '1'11 fight you, Beijeman, you swine, for that'. Within limits he knows he may depend upon us-upon our sense of humour, or what Miller would call our 'cultivated feeble-mindedness'-for the co:r:rect response. For example, there is a solidarity of class and education about our amused affection for the bad lines in certain poems of Crabbe, of Wordsworth, of Arnold. They take their place with other objects and habits as part of the defence of a way of life threatened by the defection of the servant dass. It is a way of life that permits nonconformity in inessentials; there are words you cannot say and c10thes you must not wear, hut you may be miserable at school, stupid with a gun, and eccentric about architecture. What you may never be, in spite of Orwell's example, is proletarian in the manner of Miller; you will always trunk of the world as populated by 'the chain-smoking millions and me'. 'That topic all-absorbing os it was, Is now and ever shall be to US-CLAss.'

Here, in trus autobiography, Mr. Betjeman speaks of the experiences of cruldhood (' before the dark of reason grows') but the past he longs for is not rus own. His great merit is archreological-rus power to construct cultural patterns from discrete objects. He is happiest with the late Victorian-Edwardian objects, 15°

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suggesting that he is really one of them and has somehow strayed on to the wrong level among the modern trash, mantelpieces, doilies, etc. Some of his best poems present the two epochs in significant contrast: 'The Old Liberals' , the poem on the death of George V. Mr. Betjeman gets many of his effects by sabotaging the present with the past. (This book is got up, not very atttactively, to look as if it came out Mty years ago.) Not long ago I saw him give a brilliant performance in a television programme about Marylebone Station. He pointed out the telltale juxtapositions: big, craftsmanlike carving defaced by British Railways signs, the solidity and size of the hotel that reflected the public standing of the Midland manufacturers who used it; then a glass of sherry as he sat, pretending to be a respected manufacturer, in a vast sofa; finally the wry smile, the comic-archaie shrug of resignation. Mr. Betjeman's is an art of obsolete gesture. This allows him to say what he likes about the great subjects-Iust, death, bereavementin his own way, and yet to exploit the advantages of modern selfirony. ' Deep!J I loved thee, JI West HilI!' would not be a tolerable line in a local newspaper poet. All depends upon the reconstruction of a dead epoch; Mr. Betjeman travels back into the past, but need not go far to find what he needs, certainly not to Poros or Delphi. His autobiographical poem disappoints ; blank verse lends itself less weIl than archaic stanza-forms to his purposes, as one can see from the examples in Col/eeted Poems. 1t is simply too easy; the sense of effort, of positive archaism, is essential. One sees this c1early wherever the new poem goes over old ground. The sadistic nurse who plagued him about death and hell counts for little here after the excellent 'N.W. 5 & 6'. The insult remembered through life-when somebody called him 'a common little boy'-is much less impressive here than in 'False Security'. The riehest pages are about Oxford, the 'dear private giggles' and the Kolkhorst Sunday-morning routs; but even there the best writing is in the long 'irregular ode' to Oxford. Mr. Betjeman, inevitably, also brings Wordsworth to mind; they both deal with the disciplines of love and fear. The understanding of these led Wordsworth not to the loving reconstruction of a dead culture but, much more in Miller's manner, to a visionary dreariness, to the remoter sources of humanity: 'Oh mystery oJ man, from what a depth Proeeed thy honours?' There are 15 1

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different ways of being a sage, but they all seem to require a journey to the past: to the bric-a-brac of Highgate, or the tomb of Agamemnon. Anywhere but here, any time but now. As to the means of getting away, there seem to be many, some involving mesure and some not; and however you travel you will find, it seems, that a lot of people want to go with you. 1960•

FULL PEAL OF BETJEMANl 'Among the many ways in which Mt. Betjeman differs from most ofhis fellow-poets,' according to his editor, 'is that his poems are commercially successful to his publishers and himself.' And here they are, bell-swarmed as ever. Whoever buys them will know he is doing good all round, except possibly to those fellow-poets, 'upon ... whom the autumnal blight of obscurity seems to have settled'. Not the least of the dis services performed in Lord Birkenhead's bland introduction to this book is the fostering of a notion that Mr. Betjeman is a sound alternative to the fashionable madmen who nowadays pass for poets; that ooly his kind of thing is the real thing. In the end these daims will not advance the reputation of a poet who is certainly distinguished and certainly pleasing. This inexpensive book is going to give a lot of pleasure, induding a good deal of giggling, but it also testifies to a considerable achievement, easier to recognize than to define. First the eye takes in the Betjemanian details: the conifer suburbs and colonels, the tennis on polite lawns, the trams and churches, the eccentric anecdotes. Then it observes the gravity of many of the themessin and death, lust and old age, very directly dealt with. Directly, that is, from Mr. Betjeman's angle, which is so idiosyncratic that these themes often come out funny. Now this comic astigmatism is carefully cultivated, first of all by the device of wanton particularity. This poet hardly ever mentions a motor-car; his poems are full of Morris Eights and Rovers. See, for example, 'North Coast Recollections': the lemonade is made from 'Eillel Tower' powder, the tennis club is hidden not by bushes but by 'four macrocarpa', the name ofthe actuary's 1 John Betjeman' s Collected Poems. Compiled with an Introduction by the Earl of Birkenhead (Murray).

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firm is given in full. A woman ' shuts the Walter Crane' at children's bedtime; a girl hides in the Wendy Hut (ghastly, but the dass is right) and Harvey glances at his Ingersoll (the context shows him to be young, not poor). This density and contemporaneity of context he1ps to provide the special slant on lust, death and so on; like the beils they burst from another and mysterious world into a cosiness where everything has a name; to form curious compounds with the dear familiar goings-on-just as das Heilige is blended in Anglican churches with the smell of old hassocks. There is a new poem in the book 'N.W.5 & N.6', which has many of the usual themes and all the skiil: Lissenden Mansions. And my memory sifts Lilies from lily-like electric lights ..•. Then it specifies a childhood occasion when a sadistic nurse puts the fear of God into a boy (this juvenile recognition of evil is a recurrent theme): I see black oak twig outlined on the sky, Red squirre1s on the Burdett-Coutts estate. I ask my nurse the question, 'Will I die?' Always the necessary particular, followed by the tremendum mysterium. This need for named detail, before anything else can make sense, is basic, and explains the celebrated evocations of place, the appetite for architectural detail-even, in the very rare degree to which Mr. Betjeman possesses it, the fee1 of a special architectural complex, such as the City churches. Obviously this leaves unexplained much that we recognize as characteristic-it only partly explains the careful naiveN of the tone. In this, parody is a special ingredient, not always funny; the Tennysonian blank verse sometimes is and sometimes isn't. The parody of Amold's elegiacs in the poem in memory of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava is perfect1y serious, opening with a bold unArnoldian energy, but modulating to the steady tone which saves 'Rugby Chapel' from being embarrassing. Here, as elsewhere, the object is to make possible the large and otherwise impossible statement, the kind of thing all modern poets have to work for, as, for example, Mr. Larkin works for the last stanza of 'Church Going'. In fact, the difficulties of this poet arise when such statements 153

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are not adequately prepared, so that the naivetC appears false, out of control. On the whole, the particulars which redeem such statements are those he observes with love, or anyway tolerance, usually because they contribute to a nostalgia limited by class predilections. Where he hates, Mr. Betjeman often seems to be alarmed by the power of his own disgust. This sometimes makes for good poems, like the ones ab out lust, where the fact that the jokes are uneasy makes them good jokes for poetry. But it also makes for bad ones, like 'The Town Clerk's Views', a simple, angry piece of sarcasm which comes out flat and muddled; contrast the directness and particularity working together with sophisticated plotting in 'The Old Liberals' or with idiosyncratic explosiveness in 'Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough.' The truth is that the control of tone in such poems is a most delicate affair. The good ones must suffer by vulgarization if Mr. Betjeman is to be treated as the poet of everybody who knows, culturally and sodally, what's what. At a time when the intelligentsia appear to have taken over from golf-club secretaries the duty of defining sodal and cultural boundaries, one is sorry to see here the poem 'How to get on in Society', which is about bshknives, toilets, vestibules, doilies and all that. This sort of thing has, in the end, no more to do with Mr. Betjeman's poetry than it has with that of his blighted, autumnal fellow-poets, who will, inddentally, have no difficulty in seeing how admirable, when all is said, much of his work remains. 195 8.

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To KNOW your own avant-garde you must know in what direction you are moving, and since I do not, I find it unhelpful to think of Beckett1 in that connexion. In fact he seems to be a rather oldfasruoned writer, and at one time it was permissible to think of rum as a poor one as well. The justice of that can be confirmed by anybody who bothers to consult the files of transition and to read Beckett's contribution to the volume of 1932 (' Anamyths, Psychographs, and other Prose Texts ') entitled 'Sedendo et Quiesciendo'-a performance in the manner of the Joycean monologue wruch makes these later novels seem by comparison lucid and refreshing. About this time Beckett is said to have told Peggy Guggenheim that 'he was dead and had no feelings that were human'. He was, however, learned in a Joycean way, and was one of the few young writers said by the master to have promise. His inhumanity and rus learning and his promise permitted rum to subscribe to Jolas's doctrine that one needed to write 'in a spirit of integral pessimism' and to 'combat all rationalist dogmas that stand in the way of a metaphysical universe '. Trus task demanded a consistent and progressive deformation of language and grammar. Beckett belonged, certainly, to the primitivist and decadent avant-garde of 1932. A year earlier than that he published rus little essay on Proust, wruch I have long regarded as a model of what such books ought not to be, for it is obscure, pedantic in manner, and not, as 1 Mo//oy. Ma/on, Diel. The Unnamable. By Samuel Beckett (Calder). Th, Affair. By C. P. Snow (MacMillan).

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criticism should be, in the service of the work it undertakes to elucidate. Nevertheless it is the product of astrange and wellendowed mind, and its perversity is of a kind that writers, not charlatans, occasionally display. And it has now an additional interest; for Beckett has published obviously important work, and the Protist not only shows his talent at a formative stage but discusses what the important work is forbidden to discuss, namely ideas. It is the best introduction to Beckett, though not to Proust. Beckett, for example, is more passionate about Time than the occasion quite seems to require, speaking of its 'poisonous ingenuity ... in the science of affiiction', seeing men as ordinarily trapped in vulgar intellectual errors about past and future, and hiding behind 'the haze of our smug will to live, of our pernicious and incurable optimism'. The agents of this false Time are Memory (voluntary memory, of course) and Habit. But occasionally we break away from them; some shock, some involuntary memory, revives our 'atrophied faculties' and produces a 'tense and provisionalluddity in the nervous system'. These breaches oE the ignoble agreement between the organism and its environment are terrible and isolating, but they are the source of all meaning, and, presumably, a1l pleasure. Unhappily these 'immediate, total, and delicious deflagrations ' are not summoned at will. Life, for the rest, is necessarily evil; 'wisdom consists in obliterating the faculty of suffering'. In ordinary life we expiate original sin, the sin ofhaving been born. In death, or in moments of 'inspired perception', we escape from this condition and perceive the 'only reality', 'the essence of a unique beauty', 'that damns the life of the body on earth as a pensum and reveals the meaning of the word: "defunctus"'. This is, of course, not entirely irrelevant to Proust; but Beckett's Bergsonism has its own rapt, pessimistic quality. His intuitionist aesthetic is exactly as modern as T. E. Hulme's; but he meditates much more upon the desert in which we norma1ly dweIl than upon the delicious oases. The latet Beckett is much easier to understand if one recalls these musings on Time and Habit, the inaccessibility of value, the falsity and terror of man's world, the expiatory nature of human life. We are poor almost beyond imagining, especially since we must reject the mythologies or religions which talk of eternity and redemption. Their promised 15 6

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reve1ations eome to nothing; the world is a chaos, direetionless (Beekett's eharaeters never know left from right). The Beekett hero is what Wallaee Stevens, another Bergsonian, ealled 'The prince of the proverbs of pure poverty'. The remarkable thing about Waiting for Godot is the way in whieh these sad ideas aequire vitality. Enslavement to Time is treated in the playas the eonsequence of Original Sin; Vladimir and Estragon attribute their poverty to the free1y-chosen Fall: We've lost our rights? We've waived them. (They remain motionleu, arms dangling, heads bowed, sagging at the knees.)

Godot is precise1y the sort of tragedy Beekett spoke of in the Praust book, 'the statement of an expiation ... not the miserable expiation of a eodified breach of a loeal arrangement, organized by the knaves for the fools . . . but of the original and etemal sin'. Godot is 'a something something tale of things done long ago and ill-done'. And Christ did nothing to change the situation; he was mere1y one of the luekier poor, in a warm climate where they , erucified quiek'. 'The best thing', says Estragon, 'would be to kill me like the other'. The dominion of Time and Habit is illustrated by Pozzo's fussy precision in handling his watch, his pipe, bis vaporizer, and the abject Lueky. Lueky, a representative slave, talks nothing but nonsense about 'a personal God ... outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exeeptions'. Pozzo leetures on Time-the lost eolours of morning, the horrors of night to eome-like Swann suddenly apprehensive of the future, breaking away from that optimism which is a mere biological adaptation: 'That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.' His blindness in the second act, when he answers to the names of both eain and Abe1 and is 'all men', is another way of representing the enslavement of human perception. \X'hen he falls nobody ean he1p him up. The little cloud appears, no bigger than a man's hand-but either it means nothing or is too disturbing to be considered. The clochards do not want Godot; they are terrified when he seems to be coming, relieved when he doesn't. Pozzo's last speech tells the truth about Time, and Vladimir sees the point: 'Habit is a great 157

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deadener'. But his understanding fevers him, and is the pre1ude to an ineffective annunciation. Godot's messengers are aIl ineffective, and leave the poor with only Habit to confirm them in the acceptance of their due and natural misery. What has happened to make Codot a major poetic play? The pessimism that was an inteIlectual pose in the Proust book has rotted down into images; the subman in his pure poetry has acquired the colour of myth, the banalities of Habit fall into the rhythm of poetry, the absurdities of habitual behaviour are invested with the machine-like quality of music-haIl routines and get the Bergsonian laugh. Our only contact with truth is by means of the ineffectual angels, Godot's boys; and this leaves us free to feel the poetry of falling, of inertia, of the malefic vision, as when Pozzo speaks of this bitch of an earth or Mrs. Rooney in All that Fall exclaims 'Christ, what aplanetl' Men aspire to absolute infirmity,lame, blind, crawling on the face of the earth. 'I cannot be said to be weil,' says Mr. Rooney, 'but I am no worse. Indeed, I am better than I was. The 1055 of my sight was a great fillip.' Before the messenger teIls them of the cosmic disaster that made the local train run late, the Rooneys join in wild laughter at the Wayside Pulpit text: 'The Lord upholdeth aIl that fall and raiseth up all that be bowed down'. Beckett's decaying figures, lying on the ground, sitting in dustbins, groaning along the road to nowhere, inhabit a world in wbich there has certainly been a Fall, but just as certainly no Redemption. This pessimism was part of the transition programme, but it is now given a visio:1ary quality: I listen and the voice is of a world coIlapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by, yes, and frozen too. And I hear it murmur that all wilts and yields, as if loaded down.... For what possible end to these wastes where true light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night. So the subman MoIloy. His crippled odyssey begins with his observing, in a directionless wildemess, the encounter of two men, A. and victim and murderer, the double type ofBeckett's fallen man. With bis bicycle, delusive support of lameness, emblem 15 8

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of falsely directed movement, he seeks his daft mother, the sole source of sustenance. Later, rejecting a form of protection that denied his humanity, he goes on alone, walking on crutches, crawling, rolling towards his probably dead mother's door, enduring , a passion without form or stations', unable to enumerate his ills, quite unable to teilleft from right. Is Molloy the ultimate subman, the modem God? 'What is needed for the definition of man is an inexhaustible faculty of negation .•. as though he were no better than God.' No; Molloy is not the end. He even makes a positive recommendation: the wise response to life is ataraxy. We got where we are by 'preferring the fall to the trouble of having ... to stand fast', and now wisdom is to stay lying down. Yet Moiloy's life of falling, shambling, confusing, accepting, illustrates the true nature of all human life, especially as, totally outcast, he has on occasion the power of vision, is freed from the blinkers ofhabit. Thus he describes the act of sex quite empirically (this is horribly funny) and is capable of intense mathematical activity. But the moral is this: to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the ineurious seeker. Then there may be a message: 'Don't fret, Molloy, we're coming.' 'Weil, I suppose you have to tryeverything onee, suecour included, to get a complete picture of the resourees of their planet. I lapsed down to the bottom of the ditch.' Molloy is, like everybody else, a murderer. His last image is again of the encounter between A. and c., Abel and Cain. 'One had a club.' The message came to nothing. The moderately cheerful ataraxy of Molloy in this, the most lucid part of the trilogy, is supplemented by the story of Moran, time-bound and self-serving, whose job it is to find Molloy. His life has the eruel order of habit: he bullies his servant, torments his son, goes prudentially to Mass, masturbates systematically, and is proud of his garden. The mad barren precision of his life is one of Beckett's best things, and so is its eollapse. Moran loses his son and his purpose; he lies on the ground, in love with paralysis, and acts only in order to kill a man. The messenger who comes to him is unintelligible, and seems to say that aceording to the Boss, a thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Could he have meant 159

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human life? Moran, less wise than Molloy, crawls homeward and speculates theologieally. One problem, what was God doing before the creation? is the classk forbidden inquiry, answered by Augustine with patristic humour: devising hell for people who ask such questions. We must endure sedendo et quiesciendo. Moran's garden is decayed; he falls into the poverty brought on us in the first place by wieked curiosity. Molloy is a powerful book, rieh in imagery and theological wit. Yet it is an example of the harm that could come to artists devoted to what is nowadays often cal1ed 'imitative form', to rendering the delinquency of modern humanity by a deliquescence of form and language. The same may be said more forcibly of Malone Dies, the second novel of the trilogy. Its ful1ness of intellect and its poetry are occasionally Joycean, and there is a wonderful development of Molloy's words on love-making (Malone's own sexual activity is even more bizarre than Molloy's): 'Ah, how stupid I am, I see what it is, they must be loving each other, that must be how it is done.' Malone or MacMann (son of man) is bedridden and hazily situated in the world. He lives in mortal tedium. The wisest animal in the book is a learned parrot whose attempt to speak the old tag nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu always fails after the first three words, and so strikes a blow for pessimistie Bergsonism. But Malone Dies reminds us that the nearer a book becomes to directionlessness, to absolute quiescence, the more trying it is to read, especially when it has no paragraphs. And the last novel, The Unnamable, gets even nearer to the motionless and senseless subman-god, inhabiting the darkness like a Demogorgon of impotence. He represents the hopelessness of fallen man distilled to such purity that no actual man could ever achieve it, and all are happy compared with rum; so that, paradoxically, 'I alone am man and all the rest divine '. He speaks the dirty logos and suffers all: 'All these Murphys, Mollys, and Malones. . . . They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing compared to mine' (no sorrow like unto his sorrow). He is Existence, a 'big talking ball', life without the other God; the desperate earth, for wruch God does nothing except to send inaudible or unintelligible messages. Even Mahood (son of God?) has died uselessly. The paragraph of 130 pages ends: 'I can't go on. 1'11 go on.' Trus is the only God we are entitled to, our own true image. 160

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One mayas weIl allow these books to succeed in their determined attempt to defeat comment. They are almost entirely unsuccessful; we ought to be frank about this, because litetary people are usually too willing to take the will for the deed. In Beckett's plays the theatrical demand for communicable rhythms and relatively crude satisfactions has had a beneficent effect. But in the novels he yields progressively to the magnetic pull of the primitive, to the desire to achieve, by various forms of decadence and deformation, some Work that eludes the intellect, avoids the spread nets of habitual meaning. Beckett is often allegorical, but he is allegorical in carefully fitful patches, providing illusive toeholds to any reader scrambling for sense. The formal effect is almost exactly described by Winters in his comment on Joyce: 'The procedure leads to indiscriminateness at every turn .... He is like Whitman trying to express a loose America by writing loose poetry. This fallacy, the fallacy of expressive, or imitative form, recurs constantly in modern literature.' There is indeed ample reason to think that Beckett's atavistic assumptions are still widely held, and we have recently been finding out just how unsympathetic they are to people who do not go in for ' mythical thinking' because they possess a scientific world-view. And that of course brings us to C. P. Snow, and the new novel in the Lewis Eliot sequence. Apart from thcir both admiring Proust, thcre are no resemblances, only interesting differences, bctween Beckett and Snow. Each stands for a lot of what the other deplores. Snow, for all his gifts of pathos, is, like most scientists, a meliorist at least, and when he speaks of the ' resonance between what Lewis Eliot sees and what he feels' he is not thinking of the inner Eliot as a subman. What Eliot sees is limited by the mode of feeling allowed him by Snow, and this is free of atavism but determinedly old-fashioned. I shall have to let the virtues of this book go without saying, though they are considerable, deriving partly from the author's power of narrative, partly from his honesty about the milieux he knows, and partly from an authentic compassion. What I want to do is sketch some of the ways in which such a writer is a-typical, not what we now expect of artists, whereas Beckett is exactly typical. Scientists are as a rule much more confident than 'we' are about judgments of character and ability; they have an established optimism about human achievement and a ruthlessness about 161

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failure which makes them confident of identifying either. Y ou can tell when a sdentist is successful; the rungs are clearly marked F.R.s., etc. This is a calculus they trust. One thing it cannot possibly measure, however, is what Lawrence called 'the last naked him'-the essential naive core of innocence which he thought to be apossession of the 'human individual' but not of 'the social being'. It seems to me that when the human being becomes too much divided between his subjective and objective consdousness, at last something splits and he becomes a sodal being . . • a divided thing hinged together but not strictly individual. Lawrence was talking about the Forsytes, but hete, and in his strictures on Galsworthy's treatment of sex, he might be talking of Eliot and his friends. Snow, for all the sophisticated recording ofhigh academic subterfuge in the face of Justice, for all the skill that makes his wronged scientist odious and the slightlyabsurd Bursar mo rally ambiguous, is never much interested in, probably doubts the existence of, 'the last naked him', an expression you could apply to the heroes ofLawrence and Beckett alike. Character is registered with physiognomic simplicity: 'a reckless face ... undemeath full lids, her eyes were narrow, treacle-brown, disrespectful, and amused'. Or, on the same page, 'He was a secretive man: people, even those nearest him, thought him cautious, calcu1ating, capable of being ruthless.' As to ability, we see how this is judged in college: 'Brown's reputation had kept steady since my time, Crawford's had climbed a bit, Nightingale's bad rocketed. ' These are sodal men: we are concemed with 'the shifts, the calculations, the selfseekingness of men making their way'. Wornen are mostly spectators here, but are often assessed by a different measure, their sexual activity, or what can be inferred of it. I notice that when somebody does something unexpected, out of character, like the smart barrister at the end, Eliot is always more surprised than I am. All the same, it has to be admitted that this is how, from day to day, we do go about judging and estimating people; we aren't much concerned with their nuclear innocence, nor yet with their basic povelty. On the whole we find life disappointing rather than desperate; and so, in a sense, Snow, who asks us to throw ourselves into no special posture to read him, is more concerned than 162

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Beckett with what daily concerns uso It is only by an effort of will that we can cease to be interested in what interests him. Sub specie temporis his Combination Rooms say more to us than Beckett's wet and windy plains, his grovelling exiles. (Let's leave Eternity out of it.) And he's also, it must be said, a great deal easier and more pleasant to read. 1960.

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XVIII MR. WAU G H' seI TI ES

IS probably safe to assume that most readers of Brideshead Revisited1 know and care as much ab out Papist history and

h

theology as Charles Ryder did before he became intimate with the Flytes; and although the nove1 contains a fair amount of surprisingly overt instruction we are much more like1y to allow our reading of it to be corrupted by ignorance than by an excessive1y curious attention to matters of doctrine. In fact this is true of Mt. Waugh's fiction as a whole; and one of the rewards of curiosity is a dearer notion of the differences, as weil as of the similarities, between his most successful books. At the end of Decline and Fall (1928), Paul Pennyfeather, back at Scone after his sufferings on Egdon Heath, notes with approval the condemnation of a second-century Bithynian bishop who had denied the divinity of Christ and the validity of the sacrament of Extreme Unction; a singularly dangerous heretic. A few moments later, however, he turns his attention to an apparently more innocent sect: 'the ascetic Ebionites used to turn towards Jerusalem when they prayed.... Quite right to suppress them.' They too tended, for ail the apparent harmlessness oE their idiosyncrasy, to pervert fact with fantasy and truth with opinion. More than twenty years later Mr. Waugh's He1ena ridicules theological fantasies conceming the composition of the Cross (that it was compounded of every species of wood so that the vegetable world could participate in the the act of redemption; that it had one 1 This edition is revised and has aPreface by the author. Some of the revisions are mentioned in this article. The text is re-set. There is a sutprising number of misprints, and some of them are bad ones, for example, p. 241, where 'I'm not sure', should presumably read as formerly, 'I'm sure not'.

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arm of boxwood, one of cypress, one of cedar and one of pine with the consequent amalgam of emblematic properties). She is also offended by the untruths and mythopoeic absurdities of her son Constantine. The Cross she seeks and finds consists merely of large pieces of wood. The Wandering Jew lets her have it free, foreseeing future business in relics. '1t's a stiffprice', says Helena. She wanted none of that fantastic piety, only the real routine baulks of timber used on a matter-of-fact historical occasion. 'Above the babble of her age and ours', comments the author, 'she makes one blunt assertion. And there alone lies our Hope.' These passages iIlustrate what is static in Mr. Waugh's expression of his religion. Religion as a man-made answer to pressing human needs disgusts him; Constantine's nonsense is of no more value than Brenda Last's, cutting the cards to see who shall go first to the woman who teIls fortunes by re~ding one's feet. The Church is concemed to preserve the truth, solid and palpable as a lump ofwood, from the rot of fantasy. 1t is entirely concemed with fact. Hence it was quite right to suppress the fanciful Ebionites with the same severity as the intolerable bishop; and the sentimental myth-making of Helena's scholars is dangerous because it tends to soften hard fact. A number of such facts are at present ignored in our society, which has apostasized to paganism. Yet they are facts. Given the necessary instruction, the necessary intellect, and the necessary grace, a man will be a Catholic. Mr. Waugh, paraphrasing Campion's Brag in his Lift (1935) of the martyr does not even specify the third of these necessities: 'he ... makes the claim, which lies at the root of all Catholic apologetics, that the Faith is absolutely satisfactory to the mind, enlisting all knowledge and all reason in its cause; that it is completely compelling to any who give it an "indifferent and quiet audience"'. And the author has hirnself written that he was admitted into the Church 'on firm intellectual conviction but with little emotion'. As Mr. F. J. Stopp comments, in his admirable EveIYn Waugh, it is also apparent that this 'firm intellectual conviction' relates 'not primarily to the vanquishing ot philosophical doubts about the existence of God, or considerations of the nature of authority', but rather to ' a realization of the undeniable historical presence and continuity of the Church'. QlIOd semper, quod ubique . ... The English Reformation was not only an attempt to break this historical continuity, but a very 16 5

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insular movement. The Counter-Refo-rmation, on the other hand, was an affair of genuine vitality and spirituality, universal in its scope; England was impoverished by its failure to partidpate. The consistency of Mr. Waugh's opinions is indicated by his admiration for Baroque art, the plastic expression ofTridentine Catholidsm and a great European movement that left England almost untouched. His version of English history at large is simply but faidy stated in this way: after being Catholic for nine hundred years, many English families, whether from intellectual confusion or false prudence, apostasized in the sixteenth century to schismatic inStitutiOl1S which were good only in so far as they retained elements of the true worship. The consequence has been modem paganism (at a guess, Mr. Waugh thinks of this as an atavism in degenerating stock); the inevitable end is a -restoration of the faith, but the interim is ugly and tragic except in so far as it is redeemed by the suffering of the martyrs and the patience of the faithful. C' Have you ever thought', asks Helena, 'how awfully few martyrs there were, compared with how many there ought to have been? ') This conservatism is of course reflected in the author's sodal opinions; the upper classes are good in so far as they hold on to the values and the properties cherished by their families. Aristocracy, like the Church, fights a defensive action, and that which it defends is, in the long run, a Catholic strucrure. Very intelligent upper-dass Englishmen are not common in Waugh, and when they occur (Basil Seal is the notable case) they are not intellectuals. Their brains have nothing solid to work on; not being Catholics they are not in a position to pursue the truth with any seriousness. Yet if they preserve their families and their customs they do as much as they can to maintain the link with those 'ancestors-all the andent priests, bishops, and kings-all that was once the glory of England, the island of saints, and the most devoted child of the See ofPeter'. The words are Campion's. This is the 'historical intransigence' that Ryder (in the first edition of Brideshead Revisited) leamt to admire. 1t is like Guyon smashing up the Bower of Bliss; a great deal that might, to a less ruthless mind seem admirable, if mistaken, is pulled down without a regretful glance. The age of Hooker (and Shakespeare) becomes merely a good time for prospective martyrs to live in. The piety and intellect of Andrewes, the learning of Casaubon, were all

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wasted in a cause self-evidently indefensible. The torment of Donne's conscience (a man who knew the ways of Topcliffe and the temptation of martyrdom) was an unnecessary perplexity; his dealings with Sarpi were treasonable, and all those high eirenic hopes futile. There is no need to pray, 'Show me thy spouse', for any unblinkered eye can see her. How did these great men allow themselves to be reduced to pettifogging heretics? They should have seen that it was unlikely that ' the truth, hidden from the world for fifteen centuries, had suddenly been revealed . . . to a group of important Englishmen'. They should have seen that, on the Romanist side, any apparent deviousness or error was tributary to the workings of the divine purpose. Thus it may be agreed by historians of all parties that the Bull excommunicating Elizabeth was palpably unwise: but had he [Pius V] perhaps, in those withdrawn, exalted hours before his crucifix, learned something that was hidden from the statesmen of his time and the succeeding generations of historians ; seen through and beyond the present and immediate future; understood that there was to be no easy way of reconciliation, but that it was only through blood and hatred and derision that the Faith was one day to return to England? 1t may not be amiss to say parenthetically that I wüte without the least intention to be controversial; the point is merely to establish in a sketchy way how much Mr. Waugh's historical intransigence excludes from consideration, with a view to showing how sharp that weapon is, not that it is wrong to use it. If you consider that the English Reformation opened up the way not only to paganism but to Hooper and to the salesman with the wet handshake, dentures and polygonal spectacles, you will not be disposed to dwell on the intellect of Hooker or the spirituality of Herbert. 1t is not unusual for people to believe in a kind of second Fall, a great historical disaster that began our era; for Mr. T. S. Eliot it is the Civil War. Few, however, even among Roman Catholics who might share Mr. Waugh's admiration for Tridentine as well as for mediaeval piety, have ever applied the docttine with such harsh consistency. The apostate aristocracy, adulterated by politic Tudors and later by other secular forces, moved slowly to disaster, checked only by a respect for ancient Barbarian traditions and by a hatred of middle-class Protestants. 167

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The second war was to be the apocalypse; meanwhile the behaviour of the lapsed could cause dispassionate amusement. But when the war comes it awakes certain recessive characteristics, and even Basil Seal, in Put Out More Flags, hears the feudal call to arms and, after his amusing betrayal of the outsider Silk and his exploitation of the evacuees, renounces his intention to be one of the hardfaced men who did weIl out of the war; with the rest of his kind he mans the crumbling ramparts; and in spite of the nuisance caused by a thousand Hoopers, the defence does not fail. One gets the full statement of this position in the story of Alastair DigbyVane-Trumpington, whose past achievements indude the betrayal of Paul Pennyfeather; he leaves his Soma and his black velvet not to take a commission but to join the ranks. The socially acceptable reason for this is that he can't bear to meet the temporary officers, but the astute Soma knows a deeper one: Alastair 'went into the ranks as a kind of penance or whatever it's called that religious people do'. He was paying for all that irtesponsible fun, getting back into line; soon he finds people of his own sort to be an officer with, and the penance ends.

Put Out More Flags had a new soumess; opinion crept into Mt. Waugh's fiction. Comment and diagnosis had formerly been teserved to minor, stylized characters like Father Rothschild who, in Vile Bodies, explained the wantonness of the bright young: 'they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence'for those traditions of civility that perish without the Faith. Fr. Rothschild disappears on his bicyde; but Mr. Waugh's opinions do not go with him. A few years later there was the famous eulogy of Mussolini's Abyssinian experiment, not quite imperium sine fine, not quite debellare superbos. The extension of the frontier is not, however, the main responsibility of the faithful in our time; it is defence. And with Alastair and Basil the English gentleman tumed naturally to his traditional task of defending the island of Saints and so the Church, not only the faith itself but the whole civilization in which it is incamate. This, then, is what must be defended: the arts and institutions of rational humanity and the dear reasonableness of the faith. Mr. Waugh is much concemed with the darity and openness of Catholic worship as an expression of this. Here, from When the Going was Good, is a passage from an account of his attendance at 168

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a Mass of the Ethiopian Church, 'secret and confused in character': I had sometimes thought it an odd thing that Western Christianity, alone of all the religions of the world, exposes its mysteries to every ob server, but I was so accustomed to this openness that I had never before questioned whether it was an essential and natural feature of the Christian system. Indeed, so saturated are we in this spirit that many people regard the growth of the Church as a process of elaboration--even of obfuscation.... At Debra Labanos I suddenly saw the classic basilica and open altar as a great positive achievement, a triumph of light over darkness consciously accomplished.... I saw the Church of the first century as a dark and hidden thinge ... The pure nucleus of the truth lay in the minds of the people, encumbered with superstitions, gross survivals of the paganism in which they had been brought up; hazy and obscene nonsense seeping through from the other esoteric cults of the Near East, magical infections from the conquered barbarian. And I began to see how these obscure sanctuaries had grown, with the clarity of Western reason, into the great open altars of Catholic Europe, where Mass is said in a flood of light, high in the sight of alle ••• Helena, we saw, was devoted to this openness, clarity, common sense; she is brusque and reasonable, and her spirit survives in Lady Circumference, 'the organ voice of England, the huntingcry of the ancien regime', as she snorts with disapproval at an Ameriean revivalist meeting in Mayfair: 'What a damned impudent woman.' (This was in Vile Bodies; the last page of Helena twenty years later recalls, with a change of tone, the figure used for Lady Circumference: 'Hounds are checked, hunting wild. A horn calls clear through the covert. Helena casts them back on the scent.') The Faith may be driven back to the catacombs, but its agreement with reason must never be obscured. Mr. Waugh perhaps took a hint from Mr. Eliot in characterizing the years between the wars as aperiod during which pagan obscenities seeped in. The Reformation opened the door to Madame Sosostris, to a society in which rieh women cut cards to see who shall go first to have her fortune told by a footreader. The religions of darkness are the pagan intrusions; Catholic Christianity is light, 169

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order, life. The Loved One, Mr. Waugh's most perfeet book (as Silas Marner is more perfect than Middlemarch), sketches a highlydeve10ped religion of darkness, in which art, love, language are totally corrupted and brought under the domination of death, as must happen when the offices of the Church are in every sphere usurped. This is the farcical vision of total collapse, the end of the defence which must be endless, however long Mass is said in secret. He1ena would like the Wall of the Empire to be at the limits of the world, but Constantius knows that there has to be a wall; it represents 'a natural division of the human race'. With the Donation of Constantine C' as for the old Rome, it's yours ') the secular became the holy Empire, the Catholic City that the civilized must defend. Inside the City are traditions of reason, clarity, beauty; outside, obscene nonsense, the uncreating Word. Mr. Waugh is the Augustine who, because he has a vision of this City, detests Pe1agius as a heretic and Apuleius as a sorcerer; anathematizes the humanitarian and the hotgospeller. Yet barbarism has its attractions. The 'atavistic callousness' of Lady Marchmain is oo1y another form of that barbaric vitality which animates the upper classes even in decadence. 'Capital fellows are bounders'-if it were not so there would not be much fun in the early nove1s. Sometimes it seems that not to be corrupted is the shame, as with the dull Wykehamist of Brideshead Revisited; the chic, efficient corruption of Lady Metroland be10ngs inside, the depredations of Mrs. Beaver outside the pale. The moral distinctions are as bewildering as the semantics of U or the social criteria which determine what is Pont Street and what is not. And they are, of course, employed without the least trace of Protestant assertiveness; to make them appear self-evident without mentioning them is one of the triumphant aspects of Mr. Waugh's early technique. One notices that the voices which tormented Mr. Pinfold puzzled him by missing out many of the accusations he would have made had he wished to torment himself. His mind worked much as it habitually did in composing his nove1s; the quality of the fantasies reminds one of Lord Tangent' s death or the Christmas sermon in A HandJul of Dust. The vision of barbarism is a farcical one, and the fantasy has its own vitality; the truth 170

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exists, self-evident, isolated from all this nonsense, and there is no need to arrange a direct confrontation. This co-existence of truth and fantasy is most beautifully sustained in A HandJul oJ Dust, surely Mr. Waugh's best book, and one of the most distinguished novels of the century. The great houses of England become by an easy transition types of the Catholic City, and in this book the threatened City is Hetton; it will not prove to be a continuing city. Non hinc habemus manentem civitatem-the lament resounds in Brideshead. Hetton is not beautiful; it was 'entirely rebuilt in 1864 in the Gothic style and is now devoid of interest', says the guide-book. But Tony Last has the correet Betjemanie feelings for the battlements, the pitchpine minstrels' gallery, the bedrooms named from Malory. He is 'madly feudal', which means he reads the lesson in chureh at Christmas and is thinking of having the fire lit in his pew. The nonsense that goes on in the ehurch troubles nobody. Tony is a niee dull gentleman who knows vaguely that the defence of Hetton is the defenee of everything the past has made valuable. He loses it beeause his wife takes up with a eolourless rootless bore; Hetton and Tony are sacrificed, in the end, to a sterile affair in a London Hat. The death of her son shows how far Brenda Last has departed from sanity and normality. There is a hideous divoree, a meaningless arrangement in the middle of chaos. All this without eomment; ennui, sterility, eruelty represent themselves as farcieally funny. But the attempt of the lawyers to reduee him to the point where he must give up Hetton rouses Tony, and he breaks off the proeeedings. Leaving England he goes in search of another City; but there is no other City, and this one is a fraud, like the Boa Vista of When the Going was Good. Tony was in search of something 'Gothie in eharaeter, all vanes and pinnacles, gargoyles, battlements, groining and tracery, pavilions and terraces, a transfigured Hetton'. He found the deathly Mr. Todd, and a prison whose circular walls are the novels of Dickens. Hetton becomes a silver-fox farm. Throughout this novel the callousness of incident and the eoldness of tone work by suggesting the positive and rational declarations of the Faith. Civility is the silent context of barbarism; truth of fantasy. And Hetton, within the limits of Tony's understanding, is an emblem of the true City. Mr. Pinfold's mind proliferates with infidel irrationality; this is useful, provided the truth ean be seen by its own light. 17 1

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In Bride.rhead Revisited, perhaps, it is not allowed to be so selfevident. The great house as emblem of the City is enormously deve1oped, but opinion-or truth, if you are Catholic-breaks into the text. The tone is less certain than that of A Hand/ul oJ Dust, the prose slower, more explicit, more like that of the Campior. biography than any of the other novels; a slower prose, weighted with semi-colons. Even in the making of the house itself fantasy has a smaller part than it had in Hetton. It has to be seen in the historical perspective I have been sketching; the account of Ryder-'solid, purposeful, observant' no doubt, as an artist should be, but not at the time of observing a Catholichas to be put in order. Brideshead is English Baroque, but its stone came from an earlier castle. The family was apostate until the marriage of the present Marquis, reconciled to the Church on marriage (his wife, he said, 'brought back my family to the faith of their ancestors'). Lady Marchmain's family were old Catholic; 'from Elizabeth's reign till Victoria's they lived sequestered lives among their tenantry and kinsmen, sending their sons to school abroad, often marrying there, inter-marrying, if not, with a score of families like themselves, debarred from all preferment, and learning, in those lost generations, lessons which could still be read in the lives of the last three men of the house'-Lady Marchmain's brothers, killed in 1914-18 'to make a world for Hooper'. The Chape1 at Brideshead is accordingly not in the style of the house but in the art nouveau manner of the period of Lord Marchmain's reconciliation, as if to symbolize the delayed advent of toleration. And their old religion sits just as uneasily upon the house's occupants. Mr. Waugh is always emphatic that his reasonable religion has nothing to do with making or keeping people in the ordinary sense happy. Lady Marchmain herself uneasily bears the sins of her family; Julia (descendant of earlier, somewhat Arlenesque heriones) drifts into marriage with Rex Mottram, a subman with no sense of reality (the scenes in which he dismisses it-when he is under religious instruction with a view to his being received into the Church-are the most amusing in the book because Mr. Waugh is always at his cruel best with people who cannot face reality). And J ulie is forced in the end to a self-lacerating penance. Cordelia's life is, on any naturalist view, squandered in good works. Sebastian, gifted with the power to attract love, attracts 172.

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the love of God and is hounded through alcoholism and pauperism into simple hollness. Only Brideshead, the eider son, lives calmly and unimaginativeIy with the truth; understanding even that Sebastian's career, so wildly outside his own experience, has in the end a purpose. They are all locked into a dass, these characters, and into the religion, which, by the logic of Mt. Waugh's fiction, is in the long run inseparable from that dass. Lord Marchmain makes his Byronic protest but dies in awkward splendour at Brideshead, finally reconciled to the Church. Only in misery, it seems, will the Faith be restored in the great families of England. The death of Lord Marchmain is the c1imax of the process by which Ryder returns to the Faith of his fathers, at the end of which he can see his love for Sebastian and for Julia as types and forerunners of this love of God. He begins in deep ignorance. In the first edition he complained that ' no one had ever suggested to me that these quaint observances expressed a coherent philosophical system and intransigent historical claims'. Now he says, 'They never suggested I should try to pray.... Later ... I have come to accept daims which then ... I never troubled to examine, and to accept the supernatural as the real.' This shift of emphasis is an improvement, since Ryder's intimacy with the Flytes may teach him something of 'the operation of divine grace' but nothing directly about the validity of the Church's historical claims. R yder learns certain associated lessons from the Flytes. It is Sebastian who shows him that the beauty of the City can be known only to the rieh, that architecture and wine, for example, are aspects of it. The scene of Ryder's dinner with Mottram is a parable; the Burgundy is a symbol of civility, 'a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his'; the brandy is a test of a man's truth and authenticity. Devoting his life to such civilities, exempted by an infection of the Flyte charm -as Blanche tells hirn-from the fate of the classless artist, Ryder is already a Catholic in everything but religion. Mr. Waugh has done a little to reinforce this point in his revised text by rewriting the passage describing the reunion of Ryder and his wife in New York. His indifference and distaste are unchanged, but now they make love with chill hygiene; a sham wasteIand 173

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marriage, essentially terminable. But he too must lose everything; he loses Brideshead and Julia. So, in the end, all these lives are broken, the war is on and Brideshead itself a desolation (quomodo sedet sola civitas), defaced by soldiers and housing Rooper. Rowever, in the art nouveau chapel the 'beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design' bums anew. The saving of a soul may call for the ruin of a life; the saving of the City for its desecration. Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played. The desecration of the City as a mysterious means to its restoration was the vision Mr. Waugh attributed to Pius V. Mr. Waugh says he has kept in certain details because 'they were essentially of the mood of writing; also because many readers liked them, though that is not a consideration of first importance'. I think it is possible to like these details but to dislike other, perhaps more radical elements; though this is doubtless even less important, since to name them is to place oneself with the Hoopers. I mean that the characters are sometimes repulsive, and it spoils this book, as it doesn't the earlier work, to disagree with the author on this point. It is, for example, such a surprise to leam that R yder is beautiful and beloved. Again there is Rooper, in whose person we are to see an abstract of the stupidity and vulgarity that beat upon the outer wall. The defenders have made a wrong appreciation; their enemy is more dangerous, much cleverer, than Rooper. As so on as Mr. Waugh disciplines his fantasy to a more explicit statement of the theme that has so long haunted him that theme is played falsely; Rooper marks the degree of distortion. What we have in this book is the fullest statement of this image of the City, powered by that historical intransigence that equates the English aristocratic with the Catholic tradition; and very remarkable it iso But from this book one might get the impression (false, and contrary to Mr. Waugh's own beliefs) that the operation of divine grace is confined to the best people and the enviable poor. Rooper and his brothers may be hard to bear, they may be ignorant of the City, but it seems outrageous to damn them for their manners. One would like no doubt, to keep the Faith, in all 174

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its aspects, uncontaminated; but Hoopers are not Ebion:ites, and the novelist, imitating the action of grace, is not an infallible church to suppress them. For all that one admires in Bridesheadthe City, the treatment of suffering, the useful and delightful Blanche, and Ryder's father-there is this difficulty, that intransigence when it gets into the texture of a novel breeds resistance; one fights rather than becomes absorbed. To suspend disbelief in these circumstances would be an act of sentimentality; a weakness not wholly unrelated to intransigence, and according to some discoverable in the text itself as weIl as in many readers. 1960•

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XIX MR. GREENE'S EGGS AND CROSSES

Oh, is God prodigall? hath he spent his store 0/ plagues on t/S, and on!J no1V, when more Would ease us much, doth he grudge misery, And will not let' s enjoy our curse, to dy? MR. GRAHAM GREENE'S new noveli is so far below one's expectation that the questions arise, was the expectation reasonable, and has thet:e been any pt:evious indication that a failure of this kind was a possibility? So I have been reading the novels since The Power and the Glory (1940) and taking some note of what Mr. Greene's by now numerous commentators have said about them. Bere one jostles uncomfortably with Waterbury, the critic in The End of the Affair, who loses his girl to Bendrix the novelist, which is an allegory and explains what critics (men of limited potency) may expect if they are unpleasant to their betters. Bence their refined envy; it is very noticeable that the best criticism of Mr. Greene is hostile. Be himself seems to find it all distasteful, whether it is the adulatory sort that discovers 'buried significance ... of which I was unaware' or the nasty sort that finds 'faults I was tired of facing'. But critics write for people, not for novelists; a poet commenting on another's work is far more likely to say a line won't do than that it suggests a corruption of consciousness which ought to be purged; the novelist does not need to be told that his technical shortcomings have large moral implications. If Mr. Greene, as I think, was always, on the evidence of his earlier work, likely to write a big serious novel 1

A Burnl-oul Co!e. 102.

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that would die at birth, he knew better than anybody that it was so; this, however, does not excuse Waterbury from doing his bit. A Burnt-out Case seems to be this novel. Querry, a famous Catholic architect, takes flight from his old life and stops only when he can go no farther, having reached tbe heart of darkness, aleproserie deep in the Congo. His spiritual condition, as he and the devoted but rationalist doctor Colin see it, is parallel to the physical state of aleper in whom the disease, treated too late, has had to run its course; though technically cured he is mutilated, a burnt-out case. Querry is given such a patient as his servant; and when this man runs off into the bush, in search of some lost paradise, Querry follows him and saves his life, watching with him all night. This act, and some modest building operations undertaken for the priests who run the settlement, seem to be working for the restoration of Querry's humanity. But the diagnosis of Querry and Colin is not accepted by some other characters, notably Fr. Thomas, an unstable priest, Rycker, a detestably pious margarine manufacturer,once a seminarist, and Parkinson, a corrupt English journalist. In pressing horne his complaint against Rycker, whose high-minded gossip has proved a serious nuisance, Querry is involved with Rycker's unhappy young wife; instead of seducing her he spends the night telling her the story of his life, got up rather archly as a sort of fairy tale. Rating her husband, she announces that Querry is the father of the child she is carrying, and the consequence of this affair, totally anomalous because Querry has been a selfish and successful lover of women, is that Rycker shoots his rival. Querry dies amused at the irony of this; his power over women was always an index ofhis worldly success, and when he renounced success he renounced women too; but he dies their victim. This fable is constructed with economy and skill. It is a characteristic Greene plot (though less complex than some), for it turns upon a point of comedy, or farce-the husband-wife-Iover situation which occurs in a considerable variety of manifestations in the later Greene, and with special ingenuity in The End of the Affair and The Complaisant Lover. (This time the lover is pitying, impotent, and bores the wife all night.) The timing of the story is very exact; the burnt-out leper is not too obtrusive, the talk with the girl is dramatically well-placed, and the catastrophe is arranged 177

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like an expert final act: an innocent champagne party with the priests celebrating the erection of a roof-tree on Querry's building, the approaching storm, the arrival of the Ryckers, which ends the story by destroying not only Querry's life but his growing reputation for sanctity. The clinical details of leprosy are tactfully disposed though shocking in the right degree (' the sweet smell of sloughed skin ') and the descriptions of ttopieal river and bush have the moody accuracy one has learned to expect. The idiom is often satisfyingly Greeneian-there is an ample provision of those new proverbs of hell: 'it was God's taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night'; 'suffering is something which will always be provided when required'; and there are some of those sad recondite conceits: 'The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of a disappointing life.' Everywhere there is evidence of competent arrangements. It is arranged, for instance, that we should not like the priests, yet be forced to meditate on their view of the meaning of the events described. If the texture of these events is thinner than in, say, The Heart of the Matter, that merely makes dearer the theme of the book; the problem is not to find a way of saying what this is, but rather to account for the discrepancy between it and the story, the failure to give it a body. The theme, to name it accurately but perhaps misleadingly, is Heroie Virtue. This term is used during a conversation between Colin and the dreadful, stubborn Fr. Thomas in the lull before the stormy climax of the book. Fr. Thomas is saying what a good thing it was for them that Querry had dropped in and put up this new building. Colin observes that it was an even better thing for Querry himself, who is now almost cured. Fr. Thomas at once reduces Querry's history to a familiar theologieal term: 'the better the man the worse the aridity.' He has been determined, ever since he found out who Querry was, to understand him in this language and no other. The doctor protests that they have no application to Querry's case; but the priest answers that whereas the doctor is trained to spot the early symptoms of leprosy, the priest is expert in detecting incipient Heroie Virtue. This is one of the best scenes in the book, full of ironies, little time-bombs planted with short fuses among the illusory satisfactions of the evening; and not the least striking of them is the implicit analogy 17 8

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between leprosy and Heroic Virtue. Fr. Thomas does not use the expression loosely; he has in mind the teaching of the Church on this subject, which, if I understand it, is pretty definite. Between the 'political' or 'social' virtues and the 'divine ' or 'exemplary' virtues-between the human and the divine-there are intermediate virtues of two degrees of perfection, the first of which are called purifying (purgatoriae) and the second 'the virtues of the purified soul' (virtutes iam purgati animi). Fr. Thomas presumably supposes Querry's bad time to have corresponded to the first of these states, and his present conduct to the second. The condition of Heroic Virtue is distinguished from that of sanctity, though officially described as 'rare in this life'. Fr. Thomas, in short, is putting Querry pretty high, and in terms of a doctrine which means nothing to Colin or to Querry himself. The situation is characteristic of the author, who is constantly pointing out that human behaviour acquires an entire1y different and often disturbing valuation when you consider it in the light of religious doctrine; and the question here is whether you ought to do so, especially when that doctrine is applied mechanica1ly by vulgar and imperceptive people, inc1uding priests. For this religious interpretation of Querry's life is applied by others, and indeed it is the cause of the crisis of the plot. The practice was started by Rycker with his vulgar lust for holiness; then Fr. Thomas odiously takes it up, with his theory of aridity: 'Perhaps even now you are walking in the footsteps of St. John of the Cross, the noche oscura.' He can't get it into their heads that he is mere1y burnt out. The journalist Parkinson, vlligarized beyond any hope that he might recognize distinetions between truth and falsehood, wants to make of Querry a Sunday-paper Schweitzer, even a saint if that will please Them (his readers). 'I wouldn't be surprised if there were pilgrims at your shrine in twenty years, and that's how history's written. Exegi monumentum. Quote. Virgil.' But divine intervention in human affairs is, as we could have learnt from Mr. Greene, apparently capricious, often taste1ess, and quite capable of working through Rycker or Parkinson. Even Colin has his doubts ab out Querry: 'You're too troubled by your lack of faith .... You keep on fingering it like asore.' And Querry hirnself remembers, 'in moments of superstition " that there are religious explanations for his condition; for instance, he thinks that in choosing art he deliberate1y forfeited 179

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grace, a point Fr. Thomas would confute simply by indicating bis good works. On the whole, however, Querry offers naturalist explanations oo1y, and these, of course, conflict with the others. Tbis is the choice the book offers. Either Querry is right, or God is a plotmaker, working through His inferior priests, through the theological pervert Rycker, through innocence and pity (great enemies of human happiness in Greene); ready to use any degree of absurdity-an incompetent private detective, a preposterous Palais Royal bedroom scene, to get His way. And tbis is oo1y the crisis; before it God has, on this view, been fostering Querry's self-disgust, making bim more and more successful, more and more powerful with women, so as to get bim ready for the last strategem. This is perfect1y a1l right; what goes wrong is the presentation of Querry's alternative explanation. He has recovered from the sickness of faith, and may be getting over the sickness of success. But bis way oflife has hardened all within and petrified the feeling. He has a dream (Mr. John Atkins in bis book reminds us of the extraordinary number of explanatory dreams Mr. Greene's characters have) in wbich he makes this point: 'I can't fee1 at all, I'm aleper.' The one thing he is sure of is that bis state has nothing to do with vitality, nobility, or spiritual depth, yet there is this conspiracy to enforce the theory that it has. His identity is discovered in the first place through a cover-drawing in Time magazine, wbich romanticized bis features and gave bim a soulful, mysterious quality; this is an experience Mr. Greene has had himse1f. And tbis is the really important point. Querry, the famous Catholic arcbitect, is a famous Catholic writer thinly disguised; and if it was ever true-as Mr. Greene's hostile critics insist-that the earlier nove~s are sometimes flawed by the author's inability to stand clear ofbis hero or victim, it is certainly true of tbis book. In one of bis long conversations with Colin, Querry explains that he never built except for bis own pleasure, and perhaps never loved a woman except for the same reason. 'A writer doesn't write for bis readers, does he? ... The subject of a novel is not the plot.' He makes buildings (books) in wbich people can be comfortable, but he is not interested in their use, and hardly minds when they are clogged with cheap ornaments (the irrelevant 180

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personalrubbish areader might bring to a book to make it seem lived-in). The real object of writing (building) is selfish: 'Selfexpression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express. I have no interest in anything.... I don't want to sleep with a woman or design a building.' The difficulty is that Querry's selfexplanation is a mere diagram ; he has chosen a self-consuming artist's life, perfection of the work. Even when he is drawn into the service of suffering he protests that 'Human beings are not my country'. For the doctrine of the priests he substitutes not nature but a myth of decadence; there is even a secular version of Fr. Thomas's smug theory of aridity in his talk of the artist's regress. One is driven towards the position taken up by Miss Elizabeth Sewell in a remarkable essay on Mr. Greene published a few years ago in the Dublin Review: he is a novelist of the Decadence, writing not as a Catholic but as a neo-Romantic. His heroes, all mattdits, know nothing of the happiness and hope that are, after all, part of religion; his world is one in which only Faust can be saved, and the victimized postures of his heroes are ultimately Faustian. I should want to modify Miss Sewell's account of the basic myth, but there seems no doubt that Querry, more than any other of the heroes, is a poseur, and ought not to be if the conflict between religious and secular interpretations of his life is to have a valid basis. This issue becomes very acute in the fairy-tale version of his life which Querry teIls Mme Rycker to put her to sleep. Reviewers have called this embarrassing; yet it is the marrow of the book. It exposes the falsity of Queny's position, not because the stupid priests are necessarily right, but because their view of the matter can be fully and ironically presented but this decadent mythology cannot. He speaks of a man who has not been able to detect the hand of God in human life; who sees virtue rewarded by the death of a child (the crudal test of God in The Heart oJ the Matter) and vidousness punished only invisibly. Instead of being a great artist he became a sort of Faberge, making ingenious jewels and enjoying many women. God refused to allow him to suffer. But although people thought he must be very good to have such rewards from God-as others who got their legs cut off in acddents must be very bad-he found that, unable to suffer, he was unable to love. His jewels were fashionable. and people said 181

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he was not only a master-technician but dealt with serious subjectmatter, because he made eggs with gold crosses on top, 'set with precious stones in honour of the King'. About this time a mistress committed suicide, without his being much disturbed. Then, as popular favour waned, the connoisseurs took him up. 'They began to write books about his art; expecially those who claimed to know and love the King' calling him, for instance, 'the Jeweller of Original Sin.' For 'jeweller' one reads 'architect= Querry = novelist = ?' (Mr. Greene has said before that a novel is always a kind of confession.) At this point the jeweller sees that his work has nothing to do with love, the love of the King for his people; and he wonders, as the whole plot of Mr. Greene's novel does, whether his unbelief and the ugliness of his success are not finally proof of the King's existence. While he has been talking the night away the King has in fact been at work, in the shape of the prying Parkinson, ensuring that this 'success' will amount in the end to the same thing as failure, that so much more desirable fate. Only failures can be good, and God is a specialist in failure. Querry is to have his suffering; 'with suffering we become part of the Christian myth'. He dies not for his own crimes but for those of the Ryckers; as in The Heart oj the Matter this is a case of victimage, like Huysmans refusing morphia for cancer of the throat. The artist's lust for suffering can be called a leading theme of Mr. Greene's. There is a hint of it in the famous autobiographical piece, 'The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard'. Since the acceptance of God entails pain, it is a theme to be found in The End oj the AjJair. It is strongly present in this book, a dominant, but not fully embodied theme; and behind it is something less easy to extract, the persistent notion of God as the enemy, whose disastrous invasion ofhuman life is called by theologians love. Let us look, without making too much of it, at the little emblem of the egg-jewel with the cross on top. On the world of natural generation is stuck, incongruous, the heraldic device of God. Mr. Greene's books are like that. We could get along, better perhaps since He is so interested in pain, without God. Scobie's situation would have been tolerable if the egg had no cross; his wife uses the pledge of God's love to torment him, and out of love he comes to death; even death is worse with God, since one cannot take it 182.

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out of His hands without wounding Him. (To the non-believer like Fowler in The Quict Amcrican death is something one may reasonably desire, like sex, though, virgins all, we may be scared of it as weIl as attracted.) The harshness of Mr. Greene's Christianity is that the unforgivable sins are the most tempting, and that however unreasonable God may be He is also strong, and has somehow convinced us that He is easily hurt. How much easier to be aStoie I Sometimes it seems that the disaster-that ab original calamity-that fell upon us was not the Fall but God (who foresaw without willing it). Ever since His arrival on the scene the good human emotions, and chiefly pity, are dangerous, innocence an evil trap. Querry is only the last of Greene heroes to be caught in it. They belong only to the nursery paradise, not to the wild woods forlorn of the fallen. Scobie has to pray not to be adecent fellow, but to do the will of a master who allows children to die after surviving forty days in a ship's boat, so that he may save his soul; but pity frustrates him. The priest in Thc Power and the Glory is obsessed with the need to protect God from himself. Sin is the shadow thrown by the strong light of God; Mr. Greene is of the devil's party and comes near to knowing it. God's priests are rarely up to much; the natural man has little time for the voluntary eunuch. This only strengthens the case against Hirn; He has made us as we are and expects us, on terrible penalties, to behave otherwise; He would not leave us in the state of the amoeba, yet He denies us adult brains. 'Why did he give us genitals if he wanted us to think clearly?' (' Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity, Created siek, commanded to be sound.') Once the intellect accepts God (Mr. Greene has emphasized that his reception into the Church was a result of intellectual rather than emotional conviction) a terrible incongruity invades human affairs ; confronted with that image human sex: becomes fury and mire. The natural man can scarcely act without alienating Hirn; there is even a feeling that the ugly shapes of the world are caused by thls constraint. Yet if He wants heroes, He has to find them among the dying generations; He must work in the fury and the mire. A Burot-out Case may be read as an account of His doing so, confronted with a naturalist account of the same events. The resultant tension might make a great book; it does not have that effect here, or anywhere else except in The End oj the Affair. The Power and the Glory sometimes comes near to a fuH realization, 18 3

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with its well-placed sermon on pain and fear as 'part of heaven', the paradoxical emphasis on the beauty of sin, especially sexual sin (as in the passage with the pious old maid and the shameless copulators in prison) and the perversely high valuation put upon suffering. The priest's surprised admission that his enemy, the lieutenant, is 'a good man', and the determined irrationalism of his conduct, especially at the crisis, silently stress the obsessive theme, the use God makes of wantonly unsuitable material for humanly detestable ends. And, as nearly always in Mr. Greene, the concept of mortal sin, so incredible on the human view of decency, is continually eroded by reservations of all sorts. But it is true that this endless complaint about God seems less to be shaping the book than tearing it apart, and I think it is on this score that The Power and the Glory has had some damaging criticism, notably from F. N. Lees, who thinks it never becomes 'the study of will and conduct' it seems to aim at being, but sinks into 'self-condemnatory reverie'; instead of an 'evaluating vision of a situation' we get a ventriloquial performance with an interesting dummy. Mr. Lees argues from evidences of strain in the language of the book; Mr. Hoggart, with a very nice understanding of its qualities, comes nevertheless, though from a different direction, to the same conclusion: ewe are in the presence of an unusually controlled allegory.... The characters have a kind of life, but that life is always breathed into them by Greene's breath. In Greene's novels we do not "explore experience" ; we meet Graham Greene.' Though I think both these criticisms are too severe, one sees what brought them into being; Mr. Greene's war against the intolerable God his intellect accepts is an extremely personal matter, and its obsessive presence is felt everywhere, colouring, distorting, taking the place of, more generalized 'experience', suggesting that 'will and conduct' are only defensive tactics in the struggle with omnipotence. It would seem that the way out of this is to objectify the obsession, to embody the God-hatred in the fiction. The Heart of the Matter in a way does this; much of the torment comes from the position that natural knowledge, knowledge of sex, is real, and knowledge of God by comparison notional; if you abuse a woman she will be hurt or angry, but you can insult and debase God without His giving any sign. So a man damns himself out of pity 18 4

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for those who ery out; that, at any rate, is what the rules say, and if there is an eseape clause (' the appalling strangeness of the merey of God') we eannot be sure of its applieation. Seobie is Greene's greatest expert in proverbs of hell, in 'the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness-the sense that that is where we really belong'. He is eursed by an awareness of 'the weakness of God' and by integrity-destroying pity; sufficiently of God's party to know that failure alone is lovable, but eritieal of the divine arrangements. (' Couldn't we have eommitted our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old death-bed?') Consequently, 'as for God, he eould speak to Him only as one speaks to an enemy'. In the end he propagates suffering instead of preventing it by total selfsaerifiee, beeause God will not allow one to arrange the happiness of others as one wishes. As to the 'eternal sentenee' whieh our intelleetual knowledge of God insists to have been Seobie's due, it is pronouneed for an aet of whieh the human signifieanee is trivial, the theft of a little bread. But of course there is Fr. Rank to say we do not understand God, that Scobie's conduct may be divinely construed as love of God. Mr. Lees observes with severity that this remark is misplaced, since we know, as God does, what has gone on in Seobie's mind, and 'if at his death we don't know that he wOllt go to Heaven, we most certainly don't know that he 'lI.IilI.' This is part of acharge that the novelist gives uncritical assent to Scobie's 'shouldering of the world's whole weight', and indeed he is a classic case of tJictimage, with the priest brought in to say that nobody can affirm this 'decadent' position to be erroneous. But I do not see that there is total identification of author and character here; the point of the revelation that Mrs. Seobie knew very weIl what she was doing when she coaxed her erring husband to Mass is that he was wanting in self-knowledge in a matter where you would expeet a policeman not to be; he bungles an ordinary appraisal of human suspicion; and to this extent Mr. Greene is saying that Scobie had a wrong idea ofhimself. But the main issue of the book is not fuUy discussed: it is that Scobie's intolerable position is plotted by God; He demands more love and pity than anybody else and ought not to get them. Even specialists in Him know far more about His demands than about His benefactions; it is His mercy, not His justice, thatis unfamiliar, C appallingly strange'. A good man should not be treated as 18 5

MR. GREENE 's EGGS AND CROSSES

Scobie iso But all thls lurks immediately under the surface of the book's argument; the egg is not allowed to speak out against the Cross. Thls speaking out was delayed until The End oj the Affair, and thls seems almost beyond question Mr. Greene's masterpiece, hls fullest and most completely realized book. Mr. Lees says the opening paragraph is uneasily slack; but in a deliberately tentative way it disposes of a remarkable amount of information. A novelist, a good technician launching what purports to be a straightforward narrative but at the same time foreseeing Conradian complexities, hesitates deliberately over the arbitrary but necessary starting-point; and he wants the essential fact of hls being a writer, and the other essential fact of hls new, odious, belief in God, to get said at once. Bendrix is not a Scobie but the hero Mr. Greene has needed: a natural man who sees thls God as a natural man would, as unscrupulous riyal, corrupter of human happiness, spoiler of the egg; and a novelist who hates Him as a superior technician. Bendrix's book is plotted by God, a testimony to His structural powers. And we get for the first and only time the real Satanic thing, the courage never to submit or yield. All this is germinal in the first page, which contains sentences crucial to the entire ceuvre: 'If hate is not too large a term to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry.' ... 'He surely must have hated hls wife and that other, in whom in those days we were lucky enough not to believe.' Bendrix's fury in the end is that of the trapped: everything from onions to the absurd private detective, the rationalist lectures, Arbuckle Avenue, flying bombs, miracles that can be explained away, is economicallyemployed by the Plotter. And just as Bendrix is a potent enough novelist to take away the critic's girl, God is a good enough one to take away hls, even though she doesn't want to go; He plants in her not only love of hlm but His favourite Augustinian reluctance (' ... but not yet ') to increase the pain. 'Dear God, you know I want Your pain, but I don't want it now.' The unwilling sanctification of Sarah is a difficult theme, and leads the novelist into some expressions that may seem excessive, though hardly ever in the rapt context; and God's perversity and skill are remembered even by Sarah, who takes the deforming strawberry mark as His image, and remembers how unfairly He used Bendrix to His own ends. It is a mark of the difference of thls 186

MR. GREENE'S EGGS AND CROSSES

book that the last words are shared between the frigid priest and Bendrix, and Bendrix is very explicit: 'I know Your cunning. It's Y ou who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap.' He can no longer refuse to believe in the disastrous existence of God; but he can still separate the idea from love. But God may not have finished with him. This is another love-triangle, but even the hate necessarily generated may be converted by Hirn into an inhuman love. The book ends with Bendrix praying for the peace of the natural man, burnt out. It is the only nove1 to offer a fuH statement of the case for the fornicating human victim, for the energy as weIl as the sadness of hell, and the case against the God who inflicts, as with love, that pain from which the pleasure-Ioving flesh continually shrinks. Mr. Lees calls Bendrix an evil man, and the book gives him some right to do so; but this reminds one again of the genuine proverb of hell, that hell is energy; and the difference between the vicious energy of Bendrix and the rigidly self-conscious despair of Querry is a fair measure of the difference in quality between the two books. Querry is too cleady a surrogate; the argument about Heroic Virtue is also a substitute, too partial, too technical perhaps, to bear the weight of the real theme: natural happiness, defeated not by success or surfeit, but by God and His love. 196 1.

102.

xx FIT AUDIENCE (J. D. SALINGER)

WHAT meaning, if any, can one attach to the expression 'a key book of the present decade'? It is used as a blurb in a new reprint of Mr. J. D. Salinger's famous novel,l which was first published in 1951. Whoever remembers the book will suppose that this is a serious claim, implying perhaps that The Catcher, as wen as being extremely successEul, is a work oE art existing in some more or less proEound relationship with the 'spirit oE the age'. It is, anyway, quite different from saying that No Orchids for Miss Bland/sh is a key book. On the other hand, there is an equally clear distinction between this book and such key novels as U(ysses or A Passage to India. For it is elementary that, although these books have been read by very large numbers oE people, one may reasonably distinguish between a smaller, 'true' audience and bigger audiences which read them quite differently, and were formerly a fortuitous addition to the 'highbrow' public. But although Salinger is certainly a 'highbrow' novelist, it would be unreal to speak of his audience, large though it is, as divided in this way. What we now have is a new reader who is not only common but pretty sharp. This new reader is also a pampered consumer, so thut the goods supplied him rapidly grow obsolete; which may explain why I found Thc Catcher somewhat less enchanting on a second reading. It is, of course, a book of extraordinary accomplishment; I don't know how one reviewer came to call it 'untidy'. Nothing 1

Thc Catcher in the Rye.

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FIT AUDIENCE

inept, nothing that does not look good and work weil as long as it is needed, will satisfy this new public. Structural virtuosity is now taken for granted, particularly in American novels. This one is designed for readers who can see a wood, and paths in a wood, as weil as sturdy, primitive trees-a large, roughly calculable audience: fit audience though many. At the level of its untidy story, the book is about an adolescent crisis. A boy runs away from his expensive school because he is an academic failure and finds intolerable the company of so many phoneys. He passes a lost weekend in New York, mostly in phoney hotels, night clubs and theatres, avoids going to bed with a prostitute and is beaten up by her ponce, meets some phoney friends, talks to taxi-drivers, wonders endearingly where the ducks from Central Park Lake go in winter, secretly visits his kid sister, indulges various fantasies of much charm and finally falls ill with exhaustion. He tells his story in a naive sophisticated dialect, partly in the Homeric Runyon tradition, partly something more modern. Repetitive, indecent, often very funny, it is wonderfully sustained by the author, who achieves all those ancient effects to be got from a hero who is in some ways inferior, and in others superior, to the reader. (His wisdom is natural, ours artificial.) The effect is comfortably compassionate; the boy, ungifted and isolated as he thinks himself to be, is getting his last pre-adult look at the adult world, our world, into which he is being irresistibly projected. He can't stand the adolescent world either; clean, good children turn into pimply shavers with dirty minds. For sex is what alters the goodness of children. Of the girls Holden Caulfield knows, one is niee and lovable-for her he admits no sexual feeling, though her date with a crumby seducer helps to work him up to this erisis; one is a prostitute, operating in a hotel which is a eomie emblem of the perverted adult world; and one is an arty phoney. Growing up is moving out of crumby phoneyness into perverted phoneyness. These phoneys, they come in at the goddam window, using words like 'grand' and 'marvellous " reading and writing stories ab out 'phoney lean-jawed guys named David ... and a lot of phoney girls named Marcia that are always lighting all the goddam Davids' pipes for them'. Successful people, even the Lunts, turn into phoneys because of all the phoneys who adore them. Holden, near enough to Nature to spot this, is himself knowingly infected by the false attitudes 18 9

FIT AUDIENCE

of the movies, the gteatest single SOU1'ce of phoneyness. Only childten ate ftee of it, especially dead childten. This much you get from listening to the boy, and it sounds untidy. What Mt. Salinger acids is design. Holden is betrayed at the outset by a schoolmaster (phoney-crumby) and at the end by another (phoney-perverted). The only time his parents come into the story, he has to remain motionless in the dark with his sister. The boy's slang is used to suggest patterns he cannot be aware of: whatever pleases him 'kills' him, sends him off to join his dead brother; almost everybody, even the disappointed whore, is 'old so-and-so,' and 'old' suggests the past and stability. More important, the book has its big, focal passages, wonderfully contrived. Holden he4rs a little neglected boy singing, 'If a body catch a body, etc.' This kills him. Then he helps a little girl in Centtal Park to fasten her skates. Next he walks to the Museum of Natural History, which he loved as a child; it seemed 'the only nice, dry cosy place in the world.' Nothing changed there among the stuffed Indians and Eskimos; except you. Y ou changed every time you went in. The thought that his little sister must also feel that whenever she went in depresses him; so he tries to help some kids on a see-saw, but they don't want him around. When he reaches the museum he won't go in. This is a beautiful little parable, and part of my point is that nobody will miss it. Another is the climactic scene when Holden is waiting for his sister to come out of school. Full of rage at the ' - - yous' written on the school walls, he goes into the Egyptian Room of the museum and explains to a couple of scared children why the mummies don't rot. Of course, he likes mummies; though the kids, naturally, don't. But even in there, in the congenial atmosphere of undecaying death, somebody has written ' - - you' on the wall. There is nowhere free from crumbiness and sex. As Phoebe rides the carousel, he retreats into his catcher fantasy, and then into illness. This is only a hint of the complexity of Mr. Salinger's 'highbrow' plotting. There is much more; consider the perfectly 'placed' discussion between the boy and his sister in which he teIls her about the phoneys at school. She complains that he doesn't like anything, and challenges him to mention something he does. Mter a struggle, he speaks of two casually encountered nuns, a boy who threw himself out of a window, and his dead brother. 19°

FI'I' AUDIENCE

He daren't grow up, for fear of turning into a phoney; but behind him Eden is shut for ever. Why, then, with aH this to admire, do I find something phoney in the book itse!f? Not because there is 'faking', as Mr. Forster caHs it. It isn't necessary that 'faking' should lead one direct1y to some prefabricated attitude, and this does happen in The Catcher. The mixed-up kid totters on the brink of a society which is corrupt in a conventional way; its evils are fashionably known to be such, and don't have to be proved, made valid in the book. Similady, the adult view of adolescence, insinuated by skilful faking, is agreeable to a predictable public taste. Again we like to look at the book and see the Libido having a bad time while the Death Wish does weH, as in the museum scenes; but I don't fee! that this situation occurs in the book as it were by natural growth, any more than sub-threshold advertising grows on film. The Catcher has a buHt-in death wish; it is what the consumer needs, just as he might ask that toothpaste taste good and contain a smart prophylactic against pyorrhcea. The predictable consumer-reaction is a double one: how goodl and how clever! The boy's attitudes to religion, authority, art, sex and so on are what smart people would like other people to have, but cannot have themse!ves because of their superior understanding. They hold together in a single thought purity and mess, and fee! good. The author's success springs from his having, with perfeet understanding, supplied their demand for this kind of satisfaction. It is this rapport between author and public, or high-class rabblement, that would have astonished Joyce. Its presence in The Catcher may be roughly established by comparison with Keith Waterhouse's There is a Happy Land, obviously influenced by Salinger. It is in some ways a more genuine book; the growth of a positive evil out of the sordid innocence of a proletarian childhood is worked out in a way that prevents anybody feeling superior about it. But it isn't a 'key' book, because it is not designed for the smart-common reader. These may seem hard sayings, when Tho Catcher has given me so much pleasure. But I speak as a consumer myself, asking why the book, a few years on, seems so much less impressive. The answer seems to be that new needs are readily engendered in us, and readily supplied. Books will not last us any longer than motor-cars. Of the rabblement from which we came, we retain one characteristic, its fickleness. 19 1

FIT AUDIENCE

What pleases us will not keep, of its very nature. Joyce was right not to seek Ws readers in the walks of the bestia trionfante, Forster to stand by hls aristocracy. Mr. Salinger is not like them. Since few men will write for nobody, thls fine artist writes for the sharpcommon reader. 195 8•

102.

XXI MR. WILSON'S PEOPLE

MR. ANGUS WILSON now writes long novels, and bis latestl seems to be bis best. Yet bis world remains a small one. To def1ne bis area of interest by negatives: the people he is concerned ab out are not young, not poor, not happy and not common (this last is an old-fashioned word, but he gives it a new smartness). His young people are nasty and dreary-petty criminals, homosexual prostitutes, espresso layabouts and the betrayed, selfpitying cbildren of ladies and gentlemen, an united by an unreasoning though not baseless contempt for their elders, with their obsolete kinds of guilt and archaie ethical standards. If they are more serious they remain odious, self-deceived and unprincipled, priggishly hating the intellectual and sodal ideals that gave a dowdy interest to the lives of their parents; as Mr. Wilson, with all possible cruelty and yet with compassion, explained in bis superb story' Such Darling Dodos'. All this is in the mind of the widowed Mrs. Eliot as she studies the new world in which she must find a way of living. Y outh trcats her very badly. Her own generation's determination to ignore age barriers was the first blow in a battle to end the long tyranny of respect for elders. That battle was now over, and youth could afford to look down on middle age. In the end, however, she decided that it was aretrograde step. Her generation had treated people as individuals, not bothering about age; these young people were returning to a seclusion as narrow as the 'secret lives' of youth in Victorian clmes. 1

The Middl, Age 0/ Mrs. Eliot (Secker & Warburg).

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MR. WILSON'S PEOPLE

And a whole episode is written into the book to show that this is true. This horrible modern war between old and young provides Mr. Wilson with his nightmare images of family life-the mean, loveless loyalties, the fumbling anxieties of parental tenderness, the distortion of sex, all the myriad middle-class defensive poses, all the peeuliar terrors and queernesses. Beyond the pale the poor pass their weird, morally indifferent lives, sometimes salty, sometimes prim; and the eommon adorn their hideous houses with dreadful furniture, betray their ignoranee of the mandarin dialeet and eall each other by their appalling Christian names. But it is not by their attitudes to the poor and the eommon that we must judge Mr. Wilson's people; they themselves might do it, but their eoneept of snobbery is too subtle for general use. We have other standards provided; for example, the series of ladies, declassed, ageing, disreputable, who have rather gay names like Polly and Dolly and demonstrate the severe terms upon which life may be restored to dying dodos. And we have Mr. Wilson himself. For this author is always there at the eentre of his anxious, thoroughly known world, alert and probing, magnifying the eruelty and qualifying the eompassion, as if every earessing hand eontained a tiny razor, bound in with surgical tape. His people are introspeetive, they speak a self-eritieal dialeet whieh is so ironieal that inverted eommas are always sprouting round their key words; but Mr. Wilson is there to look even more deeply within, to expose their faults of discipline like a spiritual direetor in some modern Port Royal. A man speaks to his mistress on the telephone, and then rejoins his wife: She was in an ostentatiously ealm and effi.cient mood that allowed her to exercise all the tyranny of fussing without being aeeused of it. 'That was Elvira,' said Robin, who used sineerity to his wife as his only protest against her existenee. She is aeeused of it; and if he thinks he ean exploit sineerity, he's wrong. In order to go on doing this and other things, Mr. Wilson esehews any new-fangled 'point-of-view' fietional methods; he must be there, minutely dispensing justiee among his people. Yet it seems that he himself thinks they matter only in so far as they are 'real'. This is eurious; in the earlier novels, and most 194

MR. WILSON'S PEOPLE

damagingly in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, there is an evident dash between fantasy and 'neo-realism', and the academic world of Middleton is surely no more like the 'real' thing than Lucky Jim's. I don't mean that historians do not cherish high disinterested standards or that a betrayal of these could not be used as evidence of a deep moral failure; but only that the whole situation as presented is like nothing on earth. Yet Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is patently an attempt to achieve the sort of accurate panoramic view of a social landscape that one associates with earlier and less fantastic fiction. There is a queer contrast between the characters and the workaday machinery of exposition, with all its cinematic transitions, flashbacks and flatly offered information -for instance, the self-portrait of Middleton in the first chapter: 'An ex-professor ... a sensualist ... an aesthete ... a sixty-yearold failure ... of the most boring kind, a failure with a conscience. His heavy, handsame dark face flushed with disgust..• .' There are obvious ways in which Mr. Wilson resembles George Eliot, and this is one of her kinds of failure; the plot, tao, of this book, with all its conscientious arch::eology, turns out to be not like Middlemarch, with its conscientious medicine, but like Felix Holt, with its conscientious law. The new book, though it does not abandon the idiom of Mr. Wilson's people, is in the matter of plot a new departure, very simple and very effective. It has to da with 'personalloss, man's universal tragic predicament'. First we see Mrs. Eliot, quite rieh and happily married, in her 'amusing', 'intelligent' world; she sits on committees and collects porcelain. Then her husband is killed trying to stop an obscure political assassination; we observe her suffering and her attempts to find, in a peculiarly difficult world, the kind of life that will match her loneliness and comparative poverty. A twin narrative relates her brother's troubles; he loses the friend with whom he worked and lived, and this death is slow and agonizing. In the third book of the novel the narratives merge. Working slowly, accumulating observations in which time will induce a design, Mr. Wilson constantly invites one to judge him by the novelists he himself admires, especially Jane Austen and George Eliot. He shows us his heroine losing her own world and her illusions, suffering in the world of the young, the common, the poor, seeking to understand what killed her husband, remembering the pleasure and the guilt of her 195

MR. WILSON'S PEOPLE

marriage. She cannot live quite alone, and we follow her path from one old friend to another, discovering their inadequacies and her own; steadily she retreats into childhood and aperiod of illusory happiness with her brother David. He runs a not-common nursery garden and is every kind of snob, especially the ethical kind; but they mitigate each other's suffering very successfully until their association declares itself to be mere1y evasive, a regression from actual pain into a false childhood irresponsibility. The details are skilfully corre1ated, and although the subject and the method of the book require audaciously long passages of authorial comment, the language always keeps on the right side of banality. Indeed, Mr. Wilson remains as acute as ever when analysing the motives of his people. Here an unlovable lawyer (Donald) rejoins the widowed heroine and her brother: Her hardness is hysterical, he thought. She needs some gesture of affection to steady her. He found physical contacts difficult, but he took her hand and pressed it. Oh, dear! she thought, if only he would laugh a little to ease the atmosphere. Donald came back with a light grey overcoat, a black hat umbreHa and wash-Ieather gloves. This is fine enough. But there is something finer; in a magnificent page Mr. Wilson both transcends himself and justifies his claim to belong to a great tradition of moralizing novelists. He is describing the last evening together of the brother and sister. They sit reading-they are working on a study of the early novel-and two happy, inattentive answers he makes to apparently innocent remarks convince Meg that her brother is not interested in their book except as an excuse for keeping them together. When the customary hiss of a syphon tells him she is going to bed, he, as usual, reaches out his hand over the back of his chair-for he now touches her as easily as in childhood-and she does not take it. Next morning she comes down to breakfast ready to go away. Later come the explanations-they were reading books they'd enjoyed together as children instead of leading their proper lives, his of self-denial, hers of loneliness in the real world of poverty, politics, bullets. But the sudden richness of that page, in which the accumulated power of the previous 400 is suddenly fuHy employed, sets one searching for noble comparisons. Mrs. Eliot, 19 6

MR. WILSON'S PEOPLE

with whom it was previously possible to feel a little bored, suddenly grows big enough to inhabit successfully all the space Mr. Wilson provides for her, with a completeness like that of Gwendolen Harleth, or better, perhaps, ofDorothea Brooke when she meets her husband on the stairs at the end of the fourth book of Middlemarch. And for the first time one of the not-poor, notcommon people really experiences, and can be seen to experience, a 'universal tragic predicament'. This enactment of Mrs. Eliot's necessary choice entitles us to call The Middle Age of Mr.r. Blio/for all that it may lack the glitter of some of his earlier workMr. Wilson's most distinguished performance. 195 8.

197

XXII WILLIAM GOLDING

THE

critical reception of Mr. Golding's fourth novel, Free Fall

(1959) was on the whole hostile; that of its predecessor (Pincher Martin, 1956) uncomprehending. Not since his first, Lord of the Flies (1954) has he enjoyed general acc1aim; yet the opinion that

he is the most important practising novelist in English has, over this period of five or six years, become almost commonplace. One reason for this apparent paradox is that Golding's books do not (if only because each is extremely original in construction) yield themselves at one reading: Tbc Inbcritors (195 5) and Pinchcr Martin have been better understood with the passing of time, and the same will be true of Free Fall. This suggests that Golding is a difficult writer; and it would not be strange if this were true. We have become accustomed, for intelligible historical reasons, to the idea that significant works of art are necessarily obscure. It is, however, true only in a limited sense. We may note at once that despite the roar of baffied critics Mr. Golding's intentions are always simple. Of Pincher Martin he says 'I fell over backwards in making that novel explicit. I said to myself, "Now here is going to be a novel, it's going to be a blow on behalf of the ordinary universe, which I think on the whole likely to be the right one, and I'm going to write it so vividly and accurately and with such an exact programme that nobody can possibly mistake exactly what I mean,'''l But he goes on to admit that his handling of the story was 'uospecific'; he did not actuall ytell the reader that Martin drowns on page 2; the evidence that he did 50 is oblique, and is completed only by the last sentence of the book. 1 This, and several other remarks attributed to Mr. Golding in this article, are derived from a transcript of a B.B.C. discussion programme.

19 8

WILLIAM GOLDING

Golding is unlike many modern writers in his willingness to state the 'programme' ofhis book (and also in denying the reader much liberty of interpretation); but he does not pretend that what seems to hlm simple must be so explicitly and directly set down that the reader will not have to work. In short, his simplicity is a quality best understood as intellectual economy. His theme takes the simplest available way to fuH embodiment. But embodiment is not explanation; and all that can be guaranteed the reader is that there is no unnecessary difficulty, nothing to make the business of explaining and understanding more difficult than, in the nature of the case, it has to be. The best course for sympathetic critics is to be a shade more explicit, to do what the novelist hlmself perhaps cannot do without injury to the books, which grow according to imaginative laws, and cannot be adjusted to the extravagant needs of readers. If critics have any reason for existence, this is it; to give assurances of value, and to provide somehow-perhaps anyhow-the means by which readers may be put in possession of the valuable book. It is worth notice that Golding is to a marked degree isolated from intel1ectual fashion: 'I think that my novels have very little genesis outside myself. That to a large extent I've cut myself off from contemporary literary life, and gained in one sense by it, though I may have lost in another.' He is more interested in Greek than in modern literature. Thus there are in his books preoccupations one would not expect in a highbrow modern novelist-that Ballantyne was wrong about the behaviour of English boys on a desert island, or H. G. Wells ab out the virtue ofNeanderthalmen, are not opinions many would care to dispute, but few would find in them points of departure for passionate and involved fictions. In the same way Mr. Golding, though he is in some degree an allegorical writer, is entirely free of Kafka's influence, which makes him very unlike Rex Warner, with whom he is sometimes implausibly compared. His technical equipment is as sophisticated as Conrad's; yet like Conrad he begins each new book as if it were his first, as if the germination of the new theme entailed the creation of its own incomparable form. (There are, however, some habitual devices-the sudden shift of viewpoint at the end of the first three novels, for instance). Perhaps the resemblance to Conrad could be developed: an isolated indeed exiled sensibility, a preoccupation with guilt, desperate 199

WILLIAM GOLDING

technical resource. Sometimes this last power re-invests what others have done before, old devices labelled in text-books: stream of consciousness, changing point of view, time-shifts. There was a time according to the author himself, when he wrote novels intended to meet the requirements of the public, as far as he could guess them; but these novels failed, were never even published. Then, with Lord 0/ the Flies, he saw that it was himself he had to satisfy; he planned it in very great detail, and wrote it as if tracing over words already on the page. How, in pleasing his own isolated taste, and doing it in these essentially unmodish and rather private ways, has he COOle to represent to so many the best in modern English writing? Thc answer to this is necessarily involved, though the situation is in itself simple enough. One thinks of Mr. Golding's world: he sees it swinging through its space, its wet or rocky surfaces lifting under the puH of the moon; its inhabitants, locked on to it by gravity, walking upright, containing floating brains, peristaltic entrails, secreting seed at the base of the spine, somehow free and somehow guilty. Golding once called himself 'a propagandist for Neanderthal man'; his way of looking at the world has something of the candour of Lascaux. In The Inheritors NeanderthaI man is superseded by homo sapiens, who has a better brain, and weapons; but it is the innocence of the doomed predecessor that we see enacted, for, until the last pages, we see the activities of the new man, intelligent and so capable of evil, through the bewildered eyes of the old. And Golding, though he admits that we belong with the new man, supposes that we could not recapture that innocence, that natural awe for Oa, the mothergoddess, had not something of it survived in uso I am groping for an answer to the question, how such a writer can strike us as profoundly attuned to contemporary sensibility? It seems to be that in his own way, and short-circuiting a great deal of fashionable and sophisticated mythologizing, Golding gives remarkably fuH expression to a profound modern need, the need for reassurance in terms of the primitive; the longing to know somehow of a possible humanity that lived equably in the wh oie world; the need for myths of total and satisfactory explanation. Our developed consciousness, our accumulated knowledge are marks of guilt; the fragmentary nature of our experience is the theme of our artists. To discover again the undifferentiatedzoo

WILLIAM GOLDING

myth, is to return to Eden or to Neanderthal man-or indeed to the primary germ-cell the splitting of which is the beginning of guilt: that is to find innocence and wisdom. Golding has been called a writer of 'fables'; 'what I would regard as a tremendous compliment to myself', he says, 'would be if someone would substitute the word "myth" for " fable" ... I do feel fable as being an invented thing on the surface whereas myth is something which comes out from the roots of things in the ancient sense of being the key to existence, the whole meaning of life, and experience as a whole'. And he accepts the description, 'myths of total explanation' for his works. The genesis of these myths is naturally obscure. They do not much resemble the myths of Joyce or those of Mr. Eliot or Mr. David Jones; yet they are related to the same Symbolist aspirations towards prelogical primitive images which animate all these authors. The differences are attributable to Mr. Golding's relative isolation from any mainstream of speculation. To put it too simply: he sees a world enormously altered by new knowledge. He understands the strong reaction against this new knowledge which is characteristic of modern art, an art in love with the primitive; also the patterns of human behaviour are now very generally explained by reference to psychic residua or infantile guilt. It is a world you can blame ' science' for if you like, a world in which the myth of progress has failed; but the rival myth of necessary evil and universal guilt has come back without bringing God with it. He looks at this world understanding what it contains, as the painters at Lascaux understood theirs. He thinks of the books of his childhood-CoraIIsland, Wells's Out/im 0/ Historyand observes that they are wrong about the world, because they thought cannibals more wicked than white men and Neanderthal man less worthy than his conqueror. These books have, in his own figure, rotted to compost in his mind; and in that compost the new myth puts down roots. When it grows it explains the ancient situation to which our anxieties recall us: loss of innocence, the guilt and ignominy of consciousness, the need for pardon. Mr. Golding owns that he is a religious man. He believes that some people are saints: in Lord 0/ the Flies Simon is a saint, and this is why, he says, literary people have found Simon incomprehensible; 'but he is comprehensible to the illiterate person . • . The illiterate person believes in saints, and sanctity.' 2.01

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(This is not the first time a modern artist has found his allies among the illiterate-Y eats and Eliot have made similar declarations.) Golding believes in human guilt and the human sense of paradise lost; he also believes in divine mercy. The evidence for holiness lies scattered among the fragments of our world, and those fragments are represented in Golding's, books; they form part of the whole. But this whole is a world of imagination, where everything is related, everything counts and truth is accessible; the world of myth. For Golding's own term is the right one; out of the single small seed grows this instrument' for controlling ... ordering ... giving a shape and significance to the immense paradox of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history'. These are Mr. Eliot's words on Joyce's myth; but they will serve for Golding. Art, says Cassirer, requires a step back into mythical thinking; perhaps this has always been so since mythical thinking became obsolete, but never has the step back been more consciously taken than in our times. And in the contrast between our consciousness of this, and the momentary forgetfulness of our Darwinian grandfathers, Golding found the theme of his first novel. Lord 01 the Flies has 'a pretty big connexion' with Ballantyne. In The Coral !sland Ralph, Jack and Peterkin are cast away on a desert island, where they live active, civilized, and civilizing lives. Practical difficulties are easily surmounted; they light fires with bowstrings and spyglasses, hunt pigs for food, and kill them with much ease and a total absence of guilt-indeed of bloodshed. They are a1l Britons-a term they use to compliment each other -all brave, obedient and honourable. There is much useful information conveyed concerning tropical islands, including fieldworkers' reporting of the conduct of cannibals: but anthropology is something nasty that clears up on the arrival of a missionary, and Jack himself prevents an act of cannibalism by telling the flatnoses not to be such blockheads and presenting them with six newly slaughtered pigs. The parallel between the island and the Earthly Paradise causes a trace of literary sophistication: 'Meat and drink on the same treel My dear boys, we're set up for life; it must be the ancient paradise-hurrah! . . . We afterwards found, however, that these lovely islands were very unlike Parazoz

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dise in many things.' But these' things' are non-Christian natives and, later, pirates; the boys themselves are c1eanly (cold baths recommended) and godly-regenerate, empire-building boys, who know by instinct how to turn paradise into a British protectorate. The Coral Island (1858) could be used as a document in the history of ideas; it belongs inseparably to the period when boys were sent out of Arnoldian schools certified free of Original Sin. Golding takes Ralph, Jack and Peterkin (altering this name to Simon, 'called Peter ') and studies them against an altered moral landscape. He is a schoolmaster, and knows boys weIl enough to make their collapse into savagery plausible, to see them as the cannibals; the authority of the grown-ups is all there is to prevent savagery. If you dropped these boys into an Earthly Paradise 'they would not behave like God-fearing English gentlemen' but 'as like as not ... find savages who were kindly and uncomplicated ... The devil would rise out of the intellectual complieations of the three white men.' Golding leaves the noble savages out of Lord oJ the Flies but this remark is worth quoting because it states the intellectual position in its basic simplidty. It is the civilized who are corrupt, out of phase with natural rhythm. Their guilt is the price of evolutionary success; and our awareness of this fact can be understood by duplicating Ballantyne's situation, borrowing his island, and letting his theme develop in this new and more substantial context. Once more every prospect pleases ; but the vileness proceeds, not from cannibals, but from the boys, though Man is not so much vile as 'heroie and siek'. Unlike Ballantyne's boys, these are dirty and inefficient; they have some notion of order, symbolized by the beautiful conch which heraids formal meetings; but when uncongenial effort is reguired to maintain it, order disappears. The shelters are inadequate, the signal fire goes out at the very moment when Jack first succeeds in killing a pig. Intelligence fades; irrational taboos and blood-rituals make hopeless the task of the practieal but partial intellect of Piggy; his glasses, the firemakers, are smashed and stolen, and in the end he hlmself is broken to pieces as he holds the conch. When dvilized conditioning fadeshow tedious Piggy's appeal to what adults might do or think!the children are capable of neither savage nor dvil gentleness. Always a little nearer to raw humanity than adults, they slip into 2°3

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a condition of animality depraved by mind, into the cruelty of hunters with their devil-liturgies and torture: they make an unnecessary, evil fortress, they steal, they abandon all operations aimed at restoring them to civility. Evil is the natural product of their consciousness. First the smaIlest boys create a beastie, a snake-' as if it wasn't a good island'. Then a beast is created in good earnest, and defined in a wonderful narrative sequence. The emblem of this evil society is the head of a dead pig, fixed, as a sacrifice, on the end of a stick and animated by flies and by the imagination of the vqyant, Simon. Simon is Golding's first 'saint, and a most important figure'. He is 'for the illiterate a proof of the existence of God' because the illiterate (to whom we are tacidy but unmistakably expected to attribute a correct insight here) will say, 'WeIl, a person like this cannot exist without a good God'. For Simon 'voluntarily embraces the beast . . . and tries to get rid of him'. What he understands-and this is wisdom Golding treats with awe-is that evil is 'only us'. He climbs up to where the dead fire is dominated by the beast, a dead airman in a parachute, discovers what this terrible thing really is, and rushes off with the good news to the beach, where the maddened boys at their beastslaying ritual mistake Simon himself for the beast and kill him. As Piggy, the duIl practical intelligence, is reduced to blindness and futility, so Simon, the visionary, is murdered before he can commurucate his comfortable knowledge. FinaIly, the whole Paradise is destroyed under the puzzled eyes of an adult observer. Boys will be boys. The difference of this world from BaIlantyne's simpler construction from similar materials is not merely a matter of incomparability of the two talents at work; our minds have, in general, darker needs and obscurer comforts. It would be absurd to suppose that the change has impoverished us; but it has seemed to divide our world into 'two cultures'-the foIlowers of Jack and the admirers of Simon, those who build fortresses and those who want to name the beast. Lord of the Flies was' worked out carefuIly in every possible way', and its author holds that the 'programme' of the book is its meaning. He rejects Lawrence's doctrine, 'Never trust the artist, trust the tale' and its consequence, 'the proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist'. He is wrong, I think;

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in so far as the book differs from its programme there is, as a matter of common sense, material over which the writer has no absolute authority. This means not only that there are possible readings which he cannot veto, but even that some of his own views on the book may be in a sense wrong. The interpretation of the dead parachutist is an example. This began in the' programme' as straight allegory; Golding says that this dead man 'is' History. , All that we can give our children' in their trouble is this monsttous dead adult, who's 'dead, but won't lie down'; an ugly emblem of war and decay that broods over the paradise and provides the only objective equivalent for the beast the boys imagine. Now this limited allegory (I mayeven have expanded it in the telling) seems to me not to have got out of the 'programme' into the book; what does get in is more valuable because more like myth-capable, that is, of more various interpretation than the rigidity of Golding's scheme allows. And in writing of this kind all depends upon the author's mythopoeic power to transcend the 'programme'. Golding has this poetic power, and nowhere is it more impressively used than in his second book, Thc Inhcritors. Prefixed to Thc Inhcritors is a passage from Wells's Outlinc of Histo,:y, and this serves the same purpose as Ballantyne's novel in the genesis of the earlier book; it sets off an antithetical argument. 'Wells's Outlim played a great part in my life because my father was a rationalist, and the Outlinc was something he took neat. It is the rationalist gospel in cxcelsis. ... By and by it seemed to me not to be large enough ... too neat and too sUck. And when I re-read it as an adult I came across his picture of Neanderthal man, our immediate predecessors, as being these gross, brutal creatures who were possibly the basis of the mythological bad man . . . I thought to myself that this is just absurd . . .' The difference between Golding and the WeHs of the Outlinc is simple; to Wells the success of the high-foreheaded, weapon-bearing, carnivorous homo sapicns was progress, but to Golding it was the defeat of innocence, the sin of Adam in terms of a new kind of history. Golding's real power, the true nature of his mythopoeic obsession, became evident only with the publication of this second book. This root-idea is, as I have suggested, a variant of the Fan, ttansplanted from theology. Golding is fascinated by the

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evidence-in the nature of the case ubiquitous-that human consciousness is a biological asset purchased at aprice; the price is the knowledge of evil. This evil emanates from the human mind, a product of its action upon the environment. The Inheritors is about the accumulation of guilt that necessarily attended the historical success of homo sapiens; the intellectual superiority of Man over his simian victims is precisely measured by the cruelty and guilt which dominate his life and are relatively absent from his predecessor's. The creatures to be exterminated are almost innocent, as near it as we can imagine; they practise no deceit, have an obscure sense of life as a mystery, understand wickedness as killing, but their lives are controlled by the seasons, by inhibiting fears of water, above all by a physiological equipment excellent in its way but prohibiting intellect. They know the world with senses like an animal's; they depend much upon involuntary reflexes-keen scent, night vision, acuteness of ear; they are not men at all, and that is why they are innocent. Only after prolonged observations of the new men can Lok associate sex with cruelty, derange his senses with alcohol, offer violence to a friend, or even think of one thing or process as 'like' another. Not to know evil is, in asense, to know nothing. The new men sail away, successful and guilty, leaving Lok with the doll-goddess which is his only image of the intelligent and creative mind. Clutching this toy, he who had known useful fear is now the prey of useless terror as weH as of his animal enemies; they, the real creators, plan ~ bloody and intelligent future. TechnicaHy The Inheritors attempts a little less than Pincher Martin, but has fewer flaws. The natural setting, of obvious importance, needed to be wonderfully done and iso Above an, the feat of recording observations of the activities of homorapiens made with the sensory equipment of Lok is of astonishing virtuosity. We are constantly reminded of the involuntary powers that sustain him; his ears speak to him even if he will not listen, small areas of skin react with useful knowledge, the nose marvellously distinguishes and identifies. We can always see, too, that the extinction of this animal is necessary, as in the passage where he observes a new man aiming at him with a bow and can no more conceive of what the man is doing than he can impute enmity to so similar a being or explain his tall face-his senses simply report aseries of inexplicable events. In the heart of the 206

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book there is a remarkable passage of some fifty pages in which Lok and the female Fa observe the communal activities of the new people from avantage-point in a tree. This is carried out with a fierce imaginative power that is not in the least inconsistent with a very minute attention to the complicated effect to be communicated. What we have to be shown is that although we are experiencing these events innocently, by way of the passive, vegetarian, inhuman senses of Lok, we belong down below in the clearing, corrupt and intelligent. And at the end we abruptly leave Lok; suddenly, with a loss of sympathy, observe him with our normal sight, joining the new men, our own sort. With these anxious and responsible technicians we saU away, with only a last glimpse of superseded innocence stumbling about on the shore of a dead world. The Inheritors does not, like Lord of the Flies, qualify as a spanking good tale, and with its publication Golding met for the first time that uncomprehending reception with which he is now so familiar. The book was written, presumably at white-heat, in a few weeks. It has not been surpassed. Pincher Martin is, however, a bigger book. It is another imaginative' forcing' of the same seminal idea, but more densely written, with much interweaving of image and reference-more like a poem, in fact, for undoubtedly this kind of novel 'aspires ' to the condition of poetry. It takes more reading than the others; it lacks the adventitious accessibility of Lord of the Flies and is less recognizably a story than The Inheritors. For al1 that, its wisp of narrative is handled with great skill, and after all the fuH import of the book depends upon a most ingenious narrative device. The talent remains clearly that which produced the earlier books, and some of the procedures, particularly those involving the extraction of significance from symbolic objects, are easy to recognize. And there is a continuity of theme. But it is, all the same, a book demanding unremitting attention. Golding has himself provided 'a mental lifeline' to readers who find the book difficult; it appeared in Radio Times and it might be useful to copy part of what he said. Christopher Hadley Martin had no belief in anything but the importance of his own llfe, no God. Because he was created in the image of God he had a freedom of choice which he used to centre the world on himself. He did not believe in purgatory 2 °7

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and therefore when he