All posts tagged carpe diem

Present Laughter: A Light Comedy in Three Acts by Noel Coward (1939)

Executive summary

This is a very entertaining portrait of a successful comedy actor, Garry Essendine, and the comic interplay among his coterie of servants, secretaries and sycophants (‘a tightly knit group like us’, as his wife puts it), plus a succession of outsiders whose arrivals are timed to create the maximum of comic confusion. This is the first Coward comedy that I found genuinely funny.

Background

Noel Coward wrote ‘Present Laughter’ in 1939. The title comes from a song sung by Feste the fool in Shakespeare’s comedy ‘Twelfth Night’. The song is on the age-old subject of taking pleasure while you can, the so-called carpe diem topos which we’ve seen mentioned in several other Coward plays (for example, ‘Design for Living’).

O Mistress mine where are you roaming?
O stay and hear, your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low.
Trip no further pretty sweeting.
Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.

What is love, ’tis not hereafter,
Present mirth, hath present laughter:
What’s to come, is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty:
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

This struck me as the funniest Coward play I’ve read and watched so far. It’s the only one I didn’t want to fast forward to get to the end of. I’ve been watching the highest quality productions available on the internet, in this case the 1981 Donald Sinden production.

Obviously Sinden was a notorious old ham but that means he was perfect to play the part of a notorious old ham, turning every possible moment into a Grand Scene which allows him to declaim and grandstand, the comedy sometimes deriving from the way he is sublimely indifferent to the reactions and feelings of all around him, sometimes from the way he artfully or cynically manipulates those around him.

Watching it also made me realise that although a lot of Coward’s lines are humdrum on the page, if they are delivered with the right emphasis and timing, apparently flat lines can be very funny. This makes me think badly of all the productions of the other plays I’ve watched which, by comparison, throw away or mute or lose the kinds of lines which here, in Sinden’s magniloquent performance, become comic gems.

Anyway, the plot such as it is, is that the comedy actor, Garry Essendine is in a more than usual tizzy because he is on the eve of a tour of Africa.

Built onto the premise of his outrageous self-absorption and the sycophancy of all who surround him, are piled events such as: having to deal with two women who want to seduce him, to placate both his long-suffering secretary and his worldly wise wife, cope with an infatuated young playwright, and overcome his impending mid-life crisis (he has recently turned forty).

Coward freely admitted that the character is a caricature of his real-life persona and he himself starred as Garry in the play’s original run. Because the part is such an obvious star vehicle, it has been performed onstage by a who’s who of British actors, including Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, Donald Sinden, Ian McKellen, Simon Callow and, most recently, the hot priest from Fleabag, Andrew Scott.

It’s obviously based on a lifetime as a professional actor and he had been mulling it over for years, but the actual writing of ‘Present Laughter’ took him just six days. Fans of Coward cite this kind of thing as proof of The Master’s genius but critics might point out that it also explains the sustained thinness of the characters’ interplay and dialogue. Maybe if he’d spent a few days more working on it, the comic effects might be sharper and more effective.

Cast

  • Daphne Stillington – shallow young woman Garry invited to ‘spend the night’ and soon leaves
  • Miss Erikson – Swedish housekeeper with comic attitude and phlegmatic attitude
  • Fred – breezy, whistling servant
  • Monica Reed – Garry’s humorous and businesslike secretary
  • Garry Essendine – ageing, larger-than-life comic actor
  • Liz Essendine – Garry’s former wife, now separated
  • Roland Maule – over-excited young playwright who switches from damning Garry’s lack of interest in politics and ‘commitment’ to revealing a worrying obsession with him
  • Henry Lyppiatt – Garry’s agent
  • Morris Dixon – Garry’s producer
  • Joanna Lyppiatt – Henry’s wife who, it turns out, for seven long years has been secretly in love with Garry
  • Lady Saltburn – ‘a majestic but rather effusive society woman’

Plot

All three acts of the play are set in Garry Essendine’s London flat. He is a successful West End actor who has just turned forty and dominates every scene with his grand gestures and star quality.

Act 1

Daphne Stillington, 24, a young admirer of Garry’s, has inveigled herself into the flat and has spent the night there although, as she emphasises, in the spare room.

Garry is still asleep, and while waiting for him to wake, Daphne encounters in turn three of his employees: the housekeeper (Miss Erikson), valet (Fred) and his secretary (Monica). None of them display any surprise at her presence.

Garry finally wakes and plays the lead in a very funny scene, coping with Daphne’s slavish adulation while all the time looking at his watch and rushing her out. The housekeeper comes in leading to a characteristic joke.

MISS ERIKSON: Fred said I was to go and speak to the young lady.
GARRY: Very well, Miss Erikson.
MISS ERIKSON: What shall I say to her?
GARRY: I really don’t know.
MISS ERIKSON: I have been to the grocer’s and–
GARRY: That’s as good an opening gambit as any.

His secretary presents him with various letters, the phone keeps ringing (as it kept ringing in ‘Design for Living’) and people keep arriving. Piccadilly Circus.

Garry’s ex-wife, Liz Essendine, arrives, which leads to an embarrassing meeting between Daphne, emerging from having a bath and dressing, with her. But Liz is all suave urbanity and offers Daphne the use of her (chauffeur-driven) car.

Once the young woman has left we settle down to enjoy the interplay between Garry’s coterie – his ex-wife, his secretary, his servant, Fred, breezing around, whistling and dispensing coffee.

You know the difference between this and his 1920s comedies? It’s good humoured, it is good-humoured and comic throughout, in fact its high spirited mood highlights the genuine bitterness, anger and abuse which fill ‘Hay Fever’, ‘Private Lives’ and ‘Design for Living’ and make them very mixed amusements.

I’d just written that when there was an extended argument between Garry and Liz. I can’t help thinking irritable bad temper is the central Coward quality.

Anyway, Liz tells Garry that she thinks his manager, Morris Dixon, is having an affair with Joanna, the glamorous wife of his producer, Henry. The point is this intrigue might be picked up by the press and damage Garry’s reputation, so can he find out more and do something about it? Garry is having lunch with Morris, so Liz tells him to phone her and indicate whether the affair is or is not true by using a codeword.

Miss Erikson comes onstage to announce there is a lady at the back door with ‘a tiny baby’. Flummoxed, Garry tells his secretary to go and find out who on earth she is. Liz, too, is intrigued. She stays long enough for the arrival of a young man from Uckfield (!), Roland Maule, an earnest young playwright who’s sent Garry a copy of his play to read. Liz has time to say hello to this young chap and then leave. Comic dialogue with this young man:

GARRY: So you’ve come all the way from Uckfield?
ROLAND: It isn’t very far.
GARRY: Well, it sort of sounds far, doesn’t it?
ROLAND [defensively]: It’s quite near Lewes.
GARRY: Then there’s nothing to worry about, is there?

Monica enters to say the woman with the baby knocked at the wrong door, she was looking for her sister who lives further down the mews. Garry introduces her to Roland. She leaves to get the manuscript of his play. In ‘Design for Living’ Coward included newspaper reviews of one of the characters’ plays, as a way of satirising his critics. As far as I can see this Roland Moule character is a satire on the earnest and politically committed writers who scorn Coward for producing shallow entertainment just for money, instead of making his audiences think!

ROLAND: Every play you appear in is exactly the same, superficial, frivolous and without the slightest intellectual significance. You have a great following and a strong personality, and all you do is prostitute yourself every night of your life. All you do with your talent is to wear dressing-gowns and make witty remarks when you might be really helping people, making them think!

This, as you can imagine, does not delight Garry but it provides Coward with the opportunity to reply with a prolonged broadside, telling the young man that his play is rubbish, a farrago of adolescent pseudo-intellectual poppycock, then tells him to join a repertory theatre, and play numerous parts until he understands how plays work.

To his and our surprise this blunt attack makes Roland announce that he loves Garry. He is obsessed with him. He’s his number one fan. He even offers to come to Africa with him. Garry manages to talk him down and then usher him out, spilling his gratitude at giving him new insight into his life etc.

He’s barely updated Monica (the secretary) before the front doorbell rings and it is Henry his producer and (‘rather dapper and neat’, about 40) and Morris his agent (‘a trifle younger, tall and good-looking and a little grey at the temples).

There’s a gag that on the way in they found a young man sitting on his steps, crying. Garry says it’s a young playwright and he’s just given him his opinion about his play. Henry laughs that he’s glad to see he hasn’t lost his touch.

The big news they’ve arrived with is that the leading lady in the troupe going to Africa, Nora Fenwick, has tripped and broken her leg! Now they’ll have to find a replacement though Garry takes violently against their proposed substitution of the old stager Beryl Willard.

Henry exists, leaving Morris with Garry. Garry asks him whether he’s having an affair with Joanna and explains why it’s important, namely the closeness of their little gang.

GARRY: Here we are, five people closely woven together by affection and work and intimate knowledge of each other. It’s too important a ‘set up’ to risk breaking for any outside emotional reason whatsoever.

Funny how this echoes comparable speeches by Leo and Otto in ‘Design for Living’, the sense of a tiny cohort of extremely close friends against the world. Anyway, Morris assures him he’s not having an affair with Joanna and the act ends with Garry telephoning Liz and using their much made-of code-word to assure her (Liz) everything is all round.

Act 2

Scene 1. Three days later, at midnight

A bit of preliminary business between Garry and his man Fred, who’s dressed up to go to a nightclub where his girlfriend, Doris, sings and does a turn with a skipping rope. When Garry says he knows Fred has been having relations with Doris, Fred says: ‘ Why not? She likes it, I like it and a good time’s ‘ad by all’ – a repetition of the carpe diem argument which echoes through Coward’s works and, more specifically, the idea that traditional conventional morality can simply be ignored if those involved agree and it hurts no-one else (see ‘Private Lives’ and ‘Design for Living’).

Anyway Garry is just preparing to go to bed when the front doorbell rings and it is… Joanna, who, the stage directions tell us: ‘ is an exquisitely gowned woman in the early thirties. She has a great deal of assurance and considerable charm.’

In the kind of echo/symmetry/repetition which Coward delights in, Joanna tells him she’s forgotten her latchkey which was, of course, the excuse Daphne gave for having to stay overnight in Act 1.

The comedy of this scene is that they are both artificial over-actors, triggering one among several gags at Garry’s expense:

JOANNA: I know that voice, Garry, you’ve used it in every play you’ve ever been in.
GARRY: Complete naturalness on the stage is my strong suit.

Garry has a barely concealed hostility towards her. She married Henry five years ago and swears she has done her best to stay outside their precious charmed circle. He sees that she has an ulterior motive – I thought it might be something cunning and complex but it turns out, a bit disappointingly, that she has been in love with him for seven years and just wants to seduce him. So he lets her.

But not before she delivers a little speech which is briefly earnest, and reminiscent of the serious and bitter speeches about emotional pain found in ‘Private Lives’ and ‘Design for Living’. Then it’s back to banter and a memorable exchange about which is better, the Queen’s Hall or the Albert Hall, as they move in for their first Big Kiss.

Scene 2. Garry’s flat, next morning

In a further example of Coward’s love of parallelism, Joanna emerges from the spare room wearing Garry’s pyjamas just as Daphne did in Act 1. She too encounters Miss Erikson, Fred and then Monica, who is horrified at her presence in such compromising circumstances.

Liz arrives, is taken aback by Joanna’s presence and threatens to tell Henry that she has had affairs with Morris and now Garry. Liz, again, paints the picture of a small, tight-knit group she is threatening to disrupt. Their exchange teeters on the real angry bitterness we know to be Coward’s core mode.

The doorbell rings and Liz takes advantage of it to say he knows it’s Morris, and this throws Joanna into a panic, she says she can’t face him and her temporary confusion allows Liz to extract from her a promise that she won’t see Garry again before he goes to Africa, and shoves Joanna back into the spare room where she slept.

The caller isn’t Morris but Roland Maule who says he has an appointment with Garry. Monica takes him into another room to wait for him.

The pace picks up as more people arrive. First Morris who virtually bumps into Garry coming out of his room. When Garry makes a casual reference to a lady in the spare room, Morris demands to know who it is and knocks but it is Liz who emerges, to Morris’s surprise and Garry’s astonishment.

Things become farcical. Morris melodramatically announces that he’s madly in love with Joanna (married to Henry, remember), has promised to keep it a secret, told Joanna how she feels, but she left and he hasn’t seen her for days. We are teetering on the brink of revealing that Joanna has had a fling with Garry when Liz lies that Joanna spent the night with her, well aware that she is saving Garry’s bacon and he will owe her one.

Ripe comedy when Liz calls the phone in the spare room, gets Joanna to answer it, and hands the phone to Morris, having persuaded him Joanna is at her place. He wails down the phone how much he loves her but she slams the phone down.

Garry takes this as an opportunity to complain to everyone how he is pushed from pillar to post and everyone exploits him. In the middle of which Roland Maul emerges from the other spare room, to Garry’s horror.

He’s in the middle of coping with this mad fan when the doorbell rings and Henry comes in. He, too, wants to know where Joanna is, saying she’s disappeared, she hasn’t been home all night. Garry looks panic-stricken but Liz repeats her lie that Joanna spent the night with her. They do the phone trick again, ringing through to the spare room as if it’s Liz’s flat, so that Joanna can answer and reassure Henry.

Henry doesn’t understand when Joanna says she feels like she’s in a French farce but it makes the entire audience realise that she is, and how close Coward is to straight farce, stripped of the supposed elegance and wit his fans insist on.

The doorbell rings yet again and Fred the butler announces Lady Saltburn and Miss Daphne Stillburn i.e. the young lady the play started with. Lady S is polite but Daphne is, of course, very enthusiastic. They remind him that Garry promised to give her an audition, which is what triggered her seduction of a few nights before.

Morris and Henry make their excuses and leave, though irritating Mr Maule insists on remaining. Rather inconsequentially Daphne insists on reciting a poem, ‘We Meet Not as We Parted’ by Shelley, the very same one Garry used to paint his passion and then get rid of her at the start of the play – another example of Coward’s penchant for repetition and echoing.

She’s only just finished when Joanna storms out of the spare room where she’s been stuck for most of this scene. Liz suavely tells her she can borrow her car and Daphne – to big laughs – repeats what Liz told her in that first scene, describing the appearance and name of the chauffeur.

Joanna delivers a biting accusation of Garry and mocks his loyal band of satellites, then storms out. Daphne faints.

In the production I watched his secretary, Monica, rushes to get a glass of water to revive Daphne but as she reaches it past Garry, who’s kneeling beside the fainted young lady, he grabs it and drinks it himself. This isn’t in the original script. If only there were a few more comic touches in the original… but maybe that’s always the point of comic plays, that the script leaves it open for actors and director to come up with comic business…

Act 3

It’s a week later and the act opens with Monica reading out some of his mail, generally from people he has no memory of ever meeting. After this preliminary, Monica asks Garry why he won’t go and see Liz. He says she knows Liz is in a rage, he hasn’t seen her for a week, since the Joanna incident.

As she puts on her hat to depart the dialogue becomes charged with poignancy. We are allowed to see how much he means to her and how much she relies on him. They have a moment when she could kiss him but then it passes. She knows she’d be a fool to join his list of conquests.

Left to himself for a few minutes we realise he is bored and lonely. Mrs Eriksen emerges. She is dressed to go out. Garry rather desperately asks her to stay and have a cigarette, and tell him about her life. There’s some comic banter about a friend of hers who lives in Hammersmith and is a medium. It’s not actually very funny, more sad.

The front doorbell rings and he leaps up, obviously relieved, but then dismayed when Daphne walks in in travelling outfit carrying a suitcase. She announces she’s bought a ticket and is going to accompany him to Africa. She explains that she’s realised the truth: that he is desperately lonely and needs someone to look after him, realising this when she saw that dreadful prostitute come out of the spare room. She is, of course, referring to Joanna and he is appalled.

She is in the middle of explaining that she has True Love for him when the doorbell rings again. Daphne refuses to be bundled into the spare room and so he bundles her into the office instead.

The new caller is Roland. He is worryingly demented. He announces that he too has a ticket for the voyage to Africa. Garry tries to get him to leave, but the doorbell rings a third time and Roland bolts into the spare room and locks the door.

The third caller is Joanna, who has also bought a ticket for the Africa voyage. She explains that she needs him and he needs her and they are fated to be together. Determined to do something about all this Garry phones Liz and delivers the code-word from the first scene, triggering her to pop round.

She is just explaining that she’s written a letter to Henry and Morris telling them everything when the doorbell rings again. It is Liz, come at the bidding of his code-word to save the day.

Confronting Joanna, Liz announces that she too is travelling to Africa. In her urbane way she thinks it will be most amusing for them all to be together, dining at the same table and sharing so many stories.

Moments later the doorbell rings again and Henry and Morris enter. Morris demands to know whether the contents of Joanna’s letter are true and whether Garry has been Joanna’s love. He immediately admits it. But he deflects it by saying that the person who minds the situation the most is Morris, who has also been Joanna’s lover and genuinely loves her.

Shocked, Henry asks them if it’s true. But Garry counter-attacks by telling everyone about Morris’s affair with Elvira Radcliffe for over a year.

He accuses them all of hypocrisy and then delivers the Author’s Message:

GARRY: I believe now and I always have believed that there’s far too much nonsense talked about sex. You, Morris, happen to like taking your paltry attachments seriously. You like suffering and plunging into orgies of jealousy and torturing yourself and everyone else. That’s your way of enjoying yourself. Henry’s technique is a little different, he plumps for the domestic blend. That’s why he got tired of Joanna so quickly. Anyhow, he’s beautifully suited with poor Elvira. She’s been knee-deep in pasture ever since she left Roedean! Joanna’s different again. She devotes a great deal of time to sex but not for any of the intrinsic pleasures of it, merely as a means to an end. She’s a collector. A go-getter and attractive, unscrupulous pirate. I personally am none of these things. To me the whole business is yastly over-rated. I enioy it for what it’s worth and fully intend to go on doing so for as long as anybody’s interested and when the time comes that they’re not I shall be perfectly content to settle down with an apple and a good book!

Relax. It’s only sex. It was to be another half century or more before the great British public accepted this simple philosophy without offence or horror, if it actually yet has.

Joanna angrily slaps Garry’s face and stomps out but her departure goes unnoticed because Morris let slip that they’ve booked the Forum theatre for his next production despite his expressly saying he didn’t want it. This triggers a far more important argument between Garry, Henry and Morris than all the sex and infidelity in the world.

In fact it triggers a bravura last few minutes as Garry goes into theatrical overdrive, delivering a grand histrionic speech accusing everyone of being vultures that eat his life’s blood before melodramatically sinking to the floor. Completely unimpressed, Morris and Henry depart in good humour.

MORRIS: That performance wouldn’t deceive a kitten.

You can see how Coward has dodged all the logical or psychological problems of these revelations of infidelity and betrayal with this one piece of theatrical legerdemain.

Melodramatically gasping, Garry begs Liz to fetch him a brandy to revive him but spits it out when she announces that she’s not only genuinely coming with him to Africa, but is coming back to good. She’s going to move back in. Not because she loves him especially, she’s thinking of the good of ‘the firm’. Without someone to chaperone him he goes off the rails at the slightest opportunity. He needs a minder and it’s going to be her.

At which point he remembers Daphne and Roland hidden in the adjoining rooms and tells Liz, ‘You’re not coming back to me… I’m coming back to you’ and – repeating the ending of ‘Hay Fever’ and ‘Private Lives’ – they quietly tiptoe out.

THE END

Donald Sinden production

1981 theatre production at the Vaudeville Theatre, filmed by the BBC, directed by Alan Strachan, and starring Donald Sinden as Garry, Dinah Sheridan as Liz, Gwen Watford as Monica, Elizabeth Counsell as Joanna and Julian Fellowes as Maule.

Part 1

Part 2

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by Simon on June 13, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 13, 2025

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Design for Living: A Comedy in Three Acts by Noel Coward (1932)

LEO: It should be easy, you know. The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now!

GILDA: Ernest, if you only realized what was going on inside you, you’d be bitterly offended!

‘Design for Living’ is a comedy play written by Noël Coward in 1932. It concerns a trio of artistic characters, Gilda, Otto and Leo, and their complicated three-way relationship. Originally written to star Lynn Fontanne, Alfred Lunt and Coward, it was premiered on Broadway, partly because its risqué subject matter was thought unacceptable to the official censor in London. It was not until 1939 that a London production was presented.

‘Design for Living’ was a success on Broadway in 1933, but it has been revived less often than Coward’s other major comedies. Coward said:

‘It was liked and disliked, and hated and admired, but never, I think, sufficiently loved by any but its three leading actors.’

The play was adapted into a film in 1933, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, with a screenplay by Ben Hecht, and starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper, and Miriam Hopkins.

Background

In the second half the 1920s Coward became one of the world’s most famous playwrights, with a succession of popular hits ranging from the operetta Bitter Sweet (1929) and the extravaganza Cavalcade (1931), to the intimate comedies Hay Fever (1924) and Private Lives (1930). Back when he was penniless Coward had met Lunt and Fontanne Lunt on his first trip to new York and had promised he’d write a play to showcase them as an ensemble. By the early 1930s the time was right for Coward to write their star vehicle.

The play was based on the Lunts’ own marriage. They were a devoted couple but had an open relationship with ‘triangular relationships in their private lives’. Coward wrote:

‘These glib, over-articulate and amoral creatures force their lives into fantastic shapes and problems because they cannot help themselves. Impelled chiefly by the impact of their personalities each upon the other, they are like moths in a pool of light, unable to tolerate the lonely outer darkness but equally unable to share the light without colliding constantly and bruising each other’s wings…. The ending of the play is equivocal. The three of them… are left together as the curtain falls, laughing…. Some saw it as the lascivious anticipation of a sort of a carnal frolic. Others with less ribald imaginations regarded it as a meaningless and slightly inept excuse to bring the curtain down. I as author, however, prefer to think that Gilda and Otto and Leo were laughing at themselves.’

‘Design for Living’ opened in New York on 24 January 1933, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. It was such a success that Coward was persuaded to relax his usual rule against appearing in any production for more than three months, and he allowed the play to run for a total of five months. So great were the crowds of fans in the street that special police had to be called in during the last week of the run.

Ménage à trois

A ménage à trois is a domestic arrangement or committed relationship consisting of three people in polyamorous romantic or sexual relations with each other, and often dwelling together.

Cast

  • Gilda – ‘a good-looking woman of about thirty’, ‘a permanent spectator’
  • Ernest Friedman – ‘any age between forty and fifty, rather precise in manner’
  • Otto Sylvus – ‘tall and good-looking’
  • Leo Mercuré – ‘thin and nervous’
  • Miss Hodge
  • Photographer
  • Mr Birbeck
  • Grace Torrence
  • Helen Carver
  • Henry Carver
  • Matthew

Plot

Act 1. Otto’s studio in Paris, 1932

Gilda is an interior designer who lives with the painter Otto, who was previously attached to Leo, an author. Ernest Friedman arrives, an art dealer and friend of all three. He is excited about his newly acquired Matisse and wants to show it to Otto. Gilda says that Otto is in bed, ill, has had neuralgia and absolutely cannot be disturbed.

Their conversation consists of classily phrased arguments and insults. ‘Private Lives’ taught me that a good deal of Coward dialogue consists of bad-tempered arguing.

ERNEST: If, in my dotage, I become a bore to you, you won’t scruple to let me know, will you?
GILDA: Don’t be an idiot!

He wonders why she doesn’t marry Otto and she replies because he loves her too much. To be tied legally to him would kill the love. She tells him to mind his own business.

ERNEST: I cannot, for the life of me, imagine why I’m so fond of you. You have such abominable manners.

Ernest tells her that Leo is back in Paris after making a success in New York. They both find it hilarious that he’s staying at the Georges V hotel.

Gilda’s discourse is all on stilts, on a high register of shrill self-awareness occasionally tipping over into hysteria, so much so that Earnest confesses she scares him.

GILDA: I’m yelling! Can’t you hear me yelling like mad?
OTTO: What on earth are you talking about?
GILDA: A bad joke, and very difficult to explain.

For example, she delivers a little speech about how she hates her own femininity, hates being trapped in a woman’s body.

There’s nothing funny in the scenario and few comic lines or jokes. It’s just listening to a posh man being mildly abused by this wilful neurotic. Everything is overdramatised. When Ernest makes the slightest of comments on her claiming to be in love with both Otto and Leo at the same time, she flies into a wild dramatisation of the threesome.

GILDA: Look at the whole thing as a side show. People pay to see freaks. Walk up! Walk up and see the Fat Lady and the Monkey Man and the Living.

To the audience and Earnest’s surprise, Otto – not at all in bed and suffering from neuralgia as Gilda claimed – enters from the street carrying luggage. Gilda lied fluently as so many Coward characters do cf Elyot and Amanda in ‘Private Lives’. In fact Otto’s just returned from a trip to Bordeaux where he was doing a portrait for an unknown client who he insulted by telling her she was fat, and got thrown out.

When Ernest tells Otto that Leo’s back from America, Otto insists that they go and see him straightaway and Gild eggs them on so they both depart.

Then Leo stumbles in from the bedroom and we realise why Gilda lied to Ernest about Otto being in bed with neuralgia and he couldn’t go into the bedroom even to whisper hello. It’s because it wasn’t Otto in the bedroom it was Leo. When he says ‘What we did was inevitable. It’s been inevitable for years’ it makes it sound like they’ve had sex for the first time after fancying each other for years. In other words, that the ménage à trois I’ve read about in all the blurbs and summaries of the play isn’t as established as I thought.

Anyway, he’s racked with guilt about it and they spend some time discussing what it means to have betrayed their best friend etc. As usual with Coward this takes the form of an argument or a squabble. His character suffer from an over-articulacy, they are far too fluent and articulate for their own good – which almost guarantees that they pick up on stray words here and there and magnify them into huge arguments. This was Elyot and Amanda’s way in ‘Private Lives’ and the same here. Leo says something sweet and reassuring which Gilda takes to be an appalling cliché and explodes:

GILDA [viciously]: Let’s have some more! ‘Passion’s only transitory’, isn’t it? ‘Love is ever fleeting!’ ‘Time is a great healer’. Trot them all out, dear.
LEO: Don’t try to quarrel with me.
GILDA: Don’t be so wise and assured and knowing, then. It’s infuriating.

The key word here is ‘viciously’. All Coward characters flip from civilised banter to vicious recriminations and insults in a second, and then back again. It makes them all dislikeable. And it gives the plays a constant sense of walking on eggshells, anxiously waiting for the next character to explode. It’s more like living with a wife beater than attending a sophisticated ‘comedy’.

At the height of their discussion-squabble-argument, Otto walks in and discovers them. Ah. He and Ernest got to the Hotel Georges V only to discover Leo wasn’t staying there at all, so he’s come back to his apartment and found…

They come out and tell him that they slept together in his absence. With crushing inevitability they start arguing and finding articulate fluent ways to describe how miserable they are and to accuse each other. Posh people fighting in a Noel Coward play! Yes.

LEO: What right have you to be hurt and grieved, any more than Gilda and me? We’re having just as bad a time as you are, probably worse.

Much like the audience. Coward’s alleged ‘wit’ is only intermittently apparent. Much, much more present in all these plays is the bad-tempered arguing and insults.

OTTO: I’ve seen something in you that I’ve never seen before; in all these years I’ve never noticed it—I never realized that, deep down underneath your superficial charm and wit, you’re nothing but a cheap, second-rate little opportunist, ready to sacrifice anything, however sacred, to the excitement of the moment.

Not that funny. Otto is violently unpleasant and Gilda collapses in tears.

GILDA (collapsing at the table): Stop it! Stop it! How can you be so cruel! How can you say such vile things?

Otto makes clear his contempt and hatred for both of them, wishes they were dead and in hell, and storms out.

Act 2

Scene 1. Leo’s Flat in London, 18 months later

Most of Coward’s plays take place over a few days. A gap of 18 months is a big thing, more like a novel.

Leo and Gilda are now living together and he is writing plays which are being produced and are tremendously successful. The scene opens with Leo reading out the reviews of his latest play, ‘Change and Decay’, to Gilda,

A playwright nervous about his reviews writing a play about a playwright nervously reading his reviews – you could consider this delightfully meta and cleverly postmodern – or tiresomely self-obsessed and narcissistic, according to taste.

Coward does that thing which numerous modern-ish authors do, which is have a character in one of their novels or plays repeat the popular criticism of them: in this case he has Leo read out the Daily Mirror‘s criticism that his latest play is ‘thin’. This exasperates him and stings him to tell Gilda that in future he will write fat plays about fat characters. This is, of course, to ignore the substance of the criticism: Coward’s plays are thin. The basic scenarios are often quite winning, but the characterisation is generally shallow as a puddle and the dialogue is astonishingly lacking in the wit and humour I have for decades associated with Coward until I actually came to read and watch his plays, and be rather disappointed. Instead of genuine wit or comedy you have exchanges like this.

GILDA: Anyhow, you can’t expect a paper like the Times to be really interested in your petty little excursions in the theatre. After all, it is the organ of the nation.
LEO: That sounds vaguely pornographic to me.

Schoolboy humour. Here’s another example of Coward’s shimmering wit, Gilda pretending to be a brainless newspaper interviewer:

Gilda [conversationally]: Tell me, Mr Mercure, what do you think of the modern girl?
LEO: [politely]: A silly bitch.

Not scintillating repartee, is it?

A phone call from some aristocratic inviting them to dinner prompts Leo to say these social situations are awkward when they’re obviously a couple but not married. So he proposes to her but she sagely turns him down and even says it would be against her moral code.

Presumably this kind of suave, sophisticated exchange was designed to shock and outrage the older, Edwardian generation with their Victorian morals.

The phone rings incessantly, a symptom of the modern world. Leo calls their maid or servant, Miss Hodge, in and tells her to answer the phone for him. Next time the phone rings working class Miss Hodge answers the phone with comic ineptness. The working classes, eh, ha ha ha.

What’s obvious is how bored they are. Gilda is bored to death.

GILDA: Perhaps you’re wise about our marrying; perhaps it would be a good thing. I’m developing into one of those tedious unoccupied women, who batten on men and spoil everything for them. I’m spoiling the excitement of your success for you now by being tiresome and gloomy.

Watching posh bored people torment each other, throwing ‘cheap gibes’ at each other, that’s entertainment. ‘Tiresome’ – that’s the key word. And Leo is as irritated and frustrated.

LEO: This looks like a row but it hasn’t even the virtue of being a new row. We’ve had it before several times, and just lately more than ever.

A journalist, Mr Birbeck, and press photographer from the Evening Standard arrive to do a feature on him. After arguing with Gilda Leo is in a bad mood and gives sharp replies to all the questions. Here is an example of his authorly wit:

MR BIRBECK: Do you believe the talkies will kill the theatre?
LEO: No. I think they’ll kill the talkies.
MR BIRBECK (laughing): That’s very good, that is! It really is.

It isn’t though, is it? It’s not in the slightest bit funny. It’s flippant and cynical and sounds like it ought to be a joke, but it isn’t. Leo gives up answering questions and tells him he’s tired and doesn’t he find asking all these stupid questions ‘grotesque?’ and tells him to come back dome other time when he’s less… tired.

Nonetheless he lets the photographer take some snaps and the scene ends with Mr Birbeck tentatively asking whether Leo could, just maybe, possibly, give them a teeny weeny smile? This is one of the few things I’ve found funny so far, these poor professionals trying to do their job in the face of Leo’s self-important moodiness.

Scene 2. Leo’s London flat, a few days later

A few days later Leo is away. After some comic business with the working class character, the maid Miss Hodge (Gilda asks if she minds that she and Leo are not married; Miss Hodge says she doesn’t mind, having herself been twice married and not thinking much of the institution) departs and Otto turns up.

He too is now successful, as an artist. He’s just back from staging an exhibition in New York.

There’s a joke, a joke with a punchline, such a rarity in Coward it’s worth recording.

OTTO: This seems a very nice flat.
GILDA: It is. You can see right across to the other side of the square on a clear day.

Ooh, immediately followed by another one. Otto says he bumped into a woman just leaving. Gilda explains that that was the maid, Mrs Hodge.

GILDA: That was Miss Hodge. She’s had two husbands.
OTTO: I once met a woman who’d had four husbands.

And a little later, after Otto explains that he went away for a while, on a Norwegian freighter:

OTTO: I can say, ‘How do you do?’ in Norwegian.
GILDA: We must get to know some Norwegian people immediately, so that you can say ‘How do you do? to them.—

Noel’s on fire! Maybe you can see what I mean when I say that this kind of thing isn’t really funny in itself. These aren’t really jokes, or barely. What makes them funny (if it does) is how they exemplify the attitude of these posh, superior, self-absorbed arty types. It’s so exactly the kind of flippant throwaway remark that a posh character in a Coward play ought to say.

Anyway, she asks why he’s avoided them for so frightfully long and he says yes, it has been frightfully long, hasn’t it. Did you miss me, darling etc.

Remember I commented on a playwright having a character in his latest play commenting on newspaper reviews of the character’s previous plays which sound very like the reviews and criticism Coward got for his plays? Happens again here. Otto asks what Gilda thinks of Leo’s latest play, prompting quite a serious reply:

GILDA: Three scenes are first rate, especially the last act. The beginning of the second act drags a bit, and most of the first act’s too facile—you know what I mean—he flips along with easy swift dialogue, but doesn’t go deep enough. It’s all very well played.

‘Doesn’t go deep enough’. Well, there’s no point criticising Coward for what he isn’t. No Ibsen or Strindberg, he. He concocted effective and extremely popular entertainments over a career spanning decades. An awesome achievement.

Back in this play, Otto and Gilda have a picnic dinner together: cold ham, salad, cold rice pudding, and slowly revive their friendship turning back into love. Or whatever it is they have. Maybe just opportunity.

Otto jokes about what would happen if they ended up fighting over Gilda, reminiscent of the fight scene between Elyot and Victor which fizzles out in ‘Private Lives’.

The conversation is frequently difficult to distinguish from an argument or row.

OTTO: Shut up! Don’t talk like that…
GILDA [breaking down]: Don’t—don’t laugh at me.

Author’s message

Remember how I’ve pointed out that the fundamental dichotomy in Coward isn’t between the straight and the gay, it’s between what my son calls ‘the normies’ – the normal, everyday people with their conventional beliefs and lives and morality and behaviour – and the Coward characters who proclaim that they are special, different, exceptional, Well, the same sentiment is expressed here in a pat little speech by Otto. For when Gilda has a moment of ‘normality’ and says that their falling in love is sordid and gross, Otto suavely replies that this is only so if measured by other people’s standards. I might as well give the whole speech, as it amounts to a manifesto of sorts.

GILDA: Why should we flatter ourselves that we’re so tremendously different?
OTTO: Flattery doesn’t enter into it. We are different. Our lives are diametrically opposed to ordinary social conventions; and it’s no use grabbing at those conventions to hold us up when we find we’re in deep water. We’ve jilted them and eliminated them, and we’ve got to find our own solutions for our own peculiar moral problems.
GILDA: Very glib, very glib indeed, and very plausible.
OTTO: It’s true. There’s no sense in stamping about and saying how degrading it all is. Of course it’s degrading; according to a certain code, the whole situation’s degrading and always has been. The Methodists wouldn’t approve of us, and the Catholics wouldn’t either; and the Evangelists and the Episcopalians and the Anglicans and the Christian Scientists—I don’t suppose even the Polynesian Islanders would think very highly of us, but they wouldn’t mind quite so much, being so far away. They could all club together—the whole lot of them—and say with perfect truth, according to their lights, that we were loose-living, irreligious, unmoral degenerates, couldn’t they?
GILDA [meekly]: Yes, Otto, I expect so.
OTTO: But the whole point is, it’s none of their business. We’re not doing any harm to anyone else. We’re not peppering the world with illegitimate children. The only people we could possibly mess up are ourselves, and that’s our lookout. It’s no use you trying to decide which you love best, Leo or me, because you don’t know! At the moment, it’s me, because you’ve been living with Leo for a long time and I’ve been away. A gay, ironic chance threw the three of us together and tied our lives into a tight knot at the outset. To deny it would be ridiculous, and to unravel it impossible. Therefore, the only thing left is to enjoy it thoroughly, every rich moment of it, every thrilling second.

This is no different from the ancient trope of carpe diem, Latin for ‘seize the day’, which is a literary phrase for the pretty obvious idea that you should enjoy life while you can. (The original Latin phrase comes from Horace’s Odes, which I’ve reviewed for this blog.)

The banter goes on for page after page until they realise they need to go to bed together. They embrace passionately. So it’s partner swapping again, as in ‘Private Lives’.

Scene 3. The same, the next morning

10.30 the next morning. Otto is still asleep when Ernest calls on Gilda. He asks to see Leo but Gilda lies, saying he’s not very well and can’t be disturbed. In reality, as we know, Leo is away at a weekend house party and it’s Otto asleep in the next room. This is quite funny because it mirrors the situation in the first scene, where Ernest arrived wanting to see Otto and Gilda lied, saying he was in bed with neuralgia when it was, of course, Leo who she’d illicitly slept with, who was in the bedroom.

This explains why Gilda is, once again, as in the first scene, slightly hysterical. And in this hysteria liable to sound off and make sweeping statements. For a start she says humanity is a great disappointment, has barely risen above the primeval slime. But this leads onto a more revealing statement.

GILDA: The human race is a let-down, Ernest; a bad, bad let-down! I’m disgusted with it. It thinks it’s progressed but it hasn’t; it thinks it’s risen above the primeval slime but it hasn’t—it’s still wallowing in it! It’s still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and our eyes and our souls. We’ve invented a few small things that make noises, but we haven’t invented one big thing that creates quiet, endless peaceful quiet—something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown; something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions—

Coward hated critical analysis of his plays, so I’m going to do something he would have loathed and subject this little speech to tuppeny-ha’penny analyses according to several classical schools of literary criticism.

A Marxist interpretation

Most of Coward’s characters come from the parasite rentier class which doesn’t work for a living. Thus, lacking the purpose given to existence by the need to work, they are often bored to death, as Gilda is. In this particular play, the two male leads do in fact work for a living, after a fashion, as a playwright and an artist.

But the real point is that none of them are aligned with the forces of History, specifically the Proletariat which is, in late capitalism, the embodiment of the spirit of History and which must, as Marx proved with his scientific socialism, soon overthrow the exploitative capitalist system and its imperial extensions, and usher in the triumph of the working class.

So on the Marxist view of his day, it is only by throwing in their lot with people with a cause, committed to the liberation of humanity, that Coward’s characters can discover meaning and purpose to life and stop indulging in their squalid, petty bourgeois intrigues.

Thus Gilda’s wish for ‘something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown; something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions—’ is the cry of the rootless, aimless, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie adrift from the unstoppable march of History, and for which there is only one cure or solution. Align with the class of the future, the proletariat. See the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre which dramatise just this issue.

A Freudian interpretation

Freud’s first, pre-war model of the mind, developed between about 1895 and 1918, attributed the central driving force of the unconscious to Sex, broadly speaking the Darwinian drive of the human organism to reproduce which, more narrowly, creates erotic drives which had to be channelled ‘correctly’ in order to be socially acceptable. Freud was among the first to discover how easily these drives get blocked and misdirected in childhood and adolescence to turn into the florid array of sexual ‘perversions’, or be stifled and emerge was a wide variety of neurotic and obsessive symptoms, which his patients described when they presented to him.

However, the colossal slaughter and destruction of the First World War persuaded him that his theory was inadequate. Nothing about sex could explain the hecatombs of corpses and entire empires brought to their knees.

Thus in the 1920s he developed his second model of the mind and this time posited that alongside the positive Life Force or Eros, of which reproduction and sex are merely subsets, an equal and opposite drive in all humans, indeed (he speculates) in all organisms, which he called the Death Drive or Thanatos: the widespread wish that the whole wretched business of life, all the anxieties and worries and responsibilities, not to mention illnesses and accidents, would all cease once and for all.

Thus Gilda’s wish for ‘something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown; something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions’ is a textbook expression of the deep wish, a key component of all human minds – sometimes buried deep, sometimes (as here) freely acknowledged – for the whole stressful business just to end.

Anyway, this big speech is all preparatory to Gilda telling Ernest she is leaving. Leaving Leo and Otto. Running away. She feels stifled. She wants to be free. She wants to be her ‘unadulterated self’. She’s going to run away, stay in a hotel, go to Paris, no, Berlin. Explaining all this makes her feel very tender towards Ernest and she throws her arms round his neck. She leaves two letters on the desk and then leaves with Ernest.

The phone rings, Miss Hodge answers it and this prompts Otto to slouch out of his bedroom in his pyjamas and dressing gown. Miss Hodge lets him know she disapproves, and he tells her to go away and mind her own business.

Leo sneaks in through the front door, and for a moment mistakes the back of the head on the sofa and the cigarette smoke rising to be Gilda and shouts Hi honey, I’m home. So is appalled when it’s Otto who turns to greet him.

This turns into a row, with Leo telling him how vile he is, just as Otto told him how vile he was in the earlier scene. As with so much Coward, this is studiedly symmetrical and patterned.

OTTO: I said all that to you in Paris. Do you remember? I thought it was true then, just as you think it’s true now.

They have a long conversation about how they’re doomed to repeat the same situation (infidelity with Gilda). Leo says he needs to be tolerant which Otto, understandably, finds hard.

Then they notice the letters, reading them and concluding that Gilda has escaped. So, rather pathetically, they decide to get completely pissed on brandy and then sherry. Difficult for actors portraying steady descent into quite wild and then tearful drunkenness. Otto delivers a semi-drunken rant:

OTTO (with sudden fury): So many words! That’s what’s wrong with us! So many words—too many words, masses and masses of words, spewed about until we’re choked with them. We’ve argued and probed and dragged our entrails out in front of one another for years! We’ve explained away the sea and the stars and life and death and our own peace of mind! I’m sick of this endless game of three-handed, spiritual ping-pong—this battling of our little egos in one another’s faces! Sick to death of it! Gilda’s made a supreme gesture and got out. Good luck to her, I say!

Apart from the detail of it being a trio, the basic idea of being sick to death of choking themselves with words and dragging their entrails out, this could come from one of Elyot or Amanda’s rants in ‘Private Lives’.

Coward drags out this scene to inordinate length with Leo and Otto arguing at length, though it’s dressed up with fancy ideas, for example:

LEO: Science is our only hope, the only hope for humanity! We’ve wallowed in false mysticism for centuries; we’ve fought and suffered and died for foolish beliefs, which science has proved to be as ephemeral as smoke. Now is the moment to open our eyes fearlessly and look at the truth!

Which might mean something in a more serious play but, spoken by one of Coward’s superficial mannequins, comes over as flippant and inconsequential as everything else they say. For example, increasingly fanciful digressions, for example about the absurdity of the words ‘macaroni’ and ‘wimple’. Eventually they get so drunk that they embrace, sobbing helplessly.

So the act ends with two old friends having got hopelessly drunk and feeling hopelessly lonely and sad. Not immediately comic, in fact quite sad for us…

Act 3

Scene 1. Ernest’s apartment in New York, two years later

Like the gap of 18 months before Acts 1 and 2, two whole years is another long period of time to jump. So we find ourselves in Ernest’s New York apartment. Gilda has married Ernest and become a commercially successful designer. Ernest is away and, on this fine summer’s evening, Gilda is giving a reception for some important clients, namely: Henry and Helen Carver, ‘a comparatively young married couple, wealthy and well dressed’, and Grace Torrence, ‘slightly older, a typical Europeanized New York matron’.

Gilda has grown up. She is elaborately and beautifully gowned. Her manner has changed a good deal. She is much more still and sure than before. A certain amount of vitality has gone from her, but, in its place, there is an aloof poise quite in keeping with her dress and surroundings.

Gilda takes Grace off to show her something and Henry and Helen have an extended argument about the merit of interior decorators, Henry thinking it’s all a racket, Helen defending her. Couples fiercely arguing, it’s Coward’s basic situation.

Doorbell rings and Henry lets in… Otto and Leo, both in fine fantastical moods. They come over as very camp i.e. over self-consciously mocking everything everyone says.

OTTO: There’s something strangely and deeply moving about young love, Mr. and Mrs. Carver.
LEO: Youth at the helm.
OTTO: Guiding the little fragile barque of happiness down the river of life. Unthinking, unknowing, unaware of the perils that lie in wait for you, the sudden tempests, the sharp jagged rocks beneath the surface. Are you never afraid?
HENRY I don’t see anything to be afraid of.
LEO (fondly): Foolish headstrong boy.

This is deliberately aggressively offensive but cast in such suave politeness as to be hard to talk back to. Part of the purpose of camp which is a power play.

Otto and Leo’s fast-talking sophisticated banter startles and puzzles Henry and Helen. This is also a classic scenario – clever, fast-talking smartarses bewildering the normies. Which conceals, not very well, their anger. They are cattily, bitchily angry with Gilda and their anger quickly comes out, constantly teetering on the brink of… yet another argument, a fight, a flaring row. The basic Coward content.

Gilda responds to their aggressive flippancy with bitterness of their own and barely controlled fury. On a general point, lots of twentieth century drama seems to be about people behaving badly on stage. Drunken angry bitterness being the speciality of, for example, Tennessee Williams a generation later.

Their intense, recriminatory conversation drives Helen, Henry and Grace away. Grace recognises boorish behaviour when she sees it. Gilda insists Leo and Otto leave as well but secretly gives them a key and tells them to come back.

After they’ve all gone she compulsively finished one of the other’s drink, with tears in her eyes.

Scene 2. The same, the next morning

Ernest returns the next morning and is greeted by his Black servant who makes him a coffee, he puts down his luggage etc and then… Otto and Leo come down the stairs wearing his pyjamas and dressing gowns.

He is completely flabbergasted and triggers their ‘brazen impertinence’ i.e. more camp flippancy. They tell him they gatecrashed Gilda’s little party the night before, she gave them a key, but when they came back she had gone.

They call him ludicrous for claiming that Gilda is his wife, but they dismiss this as nonsense, claiming she belongs to them just as much as to him (Ernest).

Cue Gilda walking in and explaining that she spent the night at a hotel. Ernest explodes in anger but once again, as in the previous scene, it’s a case of the two tricksters, jokers, sparky and flippant and imaginative people, against the ‘normie’, Ernest, who can’t keep up with their smooth repartee. Just as straight-laced Victor couldn’t keep up with Elyot’s smart repartee in ‘Private Lives’. So:

ERNEST: I think your arrogance is insufferable. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. I’m very, very angry.

Of course he doesn’t know what to do. He’s the normie in a play about tricksters.

Now it turns out that Gilda has realised she is bored with her life with Ernest and so she’s going to leave him. She reveals that being her wife has no value to her, it’s been very convenient and comfortable but now she realises she has to go back to the tricksters.

Ernest tries to argue that Gilda knows too much to be taken back by them but she denies it. He thinks she’s gone mad but she declares they are all of a piece, they all share the same ‘difference’ from normal society which I commented on earlier.

GILDA: It’s silly to go on saying to yourself that I’m different from Otto. and Leo just because you want to believe it. I’m not different from them. We’re all of a piece, the three of us. Those early years made us so. From now on we shall have to live and die our own way. No one else’s way is any good, we don’t fit.

‘We don’t fit’, cry of the alienated teenager for at least the last 70 years. And more manifesto:

ERNEST: Your values are false and distorted.
GILDA: Only from your point of view.
ERNEST: From the point of view of anyone who has the slightest sense of decency.
LEO: We have our own decencies. We have our own ethics. Our lives are a different shape from yours. Wave us good-bye, Little Ernest, we’re together again.

Ernest accuses them of wallowing in a ‘disgusting three-sided erotic hotch-potch’. But the more angry he gets – the more he invokes conventional morality – the more flippantly amused the naughty threesome become and, as Ernest stomps to the apartment door, leaves and slams it shut, the threesome collapse into hilarious laughter.

Thoughts

I’ve made my main comments: not many comic lines; thin characters; the whole effect achieved almost entirely by the posh self-centred self-satisfied smug superiority of the characters, which the audience is invited to alternately identify with and/or laugh at.

What impresses, maybe, is the professionalism with which the initial premise or scenario is worked through, with clever structural echoes and parallelism. But it gets pretty monotonous at moments, since the audience quickly develops a strong idea of what’s going to happen.

Is it even a real ménage à trois?

Short answer, no. It isn’t. Our three heroes do not live in a relaxed happy ménage, so they? The opposite. What really happens is Gilda sleeps around, betraying first Leo, then Otto and then, a year or so later, her husband Ernest. It is not a ménage at all but the story of a serial adulteress or promiscuous woman. The idea that the three of them can somehow happily co-exist only really comes at the end, in the Betraying Ernest scene.

But again, as with The Vortex, there’s little point judging the scenario by our own modern standards: in its day, the play’s timid hints at a genuine ménage were enough to cause shock and scandal among the bourgeois newspapers, critics and staid theatre goers.

Mocking the provinces

I wonder how long the English upper classes have been mocking the provinces. Maybe since the Norman Conquest. One of Coward’s other plays mocks Newcastle, and there’s a slight dig here.

GILDA: Have you been married much, then?
MISS HODGE: Twice, all told.
GILDA: Where are your husbands now?
MISS HODGE: One’s dead, and the other’s in Newcastle.
GILDA (smiling): Oh.

More sustained metropolitan snobbery is dispensed by Otto in Act 2.

OTTO [drawing up a chair]: What delicious-looking ham! Where did you get it?
GILDA: I have it specially sent from Scotland.
OTTO: Why Scotland?
GILDA: It lives there when it’s alive.
OTTO: A bonny country, Scotland, if all I’ve heard is correct, what with the banshees wailing and the four-leaved shamrock.
GILDA: That’s Ireland, dear.
OTTO: Never mind. The same wistful dampness distinguishes them both.

A post-colonial interpretation

Hilarious (that’s sarcasm). But if you were an Irish nationalist, an Indian nationalist, any educated inhabitant of one of Britain’s 57 colonies, dominions, territories, or protectorates, you might have read this kind of thing as precisely the kind of ignorant, self-centred, privileged, smug indifference that you had to shoot your way through in order to gain independence.

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The Art of Love by Ovid

ego sum praeceptor Amoris
I am Love’s teacher
(The Art of Love, book 1, line 17)

Ovid the pickup artist

Anyone expecting a treatise on the philosophical types of love à la Plato or Castiglione, or expecting a text about sentimental or romantic forms of love, will be very disappointed and possibly repelled. This is a hard-headed book by a professional pickup artist and consists of practical advice to young men on where and how to pick up, chat up, seduce and take to bed women married or single, young or old.

‘Love’ suggests a steady state, an ongoing condition. That bores Ovid. He is interested in the chase, the pursuit. His premise is that any woman can be seduced but only if you have technique, and that’s what he’s going to teach. Any fool can try to chat up a woman just as any fool can try his hand at sports, angling or taming horses. But all these things have a technique, an expertise, traditions and methods to guarantee success. He, Ovid, the teacher of love, pickup artist extraordinaire, seduction guru par excellence, is going to share his top tips with the excited young reader.

Vexing Augustus

Over half of Peter Green’s immense introduction to the Penguin edition of Ovid’s love poems is taken up speculating about why the emperor Augustus abruptly exiled Ovid to the furthest outpost of the Roman Empire, to the miserable frontier town of Tomis, on the Black Sea. To cut a long story short, Green thinks it’s because Ovid was witness to some kind of meeting or evidence about a conspiracy to overthrow Augustus in 8 AD and didn’t report it. In his wretched Letters From Exile Ovid hints at the nature of his crime, but to the immense frustration of scholars for 2,000 years, nowhere spells it out explicitly. He simply insists that he, personally, was never treacherous, never acted against the emperor or planned to poison or kill or hurt anyone. It wasn’t enough. Augustus, and his successor Tiberius, refused to rescind Ovid’s exile and he died miserably in Tomis in 17 or 18 AD.

The point is that Green has to piece this together, and present it as a theory, because Augustus and his people gave it out that the official reason Ovid was banished was for corrupting morals, that Ovid had deliberately undermined Augustus’s programme of moral revival, and they cited this poem, The Art of Love, as the prime example of his corrupting influence.

To grasp the background to this you have to know that, once he had secured a position of complete power, Augustus set about a wholesale programme or reviving Rome in every way: building new roads and aqueducts, encouraging the building of cities in the provinces and roads connecting them, reviving trade. And in Rome, building a grand new forum, rebuilding the temples of various gods, encouraging the revival of ancient religious ceremonies and rituals.

And when it came to the population of Rome, Augustus embarked on a campaign to reform morals and, above all, to encourage the upper classes to marry and have many sons. The series of civil wars from 91 to 31 BC had decimated many venerable old families. Augustus embarked on a series of laws designed to revive them.

In 18 BC he passed the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus (all laws passed under Augustus began with ‘lex Julia‘ because he saw himself continuing the Julian family of Julius Caesar). This law required all citizens to marry, and granted numerous benefits to fathers of three children or more; conversely, there were penalties for the unmarried and childless. Senators were forbidden from marrying freedmen (ex-slaves).

A year later Augustus passed the Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis. This law punished adultery with banishment. The two guilty parties were sent to different islands and part of their property was confiscated. Fathers were permitted to kill daughters and their partners taken in adultery (!). Husbands could kill unfaithful partners, under certain circumstances, and were compelled to divorce adulterous wives (!). Augustus himself invoked the law against his own daughter, Julia (Julia the Elder, who was banished to the island of Pandateria in 2 BC) and then against her eldest daughter (Julia the Younger who was exiled in 8 AD).

In 9 BC Augustus passed the Lex Papia et Poppaea which encouraged and strengthened the institution of marriage. It included provisions against adultery and against celibacy after a certain age. Specifically, it forbade the marriage of a senator or a senator’s children with a libertina (an emancipated slave), with a woman whose father or mother had followed one of the ars ludicra (i.e. been a dancer, actor, gladiator, or other entertainer), with a prostitute, and also the marriage of a libertinus with a senator’s daughter. The provisions against celibacy included, for example, a provision that any unmarried person could not inherit a bequest or legacy; to qualify for the bequest, they had to marry within 100 days. All else being equal, candidates with children were preferred in elections or court cases over candidates with none.

So: Rebuilding Rome, ongoing military campaigns (to pacify northern Spain, parts of Gaul and Switzerland), reviving venerable religious ceremonies, erecting fine new public buildings, enforcing sexual morality, these were all key policies of the new emperor – and, in the Art of Love, Ovid mocks every single one of them.

Ovid’s book says that being a layabout sex pest is a much more worthy lifestyle than being a boring old soldier. He mocks the empire’s military campaigns. He thinks the gods are a load of lies and fancy stories. He thinks the only use of Rome’s fine new buildings is for hanging round so you can pick up women. And above all, he targets married women. The Art of Love encourages and gives tips about precisely the kind of marital infidelity and sexual aberrance which Augustus passed laws and went to great lengths to try and prevent.

Let me instruct you in all
The way of deceit.
(3.617)

In line after line, topic after topic, Ovid seems to be deliberately, calculatedly, spitting in the face of everything Augustus dedicated his life to achieving. The only wonder about all this is why it took till 8 AD for Augustus to banish Ovid given that the Ars Amatoria was published around 1 BC i.e. 8 or 9 years earlier. And also the fact that, by the time of his banishment, Ovid himself had moved on from his erotic period and had only just published the Metamorphoses, his huge collection of ancient myths and legends, far more acceptable to Augustus and his regime, although with a strong, amoral emphasis on sex and violence.

Hence Green’s elaborate theory that the accusations of corrupting public morals which the regime used to justify exiling Ovid so far away were really just a cover for something else, in Green’s view Ovid’s passive participation in some kind of political conspiracy against Augustus.

Comparison with Oscar Wilde

So, in a way, reading the Ars is like reading Oscar Wilde. Obviously you can just read Wilde for the immediate pleasure of his wit and style but…the experience changes when you learn that many passages of his work were read out in court and interpreted in a blunt, literal sense in order to be used as evidence against him, evidence that he mocked Victorian values, mocked decent ‘morality’, and promoted irresponsible sensuality and gross immorality i.e. homosexuality.

What made Wilde’s defence so difficult was that he had written all these subversive thoughts, albeit in a wonderfully witty style. Wilde thought his style would save him but it didn’t. Therefore, reading Wilde with this in mind can be unintentionally harrowing, because each time he pokes his tongue out at conventional Victorian values you shudder for the wretched fate it was to bring him (two years hard labour in a series of grim prisons, which utterly broke his spirit and led to his early death).

Same with Ovid. Having read Green’s very long introduction, which dwells on the miseries of his Black Sea exile, means that, every time Ovid pokes his tongue out at and mocks all the po-faced solemnities of official Roman morality, you shiver a little with a premonition of what is to befall him, the miserable fate that all these witty little jokes would end up bringing down on his head.

The theatre’s curving tiers should form your favourite
Hunting ground: here you are sure to find
The richest returns, be your wish for lover or playmate,
A one-night stand or a permanent affair.
As ants hurry to and fro in column, mandibles
Clutching grains of wheat
(Their regular diet), as bees haunt fragrant pastures
And meadows, hovering over the thyme,
Flitting from flower to flower, so our fashionable ladies
Swarm to the games in such crowds, I often can’t
Decide which I like. As spectators they come, come to be inspected:
Chaste modesty doesn’t stand a chance.
(lines 89 to 100)

Proem

Back to the poem itself, the first 30 or so lines make up the proem, an ancient term for preface or prologue. It is here that Ovid explains his aim of systematically teaching the technique of the pickup artist. It does include a half line invocation of the goddess Venus, but in an almost insultingly cursory manner, compared to the five lines he spends explaining that this book isn’t theoretical – he has lived and practiced all the tricks he describes himself. He emphatically insists everything the book is based on personal experience and is fact.

There follows a brief, 10-line partitio (‘a logical division into parts or heads’, ‘a descriptive programme of contents’) where he lays out the subject matter the poem will address, which is easily summarised:

  • Book 1 is about finding and wooing a woman
  • Book 2 is about keeping her

The text contains a book 3, just as long, in fact longer than either book 1 or 2, so the fact that it isn’t mentioned in the partitio makes scholars think it was a later addition.

Book 1 (773 lines)

After the proem and partitio, book 1 is divided into two halves: part one is a description of all the best places in Rome to pick up women, namely the colonnades, foreign temples (the synagogue is a good place), the theatre, the circus (for chariot racing), during triumphal processions, at dinner parties and at coastal spas, notably the notorious resort of Baiae.

Part two lists ploys and strategies for winning women. Cultivate their maids (but don’t end up sleeping with them) so they’ll put in a good word for you at the opportune moment, like when the mistress has been snubbed by another lover.

Don’t let the target woman con you into giving them expensive presents: he lists some of the scams women use to try and wangle gifts from their lovers, and how to resist them. (This was a prominent theme in the elegiac love poems of Tibullus and Propertius, too.)

Soften them up with love letters. Use language carefully, softly, sweetly. And persist: Time breaks stubborn oxen to the yoke, Time accustoms wild horses to the bridle. Same with women.

Be clean in your personal hygiene, though not effeminately so: ‘Real men shouldn’t primp their good looks’ (line 509). Take exercise, work up an outdoor tan. Hair and beard demand expert attention. Trim your nails and your nose hairs. Avoid male body odour.

Don’t drink too much at dinner parties (though it can be handy to pretend to be more drunk than you are as this gives you licence to be more forward than a sober man would be, in order to test the waters). Become knowledgeable in the language of secret signs. Drink from her cup, accidentally brush your hand against hers. If she’s with a companion, butter him up. Let him have precedence, award him the garland so he looks favourably on you.

Promise anything; lovers’ oaths don’t count.

Don’t be shy about promising: it’s promises girls are undone by. (1.631)

You can’t flatter too much, every woman is vain of her appearance.

Undermine them with devious
Flatteries: so a stream will eat away
Its overhanging bank. Never weary of praising
Her face, her hair, her slim fingers, her tiny feet.
Even the chaste like having their good looks published,
Even virgins are taken up with their own
Cute figures.
(1.619 to 624)

Look pale and thin to prove your sincerity. Lean and haggard, reek of sleepless nights, make yourself an object of pity so passersby comment, ‘He must be in love.’

Mocking Romulus

Describing the theatre as a good location to pick up women leads Ovid into an extended comparison with the legend about early Rome, that Romulus and his band of earliest settlers invited members of the nearby Sabine tribe to a very early version of a theatrical entertainment and then, at a pre-arranged signal, all the Romans grabbed a Sabine woman and ran off with them. The so-called Rape of the Sabine Women. It was a traditional story, told in many texts, what makes it Ovidian is the way he satirises and mocks Romulus’s high-minded speeches, and makes the entire story a kind of justification for the contemporary theatre being a good pickup location, an ironic mocking use of ‘tradition’ to justify his current cynical activities.

Ever since that day, by hallowed custom,
Our theatres have always held dangers for pretty girls.

In his notes (p.341) Green points out that Augustus, as part of his programme of restoring Roman values and traditions and religions, took the figure of Romulus very seriously indeed, in fact he had for a while considered renaming himself Romulus before the negative connotations outweighed the positive and he settled on the title ‘Augustus’ (awarded him by the Senate in 27 BC). So in this passage Ovid is going out of his way to take the mickey out of a figure very dear indeed to Augustus’s heart, and remodel him as a sponsor for Ovid’s own brand of cynical sexual predatoriness. Can you imagine how furious Augustus must have been?

The gods are expedient

Book 1 contains a line which became famous, it’s line 637 in Green’s translation:

The existence of gods is expedient: let us therefore assume it.

This sounds like a grand philosophical statement. In fact it’s more to do with the fact that the gods of the Graeco-Roman pantheon behaved scandalously, indulging human passions, mad with lust or jealousy…so let’s copy them with a clear conscience. Jupiter seduced umpteen women so…so can I! Again, you can imagine Augustus reading this kind of thing and grinding his teeth with anger.

Book 2 (746 lines)

Just when you thought it couldn’t get much more offensive, it stops. Book 2 is about keeping your beloved and is considerably more emollient and less sexist than Book 1.  Obviously it has the same underlying ideology, which is that women are passive animals while men are the smart manipulators, which 50% of the population may find grossly offensive, but a lot of the actual advice could have come out of a contemporary advice column. Maybe…

To be loved, you must prove yourself lovable.

(So much so that Green in his notes is regularly lampooning the triteness of some the agony aunt truisms he spouts. Maybe. Maybe not.)

Ovid opens Book 2 with ironic cheers for the man who has followed his advice and managed to ‘bag’ himself a lady love. Well done, sunshine. But now the real challenge in this whole business is how to keep her. So that’s what this book will be about:

If my art
Caught her, my art must keep her. To guard a conquest’s
As tricky as making it. There was luck in the chase,
But this task will call for skill.

Don’t mess with witchcraft, aphrodisiacs or drugs. Didn’t work for Medea or Circe. Instead (surprisingly) cultivate the life of the mind.

… to avoid a surprise desertion
And keep your girl, it’s best you have gifts of mind
In addition to physical charms…

Then build an enduring mind, add that to your beauty:
It alone will last till the flames
Consume you. Keep your wits sharp, explore the liberal
Arts, win a mastery over Greek
As well as Latin. Ulysses was eloquent, not handsome…

Be pleasant. Be tactful, be tolerant and understanding. Keep clear of all quarrels and recriminations. Love is sensitive and needs to be fed with gentle words. Leave wrangling to wives; a mistress should hear what she wants to hear.

He emphasises the distinction between married couples who have law to keep them together, and the kind of couples he’s describing where ‘love substitutes for law’. a) the kind of thing calculated to get Augustus’s goat b) a shrewd distinction. Married couples have not only the law, but shared responsibilities for raising children and the expectations of family, plus social reputation, to keep them together; illicit lovers have none of that. So it behoves them to be more considerate and tolerant. In another throwaway line which mockingly equates Rome’s mighty military enterprises with his frothy adulterer’s handbook:

Fight Parthians, but keep peace with a civilised mistress.
(2.175)

Do not use brute force. Go with the natural bend of the bough, don’t force it. Go with the current. Laugh when she laughs, cry when she cries, approve what she approves, criticise what she criticises. Open her parasol, clear a path through the crowd. Help her on and off with her slippers. Don’t bridle at menial tasks like holding her mirror for her. Always be early for dates. If she asks for you at her country residence, Go, no matter what the weather or obstacles.

About now I began to wonder what the point of all this is? The aim doesn’t appear to be to have sex at all. Sex isn’t mentioned anywhere in Book 1 and only appears a bit in the last couple of pages of Book 2 (see below). It’s nice, but it doesn’t appear to the be the prime aim. It feels more as if the whole point of the chase is the thrill of the chase itself and the achievement of…. what exactly? Winning a woman’s what? Heart? Allegiance? Devotion? When he writes that ‘Love is a species of warfare’, I don’t take it in the sexist sense to mean warfare between men and women, but warfare between male suitors for.. for what? For the beloved’s love? All the elegiac poets complain bitterly when their lady love is taken off them by another man: the embittered poem to The Rival is a genre unto itself.

Is it just about a sense of possession, of ownership? Is it about winning a woman as a trophy and then….then not really knowing quite what to do with her?

Anyway, the reference to Parthia allows Ovid a passage comparing the soldier of love with the actual soldier in the army, and make witty comparisons with the hardships both have to endure, a trope which is beginning to feel done to death in the Amores and here, let alone in all the other elegiac poets.

It may sound ludicrous but the rhetoric about the need to humble your pride, humiliate yourself, debase yourself before your beloved, accept that no task is too great to please her is reminiscent of Christian rhetoric, with its emphasis on humility and service. At moments Ovid steps out of the 1st century BC and sounds like a medieval troubador or Renaissance lover.

(Personally, as a Darwinian materialist, I would venture that this is because human nature is finite and only capable of a fixed array of emotions, feelings and strategies. The same kind of rhetoric is found in communist propaganda, which tells you to mortify your bourgeois pride in order to throw in your lot with The People, accepting any task, no matter how humble, for the sake of the Revolution. I appreciate the contexts are wildly different but the same phrases and attitudes can be found in numerous ideologies and religions. We humans think we’re fabulous but are, in practice, very limited, very predictable animals.)

Back to Ovid’s Top Tips for Lovers: Don’t give your mistress costly presents – give small ones, but chosen with skill and discretion. Poetry? Girls might be impressed by it as by a cute little gift, but what most women really want is money, rich presents. That’s why this is truly ‘the Golden Age’, he says, with heavy irony.

Very casually he mentions slaves that are going to be manumitted, or about to be flogged, or sent to a chain gang. As usual, I find references to slavery profoundly disturbing (as I do the references to upper class women scratching the faces of their slave maids or stabbing them with pins, if they make a mistake). The context is that if you were thinking of forgiving your slaves their punishments, wangle it so your mistress pleads for mercy, then do what you were going to do anyway.

Praise her beauty. Praise anything she’s wearing. Compliment her hair, or her dancing, or her singing. Lay it on with a trowel. Praise her technique in bed. The one golden rule is don’t overdo it and get caught out obviously lying. Then your reputation’s ruined.

If she gets ill, attend her sick room, cry, be all sympathy, bring an old crone to purify the room.

The key is to be always present, get her accustomed to you, hearing your voice, seeing your face. Then, when you’ve reached peak presence, arrange to be absent and make her miss you. Absence makes the heart grow fonder…up to a point. Not too long. In a page-long passage he doesn’t blame Helen for eloping with Paris but Menelaus for going off and leaving her by herself (2.357 to 372) (a theme he explored in some detail in the Heroides supposedly written by Helen and Paris).

In a very throwaway manner he says, obviously he’s not imagining you’re restricting yourself to just one lover. God forbid! So in order not to get caught out, don’t give X presents that Y might recognise; make sure you erase all previous messages from a wax tablet letter you send lover Y; don’t meet different lovers in the same places, cultivate different locales for each.

If she catches you out, deny everything, if that fails go for it, in bed. Hard ‘cocksmanship’ is its own proof that a) your not shagging anyone else b) you’re still devoted. Some aphrodisiacs might work and he gives a characteristically Roman quirky list of foodstuffs and ingredients (white Megarian onions, colewort, eggs, Hymettus honey, pine nuts).

If things get boring you could strategically let slip that you’re seeing someone else. Handled correctly, with the right kind of girl, this could lead to terrible scenes and recriminations, sure, but if you navigate your way through the tears, beg forgiveness, take her to bed and have great make-up sex, this can rejuvenate a relationship.

The last couple of hundred lines become chaotic. I found this with Horace’s last few epistles, as well. Roman poets are not great at structure. Their poems often take unexpected turns and detours. Out of nowhere the god Apollo appears by Ovid’s side and delivers a 20 line lecture, telling lovers to employ the famous motto over his oracle in Delphi, namely to know yourself. So if you’re handsome, always present your profile; if you’re clever, fill the space at dinner parties with brilliant talk; if a good drinker, show it and so on. It’s puzzling and random that Apollo pops up like this, given that he was name-checked in the opening lines of the poem as a god who had not inspired the poet (who insists everything he teaches derives from his own experience).

After this interruption, there’s a more puzzling digression as he appears to say that all lovers should know when to quit. It is not gentlemanly to become a bore. Know when to leave, before she starts complaining that you’re always hanging around (2.530). You’d have thought this – advice on how to end a relationship – would come right at the end of the book.

Instead the book still has 200 lines to run and continues with a section on how to cope with a rival, which is accept him with sang-froid – advice Ovid immediately goes on to say he finds hard to follow himself. He advises lovers to let their mistress have another lover and turn a blind eye. Snooping, opening letters, eavesdropping, those are the mean-minded activities of a husband, a lover should rise above them.

There’s more contradiction here, because Ovid had (unnecessarily and briefly) asserted that he doesn’t have in mind, he never has in mind, respectably married matrons. And yet here and at many other places, he mentions the husband of the ideal target of all this seduction technique. It’s a flat contradiction which has no clever or literary impact – it just comes over as confused and contradictory, either badly planned or contradictory passages have been cut and pasted together, for some reason.

The final section seems repetitive. He (again) advises flattery: if the mistress is black as pitch call her a ‘brunette’ to flatter her; if she squints, compare her to Venus; if she croaks, tell her she’s like Minerva; if she’s a living skeleton, call her ‘svelte’.

Never ask a woman her age, specially if she’s past her girlish prime. Anyway, age is good, it brings experience, sophistication and skill. They know a thousand different positions. And then he surprised me by making the most explicit reference I’ve read in any Roman poet. Green has Ovid saying he likes it when both partners reach climax during love making. That’s his main objection to sex with boys, he loves making his mistress gasp with sex, and making her climax (2.683 to 691).

He gives sex advice: touch her where she wants to be touched; watch her eyes assume that expression, rapture, gasps and moans. Take your time. Don’t hurry to climax and don’t come before your mistress.

Book 2 ends with a comic conclusion in which he says he excels all the soldier heroes of legend for his skill and excellence in teaching, so may every man who uses his advice to win and keep a mistress carve a trophy with the words: ‘Ovid was my guide’!

This feels like a very neat tying up of the poem and many scholars feel it was the original ending, emphasised by the fact that two of the heroes he mentions – Achilles and Automedon – were mentioned right at the start of Book 2.

But there then appear 2 additional lines, claiming that now – the girls want his advice, which most scholars think were tacked on in order to justify the later addition of Book 3.

Book 3 (812 lines)

A prologue explaining that he’s equipped men against women, now he’s going to do the reverse and offer the girls the benefit of his ‘wisdom’. The same kind of sweeping generalisations he made against women in books 1 and 2 he now makes for women. It reminds me of Cicero the lawyer, arguing sometimes for, sometimes against, the same client. It makes you realise the extent to which this poem obviously, but maybe Roman literature as a whole, was always much more of a rhetorical exercise than we are used to. Was always more of a performance of the poet’s skill in a certain style, in a certain metre, on a certain topic – than anything like our notion of poetry in particular as expressing genuine personal feelings and views.

All this explains his sudden volte-face and attempts to prove the opposite of what he was asserting a few pages back.

Men are often deceivers, girls hardly ever.

I was president of my school debating society. I recognise the signs of being given a topic you don’t have much sympathy for, and being told to present a case, first for it, then against it. You don’t win prizes for sincerity. You win prizes for the skill with which you select and present your points.

He invents the notion of Venus appearing to him and complaining that men are benefiting from his 2 books of advice; give the girls a chance.

In fact, his advice kicks off by not being particularly woman-friendly. He spends a couple of pages striking the carpe diem note i.e. your youth will pass, you’ll grow old and wizened and grey-haired so seize the day, give into love. Maybe your lover will turn out a cheat and a liar, who cares? What’s lost? Have a shower and move onto the next one. Some goods wear out with use, but your privates won’t wear out (line 92) so let your lovers come to the well a thousand times.

I naively thought the book would be a guide to women on the art of seducing men, so was disappointed when it turned out to be more like a woman’s magazine-type set of articles about how to make the most of yourself. Don’t overdo jewellery and accessories. Advice on the best hairstyle to match the shape of your face. A page on different colours for dresses. Shave your armpits and your legs. Clean your teeth. Make-up, powder and rouge. Mascara. As traditional, the best make-up remains unobtrusive (3.211).

Keep all this hard work hidden. ‘There’s a lot men are better off not knowing.’

Beauties don’t need him, his advice is for the less than perfect, the ugly or plain or short (just as his advice to men wasn’t to the handsome and rich, who need no help, but the less well-off and physically ordinary). He goes on to give advice for the skinny, the pale, the swarthy, those with skinny calves or ugly feet, buck teeth or bad breath.

Learn to cry on demand. Learn to walk elegantly with a nice sway of the hips (3.302).

Girls should know how to sing and play a musical instrument. And, of course, poetry, leading into a much-cited passage mentioning the appeal of various poets, the love poetry of Catullus, Tibullus or Propertius, the heroic history of Virgil (‘the most publicised Latin poem of all time’) maybe even his own products, the Amores and Heroides (proudly boasting that the heroic epistle is an art form he invented himself).

A girl should know how to dance. And how to play board games, which leads into a page about Roman board games which is infuriatingly light on detail (apparently, historians don’t know how to play even one single Roman board game). Ovid points out the key thing about playing is to maintain control while men, all too easily excited by games, lose theirs.

A confused section contrasts women’s limited social freedoms with men being able to exercise on the Field of Mars and go swimming in the Tiber; which quickly cuts back to places women can go to, a surprisingly large amount i.e. temples, the colonnades, the theatre, the circus, the forum. Somehow this morphs back onto a passage about poets and how they used to be respected in olden times, not so much nowadays. As towards the end of Book 2, it feels like Ovid is just cutting and pasting passages in willy-nilly, with no logic and unnecessary repetition. Somehow the passage about poetry ends with the conclusion that a good place to find a husband is at your last husband’s funeral, when you’re there with dishevelled hair and tear-stained eyes, which some men find very sexy.

Beware of smart-looking young beaux with a handsome profile and rings on their fingers – they’re cheaters and users.

By line 470, sensing that he’s becoming chaotic, Ovid tells himself to rein his muse in and try and be more structured in how he’s presenting this advice.

How to handle letters from passionate lovers i.e. wait a bit then get your maid or boy to reply. Don’t be taken in by feigned passion.

Riskily he refers to Augustus as ‘our great leader’ and just as he places men in various positions, advises a woman to do the same to her prospective lovers.

Confusingly there’s now a third section about poets, this time including some famous lines about how they get their inspiration from heaven, the God is within them etc. Sure, but why weren’t these three separate passages about poets gathered together and ordered more logically?

Back to lovers. Lock them out sometimes. Make them sweat. When things are getting boring drop hints that you have another lover, he has a rival. Juice him up. Pretend your husband’s a tyrant who’s having you watched. In the middle of an assignation have a maid come running in shouting, ‘The master’s coming,’ and then both bundle him out the window in a panic. That’ll keep him interested.

He gives a couple of pages on how to evade the watchful eye of your husband or guardian, by smuggling messages in and out, arranging illicit meetings, using a friend’s apartment, dates at the theatre or circus, let alone the baths, or the religious ceremonies supposedly restricted to women only etc.

Don’t trust girlfriends. Or your own maid. Ovid confesses to having seduced many a maid when her mistress just made herself too unavailable. The theme of jealousy prompts him to insert a lengthy telling of the story of Cephalus and Procris (3.687 to 746). This feels like padding out and is immediately followed by a note to himself to stop all these digressions.

Final burst of advice: regarding parties, already arrive late, after dark, when the torches have been lit. Eat sparingly and daintily. Final part is another surprisingly candid section of sexual advice. Just as he recommended different hairstyles and dress colours for different faces and physiques, here he runs through half a dozen different sexual positions which are appropriate for different body types (if you have a pretty face, do it missionary position; if a strong back, from behind; if you’re petite, ride him like a horse etc).

This and the parallel passage in Book 2 are the only descriptions I’ve read in the 50 or so Roman texts I’ve read. As this is a guidebook, they’re brisk and practical. As in Book 2, his ideal is that man and woman climax together. He is aware of the fact that many women can’t climax (at least not through penetrative sex) and so suggests they pant and moan and pretend, ‘put on an act!’ something, as I understand it, hundreds of millions of women have done through the ages.

And with that it’s over and he, very weakly, ends with a straight repeat of the lines at the end of Book 2, telling his girl disciples, like the boys before them, to inscribe on their trophies of successful loves, ‘Ovid was my guide.’ It was funny the first time round. Here it’s indicative of Book 3’s very belated, tacked-on and ragbag structure. No wonder he tells himself frequently throughout the book to leave off digressing, to get back to the point, to pull his socks up.

I wonder if a powerful woman ordered him to add a Book 3. Livia, maybe?

Sexism

The Ars Amatoria isn’t a bit sexist, it is made of sexism. Has there ever been a more sexist book? The entire text is based on the assumption that women are prey, like wild animals, to be stalked and captured, that they have little or no will of their own, that their main characteristics are vanity about their looks and shopping, which is why the pickup artist should focus on relentless flattery and know how to gracefully handle endless demands for gifts.

As the Amores set out to capture and record every possible aspect of the love poem, as the Metamorphoses set out to record every single Greek myth which involved bodily change, so the Ars Amatoria is, in effect, an encyclopedia of sexist and misogynist attitudes.

I could list the ways Ovid dehumanises women, reducing them to game (as in big game, animals to be hunted), birds to be caught, wild animals to be stalked, fish to be hooked, or soil to be ploughed, wild land to be tamed, and so on.

At a less metaphorical level, he is straightforward insulting about women’s natures:

If you’re wise
Gull only girls, they’re no danger. In this one deception
It’s good faith that ought to make you blush.
They’re cheats, so cheat them: most are dumb and unscrupulous: let them
Fall into the traps they’ve set themselves.
(1.642 to 646)

If Augustus was driven to fury by Ovid’s calculated mockery of Rome’s religion, venerable founder, and sexual mores, what must the formidable Livia have made of this unrelenting abuse of women as a sex? Did she have any input into the decision to banish the scandalous poet?

I imagine modern women readers will struggle with such continual libel, objectification, undermining, insult, sexism and misogyny without being overcome with disgust. Towards the end of Book 1 Ovid sinks into the darkest hole of all when he repeats the lie of the ages, that when a woman says no she doesn’t mean it: all women, deep down, want to be overcome, by force if necessary.

It’s all right to use force – force of that sort goes down well with
The girls: what in fact they love to yield
They’d often rather have stolen. Rough seduction
Delights them, the audacity of near-rape
Is a compliment.
(1.673 to 677)

And goes on to mention two women from Greek mythology who were raped and then fell in love with their rapists. Wow. Needs no comment from me.

Just one comment about Green’s style. As I mentioned in my review of his translation of the Amores, Green uses an exaggeratedly demotic, Jack-the-Lad register, and this turns out to be really appropriate for this poem, which is a long hymn to Jack the Lads. I now understand that Green’s very demotic style – which I initially thought inappropriate for the Amores – turns out to be very appropriate for the Art of Love, bringing out the vulgarity and crudity of a lot of the thought, more so than a smoother, more ‘literary’ translation might have done.

Many women adore the elusive,
Hate over-eagerness. So, play hard to get,
Stop boredom developing. And don’t let your entreaties
Sound too confident of possession. Insinuate sex
Camouflaged as friendship. I’ve seen ultra-stubborn creatures
Fooled by this gambit, the switch from companion to stud.
(1.717 to 722)

This is a vivid translation of often very repellent sentiments.

Anticipations of the Metamorphoses

Ovid is most known and read for his epic masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, a long poem in 15 books which chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar. What makes it distinctive is that it tells the story via a series of classic Greek myths or legends, in particular, stories about humans metamorphosing into plants and animals of which, when you come to study it, there turn out to be a surprising number.

I mention it here because, unexpectedly, and not really directly relevant, the Ars Amatoria contains fairly long passages which anticipate some of these stories. Thus there are extended accounts of:

Book 1

  • the legend of Pasiphaë, queen of Crete, and how she was impregnated by a bull, conceiving the half-man, half-bull monster, the Minotaur (1.289 to 327)
  • Bacchus coming to the rescue of Ariadne, abandoned on her desert island by Theseus (1.525 to 564)

Book 2

  • Daedalus devising his plan to escape imprisonment on Crete by creating wings for himself and his son Icarus, and flying to freedom (2.20 to 97)
  • the creation of the world and the universal drive to procreate among animals (2.467 to 489)
  • Vulcan trapping his wife in adultery with Mars (2.561 to 592)

Book 3

  • the legend of Cephalus and Procris (3.687 to 746)

Last word

Let others worship the past; I much prefer the present,
Am delighted to be alive today.
(3.121)

This is actually quite a striking departure from convention, because it was axiomatic for pretty much all writers and thinkers in the ancient world that the past contained a matchless Golden Age and the present was a sad, fallen age of degeneration and decline. In this handful of words Ovid rejects that entire tradition and hapless, sorry-for-itself way of thinking and strikes an exuberantly Nietzschean note: Rejoice! The present is all we have, so: Make the most of it.

Credit

The Erotic Poems of Ovid, translated by Peter Green, was published by Penguin Books in 1982. All references are to the 1982 paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on November 11, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/11/the-art-of-love-ovid/

The odes of Horace

The gods watch over me; a heart
That’s reverent and the poets art
Please them.
(Horace Book 1, ode 17, in James Michie’s translation)

Come, learn this air
And sing it to delight me.
A good song can repair
The ravages inflicted by black care.
(Book 4, ode 11)

Horace’s works

Scholars broadly agree the following dates for Horace’s body of poetry:

Horace’s odes

Horace published 104 odes. They are divided into 4 books. He published the first 3 books of odes in 23 BC, containing 88 carmina or songs. He prided himself on the skill with which he adapted a wide variety of Greek metres to suit Latin, which is a more concise, pithy and sententious language than Greek.

I shall be renowned
As one who, poor-born, rose and pioneered
A way to fit Greek rhythms to our tongue… (3.30)

Horace aimed to create interest by varying the metre as much as possible, using over a dozen different verse formats. He was particularly indebted to metres associated with two Greek poets, Alcaeus and Sappho. Of the 104 odes, 37 are in Alcaics and 26 in Sapphics i.e. over half.

The precise definition of these forms is highly technical, so I refer you to the Wikipedia articles for Alcaics and Sapphics.

Despite all this skillful adaptation, the odes were not greeted with the acclaim Horace hoped for, which may explain why he seems to have abandoned ode writing and returned to the hexameters in which he had written the satires. Using this he now proceeded to write two books of epistles, ‘elegant and witty reflections on literature and morality,’ according to James Michie, which scholars think were published in 20 and 12 BC, respectively.

In 17 BC Augustus commissioned Horace to write an ode to be sung at the start of the Secular Games which he had reinstated as part of his policy of reviving traditional Roman festivals, customs and religious ceremonies. Soon afterwards, Augustus asked Horace to write odes on the military victories of his grandsons Drusus and Tiberius. Whether these commissions renewed an interest in the form or spurred him to assemble works he’d been writing in the interim we don’t know but in about 11 BC Horace published his fourth, final and shortest book of odes, containing just 15 poems.

What is an ode?

The following is adapted from the Wikipedia definition:

An ode (from Ancient Greek: ᾠδή, romanized: ōdḗ) is a sub-type of lyrical poem. An ode generally praises or glorifies an event or individual. Whereas a pure lyric uses impassioned and emotional language, and a satire uses harsh and demotic language, an ode – insofar as it is an address to a named individual, whether friend, emperor or god – generally has a dignified and sincere tone (although part of Horace’s practice was experimenting with and varying that tone).

Greek odes were originally poetic pieces performed with musical accompaniment. As time passed they gradually became known as personal lyrical compositions whether sung (with or without musical instruments) or merely recited (always with accompaniment). The primary instruments used were the aulos and the lyre. There are three typical forms of odes: the Pindaric, Horatian, and irregular.

  • The typical Pindaric ode was structured into three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. However, Horace’s odes do not follow this pattern.
  • Horatian odes do not have the three-part structure of Pindaric odes. They tend to be written as continuous blocks of verse, or, more often, are divided into four-line stanzas. It’s in this division into neat 4-line stanzas that they most imitate Greek lyricists such as Alcaeus and Anacreon.
  • Irregular odes use rhyme but not the three-part form of the Pindaric ode, nor the two- or four-line stanza of the Horatian ode.

An ode is short. I’ve recently read the Eclogues of Virgil which are fairly long and the Georgics which felt very long: Horace’s odes are the opposite. Some are as short as 8 lines, for example book 1 ode 30 and 4.10.

Subject matter

Horace was praised by critics for not just adapting the Greek forms of Alcaeus and Sappho to Latin, but filling them with details of the social life of Rome in the age of Augustus. He broadened the subject matter to cover a much wider range of subjects including love and jealousy, friendship and mourning, hymns to various gods, addresses to the all-powerful emperor Augustus, reflections on mortality, promotion of the golden mean and patriotic criticism of excess luxury and calls for society to return to the sterner, abstemious values of their Roman ancestors. There are several poems consisting entirely of eulogy to Augustus, describing him as a blessing to the nation, the only man who could bring peace and wishing him success in his military campaigns in the East. I enjoy John Dryden’s description of Horace as “a well-mannered court slave”. It doesn’t feel that when you read all his other poems, but when you read the Augustus ones, you immediately get what Dryden was saying. The word ‘poet’ is only one letter away from ‘pet’.

Underlying all the poems, and appearing them as either passing references or the central subject, are two ‘philosophical’ themes: the uncertainty and transience of life, and the need to observe moderation in all things, what Aristotle had defined as ‘the golden mean’ between extremes:

All who love safety make their prize
The golden mean and hate extremes… (2.10)

James Michie

Greek and Latin poets did not use rhyme to structure their poetry, they used the counting of syllables in each line according to a variety of patterns established by various ancient Greek poets and copied and adapted by the Romans.

English poets by contrast, since the Middle Ages, use beats or emphasis instead of counting syllables, and have used rhyme. Not exclusively, witness the reams of blank verse used in the dramas of Shakespeare and his contemporaries or in Milton’s Paradise Lost, but certainly in short lyrics and Horace’s odes are short lyrics. All 104 of Horace’s odes fit onto just 114 pages of English verse.

This explains the decision of James Michie, translator of the 1964 Penguin paperback edition of the complete odes of Horace, to cast them into predominantly rhymed verse.

The Penguin edition is interesting and/or useful because it features the Latin on one page, with Michie’s English translation on the page opposite. I did Latin GCSE and so, with a bit of effort, can correlate the English words to the original Latin phrases, though I don’t have anything like enough Latin to appreciate Horace’s style.

Book 1 is the longest, containing 38 odes. Book 2 has 20. Book 3 has 30, and the final, short one, book 4, has 15.

Themes

Direct address to gods

Any summary of Horace as the poet of friendship and conviviality has to take account that about one in six of the poems are straight religious hymns to named deities. Michie’s (admirably brief) introduction explains that the poems give no evidence about how sincerely Horace felt these religious sentiments. Probably he was religious in the same way most educated Romans of his time were, as Cicero was: viewing religion and the old festivals and ceremonies as important for the social cohesion of Rome.

In this view the correct ceremonies had to be carried out on the correct occasions to the correct deities in order to ensure the state’s security and future. Whether an individual ‘believed’ in the gods or not was irrelevant: correct action was all. The importance of internal, psychological ‘belief’ only became an issue with the slow arrival of Christianity well over a hundred years later. In the meantime, correct invocations of the gods could be seen as part of civic and patriotic duty, especially for Augustus, who in so many ways tried to restore the old ceremonies, rites and festivals of Republican Rome.

1.10 To Mercury

You are the one my poem sings –
The lyre’s inventor; he who brings
Heaven’s messages; the witty
Adventurer who takes delight
In slyly stowing out of sight
Anything he finds pretty.

1.21 To Diana

Virgin maidens, praise Diana.
Young men, sing a like hosanna

1.30 Prayer to Venus

O Queen of Cnidos, Paphos,
Come, leave, though dearly thine,
Cyprus; for here’s thick incense,
And Glycera calls divine
Venus to her new shrine.

1.31 Prayer to Apollo

What boon, Apollo, what does the poet as
He pours the new wine out of the bowl at your
New shrine request?

Incidentally, note the slight complexity of this long sentence. It took me a few readings to realise it is:

What boon, Apollo, what does the poet (as
He pours the new wine out of the bowl at your
New shrine) request?

We’ll come back to this issue, the sometimes grammatically challenging nature of Michie’s translation.

1.35 Hymn to Fortuna

O goddess ruling over favoured Antium,
With power to raise our perishable bodies
From low degree or turn
The pomp of triumph into funeral,

Thee the poor farmer with his worried prayer
Propitiates…

To women

The poems of heterosexual men are often about difficulties with relationships. Horace has poems directly addressing women, lovers, more often ex-lovers; or addressing women who are messing with his friends’ emotions; or poems to male friends offering advice about their relationships with women. I can see how a feminist critic might object to Horace’s basic stance and to much of the detail of what he says. For me the main effect is to create a sense of the extended social circle the poet inhabits.

Come, let’s
Go to the cave of love
And look for music in a jollier key. (2.1)

Horace plays at being jealous, while never achieving the emotional intensity of Catullus. And this is because his ‘love’ poems, such as 1.13, often turn out to be really promoting his philosophy of life, namely moderation in all things, wine, women, politics and poetry.

1.13 To Lydia

Happy are they alone whom affections hold
Inseparable united; those who stay
Friends without quarrels, and who cannot be torn away
From each other’s arms until their dying day.

1.16 is addressed to an unnamed women who he has, apparently, infuriated by writing a witty lampoon about her. Horace apologises unreservedly for upsetting her. But the poem is really about the emotion of anger, how ruinous it is for individuals and nations, how it must be avoided at all costs. Moments like this accumulate to make you suspect that even Horace’s most ‘passionate’ poems are clever artifice. It is hard to imagine the poet who promoted moderation and sensible restraint at every opportunity ever losing his head over anyone, no matter how he poses.

1.19 The Poet’s Love for Glycera

The Mother of the Loves, unkindly
Goddess, and Semele’s son combine
With wild abandon to remind me
That though I had thought desire
Dead, it still burns. The fire

Is Glycera.

1.23 To Chloe

This is such fun I’ll quote it in its entirety. Whether it reflects any real situation, I doubt. It feels more like a witty exercise, in the manner of Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress. To understand it you need to realise the first line means ‘Chloe, why won’t you venture near ME’, but Michie cannot quite say that in order to preserve his tight rhyme scheme. And to know that ‘dam’ is an archaic poetic word for ‘mother’. So that the majority of the poem is treating this young woman, Chloe, as if she is as timorous and scared as Bambi.

Chloe, you will not venture near,
Just like a lost young mountain deer
Seeking her frantic dam; for her each
Gust in the trees is a needless fear.

Whether the spring-announcing breeze
Shudders the light leaves or she sees
The brambles twitched by a green lizard,
Panic sets racing her heart and knees.

Am I a fierce Gaetulian
Lion or some tiger with a plan
To seize and maul you? Come, now, leave your
Mother: you’re ready to know a man.

So, in fact, this middle-aged man is preparing ‘to seize and maul’ this timorous young woman. If we attribute the speaking voice to 40-something Horace, it is inappropriate. But if it is a song to be sung by any young man, less so.

Here he is gently mocking a friend (in fact a fellow poet, Tibullus) because his girlfriend’s dumped him:

Tibullus, give up this extravagant grieving
For a sweetheart turned sour. ‘Why was she deceiving?’
You ask, and then whimper long elegies on
The theme of the older man being outshone… (1.33)

In praise of booze

Horace is surprisingly insistent on the blessings of wine and the vine, with a number of poems recommending it as the appropriate accompaniment to all sorts of situations, from cheering up a doleful lover to consoling a parent for the loss of a child, celebrating an old friend having his citizenship restored or safely returned from a long journey (1.36), or just a way to forget sorrows and anxieties and be sociable (2.11). In ancient Rome wine was never drunk neat, but always diluted with water:

Come, boy, look sharp. Let the healths rip!
To midnight! The new moon! The augurship
Of our Murena! Mix the bowls – diluted
With three or nine parts wine: tastes must be suited.
The poet, who loves the Muses’ number, nine,
Inspired, demands that measure of pure wine. (3.19)

Above all wine was shared. In ancient Rome wine was drunk in social situations, among friends and with slaves to open the bottles and mix them correctly. In Horace’s day, men who got together to hold a convivial evening elected one of their number ‘president’ by rolling dice to see who got the highest score, and the president then selected which wines were to be drunk, in which order, to command the slaves, and institute topics of conversation or games.

Who’ll win the right to be
Lord of the revelry
By dicing highest? (2.7)

In other words, ‘wine’ symbolises not just a drink but a much deeper concept of sociability and conviviality. And importantly, this sociability was the cure for anxiety, depression and grief. So ‘wine’ isn’t at all about seeking intoxication or oblivion; quite the opposite: ‘wine’ symbolises the moderation and sociable common sense which Horace is always promoting. Even when he appears to be promoting booze, it’s really this idea he’s promoting.

Let Damalis, the girl we crown
Champion drinker, be put down
By Bassus at the game of sinking
A whole cup without breath or blinking. (1.36)

And, as with almost all aspects of Roman life, there was a ‘religious’ aspect in the sense that the Romans thanked the gods for all their blessings (just as they attributed all disasters to the malign influence of Fortune). It was ‘fitting’ to thank the gods, and often this was done with ‘libations’ i.e. pouring part of each bottle of wine onto the ground as an offering to the gods, as thanks for blessings received, as hope for blessings continued.

Pay Jove his feast, then. In my laurel’s shade
Stretch out the bones that long campaigns have made
Weary. Your wine’s been waiting
For years: no hesitating! (2.7)

In the following extract the ‘fast-greying tops’ means the greying heads of hair of Horace and his friend, Quinctilius, who he’s trying to persuade to stop being so anxious about life.

Futurity is infinite:
Why tax the brain with plans for it?
Better by this tall plane or pine
To sprawl and while we may, drink wine
And grace with Syrian balsam drops
And roses these fast-greying tops.
Bacchus shoos off the wolves of worry. (2.11)

1.11 carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero

Horace’s attitude overlaps with the modern notion of mindfulness. According to this website, ‘Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. As he tells Maecenas:

Be a plain citizen for once – you fret
Too much about the people’s sufferings.
Relax. Take what the hour gives, gladly. Let
Others attend the graver side of things. (3.8)

The shame of recent Roman history i.e. the civil wars

This attitude is not bourgeois complacency (‘Hey slave, bring us more booze!’). Well, OK, it is – but it is given more bite by the historical background. Rome had just emerged from about 13 years of civil war (Antony and Octavian against Caesar’s assassins) or a very uneasy peace leading to another civil war (Octavian against Antony). Unlike most bourgeois Horace had led a legion in a major battle (Philippi), seen men hacked to pieces around him, and seen his cause completely crushed. What good had the assassination of Julius Caesar and then Brutus and Cassius’s war against Octavian and Antony achieved? Nothing. Absolutely nothing except tens of thousands of Roman dead and devastation of entire provinces.

And he refers to it repeatedly, the utter pointlessness and futility of war.

Alas, the shameful past – our scars, our crimes, our
Fratricides! This hardened generation
Has winced at nothing, left
No horror unexplored… (1.35)

Our fields are rich with Roman
Dead and not one lacks graves to speak against our
Impious battles. Even
Parthia can hear the ruin of the West. (2.1)

So Horace’s is not the complacent attitude of a pampered aristocrat who has never known trouble, but of a self-made man who has seen a whole lot of trouble and therefore knows the true value of peace. Although he wears it lightly, it is a hard-won philosophy. And he refers to it, repeatedly.

Greek mythology

Horace is so identified in my mind with Rome, with Augustus, with the golden age of Roman literature, that it comes as a shock to see just how much of the subject matter is Greek. Take 1.15 which is a dramatic address to Paris as he abducts Helen by the sea goddess Nereus, foreseeing the long siege and destruction of Troy. 2.4 is about inappropriate love but stuffed with examples from Troy. But all of the poems contain references to Greek mythology and require a good working knowledge of its complex family trees: just who is son of Latona, who is Semele’s son? Who are:

Yet how could mighty Mimas or Typhoeus
Or Rhoetus or Porphyrion for all hid
Colossal rage or fierce
Enceladus who tore up trees for darts

Succeed? (3.4)

Or take the long poem 3.27 which contains a rather moving soliloquy by the maid Europa who, in a fit of madness, let herself be raped by a bull, a sophisticated poem full of unexpected compassion for the miserable young woman who is, of course, Jupiter in disguise. The poem contains a twist in the tail, for Venus has been standing by all through the girl’s frantic speech, enjoying the scene with that detached cruelty typical of the gods and only at the end reveals the bull in question was none other than Jupiter in disguise, hence explaining the girl’s powerlessness to resist.

False modesty

That said, there is another repeated trope which, as it were, modifies the Hellenic influence and this is Horace’s stock protestations that his muse and lyre and skill aren’t up to epic or serious verse, are instead designed for more homely, lowly subject matter. He turns this into a joke on a couple of occasions when he’s getting carried away invoking the Mighty Warriors of the Trojan War and suddenly realises what he’s doing, back pedals and dials it down.

Where are you rambling, Muse? This theme’s beyond your
Light-hearted lyre. End now. Absurd presumption
To tell tales of the gods
And mar high matters with your reedy voice! (3.3)

Maybe 1.6 is the best expression of this repeated trope of inadequacy. To understand it you need to know that Varius is a rival Roman poet, famous for his high-flown tragedies, and that the poem is directly addressed to Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the Roman general who Augustus relied on to win his battles.

That eagle of Homeric wing,
Varius, will in due course sing
Your courage and your conquests, every deed
Of daring that our forces,
Riding on ships or horses
Accomplish with Agrippa in the lead.

But I’m not strong enough to try
Such epic flights. For themes as high
As iron Achilles in his savage pique,
Crafty Ulysses homing
After long ocean-roaming,
Or Pelops’ house of blood, my wings feel weak.

And both my modesty and my Muse,
Who tunes her lyre to peace, refuse
To let her tarnish in the laureate’s part
Our glorious Augustus’
Or your own battle-lustres
With my imperfect and unpolished art…

Feasts, and the war where girls’ trimmed nails
Scratch fiercely at besieging males –
These are the subjects that appeal to me,
Flippant, as is my fashion,
Whether the flame of passion
Has scorched me or has left me fancy-free.

As usual, the translation is fluent and clever, but I stumbled over the grammar of ‘Augustus” and it took me a few goes to realise he’s saying ‘my muse refuses to tarnish either Augustus’s, or your, battle-lustres’. Maybe you got it first time, but at quite a few places, Michie’s ingenuity in rhyming results in phrases which made me stumble. Anyway, here is Horace again, protesting the modesty of his poetic aims and means:

The history of the long Numantian war;
Iron Hannibal; the sea incarnadined
Off Sicily with Carthaginian gore;
Wild Lapiths fighting blind-

Drunk Centaurs; or the Giants who made the bright
Halls of old Saturn reel till Hercules
Tame them – you’d find my gentle lyre too slight
An instrument for these

Magnificent themes, Maecenas… (2.12)

Friends

The majority of the poems address a named individual, buttonholing and badgering them, and the number of these addressed poems, added to the variety of subject matter, creates a sense of great sociability, of a buzzing circle of friends. Horace comes over as a very sociable man with a word of advice for all his many friends, something which really struck me in the run of poems at the start of book 2:

Sallustius Crispus, you’re no friend of metal
Unless it’s made to gleam with healthy motion… (2.2)

Maintain and unmoved poise in adversity;
Likewise in luck, one free of extravagant
Joy. Bear in mind my admonition,
Dellius… (2.3)

Dear Phocian Xanthias, don’t feel ashamed
Of loving a servant… (2.4)

Septimius, my beloved friend,
Who’d go with me to the world’s end… (2.6)

Pompeius, chief of all my friends, with whom
I often ventured to the edge of doom
When Brutus led our line… (2.7)

Barine, if for perjured truth
Some punishment had ever hurt you –
One blemished nail or blackened tooth –
I might believe this show of virtue… (2.7)

The clouds disgorge a flood
Of rain; fields are churned mud;
The Caspian seas
Are persecuted by the pouncing blasts;
But, Valgius, my friend, no weather lasts
For ever… (2.9)

Licinius, to live wisely shun
The deep sea; on the other hand,
Straining to dodge the storm don’t run
Too close in to the jagged land… (2.10)

‘Is warlike Spain hatching a plot?’
You ask me anxiously. ‘And what
Of Scythia?’ My dear Quinctius
There’s a whole ocean guarding us.
Stop fretting… (2.11)

Male friends he addresses poems to include: Maecenas his patron and ‘inseperable friend’ (2.17), Virgil, Sestius, Plancus, Thaliarchus, Leuconoe, Tyndaris, Aristius Fuscus, Megilla of Opus, Iccius, Tibullus, Plotius Numida, Asinius Pollio, Sallustius Crispus, Quintus Dellius, Xanthias Phoceus, Septimius, Pompeius Varus, C. Valgius Rufus, Lucius Licinius Murena, Quinctius Hirpinus, Postumus, Aelius Lama, Telephus, Phidyle, Ligurinus, Julus, Torquatus, Caius Marcius Censorinus and Lollius.

The women he addresses include: Pyrrha, Lydia (who appears in 4 poems 1.8, 1.13, 1.25, 3.9), the unnamed lady of 1.16, Glycera (twice 1.19, 1.30, 1.33), Chloe, Barine, Asterie, Lyce, Chloris, Galatea and Phyllis.

All go to create the sense of a thriving active social life, an extended circle of friends and acquaintances which is very…urbane. Civilised, indulgent, luxurious:

Boy, fetch me wreaths, bring perfume, pour
Wine from a jar that can recall
Memories of the Marsian war… (3.14)

The predominant tone is of friendship and fondness and frank advice:

Then go, my Galatea, and, wherever
You choose, live happily… (3.27)

But the reader is left to wonder whether any of these people (apart from Maecenas and Virgil, and maybe one or two others) ever actually existed, or whether they are characters in the play of his imaginarium.

The simple life

Again and again Horace contrasts the anxious life of high officials in Rome with the simplicity of life on his farm out in the country, and the even simpler pleasures of life the peasants who live on it. The theme is elaborated at greatest length in one of the longest poems, 3.29, where Horace invites careworn Maecenas to come and stay on his farm, yet another excuse to repeat his injunction to Live in the Present, for nobody knows what the future holds.

Call him happy
And master of his own soul who every evening
Can say, ‘Today I have lived…’

Homosexuality

As long as a Roman citizen of the upper class married, sired male children and performed his religious and family duties, the details of his sexuality weren’t important, or might have prompted waspish gossip, but weren’t illegal. Homosexuality isn’t as prominent in Horace’s poetry as it is in Virgil’s, but it’s here as part of his urbane mockery of his own love life and one poem in particular, 4.1, is a passionate and surprisingly moving poem of unrequited love for a youth named Ligurinus.

Why then,
My Ligurinus, why
Should the reluctant-flowing tears surprise these dry
Cheeks, and my fluent tongue
Stumble in unbecoming silences among
Syllable? In dreams at night
I hold you in my arms, or toil behind your flight
Across the Martian Field,
Or chase through yielding waves the boy who will not yield.

This Ligurinus is (apparently) a pre-pubescent boy because another entire poem, 4.10, is devoted to him, pointing out that one day soon he’ll sprout a beard, his peaches and cream complexion will roughen, and he’ll no longer be the hairless beauty he is now.

It is very striking indeed that earlier in book 4 Horace writes a series of poems lamenting the decline and fall in Roman social standards, singling out greed and luxury, and also adultery which, of course, makes it difficult to determine the real father of a child – and yet this flagrantly homosexual and, possibly, if the boy is under 16 which seems pretty certain, pederastic poem, passes without comment and presents no obstacle to the poet’s earlier harsh moralising.

Sucking up to Augustus

As is fitting, the first poem in book 1 addresses his patron (and friend) Augustus’s minister for the arts, Maecenas. And the second poem addresses the boss man himself, Augustus, unquestioned supreme ruler of Rome and its empire, who is subsequently addressed at regular intervals throughout the series of poems. Here is Horace, addressing Jupiter king of the gods but describing Augustus (referred to here by the name of his adoptive great-uncle, Caesar, by which he was widely known, before the title ‘Augustus’ was bestowed in 27 BC):

Thou son of Saturn, father and protector
Of humankind, to thee Fate has entrusted
Care of great Caesar; govern, then, while Caesar
Holds the lieutenancy.

He, whether leading in entitled triumph
The Parthians now darkening Rome’s horizon,
The Indian or the Chinese peoples huddled
Close to the rising sun,

Shall, as thy right hand, deal the broad earth justice. (1.12)

Here Horace is asking the fickle goddess Fortune to protect Augustus and the Roman armies engaged in battle:

Guard Caesar bound for Britain at the world’s end,
Guard our young swarm of warriors on the wing now
To spread the fear of Rome
Into Arabia and the Red Sea coasts. (1.35)

1.37 includes a brief description of Octavian’s historic victory over the fleets of Antony and Cleopatra at the naval Battle of Actium in 31 BC.

Thunder in heaven confirms our faith – Jove rules there;
But here on earth Augustus shall be hailed as
God also, when he makes
New subjects of the Briton and the dour

Parthian. (3.5)

Incidentally, I don’t know why there are so many references to conquering Britain. In his long reign Augustus never sent armies to invade Britain, that was left to his great-nephew, the emperor Claudius, in 43 AD.

Book 4 contains noticeably more praise of Augustus (‘O shield of Italy and her imperial metropolis’) than the previous books: was it clearer than ever that the new regime was here to stay? Had Horace got closer to Augustus? Was it a shrewd political move to butter up the big man?

We know that Horace had been personally commissioned to write the two odes in praise of Drusus (4.4) and Tiberius (4.14) which overflow with slavish praise of their stepfather, Augustus, and the book includes a poem calling on Apollo to help him write the Centennial Hymn which Augustus commissioned (4.6). So this book contains more lickspittle emperor-worship than the previous 3 books combined.

How shall a zealous parliament or people
With due emolument and ample honours
Immortalise thy name
By inscription and commemorative page,

Augustus, O pre-eminent of princes
Wherever sunlight makes inhabitable
The earth? (4.14)

And the final ode in the entire series, 4.15, is another extended hymn of praise to Augustus’s peerless achievements.

Book 4

In his edition of Horace’s satires, Professor Nial Rudd points out that book 4, published about 12 years after books 1 to 3, has a definite autumnal feeling. Virgil is dead (19 BC) and Horace’s patron, Maecenas, no longer plays the central role he had done a decade earlier. The odes to Tiberius and Drusus highlight that a new young generation is coming up, and Horace refers to his own grey hair and age. Had Maecenas previously formed a buffer between him and the emperor, and, with his declining influence, has the emperor become more demanding of direct praise?

Famous phrases

It’s difficult for a non-Latinist to really be sure of but all the scholars and translators assure us that Horace had a way with a phrase and that this meant he coined numerous quotations used by later generations.

Probably the three most famous are ‘carpe diem’ and ‘nunc est bibendum’ and ‘dulce et decorum est’, from 1.11, 1.37 and 3.2, respectively. Here’s the source Latin and Michie’s translations of each instance:

Carmen 1.11 (complete)

Tu ne quaesieris (scire nefas) quem mihi, quem tibi
finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros. Ut melius quicquid erit pati!
Seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare 5
Tyrrhenum, sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. Dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

Don’t ask (we may not know), Leuconie,
What the gods plan for you and me.
Leave the Chaldees to parse
The sentence of the stars.

Better to bear the outcome, good or bad,
Whether Jove purposes to add
Fresh winters to the past
Or to make this the last

Which now tires out the Tuscan sea and mocks
Its strength with barricades of rocks.
Be wise, strain clear the wine
And prune the rambling vine

Of expectation. Life’s short. Even while
We talk, Time, hateful, runs a mile.
Don’t trust tomorrow’s bough
For fruit. Pluck this, here, now.

Carmen 1.37 (opening stanza)

Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero
pulsanda tellus, nunc Saliaribus
ornare pulvinar deorum
tempus erat dapibus, sodales…

Today is the day to drink and dance on. Dance, then,
Merrily, friends, till the earth shakes. Now let us
Rival the priests of Mars
With feasts to deck the couches of the gods…

3.2 comes from the series of 6 poems which open book 3, which are longer than usual and adopt quite a strict scolding tone, instructing Romans of his day to abandon luxury and return to the noble warrior values of their ancestors. It needs to be read in that context:

Carmen 3.2 (Opening only)

Angustam amice pauperiem pati
robustus acri militia puer
condiscat et Parthos ferocis
vexet eques metuendus hasta

vitamque sub divo et trepidis agat
in rebus. Illum ex moenibus hosticis
matrona bellantis tyranni
prospiciens et adulta virgo

suspiret, eheu, ne rudis agminum
sponsus lacessat regius asperum
tactu leonem, quem cruenta
per medias rapit ira caedes.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:
mors et fugacem persequitur virum
nec parcit inbellis iuventae
poplitibus timidove tergo…

Disciplined in the school of hard campaigning,
Let the young Roman study how to bear
Rigorous difficulties without complaining,
And camp with danger in the open air,

And with his horse and lance become the scourge of
Wild Parthians. From the ramparts of the town
Of the warring king, the princess on the verge of
Womanhood with her mother shall look down

And sigh, ‘Ah, royal lover, still a stranger
To battle, do not recklessly excite
That lion, savage to touch, whom murderous anger
Drives headlong through the thickest of the fight.’

The glorious and the decent way of dying
Is for one’s country. Run, and death will seize
You no less surely. The young coward, flying,
Gets his quietus in his back and knees…

Two points. One, quite obviously ancient Rome was an extremely militarised society with all its politicians expected to have served in the army or, as consuls, be sent off in command of armies in umpteen foreign campaigns. Two, with this in mind it’s worth pointing out that the poem goes on to contrast the glory won by death in battle with the vulgar world of democratic politics and elections.

Unconscious of mere loss of votes and shining
With honours that the mob’s breath cannot dim,
True worth is not found raising or resigning
The fasces at the wind of popular whim…

The fasces being the bundle of wooden rods, sometimes bound around an axe with its blade emerging, which was carried by the lictors who accompanied a consul everywhere during his term of office and which symbolised a magistrate’s power and jurisdiction.

Summary

Michie is very proficient indeed at rhyming. More than that, he enjoys showing off his skill:

Boys, give Tempe praise meanwhile and
Delos, the god’s birthday island. (1.21)

A cheap hag haunting alley places
On moonless nights when the wind from Thrace is
Rising and raging… (1.25)

When the brigade of Giants
In impious defiance… (2.19)

But I think the cumulative effect of so much dazzling ingenuity is that sometimes  the poems reek more of cleverness for its own sake than the kind of dignified tone which the Latinists describe as having. At times the cleverness of his rhyming overshadows the sense.

Boy, I detest the Persian style
Of elaboration. Garlands bore me
Laced up with lime-bark. Don’t run a mile
To find the last rose of summer for me. (1.38)

Throughout the book, in pretty much every poem, although I could read the words, I struggled to understand what the poem was about. I had to read most of them 2 or 3 times to understand what was going on. Half way through, I stumbled upon the one-sentence summaries of each ode given on the Wikipedia page about the Odes. This was a lifesaver, a game changer. From that point on, I read the one-sentence summary of each poem to find out who it was addressed to and what it was about – and so was freed to enjoy how it was constructed, and the slickness of Michie’s translations.

Bless this life

Above all, be happy. Life is short. Count each day as a blessing.

Try not to guess what lies in the future, but,
As Fortune deals days, enter them into your
Life’s book as windfalls, credit items,
Gratefully… (1.9)

You can see why all the translators, scholars and commentators on Horace describe him as a friendly, reassuring presence. A poet to take down off your shelves and read whenever you need to feel sensible and grounded.

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by Simon on September 30, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 30, 2022

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