All posts tagged ghosts

The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories by D.H. Lawrence (1928)

A Penguin paperback edition of 12 short stories by D.H. Lawrence.

  • A Modern Lover (1910?)
  • Strike Pay (1913)
  • The Border-Line (1924)
  • Jimmy and the Desperate Woman (1924)
  • The Last Laugh (1924)
  • Smile (1924)
  • The Woman Who Rode Away (1925)
  • Two Blue Birds (1926)
  • Glad Ghosts (1926)
  • In Love (1927)
  • None of That
  • Sun (1928)

The 1981 Penguin edition has a 4-page introduction written by Lawrence’s friend and critic, Richard Aldington. He gives dates of composition for the stories so I’ve rearranged them according to his chronology. Aldington’s introduction concludes with the point that:

Lawrence was quite aware that as a writer of short stories he was completely out of touch with the popular and high-paying magazines of the 1920s. Instead of trying to conform, he preferred to write newspaper articles for bread and butter, and to write his stories in his own way.

In Aldington’s view the stories fall into several groups. 1) The first two are pre-Great War, Edwardian. ‘Strike Pay’ is one of the belongs to the group of studies of West Midlands coal miners. 2) ‘A Modern Lover’ is the first embodiment of a theme Lawrence returned to in later stories, of the jilting lover who returns to his jilted love only to find she has gone off with another man. 3) There are four gruesome and uncanny stores:

  • ‘Smile’ – Matthew travels to the death bed of his wife, Ophelia
  • ‘The Border Line’ – the ghost of a woman’s first husband, killed in the Great War, takes her from her second husband
  • ‘The Last Laugh’ – the demonic appearance of the god Pan in mid-winter London
  • ‘Glad Ghosts’ – the ghost of a spurned wife haunts the inhabitants of a country mansion

Aldington relates the uncanny stories to Lawrence being persuaded by his wife to return from their ranch in New Mexico to England in late 1923. He rediscovered his hatred for England and its superannuated class system but, during the trip, went to stay with an artist versed in the occult, Frederick Carter. Maybe this influenced these four supernatural stories, which are a strange eruption in Lawrence’s oeuvre.

A Modern Lover (1910?)

The first embodiment of a theme Lawrence returned to, of the jilting lover who returns to his jilted love only to find she has gone off with another man.

Young Cyril Mersham returns to the Midlands countryside where he grew up after two years away in the big city to the south. Some of the nature description is lovely but, even for Lawrence, it’s generally overwritten, overdone.

Surely, surely somebody could give him enough of the philtre of life to stop the craving which tortured him hither and thither, enough to satisfy for a while, to intoxicate him till he could laugh the crystalline laughter of the star, and bathe in the retreating flood of twilight like a naked boy in the surf, clasping the waves and beating them and answering their wild clawings with laughter sometimes, and sometimes gasps of pain.

Cyril arrives at the farm where he used to be such a frequent visitor three years ago, and is greeted by the farm wife, the father, the two sons who’ve just come back from a day at the coal mines and strip and wash, and the daughter of the house, Muriel. He is invited to stay for dinner but nowadays he talks in the received pronunciation of the South, careful and ironic statements, and the more he talks the more he alienates the entire family from him. He is not the local man he was. After eating he is out of the way in the busy kitchen with men walking backwards and forwards with hot water and whatnot, so Muriel tells him to go and wait in the parlour.

In the parlour Cyril sits in the old chair, observes the watercolour paintings of his on the wall and photos of him on the mantlepiece. In among them he notices a photo of a stranger he doesn’t know. He remembers all the books he and Muriel read and discussed, but it is all over-egged.

There, by that hearth, they had threshed the harvest of their youth’s experience, gradually burning the chaff of sentimentality and false romance that covered the real grain of life.

Cyril priggishly pontificates at her, who is all hesitancy. Their manner of speaking is quite hard to follow but what comes over is how supercilious and patronising he is. Then there’s the sound of a bicycle bell and a different male voice outside. She looks at Cyril and he instantly divines it is her new boyfriend. Muriel tells him that he told her to find someone else and, well… she has.

Sound of the interloper’s voice in the kitchen, talking easily to the brothers. Obviously he’s quite at home. Then a brother tells him Muriel’s in the parlour and he walks in to confront Cyril, the former lover.

He is Tom Vickers. He’s some kind of electrical engineer at the mine. He crushes Cyril’s hand in his handshake. But Cyril is unquenchably superior. Fencing and sizing each other up. In his internal monologue, Cyril cites literary authors to make himself feel superior and affects a lazy drawl. But he has lost.

Lawrence’s weakest area is sometimes his dialogue: it feels like he’s trying to be witty and sharp but this isn’t his metier so that this would-be witty dialogue feels weak and contrived; in trying to portray Cyril as witty and dazzling, it mostly comes over as clumsy and pretentious. I take the point that that is precisely the character of Cyril that he’s trying to portray. As with a lot of dialogue in old books, I wonder if this is actually how people spoke 100 years ago…

Lawrence is better at describing the curdling atmosphere of the scene and describing Mersham’s stealthy method of bringing up old songs and subjects with Muriel and so slowly stealing her sympathies back from the interloper.

They both leave at ten and walk the cobbled track to the barn where Vickers has parked his bike. In a way, the most memorable thing about the entire story is learning that in those days, a bicycle lamp wasn’t electrical but was an actual flame, in a lamp, with a wick, which had to be carefully lit and the glass clicked shut.

Cyril admires the other man’s confident movements, as when he leans down to pump up his tyres. He fools himself that this is the kind of man a wife gets bored of after a while, but has to admit he’s attractive. Cyril waves goodbye as Vickers cycles off.

He goes back into the parlour and asks Muriel if she’d like to walk him part of the way back to his path home. Her father looks disapproval but that doesn’t affect to young couple. Outside it is the dark night and, because he is more restrained, Lawrence is more effective.

There was a strangeness everywhere, as if all things had ventured out alive to play in the night, as they do in fairy-tales; the trees, the many stars, the dark spaces, and the mysterious waters below uniting in some magnificent game. They emerged from the wood on to the bare hillside. She came down from the wood-fence into his arms, and he kissed her, and they laughed low together. Then they went on across the wild meadows where there was no path.

They have reignited their old flame. He even says they could get married, although he has no money. He seems to suggest that she will ‘come to him again’, suggesting sex. As if they’d made love before. But doesn’t want to seem to be coaxing of forcing. but she points out how it (sex) is different for girls. Very unreasonably, he gets angry at her reluctance. He claims to have given her ‘books’ – presumably about contraceptive techniques?

When she points out how they’d have to creep about in corners, suddenly all the magic and glamour of it disappears, and he just feels tired, and a gap opens between them which she, of course senses, and begs him not to feel cross with her. Robbed of the possibility of sex, he finds himself deflated and empty. He hasn’t the energy to kiss her goodbye or say anything fancy. She turns and walks away without saying a word, her white face disappearing into the gloom.

How many billions of men must have felt this rebuff, the woman they’re wooing’s definitive refusal of sex, which bursts their balloon, evaporating all their energy or interest – and how many billions of women must have spoken sensibly and wisely and then been heart-broken when their man abruptly went cold and walked away. The story gets better as it progresses and the further it gets from Lawrence’s cack-handed dialogue. In one sense it’s a trite scenario, but the final walk through the night woods creates a mood which makes the ending genuinely moving.

Strike Pay (1913)

One of his studies of the West Midlands miners he grew up among. A lot of information is packed into just six pages. The miners are on strike. The Union agent hands out strike pay to a roomful of miners who are in a boisterous bantering mood, joking about how much they each get paid. They go into town and join the other colliers loitering around. then four of them decide to walk to Nottingham, nine miles away, to watch the Nottingham versus Aston Villa football match.

On the way they stop at each village pub for a round. They come to a field where some of the pit ponies they work with have been liberated from toiling underground (for the duration of the strike). The more adventurous of the miners round them up and mount and ride them, larking about, falling off, getting on again. Eventually they resume their trek to Nottingham. But at the next pub Ephraim Wharmby, a shy young lad, realises he’s lost his half-sovereign (a sovereign = one pound sterling, so half a sovereign was ten shillings or modern 50p). They all rifle through his clothes and boots and go back to the pony field but can’t find it. Being good chaps they all pitch in and give him two shillings each of their pay (10p) and he doesn’t have to buy the next round.

The match is good and the lads go on to more pubs, along with thousands of other colliers, but Ephraim is miserable and opts to go home. When he arrives home there is a scene with his domineering mother, Mrs Marriott, who asks where the devil he’s been, while they’ve made lunch, and tea and dinner for him, all to wait and then be cleared away. Sheepishly Ephraim hands over all he has (4 shillings sixpence, after ha paid for his football ticket) which makes Mrs Marriott angrily ask if he thinks that’s enough room and board to support him and his wife, Maud. Under the haranguing, Ephraim turns from meek and apologetic to furious, and demands his tea. Mrs Marriott order her daughter (Maud) to refuse and flounces out, but she quietly gets her man his tea, he is her man, after all.

The Border-Line (1924)

Katherine Farquhar is another avatar of Frieda Lawrence, a handsome full-bodied woman of forty, twice married with two grown-up children.

Daughter of a German Baron she was, and remained, in her own mind and body, although England had become her life-home. And surely she looked German, with her fresh complexion and her strong, full figure.

Full of confidence, she is in Paris boarding the train to take her to visit relatives in Baden-Baden and to see her second husband, Philip, a journalist currently working in Germany. She remembers her first husband, father of her two grown-up children, Alan Anstruther, son of a Scottish baronet, and captain in a Highland regiment. They fought. Alan was obstinate. After ten years they ceased to live together.

Alan had a good friend, Philip Farquar, trained for the bar, went into journalism, small and dark with an air of knowing all the secrets, attractive to women. Philip is in awe of Alan’s solidity. ‘He is the only real man, what I call a real man, that I have ever met.’

Then the Great War broke out and Alan marched bluffly off to war. In spring of 1915 he was reported missing and never reappeared. Katherine didn’t mourn. Philip stayed in England working as a journalist and was a source of consolation and strength. In 1921, aged 38, she married him.

It was lovely at first but then a sense of loss and degradation afflicted her. Philip is clever and reassures her but she feels trapped. Sometimes the face of Alan, ‘the bony, hard, masterful, but honest face of Alan would come back’ to her. She sensed him with her on the cross-Channel ferry and his memory made her happy in Paris, where the story opens.

So she takes the train East, heading into Germany, and:

As she looked unseeing out of the carriage window, suddenly, with a jolt, the wintry landscape realized itself in her consciousness. The flat, grey, wintry landscape, ploughed fields of greyish earth that looked as if they were compound of the clay of dead men. Pallid, stark, thin trees stood like wire beside straight, abstract roads. A ruined farm between a few more wire trees. And a dismal village filed past, with smashed houses like rotten teeth between the straight rows of the village street. With sudden horror she realized that she must be in the Marne country, the ghastly Marne country, century after century digging the corpses of frustrated men into its soil. The border country, where the Latin races and the Germanic neutralize one another into horrid ash. (p.94)

She is travelling across the borderline. The train arrives at Nancy. She has to change here and catch a different train on in the morning. A German porter escorts her to her hotel, where she has dinner. Then she fancies seeing the cathedral. She gets lost and has to ask a French policeman the way, for Alsace is now occupied by the French. She used to love seeing it but now she experiences the cathedral as a huge looming mass, and is terrified by the sense that behind it ‘lurks the great blood-creature waiting, implacable and eternal.’

As she turns to leave the square she sees a man waiting by the post office and realises it is her first husband, Alan. As she goes to pass, he puts his hand on her arm. He says nothing, doesn’t look at her.

She knew that she was walking with his spirit. But that even did not trouble her. It seemed natural. And there came over her again the feeling she had forgotten, the restful, thoughtless pleasure of a woman who moves in the aura of the man to whom she belongs.

She realises nothing comes close to the fulfilment of being with your man:

As she walked at his side through the conquered city, she realized that it was the one enduring thing a woman can have, the intangible soft flood of contentment that carries her along at the side of the man she is married to. It is her perfection and her highest attainment… No matter what the man does or is, as a person, if a woman can move at his side in this dim, full flood of contentment, she has the highest of him, and her scratching efforts at getting more than this, are her ignominious efforts at self-nullity. (p.97)

She knows he is a spirit returned from hell but all the fear and dread you might imagine someone having when encountering a ghost are absent. Instead Lawrence envisions the whole thing solely in terms of fulfilling a woman’s primal need.

Now that she was walking with a man who came from the halls of death, to her, for her relief. The strong, silent kindliness of him towards her, even now, was able to wipe out the ashy, nervous horror of the world from her body. She went at his side still and released, like one newly unbound, walking in the dimness of her own contentment.

And the word ‘contentment’ is repeated throughout the passage.

At the bridge-head he came to a standstill, and drew his hand from her arm. She knew he was going to leave her. But he looked at her from under his peaked cap, darkly but kindly, and he waved his hand with a slight, kindly gesture of farewell and of promise, as if in the farewell he promised never to leave her, never to let the kindliness go out in his heart, to let it stay hers always.

She goes back to her hotel and undresses for bed, trying not to break the spell of completion.

If a man could come back out of death to save her from this, she would not ask questions of him, but be humble, and beyond tears grateful.

Next morning she goes out into the defeated and occupied town but it is hard and cold. So she catches the connecting train on into Germany proper. She crosses the Rhine, huge, sluggish and weary of race struggle. It is a profound geographical borderline between the Celtic and Germanic races. At the actual border, at Kehl, she feels that ‘the two races neutralized one another, and no polarity was felt, no life–no principle dominated.’ Lawrence gives brilliant descriptions of the watery, frozen landscape. After another long delay:

At last they set off, northwards, free for the moment, in Germany. It was the land beyond the Rhine, Germany of the pine forests. The very earth seemed strong and unsubdued, bristling with a few reeds and bushes, like savage hair. There was the same silence, and waiting, and the old barbaric undertone of the white-skinned north, under the waning civilization. The audible overtone of our civilization seemed to be wearing thin, the old, low, pine-forest hum and roar of the ancient north seemed to be sounding through. At least, in Katherine’s inner ear. (p.101)

At last the train arrives at Oos and her husband, Philip, is there to meet her. He is obviously ill and complains of being cold. And she, after her transformative experience at Nancy, the deep sense of completion she felt with the ghost of her first husband, finds Philip trivial.

As she looked at him she felt for the first time, with curious clarity, that it was humiliating to be married to him, even in name. She was humiliated even by the fact that her name was Katherine Farquhar. Yet she used to think it a nice name! ‘
Just think of me married to that little man!’ she thought to herself. ‘Think of my having his name!’
It didn’t fit. She thought of her own name: Katherine von Todtnau; or of her married name: Katherine Anstruther. The first seemed most fitting. But the second was her second nature. The third, Katherine Farquhar, wasn’t her at all. (p.101)

Also waiting there is her sister, Marianne, and they immediately gang up on Philip, denigrating him in German and bursting into giggle.

Both sisters stood still and laughed in the middle of the street. ‘The little one’ was Philip.
‘The other was more a man,’ said Marianne. ‘But I’m sure this one is easier. The little one! Yes, he should be easier,’ and she laughed in her mocking way.
‘The stand-up-mannikin!’ said Katherine, referring to those little toy men weighted at the base with lead, that always stand up again.
‘Yes! Yes!’ cried Marianne. ‘I’m sure he always comes up again! Prumm!’ She made a gesture of knocking him over. ‘And there he rises once more!’ She slowly raised her hand, as if the mannikin were elevating himself.
The two sisters stood in the street laughing consumedly. (p.102)

Which I’m sure Philip, feeling cold and ill, thoroughly appreciated. So they settle in, tea, dinner, chats. Marianne is five years older than Katherine. Her husband also was killed in the war but she has reached a place of equanimity and detachment.

She had now ceased to struggle for anything at all. She was a woman who had lived her life. So at last, life seemed endlessly quaint and amusing to her. She accepted everything, wondering over the powerful primitiveness of it all, at the root-pulse. ‘I don’t care any more at all what people do or don’t do,’ she said. ‘Life is a great big tree, and the dead leaves fall. But very wonderful is the pulse in the roots! So strong, and so pitiless.’
It was as if she found a final relief in the radical pitilessness of the Tree of Life.

This comes close to my view, or is the standpoint I would like to arrive at. Philip plays up to being weak and ill. To some extent it had always been his schtick, his brand. From his point of view, he saw the strong, manly, defiant types be exterminated by the million in the war while he kept his head down, and so he survived and won Katherine’s hand. ‘When the lion is shot, the dog gets the spoil.’

From Katherine’s point of view his weakness and dependency made a welcome change after Alan’s manly expectation of being obeyed and worshipped. But here, in defeated abject Germany, Philip comes over as abject and defeated and she realises she despises him, ‘the whimpering little beast’.

Katherine sees the abject poverty of the townspeople. In the evening they queue to get water from a hot spring since so many of them can’t afford coal or wood to warm their homes and she despises Philip for his self-pitying shivering. Let him shiver!

She goes for big bracing walks in the wild woods, deep in snow and feels the presence of her manly first husband, she wants to hug the big firm pine trees. But Philip staggers along beside her, short and sick and whining. God, how she despises him! Over there, in the reddish rocks, she is sure Alan is waiting for her but… She has to turn and take the panting Philip back to his sick bed.

Philip becomes so ill he is bed-ridden but Katherine continues her long walks in the woods. One day Alan simply walks out from among the rocks, striding proudly in his kilt, and puts his arm round her, and leads her to a secluded place, and makes love to her.

She yielded in a complete yielding she had never known before. And among the rocks he made love to her, and took her in the silent passion of a husband, took a complete possession of her. (p.104)

Obviously the word ‘possession’ has a double meaning, in the contexts of ghosts and spirits. I suppose it raises the question of whether Alan’s appearances to Katherine are ‘real’ or her hallucinations.

On her return she finds Philip really ill. She doesn’t care but out of duty stays with him and tends him. Next day she can feel Alan waiting among the rocks but Philip becomes hysterical at the thought of him leaving her and so she stays, sullen and resentful. As evening approaches it grows colder and colder and:

A very powerful flow seemed to envelop her in another reality. (p.105)

Alan is calling her, Alan has hold of her soul which a force which grows by the hour. She stays with Philip who goes downhill fast, at midnight rolling his eyes, and he begs her to hold him in his arms ‘in pure terror of death’.

And as she reluctantly works her arm down around his shoulders, on the bed, the door opens and Alan walks silently in. He walks to the bed and loosens the sick man’s arms from around Katherine’s neck and places his (Philip’s) hands on his chest. And Philip has last convulsions and dies.

But Alan ignores all that and draws her over to the other bed, where he makes love to her again:

But Alan drew her away, drew her to the other bed, in the silent passion of a husband come back from a very long journey. (p.105)

Commentary

Obviously a story like this drives a coach and horses through our modern notions of feminism and gender. Lawrence’s obsession with the notion of Man and Woman, and Husband and Wife, and the primeval power they exercise over each other, seem like they’re from the stone age. Certainly the story’s notion that a woman must submit to a strong manly husband would make any feminist throw up.

In my opinion, the best thing to do with this, as with most old literature, is to suspend judgement and give yourself to the experience, submit to the text’s descriptions, ‘ideas’, obsessions and opinions, no matter how contrary to modern belief.

There’s something to outrage a feminist or progressive reader on every page, yet it would be odd to balk at these ancient attitudes but swallow whole the bigger issue here, the idea that there are ghosts, there are spirits, that ghosts of the dead come back to visit us.

In fact this itself is contested within the story. an see that this is contested. The fundamental question is, Is the ghost of Alan real or Katherine’s (very powerful) hallucination and my opinion is, It doesn’t matter. The text is what it is.

If, for the duration of the story, you buy into the (obviously nonsensical) idea that the spirits of the dead come back to haunt us, why not buy into all the story’s other nonsensical or objectionable aspects and opinions?

Reading any literature is, in an obvious sense, submitting to someone else’s worldview for a while. What’s the point of doing it if that worldview isn’t different from ours, uncanny, alien, other, enlightening, illuminating and takes us to strange places, showing us actions and opinions we wouldn’t countenance for a second in our real lives? And so judging it by the value of our real lives is a problematic, arguably a blinkered and self-censoring, approach.

On this view, the more a text breaches modern morality, or vividly depicts old opinions, different worldviews, the better, as this exercises the muscles of the imagination and helps keep our minds open, open to the millions of things human beings have believed and valued.

Jimmy and the Desperate Woman (1924)

Jimmy plunged out into the gulfing blackness of the Northern night, feeling how horrible it was, but pressing his hat on his brow in a sense of strong adventure. He was going through with it.

A satire on the type of the squirming Oxford intellectual, a type Lawrence detested.

Jimmy Frith is 35. He’s just been divorced by his ‘very charming and clever wife’ of ten years, Clarissa. Jimmy is the editor of a high-class, rather high-brow, rather successful magazine, the Commentator, and his candid editorials bring him shoals of admiring acquaintances. Plus he’s handsome. The result? He meets loads of clever, sophisticated women when what he wants is to meet the ‘real’ people, the simple, genuine, direct spontaneous, unspoilt souls. In the opinion of his men friends, he was a grinning faun or Pan-person. In his own opinion, he was a martyred Saint Sebastian with the mind of Plato. He sought some unspoilt, unsophisticated, wild-blooded woman, to whom he would be a sort of Solomon of wisdom, beauty and wealth. She would need to be in reduced circumstances to appreciate his wealth, which amounted to the noble sum of three thousand pounds and a little week-ending cottage in Hampshire.

Then his magazine is sent a short vivid poem and accompanying letter from a woman in the North. He asks for another and a correspondence ensues. To his enquiries she explains that she is married to a coal miner who has a mistress, so is alone and misunderstood. She used to be a teacher. Now she writes poetry to relieve her heart. She is Mrs Emilia Pinnegar, 31, with a child of 8.

All these facts are by way of setting the scene for the meat of the story. This is that, after some correspondence, Jimmy decides to go and visit this woman. So he takes a train to Yorkshire, then undertakes a harrowing walk through a coal-mining town as dusk falls, eventually arriving at her poor cottage where she answers to his knock.

Mrs Pinnegar is not a pretty woman. She is tall, with a long face and a haggard defiant expression. Life has been hard to her. In his semi-realistic, semi-visionary style, Lawrence depicts Jimmy overcoming all the drawbacks, in his own internal thoughts, and then rashly inviting her to run away, to come and live with him in his house in St John’s Wood. Lawrence depicts the strange and visionary in the everyday.

He lifted his face, his eyes still cast in that inturned, blind look. He looked now like a Mephistopheles who has gone blind. With his black brows cocked up, Mephistopheles, Mephistopheles blind and begging in the street.

She is astonished by this mad invitation but he insists and she begins to accept it. She suggests he waits around to meet the man of the house, which he reluctantly accepts. The husband is on the afternoon shift at the mine and arrives home soon after 9pm, dirty and reeking of underground

Maybe that’s what all the fol-de-rol of the plot was for: to arrive at this confrontation between the bookish Oxford intellectual and the dirty but proud coalminer. He strips to the waist and washes himself, then his wife washes his back, then towels him dry. They both perform this daily ritual completely ignoring Jimmy who sits in a corner, noting the husband’s thin muscular physique.

Then the wife brings his dinner and Pinnegar sits and eats, at a right angle to Jimmy. He asks why Jimmy’s here and so begins a long, tense dialogue, which includes the blunt admission:

‘She’s told you I’ve got another woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘And I’ll tell you for why. If I give in to the coal face, and go down the mine every day to eight hours’ slavery, more or less, somebody’s got to give in to me.’ (p.122)

The husband and wife argue over his other woman, but when she says she wants to go with Jimmy, he visibly strips himself of all emotion, and agrees. It’s late. Jimmy leaves to take up the reluctant offer of the local pub, to sleep on their sofa.

Next morning, he returns to the cottage. In the daylight he sees how bad the woman’s skin is and bluntly thinks, ‘however am I going to sleep with that woman?’ but determines that he will. The husband is there, in a corner, reading the paper. He asks her to come with him now, but she refuses, saying she has things to sort out, she’ll come on Monday. Now she goes out with the child, leaving Jimmy alone with the surly husband.

They talk frankly, about the new government (‘something has to change’) and then the woman. The miner says something had to change and he regards Jimmy as the instrument of that change. Jimmy knows the cold, hard miner is dominating him and hates it.

On the train home, Jimmy at first feels exultant, like he’s had a great adventure. Back in London he goes to see his friend, Severn, who thinks he’s been an idiot. This prompts Jimmy to write a last-minute letter on Sunday night asking Emily to reconsider: does she really want to come (which, of course, signals his own reluctance)?

But the only reply is confirmation she’ll be taking the train next morning. Next morning Jimmy goes to Marylebone station taut with nerves. In the cab to his house he can more than sense the presence of the other man on her, he can feel him. It will be a battle. So the story ends:

As he sat in the taxi, a perverse but intense desire for her came over him, making him almost helpless. He could feel, so strongly, the presence of that other man about her, and this went to his head like neat spirits. That other man! In some subtle, inexplicable way, he was actually bodily present, the husband. The woman moved in his aura. She was hopelessly married to him. And this went to Jimmy’s head like neat whisky. Which of the two would fall before him with a greater fall–the woman, or the man, her husband? (p.130)

On a rational level, it is wildly improbable and doesn’t make any sense. But on the irrational, unconscious level Lawrence operates on, it is magnificent.

Two Blue Birds (1926)

This is a very high-spirited, amused, ironic story. A man and woman, in their thirties, are married and love each other but for the past four years or so can’t bear to be in each other’s company. So they live apart, he in London, she in the south of France with her latest lover. He has a secretary, Miss Wrexall, who adores him, would do anything for him. The wife thinks the arrangement is fine, she suggested she go to France, she’s the one having the ‘gallant little affairs’ but the thought of his dutiful and common little secretary is like grit in her eye.

Then he has his secretary’s mother and sister move in. They’re of the servant class: the mother is an excellent cook and the sister functions as a maid and valet de chambre. When the wife comes back from France she is horrified at how well the new household functions, and himself cock of the walk.

He had that air of easy aplomb and good humour which is so becoming to a man, and which he only acquires when he is cock of his own little walk, made much of by his own hens.

The servants are all flattery and submission and what would you like for dinner, Mrs Gee, but she hates them.

Spring visit

So on her next visit she needles him. Maybe being so well provided for might be bad for his work (for he is a workaholic)? But the narrative hovers at a generalised level, about their feelings, especially her conflicted feelings: loving him but not wanting to be with him; having affairs but not caring about the other men; hating the happy little domestic situation he’s arranged for himself.

She is Mrs Gee, ‘a broad, strong woman’ just turned 40. She schemes. Her hardness is brilliantly conveyed.

The garden was full of flowers: he loved them for their theatrical display. Lilac and snowball bushes, and laburnum and red may, tulips and anemones and coloured daisies. Lots of flowers! Borders of forget-me-nots! Bachelor’s buttons! What absurd names flowers had! She would have called them blue dots and yellow blobs and white frills. Not so much sentiment after all! There is a certain nonsense, something showy and stagey about spring, with its pushing leaves and chorus-girl flowers, unless you have something corresponding inside you. Which she hadn’t. (p.19)

This is the funniest Lawrence text I’ve read. Laugh-out-loud funny. The wife comes across him dictating an article to the secretary in the garden and is infuriated: is there nowhere to escape their happy little domesticity?

He was dictating a magazine article about the modern novel. ‘What the modern novel lacks is architecture.’ Good God! Architecture! He might just as well say: What the modern novel lacks is whalebone, or a teaspoon, or a tooth stopped. (p.19)

It is an article on ‘The Future of The Novel’, precisely the kind of thing Virginia Woolf wrote by the dozen but here, taken as the epitome of fatuousness.

The wife spies on the man complacently dictating to the compliant secretary when she notices two blue tits fighting at his feet. He notices, too, and waves them away, then the wife steps forward and there’s a tense scene, with the wife making ironic catty remarks to the secretary. Then stalks off, in her rather wolfish way.

Tea time arrives and the wife reappears as the sister serves the tea things. She asks the secretary (who was about to leave) to stay, and tell her sister (the maid) to bring another cup. Miss Wrexall runs off to change (for tea) into a chicory blue dress of the same shade as Mrs Gee’s except the latter’s is very expensive and fine. Two birds in blue fighting over their man. Like the two blue tits. And the two birds of the title. Humans becoming, and behaving like, animals, as in the novella The Fox.

Mrs Gee taunts them both, suggesting Miss Wrexall is not just the most perfect secretary but that maybe she writes the husband’s novels for him? Mrs Gee taunts the secretary for being so competent and proficient at shorthand and so on. The husband bridles. Miss Wrexall becomes agitated.

Sticking the knife in, Mrs Gee tells Cameron (the first time we’ve heard his name) that maybe he takes too much from Miss Wrexall. Her aim is to stain and sully their simple working relationship. Miss Wrexall bridles and says there is nothing inappropriate between them. Trying to reconcile, Miss Wrexall says there’s no need for Mrs Gee to feel left out.

‘Thank you, my dear, for your offer,’ said the wife, rising, ‘but I’m afraid no man can expect two blue birds of happiness to flutter round his feet, tearing out their little feathers!’ (p.26)

And with that parting shot she gets up and leaves. And that’s it. It’s an absolutely brilliant depiction of its subject matter, of the very complicated currents involved in marriage, separation, relationships, all tied up with the simple metaphor of the two birds.

The Woman Who Rode Away (1925)

The unnamed young American woman who’s the protagonist, a Californian girl from Berkeley, at 23 marries a little, wiry, twisted fellow from Holland, who’s made his fortune setting up and running silver mines in northern Mexico, in Chihuahua state.

It’s a bleak isolated location. Ten years pass. She bears him two children. The Great War knocks the bottom out of the silver market and the mines are abandoned while the Dutchman tries to switch to agriculture. They have occasional white guests (i.e. non Spanish or Mexican). One of these asks what lies beyond the hills that surround the ranch and the Dutchman explains about the neighbouring Indians: about the wandering tribes, resembling the Navajo, who were still wandering free, and the Yaquis of Sonora, and the different groups in the different valleys of Chihuahua State.

This conversation lights a flame in the woman’s soul. Her husband goes away for a few days to Torreon so the woman gets her servants to saddle up a horse, packs some food and – rejecting offers to help or accompany her – sets off for the hills.

To cut a longish story short, after a while she bumps into three Indians. When she tells them she has rejected the white man’s God and wants to find out more about their gods, they nod to each other: this was prophesied; the white man has triumphed over the Indian because the sun and the moon are out of balance, but the wise men predict that when a white woman offers herself as a sacrifice, then the sun and the moon will be realigned.

So she agrees to travel back to their village where she is put up in a house without windows and, over the course of weeks and maybe months, we see her being subjected to various rituals, stripped and anointed, redressed in native costume, allowed to watch native dances and ceremonies, and above all, plied with a sweet drink which gives her hallucinations, makes her forget herself and instead see phantasmagorias and become acutely sensitive to sights and sounds.

Lawrence prepares us for the ending by having her think, repeatedly, ‘I have died, my old self is dead, I have died to my old life etc’. So she is perfectly prepared when the shortest day of midwinter arrives, and the Indians ritually strip, wash, anoint, redress her and lead her up to a sacred cave behind an imposing sheet of ice and there, as the sun moves slowly round to shine through the ice and illuminate the cave, they sacrifice her to their gods.

The actual act isn’t described. The story stops just at the moment before she is sacrificed, with a great sense of suspense.

They were anxious, terribly anxious, and fierce. Their ferocity wanted something, and they were waiting the moment. And their ferocity was ready to leap out into a mystic exultance, of triumph. But still they were anxious.

Only the eyes of that oldest man were not anxious. Black, and fixed, and as if sightless, they watched the sun, seeing beyond the sun. And in their black, empty concentration there was power, power intensely abstract and remote, but deep, deep to the heart of the earth, and the heart of the sun. In absolute motionlessness he watched till the red sun should send his ray through the column of ice. Then the old man would strike, and strike home, accomplish the sacrifice and achieve the power.

The mastery that man must hold, and that passes from race to race. (p.81)

In Lawrence’s later novels I noticed his frequent use of words he’s coined and ‘exultance’ is one of them. Standard English isn’t deep or vivid enough to convey the depth he wants to express.

The Last Laugh (1925)

E.M. Forster wrote stories about Pan, the mischievous Greek god of nature, associated with spring, fertility, merriment and sex but they were set in sunny Greece or a summer’s day in the English countryside. Lawrence has the bright idea of relocating all this to Hampstead, in north London, in the depths of winter.

So it’s a cold winter’s night when a slight man with a red beard says goodbye to two friends, a man and a woman, who are visiting, shuts his door and they go down into the street. When the woman calls goodbye Lorenzo’, we know this is a brief, sly self-portrait of Lawrence himself.

On into the snowy street go the man in his bowler hat and the young woman. She is Miss James (referred to simply as ‘James’) and is deaf. We learn this when the man says he can hear someone laughing. This prompts James to get out her listening machine, an elaborate device which needs to be switched on, and puts on her headphones. She can’t hear any laughter but then thinks she sees something in a little park with big black holly trees and old, ribbed, silent English elms, ‘a dark face among the holly bushes, with the brilliant, mocking eyes.’

They’re loud talking brings over a tall, clean-shaven young policeman. None of them can hear the laughter but they all feel… rejuvenated, enlivened. The girl finds herself attracted to the fit young policeman and starts to feel frisky:

She seemed to stretch herself, to stretch her limbs free. And the inert look had left her full soft cheeks. Her cheeks were alive with the glimmer of pride and a new dangerous surety… The second of ancient fear was followed at once in her by a blithe, unaccustomed sense of power.

This is something new for the girl:

Having held herself all her life intensely aloof from physical contact, and never having let any man touch her, she now, with a certain nymph-like voluptuousness, allowed the large hand of the young policeman to support her

Meanwhile the man in the bowler hat:

His voice, with curious delight, broke into a laugh again, as he stood and stamped his feet on the snow, and danced to his own laughter, ducking his head.

He thinks he sees something moving and sets off at a run down the hill. He comes to a halt in front of a house just as the front door opens and a woman comes down the path. She asks if he just knocked at her door and he says no. Mysteriously, magically, seductively, she says she’s always listening for that knock at the front door because you always hope… you always hope something wonderful will happen. She makes eyes at him and invites him in and he needs no second invitation. For some reason Lawrence makes her a Jewess. Maybe that is to emphasise her exotic, slightly unenglish sexiness. Into her house disappears the man with the bowler hat.

James and the policeman watch then turn away and walk towards the tube station. She feels a tremendous sense of exultation and power, so much so that she feels she could kill the policeman.

She was surprised herself at the strong, bright, throbbing sensation beneath her breasts, a sensation of triumph and rosy anger. Her hands felt keen on her wrists. She who had always declared she had not a muscle in her body! Even now, it was not muscle, it was a sort of flame. (p.139)

And then, making it absolutely plain that this is about the god:

Voices were calling. In spite of her deafness she could hear someone, several voices, calling and whistling, as if many people were hallooing through the air: ‘He’s come back! Aha! He’s come back!’ (p.139)

There’s a flash of lightning and she sees the face right in front of her. She and the policeman walk on towards her house, which is a little one in side street near a church but as they approach the church she sees the front door is open. From inside come more voices crying ‘He is back’, then piece of paper are whirled past them on the wind and then the big white sheet of the altar cloth. In case the reader hasn’t got it yet, Lawrence writes:

There came a bit of gay, trilling music. The wind was running over the organ-pipes like pan-pipes, quickly up and down. Snatches of wild, gay, trilling music, and bursts of the naked low laughter. (p.141)

The policeman is so scared by all this that he asks if he can come into her house to warm himself up. She says OK and he can make a fire in the grate but he mustn’t come upstairs, which is where she goes.

Cut to the next morning, and James in her studio looking at her paintings. She finds them ludicrous. The servant comes to ask if she wants breakfast and is surprised when James says there’s no need to shout i.e. she can hear. In fact everything feels different the morning after.

The air all seemed rare and different. Suddenly the world had become quite different: as if some skin or integument had broken, as if the old, mouldering London sky had crackled and rolled back, like an old skin, shrivelled, leaving an absolutely new blue heaven. (p.142)

The serving woman reminds her that there’s a man downstairs, the policeman. James is surprised that he didn’t let himself out the night before.

Now she thinks of Marchbanks. This is a young man she’s been jolly good friends with for two years. Not lovers, mind; none of that dirty stuff. Now, in her new world eyes, she thinks how ridiculous it is, all this man-woman nonsense and, to her surprise, she hears the low laughter, as if agreeing with her.

Only now is it made explicit that this Marchbanks is the man in the bowler hat she was with last night. Now she sees him coming down the side street to the house then entering. It’s their habit for him to come to breakfast. He asks him about staying his night with the Jewess. He left at dawn. She tells him not to shout when he speaks and he thinks she’s joking, doesn’t realise she can hear. She is, in fact, cured.

James now has the confidence to mock Marchbanks who doesn’t like it. She tells him she saw the face again, closer up, last night, and heard the laughter, but can’t tell him any more.

They go down to see the policeman and the story for the first time topples over into being a ghost story. The policeman hasn’t left because he has gone lame. James asks him to take his socks off and they discover that his foot has become deformed, curled itself up like the paws of an animal. Of course. He has started turning into a satyr. In her ear James hears the creepy laughter and then Marchbanks reels back as if he’s been shots.

She started round again as Marchbanks gave a strange, yelping cry, like a shot animal. His white face was drawn, distorted in a curious grin, that was chiefly agony but partly wild recognition. He was staring with fixed eyes at something. And in the rolling agony of his eyes was the horrible grin of a man who realises he had made a final, and this time fatal, fool of himself.

‘Why,’ he yelped in a high voice, ‘I knew it was he!’ And with a queer shuddering laugh he pitched forward on the carpet and lay writhing for a moment on the floor. Then he lay still, in a weird, distorted position, like a man struck by lightening. (p.146)

And the story ends abruptly with ‘faint smell of almond blossom in the air.’

This is a horror story, isn’t it? not a genre you associate with Lawrence.

Aldington suggests that Lawrence’s placing of himself at the start of the story somehow implies that he is a wizard capable of deploying the occult powers that follow. This includes deforming ‘his natural enemy’, the policeman (to understand this you need to know about the terrible persecution Lawrence suffered from the authorities and the police during the First World War; see the novel Kangaroo) and striking dead a personal enemy.

Smile (1926)

A very short story, 5 pages. The third-person narrator describes a man on a train south. He’s had a telegram announcing that a woman he is attached to somehow, Ophelia, is critically ill. She is in a hospice run by the Blue Sisters, in Italy. Unable to stay up all night at her bedside, he sits up all night on the sleeper train from France into Italy, as penance. He has a Christian frame of mind, in fact:

His dark, handsome, clean-shaven face would have done for Christ on the Cross, with the thick black eyebrows tilted in the dazed agony.

But by the time he gets to the hospice, the following evening, the Mother Superior tells him Ophelia is dead. She leans towards him sympathetically, but he recoils. When she places a hand on his arm he notices how shapely it is. When she stands he sees how full-bodied she is. She calls for a young nun to come and accompany him to see the body and he notices how shapely her hand is, too. So he’s taken to see the body. In the room is another nun. When she stands he notices her fine white hand against her bosom. Obviously he is super-aware of their femininity.

When Matthew (only now are we told his name) sees the body (we are only now told it is his wife), gives a grunt and then smiles. The three women (Mother Superior, a senior nun, the junior nun) are scandalised but smiles are infectious and one by one, they smile too.

The smile fades and he looks back over his marriage. Ten years during which she became restive and left him numerous times, only to crawl back. There are no children. The whole thing was a disaster. he’s filled with bottomless sadness.

Inexplicably he feels the dead woman digging him in the ribs, tempting him to laugh. To quell it he turns to the Mother Superior and snarks ‘Mea culpa’. The nuns step back from this strange angry man. But even as he makes for the door he has to hold back the smile and, as he passes her, is smitten by voluptuous feelings for the mature nun.

When he’s left the three sisters move closer, bend over the body and notice, they think, the ghost of a smile on the dead woman’s face. Did she see him? Did she catch the smile that infected them all?

Glad Ghosts (1926)

Long, 40 pages. It was the first fictional work he began after what proved to be his final trip to Europe, in the autumn 1925.

It’s a surprisingly accessible, chatty first-person narrator tells this long ghost story. It’s all about his friendship with the Honourable Carlotta Fell. They met when they were both at school together. She was attracted to him because he had a real feel for the thing, for It, but they were never lovers, never anything like. She affected to hate her own class but like all posh young people, got over it and married into it, to a Lord Lathkill, very handsome, officer in a Guards regiment. He sees them soon after they’re engaged when Lathkill jokes about ‘the Lathkill bad luck’.

They see each other now and then but then the war comes. Afterwards, he sees them again, learns that Lathkill was wounded in the throat, now his voice is husky. They have twins. The narrator visits and sees them asleep in their cots. How sweet. Then a little girl.

He travels. Then he hears about the disasters. The twins were killed in a car crash along with their aunt. A few months later the little girl dies of an illness. He’s abroad when he gets the news and toys with writing, but what could he say? Some time later he returns to England and sends a letter. Carlotta replies inviting him to their place in Derbyshire. He counter-replies asking to see her in London. Here he sees for himself the lines of suffering in her face, and how the stuffing’s been knocked out of her.

She really presses him to visit them in Derbyshire so he acquiesces. Lathkill meets him at the station and drives him to their dark, lifeless mansion. Here things kick up a notch. For the first time we learn the narrator’s name, Mark Morier (distantly echoing the Paul Morel of Sons and Lovers).

More to the point, we learn two key facts: this house has a ghost, a woman ghost, who is meant to bring good luck (unlike the bad luck which has so far blighted the couple) but this ghost is rarely if ever seen. And 2) that Lathkill’s elderly mother holds seances and that in one of these the medium unambiguously stated that the Lathkill ghost would return as and when a friend of theirs with two Ms returned. Lathkill and Carlotta both think ‘Mark Morier’.

That evening he attends an awesomely frigid and stony dinner: Carlotta and Lathkill, along with his witchy mother, and two other guests: a yellow liverish colonel, and his terrified silent wife, Mrs Hale. The stoniness of the dinner is magnificently conveyed.

Then the women retired and the men go to the drawing room to smoke and drink spirits. Here the terrified Colonel tells his story. He married young, a woman named Lucy who was 28 to his 20. She bore him three children who grew up and married, but then she died. And then she reappeared to him after death. She badgered him to remarry and even suggested the bride, one of their daughters’ friends, 28, the same age Lucy was. And yet after the second marriage, she has haunted him angrily denouncing him for betraying her, terrifying him away from sleeping with the new Mrs Hale. Hence the extraordinary frigidity of the couple at dinner time, the fear and sterility in Mrs Hale.

Then they go up to join the women for coffee and more stilted conversation. In the midst of it, the man suggest putting some records on and dancing, so they clear the furniture out of the way and there’s an extended description of the dance, of the narrator’s feelings of dancing with old Carlotta, and then with terrified Mrs Hale.

In the midst of the dancing they feel the room become very cold. Presumably it is the ghost. The Colonel had gone to bed but now he reappears in his pyjamas, saying the ghost of Lucy has reappeared to admonish him. This triggers a diatribe from Lathkill. He explains that he realises he has been living bloodlessly, like a ghost, he and Carlotta are both ghosts, the house is dead and sterile. But this evening he has realised they have to live while they are still alive.

He sits next to Mrs Hale and presses her hand to his breast. And he tells the Colonel that the only way to appease the spirit of Lucy is to take her to his heart and warm her. Did they have much sex when they were married? No, the Colonel admits; he didn’t think she wanted it and so had affairs with other women but left her alone. Now Lathkill, in his raised visionary state, tells him to open his chest to her, and the Colonel indeed undoes his dressing gown, unbuttons his pyjamas and exposes his chest. He delivers an astonishing paean to his mother, thanking her for creating him, a man of flesh and blood.

If this was a ghost story, a genre story, we’d meet the ghost. But it isn’t, it’s Lawrence delivering a sermon. The sermon is, unsurprisingly, about the importance of physical love i.e. sex but delivered by Lathkill, who’s gone into visionary overdrive:

We’ve almost become two ghosts to one another, wrestling. Oh, but I want you to get back your body, even if I can’t give it to you. I want my flesh and blood, Carlotta, and I want you to have yours. We’ve suffered so much the other way. And the children, it is as well they are dead. They were born of our will and our disembodiment. Oh, I feel like the Bible. Clothe me with flesh again, and wrap my bones with sinew, and let the fountain of blood cover me. (p.192)

The women react to these speeches in the same bizarre spirit, Carlotta bursting into tears, Mrs Hale sticking by Lathkill.

Eventually this bizarre and surreal scene comes to an end and Lathkill walks the narrator to his guest room. Here he strips and imagines stiff unhappy Carlotta stripping down the hall and fantasises about worshipping her with his body. Instead he remains chaste. Then he goes to sleep and has a visionary dream, a long fantasia which involves meeting the ghost in the heart of oblivion. Here’s what he dreams.

Women were not unknown to me. But never before had woman come, in the depths of night, to answer my deep with her deep. As the ghost came, came as a ghost of silence, still in the depth of sleep. I know she came. I know she came even as a woman, to my man. But the knowledge is darkly naked as the event. I only know, it was so. In the deep of sleep a call was called from the deeps of me, and answered in the deeps, by a woman among women. Breasts or thighs or face. I remember not a touch, no, nor a movement of my own. It is all complete in the profundity of darkness. (p.201)

There is no embarrassing next morning, he just gets up and leaves, Lathklill shaking his hand, Carlotta saying ‘At last it was perfect!’

What this means is made clear in the last page of the story, which consists of a letter Lathkill writes some time later to the narrator who is once again abroad. In the letter Lathkill announces that Carlotta has had a baby, with yellow hair, while just a few days later, Mrs Hale had a baby with black hair.

So what I think ‘happened’ is that the evening ended with Lathkill impregnating Mrs Hale and the narrator impregnating Carlotta. The three alienated and sterile people (Lathkill, Carlotta, Mrs H) were all rejuvenated and brought back to life, in real flesh-and-blood bodies. Colonel Hale was exorcised of his guilt and has gone off to farm pigs. Even spooky Lady Lathkill has, apparently, abandoned the other side and committed to ‘this side’, to life in the here and now. With the result that the dead house where the narrator noticed everyone spoke in hushed whispers, has been restored to life. And Lathkill loves his life and his home again.

Sex is the cure.

According to notes, Lawrence really struggled with this story, starting and finishing others while he wrestled with it and you can see why. Like so many of his works it falls into two halves: the opening is amazingly fresh and realistic, sounding like a normal writer, and even up to the frigid dinner party it makes sense. It’s when the Colonel confesses how he is haunted by the ghost of his first wife that the story crosses over to the other side of fantasy. The sudden cooling of the room as if a spirit had entered, the increasingly frenetic dancing, the men swapping their dancing partners as they are to swap sexual partners, and Lathkill’s visionary speeches to the Colonel, Carlotta and his mother, before plunging into the strange ending where the narrator appears to have sex in a dream. Or is he just repressing the reality of sleeping with another man’s wife? I prefer the dream opinion because that’s what Lawrence presents in his text, that’s what’s on the page, and that is what is such a weird and giddy escape from the banal world of adultery.

Social history note: Here as in other stories from the period, Lawrence talks about them putting some jazz on the gramophone. Imagine how evocative it would be if he only told us the precise track.

In Love (1927)

12 pages. A light comedy.

Two sisters: Henrietta and Hester. Hester, the eldest, 25, is due to get married in just a month’s time. Henrietta, the younger, is just 21. Hester looks worried about going to spend a weekend with her fiancé, Joe, on his farm in Wiltshire but she goes anyway.

Here she spends the day helping with the chores, helping the cook serve dinner etc, then the servants wash up an leave. Six months earlier Hester would have been comfortable with Joe, they’ve been friends for donkey’s years. But now there’s a constraint between themselves because he’s made the mistake of falling in love with her. He wants to cuddle and ‘pet’ and all that stuff, which she finds repellent. Wishes it had never happened, now. For some reason I’ve found more humour in this selection of Lawrence stories than in all his novels put together.

He was extremely competent at motor-cars and farming and all that sort of thing. And surely she, Hester, was as complicated as a motorcar! Surely she had as many subtle little valves and magnetos and accelerators and all the rest of it, to her make-up! If only he would try to handle her as carefully as he handled his car! She needed starting, as badly as ever any automobile did. Even if a car had a self-starter, the man had to give it the right twist. Hester felt she would need a lot of cranking up, if ever she was to start off on the matrimonial road with Joe. And he, the fool, just sat in a motionless car and pretended he was making heaven knows how many miles an hour. (p.151)

After enduring some ‘cuddling’ on the sofa, Hester asks Joe to play the piano for her and while he plays she slips out of the bungalow. She feels an immense relief to be out in the cool night under the moon but then the playing stops and she, on impulse, shimmies up into the weeping willow which hangs over the stream. Joe comes calling for her, but quietly and pathetically, making her despise him even more. More comedy:

She began to cry, and fumbling in her sleeve for her hanky, she nearly fell out of the tree. Which brought her to her senses.

She worries that she must be abnormal. All the other girls love this love stuff. Suddenly there’s the sound of a car which pulls up at the gate to Joe’s place. Hesta scrambles down out of the tree and runs over. It’s none other than sister Henrietta, and the car is driven by Joe’s brother, Donald, and in the back is Teddy, a second cousin.

They all swear they don’t want to interrupt the love birds, they’ve come to stay on an adjoining farm, but Hester insists they come in. When Henrietta and Hester enter Joe is, of course, furious, which the innocent younger sister doesn’t understand. Hester wants them all to stay but Henrietta can see they’re not wanted and, after warming her hands at the fire.

In front of her Hester and Joe have a flaring row. Joe wants to know why Hester just walked out like that and Hester claims she has a very good reason so… What is it, asks naive Henrietta. The impatient boys out in the car toot their horn. Henrietta yells out the door for them to wait half a minute and turns back to the couple who are at daggers drawn. Finally Hester spits it out:

Her face flew into sudden strange fury. ‘Well, if you want to know, I absolutely can’t stand your making love to me, if that’s what you call the business… I couldn’t possibly marry him if he kept on being in love with me.’ She spoke the two words with almost snarling emphasis… ‘Nothing can be so perfectly humiliating as a man making love to you,’ said Hester. ‘I loathe it.’ (p.159)

Joe goes red with fury then pale with shock. The girls comment on horrible men:

‘I don’t believe I could stand that sort of thing, with any man. Henrietta, do you know what it is, being stroked and cuddled? It’s too perfectly awful and ridiculous.’
‘Yes!’ said Henrietta, musing sadly. ‘As if one were a perfectly priceless meat-pie, and the dog licked it tenderly before he gobbled it up. It is rather sickening, I agree.’
‘And what’s so awful, a perfectly decent man will go and get that way. Nothing is so awful as a man who has fallen in love,’ said Hester.
‘I know what you mean, Hester. So doggy!’ said Henrietta sadly. (p.159).

To be precise, the sisters agree that men are awful. But then in a comic twist Joe announces that he never lover her either. He only proposed and did all the lovey-dovey stuff because it was expected of him. All of which he says with a sneer. Is he sincere, or just recovering from being rejected. Hester is surprised but Henrietta is appalled.

And he realises what a pig he’s been and repents, And Hester for the first time sees:

the honest, patient love for her in his eyes, and the queer, quiet central desire. It was the first time she had seen it, that quiet, patient, central desire of a young man who has suffered during his youth, and seeks now almost with the slowness of age. A hot flush went over her heart. She felt herself responding to him. (p.161)

So she decides to stay and Henrietta slips out to let the love birds alone. Moral: love is a complicated thing.

None of That

22 pages. First-person narrative. The unnamed narrator meets Luis Colmenares in Venice. He’s a Mexican painter in exile. Surprisingly their conversation is all about a world-famous bullfighter from Mexico, Cuestra, who retired when an American woman, Ethel Cane, left him half a million dollars, and who Colmenares saw the other day swimming in the Lido.

Colmenares says he knew Ethel Cane in Paris before the war, when she knew ‘everybody’, was married to a painter (who wasn’t darling?) and had a mania for collecting antique furniture. Then she came to Mexico, attracted by the violence of the revolution, and hooked up with Colmenares, as someone she’d know in Paris. She came in search of a special man but her can-do energy and independence put off Mexican men, who were used to respect and obedience. They danced with her and expected her to become their mistress but she had a catchphrase: ‘I’m having none of that!’

So she became bored and insulted Mexico, saying it was nothing but little boys with guns.

She had an imaginary picture of herself as an extraordinary and potent woman who would make a stupendous change in the history of man. Like Catherine of Russia, only cosmopolitan, not merely Russian. And it is true, she was an extraordinary woman, with tremendous power of will, and truly amazing energy, even for an American woman. She was like a locomotive-engine stoked up inside and bursting with steam, which it has to let off by rolling a lot of trucks about. But I did not see how this was to cause a change in the tide of mortal affairs. It was only a part of the hubbub of traffic. She sent the trucks bouncing against one another with a clash of buffers, and sometimes she derailed some unfortunate item of the rolling-stock. (p.210)

(Cf the comic comparison of Hester with a car in ‘In Love’.) Colmenares was in thrall to her and flattered by her attention but she never had any intention of becoming an item. She used him for his information about Mexican history and society etc. Colmenares explains that he sometimes thought she wanted to be made love to, but realised that was only with her external self. Deep inside she despised men (‘she was always hating men, hating all active maleness in a man. She only wanted passive maleness’), and only used them to try and ‘start something’, to be at the centre of something, to make something happen. He knew if he gave in to becoming her lover he would be chewed up and spat out and then the subject of humiliating stories told to others. So he felt a physical repulsion from her.

Anyway, the narrator prompts Colmenares to move things along and the painter comes to the bit where Ethel Cane meets the world-famous bullfighter, Cuesta. Well Colmenares took her to a bullfight. At first she was disgusted by the blood and killing but then Cuesta came on and performed like a god. When he kills a particularly demanding bull, Ethel goes mad and joins the rest of his intoxicated admirers. She cheers and he catches her eye and it visibly affects him, he is so distracted Colmenares worries he might make a mistake and be injured.

But he isn’t. Instead, later, Ethel asks whether Colmenares knows Cuesta (yes) and asks for an introduction. So Colmenares arranges for him to call round, dressed in his best, wearing a ponytail. He doesn’t speak any other language; Ethel speaks in French, which Colmenares translates. It’s a brief call but Cuesta takes to calling round regularly. He just sits there talking to the translator he brings, staring at Ethel all the time. He’s a pig, he’s an animal, when alone with Colmenares, he refers to Ethel in the crudest physical terms. He has no brains, no imagination, nothing fires him. Colmenares he’s not really even human.

Nevertheless Ethel is infatuated and asks Colmenares endlessly for his opinion. Suddenly she starts talking about killing herself. Mad with infatuation she doesn’t want her body to triumph over her imagination.

‘If my body is stronger than my imagination, I shall kill myself,’ she said… If my body was under the control of my imagination, I could take Cuesta for my lover, and it would be an imaginative act. But if my body acted without my imagination, I–I’d kill myself… If I can’t get my body on its feet again, and either forget him or else get him to make it an imaginative act with me–I–I shall kill myself.’ (p.220)

Colmenares tries to persuade both these people to walk away, Ethel to get on a train to New York and forget, Cuesta to stop tormenting her. But she is infatuated and Cuesta 1) thinks of her as a dish he wants to eat and 2) learns that she is rich, really rich, very, very rich. But neither of them want to be physical. Ethel takes herself too seriously to be so vulgar and Cuesta actually finds her pale whiteness repulsive.

Cuesta always goes to her house early in the evening, and for half an hour at most, claiming to be busy in the evening. But on his last visit, when Ethel asks why can’t he visit her for a full evening, he tells her she is welcome to come to her house at 11, when his evening business is finished. She is embarrassed and acts surprised that he is available so late. ‘If it’s a special occasion,’ he replies.

‘Come, then, at night–come at eleven, when I am free,’ he said, with supreme animal impudence, looking into her eyes.

A few days later Colmenares hears Ethel is ill. A day or two later it is announced she is dead. It was all hushed up but Colmenares knows she poisoned herself. In her will, she had left half her fortune to Cuesta. The will had been made some ten days before her death but it was allowed to stand and so he took the money.

The narrator complacently concludes that ‘Her body had got the better of her imagination, after all’ but Colmenares says it was worse than that. When Ethel and Cuesta retired to Cuesta’s bedroom, he handed over to a gang of his cronies who gang-raped her, telling them to be careful not to leave bruises or marks. The doctors at the inquest still found puzzling bruises but then another revolution broke out and the whole affair was overshadowed by larger violence. Mexico.

Sun (1928)

18 pages. Maurice and Juliet are Americans. They live in New York (East Forty-Seventh Street) where Maurice runs his own unspectacular but efficient business. He wears dark grey suits and parts his hair neatly. Since they had a little boy, Juliet has changed, becoming increasingly upset at her stifling life. The doctors recommend a break, in the sun, so she and her little boy take ship across the grey Atlantic and on to Italy.

Here she settles into a villa with a few servants. After a few weeks of lying dressed in the sunshine, she makes the decision to sunbathe naked and, after a little scouting round, finds a sheltered rocky place among cacti where she won’t be overseen. Lawrence describes her first occasion bathing quite naked and the wonderful feeling of coming back to life it awakens in her.

She slid off all her clothes, and lay naked in the sun, and as she lay she looked up through her fingers at the central sun, his blue pulsing roundness, whose outer edges streamed brilliance. Pulsing with marvellous blue, and alive, and streaming white fire from his edges, the Sun! He faced down to her with blue body of fire, and enveloped her breasts and her face, her throat, her tired belly, her knees, her thighs and her feet.

Back at the villa she tells her little boy to strip and, reluctant and scared at first, he quickly gets used to scampering round in the nude.

‘He shall not grow up like his father,’ she said to herself. ‘Like a worm that the sun has never seen.’

A month or more passes (January through February) with Juliet sunbathing every day. She turns golden brown. She takes her boy with him to the secret place. There are a few minor incidents, like the time she realises he is standing before a snake and has to very carefully make him back away, while the snake disappears.

Then one day, walking naked among the bushes she comes across the peasant from the next-door podere tying wood to his donkey. He straightens and sees her and they make eye contact.

Then his eyes met hers, and she felt the blue fire running through her limbs to her womb, which was spreading in the helpless ecstasy. Still they looked into each other’s eyes, and the fire flowed between them, like the blue, streaming fire from the heart of the sun. And she saw the phallus rise under his clothing, and knew he would come towards her.
‘Mummy, a man! Mummy!’ The child had put a hand against her thigh. ‘Mummy, a man!’
She heard the note of fear and swung round.
‘It’s all right, boy!’ she said, and taking him by the hand, she led him back round the rock again, while the peasant watched her naked, retreating buttocks lift and fall.

She slips her grey shift on and goes back to the villa, lies on her bed and fantasises about him. Next day she is down at the secret rocky place when the villa’s ancient housemaid, Marinina, shouts down to her. Her husband is here, all the way from New York. Then she shows Maurice down the secret path to the sheltered sun terrace.

He looks immaculate in a dark grey suit and she realises what a totally indoor man he is. He for his part is shocked to see her standing completely naked and averts his eyes as he walks forward. They don’t embrace or touch, but discuss practicalities. The little boy sees his Dad and isn’t that moved. When Maurice takes him in his arms, the boy demands that he removes his jacket.

Juliet announces she’s never going back to New York, she couldn’t bear it. He hesitantly acquiesces then, for politeness’ sake, she asks if he can come out here. To her disappointment he says yes, he can probably manage a month.

She ended on an open note. But the voice of the abrupt, personal American woman had died out, and he heard the voice of the woman of flesh, the sun-ripe body. He glanced at her again and again, with growing desire and lessening fear.

They have lunch. Now Juliet had noticed that the peasant had lunch at the same time every day, at the house over on the next podere or terrace. He has it now, with his wife dressed in black. Juliet arranges their lunch so that Maurice sits with his back to the view while Juliet can see across to the peasant and his heavy wife. Juliet fantasies about sex with him, to be taken and drenched in sunlight with such an elemental force, and then part without all that tedious talking and engagement, just being uplifted and transported. Whereas, her husband! She looks at him over the lunch table.

There was a gleam in his eyes, a desperate kind of courage of desire to taste this new fruit, this woman with rosy, sun-ripening breasts tilting within her wrapper. And she thought of him with his blanched, etiolated little city figure, walking in the sun in the desperation of a husband’s rights.

God. Suddenly she realises white worm-like Maurice will make love to her and she will get pregnant again with his child and bear it and be trapped in the same sunless place. When all she longed for was to be transformed by wonderful sun-drenched sex with the solid, silent man of the earth.

And the story ends with this bitter note of her being trapped.

Note: the phallus

Interestingly, there seem to be two significantly different versions of this story. The online version includes several mentions of the peasant’s ‘phallus’, namely when she stumbles across him silently working in a little gully and he turns round and sees her naked and she sees his intense eyes but then notices his ‘phallus’ growing erect in his trousers. And ends with Juliet comparing the peasant’s big penis favourably with her husband’s ‘little, frantic penis’. Whereas the words phallus and penis don’t appear in the Penguin paperback version. There’s no mention of this in Aldington’s introduction and no notes, so I’m guessing that even in 1981, Penguin had to be careful and chose to print a bowdlerised version of the story, maybe that Lawrence himself toned down to secure publication. But that the Planet Gutenberg online version, created in 2004, felt free to use the uncensored version.

In the Penguin version it’s only at the very end that we learn of Juliet’s sun-filled infatuation with the peasant, or the idea of the peasant, and it felt to me like it came out of the blue, though was quite a powerful bombshell to end on. In the online version the incident in the gully with the phallus occurs earlier and so establishes the theme of sex-with-the-peasant much earlier, which is then reprised at the end. We are more prepared for Juliet’s sense of lust lost at the end.

Both ‘work’ but to produce different flavours. If I was forced to choose, I’d prefer the censored Penguin version. This is because the effects of the sun on Juliet’s body and consciousness are reasonably subtle, as is the interplay of her with her little boy and how he gets used to playing naked. But when you read of a phallus engorging, let alone the comparison of two men’s penises, it doesn’t exactly move things into the realm of pornography, but it does undermine the subtlety of the other perceptions and descriptions. I think the censored version is slightly crippled in shape by having the sexual impact of the gully episode played down; but the benefit is that you pay more attention to Juliet’s changing feelings.

Credit

‘The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1928 by Martin Secker. References are to the 1981 Penguin Classics paperback edition, though most of the stories are available online.

Related links

The Planet Gutenberg version of this collection has slightly different stories, in a different order.

Related reviews

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Posted by Simon on March 7, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/03/07/the-woman-who-rode-away-and-other-stories-d-h-lawrence/

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen (1881)

‘Here I go battling on with ghosts, both within and without…’
(Old Mrs Alving lamenting her lot in Ghosts, page 126)

A drama about not only the sexual and religious hypocrisies of late-nineteenth century bourgeois society but of the multiple levels of deceit and, more profoundly than that, the dead hand of old ways of thinking, which lie like ghosts upon the lives of the living.

Act 1

Pastor Manders arrives at the estate of widowed old Mrs Alving, situated near a fjord. The next day he is due to deliver a speech at the opening of a new orphanage named in honour of her dead husband, the Captain Alving memorial Home (p.103)

Mrs A is attended on by a young buxom serving girl, Regine. Regine’s crippled, often drunk carpenter father, Jacob Engstrand, has been over on the estate helping to build the new orphanage. He shambolically tries to persuade Regine to accompany him on a ferry back to his house in town but she refuses. Engstrand has a plan to set up a refuge for merchant seamen. He wants Regine to help out but this quickly degenerates into a vision of her dancing and entertaining the sailors in the evenings, and the suggestion that if she plays her cards right she’ll wangle herself a ship’s officer or even captain. And she wouldn’t have to marry them, just extract money in return for…At which point a furious Regine threatens him and forces him to back out through the French windows.

After some time away in Paris, her artistic son Oswald has returned for a visit.

There’s a long conversation between Manders and Mrs Alving which reveals a whole load of scandalous family secrets. Manders triggers it all by accusing Mrs A of being a bad wife for running away from her husband after just a year of marriage and seeking refuge with him, the pastor.

Nettled, Mrs Alving decides to reveal the truth. During that miserable first year of marriage she had discovered that Alving was a womaniser and a philanderer and how wretched it made her feel. Manders dismisses this by pontificating about the duties of a wife and mother:

MANDERS: All this demanding to be happy in life, it’s all part of this same wanton idea. What right have people to happiness? No, we have our duty to do, Mrs Alving! And your duty was to stand by the man you had chosen and to whom you were bound by sacred ties.

And:

MANDERS: It is not a wife’s place to sit in judgement on her husband. Your duty should have been to bear with humility the cross which a higher power had judged proper for you.

As if accusing her of being a bad wife isn’t enough, Manders then goes on to accuse her of being a bad mother, in that she sent her son away when he was only seven to be raised in a different household.

‘Slowly and with control’ Mrs Alving then unleashes the truth. Her husband never reformed, her husband carried on being a corrupt womaniser till the day he died. He forced her to sit with him getting drunk on wine and listening to his stupid stories before she had to roll him into bed. For nineteen long years of married purgatory she had to put up with his dire behaviour.

And he had an affair with their maid. She overheard them in the conservatory, her husband making a move, the maid (Johanna) trying to push him away. He got the maid pregnant. The whole thing was only hushed up by giving her a big cash sum ($300) and packing her back to the arms of her boyfriend, the very same ramshackle old Jacob Engstrand we saw at the start. So Regine is the illegitimate daughter of her ex-husband. Engstrand was flattered by her returning to him and then, she came with a tidy sum of cash and a story about some passing some rich foreigner who’d taken advantage of her, so shamefacedly went to Pastor Manders to get them married in a hurry (p.122).

It was because, aged seven, Oswald was getting old enough to ask questions that she sent him away. Not because she was a bad mother, because she was a good mother who didn’t want him raised in a household full of corruption and lies (p.118).

This is why she has devoted a lot of money to building the orphanage in her husband’s name, to try and prevent any whiff of scandal. But there’s another, buried motive. The orphanage cost exactly as much as her bride price. She wanted to get rid of it because ‘I don’t want any of that money to pass to Oswald. Anything my son gets is to come from me.’

When, on the morrow, the orphanage is opened, Mrs Alving will feel it like an exorcism. At long last the ghost will be laid and ‘this long, ghastly farce will be over’ (p.120).

But then something strange happens. In a way which breaches realism but is packed with symbolic meaning, both the pastor and Mrs A hear a scuffled coming from the dining room and then Regine’s voice urgently whispering: ‘Oswald! Are you made? let me go!’

The heavily moralising or symbolic point is that – the young generation are repeating the sins of their parents. Or, as Mrs Alving puts it:

MRS ALVING: ‘Ghosts! Those two in the conservatory…come back to haunt us.’ (p.120)

Act 2

Act 2 picks up in the same drawing room immediately after dinner i.e. an hour later, and shows Mrs Alving still reeling from the revelation that his son is trying it on with her maid and Manders reeling from the way everyone involved lied to him. Manders reassures himself that the marriages were all carried out according to law and order but Mrs Alving blasphemously wonders whether it’s the law and order which cause all the trouble and delivers a Nora Helming outburst:

MRS ALVING: I’m not putting up with it any longer, all these ties and restrictions. I can’t stand it! I must work myself free! (p.124)

This leads into a classic ‘moral’ quandary, namely should Mrs Alving tell her son the truth about his father. Pastor Manders, as representative of social morality, finds himself arguing no, that she shouldn’t burst his illusions and ideals. But Mrs Alving now feels that observing the proprieties i.e. lying, for all those years, and continuing to lie to her son, just indicts her as a coward.

She starts out saying she needs to get Regine out of her house as soon as possible, to send her back to her father. But then, pondering her reluctance to go home, she voices another scenario: maybe she should encourage Oswald and Regine, if not to marry, then at least to commit to live together, unconventionally but honestly.

Manders is horrified because…it would be incest – they both share the same father, they are half-brother and sister. To which Mrs Alving delivers the devastating response:

MRS ALVING: Do you think there aren’t plenty of couples all over the country who are every bit as closely related? (p.125)

So now we can see how incest brought about by male philandering is the core of the plotline. But Mrs Alving goes on to deliver a little speech which rises above this ‘issue’ to address a more imaginative or symbolic level:

MRS ALVING: Ghosts! When I heard Regina and Oswald in there, it was just like seeing ghosts. But then I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Pastor Manders, every one of us. It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them. I’ve only to pick up a newspaper and I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. Over the whole country there must be ghosts, as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here we are, all of us, abysmally afraid of the light. (p.126)

Impressive speech and compelling vision, especially to someone like me with my view of the unchangeability of human nature which condemns each new generation to repeat the behaviours of the previous ones.

Because now there’s another revelation (Ibsen’s plays seem to proceed from one devastating revelation to another) which is that back then, nineteen years ago, when Mrs Alving ran away from her unfaithful husband, she ran to Pastor Manders because she was in love with him and she knew he was in love with her. In the pastor’s mind, the greatest achievement of his life was overcoming his own personal wishes, putting duty and responsibility first and telling Mrs Alving to return to her husband. Now her revelations that this led to 19 years of purgatory throw into doubt the meaning of that great ‘victory’. He calls it a victory over himself but Mrs Alving calls it ‘a crime against both of us’.

What’s more it led her to rethink the entire notion of religious faith, honour, duty and so on, and the harder she thought about them the more they fell to pieces in her hands:

MRS ALVING: Yes, when you forced me to submit to what you called my duty and obligations. When you praised as right and proper what my whole mind revolted against, as against some loathsome thing. It was then I began to examine the fabric of your teachings. I began picking at one of the knots but as soon as I’d got that undone, the whole thing came apart at the seams. It was then I realised it was just tacked together.

So she’s quite the speech maker and quite the social radical.

Scene: Engstrand plays the pastor

Then enters Engstrand. He puts on a big performance for the pastor, claiming that now the orphanage is finished he and the lads would like the pastor to mark it with a little service. Manders hits him between the eyes with everything Mrs Alving’s told him, that Engstrand only took Johanna back for the money and lied and lied to him (Manders) about getting her pregnant etc etc. But Engstrand (who needs, I imagine, to be played by a slyly comic actor) comes over all working class piety, clutching his hat in his hand and yes my lord no my lord-ing Manders. He spins events to place himself in the light of a pious hard-working soul who saw it as his duty to rescue this poor sinner woman (Johanna) etc. When directly accused of only marrying her for her money (the $300) Engstrand loftily insists he never touched a cent of it but used it all to educate his (legal) daughter, Regine.

Manders is completely taken in and enchanted. When Engstrand exits to go and prepare the building for a little service Manders turns triumphantly to Mrs Alving and says ‘Well?’ but she (presumably like the audience) has completely seen through Engstrand and finds Manders’ naivety touching: ‘I say you are a great big baby and always will be’ and goes as if to hug him till the pastor flinches back in naive horror. He exits to go carry out the promised service.

Scene: Oswald’s illness

In the silence that follows Mrs Alving hears the tink of glass from the dining room and is disconcerted to realise Oswald is still in the dining room. She thought he’s gone for a walk. She calls him in to the living room (the main set) worried he might have overheard some of their talk. But this is quickly eclipsed by Oswald making a revelation to her (another of Ibsen’s revelations) that he is ill, very ill, so ill that he thinks he’ll never be able to work again.

In Paris, he’s been having more and more severe headaches and he went to see a specialist who confirmed that he has some kind of inherited sexual disease, or, as the doctor put it, ‘The sins of the father are visited upon the children.’ But Oswald shows the doc all the letters from his mother (Mrs A) praising her husband, Oswald’s father, to the skies (lying, as required by social convention), and so proved it couldn’t have been an inherited STI.

At which point Oswald blames himself for leading an indulgent bohemian lifestyle. He reiterates that it’s all his own fault and he can’t live with the guilt of wrecking his own life. If only he had someone else to blame it on…

Well, there’s a ton of dramatic irony here because half an hour earlier we learned that it almost certainly was inherited from his dissolute father (though the genetics and/or disease theory of all this is pretty ropey: he could, in fact, only have been infected via his mother i.e. the captain gave Mrs A syphilis or some such which she transmitted to Oswald at birth. The Wikipedia entry has a footnote dealing with the science).

Anyway, obviously Mrs Alving paces up and down in anguish, knowing that with a few sentences she could release her son from his crushing guilt but only at the cost of destroying his illusions about his father. I know it’s meant to be heart-wrenching scene of a poor mother torn between etc etc, but the patness of it, the cunning artifice of it, is quite funny.

But Mrs Alving doesn’t get to tell the truth because first he a) desperately asks for something to drink to wash away his headful of anguish and then b) makes his mother sit with him while he drinks champagne and…asks her opinion about Regine: ‘Isn’t she marvellous looking, Mother?’

He is, in other words, unconsciously copying his father, drinking far too much, forcing her to listen to him burble on, and fancying the maid. But then he goes further (as I say, Ibsen’s plays seem to consists of a succession of revelations).

He tells his mum that last time he was home he was waxing lyrical about the joys of life in gay Paris when one thing led to another and he playfully said: ‘You must come with me there’. Now, on his return, he’s discovered that Regine remembered that remark and took him literally. (This is why she’s been learning French and explains why Regine’s character keeps popping little French tags into her conversation). Anyway, she asked him: ‘What about my trip to Paris?’ and it suddenly made sense to him – that Regine, so full of life and certainty, can be the cure for the dread and anxiety he feels.

During the scene Mrs Alving had asked Regine to fetch a half bottle of champagne. Now Mrs Oswald tells her to bring another, whole, bottle and Oswald adds, ‘as a glass for yourself.’ As Regine returns with the bottle and the third glass and, very nervously accepts a drink, Oswald tells his mother his mind is made up. He’s returning to Paris and taking Regine with him.

This finally stings Mrs Alving into action and she stands and announces she has something to tell them (obviously a) his father’s immorality and b) their incestuous consanguinity). But at that moment, probably meant to be dramatic but also has a comic impact, the parson enters, as in a Whitehall farce.

He is surprised to see Regine sitting with the other two and holding a glass of champagne as if she is their social equal but flabbergasted when Oswald announces that she (Regine) is leaving with him for Paris as his wife! For the second time Mrs Alving stands and says now she is going to speak plainly but, for a second time is interrupted. For this time they hear shouting in the distance, throw open the windows and see that the brand-new orphanage, which was due to be opened the next day, is on fire!

Act 3

Scene 1

They’re all back in the main house later the same night, with the embers of the ruined orphanage glowing in the distance. It burned to the ground. Nothing was saved.

Remember how I described the scene where Engstrand posed as the embodiment of aggrieved piety, insisting that he married Joahnna out of Christian charity rather than for her little nest egg, in order to wrap the pastor round his little finger? Well, that scene has its sequel here. For we find Engstrand with mock reluctance persuading the pastor that it was him (Pastor Manders) who started the fire, it was he who they left to put out the candles, who they all saw pinch one out with his fingers and chuck the stub away, unfortunately into a pile of shavings.

Manders doesn’t remember any of this and insists that he never puts candles out that way, but Engstrand’s mock-apologetic insistence wins him round. The con man (for that is what he is) insists that he’ll stand by Manders at the public hearing, which there’ll have to be, and will do his best to deflect the anger of the townspeople at the loss of the orphanage which was going to be benefit everyone (by taking parentless children off the rates).

And one last thing: the money to find the maintenance and expenses of the orphanage was to come from the interest from her bride price which Mrs Alving had invested. Now that money needs a purpose at which point Engstrand usefully pipes up to remind the pastor about his plan for a Seaman’s Home.

Just in case there was any doubt whatsoever that Engstrand invited the pastor down to the orphanage to carry out a ‘service’ precisely in order to burn it down and blame him, and thus secure the funding and support for his own project, Ibsen gives Engstrand an ‘aside’ to his daughter in which he says: ‘Now we’ve got him nicely, my girl.’ Ibsen is routinely described as a giant of modern theatre but moments like this are as subtle as a stage villain twirling the ends of his black moustache and cackling, ‘My evil plan is working!’

There’s a final joke so broad surely the audience was meant to laugh. Engstrand helps Manders on with his coat and makes a parting promise:

ENGSTRAND: And this place for seafaring men, it’s going to be called the ‘Captain Alving Home’, and if I can run it my way, I think I can promise it’ll be a place worthy of the Captain’s memory. (p.152)

Well, as we learned earlier, the captain turned out to have been a world class philanderer, adulterer and womaniser, and this confirms the passage of the opening scene where Engstrand was trying to encourage his own daughter to come back to the city with him so as to provide ‘entertainment’ for the sailors, in the form of singing, dancing and sexual favours. I was surprised to find Ibsen doing such broad comedy.

Scene 2

So the comedy duo of Manders and Engstrand exit, leaving the tragic trio of Mrs Alving, Oswald and Regine. Oswald has only just staggered in from the scene of the fire in a semi-catatonic state. He sits stiffly while his mother cleans his face and then calls for all the doors to be closed to try and shut out his terrible feeling of dread. He starts to talk wildly, almost cackling. Basically, the actor has to give the impression of someone who’s mind is genuinely going.

Mrs Alving hurries to comfort him but poor Regine is, understandably, bewildered. Nobody told her her posh knight in shining armour was going mad.

So Mrs Alving proceeds to tell her son that his father was just like him, full of joy and energy but, finding himself trapped in a provincial town with a wife confined by her sense of duty, he felt trapped and took it out in womanising and getting drunk. And then, elliptically, refers to the fact that Regine is his father’s daughter i.e his half-sister. That makes them both sit up!

And Regine announces she will leave at once. She was having second thoughts about mad Oswald and this thunderbolt clinches it:

REGINE: No, you won’t catch me staying out in the country, working myself to death looking after invalids. (p.156)

So she wraps her shawl around her and announces she’ll hurry off to try and catch the same ferry as the pastor and her ‘father’ or ‘that rotten old carpenter’ as he calls him. Angry at being lied to, and being brought up as a servant instead of on equal terms to Oswald, she storms out, leaving the sad mother and mad son.

Scene 3

The thrust of the scene is that Oswald doesn’t feel anything for his dead father. He barely knew him and has one and only one memory of him, as a boy, making him smoke a cigar till he was sick. When Mrs Alving gives way to convention (contradicting her speeches earlier in the play) and says surely a son ought to have a duty to love a father, Oswald replies that’s just one of those old superstitions, just a relic lying around, to which Mrs Alving replies, ‘Ghosts’, and the audience go, ‘Yes, the title, the theme, we get it.’

But Oswald reveals a dismayingly instrumental view of Mrs Alving, he likes her and she will do to look after him in his illness. But then he makes her pull up a chair and reveals (remember how Ibsen plays consist of a carefully paced series of revelations?) that his illness is not physical, it’s in his head. He had an attack in Paris which rendered him helpless as a baby.

Mrs Alving is horrified but promises to be a mother to him when these attacks happen. But Oswald explains that the next attack might be permanent, infantilise him forever, and he’d be a bed-bound baby until he was old and grey. This is the course of his dread.

Which is why he shows her the small box he keeps in his breast pocket. In it are 12 shots of morphine. When he has his next attack he wants her to administer them and kill him. She screams and says, ‘What? Me who gave you life?’ to which Oswald makes the slightly teenage reply:

OSWALD: I never asked you for life. And what sort of life is this you’ve given me. I don’t want it! Take it back!

So from having been about incest this has become a play about euthanasia. Packs in the topical issues, doesn’t he, Ibsen? Mrs Alving promises she will, if he has an attack, administer the poison. Oswals calms down. She pulls up her chair and promises to look after him like a mother looks after a child. Dawn breaks over the mountains and the fjord.

And it’s at this moment that Oswald has an attack, saying, ‘Mother give me the sun,’ then shrinking in his chair, going flaccid, losing his mind, repeating flatly ‘the sun, the sun’. Mrs Alving leaps to her feet and screams, struggles to find the box Oswald just gave her, says yes, yes, then no, no, and stands staring at him in horror as the curtain falls.

Comment

I thought it was going to be a predictable number about Victorian sexual hypocrisy and double standards but the central plot of Regine and Oswald being half-siblings by the same father and the threatened risk of their incest takes things to a higher, more dangerous level.

But then, in the last few pages, the entirely new topic of a mother faced with the euthanasia of her stricken son has a blistering intensity which blots out everything which came before it.

A searing, intense, deeply disturbing experience.

The title

According to Wikipedia:

Ibsen disliked the English translator William Archer’s use of the word ‘Ghosts’ as the play’s title, the Danish or Norwegian Gengangere would be more accurately translated as ‘The Revenants’ which literally means ‘The Ones Who Return’…It has a double meaning of both ‘ghosts’ and ‘events that repeat themselves’ which the English title ‘Ghosts’ fails to capture.

Related links

Ibsen reviews

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by Simon on September 30, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Theatre, Translation
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Posted by Simon on September 30, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/09/30/ghosts-henrik-ibsen/

Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying by Roald Dahl (1946)

Ten very early short stories by Dahl, all relating to the author’s own experiences flying for the RAF during the Second World War, and published in one volume the year after the war ended.

An African Story (1945)

A story within a story. The frame story is about a rebellious trainee RAF pilot in Kenya who one day flies so low he shears the head off a giraffe by accident. A few weeks later he is killed in a training accident and the ‘editor’ of the text says they found the following story among his papers.

The main text is a spooky and unpleasant story, set in Africa. A dirty miserly old man keeps a farm and the part of it that is relevant to the story is that each morning a slobbering idiot servant he keeps, named Judson, milks the one black cow who lives and grazes in the yard near the man’s house.

Judson is a cretin, slobbering at the mouth, doing what he’s told without question. At the start of the narrative, the old man discovers that the slobbering servant, who is hyper-sensitive to sounds (hyperacusis), has just whacked the old man’s dog with a stick and broken its back. Unpleasant. Why? Because it was making a ‘noise’ as it licked itself. Doubly unpleasant. The old man yells abuse at Judson then finishes the agonised dog off with a metal bar.

Judson is meant to milk the black cow once in the morning, once in the evening. On a couple of mornings in a row the cow has no milk. At first the old man accuses Judson of drinking it himself, but then he stays up all night cradling a shotgun and watching the cow, on the suspicion that maybe a native Kikuyu is sneaking in and stealing the milk.

In the event what he sees is strange: a massive black mamba snake slithers into the yard, rears its head and suckles the cow dry. The old man conceives a wicked revenge on Judson for killing his dog. He tells Judson it is a native boy sneaking in and stealing the milk, and he’ll get him, Judson, to lie in wait then jump out and beat him. So the old man gets Judson to dig a trench next to the cow and lie in it. Judson doesn’t like it because the cow is making a loud chewing noise which upsets him, but the old man covers him in straw and tells him if he pops up too soon he will shoot him dead.

The pair then wait up all night, the old man at the window with his gun, Judson in the trench. In the dark morning along slithers the huge black mamba snake and, when it is close to the cow and the trench, the old man yells at Judson to jump up and attack the phantom milk thief. Judson jumps up, the mamba leaps forward, biting him in the trench, and the story gives a long lingering description of his death throes.

As an amateur psychologist I’d say this story is overflowing with anger. Breaking the dog’s back is nasty and brutal but is only the preliminary for the contrive revenge which the old man takes. Now he hasn’t got a servant to help him. It makes no logical sense. It is a fantasia of super-human anger and vicious revenge. Was this streak in Dahl’s imagination already or is it a reaction to the war and the pointless deaths of so many friends?

Only This (September 1944)

An ageing woman alone in a cottage in the south of England hears the thundering of an immense flight of bombers flying overhead, pulls her armchair to the open window and imagines she can see her son flying one of them and slowly, as in a dream or nightmare or horror story, finds herself actually present in the cockpit as the the plane heads into flak over the enemy target, as a wing catches fire, then a sudden explosion, the cockpit fills with smoke then flames, the pilot heroically battles to keep it flying straight as the rest of his crew bail out, then slumps forward as the bomber begins its death fall.

At which the narrative cuts back to the woman in the chair by the window as dawn glimmers and the first roar becomes audible of the bombers returning. This short intense vision ends with the fact that the woman herself has died.

Katina (March 1944)

Quite a long narrative, packed with factual detail based on Dahl’s short period flying Hurricanes during the Battle of Greece, as the British force sent to try and hold the country was overrun by the German army and Luftwaffe.

It centres round the symbolic figure of a 9-year-old girl, the Katina of the title, who the narrator and his friends rescue from a bombed village where her entire family has been killed and who becomes a mascot to the entire squadron, is fed, dressed and looked after by all of them, even as German attacks become more intense, as the Germans strafe and bomb their airfields. There is a lot of affecting detail about the impact she has on the men of the squadron, her friendship with a flyer named Fin, how she is officially enlisted onto the squadron’s membership, given a tent of her own, invited to eat at all the meals and so on.

It rises to a visionary intensity when (spoilers) at the end, a huge flight of Messerschmitts is strafing the British airfield, everyone has run for the deep slit trenches but they all see Katina get out and run into the heart of the airfield, clenching her fists and defying the invader who murdered her family. Which is magnificent by a Messerschmitt fighter machine guns her to death. All the men run out to her but the doc concludes she’s dead but here’s the thing – in a non-realistic passage the narrator has a vision of flames within flames, of an intense red fire flaring up in the hearts of all the people of Greece.

All the story up till then had been underplayed, written in a muted, understated style which, for example, casually mentioned that this or that pilot didn’t return from a mission, as one by one they’re picked off. Which makes the florid efflorescence of this vision of fire and anger at the end of the story all the more startling.

Beware of the Dog (October 1944)

Opens with a Spitfire pilot badly wounded, his right leg blown away by enemy airplane cannon fire, struggling to make it back to Blighty. It is an exercise in describing the light-headedness and hallucinations resulting from loss of blood. The pilot manages to bail out and tumble through thousands of feet of cloud spinning round and round and this very cleverly turns into the alternation of day and night at the hospital where he finds himself when he comes round with no memory of how he got there.

The kindly nurse tells him he’s in a hospital in Brighton and is very kind and carefully gives him bed baths, he begins to suspect he is not in Brighton, not even in England, he suspects he fell in enemy territory and is being softened up prior to a debriefing in which he will be encouraged to give away military secrets. So when a man dressed impeccably as a British Wing Commander arrives, he refuses to reply to his questions with anything but his name, rank and serial number.

At first I thought this was a story about his paranoia, not least because of the brilliant way the point-of-view descriptions of him tumbling out of the sky morph seamlessly into his lying in the hospital bed. But then I, also, began to suspect the nurse and the so-called Wing Commander who comes to interview him and the factual basis of his suspicions appears to be given when he painfully tumbles out of bed and crawls across the floor to a window, hoists himself up and sees that he is not in busy urban Brighton at all, but in a house in the middle of country and that opposite it is a house with a sign reading ‘Garde du chien’, French for ‘Beware of the dog’ (hence the title of the story). So he is in occupied France and the entire thing really is a clever setup to lull him into a false sense of security and allow the Germans to milk him for military information.

They Shall Not Grow Old (March 1945)

The narrator is a fighter pilot based in Haifa, north Palestine, flying sorties over Vichy France-controlled Lebanon and Beirut. His mates are ‘the Stag’, ginger-haired and the oldest flyer in the squadron at 27, and Fin. The story opens with Fin failing to return from a mission. His friends kick around in the sun and conclude he must have bought it. Tents and schedules and rations are reorganised. The commanding officer, ‘Monkey’, reports him missing.

Then a miracle happens. Two days after he failed to return the others hear the droning of an engine and Fin’s Hurricane comes into land. He gets out and walks towards his stunned colleagues. But he himself is staggered and then upset when they tell him he’s been gone 2 days; for him, it was just a normal mission, he flew over Beirut harbour, confirmed the presence of two French ships, and flew back. Why all the fuss. Monkey has to carefully explain that he’s been gone for two days. Fin thinks he’s going mad.

Slowly things settle down and next day he goes out on another flight with some of the other planes. One of their colleagues, Paddy, is shot down, and as his plane hits the ground Fin suddenly remembers what happened to him, and starts yelling on the radio that he remembers, he remembers!

Once they’ve gotten back to base and gathered in the ops room, Fin tells them a long, visionary story about how he was enveloped in white cloud and dove down and down to clear it but descended beneath the surface of the earth and there was nothing there, then he looked up and saw a visionary line of planes flying across the sky, and he knew it was a procession of all the dead flyers and he flew up to join it, all sorts of planes, allied and enemy, and they fly into a wonderful light, and he realises pilots about him have opened their cockpits and are waving like children on a rollercoaster, then he sees a vast airfield where all the planes have landed and he descends towards it, sees all the pilots getting out and walking towards a beautiful light, but suddenly his plane won’t land, he tries to force it to, but it resists all his urgings and climbs away, up into the clouds so that he loses sight of the vision altogether and then he was in his plane over the sea and flying back to the airfield and landed.

Well, his audience of fellow flyers is stunned. People walk away without commenting or asking questions. The daily routine resumes and they continue flying sorties. They know the Syrian campaign is coming to an end. On one of these sorties, Fin is shot down. The narrator shouts through the radio for him to bail out, but all they hear, as his plane hurtles towards the ground, is Fin yelling: ‘I’m a lucky bastard, a lucky, lucky bastard.’

Is this because he knows he is now, at last, going to fly his ghost plane towards the great light he saw? That this time round he is going to die for real, and go to heaven? Is that where the procession of planes he saw was heading? Was there some cock-up in his passage to the afterlife, and now, after a few days hiatus, he is filling his destiny?

The impact of the story is all the greater because the style throughout is so plain and understated, and because Dahl is very good at picking out the details of scenes – the feel of the heat on the airmen’s backs as they hang round the airfield, the noise of the planes, and a little sequence about Fin’s local girlfriend, Nikki, which helps make the real world setting that much more convincing – which all makes Fin’s vision all the more spooky and supernatural.

Someone Like You (November 1945)

Two pilots are getting really drunk in a bar. The conversation is punctuated by them asking the waiter for more drinks, even while agreeing that the beer is foul and the whiskey is worse. Doesn’t stop them and the reader realises it is part of the ‘therapy’. They have both seen terrible things, have terrible emotions coiled up inside them, getting hammered is the only way they can let it out.

The older more experienced one is a bomber pilot. He has a lot to get off his chest. He admits he hates his job, He’d rather be anything else in the world. He’s become obsessed by the thought that, when he’s over the target, just a minuscule jink on his rudder will shift the plane a hundred yards to the left or right, and will mean the difference between life or death for hundreds of people on the ground. He asks his drinking buddy to look round the nightclub they’re sitting in, then drunkenly points out that he’s killed many times the number of people in this room, hundreds of times more.

They have another drink and the bomber pilot tells the story of old Stinker Sullivan. He had an Alsatian dog he doted on and named Smith. One day the squadron was ordered to up sticks and fly to Egypt, immediately. Old Stinker ran round the airfield shouting for his dog which didn’t turn up. Forced to fly off without him. Here’s the point of the story: in the new base he slowly began talking to Smith the dog, referring to Smith, then taking him for walks, then telling him to ‘behave’ in restaurants. All the time there was no Smith there. Hallucination. Or comfort.

The point of the story is the three indicators of psychological damage, namely their determination to get drunk, the bomber pilot’s obsessive worry about the innocent people he kills, the powerful story of Stinker Sullivan going mad (four, actually, since the unnamed narrator shares his own irrational behaviour which is, after he’s gotten into a car, to count to 20 before driving off in order to prevent accidents).

Death of an Old Old Man (September 1945)

‘Oh God, how I am frightened’ is how this story starts. First-person account of a fighter pilot, tired after 4 years of combat, describing how terrified he is all the time he’s on the ground, in the mess, preparing the plane, a state of continual anxiety and terror. Once he’s up in the air his computer mind takes over, making split second decisions. The Spitfire becomes an extension of his body. He has a long duel with a Focke Wulf somewhere over Holland, which ends with them flying towards each other and shearing each other’s wings off. The narrator bails out and parachutes down into a field, at the last minute realising he’s heading straight for a cows’ muddy drinking pool. The chute falls on top of him and he is struggling up to his chest in water with the huge tangled canopy when he hears steps and the enemy pilot jumps onto him, seizes him by the neck and drowns him.

Except he doesn’t die. His disembodied consciousness watches the struggle from a distance, watches the German flyer emerge from the pool dragging a wet bundle (his own body) drop it and stomp off across the field. And the consciousness of the dead pilot pursues him, talking to him, the German reacts with terror and starts running, the dead pilot considers following him but then decides to go and have a lie-down among the primroses and violets.

So a lot happens. There’s a lot of information packed into a small space. First the semi-nervous breakdown of a pilot cracking under the strain. Then the beautiful description of flying a Spitfire meshing with the intensity of aerial combat. Then the panic of parachuting from a stricken plane. The gruesome struggle in the muddy pond. And then the ghost story ending. Amazingly, this intensely male, haunted and violent story was first published in the Ladies’ Home Journal in September 1945, one month after the end of the war.

Madame Rosette (August 1945)

The longest story of the collection, at 41 pages, in which two pilots who we have met in other stories (the Stag, Stuffy) go for a night on the piss in Cairo, picking up a young pilot from 33 Squadron, William, along the way. There is a great deal of background colour, about the sights and smells of Cairo, descriptions of hotels and bars, and a lot of comedy, for example when they decide to befriend and buy drinks for two local men in a belly dancing club and discuss the relative merits of thin women versus fat women.

But the core of the story is that, earlier that day, Stuffy had been enchanted with a woman who served him in a shop and is surprised when the Stag explains that any woman in Cairo can be bought, if you have enough cash. He explains there is an ageless brothel keeper named Madame Rosette, and if you give her the young woman’s details, she will send a pimp to the shop in question and make the woman in question an offer she can’t refuse. Then Stuffy will be able to ‘take her out’ for dinner or a dance or whatever, confident in the knowledge that they’ll end up having sex.

Initially Stuff is intoxicated by this revelation, and gets Madame R’s phone number off the Stag and rings her (from the bar where they’re drinking, kept by an Englishman named Tim) at the last minute giving a fake name, claiming to be one Colonel Higgins, describing the woman who served him and the shop, and Madame Rosette says she’ll see what she can do. Without thinking Stuffy gives her the phone number and room number of the hotel they’re staying in.

To cut a long story short, as the day progresses Stuffy comes to have second thoughts, gets increasingly nervous at both the cost and the squalor of the deal and eventually gets the Stag to ring Madame Rosette back to cancel the deal, holding the phone at some distance from his ear to avoid the barrage of abuse she unleashes.

So then they bathe, dress and head out for a night on the town. But something the Stag mentioned has stuck in Stuffy’s mind, the notion that Madame Rosette’s brothel is staffed by women who have been coerced into prostitution and then blackmailed to remain in it.

Eventually, completely drunk, the three pilots decide to ‘liberate’ the prostitutes and take a horse-drawn carriage to Madame Rosette’s where they bluff their way past the enormous bouncer, demand to see the Madame herself, and tie and gag her in her office, before bursting into the room containing the hookers in various states of undress, announce with fake officiality that they are the Military Police and frogmarch them down the street to the nearest bar, where all military pretence collapses and it turns into a wild party, ending with the three pilots each taking a horse-drawn cab to deliver back to their homes the ‘liberated’ prostitutes all except for the three who have taken their fancy.

Why do young men join the army? Well, you couldn’t behave like that in Huddersfield or Hackney, could you?

A Piece of Cake (1945)

An account of Dahl’s crash in the desert, which he described more fully in the memoir Going Solo. The facts are more or less the same, including the name of the airfield he took off from, but he omits the basic fact that he was given the wrong co-ordinates for the airfield he was meant to be flying to and ended up circling round empty desert looking for it till his gas ran out, he was forced to make a crash landing and really did crash, his face violently thrown against the windshield, smashing his nose, dislodging a few teeth, knocking him unconscious, hitting his forehead so hard all the skin swelled up and effectively blinded him.

This version includes one of the most powerful elements of the incident which is the way he felt so sleepy, so lethargic, he just wanted to curl up in a ball and go to bed and found the increasing heat (his cockpit was on fire) really boring and only reluctantly could persuade himself to move, only then discovering he couldn’t and how it took a long time to realise this was because he was still strapped in and even longer to realise how to undo his straps and topple out of the cockpit onto the desert.

What distinguishes this version from the one in Going Solo is that it includes a number of vivid hallucinations, described at great length which, presumably are the result of the morphine or painkillers he was given back in hospital.

(It is itself a revised version of the original article which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post titled Shot Down Over Libya which gave the entirely misleading impression that Dahl was shot down by enemy action rather than running out of gas and attempting an emergency landing.)

Yesterday Was Beautiful (1945)

An unnamed British fighter pilot has bailed out and landed safely enough, on a Greek island, but sprained his ankle so walking is difficult. He hobbles into a dusty village which seems to be deserted. He notices an old man sitting by a water trough and asks him if someone has a boat to take him across to the mainland. The man thinks about it and says, yes, there is a man in the village who can help, a Joannis Spirakis. But his house was hit this morning by a German bomb and obliterated. So he is staying in the house of Antonina Angelou. But be aware that her daughter was in the house when it was bombed and killed. Her name was Maria.

So the pilot hobbles down the little main street to the house the old man indicated and knocks and the door is answered by a woman all in black who takes him through to a kitchen where sits a very old, shrivelled up old lady. She asks him about the Germans, how far away they are. They will be on the island soon. Then she asks him how many he has killed. Then she tells him to kill them all, every man, woman and baby.

Only after delivering this angry rant does she come back to his question, about the boatman Joannis Spirakis. She gets up, little shrivelled old creature, and walks him back to the front door and points up the little high street to the old man the pilot first spoke to. That, she says, is Joannis Spirakis.

It’s a very powerful short (8 short pages) story, told in a minimal prose style and conveying the unbearable pain and suffering, the dislocation and madness, of war.

Thoughts

1. The irrational

I came to this collection from Dahl’s war memoir Going Solo which was published in 1986. That book is, for the most part, rational and factual. Therefore the most striking aspect of these stories from 40 years earlier, right at the start of his career, is the way they focus on the irrational, the weird, the uncanny and the hallucinatory. On at least two occasions people seem to live on after their deaths – in fact we are given powerful visions of a pilot’s afterlife, along with the mother who dies when her son’s bomber crashes: the ten stories feature at least three ghost stories.

There are plentiful hallucinations, the three ghost stories being examples, along with the description of the pilot bailing out and tumbling through the clouds in Beware of the dog and the final fiery vision of the narrator of Katina. Most of the account of his crash in the desert in fact skips over the incident itself in order to describe at length a number of vivid and strange hallucinations he has.

Then there are the strange mental states explored in Yesterday was beautiful and the disturbed mental state of the bomber pilot in Someone like you.

This is all extraordinarily strong meat – very fierce psychological states, deeply disturbed individuals, visions and hallucinations littered with sudden violent deaths. They are written in Dahl’s crisp and understated prose but that makes the sound of screaming feel even louder.

2. Dahl and Hemingway

As I read through the stories it became obvious to me Dahl was deeply influenced by Hemingway. He uses very simple language and simple syntax. For example, rather than using commas to separate items he’ll write ‘and x and y and z’. He never uses contractions; he always spells everything out:

I did not use the altimeter… I do not know how long I sat there…

These are small things but they make the language feel stately, almost like the Bible at moments. I began to get irritated by his predilection for the word ‘upon’ instead of the more obvious ‘on’. ‘He laid it upon the table’.

The sun was hot upon their shoulders and upon their backs

He uses the simplest adjectives – good, bad, the simplest opinions – ‘it was fine’. Here’s an example from They Shall Not Grow Old:

We had only six Hurricanes in the air; there were many of the Junkers and it was a good fight.

The Hemingway thing is not to use contractions or short cuts or slang, but to spell everything out in a lightly mannered explicitness. Whether or not Dahl wrote like this earlier who can say. But all these stories bear the same hallmark of extreme, Hemingwayesque simplicity of style and syntax.

There is a direct parallel with the context of Hemingway’s earliest stories. Hemingway served as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross in Italy during World War I and his earliest stories, the ones collected in In Our Time, describe men trying to manage the extremely powerful emotions triggered by the terrible sights and experiences of war. The plainness of the style is in deliberate contrast with the terrible events witnessed and the riot of awful emotions the protagonists are struggling to suppress and control. Very tightly controlled mania.

In this respect, in their context – the memories of combat and the wild thoughts and feelings unleashed by it, all controlled in an artificially plain and deceptively ‘simple’ style – Dahl is not just copying a ‘style’ but an entire strategy, an entire way of thinking about what writing is for.

6-foot-6 Roald Dahl (28) and 6-foot tall Ernest Hemingway (45) in London in 1944

I thought I’d been reasonably clever figuring this out from the style alone, but then 30 seconds on Google showed me that there was a well-known real life connection between the two authors. Dahl actually met Hemingway when the great man came to London working as a journalist during the war, and on the Roald Dahl Foundation website there’s a page about a student who wrote asking Dahl his advice about writing short stories, and Dahl replied telling him to ‘study Hemingway, particularly his early work’.

In that reply Dahl only mentions one aspect of Hemingway’s style i.e. use as few adjectives as possible, but hopefully my little analysis shows that the two writers had more than just that in common. It’s about using a minimalist style in the context of suppressed emotion that gives this approach its power.

Roald Dahl reviews

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by Simon on May 13, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Second World War, Short stories
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Posted by Simon on May 13, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/05/13/over-to-you-roald-dahl/

The Pharsalia by Lucan – 1: Introduction

O mighty the sacred labour of the poet! He rescues
all from fate, and grants immortality to mortal beings.
(Pharsalia Book 9, lines 980 to 981)

Lucan biography

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (39 to 65 AD), generally referred to in English simply as ‘Lucan’, was a Roman poet, born in Corduba (modern-day Córdoba) in the Roman province of Hispania. Although he was ordered to kill himself by the emperor Nero at the age of just 25, Lucan is regarded as one of the outstanding figures of the Imperial Latin period, particularly for his (unfinished) epic poem, Pharsalia.

Lucan was the son of Marcus Annaeus Mela, younger brother of Seneca the Younger i.e. he was Seneca’s nephew.

Lucan’s father was wealthy, a member of the knightly class, and sent him to study rhetoric at Athens and he was probably tutored in philosophy, and especially Stoic philosophy, by his uncle (maybe by Seneca’s freedman, Cornutus, who also tutored the slightly older poet, Persius).

Lucan was a precocious talent and was welcomed into the literary and philosophical circles around the young emperor Nero, who was only two years older than him (born 37 AD). In 60 AD i.e. aged barely 21, Lucan won prizes for extemporising poems at Nero’s new Quinquennial Games. Nero rewarded him by appointing him to the office of augur, a plum position in Rome’s religious hierarchy.

Soon afterwards Lucan began circulating the first three books of what was intended to be an epic poem about the civil war between Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (generally referred to as Pompey). This has come down to us with the title Pharsalia, or De Bello civili (‘On the civil war’) in other manuscripts. It’s titled Pharsalia because the action focuses on the decisive Battle of Pharsalus, fought on 9 August 48 BC, at which Caesar decisively defeated Pompey’s army.

At some point Nero and Lucan fell out. According to Tacitus (Annals, book 15, section 49) Nero became jealous of Lucan and ordered him to stop publishing the Pharsalia. According to Suetonius (in his brief Life of Lucan, cited in full at the end of this blog post), Nero disrupted a public reading by Lucan by leaving and calling a meeting of the senate. Lucan responded by writing insulting poems about Nero – which is always a bad thing to do against a tyrant. The grammarian Vacca mentions that one of Lucan’s works was entitled De Incendio Urbis (‘On the Burning of the City’) which presumably contained criticism of Nero’s role in the Great Fire of Rome (July 64). This is confirmed by a reference in a poem by Lucan’s younger contemporary, Publius Papinius Statius (45 to 96 AD).

As further proof, after the pro-Nero eulogy of the opening book of the Pharsalia, nearly all the subsequent references to emperors and the empire are vitriolically anti-imperial and pro-republican in tone. To take an example at random, Lucan’s biting criticism of not only Alexander the Great’s achievements, but of the cult of imperial Alexander which followed his death.

For, if the world had regained a shred of liberty
his corpse would have been retained as an object
of derision, not shown as an example to the world
of how a host of lands were subjected to one man.
He left his Macedonian obscurity, spurned Athens
that his father had conquered, and spurred on by
the power of destiny ran amok among the realms
of Asia, slaying humankind, putting every land
to the sword. He stained far-off rivers, Persia’s
Euphrates, India’s Ganges with blood; a plague
on earth, a lightning bolt that struck all peoples
alike, a fateful comet flaring over every nation.

But what ended Lucan’s life was his involvement in Gaius Calpurnius Piso’s conspiracy against Nero, uncovered in 65. Lucan was one of many conspirators revealed by torturing suspects. According to Suetonius he miserably truckled to his persecutors, giving them names of further conspirators, including even his own mother, in the vain hope of winning a pardon.

Once his guilt was established Nero ordered Lucan to commit suicide by opening a vein (the alternative being arrest, torture and public execution). According to Tacitus, as Lucan bled to death he recited some lines he had written about a wounded soldier. I wonder if they were from the passage about the 600 Caesarians who chose suicide rather than surrender to Pompey, in book 4:

how simple it is to escape captivity by suicide
(4.577)

Alternatively, according to Suetonius, Lucan in his dying minutes wrote a letter to his father containing corrections to some of his verses and, after eating heartily, offered his arms to a physician to cut his veins. Lucan’s father and both his uncles, i.e all three sons of Seneca the Elder, were also compelled to kill themselves.

(Statius wrote an elegy to Lucan, the Genethliacon Lucani, which was addressed to his widow, Polla Argentaria, on the dead man’s birthday. It was written during the reign of Domitian (81 to 96) and included in Statius’s collection, Silvae).

Themes in the Pharsalia

De Bello Civili (‘On the Civil War’) or the Pharsalia is long and dense with themes and ideas, some of which I will now consider:

1. No gods

The traditional epic poem is packed with gods, supporting various protagonists and intervening in the events. The entire narrative of the Aeneid exists because of the enmity of the queen of the gods, Juno, to the hero, Aeneas, who she continually enters the story to block and stymie, in doing so setting herself against fellow goddess, Venus, who, for her part, does everything she can to support Aeneas (who is her son). This leads to great set-piece debates in heaven between the rival gods, adjudicated by the king of the heavens, Jupiter.

There’s none of this in Lucan. Lucan took the decision to dispense with all the divine interventions associated with traditional epic. Lucan replaces them with the more up-to-date Stoic notions of Fate and Fortune. These two forces, sometimes blurring into each other and overlapping, at other moments appear as clearly distinct entities, names for two different forces operating at different levels of the universe.

Fate, fatum or fata is Destiny – the fixed, foreordained course of events which underpins the universe. Fate is the name given to the working through of the deep plan for the world and the nations in it.

And now, as light dispersed the chill shades of night,
Destiny lit the flames of war, setting the spur to Caesar’s
wavering heart, shattering the barriers shame interposed
and driving him on to conflict. Fate worked to justify
his rebellion, and found a pretext for his use of arms.
(Book 1, lines 261 to 265)

What but the power of destiny, that tragic fate
decreed by the eternal order, drew him, doomed
to die, to that shore…Yet
Pompey yielded to fate, obeying when requested
to leave his ship, choosing to die rather than show
fear…
(8.571 ff.)

By contrast, Fortune, fortuna, is Chance, a fickle, unpredictable force, continually turning her wheel, ensuring that anyone at the peak of professional or social success, can never be certain that Fortune won’t turn her wheel and plunge them down to the pits of failure.

At a deep level, Fate determines the occurrence of a civil war and that Caesar will win. But Fortune decides the outcome of specific events and details.

Caesar, finding civil war so eagerly welcomed by his men,
and finding fortune favourable, granted destiny no delay
due to idleness, but summoned all his forces scattered
throughout Gaul, moving every legion towards Rome.
(1.392 to 395)

Susan Braund explains all this in the introduction to her translation of the Pharsalia published by the Oxford University Press. The distinct operational levels of the two forces are sometimes made particularly clear:

Caesar, finding civil war so eagerly welcomed by his men,
and finding fortune favourable, granted destiny no delay
(1.392-3)

Here Destiny is the overall force or plan, but whether individual elements of the plan fall this way or that, depends on Fortune. Or:

Fate stirred the peoples and sent them as companions
to a great disaster, as a funeral train fit for Pompey’s
exequies. Even horned Ammon was not slow to send
squadrons from Africa to battle, from all parched Libya,
from Morocco in the west to Egyptian Syrtes in the east.
So that Caesar, fortune‘s favourite, might win all with
a single throw, Pharsalia brought all the world to battle.
(3.291 to 297)

The distinction is made particularly clear in the long speech by the witch Erictho in book 6, where she makes a distinction between ‘the chain of events fixed from the beginning of the world’ which nobody can change or alter, and ‘lesser decrees of fate’, which witches like her can alter. Level 1 and Level 2. (6.609 to 621)

However, at other moments I found the concepts a lot less clear-cut, for example in this passage where you’d expect Pompey’s ultimate death, the deep pattern of his life, to be described as his Fate not his Fortune.

Pompey by then, had gained the open sea, but the luck
that aided his past hunts for pirates was his no longer,
and Fortune, wearied by his triumphs, proved untrue.

And sometimes the two concepts seem interchangeable:

Greedy quicksand and spongy marshes hid the secret
Fate had placed there; yet later that aged general’s flesh
was scarred by iron fetters reduced by long vile imprisonment.
He was to die though as Fortune’s friend, as consul in a Rome
he had ruined.
(2.71 to 75)

Anyway, Lucan’s neglect of the traditional apparatus of gods and his focus on Fate and Fortune do two things for the poem:

  1. Lots of gods would have distracted attention away from what was a very human catastrophe and away from the all-too-human human protagonists.
  2. Also the gods can, in some sense, be appealed to and swayed by humans. Whereas Fate and Fortune are profoundly impersonal forces and so bring out the horror of the unstoppable nature of civil war, Fate emphasising the deep inevitability of the outcome, with Fortune standing for the many chance victims along the way.

There is a simpler explanation, which is that the introduction of the kind of gods found in Virgil was simply inappropriate – would have appeared gauche and clumsy – in a poem dealing with events almost within living memory. Roman literature – Classical literature generally – was very concerned with what was and wasn’t appropriate for every genre, in terms of subject matter, tone and even individual words. Including the gods in a historical epic would have breached the conventions of the genre.

2. No heroes

Epic poems feature the adventures of more-than-human heroes, from Gilgamesh, through Achilles and Aeneas, to Beowulf, humans not only with superhuman power but often the progeny of the gods. Whereas a historical epic like the Pharsalia is concerned with real historical personages, many of whose relatives were still alive when Lucan wrote.

Not only that, but epics generally feature one obvious central protagonist (Gilgamesh, Achilles, Beowulf) but just as there are no gods or divine intervention in the Pharsalia, so there is no one hero or central protagonist. Instead there are three leading but not totally dominating figures:

1. Gaius Julius Caesar

Caesar is the most prominent character in the first part of the poem, active, clear-sighted, ambitious, a force of nature – but not likeable. Lucan’s Caesar approaches closest to the figure of traditional epic hero. He has no moderating feminine influence on him until right at the end, in book 10, where his encounter with Cleopatra is a meeting of two cynical players. After the climactic battle of Pharsalus, however, Caesar is depicted as becoming more ambitious and imperial.

2. Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus

Pompey is portrayed as the opposite – vacillating, indecisive, and past his prime (‘the mere shadow of a mighty name’) but, in scenes with friends, followers and especially his wife, Cornelia, far more human than Caesar. At the end, after Pharsalus, Pompey is transformed into a stoic martyr, receiving a kind of visionary treatment as he nears his tragic death on the beach in Egypt which he meets with Stoic calm acceptance.

3. Marcus Porcius Cato

And, after the death of Pompey in book 8, Cato emerges as the strongest leader of the Republican cause, holed up with Republican legions in North Africa. Cato epitomises stern old-fashioned values. He stands for Roman patriotism and the Stoic contempt for death, notably in the episode in book 9 where he scorns to consult the oracle of Ammon, saying God gave us all the knowledge we need to live a virtuous life at birth; which triggers adulation from Lucan:

Behold, the true father of his
country, a man worthy to be worshipped,
Rome, at your altars; by whom none need
blush to swear, and who, if you ever free
your neck from the yoke, shall be made a god.

In fact, in a striking episode on the march across the desert, Cato not only embodies Stoic resolution in the face of death but inspires it in others:

Alone he was present at every
death; whenever they call, he goes, and confers that
mighty benefit, more than life: the courage to die;
so that, with him as witness, any man was ashamed
to die with a groan on his lips.
(9.882)

When Cato’s first wife, Marcia, returns to him the narrative emphasises that their marriage is sexless; it symbolises his adherence to defunct, sterile values. Many critics think Lucan intended Cato to develop into the central figure of the poem, with the narrative designed to end with his famous suicide in the besieged garrison town of Utica, symbolising the moral victory of Stoic principle and Freedom against Tyranny.

There’s a case for saying the three figures are on a spectrum: Caesar is over-balanced in one direction, all energy and decision and lust (‘impetuous in everything’ 2.657); Cato stands at the other pole, arid, sexless, aloof; with Pompey standing in the middle, reasonable and given scenes of touching married love with Cornelia. As this blog shrewdly suggests, it’s as if the heroic protagonist of Virgil’s epic, Aeneas, has decomposed into three characters, none of which are heroic.

3. The gruesome and the macabre

The supernatural

If the Pharsalia doesn’t have gods, what it does have in abundance is the Supernatural – the poem is awash with visions, dreams, ghosts, magic, rituals and so on. Braund sees the supernatural as falling into two categories, ‘dreams and visions’ and ‘portents, prophecies and consultations of supernatural powers’.

a) Dreams and visions

There are four important dream or vision sequences in the poem:

  1. Caesar’s vision of Roma as he is about to cross the Rubicon.
  2. The ghost of Julia (his beloved dead wife) appearing to Pompey (3.1 to 45)
  3. Pompey’s dream of his happy past (7.1 to 30)
  4. Caesar and his troops’ dream of battle and destruction.

All four of these dream-visions are placed strategically throughout the poem to provide structure, and to dramatise key turning points in the narrative.

b) Portents, prophecies and consultations of supernatural powers

Lucan describes a number of portents, with two specifically oracular episodes. What is a portent? “A sign or warning that a momentous or calamitous event is likely to happen.” So, on the morning of the fateful battle:

Now Fortune too did not hesitate to reveal the future
by diverse signs. When the army made for Thessaly’s
fields, the whole sky opposed their march, hurling
meteors against them, columns of flame, whirlwinds
sucking up water and trees together, blinding their
eyes with lightning, striking crests from their helms,
melting the swords in their scabbards, tearing spears
from their grasp while fusing them, their evil blades
smoking with air-borne sulphur. The standards too
could barely be plucked from the soil, their great
weight bowing the heads of the standard-bearers;
and the standards wept real tears…
(7.151 to 162)

The central example is the necromancy which takes up half of book 6, when Pompey’s son, Sextus, goes to consult the witch Erachtho. Lucan’s description of the witch and her ritual take up half the entire book (lines 413 to 830).

All this appealed to the contemporary Neronian taste for the macabre. Braund cites events in one of the tragedies of Lucan’s uncle, Seneca, his Oedipus, which contains a) a visit to the Delphic oracle, b) a gruesome description of the sacrifice and entrail examination of a bull and heifer (haruspicy), and c) the even more macabre magical rituals by which Tiresias raises the ghost of dead King Laius to accuse Oedipus of his murder.

Chaos on earth reflected in heaven

It is a central feature of the histories that war and disruption on earth must inevitably be accompanied by chaos in the heavens – just as in his uncle Seneca’s tragedies where mayhem on earth is matched and mimicked by cosmic catastrophes. In both Lucan and Seneca the entire universe often seems to be trembling on the brink of complete dissolution.

So when the fabric
of the world dissolves, in that final hour that gathers in the ages,
reverting to primal chaos, star will clash with star in confusion,
the fiery constellations will sink into the sea, and earth heaving
upwards her flat shores will throw off the ocean, the moon will
move counter to her brother, and claiming the rule of day disdain
to drive her chariot on its slanting path, and the whole discordant
frame of the shattered firmament will break free of every law.
(1.72 to 79)

This worldview, the intimate parallelism between human and supernatural affairs, is very prevalent in the biographers Plutarch and Suetonius, writing a generation later.

Haruspicy and necromancy

Along the way, Braund gives useful definitions of two key Roman practices:

  • haruspicy (haruspicies) is the art of studying animal entrails, usually the victims of ritual sacrifices
  • necromancy is the art of getting the dead to speak prophecy; necromancy is not only the general practice of this craft, but you perform a necromancy

4. Extreme rhetoric

Education for Roman aristocrats focused on rhetoric, the ability to speak eloquently and make a persuasive argument. We know from contemporary comments and satires that under the empire many of the exercises which students were given became steadily more extreme and exaggerated. This was reflected in the poetry of the age; from what survives the most extreme example might be the bloodthirsty and over-written tragedies of Seneca.

A central part of the curriculum was the suasoria, an exercise where students wrote speeches advising an historical figure on a course of action. This obviously fed into the largely invented speeches which fill Tacitus’s histories as much as Lucan’s poem.

Lucan is sometimes criticised for the extremity of his rhetoric and the luridness of scenes and imagery. But Susan Braund comes to his defence, with two arguments. One is that Lucan was a product of his times. There was a taste for melodrama and Gothic hyperbole which Lucan catered to.

More interesting is the second argument. This is to do with Virgil. Virgil was the undisputed king of Roman poets and his epic, the Aeneid, was acknowledged as a classic even as he was writing it. The problem for ambitious poets in all the succeeding generations was how to escape Virgil’s dominating influence, how to do anything new. Braund says Ovid found one way, in his Metamorphoses, which was to drop the notion of one, unified, linear narrative and instead string together hundreds of stories and episodes.

Lucan adopted another strategy which was to import into his text the ‘discourse of contemporary rhetoric’, in all its exaggeration and extremity. For there’s another aspect here, which is not to forget that a poem like this was meant to be recited aloud to audiences. Before the rule of Augustus, poetry was recited to group of like-minded friends or patrons. During Augustus’s reign it became common to recite it to larger audiences. We have accounts of Virgil reciting to the emperor and his extended family. Horace was commissioned to write odes to be declaimed at public games.

Braund argues that this trend for declamation had two consequences: it tended to promote more striking and vibrant imagery/style. And it incentivised the poet to think in terms of episodes.

5. Episodic structure

The Aeneid is very carefully constructed and susceptible to many types of structural analysis. Although critics have, of course, made a case for the existence of a deep structure in the Pharsalia (for example, a tetradic structure whereby the first four books focus on Caesar, the next four on Pompey and the final four on Cato) Braund disagrees. She thinks the narrative is far more episodic. In this respect it is like the highly episodic structure of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with one story leading to another, then another, then another – itself a strategy for escaping the highly unified and centralised narrative of the Aeneid.

Like the Metamorphoses, this lack of a single unifying narrative in the Pharsalia allows for more episodes, more adventures, more flicking between channels – episodes which are like mini-genres, containing their own appropriate languages, structure and style.

Lucan is fond of discontinuity. He presents his narrative as a series of discrete scenes, often without any transitional or scene-changing lines. Rather than a continuous narrative, it often feels like scenes are balanced within a book or between books, working by correspondence, similarity and difference between them.

We can imagine how well these dramatic episodes would have gone down as stand-alone recitations to a sophisticated audience of Roman aristocrats. I’m thinking of Appius’s confrontation with the priestess at Delphi or the terrific storm scene or Caesar’s speech of defiance to his mutinous troops, all in book 5.

6. Lucan and Virgil

Lucan frequently appropriates ideas from Virgil’s epic and inverts them to undermine their original, heroic purpose. Sextus’ visit to the Thracian witch Erictho in book 6 is the most obvious example, the scene and language clearly referencing Aeneas’ descent into the underworld (in Book 6 of the Aeneid), but while Virgil’s description, despite its gloomy setting, is an optimistic, nay triumphant vision of the future heroes of Rome leading up to the glories of Augustan rule, Lucan uses his scene to convey a bitter and bloody pessimism about the loss of liberty under the coming empire.

7. Epic similes

Braund and other critics emphasis the way that Lucan seeks to break free from the epic conventions, in particular the way he references Virgil in order to reverse or invert his technique and meaning. But in one respect Lucan strongly conforms with the tradition, which is in his use of epic similes. Straight-up epic similes really litter the narrative. Here’s the famous extended comparison of Pompey, larded with triumphs, to a venerable oak tree:

So some oak-tree towers in a rich grove,
hung with a nation’s ancient trophies, sacred gifts of the victors,
and though its clinging roots have lost their strength, their weight
alone holds it, spreading naked branches to the sky, casting shade
not with leaves but its trunk alone, and though it quivers, doomed
to fall at the next gale, among the host of sounder trees that rise
around it, still it alone is celebrated.
(1.137 to 143)

Or the inhabitants of towns which Caesar’s army approached were conflicted about who to support.

Though loyalty contended with the threat of danger,
they still favoured Pompey, as when a southerly rules
the waves, and all the sea is stirred by its vast power,
so that even if Aeolus’ trident opens the solid earth,
and lets an easterly loose on the mounting breakers,
the ocean, though struck by that second force, stays
true to the first, and though the sky surrenders itself
to the rain-filled easterly, the sea asserts the southerly’s
power.
(2.452 to 460)

Describing Octavius’s naval strategy:

…So the hunter works,
holding back the net of coloured feathers that scares
the deer with its scent, till he can pen them all, or
quieting the noise of the swift Molossian hounds,
leashing the dogs of Crete and Sparta, till he has set
his stakes and nets, leaving one hound alone to range
the ground, it puzzling out the scent and only barking
when the prey is found, content then to point toward
the creature’s lair while tugging at the leash.
(4.436 to 444)

Or describing the way Cato’s speech in book 9 persuades the allies to remain with the anti-Caesarian army:

So, when hosts of bees
depart the hive, where their young have hatched,
they neglect the waxy cells, their wings no longer
brush one another, each takes its own way, idling,
refraining now from sipping the flowering thyme
with its bitter taste; yet if the sound of Phrygian
cymbals rises, they interrupt their flight, in alarm,
returning to the performance of their flowery task,
and their love of gathering pollen. The shepherd
in Hybla’s meadows is relieved, delighted that
his honey harvest is secured. So Cato’s speech
persuaded his men to endure the lawful conflict.
(9.282 to 293)

Nothing particularly lurid or extreme or melodramatic or supernatural about these. Very conventional epic similes.

8. Geographical descriptions

Before I started reading the poem I was impressed by Braund’s introduction and its emphasis on the macabre and bloodthirsty in Lucan. But once I began reading, I realised there were a lot of other, more low-key, less sensational elements that go to make up the text. More frequent than descriptions of battle, let alone supernatural visions, are the frequent and very long passages describing the precise geography of a particular location, such as the region around Capua where Pompey first took his army or, in book 6, this very long description of Thessaly.

Mount Pelion’s ridge bounds Thessaly in the quarter where
the winter sun rises, Mount Ossa where in high summer
its shade obstructs the rays of Phoebus rising in the dawn;
while wooded Othrys dispels the flames of the southern sky,
at midsummer, opposing the brow of the all-devouring Lion;
and Mount Pindus outfacing westerlies and north-westerlies,
where daylight ebbs hastens evening on; while those who live
at the foot of Olympus never dreading the northerlies, know
nothing of the Great Bear’s stars shining a whole night long.
The low-lying lands in the region between these mountains
were once covered with endless marshes; since the plains
retained the waters, and the Vale of Tempe was insufficient
for them to reach the sea they formed continuous swampland,
and their only course was to rise. But when Hercules lifted
Ossa’s weight from Olympus, the sea felt a sudden onrush
of waters as Thessalian Pharsalos, that realm of Achilles
the hero born of a sea-goddess, rose above the surface,
a realm better drowned forever. There rose too, Phylace
whose king was first to land in the war at Troy; Pteleos;
Dorion, that laments the Muses’ anger and blind Thamyris;
Trachis; Meliboea whose Philoctetes received Hercules’
bow, for lighting that hero’s funeral pyre; Larisa, powerful
once; and the sites where the plough now passes over famed
Argos, where Echion’s Thebes once stood, to which Agave
howling bore the head of Pentheus giving it to the funeral
pyre, grieving to have carried off no other part of his flesh.
Thus the swamp was drained forming a host of rivers. From
there the Aeas, clear in its flow but of little volume, runs
westward to the Ionian Sea, the Inachus glides with no more
powerful a current (he was the river-god, father of ravished Io)
nor the Achelous (he almost won Deianeira, Oeneus’ daughter)
that silts the Echinades islands; there, the Euhenos, stained
as it is with Nessus’ blood runs through Meleager’s Calydon;
there Spercheos’ swift stream meets the Malian Gulf’s wave,
and the pure depths of the Amphrysos water those pastures
where Apollo herded cattle. There, the Asopos starts its flow,
and the Black River, and the Phoenix; there, the Anauros,
free of moist vapours, dew-drenched air, capricious breezes.
There too are the rivers which do not reach the sea themselves
but are tributaries of Peneus – the Apidanus, robbed of its flow,
the Enipeus never swift until it finds Peneus, and the Titaresos,
which alone, meeting with that river, keeps its waters intact,
glides on the surface, as though the greater river were dry land,
for legend says its stream flows from the pool of Styx, and so,
mindful of its source, scorns commingling with common water,
inspiring still that awe of its current the gods themselves feel.
Once the waters had flowed away leaving dry land, the fertile
soil was furrowed by the ploughs of the Bebryces; the labour
of Leleges drove the share deep; the ground was broken by
Aeolidae and Dolopians, by Magnesians breeders of horses,
Minyae builders of ships.
(6.398 to 416)

Long, isn’t it? A tourist’s guide to the region. I imagine the long lists of not only place names but myths and legends associated with them were a) appropriate to the grandeur of the epic genre, magnifying the action, b) awed Lucan’s readers or auditor’s with the poet’s impressive erudition, c) made those in the aristocratic audience who had visited some or many of those sites nod with smug recognition.

9. Natural history

In his last few years, Lucan’s uncle, Seneca the Younger, composed an enormous work of natural history, the Naturales quaestiones, an encyclopedia of the natural world. A decade later, 77, Pliny the Elder published the first 10 books of his compendious Naturalis Historia (Natural History) (the largest single work to have survived from the Roman Empire to the modern day).

I mention these works to indicate that a taste for ‘natural history’ was obviously in the air and maybe explains the presence of the extended passages of natural history in the Pharsalia. The obvious example is the really extended passage about the snakes of Libya which takes up over 300 lines in book 9.

10. Is the Pharsalia unfinished?

Almost all scholars agree that the Pharsalia as we now have it is unfinished. Lucan was working in book 10 when Nero’s order to commit suicide came through. Book 10 breaks off with Caesar in Egypt. There are numerous theories about this as about all other aspects of the poem. Here are some:

  • Some argue that Lucan intended to end his poem with the Battle of Philippi (42 BC).
  • Some critics speculate that the narrative was intended to continue all the way to the assassination of Julius Caesar four years after the Battle of Pharsalus, in 44 BC.
  • Some even think it was meant to continue all the way to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC.

The latter two theories, in particular, suppose that Lucan intended to write a work many times larger than what we have. The 10-book poem we have today covers a total of 20 months i.e. roughly a book per 2 months; so the 48 months to Caesar’s assassination would imply another 24 books; the 17 years (204 month) to Actium, imply another 102 books!

Another problem with the timeline continuing as far as Caesar’s assassination is that, with both Pompey and Cato dead, Lucan would have had to embark on building up a new set of characters, in particular the leaders of Caesar’s assassination, Cassius and Brutus.

Which is why Braund ends up going with the simplest hypothesis which is that Lucan’s original intent was a 12-book poem, mirroring the length of the Aeneid. The strongest piece of evidence for Lucan consciously modelling the Pharsalia on Virgil is the way Lucan introduces an extended necromantic ritual in his sixth book that deliberately parallels and inverts many of the motifs found in Virgil’s sixth book. Thus Braund goes with the view that the poem was to be 12 books long and was heading towards the suicide of Cato (as the army of Julius Caesar approached his stronghold of Utica in North Africa) held up as a model of Stoic dignity rising above tyranny.

There are a few more scenarios: one is that the Pharsalia is in fact finished, was meant to end at the end of the tenth book, and is complete as we have it. This is the view of Classicist Jamie Masters but most other scholars disagree.

But there is one last logical possibility, which is that Lucan did in fact complete the poem but, for whatever reason, the final few books of the work were lost at some point. Braund notes that little evidence has been found one way or the other, so this option will remain a matter of speculation.

11. The Roman cult of suicide

Throughout the poem suicide is praised as a noble and dignified way to take control of your life. Nothing becomes a true Roman man so much as either a) dying in battle or b) controlling the time and place of his death, especially when faced with tyranny. Thus Afranius contemplates suicide before surrendering to Caesar (book 4), Vulteius and his men commit suicide, en masse, rather than be captured:

No instant is too short for a man
to kill himself; suicide is no less glorious when death
at another’s hand approaches.
(4.480)

Even Julius Caesar unashamedly tells his mutinying soldiers that, if they lose, he will commit suicide:

I shall seek
my own salvation in suicide; whoever looks back
if the foe is unbeaten, will see me stab my breast.
(7.308)

From which Lucan draws the general lesson that suicide is the ultimate way to escape from tyranny:

Yet even after the example set
by such heroes, nations of cowards still do not comprehend
how simple it is to escape captivity by suicide; so the tyrant’s
power is feared, freedom is constrained by savage weapons,
while all remain ignorant that the sword is there to deliver
every man from slavery.

For me, the careful seeding of examples of, and praise of, and defences of, suicide, strongly suggest the poem was building up to the suicide of Cato as its climax and crowning example of resistance. Thus it is that Cato himself sternly celebrates Pompey’s death after defeat:

O happy was he, whose ending
followed on defeat, the Egyptian swords
offering the death he should have sought.
He might perhaps have lived on instead
under Caesar’s rule

Because:

the highest fate
is to know when to die, and the second
best to have such death forced upon one.

The ‘highest fate’, the best thing a man can do, the greatest achievement of human reason, is to know when to die. All the more ghoulishly ironic that Lucan himself was forced to commit suicide before he could complete the depiction of his Stoic hero committing suicide.

12. Lucan and Seneca

I finished reading Seneca’s ‘Letters from a Stoic’ a few weeks after reading the Pharsalia. Reviewing my notes I realise the tremendous overlap in ‘philosophy’ between the two works, namely the absolutely central role played in both texts by suicide as escape from tyranny. It is the central theme of both works. But as I point out in my review of the letters, suicide may be an acceptable theme for a historical poem, but not for a really long work of moral exhortation (the letters) which claim to be instructions on how to live and think. Personally, I recommend not thinking about suicide every moment of every day, as a healthier way to live.

Modern views

Since the Enlightenment the Pharsalia has commonly been considered a second rank offering, not in the same league as the king of the Roman epics, the Aeneid. But in recent decades more sophisticated literary analysis has brought out how the poem’s ‘studied artifice enacts a complex relationship between poetic fantasy and historical reality’.

His narrative of the civil war is pared down to a bare minimum; but this is overlaid with a rich and varied virtuoso display of learning which reflected contemporary interests. (Braund, Introduction, page 37)

All I can add is that I found the Pharsalia a surprisingly gripping and interesting read.

Caesar crossing the Rubicon by Adolphe Yvon (1875)

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Posted by Simon on December 28, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/12/28/the-pharsalia-lucan-1-introduction/

Seneca’s Plays

What follows are notes on E.F. Watling’s introduction to his translation of Seneca’s plays, published by Penguin Books in 1966, then a summary with comments of the four Seneca plays it contains:

Seneca’s biography

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born in 4 BC Corduba, Spain, the second son of Annaeus Seneca the Elder. His father had studied rhetoric in Rome and returned to Spain to bring his sons up with respect for the traditional virtues of the Roman Republic, which had ceased to exist a generation earlier, following the victory of Octavian against Anthony at Actium in 31 BC.

As a young man Seneca the Younger studied Stoic philosophy. He lived in Egypt for a while, probably due to ill health (tuberculosis?) and because his aunt was the wife of the prefect there. By 33 AD he was back in Rome, married to his first wife (whose name is unknown) and achieving recognition as a lawyer and teacher of rhetoric.

Seneca had run-ins with several of the early emperors. At one point he was forced to retire into private life due to the suspicions of Caligula. He returned to public life on the accession of the emperor Claudius but in the very same year, 41 AD, was exiled to Corsica, accused of adultery with the new emperor’s niece, Julia, probably at the instigation of Claudius’s scheming third wife, Valeria Messalina. Seneca spent eight years on Corsica during which he wrote a number of philosophical works.

In 48 Claudius had Messalina executed for (supposedly) conspiring to overthrow him, and married his fourth wife, the equally scheming Agrippina. But it was Agrippina who asked for the recall of Seneca and made him tutor to her 12-year-old son, Lucius Domitius, the future emperor Nero. When Nero came to power 6 years later, in 54 AD, aged just 17, Seneca became his principal civil adviser (Nero had a separate adviser for military affairs, Sextus Afranius Burrus).

Some attribute the fact that the first five years of Nero’s reign were relatively peaceful and moderate to Seneca’s restraining influence. According to Tacitus’s Annals, Seneca taught Nero how to speak effectively, and wrote numerous speeches for him to address the senate with, praising clemency, the rule of law, and so on.

However, palace politics slowly became more poisonous, Nero came to rule more despotically, and Seneca’s position and wealth made him the target of increasing political and personal attacks. In 62 Seneca asked to be allowed to retire from public life, a conversation with Nero vividly described (or invented) in Tacitus’s Annals. Emperor and adviser parted on good terms but, over the next few years, Seneca’s name was cited in various plots and conspiracies.

The largest of these was the conspiracy of Gaius Calpurnius Piso in 65, a plot to assassinate Nero which was discovered at the last moment (the morning of the planned murder), and which, as the suspects were interrogated and tortured by Nero’s Guard, turned into a bloodbath of the conspirators.

Historians think Seneca was not an active conspirator, and debate how much he even knew about the plot, but whatever the precise truth, Nero ordered him put to death. Hearing of this, Seneca, en route back to Rome from Campania, committed suicide with a high-minded detachment that impressed the friends who attended the deed, and made him a poster boy for Stoic dignity. Many classic paintings depict the noble scene. Nero himself was, of course, to commit suicide just three years later, in 68 AD.

The Death of Seneca by Manuel Dominguez Sanchez (1871)

Seneca’s works

Seneca was a prolific writer. He wrote 12 philosophical essays, an extensive work of natural science, and 124 letters of moral exhortation to his friend Lucilius. The letters are probably his most accessible and popular work.

But Seneca is also credited as the author of ten plays (though scholars bicker: maybe it’s nine; maybe it’s eight). The plays are all tragedies, loosely modeled on Greek tragedy and featuring Greek tragic protagonists. The Romans had a technical term for these, fabula crepidata, meaning a Roman tragedy with a Greek subject.

Seneca’s plays make a striking contrast to his philosophical works not only in tone but also in worldview. The Letters to Lucilius go into great detail about how to banish all attachments, emotions and feelings from your life in order to achieve a calm, rational, Stoic detachment. By contrast, the plays are full of gruesomely bloodthirsty plots and characters wrought to the utmost degree of emotional extremity. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance the works seemed so utterly different in worldview that scholars thought Seneca the moral philosopher and Seneca the dramatist were two different people.

Critics have been very harsh indeed about these plays. The editor of the Penguin edition, E.F. Watling, accuses them of ‘bombastic extravagance’, of ‘passionate yet artificial rhetoric’. The German critic Schlegel is quoted accusing them of ‘hollow hyperbole’, ‘forced and stilted’. Watling cites the consensus among scholars who condemn them as:

horrible examples of literary and dramatic incompetence, travesties of the noble Greek drama, the last wretched remnant of declining Roman taste. (Introduction, p.8)

And yet Seneca’s plays had a very important influence on Renaissance theatre, influencing Shakespeare and other playwrights in England, and Corneille and Racine in France.

Seneca’s tragedies are customarily considered the source and inspiration for what became known as the genre of ‘Revenge Tragedy’ in Elizabethan theatre, starting with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy of the 1580s, and continuing on into the Jacobean era (the reign of King James I, 1603 to 1625).

Their importance to Elizabethan drama explains why so fastidious a critic as T.S. Eliot, obsessed as he was with the period, praised Seneca’s plays, singling out Phaedra and Medea – although most critics consider Thyestes to be Seneca’s ‘masterpiece’.

Seneca’s tragedies

  • Agamemnon
  • Hercules or Hercules furens (The Madness of Hercules)
  • Medea
  • Oedipus
  • Phaedra
  • Phoenissae (The Phoenician Women)
  • Thyestes
  • Troades (The Trojan Women)

The Penguin paperback edition of the plays, edited and translated by E.F. Watling, contains four of the ‘best’ plays – Thyestes, Phaedra, Oedipus and The Trojan Women. (It also contains an oddity, a play titled Octavia, which resembles Seneca’s tragedies in melodramatic tone but, since it features Seneca as a character, and describes his death, cannot have been by him. Scholars guesstimate that it was probably written soon after Seneca’s death by someone influenced by his style and aware of the events of his lifetime.)

Watling’s critique

Watling’s introduction pulls no punches in detailing Seneca’s shortcomings:

He was not a constructor of tragic plots; his plays are not concerned with the moral conflict between good and good which is the essence of true tragedy: he only recognises the power of evil to destroy good. He does not delay or complicate the issue by any moral dilemma exhibiting the conflict of justifiable but mutually incompatible ambitions; his tragedy is simply a disastrous event foretold and anticipated from the start and pursued ruthlessly to its end. (p.25)

Seneca routinely stops the action of his ‘plots’ to give characters long, highly-strung, melodramatic speeches, which might not even be particularly relevant to the plot and often take no account of who else is on stage at the time.

His technique of dramatic speech is extremely narrow, having only two modes: either a character is delivering a long monologue, or he deploys stichomythia, where just two characters swap exchanges of dialogue; rarely anything more complicated than that.

Many of the long speeches and even some of the exchanges are so stock and stereotyped that they could easily be swapped from one play to another without anyone noticing. Watling names some of these stock topics – the ‘simple life’ speech, the ‘haunted grove’ speech and ‘the king must be obeyed’ dialogue, which all crop up in several of the plays.

The climax of all the plays is always a gruesome barbarity and Seneca uses the Greek conventions of having it take place offstage and described by a breathless messenger who comes onstage hotfoot from the scene. The messengers’ speeches all follow the exact same formula: the description of the place, the horror of the act, the stoical courage of the sufferer.

Seneca’s use of the Chorus is for the most part flaccid and unconvincing. (p.24)

The Chorus declaims its verse in a different metre from the rest of the play. They are known as Choric odes. The Choric odes’s main purpose is to comment on the main action but they often feature a clotted recital of myths or legends similar or related to the one we are witnessing.

The Chorus also often expresses ideas which contradict the worldview of the play and even of the main action. For example they will powerfully express the idea that death is the end of life and there is nothing after, except that… the plays feature ghosts and numerous descriptions of the classic souls in hell (Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion). There is no attempt at consistency – immediate and sensational effect is what is strived for.

The sense of unnecessary repetition is echoed at a verbal level where Seneca creates a drenched and intense effect by repeating synonyms for just one idea – Watling says examples in English would be larding a speech with the synonymous words anger-rage-ire, or fear-terror-dread. No idea is left to float subtly but is bludgeoned into submission by repetition.

Watling sums up Seneca’s plays as 1) sporting a bombastic, over-the-top rhetoric, deriving from 2) gruesomely bloodthirsty plots, which 3) are staged with a remarkable lack of dramatic invention i.e. very clumsily and straightforwardly.

But despite all these shortcomings, the sheer visceral intensity of his plays goes some way to explain why they were useful models for the earliest Elizabethan playwrights writing the first attempts at English tragedy, influencing Kyd, Marlowe and the early Shakespeare of Titus Andronicus (which contains several quotes from Seneca’s Phaedra).

To return to T.S. Eliot who I mentioned above, we can now see why Eliot (in an introduction to a 1927 reprint of Elizabethan translations of Seneca) made the characteristically perceptive remark that, foregrounding vivid rhetoric over more traditional notions of plot or characterisation as the do, might make Seneca’s plays suitable for what was (in 1927) the very new medium of radio – rhetoric i.e. the power of words alone, triumphing over all other factors. A surf of sensationalist sound. The bombastic power of words superseding all considerations of ‘plot’ or ‘characterisation’.

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Plots of the four plays

1. Thyestes

Summary

It’s a tragedy of two brothers who hate each other, Atreus who takes a horrific vengeance on his brother, Thyestes.

Background

Tantalus was a son of Jupiter. He killed, cooked and served up his own son, Pelops, at a banquet of the gods. For this atrocity he was condemned to eternal punishment in hell, fixed in a pool of water, dying of thirst but unable to bend down to scoop up any of the water, and dying of hunger, but unable to touch any of the fruit growing just out of reach above him. Hence the English verb to tantalise. Jupiter restored Pelops to life but he himself went on to win a wife and a kingdom by treachery. Pelops banished his two grown-up sons, Atreus and Thyestes, for the murder of their half-brother, Chrysippus. When Pelops died, Atreus returned and took possession of his father’s throne, but Thyestes claimed it too. Thyestes seduced Atreus’s wife, Aërope, who helped him steal the gold-fleeced ram from Atreus’s flocks which was said to grant the kingship. But instead of gaining the crown he was banished. Despite sitting pretty, Atreus wants to make his ascendancy over his brother complete, so he is now planning to recall Thyestes from banishment on the pretext of sharing the throne with him, but in fact carrying out an atrocious act of revenge.

Act I

A Fury raises Tantalus’s miserable spirit from the underworld. He moaningly asks if even more pain and suffering await him. The Fury delivers an extraordinary vision of the sins of the house of Peolops, ramifying out to undermine all the order in the world. The Chorus comes onstage. It consists of citizens of Argos. They invoke the presiding gods of the cities of Greece in the hope they can prevent the tragedy.

Act II

Atreus consults with his minister about the best way of carrying out vengeance on his brother. The minister wonders how he can do this, allowing Atreus to explain that he will offer forgiveness and a share in the crown to lure Thyestes back to Argos, where he can carry out his revenge; what it will be, exactly, he is still considering but it will be awful. The Chorus reproves the ambition of rulers, describing the character of a true king, before singing the praises of a retired life.

Act III

Thyestes, having been invited back to his homeland by Atreus, arrives with his three young sons and expresses his distrust and sense of approaching disaster. Atreus applauds himself: his plan is working. The Chorus, apparently oblivious of the preceding act, praises the fraternal affection of Atreus for putting aside the brother’s enmity.

Act IV

With no development of plot or character, with melodramatic abruptness, a messenger appears who describes to the appalled Chorus the grotesque climax of the play which is that Atreus had Thyestes’s three children killed, cooked and served up to Thyestes at the brothers’ reconciliation feast. It takes the form of a question and answer session, the Chorus asking what happened next, the messenger answering. The Chorus, observing the going down of the Sun, hysterically fears that this criminal act might tear apart the whole fabric of the universe.

Act V

Atreus congratulates himself on his cruel revenge. Thyestes trembles with premonition that something terrible has happened. The Atreus reveals to him that he has just eaten his own beloved sons.

(Incidentally, the curse on the house of Pelops was to continue into the next generation in the persons of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, who was murdered on his return from the Trojan War, by Aegisthus, son of Thyestes – the subject of one of Seneca’s other plays.)

Thyestes demonstrates the classic characteristics of a Seneca play. It maintains a continuous, shrill, hyperbolic tone. Hyperbolic exaggeration Here’s the Fury seeing the feud escalate into end-of-the-world anarchy:

Vengeance shall think no way forbidden her;
Brother shall flee from brother, sire from son,
And son from sire; children shall die in shames
More shameful than their birth; revengeful wives
Shall menace husbands, armies sail to war
In lands across the sea; and every soil
Be soaked with blood; the might of men of battle
In all the mortal world shall be brought down
By Lust triumphant. In this house of sin
Brothers’s adultery with brothers’ wives
Shall be the least of sins; all law, all faith
All honour shall be dead. Nor shall the heavens
Be unaffected by your evil deeds:
What right have stars to twinkle in the sky?
Why need their lights still ornament the world?
Let night be black, let there be no more day.
Let havoc rule this house; call blood and strife
And death; let every corner of this place
Be filled with the revenge of Tantalus!
(Fury, Act 1)

Here’s Atreus whipping himself up to commit the worst crime in the world:

Sanctity begone!
If thou wast ever known within these walls.
Come all the dread battalions of the Furies!
Come, seed of strife, Erinys! Come, Megaera,
With torches armed! My spirit yet lacks fire;
It would be filled with still more murderous rage!
(Atreus, Act 1)

In the introduction Watling talks up the discrepancy between Seneca the lofty Stoic and Seneca the author of blood-thirsty, amoral plays. But there is some overlap, some places where characters appear to speak the language of Stoic detachment, such as the second Choric ode which describes the true nature of kingship as not being power or riches but resilience and mental strength. The true king

is the man who faces unafraid
The lightning’s glancing stroke; is not dismayed
By storm-tossed seas; whose ship securely braves
The windy rage of Adriatic waves;
Who has escaped alive the soldier’s arm,
The brandished steel; who, far removed from harm,
Looks down upon the world, faces her end
With confidence, and greets death as a friend.
(Chorus, Act 2)

That’s the Chorus, but Thyestes himself also declaims an ‘advantages of the simple life‘ speech to his son as they arrive at Atreus’s palace:

While I stood
Among the great, I stood in daily terror;
The very sword I wore at my own side
I feared. It is the height of happiness
To stand in no man’s way, to eat at ease
Reclining on the ground. At humble tables
Food can be eaten without fear; assassins
Will not be found in poor men’s cottages;
The poisoned cup is served in cups of gold.
(Thyestes, Act 3)

(Words which resonate with Seneca’s experiences in the fraught court of the emperor Nero.) In the final act, just before Atreus reveals to Thyestes what he’s done, Thyestes feels a powerful, world-shaking sense of doom, very reminiscent of the same premonition characters experience in Shakespeare’s tragedies:

The table rocked, the floor is shaking.
The torches’ light sinks low; the sky itself
Hangs dull and heavy, seeming to be lost
Between the daylight and the dark. And why –
The ceiling of the heavens seems to shake
With violent convulsions – more and more!
The murk grows darker than the deepest darkness,
Night is engulfed in night; all stars have fled!
(Thyestes, Act 5)

Once the deed has been revealed, here’s the Chorus reciting a welter of classical precedents in an effort to capture the enormity of the event:

Are the Giants escaped from their prison and threatening war?
Has tortured Tityos found strength in his breast again to renew his old aggression?
Or has Typhoeus stretched his muscles to throw off his mountain burden?
Is Ossa to be piled on Pelion again
To build a bridge for the Phlegrean Giants’ assault?
Is all the order of the universe plunged into chaos?
(Chorus, Act 4)

These are all formulae or stock ingredients, which are repeated in all the other plays, and were to be enthusiastically taken up by the Elizabethan playwrights striving for sensational effects in the 1590s and early 1600s.

2. Phaedra

Background

Theseus was a typical Greek ‘hero’ i.e. an appalling human being, guilty of countless crimes, infidelities, murders and rapes. But the play isn’t about him, it’s about his second wife and his son. In his first marriage Theseus married the Amazon warrior Antiope, also known as Hippolyta, who bore him a son, Hippolytus. This Hippolytus grew up despising love, refusing to worship at the temples of Venus. He preferred Diana and the joys of the hunt. During this time, Theseus divorced his first wife and married Phaedra, daughter of Minos, king of Crete (following his adventure on Crete where he slew the Minotaur).

Now, Hyppolitus had grown to be a handsome young man and Phaedra was a mature woman when Theseus left his kingdom for a while to help his friend Peirithous rescue Persephone from the underworld. During his absence, the goddess of love, Venus, determined to take her revenge on Hippolytus for spurning her worship, inflamed his stepmother, Phaedra’s, heart with insatiable desire for the handsome young man.

Prelude (Hippolytus)

Hippolytus soliloquises on the joys of the hunt, delivering a long list of Greek hunting locations to his companions. It not only reveals Hippolytus’s character but impresses the audience with Seneca’s detailed and scholarly knowledge of Greek geography.

Act 1 (Phaedra and the nurse)

Phaedra soliloquy in which she laments that Theseus has gone off to the underworld, abandoning her in a place she has never liked, exiled from her beloved Crete. She wonders that she has recently become obsessed with the hunt.

(Her mother was Pasiphae, wife of King Minos who notoriously allowed herself to be impregnated by a bull, giving birth to the Minotaur. More relevant, though, is that Pasiphae was a daughter of Phoebus the sun god, and Venus the goddess of love has a long-running feud with him. Which explains why Venus is also against Phaedra.)

It is the nurse who makes explicit the fact that Phaedra has fallen in love with her stepson. Phaedra says her infatuation is driving her so mad she wants to kill herself.

Unreason reigns
Supreme, a potent god commands my heart,
The invincible winged god, who rules all earth,
Who strikes and scorches Jove with his fierce flame…

Interestingly, the nurse insists that all this talk of Venus and Eros is rubbish. There is no little god with a bow and arrow fluttering about in the sky. Instead it is the corruption of the times: ‘Too much contentment and prosperity and self-indulgence’ lead to new desires. In fact she states the Stoic theme that the simple life is best and luxury leads to decadence.

Then the Chorus delivers a long impressive hymn to the power of Eros or Love, as demonstrated by mating behaviour throughout the animal kingdom. As a Darwinian materialist I, of course, agree that the urge to mate and reproduce is the primary function of all life forms, including humans.

Act 2

The nurse describes to the Chorus Phaedra’s ever more miserably lovelorn state, pale face, tearful eyes etc. We are shown Phaedra in her boudoir angrily bossing her attendants about, despising her traditional dresses and jewellery, wanting to wear the outfit of a hunting queen and roam through the woods after her beloved.

Enter Hippolytus. The nurse tells him to stop hunting so hard, relax, find love, enjoy his youth. She counsels him to reproduce; if all young men were like him, humanity would cease to exist. Hippolytus replies not really to her points, instead declaring that he prefers simple rustic rural life in its honest simplicity to the deceit of courts and the city, mob rule, envy etc – turns into an extended description of that old chestnut, the sweet and innocent life of the age of Saturn, before cities or ships or agriculture, before war itself. Illogically this long speech ends with a swerve into his hatred of women, who he blames for all conflict and wars, and explains why he shuns women like the plague.

Enter Phaedra and metaphorically falls at Hippolytus’s feet, swearing she will be his slave and do anything for him. He mistakes, thinking she is upset because of the long absence of her husband, his father, Theseus in the underworld. He tries to reassure her, while Phaedra cannot contain her made infatuation:

Madness is in my heart;
It is consumed by love, a wild fire raging
Secretly in my body in my blood,
Like flames that lick across a roof of timber.

Phaedra describes how beautiful Theseus was as a young man when he came to Crete to kill the Minotaur and sue King Minos for the hand of his daughter, Ariadne. But all this leads up to Phaedra kneeling in front of Hippolytus and declaring her love for him. Hippolytus responds with end-of-the-world bombast:

For what cause shall the sky be rent with thunder
If no cloud dims it now? Let ruin wreck
The firmament, and black night hide the day!
Let stars run back and all their courses turn
Into confusion!..
Ruler of gods in heaven and men on earth,
Why is thy hand not armed, will not thy torch
Of triple fire set all the world ablaze?
Hurl against me thy thunderbolt, thy spear,
And let me be consumed in instant fire.

He rebuffs her. She throws herself into his arms, swearing to follow him everywhere. He draws his sword. Yes! She begs to be killed and put out of her misery. He realises it will defile his sword and all the oceans will not be able to clean it. (A very common trope in tragedy, originating with the Greeks, repeated in, for example, Macbeth, one thousand five hundred and fifty years later.)

Phaedra faints, Hippolytus flees. The nurse steps forward to comment and make the suggestion that, now Phaedra’s criminal love is revealed and Hippolytus has rejected her, to deflect blame she ought to accuse him of propositioning her. She yells ‘Help! Rape!’ as the Chorus enters, representing ‘the people’, showing them the sword Hippolytus dropped in his flight and the Queen, lying distraught on the ground, her hair all dishevelled.

The Chorus apparently ignores the cries of the nurse and instead proceeds with a 3-page hymn to Hippolytus’s matchless male beauty.

Act 3

Weirdly, act 3 opens with the self-same Chorus only now summarising the situation i.e. the queen intends to pursue her utterly false claim of rape against Hippolytus. But the Chorus hasn’t got far before who do we see arriving but Theseus, the mature hero, who describes how he has been in the underworld for four long years, only able to return because Hercules rescued him. But what is all this weeping and lamentation he hears?

The nurse explains her wife is distraught and some kind of curtain is lifted or something removed to reveal an ‘inner scene’ where we see Phaedra holding a sword as if to kill herself. Theseus interrogates Phaedra who refuses to explain. So – in the kind of casual mention of hyper violence to servants and slaves which always disturbs me – Theseus says he’ll have the nurse bound and scourged and chained and whipped till she spills the beans.

But before he can do this, Phaedra says Hippolytus tried to rape her, saying this is his sword which he left in his flight. Theseus now delivers the ‘Great gods, what infamy is this!’ type speech. Interestingly, he accuses Hippolytus not only of the obvious things, but accuses him of hypocrisy in his ‘affectation of old time-honoured ways’ i.e. Seneca has expanded Hippolytus’s traditional character of hunter to include this extra dimension of him being a proponent of the whole back-to-the-ways-of-our-ancestors movement, a view Seneca himself propounds in the Letters to Lucilius.

Theseus accuses Hippolytus of being the worst kind of hypocrite, in language which reminds me of Hamlet berating his uncle Claudius, then vows to track him down wherever he flees. He tells us that the god Neptune granted him three wishes, and now he invokes this promise, demanding that Hippolytus never sees another dawn.

The Chorus steps in to lament why the king of the gods never intervenes to ensure justice, why men’s affairs seem governed by blind fate, why the evil triumph and the good are punished.

Act 4

Enter the messenger with stock tears and reluctance to tell what he has seen. Theseus commands him and so the messenger describes the death of Hippolytus. The youth fled, jumped into his chariot, and whipped the horses off at great speed but that is when a strange enormous storm arose at sea, vast waves attacking the land, and giving birth to a monster, a bull-shaped thing coloured green of the sea with fiery red eyes. This thing proceeds to terrify Hippolytus’s horses which run wild, throwing him from the chariot but tangling his arms and legs in the traces, so that he is dragged at speed over the clifftop’s ragged rocks and flayed alive, his body disintegrating into pieces until he collided with a fallen tree trunk and was transfixed in the groin. Theseus laments that his wish has been so violently fulfilled.

The Chorus repeats the idea which I’m coming to see as central to the play, less about love or lust etc but the safeness of the humble life, not exposed to the decadent living, random lusts and shocking violence associated with the rich.

Peace and obscurity make most content,
In lowly homes old age sleeps easily…
For Jupiter is on his guard
And strikes whatever comes too near the sky.
The thunder rumbles round his throne,
But no great harm can come to common folk
Who dwell in modest homes.

If you think about this for a moment, you’ll realise it’s bullshit. Poor people living in lowly homes often have terrible lives, scarred by poverty, ignorance and, of course, the random violence of their superiors who might, for example, decide to start a civil war and devastate the homes and livelihoods of ‘common folk’ in entire regions. Think of Julius Caesar laying waste entire regions of Gaul, burning cities to the ground and selling their entire populations into slavery. It’s the kind of patronising crap rich people tell themselves to convince themselves that they, the filthy rich, living in the lap of luxury, eating at gluttonous banquets, waited on hand and foot by literally hundreds of slaves, and filling their day with sexual perversions, that they are the ones who have it rough.

Act 5

Barely has Theseus heard all from the messenger than Phaedra enters, wailing and wielding the sword. She begins her lament as the ruined corpse of Hippolytus is brought onstage and continues, lamenting his death, berating her treachery and falsehood, confessing to Theseus that Hippolytus was totally innocent, then stabbing herself to death.

Theseus then laments a) was it for this that he was allowed to escape from hell, into a hell of his own devising? And then lists all the ingenious punishments he saw in hell and says none of them are adequate for him.

The Chorus intervenes to advise that they honour and bury the body first and then, very gruesomely, specifically directs Theseus in placing the left hand here and the right hand over here, and so on, as they assemble his body parts, a ghoulish jigsaw.

In the final lines, Theseus orders his staff to a) go scour the landscape to find the last missing bits of Hippolytus and b) and as for the wicked Phaedra:

let a deep pit of earth conceal
And soil lie heavy on her cursed head.

3. The Trojan Women

Background

The Trojan War has ended. Troy has fallen. Outside the smouldering ruins of the city huddle the surviving royal women, rounded up by the victorious Greeks and awaiting their fate. The leading women are Hecuba, widow of King Priam, and Andromache, widow of the great Trojan warrior, Hector.

Act 1

Hecuba opens the play with a long lament about the fall of Troy, symbol of the uncertainty on which all pomp and power is based. She interacts with the Chorus of Trojan women. She makes them unbind their hair and loosen their tunics to expose their bare breasts which they then proceed to beat in lament for Hector, wall of Troy, and Priam its murdered king. But at least they are at peace now and will never be led as slaves to foreign lands.

Happy is Priam, happy every man
That has died in battle
And taken with him his life’s fulfilment.

(The literal baring and beating of their own breasts occurs in several of the plays. Was it performed literally in ancient times? Women mourning in ancient times were meant to not only beat their bare breasts but scratch their faces till they bled. If taken literally, surely this would be as difficult to perform persuasively onstage as a sword fight.)

Act 2

The Chorus wonders why the Greeks are delaying. Talthybius describes the momentous appearance of the ghost of Achilles, demanding the sacrifice he was promised before the fleet can sail. A prime slab of Senecan bombast:

A rift appeared,
Caves yawned, hell gaped, earth parted and revealed
A way from worlds below to worlds above.
His tomb was burst asunder and there stood
The living ghost of the Thessalian leader…

Pyrrhus, son of dead Achilles, takes up the case for his father, first listing his great victories before he even came to Troy, then insisting the Greeks fulfil their vow and make a human sacrifice at his tomb. Agamemnon sharply refuses, saying he regrets the blood and cruelty of the night of the sack of Troy but it was sort of justified by bloodlust. But now in the cold light of day, sacrifice a human being? No. This dialogue turns really bitter as the two Greeks insult each other, accusing each other of cowardice and crimes.

Agamemnon calls for Calchas the soothsayer. Enter Calchas who announces that the gods demand two sacrifices: a young woman dressed as a bride must be sacrificed on Achilles’ tomb; and Priam’s grandson must be thrown from the battlements of Troy. Then the Greek fleet can sail.

The Chorus delivers quite a profound speech about death: is there anything afterwards, does the spirit live on, or is this all? It concludes:

There is nothing after death; and death is nothing –
Only the finishing post of life’s short race.

Therefore, ambition give up your hopes, anxiety give up your fears. (This is the third play in which, contrary to Watling’s comments in the introduction, we find Seneca’s characters delivering very clearly Stoic beliefs, entirely in line with Seneca the philosopher.)

Act 3

Andromache berates the Trojan women for only just learning grief, whereas for her Troy fell and the world ended when her husband, Hector, was killed. Now she only resists the death she wants to protect their son, Astyanax. An Elder performs the function of the nurse in other plays i.e. asks questions and is a sounding board for Andromache’s thoughts. She tells how the ghost of Hector came to her in a dream warning her to hide their son. Now she has come to the tomb of her husband and pushes the boy to go inside it (through gates) and hide, which he does without a word.

Then the Elder warns that Ulysses approaches. Ulysses announces he has been drawn by lot to ask Andromache for her son. While the son of Hector lives no Greek can rest, knowing he will grow up to restore Troy and relaunch the war. Andromache pretends her son was stolen from her during the sack of the city and laments his whereabouts and fate. Ulysses sees through her lies and threatens her with torture. Andromache welcomes torture and death. Ulysses understands her mother love and says it is love of his son, Telemachus, which motivates him.

At which point Andromache, to the accompaniment of fierce oaths, makes the ironic lie that her son right now is entombed with the dead (he, as we saw, is hiding in the tomb of Hector). Ulysses detects that Andromache is still anxious, pacing, muttering, as one who had lost everything would not. She is lying. He orders his men to tear down Hector’s tomb with the aim of scattering the ashes on the sea.

Andromache agonises over whether to surrender her son to save the ashes of her husband. She places herself before the tomb defying the soldiers to kill her first. Ulysses orders them on. She falls to her knees and clasps Ulysses’ legs and begs him to have mercy. She calls forth the boy, who comes from the tomb, she tells him to kneel before Ulysses.

Andromache ridicules the idea that this poor boy but himself could rebuild the walls of the ruined city. She begs Ulysses to let the boy become his slave. But Ulysses ducks responsibility, saying it is not his decision but Calchas’s.

Andromache despises him, but Ulysses says time is marching on, the ships have weighed anchor. He allows her a moment to lament her son and Andromache gives a page-long speech describing Astyanax growing to manhood and being a wise and noble king, which will not now happen. Andromache bids him go with the Greeks, but the boy clings on to his mother and doesn’t want to leave, but Andromache says there is no choice and bids him take a message from her to his father. Ulysses, bored of all this yap, commands his soldiers to take him away.

The Chorus of Trojan women pulls back, as it were, from this immediate scene, to consider the general problem, what will become of them, where will they be sent, whose slaves will they become?

Act 4

Helen laments that she has been ordered by the victorious Greeks to lie to Priam’s daughter Polyxena, and persuade her she is to be married to Pyrrhus. It is, of course, a lie, she is going to be sacrificed, but Helen dutifully tells her to rejoice and dress as a bride. Andromache, hearing all this, is filled with disgust that anyone can think of rejoicing at this disastrous time, and at the unremitting evil Helen represents, ‘bringer of doom, disaster and destruction’.

Helen replies to this attack, saying she had no say in the matter, was handed over like an object won in a competition, has endured 10 years of exile, and is now hated by all sides. Andromache knows Helen is telling lies and orders her to tell the truth. Herself weeping, Helen comes clean and says Polyxena is to be sacrificed, burned, and her ashes scattered over Achilles’ tomb.

Andromache is shocked that Polyxena takes the news that she is about to die with alacrity and enthusiastically changes clothes, braids her hair etc. It means exit from this misery and avoiding a lifetime of slavery. Not so happy is her mother, Hecuba, who laments.

Now Helen tells the Trojan women have been parcelled out to, Andromache to Pyrrhus, Hecuba to Ulysses, Cassandra to Agamemnon. Hecuba rains down curses on Ulysses, hoping that storm and sea will plague his return to Ithaca. And, as Pyrrhus appears, she extends her curse of storms and shipwreck to the entire Greek fleet.

The Chorus of Trojan women point out there is comfort in numbers, it is easier to mourn or suffer with colleagues, and describes how it will feel to be rounded up into the ships and sail away and slowly lose sight of their homeland, the smoke rising from their ruined city, Mount Ida, all fading over the horizon.

Act 5

The messenger arrives and announces the boy has been flung from the tower, the girl has met her death. The women ask for a detailed account, which he gives them. Both died with tremendous bravery, shaming the Greeks.

The last word goes to Hecuba who laments that death has come to everyone in her family, but will not come to her, to ease her suffering.

Thoughts

  1. The supernatural element of Achilles’ ghost rising up from the underworld is very unlike the chaste, restrained style of Euripides’ tragedy on the same subject. it feels closer in style to the Middle Ages or Gothic horror.
  2. The choral ode in act 2 persuasively argues that there is nothing after death, death is the end, our minds expire with our bodies – which is flatly contradicted by everything else in the play, including Achilles’ miraculous appearance, the ghost of Hector, and so on.
  3. The other plays feature a unified chronological plot. The Trojan Women is interesting because it has what feels like two plots, featuring two women (Hecuba and Andromache) running in parallel, though linking up at places. Its emphasis on the suffering of women reminds me of Ovid’s Heroides. It’s my favourite.

4. Oedipus

Background

The most famous Greek myth. A soothsayer tells Oedipus’s parents, Laius and Jocasta, the rulers of Thebes, that their unborn son will kill his father and sleep with his mother. Horrified, the royal couple deliver the baby, but then expose him in the country. To avoid the prophecy coming true they have the baby’s ankles pierced and joined together with a strap. (This caused the child’s feet to swell up and gave rise to Oedipus’ name, which literally means ‘swollen foot’.)

A peasant finds him and takes him to the king of the neighbouring realm, Polybus of Corinth who, being childless, considers him a providential gift from the gods and adopts him. As Oedipus grows to be strong and virile, his peers taunt him that he can’t be the son of the mild and gentle Polybus. So he travels to Delphi where the oracle tells him he is fated to kill his father and sleep with his mother. Horrified, Oedipus vows never to return to Corinth. On the way back he gets into an argument in a narrow path with an old man driving a chariot and hits him so hard he accidentally kills him. On the same journey he comes across the half-human, half-animal sphinx who won’t let him pass unless he answers the riddle: What walks on 4 legs in the morning, 2 legs at noon, and 3 legs in the evening. Oedipus answers correctly that it is Man. He travels on to Thebes to discover that the entire city had been terrorised by the Sphinx but he has saved them all. Not only that, but news has come that old King Laius has been killed. As saviour of the city, Oedipus is offered the hand of the widowed queen and marries Jocasta and becomes the new king.

The play opens as a plague is ravaging Thebes. A sequence of events, and messengers bringing news, slowly reveal to Oedipus that he was never the natural son of King Polybus, that he was adopted, that his true parents were Laius and Jocasta and then…that the old man he killed in the fight in the road was Laius and…he has been sleeping with Jocasta, his own mother, for years. At which point a) Jocasta hangs herself and b) Oedipus blinds himself.

Act 1

Oedipus outlines the situation i.e. he is king at Thebes, the city is stricken with plague which is striking down everyone but himself, he has sent to the oracle at Delphi which has sent back the horrifying prediction that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother. He is pleased he fled his homeland and his father Polybus, but feels a terrible sense of dread.

I see
Disaster everywhere, I doubt myself.
Fate is preparing, even while I speak,
Some blow for me.

Of course the blight of the plague gives Seneca scope for some typical hyperbole, ‘the murk of hell has swallowed up the heavenly citadels’ and so on. The description of the plague goes on at length, describing people too sick to bury the dead and so on, reminding me of the vivid description of the plague which ends Lucretius’s long poem De Rerum Natura, premonitory of Albert Camus’s great novel about a 20th century plague. Oedipus says maybe he brought the bad luck, maybe must leave the city.

His queen (and unbeknown to him, his mother) tells him a true king grasps misfortune with a steady hand.

Oedipus describes his encounter with the Sphinx who is made to sound a hellish beast surrounded by the bones of those who failed her riddle. Well, he triumphed over her but now seems to have himself brought the plague to Thebes.

The Chorus is made up of Theban elders. It gives a 4-page-long, vivid description of the plague, how it first struck animals then moved to humans. With characteristic bombast it then shrilly describes:

Out of the depths of Erebus their prison
The Furies have rushed upon us with the fire of hell.
Phlegethon, river of fire, has burst its banks,
The River of Hades is mingled with the River of Cadmus.

The act ends as Oedipus sees Creon, Jocasta’s brother, arriving. He has been to the oracle.

Act 2

Creon described to Oedipus the mood of horror at the oracle, till a superhuman voice declared that only when the murderer of Laius is driven out will Thebes know peace. Oedipus then makes one of those ironic vows, vowing to all the gods that the murderer of Laius will never know rest but live in permanent exile, a wandering nomad, and find no pardon – ignorant of the fact he is cursing himself.

On a more mundane note Oedipus now asks Creon how Laius met his death. He was attacked and murdered at a crossroads out in the countryside, says Creon.

Enter the old blind prophet Tiresias, led by his daughter, Manto. He tells Oedipus he can interpret the situation through a sacrifice, so a bull and heifer are brought in and the sacrificial flame rises and parts in two parts which fight each other.

[This is a classic example of the way these plays would be hard to stage but work very well when read, or read aloud, or broadcast. The getting onstage of the animal, its execution and especially the behaviour of the flame would be impossible to create onstage but work pretty well when read out.]

Manto describes the strange behaviour of the flame which Tiresias interprets as the gods themselves being ashamed of the truth. Tiresias asks how the animals behaved when sacrificed and Manto tells him the heifer submitted but the bull shied and defied the blows. The heifer bled freely but the bull’s blood not at all, while dark blood poured from its eyes and mouth. When they examined the entrails, they were in bad shape, the heart was shrunk, the veins were livid, part of the lungs was missing, the liver was putrid. Far, far worse, the virgin heifer turned out to be pregnant and the deformed life in her stirred. The fire on the altar roared, the hearth quaked etc.

Oedipus begs to know what this all means, but Tiresias pushes the play deep into Gothic territory by saying they will have to perform a magic rite to call the soul of the dead king himself up from hell to tell them. Oedipus must not attend, so he nominates Creon to go in his place.

Incongruously, oddly, the Chorus sing a sustained hymn to the Bacchus, god of the vine, listing his adventures and achievements – notably the occasion when he scared pirates who had captured him into jumping overboard and being changed into dolphins, and the time he rescued Ariadne from Naxos and proceeded to marry her.

Act 3

Creon enters. Oedipus asks what he saw at the ceremony. Creon is so terrified he repeatedly refuses to speak until Oedipus forces him. Then Creon gives a terrific description of the dark and ill-fated glade where they took Tiresias and dug a ditch and burned animal sacrifices and chanted evil spells and a great chasm opened up and hordes of the dead appeared before them. Last of all came the reluctant figure of Laius, still dishevelled and bloody, who proceeds to give a long speech saying the plague on Thebes is due to the current king, who killed his father and has slept with his mother and had children by her. Only when he is cast out as an unclean thing will Thebes be cured.

Oedipus is appalled but refuses to believe it: after all, his father Polybus lives on at Corinth and he’s never laid a finger on his mother, Merope. Oedipus refuses to believe it and says Creon is conspiring with Tiresias to seize the crown. Creon, for his part, advises Oedipus to abdicate now, to step down to a humbler position before he is pushed. They proceed to have a page of dialogue which turns into a debate about whether a subject should stand up to the king, Oedipus dismissing these as typical arguments of the revolutionary.

The Chorus gives a potted history of the land of Thebes, and the wider region of Boeotia, populated by Cadmus in search of his abducted sister Europa, of the many monsters which have been spawned in this region, with a final mention of the myth of Actaeon, turned into a stag and ripped apart by his own hunting dogs.

Act 4

Oedipus is confused, he asks Jocasta how Laius died and is told he was struck down by a young man when travelling with his entourage at a place where three roads meet. It jogs a faint memory in Oedipus’s mind but then a messenger comes to interrupt his attempts to remember with news that his ‘father’, King Polybus of Corinth, has passed away peacefully in his sleep.

The old man/messenger requests him to come to Corinth to attend the dead king’s funeral, but Oedipus refuses, saying he is afraid of being alone in the company of his mother. The old man reassures him that Meropa was not his real mother and proceeds to tell the full story of how he, the old man, was given Oedipus as a baby, his ankles bound together with a metal pin. ‘Who by?’ Oedipus asks. ‘The keeper of the royal flocks,’ the man replies. ‘Can he remember his name?’ Oedipus asks. No, but he might remember the face. So Oedipus orders his men to assemble all the royal shepherds.

The old man warns Oedipus to stop probing while he still has time, but Oedipus insists he has nothing to fear and the truth will set him free. Poor dupe of fate.

Enter Phorbas, head of Thebes’s royal flocks. He begins to remember the old man. He confirms that he handed the old man a baby but doubts if it can have lived because its ankles were pierced through with an iron bolt and infection had spread.

Who was the baby, Oedipus demands. Phorbas refuses to say so Oedipus says he will order hot coals to torture him with. Phorbas replies with one line: ‘Your wife was that child’s mother.’

With that one line the truth comes flooding in on Oedipus. He is not Polybus and Meropa’s child; they adopted him; he is the child of Laius who he killed at the crossroads and of…Jocasta, the woman he has married and had children with. Oedipus is, understandably, distraught, and expresses it with full Senecan hyperbole:

Earth, be opened!
Ruler of darkness, hide in deepest hell
This monstrous travesty of procreation!

The Chorus continues its very tangential relationship with the story, not commenting on this amazing revelation at all, but instead wishing its ship of life was riding on milder waters to a gentler wind. And then goes off at a real tangent, briefly describing the story of Daedalus and Icarus to show that living in moderation, the golden mean, is best.

Act 5

The Chorus sees a messenger approaching. Never good news these messengers, and this one is no exception. He describes in great detail how distraught Oedipus went into the palace, grabbed a sword and made a great speech about killing himself, but then realised it wasn’t punishment enough, was too quick and easy. Something was demanded to placate the gods and end the curse and the plague, more like a living death, where he would die again and again every day. Then it comes to him to blind himself and the messenger gives a very gory description of Oedipus plucking his own eyes out.

The Chorus gives a brief didactic explanation that Fate is unchangeable, one iron chain of endless causes and consequences. No man can escape it.

Enter Oedipus blinded, freed from the light of the accusing sun.

The Chorus describes Jocasta coming onstage, distraught, uncertain whether to address her son and husband.

Jocasta addresses Oedipus who is horrified and says they must never speak, never be in the same country together. Jocasta seizes his sword and, after some debate exactly where to stab herself, stabs herself in her womb, seat of all her sinfulness, and falls dead.

In his final soliloquy Oedipus says he has expiated his sin and now will set out on his wanderings. He promises the poor suffering people of Thebes that he will take with him the capitalised allegorised figures of infliction and free them at last. What better companions and tormentors could he hope for on his endless wanderings and punishments.

Moral of the story

Even if you’re a childless couple, desperate for a baby, do not accept the gift of a little baby boy whose ankles are pierced together by an iron bar!

*************

Big ideas

When I was a boy reading these Penguin introductions, it was often not specific criticism of specific aspects of the play which stuck with me, but when the scholars and editors made throwaway generalisations which in a flash helped me make sense of an entire genre or period of history.

Thus, in among his detailed critique of specific plays or aspects, Watling offers three big, memorable ideas about Seneca’s influence on English Renaissance literature.

1. One is that Seneca is often blamed for Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights’ addiction to ghosts, ghosts of gruesomely murdered figures who return to the land of the living to trigger the action of the plot (p.28). The ghost of the dead Spanish officer Andrea appears at the start of the archetypal Elizabethan revenge tragedy, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and ghosts are important in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Julius Caesar and central to the plot of his greatest play, Hamlet. In fact, Watling refutes this by pointing out there are only two ghosts in Seneca’s oeuvre, Tantalus in Thyestes and Thyestes in Agamemnon.

2. The other is the simple but illuminating comment that:

The language of Elizabethan drama would not have reached its height of poetic eloquence without the infusion of the classical voice – the Ovidian mythology and the Senecan rhetoric. (p.32)

Aha, Ovid and Seneca – so that was their influence and how they fit together to flow through all Elizabethan drama: Ovid for mythological stories, with their bucolic settings, flowers and curlicues; Seneca for accusing ghosts, characters howling for revenge and invoking the shadows of Erebus and darkest night.

3. There’s a third insight, not so striking as the first two, maybe, and this is that, despite the best efforts of scholars and academically-minded authors like Philip Sidney or Ben Jonson to import the so-called Dramatic Unities and impose them on contemporary drama, they failed; they failed to dent the English preference for ‘straggling narrative plays‘ which cheerfully ignore the cardinal unities of time or place or even action (p.35).

In Watling’s words 1) Senecan rhetoric of extreme emotions was grafted onto 2) plots which lacked Senecan focus and concision, to create a ‘fusion of classical uniformity with romantic multiformity in the Elizabethan theatre.’ (p.37).

In the greatest Elizabethan plays, the theme, the form and the language may have crystallised into an impressive whole:

but yet not so perfect as to tidy up all the loose ends or exclude the superfluities and irrelevances which make the Elizabethan drama of life a different thing from the Roman sculptured monument of death. (p.38)

Messy, mongrel literature has always been our style.

Credit

E.F. Watling’s translation of Four Tragedies and Octavia was published by Penguin Books in 1966.

Related links

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The Aeneid by Virgil – books 1 to 3

I am Aeneas, known for my devotion. (Aeneid book 1, line 378)

I own three translations of the Aeneid:

  • the 1956 Penguin Classics prose translation by W.F. Jackson Knight
  • the 1971 verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum
  • the 1991 Penguin Classics prose translation by David West

I read most of the Aeneid in the West prose translation. It seemed easy and modern. I dipped into the Mandelbaum but was put off by his tone, too hectically American, maybe because I read it at the height of the heatwave when everything felt a bit hysterical. But I did use Mandelbaum’s comprehensive Glossary of Names and Places. The West edition doesn’t have a glossary or any notes at all. The idea is for you to rely entirely on the information Virgil gives in the poem itself which, it turns out, is all you need, most of the time.

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, generally referred to as Virgil (70 to 19 BC) was the great Roman poet who straddled the epochal transition from the Roman Republic to the early Roman Empire. There were other very important figures, such as Catullus from the generation before (b.84), Virgil’s younger contemporary, Horace (b.63 BC), and, a generation younger, the great poet of mythology, Ovid (b.43). But Virgil towers above them all.

Virgil was born near the northern city of Mantua to parents who owned farmland. He was sent to Rome to complete his education where he probably met the young Augustus (63 BC to 14 AD) and his friends, namely his future patron and Augustus’s ‘minister of culture’, Maecenas (68 to 8 BC).

Always a sickly, sensitive young man, Virgil left Rome and settled near Naples where he spent the rest of his life quietly studying and writing poetry.

Virgil left no juvenilia or collections of random poems. He wrote just three works, each of them masterpieces:

  • the ten very short and highly stylised poems of idealised country life featuring lovelorn shepherds, the Eclogues
  • the four longer, tougher-minded, sometimes lyrical, sometimes practical, sometimes sweepingly destructive Georgics, are, on paper, poems of advice to farmers and livestock owners, but in reality a lot more varied and complex than that
  • the long epic poem the Aeneid, which has a claim to being the most important and most influential poem ever written in Europe

Epic poem

An epic poem is a long poem with a historical or legendary setting, which usually tells the adventures of one or more heroes on an epic journey or pitched into a mighty struggle, all with the input of gods and goddesses. Many societies and cultures have produced epic poems.

Sometimes an epic poem has as part of its purpose to explain the origin of cities or races or gods and religions. (The Greeks had a word for such an origin story, an aition.) Always epics are characterised by long narratives with multiple incidents or episodes strung along the central plot.

In the 1940s C.S. Lewis proposed an elemental distinction between primary and secondary epic. Primary epic is produced in illiterate cultures, often by travelling poets or troubadors, often using familiar narratives, well-known characters and using time-honoured, stock descriptions. The process by which they’re written down is obscure but by the time they are recorded they already display very sophisticated techniques of oral storytelling. In our European tradition, the two Greek epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey show these characteristics. They are attributed to a figure called ‘Homer’ but it’s not certain that anyone named Homer ever existed.

By complete contrast, secondary epic is the production of a literate culture. It is the product of known authors, was written at a known time and place. It self-consciously invokes many of the tropes and techniques of primary epic, such as well-known legends and legendary characters, famous episodes or adventures, extended similes, stock descriptive phrases, episodic structure and so on. Virgil’s Aeneid has a good claim to be the greatest secondary epic.

A poem of multiple levels

The Aeneid is a carefully wrought collation of numerous themes on multiple levels.

Adventure story

In terms of storyline or plot it tells the story of Aeneas, a prince of Troy – a story familiar to all educated Romans of Virgil’s day – who escapes the destruction of the city at the climax of the ten-year-long siege by the Greeks, and describes the wanderings of him and 20 shiploads of comrades as they sail west across the Mediterranean looking for a new home.

Foundation story

Why bother with this story? Because the Romans believed that their city ultimately owed its founding to prince Aeneas. The traditional view (which is recapped in book 1) goes that Aeneas underwent numerous florid adventures as he sailed west from Troy before finally making landfall in western Italy. After fighting off the local tribes he establishes a settlement at a place he calls Lavinium.

His son, Ascanius, also known as Iulus, will move their settlement to a place named Alba Longa, where his descendants will live for 300 years. Then Ilia, the royal priestess of Vesta, will be seduced and impregnated by the god Mars and give birth to twins, Romulus and Remus. Romulus will grow up to build a new settlement, named Rome after him, which will go on to rule the world.

Patriotic story

So on one level the poem is an ultra-patriotic dramatisation of the man who founds the settlement which was to form the basis of Rome. Aeneas is shown as an epitome of the Roman virtues, a man who puts duty to family and country before self.

Pleasing Augustus

Throughout the narrative Virgil goes out of his way to suck up to the current ruler of Rome, the princeps Gaius Octavianus who was awarded the title Augustus while he was composing the work. Gaius Octavianus had been adopted by Julius Caesar in his will and so took his name, becoming Gaius Julius Caesar.

Virgil is at pains to demonstrate the extreme antiquity of the family of ‘Julii’ of which Octavianus had become a member, and so goes out of his way to tell us, repeatedly, that Aeneas’s son, Ascanius, had this second name Iulus (this name had been Ilus while Troy, which was also called Ilium, had stood). Ilus – Iulus – Iulius. The aim was to create a direct link from Aeneas via Ilus-Iulius to the house of Julius Caesar, and so to the current emperor, Gaius Julius Caesar aka Augustus.

Those are the public and political aims of the poem. Two additional factors make it a masterpiece.

Adapting Homer

One is the tremendous skill with which Virgil closely models himself on the two outstanding epics of his tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, adopting the tone of voice, the capacious bird’s-eye-view of the narrator, the confident intertwining of the human level with the character of the immortal gods who play a crucial role in the plot, either supporting or scheming against Aeneas. It is a very sophisticated invocation and twining together of the epic tradition up to his time.

Virgil’s sensibility

But more important is Virgil’s sensitivity. Homer’s heroes are killing machines. They may be sad and burst into tears, but only when there is good justification (weeping over the dead) and most of the time they are just angry and keying themselves up for yet another fight.

By contrast, the Aeneid is soulful. The narrator and his hero are sensitive to ‘the tears of things’, to the tragic inevitability of the universe. Aeneas does his duty, but with a heavy heart at the suffering he has seen and the new suffering he causes. It is an epic poem with lyrical feeling.

Book 1 Storm and banquet

In the best tradition, the poem starts in media res meaning ‘in the middle of things’. We find our hero aboard ship, having set sail from Sicily towards the cost of Italy but caught up in a violent storm. His fleet is dispersed and at least one ship sinks.

In fact the read of the poem is informed that this storm has been whipped up by Juno queen of the gods. She hates Aeneas and is his steady foe. She cannot forgive the Trojans for the snub when Paris awarded the apple of beauty to Venus. This long-standing grudge is why we see her visit the home of Aeolus, gods of the winds, and ask him to whip up a storm to shipwreck Aeneas, which he promptly does.

But we also see Venus, Aeneas’s mother, who was impregnated by Aeneas’s father Anchises, rushing to confront Jupiter, king of the gods, and tearfully ask how he can let his wife massacre her son and his colleagues. Jupiter calmly tells her to dry her eyes, he has no intention of letting Aeneas drown, and it is now that he reveals what the fates have in store for the Trojan prince (as I outlined above).

And as he speaks he gets his brother Neptune, king of the seas, to abate the storm, and gently blow the remainder of Aeneas’s fleet towards the coast of north Africa, referred to here as Libya. Here the Trojans gratefully anchor, come ashore, dry off, go hunting, shoot some deer, build fires, eat and drink wine and recover their strength.

And here Aeneas is visited by his mother in the guise of a local woman who assures him all will be well and tells him about the nearby town of Carthage, just now being built by exiles from Tyre. Venus-in-disguise tells the rather complicated backstory of this people. Tyre is a rich city on the coast of Phoenicia (what is now Israel) ruled by king Pygmalion. He has a sister, princess Dido. Dido marries a rich man Sychaeus. But Pygmalion is jealous of Sychaeus’s wealth and murders him while he worships at an altar. For a while no-one knows who committed the crime and Pygmalion hypocritically comforts his sister.

But then the ghost of Sychaeus appears to Dido, reveals the truth, warns her to flee her brother, and shows her the burial place of a huge secret treasure. She gathers her friends and supporters and the many people opposed to the ‘tyrant’ Pygmalion, they dig up the treasure, load it onto some ships and sail away forever.

Now she and her people have arrived at the other end of the Mediterranean, made land, settled and Aeneas and his crew have arrived just as the Tyrians are laying out and building a new ‘city’, a city the narrative refers to as Carthage.

You don’t need to be a literary critic to spot that both Aeneas and Dido are in similar plight, both refugees from distant lands in the eastern Mediterranean, forced by tragic events to flee their home cities, and now trying to build new lives, and new cities, in the west.

All this is explained to him by Aeneas’s mother, Venus who, having intervened to save Aeneas from the storm, now appears to him in the guise of a local maiden. She has wrapped Aeneas in a magic cloud so he and his companion can walk up to the new city walls and watch the Tyrians building Carthage.

Then she disappears the cloud and Aeneas is welcomed by the Tyrians. Their queen, Dido, welcomes Aeneas and his men to a lavish feast. Venus waylays Aeneas’s son as he comes from the beach where they’ve all landed towards the city, makes him fall asleep in a copse of trees. And gets her other son, the god Eros, to take on Ascanius’s form, and be introduced to Queen Dido, and sit on her lap during the feast (!) and deliberately make her fall in love with Aeneas. Because we all know how this love affair will end Virgil describes her as poor Dido and ‘doomed’ Dido.

Homer is always full of a kind of metallic energy. Even when his heroes weep, they do so in a virile, manly way. But in his treatment of Dido Virgil displays a completely different sensibility, sympathetic and sad.

Back at the feast, Dido asks Aeneas to tell them about his adventures. He has already told them he has been wandering for seven years since the fall of Troy. Reluctantly, Aeneas agrees.

Book 2 The fall of Troy

Aeneas’s story. He cuts straight to the final days of the 10-year-long siege as the Greeks cut down mighty trees to make the enormous wooden horse. Then strike camp and sail away leaving it alone on the plain in front of Troy. The Trojans come out to admire it. The priest Laocoön warns them all that it is a Greek scam but at that point a Trojan patrol returns with a Greek captive. He tells them he’s called Sinon and, after incurring the enmity of the mighty Odysseus (here called Ulixes) he was chosen to be the human sacrifice the Greek fleet needed to set sail (just as it had required the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigeneia in order to set sail from Greece, 10 long years ago).

Sinon tells them he managed to escape the night before he was due to be killed and has hidden. Now they can kill him or spare him as they please. But he is a plant left by the Greeks to give a false explanation of the horse. He says it is a peace offering to the gods to let the fleet sail. More precisely, it is atonement for the incident when Ulixes and Diomede stole the Palladium from the temple of Pallas Athene in the citadel of Troy. Since then she has persecuted them and their chief priest, Calchas, ordered them a) to return to Greece to worship the gods, atone for their sins, rearm and return to renew the siege, and b) to build this enormous horse as a peace offering to Athena. Sinon warns that if the Trojans damage it at all it will bring down the wrath of Athena on them. If, on the other hand, they take it into the city and venerate it, then Athena will bless them and, when the Greeks return, allies from all across Asia will rally to their cause and they will defeat the Greeks in a final battle.

The Trojans are still hesitating when an amazing thing happens. The priest of Neptune, Laocoön, is sacrificing to an altar by the shore when two might sea snakes emerge from the waves and envelop his two young sons. Laocoön goes to their rescue and tries to fight them off but the snakes strangle all three to death and then slither into the city and up to the citadel of the goddess Venus.

Well, that decides it for the Trojans who set about dismantling part of their walls (the horse is too big to go through the city gates) in a kind of mad frenzy. Aeneas tells the story with much regret and sorrow at their foolhardiness, but they were whipped on by the scheming gods. The priestess Cassandra warns against letting the horse in but, of course, she was doomed never to be believed.

That night the Trojans hold a mighty feast to celebrate the end of the war then pass out on their beds. In the middle of the night Aeneas is woken by the ghost of Hector, looking grim and broken and bloody as he was after Achilles dragged his corpse round the walls of Troy, tied by the ankles to his chariot.

Hector’s ghost warns Aeneas to flee and sure enough, now he is awake, he hears screams and smells smoke. While they were asleep, Sinon snuck out to the horse, undid the pine bolts which secured its secret trap door, the Greeks inside the horse lowered themselves by a rope to the ground and set about massacring the guards set on the horse, while a contingent went and opened the main gates to the Greeks who had a) silently sailed back from where the fleet had hidden behind the offshore island of Tenedos and b) swarmed across the plain, till they were massed outside the gates.

Now the Greek army is pouring into the city determined to kill every man, woman and child. Hector’s ghost tells Aeneas all his lost, to gather his family and companions and flee, and predicts that, after long wanderings, he will found a new city.

But if you think about it, Virgil can’t depict the legendary founder of Rome as a coward who turns and bolts. Instead Aeneas leaps from his bed, grabs his armour, runs into the street, and rallies other warriors he finds emerging from their homes. They form a troop and roam through the streets taking on Greeks. They massacre one group of Greeks and put on their armour. This allows them to mingle with other Greeks before turning on them and many, the narrative assures us, they sent down to Orcus (hell), many fled back across the plain, and some even scuttled back up inside the horse.

Then a huge fight develops around the figure of the priestess Cassandra who is being dragged bound and gagged by Greeks from her temple. Aeneas and his band rally to save her but a hornet’s nest of Greeks counter attack, and they are even struck down by some Trojan brothers because they are wearing Greek armour.

He doesn’t mention Cassandra again but shifts the focus to the battle round the palace of Priam. Trojans are reduced to tearing down their walls and roofs to throw down on the Greeks climbing siege ladders. Aeneas enters the palace by a secret back passage and makes his way to the top of the tallest tower where he joins Trojans loosening the masonry to send huge blocks of stone falling on the Greek attackers.

Aeneas knows his audience will want to know how King Priam died. He gives a vivid, heart-breaking account of the old man buckling on his armour and heading for the fight, how his wife Hecuba tries to persuade him to desist, how Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, chases and kills Polites, one of Priam’s sons, right in front of him. How Priam defies him, harmlessly throws his spear, reproaches Pyrrhus for being a shame to his noble father. But Pyrrhus doesn’t care, grabs Priam by his long hair, drags him over to the altar and thrusts his sword up to the hilt in Priam’s side. Then his head is hacked from his body which is left to rot on the shore, unknown and unmourned.

Aeneas looks around and realises all his companions are dead i.e. he has done all that honour demanded. Now his thoughts turn to his aged father Anchises, his wife, Creusa, and son, Ascanius.

He spots Helen hiding in a temple, cause of all this death and destruction. Shall she survive and be taken back to Sparta to live in luxury, waited on by Trojan slaves? In a burst of fury Aeneas rushes forward to kill her but suddenly his mother, the goddess Venus appears. She tells him the war is not really Helen or even Paris’s fault. It is the gods. And she strips away the fog which clouds his mortal vision and shows him Neptune shaking the city’s foundations, Juno opening the gates and egging on the Greeks, Pallas Athena taking command of the citadel, and Jupiter himself leading the gods and supporting the Greeks. No mortal can stop this. As the Sibyl says, much later, in book 6:

You must cease to hope that the fates of the gods can be altered by prayer. (6.376)

Venus now orders Aeneas to collect his family and flee. But Anchises refuses to leave the city he has lived in all his life, determined to die in his house. Aeneas remonstrates, the old man refuses, so Aeneas says he’ll buckle back on his armour and die defending him rather than leave him. But Creusa throws herself in front of him and tells him his first duty is to his family.

At this tense moment there are signs from heaven. A heatless flame settles on Ascanius’s head and there was a peal of thunder and a star fell from the sky, a meteorite crashing down into Mount Ida.

This persuades Anchises to leave, so Aeneas puts a lion skin on his shoulders, tells the household slaves to meet them at a hill outside the city, puts his father on his shoulder, takes little Ascanius by the hand and Creusa follows behind as they set off through the dark side streets of the burning city.

It was then that his father heard marching soldiers’ feet and told Aeneas to run and Aeneas was overcome by irrational fear and bolted and somehow his wife Creusa got left behind, He never saw her again.

I stormed and raged and blamed every man and god that ever was. (2.745)

He puts his armour back on and runs back to the city, through the same gate they exited, trying to retrace his steps, going first to his house then to the palace of Priam, finding death, devastation and flames everywhere.

But then Creusa appears in a vision to him, calmly telling him that this is the wish of the gods and destiny. He is to sail far away and come to rest in Hesperia by the river Thybris in a land of warriors and take another bride. It is for the best. Their gods will protect her. She promises she will never be led away a slave for some Greek wife, although what her exact fate is is left unstated. He goes to put his arms around her but she fades like a phantom.

Anyway, this, like the account of Aeneas’s brave fighting, are obviously both designed to show him to best advantage, full of patriotic, familial and husbandly loyalty, but at every step overpowered by fate and destiny and the will of the gods. Now, sadly. Aeneas returns to the mound where his father and son are waiting and is amazed at the sheer number of other survivors who have gathered there. From now on he is to be their leader.

[Maybe worth pointing out the number of ghostly and visionary appearances: Dido’s husband’s ghost appears to her; Hector’s ghost appears to Aeneas; Creusa’s spirit appears to him. Although ostensibly about fighting there is a good deal of this otherworldly, visionary, shimmering quality about much of the story.]

Book 3 The wanderings

Aeneas is still talking, recounting his adventures to Dido and her court. He describes how the survivors built a settlement not far from ruined Troy, in the lee of the Ida mountains and built ships. Then set sail. This is described very briefly, in successive sentences. The lack of detail is very characteristic of Virgil. Unlike the hard-edged detailing of Homer, Virgil’s habit of skipping over details (for example, not telling us the outcome of the battle over Cassandra) creates a kind of shimmering, dreamy quality to the poem.

They sail to Thrace and begin to lay out foundations for a city but when Aeneas pulls up trees to decorate the altar he’s going to sacrifice on, he is horrified when they and spurt blood. Then terrified when a voice speaks and declares himself to be the spirit of Polydorus, sent by Priam to Thrace with a treasure, to be raised there, far from war-torn Troy. Now he tells Aeneas he was murdered by the king of Thrace who simply stole the gold.

Aeneas tells Anchises who responds that this is no place to stay. So they rebury the body of Polydorus with full rites, and set sail, letting the gods decide their final destination. They sail onto the island of Delos, dock in the harbour of Ortygia, and are greeted by King Anius.

Aeneas prays at the temple of Apollo, asking what he should do. A booming voice replies he must seek out the land of his ‘ancient mother’. Father Anchises interprets this to mean Crete, where the founder of Troy, Teucer, first came from.

So they sail and row from Delos via Naxos, Donusa, Olearos, Paros, through the Cyclades to Crete, where they land and begin to build a settlement Aeneas calls Pergamea. Things are just beginning to thrive when the settlement is struck down by a great plague and the crops wither in the fields.

One night the household gods are bathed in sunlight and speak to him, telling him again the prophecy that he will sail the seas, come to a peaceful land, and found a race who rule the world. The Greeks call the land Hesperia but it has been settled by the Oenetrians who have called it Italy after their god, Italus.

When he tells Father Anchises the latter remembers that Troy had two founders. One was Teucer from Crete but the other was Dardanus from Hesperia. They misinterpreted the message from Apollo and mistakenly came to Crete. So now they pack ship and set sail for Hesperia/Italy.

For three days and nights a black storm descends, blotting out the sky. Then it lifts and they sail into the harbour of the Strophades. They see fat cattle and goats and storm ashore, kill some and are feasting when they are attacked by the foul harpies, birds with the faces of girls, bellies oozing filth, talons like birds, which tear the food from their hands.

The harpies’ leader, Celaeno, perches on a pinnacle of rock and announces a prophecy which Jupiter gave Apollo, and Apollo gave her, and she is now giving the Trojans. They will settle a new land but not until they have passed through a famine which makes them gnaw their tables. (The prophesy is fulfilled at 7.116 to 130.)

So the Trojans abandon the feast and the land, take ship and scud over the waves to the island of Leucas. Here they performed rites of purification and then held games. They stayed here till mid-winter, when Aeneas pinned a shield taken from a Greek on the temple doors and they set sail again.

They dock at Chaonia and walk up to the city of Buthrotum. Here they are astounded to come across Andromache, wife of the great hero Hector, making ritual sacrifices for her dead husband. She tells them that she survived the sack of Troy and was taken as wife by Pyrrhus to whom she bore a child. But Pyrrhus dumped her on fellow slave Helenus (one of the sons of Priam) in order to marry Hermione. But Orestes loved Hermione and so murdered Pyrrhus. At his death some of Pyrrhus’s land descended to Helenus. He built a settlement there, a new Pergamum, and here Andromache lives.

At which point Helenus arrives and, amid much weeping by everyone, escorts them to his city which is a miniature copy of Troy in all aspects. They stay for some time. Eventually Aeneas asks the priest Helenus to answer his questions: should he set sail, will he come to the promised land?

So Helenus sacrifices some bullocks and then gives Aeneas the latest in the line of prophecies, first of all warning it won’t be a short voyage, but a long one fraught with adventures. He will recognise the place to build his city because he will find a sow suckling 30 piglets. He must make it a priority to worship Juno and try to win her over. He must make time to visit the prophetess at Cumae. He must avoid sailing through the straits of Messina, which are terrorised by Scylla and Charybdis.

Helenus gives them gifts of gold and ivory and silver, and blesses them as they set sail. They sight Italy and sail into harbour. They sail on past Tarentum in the instep of Italy. They sail past the gulf of Scylla and Charybdis and make shore in the land of the Cyclopes, a peaceful harbour but in the shadow of the fearsome Mount Etna who belching black smoke darkens the sky.

Next morning they are surprised to see a wretched filthy man in rags come running towards them. He announces he is Achaemenides, one of Ulixe’s crew. He describes how they were captured by the Cyclops which ate some of their comrades, drank and fell asleep and how, in the night, they conspired to blind him. But they sailed and left him behind. He has just about survived for three months, since then. But he warns them to flee.

At that moment they see blinded Polyphemus appear with his flocks on the side of the mountain and run down to their ships and set sail, rowing for all they’re worth. Polyphemus hears them and lets out a road which shakes the earth and brings all the other cyclops to the shore to rage at them, but they are clear of harm.

They sail down the east coast of Sicily past Syracuse. Then along the south coast, ticking off all the settlements and sights till they come to Lilybaeum. They put in at Drepanum but here Aeneas ‘lost’ his father Anchises. There is, as so often with Virgil, no detail, no explanation, just a focus on Aeneas’s loss and sadness.

When they set sail from there to head north and east to the Italian coast the great storm described at the start of book 1 was stirred up and so they were blown to the African shore which the Tyrians are settling. And with that, Aeneas’s recital of his story comes to an end.

Epicurean rest

It is noticeable that Virgil/West phrase the very end of Aeneas’s recital with ‘Here he made an end and was at peace.’ When I read Virgil’s Georgics I was struck by how much he told us he was struggling to complete the poem. He had to ask his patron, Maecenas, for help and support, he kept telling himself ‘onwards and upwards!’, he wrote with relief about reaching the end of each of the four books. Then the very opening of book 4 describes how Dido fell in love and ‘love gave her body no rest or peace‘.

It was only when I read the Georgics that I became aware for the first time of Virgil’s adherence to the teachings of Epicurus. In the blurb to the Penguin edition, I learn that Virgil lived most of his adult life in an Epicurean colony near Naples.

Epicurus’s teachings are above all designed to cultivate freedom from stress and anxiety in his followers. Peace of mind and spirit. So these references in the Aeneid to peace of spirit, or lack of it, acquired, for me, two deeper resonances. On one level, Virgil uses the word ‘peace’ to mean an end to the gruelling torment of writing this long, demanding poem, which comes over as being a huge ordeal for him. But the word also means far more than it does to you or me – for the Epicurean Virgil, ‘peace’ represents the nirvana, the blessed state sought for by his philosophy. When he says his characters achieve ‘peace’ or, conversely, are deprived of ‘peace’, it isn’t in the casual way that you or I might use the word, but has this much deeper resonance, referring to a philosophically idealised state of complete detachment from all sources of strife or worry.

Looked at this way, the entire poem represents a kind of vast detour from man’s ideal condition of rest or stasis, into a world of strife and anxiety. It helps to explain Virgil’s sad and doleful tone, lamenting the endless destiny of man to be troubled – by duties, responsibilities, the need to work, to eat, to love, to be a social animal – all of it endlessly distracting from his best, optimum state of complete Buddhist detachment. Hence Virgil’s insistent tone of lamentation over humanity in general, continually remarking on the sadness of their poor mortal existence.

It was the time when sleep, the most grateful gift of the gods, was first beginning to creep over suffering mortals… (2.270)

I guess there’s a third interpretation which is literally to do with rest after physical labour. This harks back to the many images in the Georgics of the sheer amount of physical labour involved in human existence. How many times in that long book did weary shepherds, farmers, goatherds, horticulturalists and livestock herders and outdoor workers greet the end of the day, the westering of the sun, as a welcome sign of the end of their day’s labours. Well, that tone is repeated again and again in the Aeneid. Night and, with it, sleep, represent welcome oblivion for animals and humans exhausted by their labours.

It was night and weary living things were peacefully taking their rest upon the earth. (4.522)

It was night and over the whole earth the weary animals, all manner of birds and all manner of flocks, were already deep in sleep.. (8.28)

Over the whole world the creatures of the earth were relaxed in sleep, all resting from their cares, and their hearts had forgotten their labours… (9.226)

Contrasting with the mellifluous descriptions of restful sleep are the hard descriptions of the scenes of fighting and the days of war (especially in the harsh, second half of the Aeneid, which I’ll be discussing in a later blog post).

Bitter grief was everywhere. Everywhere there was fear and death in many forms. (2.369)

Aurora meanwhile had lifted up her life-giving light for miserable mortals, bringing back their toil and sufferings. (11.184)

As an English poet wrote, 1,600 years later:

Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.

Roman reviews

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by Simon on August 29, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 29, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/08/29/the-aeneid-virgil-books-1-to-3/

Damned to Fame by James Knowlson (1996) part 2

…his view that suffering is the norm of human life, that will represents an unwelcome intrusion, and that real consciousness lies beyond human understanding
(Knowlson summarising how Beckett found his deepest beliefs reinforced by the philosopher Schopenhauer, page 268)

This is a truly excellent literary biography. Knowlson documents Beckett’s life with immense thoroughness but shows a completely sure touch, a very satisfying sense of taste and tact throughout, not only regarding the complexities of Beckett’s private life (a lifelong companion and a small cadre of mistresses) but in tracing the sources and gestation of his many works, and lightly, intelligently bringing out their important aspects.

I summarised the first third of the book, up to the 1930s, in my last blog post. But that only covered 200 of the Damned To Fame‘s 700 or so pages and, as I tried to summarise the rest, I found there was simply too much material, it was overwhelming.

And so I abandoned a chronological summary in favour of looking at topics from Beckett’s life and works, some big and serious, others short and frivolous, as the fancy took me, to create a mosaic or collage of a review.

Affairs of the heart

Ethna MacCarthy Beckett was a slow starter, which was traditional for his time and place (1920s Ireland). As a tall but timid student at Trinity College, Dublin, he fell in love with Ethna MacCarthy, also studying modern languages, a strong, independent-minded feminist (p.58 to 60). He was swept off his feet by her intelligence and charisma but she had plenty of other admirers and it emerged she was having an affair with an older man, a married college professor (plus ça change…). A few years later, just before he quit his job at Trinity College, Dublin and left Ireland for the last time, he took Ethna for a night out in his car and, whether drunk or showing off, crashed it down at the docks, escaping with bruises himself but seriously injuring Ethna who had to be taken to hospital. The guilt never left him (p.143).

They kept in touch and remained good friends though Beckett was discombobulated when she embarked on a long affair with one of his best friends from college, Con Leventhal (even though Con was married). This affair continued until Con’s wife died, in 1956, at which point he immediately married Ethna. But fulfilment turned to tragedy when she was stricken with cancer and died in 1959. Beckett remained close friends with both of them.

Later on, we are told that the happy memories of love which haunt Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape are likely reworkings of his memories of Ethna.

Peggy Sinclair In summer 1928, having returned home after having graduated from Trinity College Dublin and a brief abortive spell as a teacher at a boarding school in the North, Beckett returned to Dublin and fell deeply in love with his second cousin, Ruth Margaret Sinclair, generally referred to as Peggy, daughter of his aunt Cissie and the Jewish art dealer William ‘Boss’ Sinclair with whom she had moved to the town of Kassel in north Germany. Peggy was only 17 and on her first visit to Ireland. 22-year-old Sam drove her around in his dinky sports car, took her to galleries and the theatre, she was overawed. After a few months she returned to her parents in Germany, but they exchanged letters, he visited her in Kassel a few times over the coming years, and when she went to dance  school in Austria (in Laxenberg, south of Vienna, pages 83 to 86), visited her there, too, all this despite the very strong disapproval of Beckett’s parents for whom 1. Boss’s notorious poverty 2. Boss’s Jewishness 3. the fact Sam and Peg were cousins, all resulted in strong opposition to the relationship. He visited Kassel quite a few more times over the coming years, although the affair with Peggy came to an end and she became engaged to another man. But Beckett was devastated when she died terribly young of tuberculosis in May 1933.

Lucia Joyce When Beckett took up the post of exchange lecteur at the École Normale Supérieure, his predecessor Tom MacGreevey introduced him to James Joyce and his circle in February 1928. This included Joyce’s wife, Nora, son, Giorgio, and daughter Lucia. Born in 1907, so just a year younger than Beckett, she was clever, creative and wilful and fell in love with the tall, quiet Irishman whom her father used as a secretary and assistant. She asked him to take her out for meals, for walks and so on and generally hoped they would fall in love. She was slender and had some training as a dancer. According to Beckett, even at this stage, she was bulimic (p.150). When it became clear Beckett wasn’t interested, Lucia accused him to her parents of leading her on. Nora never liked Beckett, had taken against him, and Lucia’s accusation was all it took to force Joyce to drop Beckett, much to the latter’s devastation (pages 103 to 105). Later Lucia was to suffer a mental breakdown into irreparable mental illness. Beckett, reconciled with Joyce at the start of 1932 (p.156), went on to watch his mentor devote huge energy and money to trying to find a cure which, slowly, friends and family realised would never work.

Mary Manning Howe In summer 1936, back in Dublin staying at the family home, after failing to get an affair going with a woman named Betty Stockton, Beckett had a brief whirlwind sexual affair with a friend since childhood, the now married Mary Manning Howe (p.229).

Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil While in hospital after being stabbed in Paris in January 1937, he was visited by Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, and a friendship slowly grew which was to become the key relationship of his life. She was austere, intellectual, puritanical – not unlike his mother in many respects, although maybe not insofar as, being a good post-war French intellectual, she was a fervent communist. Profile of her character page 296.

Suzanne shared with Beckett their panic flight from Paris after the initial Nazi invasion in 1940 (pages 297 to 302). Then, when they returned, the risks of his life as an operative for the Resistance until they were forced to flee Paris a second time when their cell was betrayed August 1942, and he and Suzanne fled south on foot to the safety of the small village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse département in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.

In the bleak post-war period she doggedly supported his writing and hawked his manuscripts from publisher to publisher. Despite his many infidelities to her, in the conversation with Knowlson at the end of his life, Beckett repeated that he owed her ‘everything’ (p.473).

Peggy Guggenheim (1898 to 1979) At the time the relationship with Suzanne began, Beckett was involved in a passionate affair with heiress Peggy Guggenheim who was madly in love with him and nicknamed him ‘Oblomov’. The mismatch between the super-rich socialite heiress and the frugal, moody Irish intellectual is amusingly detailed by Knowlson, pages 281 to 288. She was obsessed with him for a good year, although Knowlson suspects Beckett mainly kept things going because of the influence she could bring to bear on promoting his artist friends such as Geer van Velde.

Pamela Mitchell 32-year-old American working for Beckett’s American publisher, arrived in Paris to meet with Beckett in September 1953 to discuss rights and editions. He showed her the town and they had a brief fling, with follow-up letters after she returned to New York and further visits and meetings until January 1955 (pages 398 to 403).

Barbara Bray (1924 to 2010) In 1957, on a trip to London to supervise the premiere of Endgame and the radio production of Krapp’s Last Tape Beckett met Barbara Bray, 18 years his junior, a widow with two small children, who had been working as a script editor for the BBC Third Programme. Knowlson writes:

She was small and attractive, but, above all, keenly intelligent and well-read. Beckett seems to have been immediately attracted by her and she to him. Their encounter was highly significant for them both, for it represented the beginning of a relationship that was to last, in parallel with that with Suzanne, for the rest of his life. (p.458)

In 1961 Bray quit her job in London and moved to Paris, taking an apartment in the Rue Séguier where Beckett regularly visited her. She had a piano. He played Schubert, Haydn or Beethoven on it (p.595). He routinely visited her, she came to see him on his trips directing abroad, they were in most respects an item for the rest of his life. Which is interesting because he continued to live with Suzanne and go with her on increasing numbers of foreign holidays which Knowlson describes in winning detail (Lake Como, Sardinia, Tunisia, Morocco, the Canaries).

Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil part 2 When Bray announced in 1961 that she was packing in her career with the BBC in London and moving to Paris, Beckett’s reaction was unusual. He promptly married Déchevaux-Dumesnil in March 1961 in a civil ceremony in Folkestone (pages 480 to 484). This was ostensibly to ensure that, if he predeceased her, Déchevaux-Dumesnil would inherit the rights to his work, because there was no common-law marriage under French law – but maybe also because he wanted to affirm his primary loyalty to her. But as soon as they were back in Paris he went to visit Barbara and spend much of his free time with her. Barbara outlived Sam and Suzanne (who both died in 1989) only passing away, in Edinburgh, in February 2010.

There appear to have been other, more fleeting dalliances: Jacoba van Velde, older than Beckett, literary agent and novelist (p.519). Mira Averech attractive young journalist, who interviewed him (p.553).

The BBC

The BBC played a key role in commissioning and producing and broadcasting Beckett’s work to a vastly wider audience than it would have reached via the theatre alone. The second half of Knowlson’s book is stuffed with accounts of commissions and productions overseen by Donald MacWhinnie, radio director and then director of TV drama, Head of BBC Radio Drama 1963 to 1977 Martin Esslin. In other words, Beckett had very powerful supporters within the national broadcaster, who supported him at every step of his career. There’s a book on the subject. Its blurb states:

This book is the first sustained examination of Samuel Beckett’s pivotal engagements with post-war BBC radio. The BBC acted as a key interpreter and promoter of Beckett’s work during this crucial period of his ‘getting known’ in the Anglophone world in the 1950s and 1960s, especially through the culturally ambitious Third Programme, but also by the intermediary of the house magazine, The Listener. The BBC ensured a sizeable but also informed reception for Beckett’s radio plays and various ‘adaptations’ (including his stage plays, prose, and even poetry); the audience that Beckett’s works reached by radio almost certainly exceeded in size his readership or theatre audiences at the time.

Beach

As a boy Beckett went on summer holidays with his parents to Greystones, a seaside resort village just down the coast from Dublin, complete with fishermen, cliffs and a pebbly beach. He played with his brother but also spent hours skimming stones across the waves or staring out to sea. Beaches and the sound of the sea figure heavily in works like Embers and Cascando and the protagonist of Molloy famously spends a couple of pages working out which order to suck a collection of 16 pebbles he’s gathered from the beach (p.28).

Beckett, the surname

Beckett is originally a French name. The family are descended from French Huguenots who fled persecution in the 18th century, first to England and then on to Dublin (p.6) – a fact which adds colour to:

  1. the way Beckett subsequently returned to live in France
  2. the several of his texts which are ‘about’ refugees, namely Lessness (p.564)

Breath

Beckett’s fury at Kenneth Tynan for letting the super-short, absurdist theatre piece, Breath, which he contributed as a personal favour to Tynan’s ‘ground-breaking’ 1969 extravaganza, Oh Calcutta!, be festooned with naked actors, and then going on to print his name in the published script opposite photos of the naked men cavorting onstage during the production. He owed Tynan a big debt of gratitude for writing a rave review of the first English production of Waiting For Godot which helped turn critical opinion in its favour back in 1953. But his behaviour over Breath infuriated Beckett who called Tynan a ‘liar’ and a ‘cheat’ (pages 565 to 566).

Censorship

Lifelong opponent of censorship, whether it was the Irish Free State banning Joyce in the 1920s, the Nazis banning Jewish and degenerate art in the 1930s, or the British Lord Chamberlain insisting on stupid edits to his plays before they could be performed in London in the 1950s and 60s. He banned his own works from being performed in apartheid South Africa, and publicly supported writers suffering from state censorship or persecution.

Chess

Beckett was a serious chess player (p.9). He was taught to play by his brother Frank, and then learned more from his Uncle Howard who once beat the reigning world champion, José Raúl Capablanca y Graupera, when the latter visited Dublin. He was a noted chess player at his private school (p.43). He inherited a Staunton chess set from his father (p.627).

His first published story, Assumption, contains allusions to chess. Murphy plays a game of chess against the mental patient Mr Endon in Beckett’s first novel, Murphy (p.210). In fact Beckett really wanted the cover of Murphy to be a photo he’d seen of two apes playing chess (p.293).

Later in life Beckett played against Marcel Duchamp (p.289), he played against his friend the painter Henri Hayden, when the latter came to live in a village near Beckett’s rural retreat. Beckett built up a large collection of chess books, many given as gifts by friends who knew his interest or on sets like the magnetised chess set given to him by the artist Avigdor Arikha (p.595). When ill or isolated at his country bungalow at Ussy, he played against himself or played through famous games of the grandmasters.

Damned to fame

At first glance this seems like a melodramatic title, but it’s a quotation, from Alexander Pope’s mock-heroic comic poem, The Dunciad, whose subject is the fantastic lengths utterly talentless writers will go to to become famous. The short phrase thus contains multiple ironies, and Beckett used it of himself with maximum irony (p.644), and again (p.672).

Drinking

Teetotal as a youth and student, discovered alcohol in Paris and never looked back. In adult life, especially socialising in Paris, he often became drunk in the evening. Knowlson details numerous evenings of hard drinking with certain cronies, notably the two Irishmen Jack MacGowran and Patrick Magee. Suzanne hated his drinking: she had to cope with him rolling home in the early hours, disturbing her sleep, his late start the next morning, and resultant bad mood and depression.

Favourite dish

Mackerel (p.416).

Finney, Albert

Finney was cast in a production of Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court in 1972. He was completely miscast and Beckett found it hard to hide his boredom and impatience, at one point falling asleep. The more Finney tried his full range of colours and emotions the more impatient Beckett became. At one point, with unusual bluntness, Beckett held up his little finger and declared there was more poetry in it than in Finney’s entire body (p.596).

Foxrock

Village south of Dublin where, in 1902, William Beckett bought some land and had a family house built for him and his wife, Maria Jones Roe (widely known as May), named it ‘Cooldrinagh’, where Sam’s older brother, Frank, was born in 1902, and where Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on 13 April 1906. He was named Samuel after his maternal grandfather. According to Knowlson, nobody alive knows where his middle name came from. The house was named Cooldrinagh after the family home of Beckett’s mother, May, which was named Cooldrinagh House. The name is from the Gaelic and means ‘ back of the blackthorn hedge’ (p.3). There was an acre of land, a summerhouse, a double garage and outbuildings (p.14).

French

Despite being a native English speaker, Beckett wrote in French because — as he himself claimed — it was easier for him thus to write ‘without style’. English had become overcrowded with allusions and memories. He had experimentally written a few poems in French before the war, but it was only on his return to post-War Paris that he began to write in French prose.

By adopting another language, he gained a greater simplicity and objectivity. French offered him the freedom to concentrate on a more direct expression of the search for ‘being’ and on an exploration of ignorance, impotence and indigence. (p.357)

However, this had an unintended consequence which becomes abundantly clear as Knowlson’s book progresses into the 1950s and Beckett acquires more writing in either French or English, which is the effort required by translating his work from one language to the other. Knowlson quotes countless letters in which Beckett complains to friends about having to translate monster texts such as L’Innomable or Mercier et Camier from French into English.

He in effect gave himself twice the labour of an ordinary writer who sticks to just one language.

This explains the complexity of a timeline of Beckett publications because very often there is a lag, sometimes a significant lag, between the publication of a work in French (or English) and then of its translation into the other language, which makes his publishing record complex and sometimes pretty confusing. And then there was German.  Beckett took it on himself to translate, or at least supervise translations, of all his plays into German scripts. The biography brings home how this turned out to be a vast burden.

Generosity

Legendary. ‘Few writers have distributed their cash with as much liberality as Beckett’ (p.603). Knowlson quotes Claude Jamet’s story of being in a bar with Beckett when a tramp asked him for his coat and Beckett simply took it off and handed it over, without even checking the pockets! (p.408). Jack Emery met him in La Coupole bar and watched as a beggar approached Beckett with a tray of shabby postcards and Beckett promptly bought the lot (p.642). He gave money and support without stint to almost anyone who asked for it. He supported actor Jack MacGowran’s family after he died, and numerous relatives after spouses died. He gave away most of the money from the Nobel Prize, supporting friends and relatives in times of grief and difficulty.

An outstanding example of this is the support Beckett gave to an American convict, Rick Cluchey, serving time in San Quentin gaol, California, for robbery and murder. In prison, Cluchey became a changed man, who read widely and began to direct and act in plays. He wrote to Beckett asking permission to stage a production of Waiting For Godot, and this was the start of a friendship which lasted the rest of his life, as Cluchey, once released on probation,  put on further Beckett productions, securing the great man’s artistic and financial aid (p.611, 613).

Late in life his friends worried that Beckett was a soft touch. He was unable to refuse requests for help

Germany

In September 1937 Beckett left for what turned into a seven-month trip to Germany. It is possibly a scoop for this biography (I don’t know, I haven’t read the others) that Knowlson has obtained access to the detailed diary Beckett kept of this seven-month cultural jaunt which saw him tour the great cultural centres of Germany, and so is in a position to give us a day-by-day account of the visit, which is almost all about art. Beckett systematically visited the great art galleries of Germany, public and private, as well as getting to know a number of German (and Dutch) artists personally. As well as experiencing at first hand the impact on individual artists, of galleries and ordinary people of Nazi repression. He loathed and despised the Nazis and is quoted quite a few times mocking and ridiculing the Nazi leaders (pages 230 to 261).

Ghosts

At one point I thought I’d spotted that Beckett’s use of memories, of voices and characters from the past amounted to ghost stories, shivers. But then they kept on coming, one entire play is named Ghost Trio and the ghost theme rises to a kind of climax in A Piece of Monologue:

and head rests on wall. But no. Stock still head naught staring beyond. Nothing stirring. Faintly stirring. Thirty thousand nights of ghosts beyond. Beyond that black beyond. Ghost light. Ghost nights. Ghost rooms. Ghost graves. Ghost … he all but said ghost loved ones…

When Beckett was directing Billie Whitelaw in Footfalls (1976) he told her to make the third section ‘ghostly’ (p.624). In other words, everyone and their mother has been well aware for decades that Beckett’s final period can is largely defined by his interest in ghosts, ghostly memories, apparition, and voices from beyond the grave (as in What Where).

Maybe the only contribution I can make is to point out that it’s not just the style and presentation of many of the later plays which brings to mind ghosts and faint presences, but there’s a sense in which much of the actual content is very old. What I mean is that about ten of Beckett’s total of 19 plays date from the 1970s and 80s – out in the real world we had fast cars, speedboats, supersonic jets, ocean liners and rockets flying to the moon, but you’d never have known it from Beckett’s plays. In those plays an ageing man listens to memories of himself as a boy in rural Ireland (That Time), an ageing woman paces the floor ridden by memories of herself in rural Ireland (Footfalls), an old man alone in a room waits for a message from his lost love (Ghost Trio), an ageing man remembers walking the back roads while he waits for the appearance of his lost love (…but the clouds…), an ageing man remembers back to his parents and funerals in rural Ireland (A Piece of Monologue), an ageing woman sits in a rocking chair remembering how her old mother died (Rockaby), an ageing man sits in a room listening to a doppelgänger read about his younger life (Ohio Impromptu), an autocratic director poses an old man on a stage (Catastrophe).

My point is that although the form of all these plays was radically experimental and inventive, often staggeringly so, the actual verbal and image content of most of the late works is very old, Edwardian or late Victorian, ghostly memories of a world that vanished long ago, 50 or 60 years before the plays were first performed. Hence the widespread sense that Beckett was the ‘last of his kind’, emblem of a vanished generation (hence the title of Isaac Cronin’s biography, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist). It was because the actual content of almost all the later plays and prose more or less ignores every technological advance of the 20th century in favour of memories of trudging round rural back roads, walking hand in hand with his father, walking along a riverbank, of a small girl struck dumb till she became uncontrollably voluble (Rockaby), of dismal rainy rural funerals. Watching A Piece of a Monologue again, I am struck by how the central action is lighting an old-style lantern by fiddling with the wick, chimney and shade. All of this stuff could straight from the time of Thomas Hardy.

Illness

For someone so phenomenally sporty (rugby, cricket, swimming, long distance running, boxing and motorbike racing) Beckett was frequently ill. As a boy he suffered from night anxiety and as an undergraduate from insomnia combined with night sweats and a racing heart (p.64). He was knocked out one term by a bout of pneumonia (p.63). On his first return from Paris in 1930 he presented his parents with the sight of a young man stricken by a rash on his face and scalp (p.118).

  • May 1931 struck down with a case of pleurisy (p.130).
  • a painful cyst that developed on his neck required an operation in December 1932 (p.166)
  • May 1933 the same cyst had to be treated again (p.168)
  • July 1933 an abscess on his palm needed treating. Following the death of his father he developed night sweats and panic attacks (p.172)
  • August 1934 acute abdominal paints (p.185)
  • throughout 1935 the night sweats and heart which had triggered his psychotherapy persisted (p.200). Knowlson points out that Beckett gives the antihero of his first novel, Murphy, a vivid description of these heart problems (p.215)
  • Christmas 1935 bed-ridden with an attack of pleurisy (p.222)
  • 1936 on his German trip he developed a painfully festering finger and thumb (p.241)
  • January 1937, still in Germany, a lump developed on his scrotum that became so painful he was confined to bed (p.243)
  • September 1937 confined to bed with gastric flu
  • 1946 cyst lanced and drained (p.366)
  • 1947 abscess in his mouth and tooth problems (p.366)
  • August 1950 takes to his bed with a high temperature and raging toothache (p.380)
  • 1956 several teeth removed and bridges built (p.438)
  • 1957 abscess in the roof of his mouth (p.438)
  • 1958 persistent insomnia (p.456)
  • June 1959 bad attack of bronchial flu; exacerbation of the intra-osseous cyst in his upper jaw (p.464)
  • November 1964 operation on the abscess in the roof of his mouth, creating a hole into his nose (p.530)
  • July 1965 surgical graft to close the hole in the roof of his mouth (p.535)
  • 1965 extraction of numerous teeth and creation of a dental plate (p.535)
  • April 1966 diagnosis of double cataracts (p.540)
  • 1967 treatments for cataracts included eye drops, suppositories and homeopathic remedies (p.547)
  • February 1967 fell into the garage pit at a local garage and fractured several ribs (p.547)
  • April 1968 severe abscess on the lung, which had been making him breathless and weak, required prolonged treatment (p.558)
  • end 1970 – February 1971 operations on the cataracts in his left and right eye (pages 579 to 581)
  • April 1971 nasty bout of viral flu (p.582)
  • 1971 periodic bouts of lumbago (p.587)
  • November 1972 has eight teeth extracted and impressions made for dental plates (p.596)
  • 1970s – continued depression, enlarged prostate (p.645)
  • 1980 muscular contraction of the hand diagnosed as Dupuytren’s Contracture (p.660 and 679)
  • April 1984 bedbound with a bad viral infection (p.696)

Illustrated editions

An aspect of Beckett’s lifelong interest in art was the way many of his later texts, for all the lack of colour and description in the prose, turned out to be tremendously inspirational for a whole range of artists, who created illustrations for them. The volume of Collected Shorter prose gives an impressive list indicating the extensive nature of this overlooked aspect of the work.

  • All Strange Away, with illustrations by Edward Gorey (1976)
  • Au loin un oiseau, with etchings by Avigdor Arikha (1973)
  • Bing, with illustrations by H. M. Erhardt (1970) Erhardt also produced illustrations for Manus Presse of Act Without Words I and II (1965), Come and Go (1968), and Watt (1971)
  • Foirades/Fizzles, with etchings by Jasper Johns (1976)
  • From an Abandoned Work, with illustrations by Max Ernst (1969)
  • Imagination Dead Imagine, with illustrations by Sorel Etrog (1977)
  • L’Issue, with six original engravings by Avigdor Arikha (1968)
  • The Lost Ones, with illustrations by Charles Klabunde (1984)
  • The Lost Ones, illustrated by Philippe Weisbecker, Evergreen Review, No. 96 (Spring 1973)
  • The North, with etchings by Avigdor Arikha (1972)
  • Séjour, with engravings by Louis Maccard from the original drawings by Jean Deyrolle (1970)
  • Still, with etchings by William Hayter (1974)
  • Stirrings Still, with illustrations by Louis le Brocquy (1988)
  • Stories and Texts for Nothing, with drawings by Avigdor Arikha (1967)
  • Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, illustrated with etchings by Robert Ryman (1989)

Interpretations, dislike of

One of Billie Whitelaw’s great appeals as an actress to Beckett was that she never asked him what lines meant, only how to speak them (p.598). In this respect she was the opposite of actresses like Peggy Ashcroft or Jessica Tandy, who both played Winnie in Happy Days and both pissed Beckett off with questions about her character and life story and motivation and so on. That was not at all how he conceived of theatre or prose. It is about the surface, there is only the surface, there is nothing behind the performance except the performance.

In a similar spirit he got very pissed off with actors (or critics) who asked him what Waiting For Godot meant. It means what it says. Knowlson repeats Beckett’s account of reacting badly when English actor Ralph Richardson bombarded him with questions about Pozzo, ‘his home address and curriculum vitae’, and how Richardson was comically disappointed when Beckett told him to his face that Godot does not mean God! If he had meant God, he would have written God! (p.412).

In a similar vein, Knowlson quotes his exasperated response when Beckett went through the reviews of the English production of Godot, saying:

he was tired of the whole thing and the endless misunderstanding. ‘Why people have to complicate a thing so simple I don’t understand.’ (quoted page 416)

Repeatedly actors asked for more information about their characters and their motivations, but Beckett politely but firmly repeated his mantra:

I only know what’s on the page (p.513)

It’s ironic because Beckett of all people should have known why everyone who came into contact with his texts would waste vast amounts of time searching for sub-texts, symbolism, allegory, and a universe of extra meaning. Because simply taking things at face value is one of the things human beings are useless at. Making up all kinds of extravagant meanings and elaborate theories is what humans excel at.

Intrusive narrator and Henry Fielding

There’s a great deal to be said on this subject because lots of the prose works involve not only an intrusive narrator but multiple narrators and narratives which collapse amid a failure of narrative altogether. But one detail stuck out for me from Knowlson’s biography, which is the direct influence of the eighteenth century novelist Henry Fielding. If you read Fielding’s shorter comic novel Joseph Andrews (1742) and his epic comic novel, Tom Jones (1749) you find that the narrator is a very active participant, not only describing events but giving a running commentary on them, moralising and judging and reminding us of previous events or warning of events to come. Once you get used to the 18th century style, this can be very funny. Obviously Beckett brings a completely different sensibility and a highly Modernist approach to what is more a ‘disintegrating narrator’. Still, it is fascinating to read in Knowlson that he specifically cites Fielding as showing just how interactive and interfering a narrator can be in his own text. It is August 1932 and Beckett has returned from Paris to the family home outside Dublin where he immerses himself in reading:

One of the most significant items on his reading list was Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews… He probably learned a lot from Fielding’s novels (for he went on to read Tom Jones) while he was writing the stories of More Pricks Than Kicks. This influence can still be detected in Murphy and continued even into the postwar novel trilogy. It can be seen in what he described as ‘the giving away of the show pari passu with the show’, in a balance and an elaborateness of phrase, and…in the playful pr ironic comments of a self-conscious narrator who makes regular intrusions into the text of his narrative. (page 165)

Ireland

There’s a lot of scope to discuss Beckett’s Irishness, how ‘Irish’ his own personality was, and his characters and his creations, but I don’t feel qualified to comment either way. Knowlson occasionally mentions Beckett’s love of the Irish countryside but only rarely addresses the subject of Beckett’s ‘Irishness’. Three aspects of the issue interested me:

1. Protestant Beckett wasn’t Catholic Irish, like James Joyce and the majority of the population. He was a Protestant, his mother was a God-fearing believer who took him to church every Sunday, and the private school he went to was redolent of strict Protestant teaching. It’s arguable that, although he lost his faith, Beckett retained this strict, almost Puritan turn of mind, in both his lifestyle, which was very spartan and simple, and, of course, in the unromantic, tough, self-punishing nature of his works.

2. Irish Partition I was surprised that Knowlson made so little of the partition of Ireland and the year-long civil war that followed 1921 to 1922. Beckett was born and raised in a suburb of Dublin, where his mother and brother continued to live, but the private secondary school he attended was in what became, while he was still attending it, part of Northern Ireland. The war was a long, drawn-out and very traumatic experience for the nation, but Knowlson barely mentions it and it seems to have had no impact on Beckett, which seems hard to believe. The entire subject of Irish nationalism is conspicuous by its absence.

3. Rejection of Ireland Again, it is underplayed in Knowlson’s book, but reading between the lines, it appears that some Irish considered Beckett moving to Paris in October 1937 and his continued living there was a studied rejection of his home country, a rejection he repeated at key moments of his career. Certainly Beckett, driven to exasperation by a lack of money, job, prospects, any success as a writer and the nagging of his mother to get a job, finally and decisively quit Ireland in September 1937 to make a permanent home in Paris. Knowlson says Beckett found Ireland too ‘narrow-minded and parochial’. He wrote to his old schoolfriend, Geoffrey Thompson, that the move to Paris was like being let out of gaol (p.274). Ironically, only a few weeks after emigrating, Beckett was recalled to Dublin to act as a witness in a libel case brought against a book which appeared to lampoon his beloved Uncle, ‘Boss’ Sinclair, and was subjected to a fierce cross-questioning by the defending QC which raised the subject of Beckett’s ‘immoral’ writings in order to question his credibility. This gruelling experience set the seal on Beckett’s rejection of his homeland:

His remarks about Ireland became more and more vituperative after his return to Paris, as he lambasted its censorship, its bigotry and its narrow-minded attitudes to both sex and religion from which he felt he’d suffered. (p.280).

The theme recurs when Beckett himself imposed a ban on his works being performed in Ireland: In 1958, upon hearing that Archbishop John McQuaid had intervened in the Dublin Theatre Festival programme, forcing the organisers to withdraw a stage adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses as well as Sean O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned, Beckett responded by cancelling his permission for the Pike Theatre to perform his mimes and All That Fall at the festival.

The theme recurs again in the context of Beckett being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969 because, super-reluctant to attend the award ceremony himself, instead of asking the Irish Ambassador to accept it, according to the convention whereby a demurring author is represented by his country’s ambassador, Beckett instead nominated his long-standing and loyal French publisher, Jérôme Lindon (p.572). It was a typical gesture of friendship and personal loyalty but some Irish commentators took it as a calculated slight to his homeland.

So, just like his hero James Joyce before him, Beckett had a complex love-hate relationship with his homeland. Irish emigré Peter Lennon spent time with Beckett and recalls:

The sense of Ireland was strong in him, there was a subterranean emotional involvement… [but he also] despised the ethos of the place. (quoted page 490)

Mind you this argument is countered by the fact that, of all the honorary degrees he was offered during his lifetime, the only one he accepted was from his old alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, which he flew back to in order to receive an honorary D.Litt. degree on 2 July 1959 (pages 469 to 470).

Keaton, Buster

In the early 1960s Beckett developed a treatment for a short silent film to be shot with American collaborators. As a boy Beckett had loved the classic silent movies of Charlie Chaplin et al so the American producers approached a number of the greats, including Chaplin, Zero Mostel, Beckett’s friend MacGowran, but they had other commitments or weren’t interested.

Thus it was that they came to invite the legendary Buster Keaton, who delighted everyone by agreeing. Knowlson points out how the pair had a secret artistic affinity, a Keaton movie like Go West featuring a protagonist named Friendless, who is all alone in the world – closely related to Beckett’s worldview (p.54).

However, the actual meeting between Beckett and Keaton was a famous disaster, with Beckett invited into the Keaton apartment where Buster went back to sitting in a chair in front of the TV watching a game of American football sipping a beer from the fridge. After a few conversational gambits Beckett fell silent. Impasse (p.522).

The film ended up being shot over a few sweltering days in lower Manhattan in July 1964 during Beckett’s first and only trip to the United States.

London

Beckett lived in London for two years in 1934 and 1935. He lived first in rooms in Chelsea and then in the Gray’s Inn Road, locations invoked in the novel he wrote about the period, Murphy.

Beckett hated London. Dirty and noisy and cramped. It infuriated him the way strangers called him ‘Paddy’ in shops and pubs. In later life he referred to London as ‘Muttonfatville’ (p.512).

Jack MacGowran (1918 to 1973)

Beckett wrote the radio play Embers and the teleplay Eh Joe specifically for MacGowran. The actor also appeared in various productions of Waiting for Godot and Endgame, and did several readings of Beckett’s plays and poems on BBC Radio. MacGowran was the first actor to do a one-man show based on the works of Beckett. He debuted End of Day in Dublin in 1962, revising it as Beginning To End in 1965. The show went through further revisions before Beckett directed it in Paris in 1970. He also recorded the LP, MacGowran Speaking Beckett for Claddagh Records in 1966 (the recording sessions described at p.539). Whenever he was over in Paris visiting, chances are the lads would go out and get slaughtered. Even worse when the duo turned into a threesome with fellow Irish actor Patrick Magee (p.514). After MacGowran’s death Beckett wrote immediately to his widow Gloria to offer financial assistance for her and daughter, Tara (p.599).

May Beckett

Tall, lean-faced, with a long nose, when you look at photos you immediately see that Beckett has his mother’s appearance not his father, who was round-faced and jovial. May Beckett had an unforgiving temperament and she ruled Cooldrinagh House and its servants with a rod of iron (p.5). Very respectable, she attended the local Protestant church every Sunday. Everyone found her difficult and demanding, she had regular shouting matches with the servants, but could descend into days of dark depression. A family friend, Mary Manning, said Beckett ‘was like his mother, he was not a relaxed social person at all’ (p.223). As he grew up Beckett developed an intense love-hate relationship with her until, by his twenties, he found it impossible to live in the same house. Beckett referred to her ‘savage loving’:

I am what her savage loving has made me (p.273).

His two years of psychotherapy in London (1933 to 1935) rotated around his unresolved relationship with this woman who was so difficult but who, in so many ways, he took after. According to his schoolfriend and doctor who recommended the therapy, Geoffrey Thompson, the key to Beckett’s problems was to be found in his relationship with his mother (p.178). It is, therefore, quite funny that the long and expensive course of psychotherapy was paid for… by his mother.

Mental illness

Beckett himself suffered from depression, as had his mother before him. It was partly deep-seated unhappiness triggered by his father’s death in 1933 which led to his two-year stay in London solely for the purpose of psychotherapy. The condition recurred throughout his life, in fact the second half of the book becomes quite monotonous for the repeated description of Beckett, if he had nothing immediate to work on, spiralling down into depression and isolation (p.441). As late as his 70s he was dosing himself with lithium as a treatment (pages 616 and 644).

He knew he had an obsessive compulsive streak, which could sometimes be regarded as determination and courage, at others simple neurosis: in his German diary Beckett refers to himself as ‘an obsessional neurotic’ (p.252).

Interesting to learn that during his London period (1934 to 1936) he visited his schoolfriend Geoffrey Thompson who had taken up the post of Senior House Physician at Bethlem Royal Hospital in Beckenham, where he observed the patients and learned about their diseases (pages 208 to 210). It was these trips and Thompson’s account which Beckett reworked into the fictional Magdalen Mental Mercyseat where the antihero of his novel Murphy finds a job. This real-life contact with mental patients (Knowlson quotes Beckett describing individual patients and their symptoms) was reinforced when Beckett undertook a series of visits to Lucia Joyce after she was confined to a hospital in Ivry in 1939.

This ‘long-standing interest in abnormal psychology’ (p.615) translated into characters who make up ‘a long line of split personalities, psychotics or obsessional neurotics’, as Knowlson calls them (page 590). Possibly Beckett’s works can be seen as a kind of escalation of depictions of various mental conditions, from the light-hearted neurosis of Murphy, through the more serious mental breakdown of Watt, but then taken to out-of-this-world extremes in the Trilogy, and particularly the collapse of subject, object and language in The Unnamable. Footfalls is a particularly spooky investigation of strange mental states and situations such as the protagonist’s radical agoraphobia and chronic neurosis (p.616).

Miserabilism

Miserabilism is defined as ‘gloomy pessimism or negativity.’ It’s so obvious that Beckett’s work concentrates oppressively on failure and negativity that it barely needs mentioning. Soon after the war he gave his beliefs classic expression in the avant-garde magazine transition:

‘I speak of an art turning from [the plane of the possible] in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.’

And, when asked what the contemporary artist should be striving for, he wrote:

‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.’

His position didn’t budge much in the remaining 45 years of his life.

Music

He came from a very musical family. Beckett’s grandmother (Frances, Fannie) was very musical, wrote songs, set poems to music. Her son, Beckett’s Uncle Gerald, was very musical, piano in the house, spent hours playing duets with young Sam (p.7). Their daughter, Aunt Cissie, also very musical. Cissie married a Jewish art dealer, William ‘Boss’ Sinclair and moved to north Germany, where Boss tried to make a career dealing contemporary art. In his 20s Beckett went to stay with them and fell in love with their daughter, Peggy, a few years younger than him.

Beckett grew up able to play Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart piano pieces very well, as well as lighter pieces like Gilbert and Sullivan (p.28). At private school he carried on having music lessons and gained a reputation for being more or less word perfect in the entire Gilbert and Sullivan oeuvre (p.43).

In his first year at Trinity College Dublin he commuted from his parents house, but in his second year moved into rented accommodation, where he installed a piano. He was by now into modern French music and studied and played the piano music of Debussy (p.65). It is, maybe, revealing that Beckett hated Bach. He described him to a friend as like an organ grinder endlessly grinding out phrases (p.193). He had pianos in most of his lodgings and houses. Once living in France he regularly listened to concerts broadcast on France Musique (p.453). In 1967 he bought a small Schimmel piano for the house in Ussy, which he played Haydn and Schubert on (p.546).

Music is overtly important in plays like Ghost Trio (named after a piano work by Beethoven) and Nacht und Träume (named after a song by Schubert). But it is arguable that many of Beckett’s plays, and certainly the later ones, are conceived as musical in rhythm and performance, and are dependent on essentially non-dramatic but musical ideas of repetition, repetition with variation, counterpoint, introduction of new themes, and so on (p.193).

What is important to him is the rhythm, choreography and shape of the whole production. (p.551)

Thus, when he wrote That Time he conceived of it as a sonata, paying meticulous care to the entrance and exits of the three voices from the protagonist’s past. Into the 1980s he was still listening to classical concerts on the radio, playing the piano and made a number of composer friends. Knowlson points out how many of his works have been set to music or have inspired composers (p.655).

Visitors to his supervision of a 1980 production of Endgame noticed that as the actors spoke his hand beat out the rhythm like Karajan conducting an orchestra. ‘It was all about rhythm and music’, said one of the actors (p.668). He particularly loved Schubert and it is a Schubert song which inspired Nacht und Träume and Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise which inspired the play What Where (p.685).

Nobel Prize

1969 23 October Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (pages 570 to 573). He and Suzanne experienced this as a complete disaster, ending their life of peaceful anonymity. They were on holiday in a hotel in Tunisia and the announcement had an immediate impact in that the hotel was besieged by journalists and photographers.

Beckett accepted, recognising the honour, but couldn’t face attending the ceremony as he hated all such events. There was some sharp criticism back in Ireland when, instead of asking the ambassador of the nation of the winner i.e. the Irish ambassador, Beckett instead asked for the award to be given to his loyal French publisher, Jérôme Lindon (p.572).

Later Beckett blamed the award for a prolonged period of writer’s block which immediately followed it.

Not I

Inspired, or at least crystallised, by Beckett seeing Caravaggio’s painting Decollation of St John The Baptist in Valletta cathedral in Malta (p.588), and a holiday in North Africa where he was fascinated by the locals wearing djellabis. The original conception was of the woman speaker strapped into a device above the stage with a spotlight on her face as she spoke at breakneck speed, taking four pauses or breaks, during which the tall, faceless figure at the side of the stage wearing a djellabi slowly raised and then slowly lowered his arms, as in a gesture of helpless compassion.

But rehearsals for various productions eventually persuaded Beckett the play didn’t need the auditor at all, and the figure was quietly dropped from the 1975 BBC recording with Billie Whitelaw. And Beckett admitted to Knowsley that maybe the entire notion of the auditor was simply ‘an error of the creative imagination, a rare admission (p.617).

Ohio Impromptu

Beckett wrote this piece for American actor David Warrilow to play the part of Reader, a man sitting at a table next to a silent doppelgänger, reading out a narrative, a story which the audience slowly realises applies to the two men onstage. Beckett wrote to tell to Warrilow to read it as if it was ‘a bedtime story’.

O’Toole, Peter

Beckett hated him, and was infuriated when his agent, Curtis Brown, gave O’Toole permission to stage a production of Waiting For Godot in 1969. Possibly Beckett disliked O’Toole because one boozy night down the Falstaff pub in London, O’Toole was about to throw his friend Peter Lennon down the stairs before Beckett personally intervened. Or maybe it was just his florid, attention-grabbing acting style, the histrionic opposite of everything Beckett’s minimalist theatre stood for. He called the resulting production ‘O’Tooled beyond redemption’ (p.567)

Painting

Visual art was very important to Beckett. He had started to systematically visit galleries and develop his taste, as a student (p.58). In summer 1927 Beckett travelled to Florence, calling on the sister of his Italian tutor at Trinity College, and systematically visiting museums, galleries and churches (pages 71 to 75). During his two years as lecteur in Paris he visited as many galleries as he could and immersed himself in the French tradition. Back in Ireland in 1931, he resumed his visits to the National Gallery (p.140). After his father’s death, at a loss what to do, it’s not that surprising to learn that he applied to be an assistant curator at London’s National Gallery (p.174).

A decade later, Beckett was to spend no fewer than seven months, from September 1937 to April 1938, on a really thorough and systematic tour of the art galleries of Germany. One of the features of Knowlson’s biography is that he got access to Beckett’s detailed diary of this trip and so gives the reader a city-by-city, gallery-by-gallery, painting-by-painting detailed account of not only the paintings Beckett saw, but also of the contemporary artists he met in cities like Hamburg, Berlin and Munich (pages 230 to 261). The first work he wrote in French after the war was an essay on contemporary art (page 357).

Beckett had a very visual imagination and many critics have found analogues for scenes in the prose and plays among classic paintings of the Old Masters, and by his own account, a number of works were heavily inspired by works of art.

Thus Waiting For Godot, notable Godot – in which the final scene of both parts, of two men looking up at the rising moon mimics Caspar David Friedrich (p.609), and Breughel paintings inspire various poses of the four characters; while Not I was directly inspired by Beckett seeing Caravaggio’s painting Decollation of St John The Baptist in the cathedral in Malta (p.588).

Decollation of St John The Baptist

The Beheading of St John the Baptist by Caravaggio (1608)

Artistic friendships In November 1930 he was introduced to the Dublin painter Jack B. Yeats who was to become a lifelong friend. Travelling in Germany in 1937 he met Dutch painters Geer and Bram van Velde who became enduring friends. When he bought the cottage in Ussy outside Paris he found himself in proximity to the French painter Henri Hayden and his wife, Josette, who Sam and Suzanne had got to know well during their wartime stay in Roussilon, and who became close friends for the rest of their lives.

Paris

Paris came as a revelation to Beckett when he moved there for to take the post of lecteur at the École Normale Supérieure in 1928. He was quickly introduced to James Joyce and other members of the anglophone literary community, but also flourished in the city’s permissive, experimental avant-garde artistic and literary atmosphere. It was with reluctance that he moved back to Ireland in 1930.

Years passed with occasional visits and reunions with old friends before his patience with Dublin and living with his mother in the big empty family house finally snapped in September 1937, and he left Ireland for good to try and make his way as a freelance writer in Paris. However, he hadn’t been there long before he was stabbed in a random altercation with a pimp in Montparnasse. His lifelong partner Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil visited him in hospital and began caring for him. Once he’d recovered, she arranged for Beckett to move out of an expensive hotel into a flat at 6 Rue des Favorites.

They inhabited the Rue de Favorites flat for 20 years, but eventually their lives had diverged so markedly that they needed a bigger space. Beckett was a night owl, staying out late often getting drunk with friends when they were in town, and disturbed her when he got home. Suzanne was a morning person and disturbed Beckett’s lying-in when she woke. Plus the mistresses. His unexplained absences became harder to bear in a small space.

Thus in 1960 they moved to a larger space, a seventh floor apartment at 38 Boulevard Saint-Jacques. Knowlson gives a detailed description of its layout (p.472). It allowed them to live partly companionable, but partly independent lives. A notable feature of the flat was that from it he could see the windows of the Santé prison. He sat staring at a prison for long stretches of his day. Some visitors entered his apartment to discover him standing at the window semaphoring messages to the prisoners: ‘They have so little to entertain them, you know’ (p.642)

Poetry

In my opinion Beckett’s poetry is pants. Here’s part of an early poem:

But she will die and her snare
tendered so patiently
to my tamed and watchful sorrow
will break and hang
in a pitiful crescent
(The Yoke of Liberty, 1932)

And a few years later:

a last even of last time of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words

God, it’s dire, the ineffectual repetition of ‘love’, the woeful metaphor of the heart as a pestle grinding away at words. Flat and lifeless and clichéd.

Beckett’s poetry is so poor because, in my opinion, he had little or no feel for the sensual aspect of language. He has nothing of what Keats or Tennyson or Yeats or TS Eliot had for language, an unparalleled feel for the mellifluous flow of sensual speech. A reviewer of his first collection of short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, is quoted as writing that Beckett ‘has imitated everything in Mr Joyce – except the verbal magic and the inspiration’ (quoted page 184). I think that is dead right. Hardly anywhere in Beckett’s works is there ‘verbal magic’ in the sense that an individual phrase leaps out at you as a miraculous use of language. The opposite. They’re often heavy with cliches and triteness. Here’s part of a short poem he wrote in 1977:

one dead of night
in the dead still
he looked up
from his book (p.647)

No Beckett really does not have the magic touch required for poetry. Instead Beckett does something completely different with language. For me his characteristic strategies are paring back language, omitting key syntactical units, and above all using repetition, the clumping of key phrases which are nothing in themselves but acquire power by dogged repetition.

Traditional poetry requires a certain charge behind individual words. And yet this is the precise opposite of how Beckett works. Beckett works by applying the exact opposite of the mot juste, he works through processes of paring down, creating key phrases, and then repeating the hell out of them. He sandblasts language. Thus, in my opinion, his most successful ‘poetry’ is in the play Rockaby, where no individual word has the kind of poetic charge you find in Eliot or Larkin or Hughes or Hill – it is all about the remorseless repetition. 

till in the end
the day came
in the end came
close of a long day
when she said
to herself
whom else
time she stopped
time she stopped
going to and fro
all eyes
all sides
high and low
for another
another like herself
another creature like herself
a little like
going to and fro
all eyes
all sides
high and low
for another
till in the end
close of a long day
to herself
whom else
time she stopped
time she stopped

My contention is that he is a great writer despite his lack of feel for language, because of his systematic methodology. He doesn’t feel or express so much as process language, submits it to distortions, denials and repetitions in order to make his language pared back, hard, white bone (‘All the verbs have perished’, as he wrote of his short prose piece Ping, p.542).

His prose and theatrical dialogue doesn’t work with language, doesn’t facilitate expression – it does something to language. Manipulates and twists it into a kind of abstract sculpture. And this, in my opinion, helps to explain why his poetry is so pants.

Politics

It is striking that there is so little politics in Knowlson’s account. He devotes precisely one sentence to the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin (p.36) when Beckett was 10, and only 2 sentences to the partition of Ireland and the tragic Irish civil war which followed, (June 1922 to May 1923) when Beckett would have been 16 going on 17. There is a brief mention of the IRA, but only because the sister of his Italian tutor at college might have been an IRA operative (p.73). There is only one mention of the Great War and that only in connection with the impact it had on the calibre of teachers when Beckett was still at secondary school (p.44).

Again, most accounts of the 1930s are heavily coloured by the terrible international situation but this is mostly absent from Knowlson’s account. For example, in the second year of the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) Nancy Cunard sent a questionnaire round eminent artists and writers asking which side they would support and why (Authors Takes Sides in the Spanish Civil War). Beckett sent back the famously short and pithy reply: “UP THE REPUBLIC!” I might have blinked and missed it but I don’t think this is mentioned in Knowlson’s vast tome.

The Nazis do come into it when Beckett makes his seven month tour round Germany from September 1937 to April 1938. Beckett despised and mocked them (pages 238 and 297). But they are considered more from the point of view of the material impact their bans and prohibitions had on the local artists Beckett met and came to respect. Similarly, when they begin to enforce their racial edicts in Paris in 1940, it is the direct practical impact on his friends and acquaintances which Knowlson emphasises (page 303).

Similarly, after the end of the Second World War, the entire Cold War is not mentioned at all in the book, Suez, Indo-China, Hungary, Cuba. Silence.

One area which is briefly covered is the war in Algeria. This affected Beckett because his publisher, Jérôme Lindon, became involved in a campaign to publish graphic accounts of the French Army’s use of torture in Algeria, which made the publisher the target of death threats (pages 492 to 495). We find Beckett helping other writers and actors who lost work because of their principles opposition to the war.

Twenty years later there’s a passage about Beckett, violently against the apartheid regime in South Africa, giving permission for a mixed-race production of Godot, and the issues surrounding that (pages 636 to 639).

But Knowlson makes the important point that Beckett’s post-war political activity was very constrained because he was not a citizen of France and only allowed to stay on sufferance. His carte de séjour could be withdrawn by the French government at any moment. Hence, tact.

Maybe this is because the book was already very long and Knowlson’s publishers and editor made him remove anything not directly related to Beckett. Possibly it’s because just too much happened in the Twentieth Century and once you start filling in this or that bit of political background, where would you end? Especially as Beckett was tied to the politics of not one but three countries – Ireland where he was born, England where he spent some time and a lot of his plays were premiered, and France which was his adoptive home. That’s a lot of politics to try and summarise. If you throw in America, because it was an important location for the premiering and performance of his plays, then that’s an awful lot of national and international politics to make even cursory references to. So maybe that explains why the book contains as little or as brief references to world affairs as are possible.

Psychotherapy

One of the revelations of Knowlson’s book is the extent of Beckett’s psychotherapy. His sense of frustration at not knowing what to do in his life, exacerbated by the death of his beloved father in 1933, and the very tense atmosphere of being a grown adult stuck at home with his disapproving mother, led to an escalation of physical symptoms – night sweats, panic attacks, heart palpitations. Beckett described to Knowlson how, on at least one occasion, he was walking down the street when he came to a complete halt and couldn’t move any further (p.172).

Beckett’s good schoolfriend Geoffrey Thompson was now a doctor and recommended psychotherapy. It is startling to learn that, at that time, psychoanalysis was illegal in Ireland (p.173), so he had to go to London to be treated. And so it was that Beckett moved to London in January 1934 and began an astonishingly prolonged course of treatment with pioneering psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion at the Tavistock Clinic. This continued for two years, three sessions a week, lying on his back dredging up memories, while his hyper-critical intellect dissected them, analysed the positioning of the protagonists, their words (the London years as a whole are described on page 171 to 197).

The actual physical experience of therapy, and the theories of the mind it invokes, both provide a plausible underpinning to much of Beckett’s work, particularly the prose works where characters lie in the dark, imagining, visualising, listening to the voices of memory. The haunting prose work Company consists of 15 paragraphs of memories from boyhood and young manhood, seeded among 42 paragraphs describing the situation of the protagonist lying on his back in the dark and remembering:

To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past. (p.653)

In October 1935 Bion took Beckett to a lecture by Carl Jung. Some critics have read Jung’s theories of archetypes, of the anima, of the female and male parts of the psyche into the split personas, into the very male male and very female female characters and protagonists.

Freud and Jung, between them, cooked up quite a handful of theories about the multiple aspects of levels of the mind, a fissiparation which was only complexified by their hordes of followers, respectable and not so respectable (p.616). Temperamentally predisposed towards them, they provided ammunition for Beckett’s attack on the Cartesian notion of the mind as unified and rational. Freud transformed human understanding forever into a completely different model of a mind divided into all sorts of fragments and compartments.

But both Freud and Jung and most of their followers thought that, with long expensive therapy, these various contending psychic forces could be brought into some kind of harmony, that people could be helped to master their neuroses and compulsions. As Freud put it, ‘Where id was, there let ego be’, and therapy undoubtedly helped Beckett, indeed the case is made that it transformed him from a haughty, arrogant, self-centred young man into a far more socialised, generous and considerate person. But he never believed the self can be saved. All Beckett’s post-war works can be seen as explorations of exactly the opposite – ‘Where id was… there is more id, and more id behind that, multiple ids, a wilderness of ids.’ A problematics of the self.

In Beckett’s case, voices, the voices, the voice that drives the narrators of The Unnamable and How It Is, the voices that taunt the protagonists of That Time and Eh Joe and Footfalls, and texts which collapse in the failure to be able to make sense of any narrative, to establish any centre, any self amid the conflicting claims of language reduced to wrecks and stumps, as in the devastating Worstward Ho

Late in his career, on 20 September 1977, Beckett met the American avant-garde composer Milton Feldman. Over a nervous, shy lunch Feldman said he wasn’t interested in setting any of Beckett’s works but was looking for their essence. Beckett got a piece of paper and told Feldman there was only one theme in his life, and quickly wrote out the following words.

to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow
from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself
by way of neither

He later expanded this by another ten or so lines and it became the basic of the monodrama which Feldman composed and called neither. But the point is that Beckett considered this the very core of his project – the endless shuttling around of the mind, the psyche, the spirit call it what you will, looking for a solid reliable self which doesn’t exist. Here’s the opening ten minutes of the resulting ‘opera’.

P.S. It is funny to learn that Beckett was startled when, in his October 1935 lecture, Jung revealed that he never took on a patient unless he or she had had their horoscope read. This is the kind of voodoo bunkum which led Freud to disown and ridicule Jung. But the tip about the horoscope led Beckett to make it an important structuring element in his first novel, Murphy (p.208).

Quietism

The general sense of Quietism is a passive acceptance of things as they are, but in the tradition of Christian theology it has a more specific meaning. It means: ‘devotional contemplation and abandonment of the will as a form of religious mysticism’. Beckett deepened his understanding of Quietism in the 1930s in his reading of the German philosopher Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, what drives human beings is will – ‘a blind, unconscious, aimless striving devoid of knowledge, outside of space and time, and free of all multiplicity’. The ‘world’ as we perceive it is a creation of the human will which may or may not bear any relation to what is actually ‘out there’. For Schopenhauer, it is this endless will, driving us on and inevitably banging us against limitations and frustrations which is the cause of all our pain and suffering. Well aware that he was coming very close to Eastern religions in his attitude, Schopenhauer argued that the only redemption or escape from the endless, hurtful engine of the will is the total ascetic negation of the ‘will to life.’ Damp it, kiss it, crush it, negate it, transcend it.

When it’s put like that you can see, not so much that Schopenhauer’s thought ‘influenced’ Beckett but, as so often with the thinkers important in a creative writer’s life, that Schopenhauer helped Beckett think through and rationalise what was, in effect, already his worldview. Once you identify it, you realise it is Beckett’s core view of the world and attitude to life, described again and again in variations on the same idea:

  • The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere.
  • What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there.
  • Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

He and so many of the narrators of his texts, don’t necessarily want to die, as such. Just not to be. To cease being. Not to be, and not to know.

Radio

Beckett wrote seven plays for radio, being

  • All That Fall (1957) commissioned by BBC produced by Donald McWhinnie, small parts for Patrick Magee and Jack MacGowran
  • From an Abandoned Work (1957) BBC Radio 3: Patrick Magee directed by Donald McWhinnie
  • Embers (1959) BBC Radio 3: Jack MacGowran and Patrick Magee directed by Donald McWhinnie
  • The Old Tune (translation of a play by Robert Pinget) (1960) BBC: Jack MacGowran and Patrick Magee directed by (Beckett’s lover) Barbara Bray
  • [Rough for Radio I – written in French in 1961 but not translated till 1976 and never broadcast in English]
  • Rough for Radio II – written 1961, broadcast BBC Radio 3 1976, Patrick Magee, Harold Pinter and Billie Whitelaw directed by Martin Esslin
  • Words and Music (1962) BBC Radio 3: Patrick Magee
  • Cascando (1963) BBC Radio 3: Patrick Magee

They include some of his most haunting pieces such as Embers (44 minutes in the original BBC production featuring Jack MacGowran), the torture play Rough For Radio II, and the haunting Cascando, featuring Patrick Magee. The list also indicates 1. the central role played by the BBC in commissioning and broadcasting important works by Beckett 2. the specific role of Donald McWhinnie as director of the earlier radio plays 3. the close association with two key Beckett actors, Patrick Magee (who appears in all of them) and Jack MacGowran.

Beckett refused permission for his radio plays to be made either into TV productions or stage plays. He said they were expressly designed for their medium alone. Asked about the possibility of transferring the radio play All That Fall to the stage, Beckett wrote: ‘It is no more theatre than Endgame is radio and to ‘act’ it is to kill it. Even the reduced visual dimension it will receive from the simplest and most static of readings … will be destructive of whatever quality it may have and which depends on the whole thing’s coming out of the dark.’ [emphasis added]

Resistance

On 1 September 1940 Beckett, back in occupied Paris after a brief flight to the south, joined the French Resistance. He was inducted into the Resistance cell Gloria SMH, run by Jeannine Picabia, daughter of the painter Francis Picabia. Knowlson goes into fascinating detail about the cell’s structure and work. Basically, Beckett continued sitting at his desk in his Paris flat, where he was registered with the authorities as an Irish citizen and a writer. His job was – various couriers brought him information written in a number of formats from typed reports to scribbled notes, and he translated them from French into good clear English, typed them up – then another courier collected these notes and took them off to an unknown destination where they were photographed and reduced to something like microfilm, before being smuggled south to the free zone of France by a network of couriers (pages 307 to 308).

It was the perfect role and the perfect cover since, as a bilingual writer, his flat was covered in scribbled notes and manuscripts in both languages although, if the Germans had actually found and examined the incriminating documents he would have been in big trouble. Written records exists in the French archive of the Resistance and of the British Special Operations Executive in London, which amply confirm Beckett’s identity and role.

Although the group paid lip service to the idea that all members only knew the names and details of a handful of other members, in practice Beckett thought too many friends who had been recruited who would give each other away under interrogation. But it wasn’t from an insider that betrayal came, and the most vivid thing about Beckett’s war work is the way it ended.

Basically the group was infiltrated by a Catholic priest, Robert Alesch, who railed against the Nazis in his sermons and came fully vetted. What no-one knew what that Alesch led a florid double life, respectable priest on Sundays, but coming up to Paris from his rural parish on weekdays, to indulge in nights of sex and drugs with prostitutes. He needed money to fund this lifestyle. So he inveigled his way into Cell Gloria and, as soon as he’d been given details of the members, sold it to the German authorities for a sum which Knowlson calculates as the lifetime earnings of an average worker. It was August 1942.

The Nazis immediately began arresting members, including Beckett’s good friend Alfred Péron, who was to die in a concentration camp. A brief telegram was sent to Beckett and Suzanne who immediately packed their bags ready for immediate flight. Suzanne went to the flat of a friend where she was briefly stopped and questioned by the Gestapo, who let her go and returned, traumatised, to the flat she shared with Beckett, they finished packing and left within the hour. Later the same day the Gestapo arrived to arrest them, and placed a permanent guard on the flat (p.315).

They went into hiding in various safe houses across Paris, before preparing for the long and dangerous trek by foot south towards the unoccupied zone of France, with the major stumbling block of having to arrange with professionals, passeurs, to be smuggled across the actual border. (It is fascinating to learn that Suzanne and Beckett spent ten days hiding out with the French-Russian writer Nathalie Sarraute, who was holing up in a rural cottage with her husband. They didn’t get on. (pages 316 to 317.)

After much walking and sleeping in haystacks and begging food, the couple arrived at the small village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse département in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. Why Roussillon? Connections. A friend of Suzanne’s had bought an estate near the village and knew about local property and vacancies in the village. There they made a new life, initially staying in the small village hotel, then through local contacts finding a vacant property in the village, lying low, rerouting the small payments Beckett was owed from his father’s legacy and his handful of published books.

One of the major aspects of their two years in the village which gets no coverage is the fact that Beckett undertook demanding labour on local farms. He became a trusty and reliable farm labourer in the south of France, specifically for the Aude family, members of which Knowlson has tracked down and interviewed for eye witness accounts of Sam the labourer – managing the livestock, helping with ploughing and sowing and also, during the season, helping to trample down the grapes for that year’s wine. Can’t get more French than that (pages 323 to 326). Of course the motivation to do it was the extra food it brought Sam and Suzanne during a time of great privation.

Knowlson also brings out the fact that it was far from being a life of ‘rural idiocy’ and that a surprising number of intellectuals, writers and artists lived in the vicinity who quickly formed convivial social circles, dwelling on the charming, elderly lady novelist Miss Beamish, who lived with her ‘companion’. Autres temps (p.330).

After a lull, while they found their feet, Beckett rejoined the Maquis (their archives date it as May 1944) and helped out when he could by storing armaments in the shed of their village house (page 337). In this new situation, Beckett volunteered for more active service, going out on night trips to recover parachuted arms and was given training in the remote countryside on firing a rifle and lobbing grenades, but the local leaders quickly realised his poor eyesight and unpractical nature militated against fieldwork (pages 337 to 338).

All in all you can see why his prompt volunteering for the service, his unflinching integrity, his continued service even in the South, earned him the gratitude of the Free French government once Paris was liberated by the Allies 19 August 1944 and why, before the war was even over, in March 1945 he was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Revelation (pages 351 to 353)

Possibly the most important event in his life came when Beckett was back at the family home, long after his father’s death, just after the Second World War and all its tribulations, suffering the cloying attentions of his aging mother and frustrated at the difficulty of getting his pre-war writings published, an unemployed, largely unpublished ‘writer’, fast approaching 40, when he had a life-changing revelation.

Since his character, Krapp, discusses a life-changing revelation which came to him as he stood on the pier at Dún Laoghaire, generations of critics have assumed something similar happened to Beckett. But one of the huge selling points of Knowlson’s biography is that he got to ask Beckett questions like this, directly, face to face, or in extended question and answer correspondence, and was able to get at the definitive truth of cruxes like this. And thus it was that Beckett told him to set the record straight ‘for once and all’, that it was in his mother’s room in the family home, that he suddenly realised the way forward.

At a stroke, he realised his entire approach to literature was wrong, that he must do the opposite of his hero Joyce. Joyce was the poet of joy and life, which he celebrates with texts which try to incorporate sounds and smells and all the senses, try to incorporate the entire world in a text, which grow huge by accumulating new words, mixing up languages, swallowing the world.

In books like More Pricks Than Kicks and Murphy Beckett had come off as a sort of half-cocked Joyce, adding his own quirky obsessions with repetitive actions to heavy, pedantic humour and outlandish characters. Now, in a flash, he realised this was all wrong, wrong, wrong.

‘I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.’

He realised at a stroke that he must be the laureate of rejection, abandonment and decay, all the fleeting moods and expressions of failure and collapse which had been neglected in literature, ignored and brushed aside so that the author could get on with writing his masterpiece.

But what about taking that failure, the failure of the text to get written, as the subject of the text? What about listening to the voices the author hears in his or her head, as they review a page and conclude it’s rubbish, start again, or sit and ponder the alternatives, voices saying one thing, then another, making one suggestion, then another? What if you made those voices, the voices you hear during the process of writing but ignore in order to get something sensible down on the page – what if you made those voices themselves the subject of the writing?

This not only represented a superficial change of topic or approach but also made Beckett face up to something in himself. Previously, he had tried to write clever books like Murphy while gloomily acknowledging to himself and friends that he wasn’t really learned and scholarly enough to pull it off. Pushing 40 he felt like a failure in all kinds of ways, letting down successive women who had loved him, letting down his parents and patrons when he rejected the lectureship at Trinity College Dublin, failing to get his works published or, if they were, failing to sell any – a welter of failures, intellectual, personal and professional

What if, instead of trying to smother it, he made this failure the focus of his writing? Turned his laser-like intellect inwards to examine the complex world of interlocking failures, from deep personal feelings, all the way up to the struggle to write, to define who is doing the writing, and why, for God’s sake! when the whole exercise was so bloody pointless, when – as his two years of intensive psychotherapy had shown him – we can’t really change ourselves. The best we can hope for is to acknowledge the truth of who we are.

What if he took this, this arid dusty terrain of guilt and failure and the excruciating difficulty of ever expressing anything properly as his subject matter?

‘Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel.’ (quoted page 352)

Beckett was rejecting the Joycean principle that knowing more was a way of creatively understanding the world and controlling it … In future, his work would focus on poverty, failure, exile and loss – as he put it, on man as a ‘non-knower’ and as a ‘non-can-er.’ The revelation ‘has rightly been regarded as a pivotal moment in his entire career’.

(Sentiments echoed at page 492).

St-Lô (pages 345 to 350)

Early in 1945, Beckett and Suzanne returned to Paris to discover that, although their flat on the Rue Favorite had been occupied, it had been left largely untouched (unlike other friends’ apartments which had been ransacked). Beckett then set off back to Ireland, of course stopping off in London to meet up with old friends and also hawk round the manuscript of the ‘mad’ novel he’d written during the long nights of his exile in the south of France, Watt. He was struck by the bomb-damaged shabby nature of the city. Then on to Dublin where he was upset by the appearance of his now aged mother.

But Beckett then found it very difficult to get legal permission to travel back to Paris. Things were confused, the bureaucracy was immense. So he took the opportunity of applying for a job in France, mainly to get official permission to return, namely as quartermaster/interpreter with the Irish Red Cross who were setting up a hospital in the Normandy town of Saint-Lô.

This passage is fascinating as social / war history. St-Lô had been utterly destroyed by allied bombing, with barely a building left standing. Knowlson explains the plight of the town and then the practicalities of setting up a hospital before investigating Beckett’s role.

Altogether the war radically changed Beckett. It humanised him. He went from being an aloof, arrogant, self-centred young man, to becoming much more humble and socialised. In his farmwork and then the work at St-Lo he was able to put aside his problematic psychology and just get on with it. Both experiences forced him into close proximity with a far wider range of people, from all classes, than he had previously met.

(Interestingly, this is the exact same point made in the recent biography of John Wyndham, who served in the London Air Raid Warning service during the Blitz, and then as a censor in Senate House, His biographer, Amy Binns, makes the identical point, that his war service forced Wyndham into close proximity with people outside his usual class [both Beckett and Wyndham went to private school] and resulted in a deepening and humanising of his fiction.)

Skullscapes

The word and concept ‘skullscape’ is Linda Ben Zvi’s, from the recorded discussion that followed the production of Embers for the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays, recorded at the BBC Studios, London on January 1988. Since Zvi suggested it has become common currency because it captures at least three qualities,

1. the bone-hard, pared-down prose works

2. the obsession with the colour white, the whiteness of the cell in All Strange Away, the rotunda in Imagination Dead Imagine, the whiteness of the cliff in the short text of the same title, the whiteness in Embers

bright winter’s night, snow everywhere, bitter cold, white world, cedar boughs bending under load… [Pause.] Outside all still, not a sound, dog’s chain maybe or a bough groaning if you stood there listening long enough, white world, Holloway with his little black bag, not a sound, bitter cold, full moon small and white…

The whiteness of the snow the man trudges through in Heard in the Dark 1 or the snow through which the old lady trudges in Ill Seen Ill Said, the spread white long hair of the protagonist in That Time, the White hair, white nightgown, white socks of Speaker in A Piece of Monologue:

White hair catching light. White gown. White socks. White foot of pallet edge of frame stage left. Once white.

The long white hair of Listener and Reader in Ohio Impromptu, the pure white overall of the Assistant in Catastrophe, and the Director’s instructions to whiten the Protagonist’s skull and hands and skin.

3. but the real application is to the prose works which seem to take place entirely inside the head of the protagonist or of the narrator or of the text, trapped in a claustrophobic space, a bonewhite space:

Ceiling wrong now, down two foot, perfect cube now, three foot every way, always was, light as before, all bonewhite when at full as before, floor like bleached dirt, something there, leave it for the moment…

Stabbing in Paris (pages 281 to 284)

and Suzanne Back in Paris Beckett was returning from a night in a bar on 6 January 1938 when a pimp came out of nowhere and started squabbling with him and his friends, insisting they accompany him somewhere and then, out of nowhere, stabbed Beckett in the chest. The blade narrowly missed his heart but punctured a lung, there was lots of blood, his friends called an ambulance, and he was in hospital  (the Hopital Broussais) recovering for some weeks. Initially it hurt just to breathe and for months afterwards it hurt to laugh or make any sudden movements. Beckett was touched by the number of people who sent messages of goodwill. Among his visitors was Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. He’d met her a decade before on a few social occasions in Paris (playing tennis) but it’s from the period of her hospital visits that stems the deepening of their friendship into what became a lifelong relationship.

Beckett met his near-murderer, a well-known pimp with a criminal record M. Prudent, because the police caught him, charged him, and Beckett had to attend the trial. He got to meet the man in the corridor outside court and asked him why he did it. According to Beckett the pimp shrugged his shoulders in that Gallic way and said ‘Je ne sais pas, Monsieur’ – I don’t know – before adding, embarrassedly, ‘Je m’excuse’. Sorry. Possibly Beckett simplified the story because it rather neatly reinforces his philosophical convictions that we don’t know why we act as we do, that it is impossible to know ourselves, that it is highly likely there is no such thing as one, unified self.

Suicide, against

Oddly, maybe, for a man who suffered from lifelong depression and whose work is often about despair, Beckett was against suicide. He thought it was an unacceptable form of surrender. It was against the stern sense of duty and soldiering on inculcated by his Protestant upbringing, amplified by his private school which placed a strong emphasis on duty and responsibility (p.569).

And Knowlson sees this in the works. Despite the widely held view that Beckett’s work is essentially pessimistic, the will to live, to endure, to carry on, just about wins out in the end. Witness the famous final phrase of The Unnamable: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’.

Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil (1900 to 1989)

Beckett’s lifelong partner, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, was key to his success. After the war Dechevaux-Dumesnil became his agent and sent the manuscript to multiple producers until they met Roger Blin who arranged for the Paris premiere of Waiting For Godot.

In the 1930s, Beckett chose Déchevaux-Dumesnil as his lover over the heiress Peggy Guggenheim after she visited him in hospital after his stabbing. She was six years older than Beckett, an austere woman known for avant-garde tastes and left-wing politics. She was a good pianist which was something they had in common.

During the Second World War, Suzanne supported Beckett’s work with the French Resistance cell Gloria. When the cell was betrayed, together they fled south to unoccupied France and took up residence in the village of Roussillon. As Beckett began to experience success their lives began to diverge, with Sam increasingly called on to travel to England or Germany to supervise new productions of his works. He also had a series of affairs, the most important with Barbara Bray who became his lifelong lover. The move in 1960 to a bigger apartment in Paris allowed them to live more separate lives and for Suzanne to socialise with her own, separate circle of friends.

In 1961, Beckett married Suzanne in a secret civil ceremony in England in order to legally establish her as heir to his works and copyrights and estate (pages 481 to 482). The classic love triangle Beckett found himself is the supposed inspiration for the play Play, written at this time (p.481).

Together they had bought a piece of land in the Marne valley and paid for the building of a simple writer’s house. At first Suzanne resented the long spells she spent there on her own when Beckett was going up to Paris for work or abroad. Later she grew to dislike going there and eventually ceased altogether, making the house in Ussy into a lonely, psychologically isolated location where Beckett wrote a lot of his later works, works in which a solitary, isolated individual stares out of the window or lies in the dark, often reminiscing about the past… As in the prose work Still (p.593).

Knowlson comments that in the last ten years of their lives people who met them as a couple often commented on how short tempered and irritable they were with each other. Suzanne is recorded as saying ‘celibataires’ (page 665). But there was never any question of him leaving her.

Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil died at age eighty-eight in July 1989, five months before Beckett. They are both interred in the cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.

Swearwords, prolific use of

Beckett wasn’t shy of using the crudest Anglo-Saxon swearwords. He used them liberally in his correspondence (in 1932 he wrote to a friend that he was reading Aldous Huxley’s new novel, Point Counterpoint, except he called it ‘Cunt Pointer Cunt’, p.161) and they are sprinkled intermittently throughout his works:

  • Simone de Beauvoir objected to Beckett’s first story written in French, The End, because of its Rabelaisian references to pissing and farting (p.359).
  • Balls, arse and pee in Endgame, which Beckett reluctantly agreed to alter for the English censor (p.449)
  • the c word plays a startling role in the novel How It Is
  • ‘Fuck life’ says the recorded voice in the late play, Rockaby (page 663).

Telegraphese, use of

According to the dictionary telegraphese is: ‘the terse, abbreviated style of language used in telegrams’.

You are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then it’s over you are there no more alive no more than again you are there again alive again it wasn’t over an error you begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another as when another image above in the light you come to in hospital in the dark. (How It Is, 1961) (p.602)

Television

Beckett wrote seven plays for the evolving medium of television. He strived to take advantage of the way TV has just the one point of view, unlike the audience at a theatre which has a much more panoramic view of the action. It is revealing that he heartily disliked a TV production of Waiting For Godot even though it was directed by his loyal director Donald McWhinnie. At the party after the viewing Beckett memorably said:

‘My play wasn’t written for this box. My play was written for small men locked in a big space. Here you’re all too big for the place.’ (quoted page 488)

As the 50s moved into the 60s Beckett encountered difficulties with other adaptations and slowly his approach hardened into a refusal to let a work be translated into another medium (p.505). When Peter O’Toole expressed interest in making a film version of Godot Beckett simply replied, ‘I do not want a film of Godot,’ (p.545).

Theatre

The most obvious thing about the theatre is how arduous and complicated it is having to work with all those people, producers, directors, actors and technicians, not to mention set designers, props and so on, especially for someone so morbidly shy and anti-social as Beckett.

Beckett acutely disliked the social side of theatre, and in fact couldn’t bear to go to the first nights of most of his plays – he sent Suzanne who reported back her opinion. He used the vivid phrase that, once the thing had finished rehearsals and had its dress rehearsal and first night, then it’s the ‘start of all the dinners’ (p.554).

Knowlson’s book charts how, from the success of Godot in 1953 until the end of his life, Beckett entered into a maze of theatrical productions, as new works were written, then required extensive liaisons with producers and directors, discussions about venues and actors, negotiations with state censors and so on. The book becomes clotted with his complex calendar of appointments and meetings and flights to London or Berlin or (on just the one occasion) America.

As to his attitude to theatre, the later works make it quite clear he saw it more as a question of choreography, his scripts giving increasingly detailed descriptions of movements, gestures, and how they synchronise with the words to create a ballet with words. It is no accident that several of his works are mimes, or mechanical ballets, like Quad. Or approach so close to wordlessness as to become something like four dimensional paintings (the fourth dimension being time) such as Nacht und Träume.

Themes

Some of Beckett’s most cherished themes: an absence of an identifiable self; man forced to live a kind of surrogate existence, trying to ‘make up’ his life by creating fictions or voices to which he listens; a world scurrying about its business, ignoring the signs of decay, disintegration and death with which it is surrounded. (p.602)

1930s

Beckett’s 1930s can probably be summed up as a long decade full of frustrating attempts to get his works published and, when he did, discovering no-one was interested in them. Only hard-core Beckett fans or scholars are interested in any of these:

1929 Dante… Vico… Bruno… Joyce (essay)
1930 Whoroscope (poem)
1931 Proust (literary study)
1932 Dante and the Lobster (short story)
1934 Negro Anthology edited by Nancy Cunard, many works translated by Beckett
1934 More Pricks Than Kicks (series of linked short stories)
1935 Echoes Bones (set of linked poems)
1937 attempts a play about Samuel Johnson but abandons it
1938 Murphy (first published novel)

Murphy is the only one of these you might recommend to someone starting Beckett, and maybe not even then.

Tonelessness

Voices toneless except where indicated (stage directions for Play)

For most of his theatre productions Beckett made the same stipulation, that the actors speak the words without expression, flatly, in a voice as devoid of emotion or expression as possible. Thus in 1958 he told director George Devine the actors of Endgame should speak the words in a ‘toneless voice’ (p.457).

For Beckett, pace, tone, and above all, rhythm were more important than sharpness of character delineation or emotional depth. (p.502)

Sian Philips was disconcerted to discover just how mechanical Beckett wanted her recording of the Voice part of Eh Joe and the ‘vocal colourlessness’ he aimed for (p.538). He explained to actress Nancy Illig that he wanted her voice to sound ‘dead’, without colour, without expression (p.540). He made sure the exchanges of Nagg and Nell in a German production of Endgame were ‘toneless’ (p.551). He struggled with Dame Peggy Ashcroft who was reluctant to give an ’emotion-free’ performance of Winnie in Happy Days (p.604).

In this respect Knowlson mentions Beckett recommending actor Ronald Pickup to read Heinrich von Kleist’s essay about the marionette theatre, in which the German poet claims that puppets posses a mobility, symmetry, harmony and grace greater than any human can achieve because they lack the self-consciousness that puts humans permanently off balance (p.632).

Billie Whitelaw remembers him calling out: ‘Too much colour, Billie, too much colour’. That was his way of saying ‘Don’t act.’ (p.624) Surprisingly, given his preparedness to jet off round Europe to help supervise productions of his plays, Knowlson concludes that he was never an actor’s director. He never let go of his own, intense personal reading of the lines.

Translation

It’s easy to read of this or that work that Beckett translated his own work from French into English or English into French but it’s only by reading Knowlson’s laborious record of the sustained periods when he did this that you realise what an immense undertaking it was, what a huge amount of time and mental energy it took up. That Beckett composed many of his works in French sounds cool until you realise that by being so bilingual he gave himself twice the work an ordinary writer would have had, and the later pages of Knowlson ring to the sound of Beckett complaining bitterly to friends and publishers just what an ordeal and grind he was finding it.

Trilogy, the Beckett

The Beckett Trilogy refers to three novels: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. There’s a vast amount to say but here are a few key facts (pages 371 to 376):

  • Beckett wrote all three novels and Waiting For Godot in just two and a half years, from May 1947 to January 1950.
  • Probably these four works are the highlight, the most enduring of his works.
  • Beckett himself disliked the use of the phrase The Beckett Trilogy to describe them.
  • Arguably, The Unnamable takes the possibility of writing ‘fiction’, explores what happens when you abandon the existence of a stable narrator or plot or characters or dialogue, to the furthest possible extreme. This explains why for decades afterwards he struggled to write any further prose because he was trying to go on from a place he conceived of as being the ne plus ultra of fiction. Explains why so much of the later prose amounts to fragments and offcuts, starting with the dozen or so Texts For Nothing that he struggled with in the early 1950s (p.397), and what he was still calling, 20 years later, ‘shorts’ (p.578). To understand any of it you need to have read the Trilogy and particularly The Unnamable.

Ussy

In 1948 Sam and Suzanne took a break from Paris by hiring a cottage in the little village of Ussy-sur-Marne, 30 kilometres from Paris in the valley of the Marne which he was to grow to love (p.367). Sam and Suzanne continued holidaying there intermittently. After his mother died on 25 August 1950, she left him some money and Beckett used it to buy some land near the village and then, in 1953, had a modest two-roomed house built on it, with a kitchen and bathroom. This was to become his country getaway and writing base. Knowlson gives a detailed description of its plain, spartan arrangements, including the detail that the flooring was of alternating black and white tiles like a chess board (p.388).

Waiting for Godot (pages 379 to 381)

Written between October 1948 and January 1949 (p.378). It is interesting to learn that Beckett told a friend that Godot was inspired by a painting by Caspar Georg Friedrich, Man and Woman Observing The Moon.

Caspar Georg Friedrich, Man and Woman Observing The Moon

Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon by Caspar David Friedrich (c. 1824)

But I think the single most interesting fact about Godot is that it was written as a kind of break or pitstop during the writing of the Beckett Trilogy, after he had completed Malone Dies and before he embarked on the daunting monolith of The Unnamable. It was the same subject matter but approached in a completely different angle and medium, and with numerous other elements, not least the music hall banter and silent movie knockabout slapstick.

Wartime background Another anti-intellectual interpretation of the play is Dierdre Bair’s contention that the play recalls ‘the long walk into Roussillon, when Beckett and Suzanne slept in haystacks… during the day and walked by night..’ Although Knowlson is dismissive of this view, he suggests an alternative ‘realist’ interpretation, namely that the basic situation and many of the details derive form the way Sam and Suzanne (and their friends in exile and, in a sense, an entire generation) had to sit out the war, filling in the time as best they could until the whole bloody nightmare came to an end (p.380).

Bad reviews in London It took two and a half years between the premiere of the play in Paris and the premiere of the English version in London, a long, drawn-out period full of delays and disappointments which Knowlson describes in excruciating detail, plus the way it opened to terrible reviews (very funny) until the situation was transformed by two favourable reviews from the heavyweight critics, Harold Hobson and Kenneth Tynan, to whom Beckett was eternally grateful (even if they later had an angry falling out) (pages 411 to 415).

Success and economic breakthrough in America The American premiere came three years after the French one. It opened in January 1956 in Miami, directed by Alan Schneider who was to become a long-time collaborator of Beckett’s and was a fiasco. The audience had been promised a comedy and hated it. By contrast, another production opened on Broadway in April 1956 and was a smash hit, running for a hundred performances, paying Beckett $500 a week, plus royalties from the paperback script which was sold in the foyer. Suddenly, Beckett found himself, if not exactly rich, in funds and making money for the first time in his life. God bless America! (p.423).

Billie Whitelaw (1932 to 2014)

Actress Billie Whitelaw worked with Beckett for 25 years on such plays as Not I, Eh Joe, Footfalls and Rockaby. In her autobiography Billie Whitelaw… Who He?, she describes their first meeting in 1963 as ‘trust at first sight’. Beckett went on to write many of his experimental theatre works for her. She came to be regarded as his muse, the ‘supreme interpreter of his work’. Perhaps most famous for her role as the mouth in the January 1973 production of Not I. Of 1980’s Rockaby she said: ‘I put the tape in my head. And I sort of look in a particular way, but not at the audience. Sometimes as a director Beckett comes out with absolute gems and I use them a lot in other areas. We were doing Happy Days and I just did not know where in the theatre to look during this particular section. And I asked, and he thought for a bit and then said, “Inward”‘.

She said of her role in Footfalls, ‘I felt like a moving, musical Edvard Munch painting and, in fact, when Beckett was directing Footfalls he was not only using me to play the notes but I almost felt that he did have the paintbrush out and was painting.’

‘Sam knew that I would turn myself inside out to give him what he wanted… With all of Sam’s work, the scream was there, my task was to try to get it out.’

Whitelaw stopped performing Beckett’s plays after he died in December 1989.

One of her great appeals is that she never asked him what lines meant, only how to speak them (p.598). In this respect she was the opposite of actresses like Peggy Ashcroft or Jessica Tandy, who both played Winnie in Happy Days and both pissed Beckett off with questions about her character and life story and motivation and so on. That was not at all how he conceived of theatre or prose.

The only thing important to Beckett was the situation. (p.506)

It is about the surface, there is only the surface, there is nothing behind the performance except the performance.

In a similar spirit he got very pissed off with actors (or critics) who asked him what Waiting For Godot meant. It means what it says. Knowlson repeats Beckett’s account of reacting badly when English actor Ralph Richardson bombarded him with questions about Pozzo, ‘his home address and curriculum vitae’, and was very disappointed when Beckett told him to his face that Godot does not mean God! If he had meant God, he would have written God! (p.412).

That said, Knowlson describes Beckett directing Whitelaw in her long-anticipated performance in Happy Days in 1977 led to unexpected problems. Billie turned up having learned the entire text only to discover that Beckett had made extensive minor changes of phrasing plus cutting one entire passage. Whenever she made mistakes she could see him putting his head in his hands and eventually his constant scrutiny made it impossible for her to work and she asked the director to have him removed. Surprisingly, he agreed, she got on with the production, and the final result was stunning.

Credit

Damned To Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson was published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 1996. All references are to the 1997 paperback edition.

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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The October Country by Ray Bradbury (1955)

I didn’t realise until I began to read him, that science fiction accounts for less than half of Bradbury’s output of short stories and novels, though it makes perfect sense once you’re told. Even in the supposedly science fiction stories you can feel the pull of the fairy tale, the fable, of horror and fantasy, and also, sometimes, of strikingly ‘normal’, non-sci-fi, naturalistic stories – the kind of sweet and sentimental sensibility which produced the idyllic stories of boyhood in rural Illinois which are captured in Dandelion Wine.

But this volume is all about the grotesque and the macabre. The October Country contains nineteen dark and twisted short stories. Fifteen of them are taken from the 27 stories in Bradbury’s first collection, 1947’s Dark Carnival, with four more added which had been previously published elsewhere.

I read a reissue of the 1955 hardcover edition which features artwork by Joseph Mugnaini. I’m not sure I liked them, but Mugnaini’s illustrations certainly contribute to the dated feel of many of the stories, to the sense of 1950s American Gothick, and also to the feeling that they are, at bottom, children’s stories. Albeit for very twisted children.

Illustration by Joseph Mugnaini of Ray Bradbury's story The Halloween Tree

Illustration by Joseph Mugnaini of Ray Bradbury’s story The Halloween Tree

The stories

The Dwarf (1954)

Set in a carnival at the end of a pier. Ralph Banghart, the owner of a Hall of Mirrors, plays a cruel trick on a dwarf who is a regular customer. He spies on the dwarf and realises that he likes going to the room of mirrors which elongate your reflection i.e. make the dwarf look ‘normal’ height. So Ralph replaces the heightening mirror with a shortening one, and listens to the dwarf’s screams of horror. All this is observed by Aimee, the kind-hearted owner of the hoop stall, Aimee, who runs off to find the distraught dwarf.

The Next in Line (1947)

This is a long story made up of numerous powerful scenes. An American couple are on holiday in mexico. When they see a funeral procession passing below their hotel balcony carrying a small child’s coffin, something in the wife, Marie, snaps. Her unfeeling husband takes her to the local cemetery which features a macabre tourist attraction, a catacomb where the mummified bodies of the poor whose relatives can’t afford to keep up payments for their burial plots, are dug up and lined up against the wall. There is room for one more at the end of the line of horrific half-decayed corpses. Marie is insistent now that they leave town, but at first the husband, Joseph, refuses, and then their car breaks down and will take days to repair.

The ensuing scenes record Marie’s nervous breakdown, stumbling weeping in the street, locking herself in the bedroom with American magazines as a psychological wall against the outside world.

Outside, in the plaza, the street lights rocked like crazy flashlights on a wind. Papers ran through the gutters in sheep flocks. Shadows penciled and slashed under the bucketing lamps now this way, now that, here a shadow one instant, there a shadow next, now no shadows, all cold light, now no light, all cold blue-black shadow. The lamps creaked on their high metal hasps.
In the room her hands began to tremble.

The story reaches Edgar Allen Poe levels of macabre when she lies on the hotel bed trying to stop her breathing, to stop her pulse, screaming at her husband that, whatever happens, she doesn’t want to end up next in line to the mummies.

Then the scene cuts to the husband merrily driving his car back north to America, wearing a black armband, and alone! Did she die? Did he have her embalmed and placed in the row? Was the whole thing some kind of evil conspiracy by him?

I didn’t quite get the ending, but for most of the story, anyway, it wasn’t really about horror, it was an intense description of a marriage breaking down, marital arguments, and of a squeaky clean housewife having a nervous breakdown.

Here’s a review of the story which includes photos of the mummies which actually exist, and inspired the story after Bradbury visited them.

The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse (1954)

A comedy which satirises the ‘honey I’m home’ conformity of the American middle classes and the ‘hey daddio’ coolness of 1950s hepcats. George Garvey is the most boring man in the world. They have no social life because George almost instantly bores company to death. By chance the leader of a gang of jazz-loving hepcats, Alexander Pape, meets him in the hall of the apartment building and is so blown away with his stupefying dullness, that he invites his gang of swinging dudes to pay him a visit. The story recounts their jazz-slang conversations as they (afterwards) marvel at his world-stopping dullness. Eventually George becomes the epicentre of a new craze, with jiving cool dudes packing out his apartment.

But, alas, under the influence of all these precious things he himself starts to become interesting. He accidentally nips the tip of one finger in the door of his car but insists on having a gold fingertip replacement made. When his eyesight fails in one eye he posts a poker chip to Henri Matisse in France with fifty dollars and asks the master to pint it for him. Astonishingly, Matisse does and George receives the Matisse eyepiece back (along with the cheque – Matisse doesn’t need the vulgar money).

The hepcats get bored of George and abandon him, but he is now a man transformed. He insists on being called Giulio and sometimes, in the depth of the night, his wife wakes up, looks over at her snoring husband and could swear that… she sees the Matisse poker chip wink at her!

Skeleton (1945)

A really delirious story in which everyday Mr Harris develops the neurosis that his own skeleton has a life and personality of his own. Through a series of encounters, with his wife (Clarisse), his friends, a doctor, a bone specialist, the narrative becomes a kind of continuous hallucination as Harris loses weight and his skeleton becomes evermore apparent, in the street, in the mirror.

Finally, he calls back the creepy bone specialist, a Monsieur Munigant, who sits him down, bends over him with a peculiar device and…. extracts his skeleton from his body! Cut to M. Munigant strolling down the sidewalk, pulling out a long white thing which looks remarkably like a thigh bone, carving holes in it and… playing a tune on it… and then to Harris’s wife returning from the shops:

Many times as a little girl Clarisse had run on the beach sands, stepped on a jellyfish and screamed. It was not so bad, finding an intact, gelatin-skinned jellyfish in one’s living room. One could step back from it.
It was when the jellyfish called you by name…

The Jar (1944)

Charlie is a poor hick from the outback in Louisiana. At a carnival he’s entranced by one an object in a jar, something like one of those pickled foetuses. He buys it off the carny-owner for $12 and takes it in his horse and cart back to the shack by the swamp, and it becomes a talking point, a feature, a pretext for the real backwoods retards of the village to come up every evening and speculate on its contents.A poor farmer buys a jar with something floating in it for twelve dollars and it soon becomes the conversation piece of the town. However his wife begins to realize that she cannot stand the jar or him.

The Lake (1944)

Harry is twelve. It is the last day of summer. He is at the lake and his mother washes him down. He walks off a long the short remembering his childhood friend, Tally, who drowned her earlier in the summer. They used to build sandcastles together. He builds half of one leaving the rest for her to complete.

Ten years pass by. He moves to Los Angeles and grows up, goes to college, gets a job, and married Margaret. They come East for their honeymoon. When Harry takes her down to the beach where it all happened one summer long ago, he is startled that the lifeguard is carrying in a small bundle. To his fascination and horror the lifeguard unwraps the decayed face long enough for Harry to recognise the long blonde hair and (admittedly decayed) features. It is Tally. Staggering back along the beach he comes to a sandcastle, half a sandcastle… as if built by her spirit.

The Emissary (1947)

Martin is ten. Since he contracted an unnamed disease he is bed-ridden. His only contact with the outside world is the family dog who they’ve named Dog. Bradbury revels in giving acute descriptions of the smells and fragments Dog brings to Martin’s bed of woods and leafmould and fresh air and sunshine. He also often returns with the teacher Miss Haight, who sits and listens to Martin.

Autumn comes, then wet October. His mother haltingly tells him that Miss Haight has been killed in an auto accident. Martin cries. Then one day Dog doesn’t return. Martin is distraught, his two lifelines lost.

And then, one cold and rainy night three days after Halloween, there is a barking and commotion and Dog comes bounding up the stairs and leaping onto Martin’s bedcovers. And something else is with him. Something else has come into the empty house. And clumps crudely up the stairs. And swings open the door to Martin’s bedroom.

It is the living corpse of Miss Haight which Dog has dutifully dug up and brought to Martin, like a good dog.

Touched With Fire (1954)

Mr Foxe and Mr Shaw used to work in insurance. They’re both now retired and chat about the old days. During this unusually hot summer it dawns on them that certain people are just destined to have accidents, certain people are made careless or negligent.

As a hobby, they have been studying people in their neighbourhood, studying the personalities and habits and trying to calculate the odds. One fat, argumentative woman in particular, Mrs Shrike, catches their attention, and they watch her storm out of her apartment building, slamming the door, nagging everyone she comes across, haranguing the shopkeepers, before storming home.

Mr Foxe and Mr Shaw decide they have to help her. they come to warn her that she is just the sort of person accidents happen to. but she is outraged that they’ve been following and watching her. Moreover, there is a certain temperature, 92 F, Mr Foxes has informed us, at which the most murders are committed – the temperature at which people lose self-control and snap!

And as Mrs Shriek harangues them, Mr Shaw notices the thermometer in the room hitting 92 degrees and Mr Foxe does indeed snap, raising his cane and hitting her over the head. I thought that he would end up killing her and so it would be one of those spookily self-fulfilling prophecy stories.

But instead Foxe drops the cane and staggers out with his friend, they sit on the cool stoop and get their breath back. She was hurt but still shrieking when they left. And they are still recovering when the front door is brusquely pushed open and the enormous brute who is Mr Shrike pushes past them and clumps up the stairs. As he goes, they can’t help noticing that tucked in his back pocket is a big ugly sharp longshoreman’s hook. The strong implication is that, what with her nagging and the sweltering heat, Mr Shrike is about to murder his wife.

The Small Assassin (1946)

Alice and David Leiber are comfortably off, nice job, nice house. They consciously plan to have a baby but even before it’s born, Alice begins to have nightmares about it. the actual birth is excruciating and she screams convinced the baby is trying to kill her. The hospital psychiatrist Jeffers takes David aside to warn him that his wife may be suffering from post-partum psychosis.

In fact Alice is remarkably clear headed and lucid (I say this having known two women who had severe post-natal depression) and simply points out to her husband that their baby is trying to kill her. He goes off on a business trip. Jeffers rings him to say his wife is ill. he rushes home. She recovers from pneumonia. Things settle down. One midnight, David is sure he hears something at the bedroom door. Gets quietly out of bed, pads to the door and… stumbles over a soft toy placed in just the right place to make someone stumble. But this soft toy was in the baby’s room. How did it get here? He begins to have horrible suspicions. He takes the toy back to the baby’s room and looks down at the little creature.

David drives to work the next day full of misgivings. When he gets home he finds his wife dead at the foot of the stairs. She has tripped on the soft which he placed back in the baby’s room and fallen all the way down the stairs.

Dr Jeffers attends and David blurts it all out, convinced now that the baby is the killer. they had put off giving it a name. Now he wants to call it Lucifer. Jeffers tries to calm David down and prescribes sleeping pills. David takes them but as he’s passing out, swears he can hear something else moving in the empty house.

Next morning the doctor pops round to check up on him and finds David dead in his bed. Someone had disconnected the gas pipe in his room and, being drugged asleep, David had asphyxiated. Convinced now that the baby is to blame, Dr Jeffers takes things into his own hands and the story ends with him leaning over the baby’s crib… holding a scalpel!

The Crowd (1943)

Mr Spallner is in a car crash and, as he passes out, hears the voices in the crowd around him. Later, in hospital, he becomes convinced something was wrong about it. It got there too fast, people were commenting on things they couldn’t have known about. He becomes obsessed and scours the archives for photos of other auto accidents – and discovers the same faces in the crowds that thronged round them as thronged round his one, even down to the colour of their dresses and coats.

He shares his theories with work colleague Morgan who thinks he’s bonkers, but as the evidence mounts, begins to be persuaded.

The story ends with Spallner in another car crash, this time nothing to do with him as a heavy truck rolls out of a side street and crushes his car. He sees the same faces bending over him, the same voices asking whether’s he’s dead. but whereas in the first accident, a voice had said, No, he’ll be alright,’ now he hears the very same voice suggesting that they move him – which he knows is that last thing you want to do to a crash victim. He tries to cry out to prevent them but a couple of guys move him onto the sidewalk and he fells his body break and erupt in pain.

As he fades Spallner realises the crowd decides who will live and die. And in the rather ambiguous final words, he manages to speak a little and seems to have realised that – the crowd are the spirits of the dead, themselves killed in car accidents and somehow condemned to eternally revisit and rewitness them.

He tried to speak. A little bit got out:
“It – looks like I’ll – be joining up with you. I – guess I’ll be a member of your – group – now.’

Jack-in-the-Box (1947)

This is one of the really weirdest stories in the collection, told from the point of view of a boy who lives with his mother in a vast secluded mansion, convinced that beyond the dense forest which surrounds them are monsters which will eat him, told that his father, the original God, was killed by beasts outside. Every day his mother prepares breakfast for him then packs him off to see the ‘teacher’, who wears a grey cloak and has her classroom up on the top floor.

A lot of effort goes into creating the detail of this 20-page story, before the rather inevitable climax, namely that the mother dies: when the boy goes to see ‘the teacher’ she is not there either and he pieces it together that the two women are one and the same.

At which point he sets off bravely through the gates of the mansion’s garden, on through the densely overgrown tunnel through the woods to emerge… into a perfectly normal American city, with cars honking and pedestrians hurrying by and two cops puzzled by the strange looking boy wandering round repeating ‘I am dead, I am dead’ to himself.

The Scythe (1943)

During the Depression a family of four are heading west to California but are pushed off the highway by their car failing then breaking down, close to an empty-looking farm. Going into the farm building, the husband, Drew, discovers the owner, dressed in his Sunday best, dead on his bed, and next to him a will leaving the property to whoever finds him, on condition they use the scythe – which is there in the room – to mow the huge wheatfield out back.

Not looking a gift horse in the mouth Drew, his wife and two kids move in, quickly discovering reserves of delicious meat and milk in the barn. Next day Drew sets to mowing. He quickly discovers that the wheat he mows rots immediately. Also that it has all grown back next day. He tries to abandon the futile mowing but discovers that he can’t settle to anything, his hands and arms are twitchy. Only when the scythe is in his hand is he happy.

Worse, he slowly realises what the wheatfield is when he hears a crying out as he mows one outcrop. The wheat is human souls. He himself is the grim reaper, fated to carry out his duty whether he wants to or not.

The story comes to a climax when he realises a little clump of wheat stalks represents his wife and children. Revolted he throws down the scythe and walks away. But next day, when he is out mowing another part of the field, he sees smoke from the house and runs to find it burning to the ground. but his wife and children preserved intact inside. They should have died, but they didn’t died because he didn’t mow them.

So back out to the meadow he goes and consciously scythes the stalks representing his family and, embittered and enraged, goes on, madly, feverishly, unable to stop.

Sobbing wildly, he rose above the grain again and again and hewed to left and right and to left and to right and to left and to right. Over and over and over! Slicing out huge scars in green wheat and ripe wheat, with no selection and no care, cursing, over and over, swearing, laughing, the blade swinging up in the sun and falling in the sun with a singing whistle! Down!
Bombs shattered London, Moscow, Tokyo.
The blade swung insanely.
And the kilns of Belsen and Buchenwald took fire.
The blade sang, crimson wet.
And mushrooms vomited out blind suns at White Sands, Hiroshima, Bikini, and up, through, and in continental Siberian skies.
The grain wept in a green rain, falling.
Korea, Indo-China, Egypt, India trembled; Asia stirred, Africa woke in the night. . . .
And the blade went on rising, crashing, severing, with the fury and the rage of a man who has lost and lost so much that he no longer cares what he does to the world.

Uncle Einar (1947)

This is one of several stories about the ‘Elliott’ family which bears a close resemblance to the Addams family, being made up of monsters and ghouls.

It’s the story of Uncle Einar who has enormous wings on his shoulders, and becomes a kind of bat at night-time, but who one night flies into an electricity pylon, and wakes up on the ground, being tended by a kindly cowherd, Brunilla.

they fall in love and get married but Einar is devastated to discover that the accident with the power cable has destroyed his sense of sonar i.e. he can’t safely fly at night. Since he cannot fly during the day because people will spot him and call the cops, he is stuck and becomes very depressed.

Then he discovers some of the Elliott children are going to fly kites and he has a brainwave: he attaches a string to his feet, goes along with them to the kite hill, then leaps into the air and swoops and soars in complete freedom, under the pretence of being their kite.

The Wind (1943)

A really atmospheric little thriller: the main character, Herb Thompson, is having friends round for drinks and his wife is hassling him to get ready. Trouble is he keeps getting rung up by his friend Allin, a former explorer who once penetrated to a mystic valley in the Himalayas which was the source of all the world’s winds.

Now the winds are coming to get him. Herb’s wife calls him away to come and be polite to the guests, but throughout their drinks and dinner are continually interrupted by calls from Allin, who lives in an isolated house thirty miles away, and describes, at each call, how a big wind is assembling on the horizon, then blowing round his house, then smashing in the windows, then blowing down the walls, so he retreats to the cellar, at which point, taking the umpteenth call, Herb hears a great shattering sound, the roar of wind and screaming.

Later that night a surprisingly strong wind comes and rattles Herb’s door and windows. He opens the door and calls Allin’s name and hears a cackling and feels a sudden gust in his face. then the winds are off, laughing, to their multiple destinations round the world.

The Man Upstairs (1947)

Young Douglas watches his grandma stuffing a chicken the old fashioned way, pulling out the innards herself, then stitching it back together and filling it with stuffing.

A new stranger, Mr Koberman, comes to rent the room at the top of the house. He is creepy and has strange demands, such as insisting on using only wooden cutlery.

Over the ensuing days Douglas follows and spies on the man, establishing that he only goes out at night and sleeps like a log through the day, despite Douglas’s attempts to wake him up by stomping up and down and banging things and singing right outside his door.

One day Doug happens to be on the landing where there’s a window with panes of coloured glass in it when he watches Mr Koberman walking down the street, experimentally watching him through each of the colours and sees… to his horror, that Mr Koberman has a completely different insides from us. He is filled with geometric shapes.

Next day, when his grandma has gone out, and Mr Koberman is asleep in his darkened room, Doug creeps into the stranger’s room with shards of the coloured glass and… a sharp kitchen knife. To cut to the chase, Doug kills him and guts him, removing a whole series of weird-colour and strange-shaped organs.

The story ends with two hardened cop and the coroner standing over the body, examining the organs before sewing him back up and agreeing that the kid did the right thing.

There Was an Old Woman (1944)

Aunt Tildy is an ‘ornery, opinionated, down-home, no-nonsense old lady. When a smooth-talking young man comes a-calling, saying he wants to take her away, she thinks he’s an insurance salesman and kicks him out. The four men with him carry out a huge heavy casket which she doesn’t understand at first but when her young friend Emily comes to visit, the latter is terrified to discover her hand and the cup of tea she’s made go right through Aunt Tilda.

Because Aunt Tilda is a ghost! That nice young man was Death, and those other men carried her body when they carried out the casket.

Mad as hell the ghostly Aunt Tilda gets Emily to drive her down to the mortuary and makes a big scene, interrupting the service, insisting on seeing the manager, threatening to turn the whole place upside down until, at her insistence, the fetch the casket, open it and, with great effort, and much comic sound effects, she squeezes herself back into her corpse, ordering all the parts, one by one, to come back to warm life!

The Cistern (1947)

Two lonely, odd old ladies, Juliet and Anna, live in a house overlooking the street. During the long dark afternoon they tell stories about lost loves and also the urban legends about the rainwater drain outside the house, how it runs like a dark secret beneath the whole city to a magical land where lovers are reunited after death and – by sheer force of hallucinating intensity – persuades herself that that is where her long-lost lover, Frank, who never had the courage to marry her, is waiting for her.

Juliet drowses in the late afternoon, then hears the front door slam.Leaping up, by the time she gets there to open it the street is empty, but she thought she just had time to hear… the big manhole cover in the middle of street clang closed, as if someone had just climbed down into the dark wet underworld…

Homecoming (1946)

The second and longer story about the supernatural Elliott family who return from round the world for a family reunion at their spooky Gothic mansion, each demonstrating their special supernatural skills, as seen through the eyes of young boy Timothy who is one of the family but – being an orphan mortal boy left on their doorstep – has no immortal powers himself.

The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone (1954)

Fans track down a writer who chose to withdraw into seclusion and cease writing, and get his story from him.

Reflections on Bradbury’s approach and style

After a while I began to get a bit bored of one very prominent feature of the stories, which is that so many of the characters experience intensely altered, hallucinatory, delirious psychological states.

In story after story Bradbury describes people passing out, having delusions, fainting, besides themselves, alienated from their bodies, hysterical and so on. These may all sound like different and distinct states of mind but they’re all described in the same way, in sentences which:

  • tend to be long, with lots of consecutive ‘ands’ conveying
    • a nightmareish sense of unendingness and
    • mental collapse, the failure of the adult ability to distinguish between events, reversion to an infantile state where a thing happens and another thing happens and another thing happens
  • repeat the same phrases or words to convey the way the mind is numb and repeating like a machine
  • often include words indicating falling, swooning, fainting, passing out
  • sometimes invoke the grand concepts of ‘time’ and ‘space’ to give the impression that the entire universe is crashing around the characters

1. Long sentences

Here’s an example of a long sentence with lots of naively consecutive ‘ands’. Marie, the wife in The Next in Line, is having a nervous breakdown:

She could not speak to him for she knew no words that he knew and he said nothing to her that she understood, and she walked to her bed and slipped into it and he lay with his back to her in his bed and he was like one of these brown-baked people of this far-away town upon the moon, and the real earth was off somewhere where it would take a star-flight to reach it. If only he could speak with her and she to him tonight, how good the night might be, and how easy to breathe and how lax the vessels of blood in her ankles and in her wrists and the under-arms, but there was no speaking and the night was ten thousand tickings and ten thousand twistings of the blankets, and the pillow was like a tiny white warm stove under-cheek, and the blackness of the room was a mosquito netting draped all about so that a turn entangled her in it.

‘and… and… and’, a headlong sequence of clauses which creates a sense of breathless, panting hysteria.

2. Clotted clauses

Here is Bradbury doing hysteria – old man Foxe in Touched with Fire is being driven mad by the harridan Mrs Shrike taunting him on a blisteringly hot day until he reaches breaking point and snaps. Not the long flatness achieved by all the ‘and’s, here it’s something different, the piling up of multiple clotted clauses to create a sense of claustrophobia:

He was in a blazing yellow jungle. The room was drowned in fire, it clenched upon him, the furniture seemed to shift and whirl about, the sunlight shot through the rammed-shut windows, firing the dust, which leaped up from the rug in angry sparks when a fly buzzed a crazy spiral from nowhere; her mouth, a feral red thing, licked the air with all the obscenities collected just behind it in a lifetime, and beyond her on the baked brown wallpaper the thermometer said ninety-two, and he looked again and it said ninety-two, and still the woman screamed like the wheels of a train scraping around a vast iron curve of track; fingernails down a blackboard, and steel across marble.

Here is the dwarf driven mad by the sight of himself crushed and compressed in a distorting mirror. The first sentence is the usual concatenation of ‘ands’; the second sentence uses the piling up clauses technique to create a sense of crashing stumbling.

There was another scream, and another and still another, and a threshing and a pounding and a breaking, a rushing around and through the maze. There, there, wildly colliding and richocheting, from mirror to mirror, shrieking hysterically and sobbing, tears on his face, mouth gasped open, came Mr. Bigelow.

3. Out of body

Numerous Bradbury characters suffer from a hyper-self-consciousness about their bodies, have out-of-body experiences, find themselves looking down and not recognising your own hands, feel their body disappear from under them. Here’s the husband, David, in The Small Assassin being told down the phone that his wife is very ill:

Leiber dropped the phone into its cradle. He got up, with no feet under him, and no hands and no body. The hotel room blurred and fell apart.

If this was a spy thriller, you’d think this character had just drunk a poisoned drink or been injected with a sleeping potion. In Bradbury it’s a fairly common occurrence. Here is the same husband, having flown home to be with his wife:

The propellers spun about, whirled, fluttered, stopped; time and space were put behind. Under his hand, David felt the doorknob turn; under his feet the floor assumed reality, around him flowed the walls of a bedroom…

Later, Alice ‘collapsed inward on herself and finally slept.’ Characters’ bodies bend, buckle, disappear, are suddenly empty or void or alien.

4. Repetition 

Another trick is the repetition of the exact same phrase, maybe for incantatory effect, sometimes to emphasise the sense that the mind being described is in such a state of shock, that it has become a stuck record. This is from The Crowd:

They were a ring of shifting, compressing, changing faces over him, looking down, looking down, reading the time of his life or death by his face…

The ambulance doors slammed. Through the windows he saw the crowd looking in, looking in…

He heard their feet running and running and running…

He could smell their breaths, the mingled odors of many people sucking and sucking on the air a man needs to live by…

Conclusion

Bradbury was young when he wrote these stories and the cumulative impression of reading a sequence of them is the impression that he was still dazzled with the tremendous impact these tricks can have.

Thus when the story The Crowd opens with just such an out-of-body altered moment of experience, conveyed by one long sentence with lots of ‘ands’ simply and naively joining together a sequence of impressions as if the higher functions of the brain have been surgically removed – and when the story then invokes grand words like time and space – all these tricks are being used to convey the experience of being in the centre of a car crash.

There was the feeling of movement in space, the beautifully tortured scream, the impact and tumbling of the car with wall, through wall, over and down like a toy, and him hurled out of it. Then – silence.

The only problem is that by this stage in the book, we have seen same box of tricks nine times already, used variously to describe a woman having a nervous breakdown, a man learning his wife is seriously ill, an old man being goaded to snapping point, and a dwarf being goaded to madness. In other words, it is getting a bit over-familiar.

You even begin to suspect that Bradbury began the writing process with a strong personal familiarity with this kind of over-self-aware, hallucinatory, out of body, psychological state, discovered that he could reel off hundreds of pages of long incantatory sentences describing it – and only then found stories to fit the effects into.

You suspect that this acute sense of nervous collapse, and the giddy style which captures it, came first – and then he had to find the kind of tales and narratives which justified deploying it.

Ray Bradbury reviews

  • 1950 The Martian Chronicles – nineteen stories loosely telling the colonisation of Mars but much weirder and stranger than that suggests
  • 1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
  • 1953 Fahrenheit 451 – a true masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down forbidden books and burn them
  • 1955 The October Country – nineteen stories of the gruesome and the macabre
  • 1957 Dandelion Wine – wonderfully uplifting happy stories based on Bradbury’s own boyhood in small-town America in the 1920s
  • 1962 Something Wicked This Way Comes
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by Simon on December 27, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 27, 2018

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