Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  If Sir Maurice means that the extraordinary lines quoted on every page are to be read merely as illustrative points, his warning must fall on deaf ears. (Of course he does not.) They are all of them beautiful or extremely odd, a sort of Pitt-Rivers museum in verse. It is impossible, for a start, not to pause and marvel at the curious fauna, flora, gear, scenery and dramatis personae which crowd in on every side: icefloes, apes, flying foxes, bullroarers, boomerangs, blow-pipes, opossums, wallabies, kangaroos, termites, fieldmice, garlands, monitor lizards, porcupines, badgers, harpoons, poisoned arrows, bamboo spears, lions, giraffes, caribous, dugongs, musk oxen, polar bears, whales, centipedes, snakes, thunder, string-bark trees, tomahawks, carved antlers, igloos, cabbage palms, chameleons, unspecified gallopers, skeletons with snapping teeth (Kra! Kra!), white forest ghosts, wreaths of tanyong flowers, yams, honeycombs, blubber, rainbows, clouds, ice-holes, waterfalls, anteaters, talking mynahs, kestrels, headdresses of blossom, coolibahs, billabongs, catfish, prawns, frogs, lotuses, baboons, spinifex, falling stars, elephants and earth voles.

  To bring him strength, an aboriginal woman beats her child with a bustard’s wing; the Djapu of Arnhemland look on death as a wind full of maggots; ancestresses weep on far-off windy mountain tops; Kantijia, an Aranda ancestor and a god of thunder, lightning and rain, mourns under many waters; the Pygmy Khrum travels along the Milky Way ‘gathering stars as women gather locusts.’ The Andamanese cranes from his canoe to fling his harpoon after the twirling manatee; the white bear rushes across the ice at Orpingalik the Eskimo, innumerable degrees below zero . . .

  It is hard, as the theme sweeps on, not to form favourites. The condemned Fuegians excite pity, and one feels sympathy for the aborigines in their forlorn and dusty lairs:

  What is that? What is the cry?

  Flying-foxes suspended there in the tree, comrade;

  and gratitude to the Semang for their tropical Arcadia; and there is something engaging about the humility and innocence, laced with cunning, of the Veddas:

  Ha ha ha

  Ha ha

  I am the one whom the lynx derides.

  It is hard to feel the same towards the Eskimos, as reflected in their songs, in spite of their advanced poetic fluency; perhaps because their twilight world transmits a shiver, perhaps because the directness of their stance towards the seal, though unfaultably Stone Age in sentiment, strikes no answering spark.

  When the broth-producer was going to rush up to me,

  Beneath me, I could feel nothing else,

  and

  There was the big, blubbery seal on the ice

  I struck smartly with my harpoon.

  It is the same with the musk-ox and the caribou. These men lick their lips as they stalk through the snow. How different from the Pygmies’ approach to the elephant! Admittedly, one song speaks of ‘the meat which walks like a hill’; but he is not only a meal. He is a god, an ancestor, the lord of the forest, a destroyer and a protector. This multiple apprehension of the divine, worthy of more evolved religions, surely hints at a flexible cast of mind.

  Perhaps I feel this bias because they are the only one of these groups I have met. There they were, close to the Congo’s banks in the Ubangi-Shari, stamping and turning round a fire in the dark and liana-looped forest, their primeval arms and tackle leaning against the giant boles; a troop of tiny, cheerful Palaeolithics. They clapped and sang in time to the drums and the twangling notes of graduated metal prongs projecting from wooden blocks, the ‘equatorial piano.’ Wrinkled and benign, they were a captivating community. The forest had flowed over and befriended them. There was no conflict here; in fact, they lived in the trees, and their intelligent little faces were free of tension. (The difference from the delving and reaping Negroes who lived on the forest’s edge was compelling. They seemed to be engaged in an unequal and never-ending boxing-match with the great arboreal bruisers that sheltered the Pygmies; forever reeling back with thick ears and flattened noses; huge, groggy, baffled and sad.)

  There is a chance that Pygmy dances (and perhaps Pygmy songs?) are the oldest in existence. The young Pharaoh Pepi II captured one in the twenty-fourth century BC, and prized him for dancing ‘the dances of the gods.’ He was taken prisoner in Yam, south of the Sudan, on the way to Ruanda, where they still exist. Nor, perhaps, is their war with the cranes a mere Homeric myth: their remote kinsmen, the Bushmen, still sing of the blue crane, and pursue it eagerly. Perhaps those dancers by the Congo . . .

  There are a number of these alluring byways, and I wish there were more; but they must be resisted here. Much of Sir Maurice’s task must have been exclusion. In a world of shadows, surmise and folk-memory he is right to seize the established data of recorded song by the scruff and then grill, screen, compare and deduce remorselessly. A softer technique, swaying to the seductions of every coincidence and historical chance-shot, would end in a fog where everything can be everything else, beyond which nonsense might loom. The author’s scholarly rigour and controlled intuition gives us the reverse: unprecedented insight—has this task been attempted before?—into the birth of primeval poetry all over the world and the sources of its inspiration; and corollary surmises which are next door to facts—and how could they be more?—about the nature and thought of our earliest ancestors. It is an impressive achievement and one of lasting importance.

  But, beside the main scope and findings, many lesser details fix themselves in the brain. Are they lodged there so firmly by the thought that this peculiar poetry must be akin to the metrical murmurings which our own earliest begetters accompanied on those bone flutes dug up in France? Or because some of the singers will soon be gone as irretrievably as the archaeopteryx and the pterodactyl which cast their slow shadows across the swamps and the giant of prehistory? Long after the book’s argument has been absorbed into the intellectual bloodstream, unusual syllables linger and echo in the ear, scanned in imagination by claps and the dusty thump of calloused feet, by horns and twanging percussion; or failing this, and more austerely, delivered in the author’s measured tones:

  . . . For the lynx is the one who is cunning.

  Haggla haggla haggla

  Haggla haggla

  Heggle heggle heggle

  Heggli

  Heggli heggli heggli

  Hegli n!

  Cold Sores

  Review of Literary Lifelines: The Richard Aldington— Lawrence Durrell Correspondence, ed. Ian S. Macniven and Harry T. Moore (Faber & Faber, 1981), The Spectator; 26 September 1981

  Aldington’s share in this book came my way at a bad season. Memories of the fine early novels had all been superseded and effaced by the publication of Pinorman—if Aldington was a friend of Norman Douglas, what need of foes?—and, finally, by Lawrence of Arabia.*

  Many had felt that Lawrence had piled it on a bit in the Seven Pillars. Temporary folie de grandeur had touched him. He rashly claimed Shereefian rank and rather vainly hinted at honours offered and refused. He had the knack of retreat into the limelight; the Doughty-biblical style, endemic to Arabists, ran riot; the doings at Dera’a were uncorroborated; and his psychological make-up was complex and unorthodox in the extreme. All deplorable, but allowing for a highly strung nature, not to be judged harshly. His faults, after all, were outweighed by his courage and flair for command, by a mass of strange gifts and by a strong touch of genius. Then came Aldington’s book. Muckraking fit for Le Crapouillot and sneers like Peyrefitte at his slimiest were combined with the monomania of a pack of hounds. Hate and relish showed through the veil of sorrowing impartiality and the ensuing revulsion against Aldington was not caused, as he untiringly insists, by his success in felling an idol—Lawrence was no longer quite that—but by the manner of the onslaught. Perversely, all Lawrence’s blemishes shrank overnight to peccadillos and the axe, jumping in Aldington’s hand as it often does on jobs like this, gashed him to the bone. And the aftermath haunts all these letters.

  A few months ago in Damascus I noticed a book in Arabic selling li
ke hot cakes. The cover showed the famous features and the Bedouin headdress and I could just decipher the words Laruns and Arabiya. How appropriate for this capital which he had entered with Feisal in that victorious turmoil of neighing and feu de joie! But the book was not the Seven Pillars in translation—the bookseller had never heard of Aamid al Hikme al Sabaa—but the life, by a ‘Mister Aldingtoun,’ of a wicked western spy: it was on sale all over Islam. Through the following days at Dera’a and Azrak, and Akaba, and Wadi Rum and at all the Lawrence landmarks, I felt, perhaps by reaction, that every word of the Seven Pillars, even the most questionable passages, rang true, and left with the conviction that the book was a great work of art and unique, and the opinion stands.

  So I opened Literary Lifelines dark with prejudice and found most of it justified. Aldington never ascribes his neglect to waning powers or change of fashion: camarillas are to blame, and collusion and cliques; and there is always ‘MacSpaunday,’ a four-man portmanteau not hard to unpack, blocking the way for older poets. ‘The Pound-Eliot faction or coterie’—this is 1959—‘practically blocks ALL literary means of expression except the Communist and the Fascist. Which is why I have taken up with Mosley’s lot, not that I like them or approve, but nothing else will have me.’ This is before his Lawrence book. Its publication welds ‘the establishment poets, hacks, commies, sods and draught-dodgers’—‘the chairborne warriors of the knife-and-fork brigade’—into an alliance with Lawrence’s other champions, ‘the Edens and Vansittarts and Wingates and even the Churchills, all his close relations on the wrong side of the blanket . . .’ This was roughly the state of play when the Aldington—Durrell correspondence began.

  It really began—after a brief 1933 exchange—in 1957. Both of them were settled in different parts of France. Aldington at sixty-four was out of fashion after wide fame. Durrell at forty-five, though his poems and novels and his brilliant Greek island books were well known, was still on the brink of his great success and when it suddenly rose to a flood, we are faced by the situation of an old lion in decline and a young one in the ascendant; Henry James would have dealt with it very well. (Aldington would have hated this: his scorn of ‘Henrietta’ was intense.)

  At last Aldington could let off steam to someone who did not mind the fixations and the rancour and Durrell comes shiningly out of the exchange; cheering Aldington up; encouraging him to write; tactfully hinting that the persecution and the conspiracy were both chimerical, trying in vain to arrange a comeback in a series of BBC interviews (‘You’d have them cold’) and then, jubilant but unspoilt, involving him in his own sudden good fortune. In real life, Larry Durrell himself is very lightly peppered with blind spots and perhaps this helped him to deal tolerantly with the cracked invective of Aldington’s letters. His brimstone is hurled at random, some of it prompted by envy or disapproval (‘Mr Evelyn Waugh is rather a baw; Mr Evelyn Wuff writes plenty of guff’ etc), some of it painfully feeble. It is a relief when he switches to praise. He is unswervingly loyal to D. H. Lawrence (the right initials at last), to Roy Campbell (with an old sweat’s proviso: did he actually fight in Spain?), and to his long-separated first wife and fellow-imagist poet, Hilda Doolittle: her death came as a heavy blow. There is nothing but unstinted rejoicing at Larry Durrell’s ascending star. Durrell’s buoyancy and encouragement and his fluent and vivifying zest must have utterly changed the last five years of Aldington’s life, the period the letters cover. The parts that deal with the problems of writing are absorbing. Aldington, in spite of his repellent foibles, is revealed as learned and civilized, devoted to French literature and the classics and, with his discourse on food and wine and the records of their meetings and feasts and jokes, an unexpectedly warm and genial character begins to surface.

  His life had a last ironic climax. The letters bristle with abhorrence of the Left. But the vogue for his books in Russia had never flagged, and, out of the blue, to honour and celebrate his seventieth birthday the Soviet Writers Union invited him to Moscow and he went.

  He revelled in the interviews, the testimonials framed in blue leather, the silver plaques, the banquets and the tributes; but in the last letter before he set out, he ruefully quotes Tony Weller—’I don’t take no pride on it, Sammy’—and one suddenly likes him. He died a few days after he got back.

  It is a remarkable collection, well worth publishing. The heart of one correspondent is firmly in the right place and the other not exactly in the wrong one, but askew.

  *Aldington’s book on Lawrence of Arabia, which appeared in 1955, did his career a lot of damage. From having been a respected author and poet, he suddenly found himself shunned by critics, publishers and editors alike. Britain was not ready for such a vitriolic attack on one of its national heroes.

  The Art of Nonsense

  Review of George Seferis, Poiémata me Zographies se Mikra Paidia (Athens: Hermes, 1976), The Times Literary Supplement, 28 January 1977

  Pure nonsense is as rare among the arts as an equatorial snowdrop. It was understandably scarce in classical times, though Aristophanes, especially in composing The Birds, sometimes forgot his satirical duties for a moment, but the polysyllabic knockabout of Roman comedy had heavy axes to grind, and so had the Dark and Middle Ages. The wild scenes that run riot in wall-paintings, capitals and stained glass are lunacy only to the uninitiated: pagan survival, the apocryphal gospels, faulty translation, demon-lore and the bestiary, in collusion with the Thebaïd and the torments of anchorites, solve every riddle. Familiar broodings hatched out the eggshells of Bosch, identifiable furnaces stoked his rocketing and backfiring journeys and lit up the apocalyptic scenes; and the same impulses, reinforced by Spanish tyranny and the spectacle of folly, unloosed the skeleton onslaughts of Breughel; all his allegories and proverbs and parables, even the teeming amphibian chaos, have their explanations. Luckily prolific zest made Rabelais and, later on, his illustrator Doré, overshoot all their targets, and a kind of spellbound invention transported Goya beyond the Disasters of War, as though bats’ wings had lifted him there, to the enigmatic regions of the Caprichos: ‘his great merit’ (according to Baudelaire) ‘is the creation of plausible monsters. No one has gone further than he in the acceptable absurd.’

  But all of them and the extravagances of Swift and Lautréamont and Jarry and the visual punning of Arcimboldo and Grandville, can be explained; a fierce warning underlies the apparent frivolity of Cocteau’s illustrations in Le Potomac; even The Naked Lunch has a clear purpose—like Portnoy’s Complaint, it is a seminal work—and the maze of Ulysses, once baffling, is plain as daylight and a clew has been unravelled for its sequel. The function of Augustan follies is tamely scrutable and Gaudí could expound his heterodoxy with almost Vitruvian logic. Perhaps the concavo-convex freaks of Bomarzo in the ilex woods of Upper Latium—hollow monsters, gaping ogres the size of houses, houses nightmarishly tilted to a drunken slant; all cut from the Etruscan tufa with wonderfully aimless exuberance by Turkish captives brought back by the Orsini as their spoils from Lepanto—are the closest approach to true three-dimensional folly in Europe. Dada and Surrealism, through self-conscious gravity and the diffuseness of their claims, loaded themselves with disqualifying fetters. Free, purposeless, spontaneously born and ideologically disengaged, the genuine article bombinates in a vacuum.

  By nature France is stony ground for this sort of stuff but it may not always have been so. We know how significantly her poetry changed after Malherbe; as banefully, some thought, as her vineyards later on at the touch of phylloxera (an opening here: phylloxera = withered leaf = Malherbe), and the same critics might point to Descartes as his prose accomplice (Cogito ergo sum: the first six clockwork notes of a metronome that clicks all through the reign of the philosophes . . . Voltaire dismisses Shakespeare as ces pièces visigothes; flinty encyclopaedic smiles snap round us like nutcrackers for a century or two; finally, salutary but quelling, Valéry murmurs with a Cartesian sigh that la bêtise n’est pas mon fort’). In verse, the logical straitjacket
was further stiffened by an inflexible prosody; vocabulary was pruned to the bone and chênes séculaires, roses, laurels, cypresses, myrtle, thyme and marjoram were allowed in the lyrical garden, but nothing else.

  These obstacles turned French poems, when genius triumphed over the vetoes, into dazzling feats. But sometimes, to outwit the iron rigours, poets sought refuge in a kind of momentary nonsense—or verbal cheating, rather—which was innocent because confessed, even though the confessions were far from plain sailing. Mallarmé, at a loss in mid-sonnet for a rhyme for the river Styx, and having used up the Pnyx—there is no ‘pyx’ in French—invents one: ‘ptyx’: a non-existent knicknack with which he saves the line, and then conjures deftly back into the Mallarméen shadows: ‘nul ptyx, / Aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore . . .’ The words implicitly admit the ptyx’s lack of being. Similarly Victor Hugo, in Booz Endormi, stuck for a rhyme to the last syllable of ‘demandait,’ fabricates a biblical city, puts the inhabitants to sleep and sets it down without a blush beside a real one: ‘Tout reposait dans Ur et dans Jérimadeth.’ Here it is the invented word—‘J’ai rime à “dait”‘—which whispers an excuse and an explanation. (He makes no apology for Ur, however. The Chaldean city was as far from the Judaean stubble-fields where Ruth and Boaz met as Southampton is from Barcelona. He had a wild way with details.)

  These strictures offered a perverse intellectual challenge. During the last half of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, scattered Frenchmen responded with a glittering display of acrobatics. Only one creaking palindrome surfaced—‘L’âme des uns jamais n’use de mal’; the language rebels against these amphisbaenas; but famous holorimes abounded—‘Gall, amant de la reine,’ ‘O, bois du djinn,’ etc—and anagrams, spoonerisms, back-formations and artificial malaprops: intricate normalien stunts unfolded like a glasshouse full of hybrids. About forty years ago, Eugène Jolas (under post Joycean influence, I think) published verses in transition which relied entirely on improvised onomatopoeia. (One line has stuck, probably inaccurately. A tramp is ravishing somebody in a wood: ‘Je la triffouille! Je la ziloche! Han! Et hanhan!’) An ingenious galaxy of writers, examined by Matila Ghyka in his Sortilege du verbe, explored and deployed the secondary and tertiary functions of the language. Laforgue, Apollinaire and Tristan Derème spring to mind, and Léon-Paul Fargue. There is something engaging about his way of declaring an incident closed—‘L’inciclot est dent!’—and his proposal of ‘Ossitoyarmezin!’ as a new chorus for the Marseillaise. Finally, in novels and essays and triumphantly in his Exercices de style, there is Raymond Queneau—and scarcely are these words down before the sad news of his death reaches the Himalayan slope where these lines are being written.