From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings

by Lawrence Durrell

  But the outbreak of the First World War put an abrupt end to these considerations; the little band of intellectuals was abruptly dispersed. Escaping arrest by the Turks, Zarian crossed the boarder into Bulgaria and thence made his way to Italy. Here he composed his “Three Mysteries,” a pantheistic poem of great force and beauty which, in Italian translation, earned him immediate recognition and which was put to music by Ottorino Respighi.[4]

  At the end of the war Zarian returned to Constantinople to continue his literary work, and in 1920 accepted an invitation by the Soviet authorities to return to Armenia with full honours. He was to have a chair founded for him at the University of Erevan.[5] He accepted the invitation and returned. He determined to stay and help the revolutionaries to found their promised Utopia. It took him two years to understand finally the full horror of the system that had been imposed upon his own people. In 1924 he fled.

  To those who come back, he will tell you, after having fully tasted the fruits of Communism in Russia, Europe seems a strangely unreal thing; and the values of Europe acquire all of a sudden a new perspective. What are all these people talking about, the traveller asks himself, as everywhere around him he sees traces of a moral order, a coherence in values, a culture which has been systematically extirpated behind the curtain? The virtues so far outweigh the defects that it seems incredible to him that he himself was once among those sentimental believers who wished for a new Marxist Utopia and the end of capitalism. To those who have the chance fully to compare the two systems the shock is a very profound one. Not only does capitalism offer the worker a far better chance of ameliorating his lot, but in every way and from every point of view it is superior to the paltry materialistic inventions of that dated humbug, the Communist, whose politics are based upon a pipe-dream which in turn is based upon a social grudge.[6] It was from this new angle of vision that the disappointed poet saw Europe on his return.

  Many people since Zarian have learned the lesson, too; but for him the shock was perhaps greater, since it concerned his own country and his own people. He had always been disposed to listen openly to criticisms of Communism; no doubt he had always agreed the earlier stages were clumsy, crude, and mistaken. Nevertheless, it offered hopes of equality and justice. But after an exposure to it at first hand he realised with alarm that the system itself did not work (regardless of whether it were to be applied by angels or gangsters). Based on a futile actuary’s view of the universe, it laid low every seed of culture and growth that a thousand years of Christian humanism had offered to the Western European. It was the deliberate enemy of the imagination, of love, of every faculty and grace that one could prize as a human being. And here was another paradox; he had expected to find that the Communist state was truly a worker’s state and found that it was, in the most precise sense of the word, a state run by the failures of Bloomsbury.[7] Marxism was the bin into which every manqué poured the talents he could not exercise in the arts and sciences.

  To return then, like Lazarus risen from the grave, and to find the currents still running strongly leftward in Europe, was something which made his blood run cold. Fifty years of sentimental agitation, of barren provincial Utopianism, had produced this attitude in public opinion. To read the utterances of a Shaw, a Haldane,[8] after leaving Armenia was almost to despair of the fate of Western Europe as such—for never had so gigantic and palpable a fraud, so hideous a tyranny ever been supported by so many men of apparent distinction and eminence.

  Zarian has never ceased to believe in the artist as the responsible factor in human affairs; and the blame for this situation he laid, and still lays, at the door of the Western artist. The utter irresponsibility in human affairs which has characterised the artists of the last fifty years, he often insists, is something that can only be appreciated in all its richness by someone who has enjoyed the fruits of their agitation—a worker’s state: at least so Zarian thought when, once more in France, he tried to assemble his ideas of the two years he had passed in his country. He was consumed by anxiety that Europe, with all its remediable faults, should be destroyed by the tyranny he saw approaching in so many seductive guises.

  Marxism, he recognised, was itself the enemy, whether in the mild form of humanistic socialism advocated by the sentimental agitators of the west, or in its complete Soviet form; indeed one could only be a stepping stone to the other. What could he do to atone for his mistake? What kind of artist could he become without falling into the camp of the clericals, or the duller ranks of the quasi-reactionaries? How best could he contribute to the twentieth-century symposium?[9]

  It was these considerations that were finally to determine the shape and magnitude of the writings which, for the next twenty years and more, were to pour from his pen. It was no conscious choice that made Zarian a classical man—it was the development of a natural style of mind, founded in bitter experience and in a tenacious belief that if man was to be saved from destruction he stood in need of major artists of a new type—responsible men. His own task was no longer to reject, to criticise, to whine—but, in the deepest sense of the word, to submerge in the swift currents of history and to give their impulse direction and form. “To endure and contribute”—that was the new motto: and he has never deviated by a hairsbreadth from it in his attitude to his work and his people.

  He was by now a triple exile: exiled by both Czarist and Bolshevik; and doubly exiled from the current of European thought by his choice of language. After what he had seen he recognised that the Fabians[10] and their followers, though they were striking many a shrewd blow for justice in social affairs, were still hypnotised by the corpus of belief derived out of Marxism. They constituted nothing less than an intellectual fifth column situated at the heart of European life. The very science upon which their belief in a new social order was founded had become obsolete with the relativity principle.[11] There was a real danger that they would succeed in destroying the old culture and finding themselves with nothing to put in its place. Could they not recognise that cultures were born and died like organisms? That they could not be forced and shaped only by the human powers of a fallible logic?

  Zarian addressed himself to the social problem not by entering the arena as a man of politics or of science but simply as an artist devoted to the responsibilities which his country and language had put upon him. He dealt with Soviet Armenia in the way that one would deal with the phenomenon of, say, first love—artistically. His “Impressions of Soviet Life” and “The Co-operative and the Bones of the Mammoth”[12] recreated the atmosphere and flavour of the submerged life that human beings live when their hearts have been conscripted under the flag of the false god, Matter. The emphasis was on the pity and the comedy, and his best effects have some of the simplicity and grotesque humour of Gogol.[13]

  For the rest, his work belongs to the main current of European thought, and his books from 1930 onwards were milestones set up along the winding roads of his journeys, both physical and spiritual, in the Europe he had come to love. His Philosophical Studies and the two fat Notebooks (1946) contain not only his impressions of Spain, Italy, and Holland but, in a sense, a study of the philosophic background which makes or unmakes nations; yet these studies were free from a false professionalism in that they were at all points derived, not from abstractions, but from the landscape, wine, food, people, and languages he encountered.

  He spent the Second World War in America and published there what he regards as his greatest novel, The Ship Upon The Mountain. So much for the prose of this formidable poet, the appearance of whose prose work has been punctuated through the years by the publication of many books of verse. This year his Collected Poems are in the press and contain all the work that he wishes to preserve in this medium.[14]

  “As a classical man,” Zarian is fond of saying, “I am either out of date or else I belong to a type of artist who has not yet emerged but whom the future will bring us: the artist who belongs to his people.” It is perhaps easier to be this type of artis
t if one belongs to a small people whose literature is as yet not significant in the way that, say, German or French literature is. Certainly our own native genius seems to be bred out of revolt, out of a refusal to conform or belong (Shelley, Byron, Lawrence, Blake,[15] etc.). It is characteristic also that in English it is the rebels that Zarian most admires…Nevertheless he feels that the future will bring us artists who belong without being tame or toothless, without being a Southey or Rogers.[16] “They will not stop being exiles, of course,” adds Zarian, “because it seems that one has to be an exile in order to belong to the world.” The translation of his work into two European languages will, we believe, qualify him for admission into this class.

  Enigma Variations

  1957

  MR. EZRA POUND’S POETRY has so secure a place in the canon of modern literature that there can be no harm in a reviewer admitting that his huge work-in-progress, The Cantos,[1] presents the reader with a series of insurmountable difficulties, not the least of which is the apparent lack of a discernable architectural pattern shaping towards a whole. Is it because the poem is as yet incomplete? I would like to think so. Yet this new volume,[2] which seems full of the chips and fragments thrown off by a giant rock-drill at work upon a statue, is just as baffling as its predecessor; for the statue itself is still not visible to the naked eye. I personally am beginning to wonder whether it is there at all.

  Presumably this work will take its place among those great unfinished enigmas of art which tease the mind by their incompleteness, their hostility to form and the rights of communication between poets and their readers; their surrender to the Platonic daemon. Somewhere there is a special shelf reserved for them—Mallarmé’s Igitur, Smart’s Song of David, Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, Solomos’s Woman of Xante: Blake, Hölderlin, Nijinksy…[3] they shade insensibly into the poets of mysticism, of alchemy, like Nostradamus and Dr. John Dee. They belong to the irrational twilight world where the symbol prime is king and where the experience it mirrors is incommunicable save in these mutterings and groanings, frenzied prayers uttered in the complete loneliness of the poet’s workshop. Mr. Pound has every right to demand sympathy and suspend judgement of his critics. He is writing an agon.[4]

  But…if one removed all the verbs and nouns from a volume of Spengler[5] and then interspersed what was left with a few Chinese characters from Fenellosa’s book[6] and some hieroglyphs from Budge’s Egyptian Book of the Dead[7] one could, by synthetic means, produce roughly the sort of effects achieved by Mr. Pound in this poem. I am speaking only of the form. If Joyce ran pun-mad in Finnegans Wake[8] Mr. Pound has run quotation-mad here, though he has successfully disguised most of his quotations by cutting them into pieces. One recognizes only the quotation marks, as it were. What is he getting at?

  The whole momentum of his work seems to derive, as well as to rest upon, an obsessive preoccupation with human history. Indeed the central intention of the Cantos—if one can dare to be so precise about so inchoate a production—seems to be to erect a great rubbish heap of cultural fragments,[9] a giant word-tumulus in which the spades of future archaeologists will turn up something of everything—a fragment (incomplete) of every known culture. In this sense the poem is in the direct line of descent from the great cultural jumble-sales already organized by Eliot in The Waste Land and Joyce in Finnegan. These works illustrate the twentieth-century psyche at dispersal points—dispersal into a series of component parts or states—literary spectrum analysis. One reads them as one might read the brilliant and baffling annotations of a great scholar to a text which has been lost but which—to judge by the quotations cited—was of heart-breaking beauty. But there is one point upon which I cannot make up my mind. Is there in Mr. Pound’s poem any trace of the conscious deliberation, the purpose and regulation of means, which irradiate the works of Eliot and Joyce, and which in fact constitute their real claim to be regarded as works of art rather than hoaxes? I can as yet find none. But perhaps the outlines will emerge in time and supply the huge cumbersome, indeed gruesome, piece of contrivance with a fulcrum, a point of intention.

  I know the poetic symbol is not rational and didactic so much as initiatory, and when faced with a work like the Chinese Book of Changes I realized that it is meaningless to me because I haven’t really mastered its metaphysic; I am quite prepared to believe that I am encountering the same trouble with Mr. Pound’s poem. The only trouble is that I am beginning to wonder whether there is, at the bottom of it, something like the same informing seed which, when I grasp it, will enable me to enter the poem quietly and shut the door behind me. If this is so I shall be delighted, for I have always loved the early Pound and no writer of my generation can fail to acknowledge the debt he owes to so brilliant an innovator and exploiter of metrical forms.[10] We, his readers, must keep trying and wait patiently for the conclusion of this poem. But I can’t disguise the fact that so far these oracular discharges afflict me like the message of a teleprinter in need of mechanical attention.

  The Shades of Dylan Thomas

  1957

  MUCH WAS WRITTEN ABOUT THOMAS immediately after his untimely death, but for the most part it took the form of obituary, eulogy, and criticism.[1] Fifty years from now his readers will want to know other things, about the way he looked and talked and wrote—for these are the little things which bring a poet alive to his readers; they are perhaps worth jotting down, even though I was not a close friend of his and my memories of him are of an early period, when 18 Poems[2] had woken the world of poetry up to the fact that a new and original poet had sprung out of Wales. Others will have better stories of his latest period. It is to be hoped that they won’t be lost, or snowed under by anecdotes of his wildness and improvidence only. For he was an original in his way.

  I first met him quite by chance; on a flying visit to England I had been commissioned by Henry Miller to investigate the story that Anna Wickham,[3] the poetess, had a large private diary for publication, parts of which might be regarded as actionable if produced in England itself. I called on her to see if there was any truth in the story. She was a rather formidable person, of intimidating size and forthrightness—and I soon found out that her diary was a myth. (She afterwards hanged herself from the window-sash of her house because cigarettes went up in price—a noble protest at the English way of life.) While I was talking to her, Thomas came into the room and introduced himself. He had caught the name of Henry Miller—whom he deeply admired—and wanted to know what was going forward. He was then a slim, neat young man with well-trimmed hair and a well-cut suit—anything less like the sublunary golliwog I was to meet years later cannot be imagined.

  His voice was low and musical, his smile ready. Since he wanted to know more about the Paris Group,[4] as he called it, I was delighted that he should elect to share a long bus ride back to Notting Hill Gate with me; we talked and became good friends. He was full of eager questions about Miller, most of which I was able to answer; and in return I questioned him about his own work which he took seriously but not too seriously. He was particularly amused by our attempts to revitalise The Booster (official publication of the American Country Club, Paris, France). By some stroke of fate this periodical, so like The Hairdresser in format, had come into the possession of Alfred Perlès who had been instructed to turn it into a Paris version of the New Yorker. As Perlès cordially detested the paper’s owner, he decided to make it really good; and this is where we came in. The Booster became so good so quickly that within three numbers it had not only lost all its advertising but had provoked the President to the Club to threaten us with an action under French laws of obscenity. It became an act of wisdom to transfer The Booster to London where it lived on for two numbers under the incognito of Delta, before dying.[5] Some of Thomas’s work was first printed here.[6] It is worth mentioning, perhaps, that today bound sets fetch up to sixty pounds second-hand!

  All this gossip seemed to delight Thomas, who confessed that he found the English literary scene rather dull and he p
romised us contributions, which he duly sent so long as we were in Paris. I found him then very self-possessed and single-minded and with a marvellous sense of the comic. He was not, I thought, very widely read—indeed, reading bored him somewhat. He liked some novels, and mentioned Dickens and Lawrence with enthusiasm. But though he had heard of Freud and Jung, he had not at this time read either. He listened with attention to what one had to say but gave the impression of knowing exactly what interested him, and being unwilling to waste energies outside his chosen field. I imagine true poets must be like that, shielding their sensibilities against distracting intrusions from the world of ideas. I liked him awfully, too, because he believed in hard work and said that he never released a poem until he had tested every nut and bolt in its body. We drank a farewell beer at the local and promised to keep in touch, which we did for years, exchanging vigorous and jolly messages whenever I happened to be in England but too far away perhaps to reach him.

  I tried, I remember, to persuade him to come back to Paris with us and then on to Corfu for a summer. I thought the Mediterranean would blind him with its colours and perhaps help him dig new veins for his verse—the image is a happy one, for his poems rattled and banged away in the darkness like convoys of coal-trucks. And you could always hear the sound of the rock-drill[7] in the best of them. But he sheered away from France and Greece—and wrote saying he preferred to mix his colours from the greys and browns of Wales. He couldn’t be budged on this.