From the Elephant's Back

by Lawrence Durrell

  Side by side with his poetic life Wordsworth lived a fruitful and purposeful private life of a family man, passed for the most part in the most quiet and beautiful part of the one countryside which he loved above all others and to which he belonged. In many ways, if one adds up the debit and credit, he was almost supernaturally lucky. To live, first of all, exactly where he wished to; then to devote his whole time, his whole spirit, to his vocation. Poetry was both his life and his business. There were moments of hesitation when during his youth he was threatened with having to take a job—becoming a parson or a tutor—and then he felt his poetic independence threatened. But each time the clouds passed and the future allowed him to set his feet upon the path to selfhood, and with it to fame. Has there ever been a poet (without a private income) half as lucky as he? And then, Dorothy Wordsworth—what a gift from the Gods this sister turned out to be.[20] Her invincible devotion to him—and not only to him, but to his work—made a shelter in which his mind could take refuge. The little harem of copyists existed only to further his aims, to make life easy for him.

  With such an ambience it would have been impossible not to make the best of one’s art. No wonder Wordsworth did his work entirely without the use of drugs, or even the abuse of alcohol. He was perhaps the only poet of his age to manage to work thus. Of course so sensitive a man could not expect to be free from the strains and stresses of creative unhappiness—he would have been exceptional indeed had he never shown a sign of distress or anxiety. One remembers the pain in his side which often prevented him working, and which he outfaced; one remembers the eye-trouble; and also the periods of nervous stress which gave the attentive Dorothy so much cause for alarm and misgiving. But in the end it was Dorothy and not William who suffered a mental overthrow.

  Yes, there were occasional money troubles too, and the need to secure himself a sinecure from the distribution of stamps arose in middle life. But this involved only local travelling. He was never forced to leave his own countryside. He always found admirers to let him rent or borrow congenial places to live with his family. Moreover his calculated frugality put him beyond the scope of those to whom he might have found himself indebted had he been a borrower or a spendthrift. If his luck was good, his credit was also, and in money matters he showed conspicuous good sense.

  The existence of a definitive text of the poetry, and of more than one comprehensive biography of the poet, gives one the courage if not the right to pick about in the record of his long life in order to isolate if possible the high spots and the low, the miracles of good luck and the calamities which beset him—no poet can hope to side step Nemesis entirely; and Wordsworth the family man, the husband and father, had many sorrows to contend with on his line of march. They temper the rather austere after-image he has left us, and point to a man capable of deep passionate feeling underneath his proud reticence—and most of all where his children were concerned.

  I am thinking most particularly of the year 1812 which was a particularly bitter one for the Wordsworth family, for two of the small children died during the course of it—little four year old Catherine first, and then Tom some six months later. Wordsworth’s own grief transmuted itself into one of his loveliest poems for the child, though it was not published until much later.

  Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

  I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom

  But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,

  That spot which no vicissitude can find?

  Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—[21]

  But there were other bitternesses almost as hard to surmount, such as the unexpected loss of his adored brother John, the sea captain, who went down with the wreck of his ship. This cruel calamity cast a shadow over the hearts of William and Dorothy, for John had been closest to them, and was planning to come one day and share their lives.

  Dorothy’s own gradual collapse and the gradual foundering of her reason must also have weighed on him a great deal—she was so much his alter ego that it must have seemed like the loss of half of his own mind to watch her slowly descending the long slopes of unreason, to end up as a total mental wreck. All these tragedies he faced with fierce pride and responsibility. Perhaps there were others of which we know nothing, but if his later poetry is coloured by an ever deepening melancholy, a deep gathering pessimism, we might suspect that it was not only due to a gradual loss of faith in man’s ability to restore to himself the shattered Paradise which had once seemed (to Wordsworth) within his reach; these private blows of fate must also have helped to charge his poetry with an autumnal sadness, a resignation, perhaps the vibration of his own approaching death. And then the death of his elder married daughter Dora was the final twist of the knife.

  Two meetings of a professional kind might be accounted as of capital importance to Wordsworth’s thinking. The most important is of course his encounter with the greatest thinker of the age, Coleridge—that unselfish, wayward, haphazard, and eccentric genius who rushed into Wordsworth’s life like a whirlwind. Never could the poet have hoped for so profound an understanding of his work; but Coleridge brought even more than sympathetic appreciation. He approved the basic principles upon which Wordsworth had founded his poetic style. How moving is this great encounter; and how tragic that this literary friendship (which gave us the Lyrical Ballads) was clouded for so long by a silly misunderstanding which both men were big enough to have surmounted.[22] Never mind. Their association fecundated a whole period of our literature.

  To this momentous friendship I would add another meeting, perhaps of less consequence in terms of friendship, but of great importance to the poet’s intellectual make-up—the meeting with Hamilton, the Irish mathematical genius.[23] Through him Wordsworth learned all that was to be known about modern science—though of course he was getting on in years while Hamilton was still a young man. But he had always had an aptitude for, a fondness for, mathematics.

  Another point is worth mentioning. In spite of the somewhat static picture his life gives, Wordsworth’s mind was always open to Europe through its aptitudes. By education he was a classicist and humanist, but he also adventured in Italian and German as well as French. He also travelled in Europe increasingly after the wars subsided and the frontiers opened for travellers. His sympathies were generous and universal even if sometimes hidden under a dry and restrained exterior.

  The reader should also bear in mind that this poet composed aloud, testing out his verses on the ear, not only on the eye. To do him justice he should be tested on the inner ear, or frankly, aloud. It will serve no purpose to hint at a certain metrical lack of variety in his work, and perhaps a touch of humourlessness. People of this calibre must be judged by their best qualities, and Wordsworth is no exception as he steers his verse around the rocks and shoals which lay in wait for it—over-meekness, sententiousness, too much austerity, too great a rectitude—towards the open sea of English poetry. He knew full well that the reality he sought lay beyond life, and that life was a very fragile and provisional matter.

  The poem is an act of affirmation—one dares to make such a statement feeling that Wordsworth would have quietly agreed.

  L’amour, Clef du Mystère?[1]

  I HOPE YOU ARE STILL PREPARED to hear about Shakespeare. I ought to begin by confessing that centenaries and anniversaries, celebrations of national genius always seem to me to savour a little of corpse-eating. But it is true that we, writers, do live on the corpses of our ancestors in the strictly anthropological sense and we are so very much their children, their creations, both physical and intellectual, that it is perhaps poetic justice that we should be dug out from time to time to make a public confession of a debt to them, and to make a standard genuflection to any of the great images of our great ancestors. In the case of Shakespeare, what I found bizarre was the choice of a date like Friday the thirteenth which is considered a very unlucky day. It seemed to me that it was going to clash with my theme, because I wanted to present a por
trait of an extremely lucky man. I don’t mean by that a man who did not have personal private tragedy in his life, but from the point of view of his gifts, from his genius, it seems to me that the goddess luck was perpetually at his elbow. He had to invent absolutely nothing, the machinery was all lying ready, he simply had to manifest himself and be himself. To begin with, I think we often forget that he was saved from education by the fact that he got married far too early, at the age of eighteen, and already when he went to London to make a living, he had three small children. While he himself always felt somehow dishonoured by the fact that he was not a university man (his use of the word “gentleman” simply means university man), nevertheless when we compare his imagery, in his work, with that of all his contemporaries, we see to what a degree the rather bad form of university of that day, what a bad effect it had on their work. The best of them, Chapman,[2] and almost anybody else one could name of that period, who suffered from a university education, his verse had become encrusted with Latin and Greek allusions with the result that it is virtually unreadable now. In Shakespeare’s case, I don’t think it was really lack of education. He was just every bit as much of a gentleman as Marlowe who was also a cobbler’s son. It was just the small difference of the university education, I think. It was not that he could not throw gods and goddesses into his work just as liberally as anyone else, but that his métier made him very much more sensitive to the people he was talking to. I think perhaps half his audience would not have understood a reference to Venus or Aphrodite thrown off like that, and consequently his choice of imagery was limited very strictly to an audience.

  Now, I spoke of him as a lucky man and I really believe that good luck did follow him all the way through from the very beginning, first of all in his job. The scholars try and tell us that the Elizabethan stage evolved out of the morality play, but in fact I think that we would be right in considering it a really new invention; it leaped pristine onto the scene thanks to Marlowe and Kyd[3] and perhaps some unnamed other playwrights too. The ordinary dramatic structure of the morality play is so totally different from a play which has character motivation, has plot, and has pace, that I think we would really be right in thinking that someone like Marlowe had placed in Shakespeare’s hands the equivalent of a movie camera. I think personally of the Elizabethan stage as a creation to compare with the creation of the cinema of our own epoch. Incidentally, the conditions of writing for the stage were not very dissimilar from the conditions that are obtained today in a modern film studio. It was all team work and done at a terrific pace and very carelessly, and the miracle is that Shakespeare again had the extraordinary luck to work for the same company through his life. Many of the others changed, they were all selling their plays to different companies, and many of them were too gentlemanly to see them performed. He was the only one inside the theatre, and he was actually engaged in the work of mounting them; but he was also able to write them himself and this gave him a stranglehold on the Elizabethan theatre. In fact, on his arrival, at the age of about twenty-eight in London, he is first announced to us by a terrific attack by another dramatist called Greene, who calls him the “upstart crow”:[4] the upstart crow beautified without feathers, who thinks that he can bump us out blank verse with the best of them. The considered “upstart crow” at this moment was doing something rather wicked. Up to now these young gentlemen were from the university, and I am not trying to be satirical; the distinction is a terribly important one in the sociological sense. The players were really considered vagabonds and any transgression of the law put them in a very awkward position, whereas the gentleman could recite his neat verse, and he who has been to the university did not have to be a noble’s son. None of the others were. Ben Jonson was a bricklayer’s son, and Marlowe was a cobbler’s son, but he did not happen to have the university education. From the point of view of the law, it put them in a much stronger position than an ordinary player who was classed socially with a footpad or a vagabond. And I think this is really the reason, not snobbery, that we find these complaints in Shakespeare. I think he wanted to have the security of the added gentlemanly position, because Ben Jonson nearly went to the gallows and the penalties were extreme; Nashe had his ears cropped. It did not pay to have opinions; the list of people who suffered for one reason or another, or the list of people who were imprisoned, is quite impressive, and there were even more savage sentences. There was a gentleman called Stubbs who had some opinions about the French marriage; they were quite sound opinions, but it is a fact that he had opinions and they objected to them. His sentence was an extremely severe one. He was sentenced to have his right arm cut off, on the block, at Smithfield, by the public hangman, with the hangman’s knife. He submitted to it quite calmly, and when it was over he raised his hat with the other hand and said “God save the Queen.” At which point the reporter says: “The multitude was strangely silent”; but you see it was not all that easy. Now in Shakespeare’s case, he was almost the only dramatist (I cannot think, in fact, of another off-hand) who did not even seem to get into trouble with the authorities. I suspect that he learnt his lesson very rapidly. We must imagine the London of that epoch as being something about the size of a park, perhaps 250,000 people, or Aix-en-Provence or Arles say. If he seems a bit of an enigma to us, he was certainly of flesh and blood to his contemporaries, and they saw him not only on the stage but walking about this town. One of the architectural features of this town was a row of rotting heads on pikes, along the walls, and this was a permanent reminder that opinions were dangerous and could land one in awful trouble.[5]

  This sounds like a boutade but in fact what would be horrifying to writers today is the state of Elizabethan censorship, and yet, I am not sure that it was not precisely the narrowness and censoriousness of the Elizabethan in general that assisted Shakespeare. It prevented him from becoming either a sociologist, a politician, or a prophet. Now if we could do that for Sartre![6] Well, I think the theme of luck runs all the way to the trough. Few of the people of that period had the luck, for example, to find a livelihood and not to be obliged to adopt an ignominious begging position in front of a noble Lord for trivial presents or perhaps a tiny job as a tutor. While he bemoaned his social status, the fact that he was an ordinary player put the machinery into his hands to earn a livelihood and he seems to care about that very much. I think perhaps independent spirits do not like to beg and borrow, and they must prefer to earn their keep. At any rate, one would not classify as anything but a successful life that of a man who at the age of thirty-five already had money invested in Stratford and who was able to retire to the best house at forty-five or thereabout and live the rest of his short life spending very large sums of money and enjoying himself not with the nobility, because the last drinking bout that he had where he caught the fever that carried him off was with fellow-poets. Every attestation by his contemporaries suggests not only a brilliant actor but a very good-tempered, even, smooth-witted and pleasant person and a humorist. Well, if this distinct pattern is right, as I see it, and luck was the basic thing, he had nothing to do but be himself, and this of course is the hardest thing for any writer to be. It is hard to take time off to be yourself when you have all sorts of other preoccupations. I suspect that now we don’t really talk about Shakespeare when we are talking about Shakespeare. For example he must have judged his work by the really acid test of theatrical efficacy, and I think we tend to see him more or less as a novelist because I have only seen about eight of his plays in my life, and I am perfectly sure that is about average for most people. To talk fully about his complete canon I think actors and metteurs en scène[7] would be the people who are always more fruitful in discussions on Shakespeare because they see more of him.

  Incidentally, another point which I have overlooked terribly, and which is important is that despite the fact that he was in the public eye and always acting and so on, he lived a life of relative anonymity. You see, of his plays there were sixteen piracies during his life-time an
d many of them very corrupt; there was no copyright, so the printer could print anything that he picked up, and the author could say nothing about it; that is how the sonnets got out. In the obvious sixteen piracies there were perhaps four or five plays which were tolerably accurate, but we had to wait, the world had to wait, until seven years after his death before the big Folio came out, done by his friends, and in that Folio, which had been lying in the strong rooms of the company all these years, there were twenty-one plays that we would not have got if his friends had not put them together. Those plays were not for publication. They were the property of a company of actors, and they were religiously locked up at night after the show. Of course, occasionally, an impecunious actor sold one, or a company went broke, or one was stolen, and they even ingeniously invented two types of shorthand to try to take down plays, so that they would send a spy, and we suspect that the first version of Hamlet that we have was a bad stenographic copy taken by someone who went into the theatre and whose shorthand was not up to UNESCO standards.

  I don’t want to play with the obvious because to place him is not necessary, he placed himself so very squarely all over the world, but if there is an enigma about him, and we seem to feel there is, I think it is created by ourselves. He really was flesh and blood to the contemporaries who saw him walk about, who heard him act, and we know more about him than we know about any other playwright. There does not seem to me to be any mystery, and the materials we have in the form of gossips and anecdotes about him add up to quite an effective picture of temperament. If his life seems a little too uneventful, it is because the Romantics put it into our heads that artists must have dramatic lives in order to be artists at all. I suspect that the reason we find him delineated so vaguely today is because he has become half a god and half a heavy industry. The titles to godship were supplied largely by Coleridge with help of German critics, who were very romantic, and that side of him is rather cloudy. The heavy industry is being supplied by the Americans, in terms of doctorates and scholarships, and in justice to the Americans, we must say, and this is very important, that in the last twenty-five years, all the best scholarship, the most acute work and the most profound work on the Elizabethans has been done by them and they are clearly leading the field in Elizabethan studies. You cannot move without falling in something really critical by an American scholar. As I say, this part-deity part-machine for producing doctorates and theses was apparently a man walking about in the streets of a small town of 250,000 inhabitants, well-known as an actor. The panoramic view he had is also quite explicable I think; he did not have a life as limited as a modern novelist does, who has very little chance, unless he is taken up by society, of seeing the nobility, of meeting people of cultural or any kind of consequence. Though this tiny little world of London of Shakespeare’s time was in some ways very small, from the point of view of population, it was an extremely cosmopolitan world; it was open wide to all continents through the river, and it did centre on the whole Court. I don’t know how many times an actor in his career today can count upon going to a command performance; I think probably twice or three times if he is lucky. There, they were called to court every week, every ten days, every month for a celebration, and they were quite used to it; it was rather a villagy atmosphere, you must imagine, and they were allowed on equal terms: all the noble people in the land as well as the most sensitive, youthful members of the nobility of that period and the inordinately rich. The suggestion is that it was due to him: the goddess luck again who made Shakespeare a loan and enabled him to buy a share in the company, because Shakespeare’s money was made from the company and it came from the public. It was not just handouts from peers and exchanges with dedications. Then, finally, of course, the mystery of why in his will there were no books. And this is rather a mystery. It has been presumed that he bought the best house in Stratford as a sort of status symbol, the poor boy who wants to come back and show that he is a person of distinction now. But I wonder whether he could have been that. At any rate there are no books listed in the will; it is possible he did not like literature.