From the Elephant's Back

by Lawrence Durrell

  Psychologists have already pointed out the poet’s partiality towards substitution in the early comedies: girls are disguised as pages, brothers as sisters, and so on. This is regarded as a sign of sexual ambivalence; but I am not sure that this is very certain ground. The tradition from which he was borrowing was Italian, and here we may have simply a stage convention of the day and not a clue to psychological predispositions. I am, of course, prepared to concede that Rosalind says of herself that she would be “changeable, longing, and liking…full of tears, full of smiles…as boys and women are.”[46] But Rosalind is a renaissance woman. We might find more material in Two Gentlemen of Verona, where Proteus loves both Silvia and Julia, and where the latter says of the former: “Her hair is auburn, mine a perfect yellow.”[47] But there is not the space to deal exhaustively with such hints. Certainly all such tentative explanations must halt before the magnitude of his female creations, starting with those lovely and spirited girls in the comedies, and gradually gathering breadth and depth and tragic sense in a Cordelia, a Lady MacBeth, and Ophelia. On one score we can reassure ourselves; Shakespeare was not a woman, for no woman has ever or could ever, create beings like these! But perhaps it would be politer to say only that up to today no woman has done so.

  All great experiences are a challenge to the artist. They are to be surmounted and transformed, and their precious essence must be distilled and turned to use—for in art lies the justification for reality (from the artist’s point of view). I am prepared to presume that this early and seminal experience which marked and formed young Shakespeare finally dispersed itself into the rest of his work, enriching it even as it slowly faded—or was superseded by experiences more wounding, more damaging, more useful. We know almost nothing about the middle period of the great tragedies, except for fragmentary data of little interest. Freudians have done a systematic treatment of Hamlet in terms of the Oedipus complex which is extremely brilliant as far as it goes; and Freud, in trying to date Hamlet, has suggested that the death of the poet’s mother might have set into train the emotions which led to the writing of the play. I would myself be inclined to favour an earlier date connected with the death of his son.

  We speak of the artist and tend rather to forget the somewhat grasping peasant Shakespeare was; undeflected in his career he succeeded in making a comfortable fortune which was directed (one might say) obsessively towards re-establishing his family in Stratford. He bought a family coat of arms. Always the faithful Taurus, he kept in touch with his town, visiting it every year, according to Aubrey. He did not want the kind of honours London could have offered him—he left those for Ben Jonson. What he wanted for himself (what he wanted for W.H.) was to found a solid yeoman family with plenty of land. Nothing could turn him from this purpose and nothing did.

  So we come to his last work—one which no biographer can afford to overlook though Shakespeare did not actually write it himself; his will. When he came to dictate it a little while before he died there still remained the old active peasant streak. What the death of his son cost him we shall never know; but his two daughters were still alive and suitably married. Either might bear him a male child to continue the succession. So the will was planned; on the surface it may appear a somewhat confusing document but there is no mistaking the central driving purpose to it. It was designed in such a way that the property would find itself intact in the hands of a male descendant—a male heir!

  From fairest creatures we desire increase

  That thereby beauty’s rose may never die.[48]

  How touching the sonnets are when read in the light of this central dominating purpose of our gentle poet. Alas! his hopes died with his son Hamnet, though he did not live to know it. Within two generations the male side of the family was extinct, and the land for which he had struggled, plotted, and saved, had been slowly dispersed among the families of his daughters. The mainspring of his working life failed him in the last resort, and all his sacrifices were wasted.[49]

  We have, then, here the portrait of an exceptionally faithful man, true to old friends and old business ties, true to his own peasant origins and their attitudes, true to his own character with all its mutinous impulses. It would not be too much to suggest that he was also a faithful and truthful lover, and though time has covered up the record of later loves, we have in the sonnets at any rate the record of one great experience which formed him. Perhaps he did not entirely forget the dark lady and the fair youth? Perhaps echoes of them came back sometimes, faded like perfume in a room a long time uninhabited, among the images of his later plays? It is a pardonable sentimentality to imagine so. Here, for example, is one from his last play: The Tempest.

  Gon: What marvelous sweet music!

  Alon: Give us kind keepers, heavens! What were these?

  Seb: A living drollery. Now I will believe

  That there are unicorns; that in Arabia

  There is one tree, the phoenix throne; one phoenix

  At this hour reigning there![50]

  Eternal Contemporaries

  Theatre

  Sense and Sensibility

  1939

  HEAVEN AND CHARING CROSS

  by A. Danvers-Walker—St. Martin’s Theatre[1]

  FAMILY REUNION

  by T.S. Eliot—Westminster Theatre

  THOSE WHO WERE BAFFLED by the dark spiritual implications of blood-guilt in T.S. Eliot’s recent play will be able to turn with composure and pleasure to this human drama, in which every element that goes to make a murderer is psychologically apparent. It is a kind of behaviourist play,[2] written extremely well, articulated clearly and smoothly, and acted brilliantly by a good cast. Indeed, it is crashingly mediocre in conception; and only the marvellous interpretation of the players prevents one noticing the fact until the morning after.[3]

  Love, in the case of Charlie Norman, was blind; blind with rage. He loved Bella Wilson[4] with an adolescent lack of control; but even he did not plan the murder which came upon them all so suddenly, and which is the crux of the drama. The ingredients have been well mixed and served: several excellent cockney studies by Mary Clare, Alban Blakelock, Cyril Smith; a few morsels of shrewd and salty human philosophy delivered by George Carney; an extremely fine study of the murderer son by Frederick Peisley; and the best performance of all for balance and sureness of touch—that of Jean Shepheard as Lily, the hunchback.[5] It is a great pity that the solid workmanship and dramatic execution should not have been lit up by one internal spark. After all, drama is not merely events, but the transformation of people’s souls in front of one’s eyes. If the play of T.S. Eliot (which is by far the most effective comparison to a play of this kind) could be described as all sensibility and no sense, Heaven and Charing Cross could be as certainly described as all sense and no sensibility. The people do not move except in time and events; suffering does not alter them. Dramatic inevitability, which is the essence of form in drama becomes here a mere mechanical pattern which is fulfilled. It is a great pity because the acting is really magnificent throughout.

  If it is not a winner it will be through no fault of the cast.

  Turn to The Family Reunion,[6] however, and you are faced by dramatic entertainment of another order, presented every bit as brilliantly by a superb cast. This is a dire parable complicated enough in theme to sound aboriginal to the mind of Mr. Agate; but which the average playgoer should find enthralling, because he will get from it not only drama, but also a good moral judgement on life and destiny. The guilt from which Harry suffers, and which is personified by the Furies who appear so dramatically to him in the family mansion, is caused by more than murder. The murder itself was the result of the guilt—otherwise why so pointless, the pushing of a woman from the boat-deck of a liner? Why did Harry feel what he felt? Above all, exactly how did he feel? The poetry has some great moments in it: and the questions posed here could really only be answered by Hamlet, whose ghost haunts the wings of this play.[7]

  One cannot see this play without b
eing convinced that it is a really noble statement on life; and that a great step has been made in verse drama—because the characters for the first time act and interact, not merely emote and mime. In fact this is true drama as opposed to pageant or Camden Town recitative by the waterproof boys’ brigade. It shows up the shabby tinfoil conceptions of the other dramatic poets’ writing; and reaches behind the shell of events towards the deep symbolic meanings of our actions and our feelings. It contains some of the best and most personal work of T.S. Eliot;[8] and a first class cast to interpret it including Catherine Lacey, who exploits her crooked Brontesque spirit to the full, and Michael Redgrave who does a weird and Hamletesque study of Harry.[9] This is the only play on at the moment that is not only intelligent and beautifully produced, but also poetic as well. This notice of it ends with an unequivocal categoric imperative. See it!

  The Happy Rock

  1945

  HENRY MILLER is still more or less unknown to the general public of England and America. It is not entirely his fault in spite of the fact that the proportion of so-called “unprintable” words employed in the construction of his three great books (Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn) is fairly high.[1] It is, in fact, due entirely to the power and vehemence of his purely descriptive writing that he is as well known as he is. The abashed literary gents of the thirties who turned in horror from brutal descriptions of Parisian brothel life in Tropic of Cancer suddenly found themselves impaled upon passages of miraculous prose about subjects dearer to them—Matisse, Proust, the Seine: flights of prose which seemed incontestably the work of a genius. Thus it is that Miller has got two distinct publics—those who deplore his Brooklyn predilections in subject but feel that he cannot be ignored without loss of literary face; and those few who can see him in the round as a figure in American literature who steps straight up beside Whitman and Melville.[2] Certainly there is no doubt that this towering, shapeless, sometimes comic figure completely overtops the glazed reflections cast by those waxworks of contemporary American fiction—Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner.[3] In Miller you have someone who has crossed the dividing line between art and kitsch once and for all.

  Tropic of Cancer first came into my hands in 1938 in the island of Corfu.[4] It was not a novel. It was not completely an autobiography. It was a piece of self-evisceration written in the purest romance vein.

  Formally the book was a chaos. (“Chaos is the score on which reality is written,”[5] says the author somewhere in it). It contained everything, speculations, soliloquies, short stories, strings of images, flights of fancy. It was chaotic in the way that Leaves of Grass[6] is chaotic: it dramatised and ranted; it was cold blooded and terrifying and upsetting. It defied every rule of taste and construction. It completely came off. It rang like a bell in every line.

  For over a year I corresponded with Henry Miller.[7] His letters were boisterous, friendly, shy, and warming all at once. They were the letters of a man at once self-possessed and timid: they were puzzling. They were not the letters of an Educationed European. He described himself on various occasions as “just a Brooklyn boy,” “Someone who had gone off the gold standard of Literature” and “Something quite other—a Patagonian, say.”[8] He was something quite new to me at all events—genus epileptoid.[9]

  It is always difficult to imagine a writer writing in English who has no correspondence with English literature. Miller has never read Milton, Donne, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Pope, Swift, etc. They do not form, as they do with most writers, a kind of invisible chorus in the subconscious—a stratum of derived experience. Poetry bores Miller: what he reads and enjoys above all things is drama based on the anomalies of human behaviour. His deepest literary influences were always translations of foreigners, Dostoevsky above all, Knut Hamsun, Tchekov, Strindberg.[10] And characteristically the form of literature he most cherishes is autobiography.

  Born of poor parents in Brooklyn, New York, he began writing late in life: “at the point of madness,” he says in a letter. To be rich in emotion and experience, and to have no centre focus for self-expression, is the common lot of writers when they begin. But to be already a grown man, “exhausted by death of many selves,” and undertake a task of self expression is far more difficult. Miller began to write badly—but so badly that it is impossible to find any trace of the published Miller in his first two manuscripts.[11] Side by side with his search for himself, his technical deficiencies sent him in search of models: Melville and Whitman seemed to be the answer—though an incomplete answer. He began reading extensively and along haphazard lines: a course in books on history and comparative religion threw up whole pieces—Atlantean chunks like continents—of new ideas: Buddhism, Nietzsche, Confucius, Nostradamus, Elie Faure, Spengler, D.H. Lawrence, Joyce.[12] There was little order and shape to this vegetable accretion of knowledge. He read like a hungry animal. Science promised but bored. Psychology suddenly came in view with Freud, Bleuler, Jung, Rank;[13] and then one day in Paris he came across Dadaism and Breton’s manifestoes. He was enslaved: Surrealism seemed to him to offer a means of breaking out of this hypnotic autism.[14] Yet even here he did not succumb because he realised that this barren mechanistic attitude to the sub-conscious,[15] while it gave one a superb critical apparatus, could not teach one to write about the things that mattered—other human beings, death, marriage, sex. He never joined the movement, but admired it, and still admires it, from a distance.[16]

  Then one day life provided the key. A personal chagrin of some proportions drove him into a book before he was quite ready for it. Nothing was planned. He walked into Tropic of Cancer as a man might walk into a darkened operating theatre. The voice he heard talking was his own personal voice, without overtone or affectation. He began to talk, rapidly and confidently, to himself on paper—he began to talk about his own life and friends with complete candour and naturalness. The result was no self-confession or revelation; the result, strangely enough, was a swollen manuscript in which the world around him was reproduced in a totally unclassical, unromantic, un-European way. It was the voice of one of the Dead End Kids,[17] bringing his news of current affairs to the camp-fire. It was the voice of the Patagonian.

  To read Tropic of Cancer is to understand how shockingly romantic all European writing after Rousseau has become. In Miller’s book all the passions are there, stripped of their romantic envelope; it was not a book due to puritanical shock. (The French would say “a great Catholic book.”) It was the book of someone whose fidelity to himself had conquered the narrow confines in which we normally hem the range of subjects permissible to art. It was healthy where Céline and Lawrence were sick.[18] It corroded and blistered where Joyce merely divagated and discharged. Into this portmanteau of confused stories, images, and essays Miller poured the better self of a great man. At the time he wrote this book he was all but starving in Paris. Published by the Obelisk Press,[19] it at first passed unnoticed—but not for long. It was too urgent a voice not to catch the ears of those who were alert. Critics wrote about it. Writers began to visit the little studio in Villa Seurat where Miller was living.

  Critics should be interested in him, for there is much to pull to pieces—much bad writing and talking; there is too, a complete lack of imposed form. But there is something else in place of it—the organic form which one finds in all documents of the heart. In Miller’s books the author has taken himself as the central character, and he is engaged in rewriting his own life in terms of fiction.[20] In every story, in every aside or soliloquy, it is Henry Miller who stands personally responsible for the success or failure of the work.

  He revolves on a stage set by himself; and pictures the world as he sees it, through the soft focus of his marvellous gift for creative prose. It is not, in a sense, “art” after all: his books are combed out as if they were written by the Mississippi river, and as if Miller himself had found and preserved these huge weather-beaten rocks of writing among the other treasures of his life, books, water-colours, love letters, t
rain tickets. He reveals himself so completely that he is completely disguised in this giant grape-vine—his life and times. If anywhere the books fail, it is with the failings of Miller the man: the failings, that is, are not those of a work of art as something detached from the author. But they constitute something new in the art of our times: autobiography conceived in terms of fiction, with a living cast, and with the author in the title role. Apart from the three great books in the saga Miller has indulged in endless peripheral activities—letters to friends, comic articles, essays.