Arthur and Guinever… Guinever who betrayed her husband King Arthur with the greatest knight of all the world, Sir Lancelot, as the old romances of the Round Table described him; Tristan, son, not nephew, of King Mark of Cornwall, who, sent to Ireland to fetch his father’s bride, fell in love with her himself, and she with him, so bringing jealousy and despair to the father’s heart. Is it possible that the Tristan story is really an adaptation from the Theseus, Phaedra and Hippolytus tale, handed down from singer to minstrel, from Greece to Gaul, from Gaul to Brittany and Cornwall? During the telling of it the theme has softened. Tristan has become nephew, not son, thus drawing a veil over the incest barrier. King Mark has become an aged, crusty old man, the two lovers Tristan and Isolde both young and innocent, sleeping, when they fled his wrath to the woods, with a drawn sword between them.
Not so originally. Béroul, the first Frenchman to take up the tale and make a poem from it, described the love affair with all the robust humour inherited from some earlier source. King Mark sprinkles the bedroom floor with flour so that Tristan, creeping to Isolde’s bed, will leave his traces there. Tristan, disguising himself as a pilgrim, waits by a ford which the Queen and her retinue cannot pass, and offers himself as carrier. Then, with the Queen upon his shoulders, he stumbles in the mud, and they fall together to make play with one another in the shallows, and later the Queen can tell her husband the King, without speaking an untruth, that she has ‘lain’ with no man except a pilgrim.
This is true bawdy, and certainly not romance. Here was the stuff that made our ancestors slap their thighs and roll in their seats, but it did not serve at a later date. The women demanded romance, as they continue to do today in their novels and magazines, and, if they can get it, on their television screens as well. Lovely Guinever, noble Sir Lancelot! Gallant Tristan, unhappy sweet Isolde! They couldn’t help falling in love. It just happened to them.
Another famous pair of lovers were Paolo and Francesca. Francesca, married to a lame husband, Giovanni Sciancato (John the Lame), falls in love with his younger brother Paolo, but not, let me remind the reader, until both the innocent young people are sitting together reading the story of Lancelot and Guinever. (Which proves that reading about illicit love can corrupt the reader.) Then, as the poet Dante has it, ‘Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto, di Lancialotto, come amor lo strinse!’ or, in matter-of-fact prose, ‘One day we read of Lancelot, and how love constrained him. We were alone, and without all suspicion. Our eyes met, and when we read how the fond smile was kissed by such a lover, he, who shall never be divided from me, kissed my mouth all trembling.’ The deed was done. Fate ran its course. John the Lame discovered what was brewing, and murdered both his wife and younger brother.
Of course Dante, being a good Christian, a Catholic to boot, and not a Greek or Roman poet, had the two lovers condemned forever to circle on the winds in hell. You can read of them in the Inferno. And yes, Helen of Troy is there too, and Tristan, and other illicit lovers, including—but possibly she deserved it—Cleopatra, though Antony is not named. Dido is amongst the damned, simply because she killed herself for love after her husband’s death—he was her uncle, incidentally—and this has always seemed to me a curious choice on Dante’s part, because poor Dido had committed no ill deed. Whether it was the suicide, or the marriage to the uncle, that caused Dante to shake his head I have never discovered. As for Paolo and Francesca, and the other band of doomed sinners, surely the Greeks would have turned them into stars? We lost much when Olympus fell.
Shakespeare, living three centuries after Dante, had a lighter touch with lovers. True, the jealous husband plays his customary role, and though Desdemona, unlike Isolde and Guinever, is innocent of adultery, her spouse Othello smothers her with a pillow. But then Shakespeare never claimed his play was a romance. Othello is a tragedy, and so is Antony and Cleopatra, in which Egypt’s Queen (an inhabitant of Dante’s Inferno) puts a poisonous snake to her bosom after her lover Antony has died of his wounds at her side. We may suppose, though we cannot say for certain, that there was much writhing and contortion, groans as well, upon the Elizabethan stage when the leading characters died. The spectators, pressing forward, would watch breathless as the boy actor, playing Cleopatra, put the asp to his breast and murmured, ‘Peace, peace! Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?’ They were spared, probably from scenic difficulties, the drowning of mad Ophelia in Hamlet, but were told how ‘her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.’
Shakespeare’s most famous pair of lovers were undoubtedly Romeo and Juliet. Here at last, you will say, we have romance. Nothing illicit in this play, the tragic ending has us all in tears. Well… it must not be forgotten that in the first act Romeo declares himself burning with love for one Rosaline, whom we are never permitted to see, alas; but for a young man supposedly suffering from a broken heart Romeo recovers very swiftly at first sight of Juliet. Juliet, at twelve years old, is equally stricken, but one wonders how much this mutual attraction between the two young people is whipped to a point of frenzied passion by the knowledge that any alliance would be forbidden by their shocked and horrified parents. Once more we have illicit love, and this makes the spice of the story, or did so at any rate for its Elizabethan audiences.
Had the course of true love run smooth, had Romeo and Juliet stood hand in hand a bridal pair in the final scene with Capulets and Montagues smiling, the whole point would have gone. Happy endings were implicit in Shakespeare’s comedies, but these plays were mostly given before selected audiences, written for specific occasions, guests at court and so on, when, having dined well, the assembled company preferred to be soothed and entertained rather than horrified or stirred. Hence in Twelfth Night the jaded palate of the sophisticated visitor or courtier could be tickled by the spectacle of a lovesick duke becoming unconsciously attracted to a girl disguised as a page, with the widow for whom he has sighed in vain so long herself seeking the favours of the same supposed youth. Shakespeare, tongue in cheek, knew only too well what went on behind the scenes of Queen Elizabeth’s court. The same sort of deception delighted those who watched As You Like It. Girls dressed as boys; Portia did it too in The Merchant of Venice. A fairy besotted by a fool with an ass’s head was the final touch of irony spun in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare was well aware that to make a comedy savoury you had to play it witty, coarse and quick, or you would have your audience on the yawn.
Therefore today, when we upbraid the modern playwright for pornography, let us remember that the tradition is long-standing, handed on by masters of the game, Aristophanes surely being the supreme example. They did it, however, with more finesse. To show lovers naked in the act would have dulled the appetite.
The great dramatists were never romantic, any more than the great novelists. Tolstoy did not portray a happy wife in Anna Karenina. She deceived her husband for a pretty worthless lover, and when he went to the wars preferred to throw herself under a train rather than live without him. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, bored with provincial life and her doctor husband, lacked courage at first to console herself with a lover, but when she succumbed to Rodolphe Boulanger and Léon Dupuis corruption set in, lies, deceit, debts, all sense of honour left her, and in the end, deserted by her lovers, her still-loving husband absent, she died a slow and painful death from self-administered arsenic. A fine romance.
Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles was dogged by fate from the start. Raped by a man she did not love, then married to one she did, who spurned her on the wedding night when he learnt the secret from her own lips, she passed a wretched existence desired by the first, desiring the second, and in the end, having stabbed to death, while he slept, the man who had first possessed her, she ran away after her true husband Angel Clare, seeking forgiveness, which at last he gave, even for the murder, but it was too late for happiness. The officials of the law came to arrest her, and, as Hardy himself put it, the
immortals had finished their sport with Tess. Here is the essence of Greek tragedy, but in nineteenth-century England.
Wuthering Heights has been acclaimed as a supreme romantic novel, but what is romantic about its hero Heathcliffe, who marries a woman he despises in order to ill-treat her and to spite her brother, who mistreats in equal measure the delicate son he has by her, and tries to turn this son’s wife into a kitchen slut? And all this because Cathy, his foster sister and the only being in the world he has ever had feeling for, marries another and then dies in childbirth? There is more savagery, more brutality, in the pages of Wuthering Heights than in any novel of the nineteenth century, and, for good measure, more beauty too, more poetry, and, what is more unusual, a complete lack of sexual emotion. Heathcliffe’s feeling for Cathy, Cathy’s for Heathcliffe, despite their force and passion, have a non-sexual quality; the emotion is elemental like the wind on Wuthering Heights.
Emily Brontë, striding over the Yorkshire moors with her dog, did not conjure from her imagination any cosy tale of happy lovers to console women readers sitting snugly within doors. A romance, according to my dictionary, is a tale ‘with scenes and incidents remote from everyday life,’ and a romancer a ‘fantastic liar’. Well, fair enough. If a romantic tale is what editors of magazines demand for their reading public they may get it, but not quite in the form for which they hoped: instead, jealousy, treachery, deceit, passion, ending all too often in a violent death. It is not, alas, the gods who make men and women mad, but the chemistry in the blood. ‘Men have died… and worms have eaten them, but not for love…’
This I Believe
In my end is my beginning. The ill-fated Mary Stuart, Queen of France and of Scotland, chose this cryptic saying as her motto. It was embroidered, in French, upon her chair of state—En ma fin est mon commencement—a puzzle to those who looked upon it, but the truth was that the quotation came from a fourteenth-century lyric written by a priest, Giles de Machant, and the song doubtless took her fancy when she was young and gay and lived in France with her youthful husband the Dauphin, later François II, before she had any presentiment of his early death or of her own future tempestuous life and unhappy middle years.
We, knowing her history, remembering the blindfold figure stumbling towards the block, may venture to transpose the words and read into them greater significance—In my beginning is my end. Mary Stuart carried within her from birth the potential seeds of disruption, doom and tragedy; such were the qualities and traits inherited from her forebears that, no matter what road she had followed, and even if she had reigned neither in Scotland nor in France, she would have caused disunity and stress.
In our beginning is our end. The colour of our eyes, our skin, the shape of our hands, the depth of our emotions, the bump of humour or lack of it, the small talents we may put to good account, even the ill-health that suddenly in later life descends without apparent reason—these are the things that make us what we are. There is no cell in our bodies that has not been transmitted to us by our ancestors, and the very blood group to which we belong may predispose us to the disease that finally kills. We are all of us chemical particles, inherited not only from our parents but from a million ancestors; and because of this we beget in turn, passing on to our descendants at best a doubtful, sometimes a disturbing legacy.
I find these facts, of which I knew little in my youth, exciting, even exhilarating. They stand for order, for a plan. They make for sense in what too often in the past seemed a senseless world. If the particles that we now are came originally from an explosion in or near the sun, and the sun itself from yet another explosion in a kindred universe, then there is no limit either to the past or to the future, life of some sort is continuous, it has no beginning and no end. Our world may burn, disintegrate: there will be others. New explosions will form new particles, which will unite. Life will go on. Creation is at work, has always been at work, will always be at work.
The image of a super-Brain, sitting before a blueprint of a million universes and commanding, ‘Let there be light,’ does not convince me, nor that such a super-Brain should point a finger at the particle I am and demand subservience to its authority. The super-Brain, if it exists, has made too many errors of judgement through the ages to deem itself omnipotent, and so win our allegiance. The automaton that gives life has, like our own inventors, second and third thoughts when working out a problem. What cannot adapt is scrapped. The first insects, the first reptiles, were too large, too cumbersome. They became redundant. Giant bats with wings and claws that pawed the sky were mistakes and—to use a modern term—were quickly scrubbed, along with the lumbering mammals glimpsed by our first ancestors. Plants, fishes, birds, apes are tried, found wanting, vanish. Races die out. Civilisations crumble. Not because an Almighty Ruler deals out punishment to offending sinners, but because certain particles of matter have failed to adapt to the changing circumstances of a particular period.
I have never understood why this belief—for belief it is—cannot be reconciled with a firm faith in all the finer feelings and qualities that have evolved in man since he first stood erect. Self-preservation, the instinct to reproduce his species, was part of his genetic inheritance. He had to destroy to live, and by forming into tribes, into groups, achieve greater stability. Awareness of others, the feeling for his young shared by all birds and beasts, enabled him to keep his unit strong.
The bird that trails its wing to avert danger to its chick and deceives the pursuer, the lioness that guards its cub, the woman who snatches her child from the road on the approach of a car, these things are done from an agelong impulse to preserve the species, to adapt, to meet the future; and the chemical change that fires the impulse, the discharge of adrenalin into the bloodstream that directs the action, these are all part of our inheritance, transmuted from those first particles that gave us life. I do not see what all this has to do with God unless God is another name for Life—not omnipotent, not unchanging, but forever growing, forever developing, forever discarding old worlds and creating new ones.
If we are particles made to a repetitive pattern, our actions and our thoughts frequently predictable, no more able to change our pattern than a plant, cross-fertilised to bloom purple, will turn yellow, nevertheless we can come to terms with our inheritance, recognise the good within us, and the ill. As an individual living here and now I am only too well aware that I possess feelings, emotions, a mind and body bequeathed to me by people long since dead who have made me what I am. Generations of French craftsmen of the tight-knit glass-blowing fraternity, provincial, clannish, have handed on to me a strong family sense, a wary suspicion of all who are not ‘us’. Drawing their life and sustenance from the deep forests of Vibraye and Montmirail, they have made me to their pattern, and thus inevitably, it seemed, I sought wooded shelter, the protection of great trees, for what ultimately came to be my home. Respect for tradition vies in me with a contempt for authority imposed from above, a legacy of French temperament passed on from that nation of individualists.
In my beginning is my end; and having passed through many phases and attempts to be other than I am, I have reached my fifty-eighth year with the realisation that basically I have never changed. The child who rebelled against parental standards rebels against them still in middle age. The sceptic of seven who queried the existence of God in the sky, of fairies in the woods, of Father Christmas descending every London chimney in a single magic night, remains a sceptic at fifty-seven, believing all things possible only when they can be proved by scientific fact. The child who avoided the company of adults, and of her own contemporaries with the exception of the immediate members of her family, prefering solitude in the countryside and an interchange of conversation with her own self, does so still. A hatred of injustice fills me now as it did then. Kindness seems to me the one quality worth praising, but today I give it a longer name and call it compassion.
I have known only one person in my life whom I would truly call good, and that was my
maternal grandmother, a little woman of great simplicity and charm, who, when she entered a room, made it warm with her bright presence. English to the core, a native of the Cambridgeshire fens, ‘honest cathedral stock,’ as my father used to say in playful mockery of his mother-in-law, no adversity of circumstance defeated her. She was always smiling, always serene, the light and centre of her modest home. Kneeling beside her in St Jude’s Church, Golders Green—I would have been about nine and she in her late fifties—I remember watching her bowed head, her closed eyes, and the fervent movement of her lips as she murmured the words of the Confession at Morning Service, and the sight of such humility filled me with outrage against the vicar, against God, that both should deem it necessary for someone as gentle and as unselfish as my little grandmother to admit to uncommitted sin.
‘We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders…’ The miserable offender was the final straw. If God demanded such self-abasement from one who brought only happiness to those about her, then I wanted no part of Him. I questioned, at that moment, all authority from heaven. I had no compulsion to obey God’s holy laws. I was not a miserable offender any more than was my grandmother but, unlike her, I would not ask for mercy. As for sin, the word was meaningless. It is so still. The only sin then, as now, is cruelty, and today I know that cruelty is bred from ignorance out of fear.
Prayer is different, too habit-forming ever to be shed. I pray nightly upon my knees today as I did then, ending with the childish words, ‘Let everything be all right,’ as if, by so expressing myself, I may come to terms with fate. Yet I know in my heart that the only worthwhile prayer is a prayer for courage, courage to bear the ills that may come upon me, and the ills that I may bring upon myself. I know now that the good we do returns to us in full measure, and the evil that we do rebounds also—the lies, the deceits, the evasions which we have inflicted on other people.
The Rebecca Notebook Page 9