by D J Enright
Eve’s other noteworthy dream comes near the end of the poem, while Michael is apprising Adam (man to man) of what the future holds. A sweet dream, too, free from irresponsible fancy, discontented thoughts or inordinate desires. ‘For God is also in sleep,’ she tells Adam, ‘and dreams advise,/ Which he hath sent propitious, some great good/ Presaging’: that, despite her ‘wilful crime’, ‘by me the Promised Seed shall all restore.’ God has spoken to her, in gentle tones, by way of the Archangel Michael, giver of dreams. This is one of the very finest passages in Milton.
‘The only two of mankind, but in them/ The whole included race.’ The notion of Eve as a passive tertium quid, an uncomprehending bystander at the feast of intellect, won’t do. Compared with her – though not in her fond eyes – Adam is something of a dull (but faithful) dog. Earlier, when Raphael and Adam discourse on astronomy, Eve wanders off to tend her fruits and flowers: not because she wouldn’t have understood – Milton is perfectly clear on the point – but because she preferred to hear about it from her spouse, who would ‘intermix grateful digressions’ and ‘conjugal caresses’: ‘from his lip/ Not words alone pleased her’. She was learning how to make the best of both worlds.
Talking along these lines to first-year students in Singapore, I was taken to task by a severe-looking Chinese nun of mature years: ‘But all this is only Milton!’ I mildly deplored the word ‘only’ and mumbled something about God moving in a mysterious way. Clearly the nun couldn’t see God ever moving in that mysterious a way. She dropped English the following year.
Sister D., the Irish head of the English department of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, a highly respected school in Singapore, would have had no great problem with Milton. She was known to be of the opinion that Antony and Cleopatra would be received into heaven since, although not married, they were truly in love with each other. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, that would be.
‘Not only does the Darwinian theory command superabundant power to explain. Its economy in doing so has a sinewy elegance, a poetic beauty that outclasses even the most haunting of the world’s origin myths’: thus Richard Dawkins writing in River Out of Eden (a Miltonic echo) with an elegance of his own. ‘There is more poetry in Mitochondrial Eve than in her mythological namesake.’ (‘Mitochondrion: a small spherical or rodlike body, bounded by a double membrane, in the cytoplasm of most cells: contains enzymes responsible for energy production,’ says Collins English Dictionary.) A busy little body, this Darwinian Eve! Small, spherical or rodlike – but there’s no accounting for tastes. Milton, you should be living at this hour! But you are, and so is your Eve.
A small Singapore publisher by the name of Cultured Lotus has proposed to reprint my Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor (1969) for the local, Malaysian and Hong Kong market. A week later Cultured Lotus backs out. While there is no ‘theoretical’ problem with the Singapore Ministry of Information and the Arts, the publisher fears they wouldn’t find a printer for the book or a distributor or bookstores bold enough to stock it. Cultured Lotus, he says, would like to go on leading a quiet life, unknown and anonymous.
How ridiculous, one might think, thirty-one years after the book’s publication in London and its discreet banning in Singapore, and forty years after my initial brush with Lee Kuan Yew’s ruling party. (Over something to do with culture.) But this is the nicest way of preserving an orderly, compliant, industrious and highly prosperous little country: a mild, bearable, ever-present fearfulness. Happy the land that doesn’t feel a need for heroes.
Our Prime Minister is attacked for philistinism and anti-elitism, notably by Sir Vidia Naipaul and Doris Lessing. But a democratic government is supposed to serve the majority of the electorate, not some elite, and hence a Ministry of Culture, Media and Sport busies itself largely with the more popular of these tricky charges. A prime minister who quoted Hamlet in his speeches would require the remedial services of an exceptionally gifted spin-doctor, whereas an occasional carefully chosen allusion to EastEnders will go down a treat at the pub. If it’s the nation that’s imposing what Naipaul terms ‘an aggressively plebeian culture’ on Mr Blair, Mr Blair isn’t putting up much resistance. For all I know, he may read Anita Brookner and listen to Anton Bruckner in the privacy of his bedroom, but somehow I doubt it. He is a man of his time, the past is of little consequence, his time is him. His duties are heavy, his recreations light. It is the company of friends that he prizes, the like-minded, not of captious literati.
And can you blame people for ‘philistinism’, when a farm animal pickled in formaldehyde is the inescapable wonder of the galleries, an ‘artist’s’ unmade bed fetches £150,000, and the director of a ‘brutal sex shocker’ proclaims that the theatre must be ‘not timid, not comfortable, … It is like a bullfight.’ The great enemy of art is bad art. Where are the enemies of bad art, and what are they doing? Keeping their heads down? It’s true that their grumblings don’t make good or durable copy; they soon take on the aspect of spoilsports and holier-than-thous – the bugaboos of the media and of media-led democracy. As for elitism, with young Leverkühn in mind, one might ask oneself whether epochs that possessed such a thing knew the word at all, or used it.
Writers are free to criticize, complain and contest; they can’t expect governments to reward them for doing so. And patronage is never far from patronizing. Yet in fact there are valuable prizes around, and lots of grants. The odd knighthood or dameship is dished out, and a generous scattering of CBEs and OBEs, for unspecified ‘services to literature’, and even, among humbler oldies whose offences are forgotten or were never noticed, civil list pensions. No one is sent to prison or exiled.
British writers have long been exceptionally fortunate. So why this unseemly longing to be loved and treasured by the secular powers?
Under a Sovereign
who despised culture
Arts and Letters improved –
Auden doesn’t say whether the artists and men of letters themselves enjoyed any improvement in their creature comforts, but they were not positively hindered in their creative labours.
‘Of comfort no man speak’; ‘These elegies are to this generation in no way consolatory’; ‘I tell you naught for your comfort’. How low they have fallen, these once noble rejections of spurious comfort and consolation. These days they proudly preface some routine discharge of studied nastiness or squalor. Mostly coming from the word processors of individuals who have never fallen foul of the authorities, who have led pretty comfortable lives.
You might have thought it was irony, in line with Swift’s Modest Proposal …
A ‘quality’ Sunday paper runs an article headed ‘A good reason to stop being hypocritical about porn’, on the popularity and commercial success of ‘the international adult entertainment industry’, the only business on the Internet consistently turning a profit. Yet we British are ‘frozen in a kind of moral Dark Ages’: nearly all the pornography we buy ‘by the bucketload’ is generated abroad. Our money flows only one way – out. In the US and elsewhere in Europe profitability runs as high as 2,000 per cent; there are said to be some 200,000 active sex sites accessible from one’s home PC. Only when our laws are reformed can we develop legitimate taxpaying, global businesses and compete in this flourishing market.
The writer detests hypocrisy; the insinuation that it is a tribute vice pays to virtue is a frivolous French joke: neither virtue nor vice plays any part here, or only figuratively as commercial success or commercial failure. He doesn’t drag in the tired old contention common in the arms trade that if we don’t oblige dubious regimes someone else will (‘Pray tell me why we may not also go smacks?’). There’s no irony here, that puerile artifice, ignorance posing as simulated ignorance. Just one simple all-subjugating idea: the ‘good reason’.
How assiduously the intelligentsia shepherd us down the primrose path!
‘Among the many agents of the public’s spiritual debilitation, it is the voyeuristic genre of biography that takes the ca
ke. That there are far more ruined maidens than immortal lyrics seems to give pause to nobody. The last bastion of realism, biography is based on the breathtaking premise that art can be explained by life’: Joseph Brodsky.
‘In the end, the gift of writing novels is not unlike God’s grace: it is arbitrary, incomprehensible and sublimely unjust. It is not a scandal if novelists of genius prove to be wretched fellows; it is a comforting miracle that wretched fellows prove to be novelists of genius’: Simon Leys.
Well, yes, one responds guardedly to both statements, which may seem to edge a little too close to the theory that normal standards of behaviour don’t apply to ‘immortal poets’ or ‘novelists of genius’, a theory most commonly promoted by charlatans. Which these two men are not.
I know nothing of Joseph Brodsky personally; only some of his writings, which tell one a lot about him as a writer (which is enough for me). Going by what little I know of him personally, Simon Leys (i.e. Pierre Ryckmans) is a good person. He is for certain a sweet-natured writer, except when faced with the likes of Mao Zedong. Still, if someone comes up with a biography of him, I shall hasten not to read it.
‘It is not that one doesn’t want to know about Simone de Beauvoir’s trademark turban, or Jane Gallop’s penchant for sex with 36-year-old men, or whether Mary McCarthy shaved her legs (she didn’t)’: London Review of Books. One had better want to know if one wants to keep one’s good name.
Dear dead artist! All those years of striving, of sacrifice, of self-doubt, of manifest failure and obscure success. A life of hard graft at your desk – and what for? That someone should write a book about your life in bed.
*
Those experts on the lives, somatic and psycho, of other people! One of them asserts that Rupert Brooke’s semen sometimes came out green. Another says it was his urine. If they can’t agree on so colourful a point, how can we trust them to get anything right?
David Ellis, author of the third volume of the Cambridge biography of D. H. Lawrence, has observed: ‘Trying to prevent a posthumous invasion of all one’s private doings, when the only real protection is a life wholly dull and uninteresting, is like putting a finger in the dike. Sooner or later the insatiable public appetite for gossip bursts through.’ Even that ‘real protection’ isn’t inevitably reliable: just think of the seductive challenge posed by a clean slate, a blank page.
A resident of Hull informs me that his local branch of W. H. Smith has created a new subject section called ‘Biography/True Crime’.
Our highbrow police … In a Manchester suburb a bookmaker’s was being burgled. The police were alerted, but although they had a station nearby they took two hours to get to the scene. They said they had been looking for a place that made books.
‘Great legs’, ‘slim build’, ‘sexy voice’, ‘penetrating green eyes’, ‘of abundant voltage’, ‘passionate’, ‘French background’ … But also ‘doctoral-degreed’: the personals in the New York Review of Books, as you might expect, revel in books (alternatively, the ‘written word’, ‘poetry’, ‘reading’). ‘SINGLE BOOKLOVERS gets unattached people acquainted.’ Books do furnish a bedroom.
A group of fifteen young authors, calling themselves the New Puritans, have come up with ten rules. In the arts, rules are made to be broken: a reason why one shouldn’t turn up one’s nose at them. Rules you can actually articulate – without drowning in an ocean of provisos – won’t amount to much, but may be of interest as indicating aspiration and abjuration.
‘1. Primarily story-tellers, we are dedicated to the narrative form.’ (Fair enough, a story-teller should tell a story.)
‘2. We are prose writers and recognize that it is the dominant form of expression. For this reason we shun poetry and poetic licence in all its forms.’ (Their privilege. Prose writers usually do well to avoid poetic prose. The juxtaposition of ‘shun’ and ‘in all its forms’ brings out the secondary definitions of ‘licence’: ‘disregard of law or propriety, abuse of freedom’ and ‘licentiousness’. The true voice of the puritan in one of the word’s meanings: someone practising or affecting extreme strictness in religion or morals. Nowadays, and despite all the licence at hand, poetry has little truck with religion or morals, but think of Horace; ‘Poets aim either to benefit, or to amuse, or to utter words at once both pleasing and helpful to life.’ Delete ‘to amuse’ and this might even smack of morals.)
‘3. While acknowledging the value of genre fiction, whether classical or modern, we will always move towards new openings, rupturing existing genre expectations.’ (Unexceptionable and expected – note the exciting, if somewhat surgical, violence of ‘rupturing’ – although the term ‘genre’ is imprecise and top-heavy outside such clear-cut applications as science fiction and bodice ripper. New openings betoken or promise new genres. Can anything be genreless? If so, genrelessness is a genre.)
‘4. We believe in textual simplicity and vow to avoid all devices of voice, rhetoric, authorial asides.’ (Simplicity is a lovely thing, but not always altogether possible. Note the religious – or is it rhetorical? – connotations of ‘vow’. Because thou art virtuous, shall there be no more cakes and ale?, no more voice or asides? Tell us what will there be.)
‘5. In the name of clarity, we recognize the importance of temporal linearity and eschew flashbacks, dual temporal narrative and foreshadowing.’ (Aristotle, I think, said something about aiming for as much clarity as the subject allows. ‘Only in limitation is mastery shown,’ decreed Goethe, a man of illimitable interests and powers. You never know when a flashback will come in handy, or a touch of foreshadowing, but you have to be rather clever to get away with these devices.)
‘6. We believe in grammatical purity and avoid any elaborate punctuation.’ (We all believe in purity, don’t we? As for punctuation, it depends on how elaborate ‘elaborate’ is; an example would help.)
‘7. We recognize that published works are also historical documents. As fragments of time, all our texts are dated and set in the present day. All products, places, artists and objects named are real.’ (The majority of published works don’t last long enough to become historical in any respect or sense. ‘Set in the present day’ would have eliminated much of Dickens, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Balzac, Thomas Mann, and other great story-tellers. This rule sounds like publicity for organic food. Or like a recipe for libel.)
‘8. As faithful representations of the present, our texts will avoid all improbable or unknowable speculation about the past or the future.’ (Are the New Puritans restricting themselves to vignettes and faits divers? Or are they purely determined to live up to their self-designation, that old word ‘puritan’?)
‘9. We are moralists, so all texts feature a recognizable ethical reality.’ (Fine, were it not that we distrust people who announce themselves as moralists. Some of us don’t care for that jargonic ‘text’, but possibly the New Puritans are thinking of the word’s medieval sense of ‘Gospel’, and its modern usage: a passage drawn from Scripture as the subject of a sermon.)
‘10. Nevertheless, our aim is integrity of expression, above and beyond any commitment to form.’ (At last a nevertheless. A good note to end on: no one can quarrel with integrity, whatever the rest of the sentence may mean.)
It’s too easy to make fun of rules, other people’s. In an engaging article in The Times, Nicholas Blincoe, one of the New Puritans, says of this ‘once in a generation call to arms’: ‘If New Puritanism is anything, it is an attempt to embrace what we do where we do it and who we do it with.’ (Perhaps not a hundred per cent pure grammatically, but all their texts are set in the present day, whereas ‘whom’ is stuck fast in the past.) Also, almost disarmingly: ‘It seems possible that we have genuinely found the holy rules of literature (or maybe eighty per cent of them; the problem is that none of us can agree on which eight out of the ten are the essential ones).’
Good luck to the fearless fifteen. My guess is they’ll survive their rules. Goethe declared that ‘The novel is a subjective epic in whi
ch the author requests permission to treat the world in his own way. So the only question is whether he has a way.’
Rebelliousness, whether the enemy be repression or indulgence, is what gives the young writer lift-off. Even the blasé look on with wonder. Then the rocket boosters fall away, and with seeming sedateness the craft moves on into deeper space. But no one wants to know.
‘We shun poetry.’ That delight in tropes and images: the lady’s feet were ‘three-inch golden lilies, graced by tiny shoes made like the mountain-crow, with tips embroidered to look like the claws’, and she moved ‘like a tender young willow shoot in a spring breeze’, or with ‘the graceful gliding flight of a swallow’. The custom of foot-binding is attributed to the Chinese poet Li Yü or Li Houzhu (936/7–78), third and last emperor of the Southern Tang Dynasty, who conceived the poetical idea of enabling his favourite concubine to dance on the likeness of a lotus flower. It took a revolution, early twentieth century, to silence this poetry.
Poeticisms in another sphere bring home how pathetically impoverished the West is in its erotic vocabulary. For example, ‘the butterfly flutters about, searching for flowery scents’, ‘the queen bee making honey’, ‘the hungry steed gallops to the feed crib’, ‘striking the silver swan with a golden ball’, ‘making candles by dipping the wick in tallow’ and ‘fetching fire behind the hill’. The innocent young bride in the seventeenth-century novel, The Prayer Mat of Flesh (anglicized as The Before Midnight Scholar), rejects this exercise because turning one’s back on one’s husband is an offence against decorum.
These are a few of the thirty-six practices of ‘vernal dalliance’ celebrated by the poets of the Tang period. Aside from a limited stock of dysphemisms, all we can boast of is the dispiriting ‘missionary position’.