A season spent in Hell, I’ve no desire
for whiffs of brimstone from the household fire.
IV
Neoclassical plays are about sex and politics. From as early as classical times there has been a healthily vulgar if slightly overdone satiric scorn for Phaedra’s problems. The taboo of incest between stepmother and stepson seems irrelevant in societies with different kinship restraints. It is easy for us to feel self-satisfied at what we think of as our own permissiveness and to sneer at sexual problems which were at the time agonisingly real. If literature is what Ezra Pound said it was, ‘news that stays news’, then dramatic agony should stay agony, but this is difficult when the tensions involved have come adrift from their social origins. To Ovid, the Roman poet of sexual opportunism, Phaedra’s passion was not only not incestuous, Hippolytus had to be chivvied by her beyond his consciousness of taboo (Phaedra to Hippolytus, Heroides 4.129–32):
Nec, quia privigno videar coitura noverca
Terruerint animos nomina vana tuos.
Ista vetus pietas, aevo moritura futuro,
Rustica Saturno regno tenente fuit.
Don’t be alarmed by vain fears that intercourse
between son-in-law and stepmother is disreputable.
Such kind of out-of-date piety, which had no future,
was appropriate to the rustic age of Saturn.
And this in the translation of poet/dramatist Thomas Otway (1683), who also did a version of Racine’s Bérénice into heroic couplets:
How can’st thou reverence thy Father’s Bed,
From which himself so Abjectly is fled?
The thought affrights not me, but me enflames;
Mother and Son are notions, very Names
Of Worn out Piety, in Fashion Then
When old dull Saturn rul’d the Race of men.
But braver Jove taught pleasure was no sin,
And with his sister did himself begin.
These attitudes to a ‘Worn out Piety’, repeated often enough throughout the ages, are mild enough compared with a version of the story published only four years after Racine’s play by Alexander Radcliffe (also author of Terrestrial Hymns and Carnal Ejaculations (1682)). This is a Phaedra Britannica, isolated in ‘a Farm-House in Putney in Surrey’, who has no feelings of restraint whatsoever, either Euripidean Greek or neoclassical French:
When Young, I cou’d have cur’d these am’rous stings
With Carrots, Radishes, or such like things;
Now there’s no pleasure in such Earthly cures,
I must have things apply’d as warm as yours.
Where lies the blame, art thou not strong, and young?
Who would not gather fruit that is well hung?
In this case Pasiphaë has triumphed over Minos, and reworking the passage already quoted from Ovid and Otway, Radcliffe has:
We’d no such opportunity before:
Your Father is at London with his Whore.
Therefore I think ’tis but a just design,
To cuckold him, and pay him in his coin.
Besides he ne’re was marry’d to your Mother,
He first whor’d her, and then he took another.
What kindness or respect ought we to have
For such a Villain and perfidious Knave?
This should not trouble, but provoke us rather
With all the speed we can to lye together.
I am no kin to you, nor you to me,
They call it Incest but to terrifie.
Lovers Embraces are Lascivious Tricks
’Mongst musty Puritans and Schismaticks.
This is that ‘Anglo-Saxon irreverence’ that Michael Billington mentioned in his review of Phaedra Britannica. One sees it too in Stevie Smith’s poem ‘Phèdre’. And very necessary it is too, though it scarcely helps to recreate the Racinian mode in modern English. We read such pieces in early rehearsals, partly for the couplets, but also to draw the fire of cheerful vulgarity before we tackled the main text. It’s an irreverence not confined to our attitude to inaccessible foreign classics, and I associate it in my mind with one of my culture heroes, the comedian ‘Professor’ Leon Cortez, who offered his own cockneyfications of Shakespeare, reducing the high-flown poetry of kings to an earthy demotic. Nor is such irreverence purely Anglo-Saxon, even towards Racine. Far from it. In June 1974, I saw a production of Phèdre I have already referred to, directed by Régis Santon at the Théâtre Essaion, which played the Racinian text as vulgar farce, a compound of Buñuel, Racine and Feydeau, with Tristan and Isolde as background music, and a vaguely Latin American setting, something like Torre Nilsson’s film La casa del ángel (1957). The production had simply given up the struggle to present the play on its own terms, and enjoyable as it was as a lively piece of juvenile iconoclasm, very necessary for the French classic theatre, it gave no help whatsoever to one desperately seeking access to the play for equally, if not more, irreverent English audiences. With this constant sense of total subversion I had, even more carefully, to consider solutions to the play which would place the problem in a society where the sense of transgression was once more an agonising burden. Sexual problems do not occur in a vacuum, in a theatrical never-never land, but are created by social codes. The period I chose eventually, after many false starts and crablike researches, envisaged a particular society, early Victorian Britain, with a rigid code made even more formally defensive by being placed in the alien environs of sensual India.
The politics of the play are also obscured by genealogical complications, with which we no longer have any spontaneous rapport, and distanced by our distaste for the absolute monarchy of the court of Louis XIV. Even the translator cannot shirk his responsibility for historical criticism.
Everywhere in the imagery of seventeenth-century poetry, prose and drama, in England and France, the psychological structure of man is seen as an interiorisation of the political. ‘The Government of Man’, writes the Cambridge Platonist, Benjamin Whichcote, ‘should be the Monarchy of Reason; it is too often a Democracy of Passions.’ Passions are elsewhere in Dryden:
unreasonable things
That strike at Sense, as Rebels do at Kings.
When Dryden came to paraphrase the famous Latin hymn ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’, the simple lines
infirma nostri corporis
virtus firmans perpeti
become a typical piece of the politically expressed psychology I mean:
Our Frailties help, our vice controul;
Submit the Senses to the Soul;
And when Rebellious they are grown
Then lay thy hand and hold ’em down.
The alignment of political synonyms in such imagery is: Reason/King/Rule/Monarchy/(to which series we can add raj = rule) on the one hand and what they restrain on the other: Passions/Mob/Democracy/(‘the Natives’). As Martin Turnell, the best English commentator on Racine, points out: ‘there are only two classes in Racine: masters and servants, the rulers and the ruled, royalty and the people’. Elsewhere, discussing the psychology of Corneille and Racine, he writes that ‘reason has to operate tyrannically and repress by force an uprush of the senses’. Hence ‘the rule of law’; the use of words like ‘seditious’ and ‘mutinous’ of the passions, hence also the time of the piece, defined as taking place a few years before the Mutiny. As I used the prospect of les événements of 1968 in Paris as a political, historical ‘measure’ of the realities of my setting of Le Misanthrope and of Alceste’s status as a critic of society, so in Phaedra Britannica I imagine the tensions of the play continuing into the Indian Mutiny, 1857 (the year also of the Obscene Publications Act). My text demands that the political realities of Racinian society are reinterpreted physically, realised literally in ‘black and white’. I sought to re-energise critically the political content by aligning it with the British ‘Imperial dream’, which like Goya’s dream of reason, ‘produces monsters’.
V
Aphrodite speaks in Euripides. In Seneca,
Venus is merely addressed. But even in Euripides the gods are, as his translator Philip Vellacott puts it, ‘no more than dramatic fictions’. The gods in Racine, as Martin Turnell points out, are ‘projections of basic human impulses, which means that in Phèdre they belong to the realm of psychology rather than theology’. ‘Venus, c’est Phèdre, c’est Hippolyte … Neptune est dans Thésée,’ writes Jean-Louis Barrault in his production notes. The British projected their own suppressed nature onto the continent they subdued, personifying a destructive India, devastating to those who gave in to its powers, who were seduced by its nakedly obvious allure. Personification is general throughout the literature and memoirs of British India. Everything psychologically alien or suppressed becomes ‘India’ or ‘the dark gods’ or, not detached enough to be theologically accurate, an apostrophised Hindu deity like Siva or some other menacing god from a bewilderingly diverse pantheon. Here, for example, is an Englishwoman writing about the ‘hot weather’:
One has to experience the coming of the Hot Season to understand something of the worship of Siva – Creator and Destroyer – the Third Person of the Hindu Trinity. For its approach – swift, relentless and inevitable – is like that of a living and sensate force – like the visible work of that terrible yet withal beneficent God who destroys and tramples all things beneath His feet in an ecstatic harmonious dance, that He may create them anew. For in a sense there is a necessity for the hot weather. The intensity of the sun’s power cracks and cleaves the dry, obdurate earth, in order that the blessed rains of the Monsoon may irrigate and revivify the whole, jaded, exhausted face of the land.
And as Jean-Louis Barrault speaks of the tragedy of Phèdre, giving the arc and cathartic trajectory of the play the same kind of cumulative, meteorological image, as ‘un de ces orages de fin août’, ‘a late August thunderstorm’, it seems to make Siva, as present in the British imagination, particularly fitted to preside over the passion of Phaedra Britannica. The same woman goes on to describe her feelings of helplessness in the Indian heat (which another woman, Mrs B. M. Croker, likens to some ‘cruel vindictive animal’) in terms which, typically, create the sense of powerful alien forces:
And finally there is the close, hot evening, and an airless night of tossing and turning, of trying to find one cool spot in one’s bed, giving it up in despair, and lying in still resignation to look up at the uncaring stars above the gently flapping punkah, helpless beneath the destroying feet of Siva.
Such projections onto an alien divinity are very common in Anglo-Indian writing, and they tend to stand for those things that are felt to be outside the sphere of reason, order and justice (or the current concepts of them), which it is the function of tragedy, according to George Steiner, to reveal as ‘terribly limited’. It was to insist on the role of the gods as projections that I conflated the functions of Venus and Neptune in Racine. The sea which in Racine is the symbol of the uncontrolled, the formless, becomes in my version ‘the jungle’, almost a synonym for chaos. I have unified the psychological projections represented in Racine and ascribed them both to Siva, as he was imagined by the British, not necessarily as a complex component of the Hindu pantheon. Contemplating the attributes of Siva, though, one can see that the god can well bear the parallels, being at once the god of regeneration and sexuality, and of destruction. He contains opposing forces. He is associated both with asceticism (Hippolyte) and yet is everywhere reverenced under the symbol of the phallus or lingam. He is Destroyer/Creator, birth and death, Apollo and Dionysus, to use the Nietzschean pair that forge the tragic dialectic. Even the minor parallels can be maintained, to authenticate the transfer, as Siva has a bull as a vehicle, and as a weapon the trisula or trident. But the matchings at this level hardly matter, even if they aid the metamorphosis. What matters is the function of projection, the use of pagan gods in a culture that dramatises itself as an age of reason, and its equivalent in the British apostrophisation of the dark gods of India.
VI
I don’t remember the exact point at which I decided on a nineteenth-century Indian setting, but in retrospect there seem to have been catalysts and clues about me from the start, though I did begin with versions ostensibly in ancient Greece and in the period of Louis XIV. Of all the many elements I now can recognise the following as particularly prominent:
1. Maria Casarès, who played Phèdre in Jean Vilar’s production at the TNP in 1957, said of her character: ‘j’ai toujours imaginée étendue dans l’ombre d’un chambre closé, dans un lieu où le soleil explosé’ (‘I always imagined lying in the shadow of a closed room, in a place where the sun exploded’). India! The all-pervading presence of the sun, either seen as light or felt as heat in a darkened room, became also a physical counterpart for Phèdre’s mythological kinship in the original.
2. There was an equivalence, felt intuitively at first and then researched, between the way critics write about the character of the confidante, Oenone, and the way in which Anglo-Indian memoirs and fiction write of the ayah figure. Jean-Louis Barrault calls Oenone the ‘valeur noire’ of Phèdre, and in my version she is literally that (the Anglo-Indians used the inaccurate and deliberately insulting adjective ‘black’ of Indians). Racine also speaks, too aristocratically and high-handedly for my liking, of the bassesse of Oenone, and the servile propensities which make her able to accuse Hippolyte, and not her mistress as was the case in the Euripides version. As I have made it a Memsahib-and-ayah relationship, it is a way of absorbing into my version, without doing violence to the sense, my social reservations about Racine, and it makes the Memsahib’s final outburst of racialist rejection of her faithful servant a terrible one, and one that is linked to the outside world of alien domination, of which the psychological is a mirror aspect.
3. I felt the need of making the Amazon mother of Hippolyte physically present in the son, a constant reminder of the past of Thésée. My Hippolyte, Thomas Theophilus, becomes a ‘half-caste’ embodying the tensions between Britain and India within himself, as much as he embodies the two conflicting selves of his father. The occurrence of marriage between British men and Indian women was by no means uncommon in nineteenth-century India, and if we need historical authentication, it is enough to cite only the more well-known examples, like James Achilles Kirkpatrick, Resident at Hyderabad; Job Charnock, who rescued a Brahmin widow from suttee and lived with her happily until her natural death fourteen years after; Colonel Gardiner; and Sir Charles Metcalfe, who had three Eurasian sons by an Indian princess probably related to Ranjit Singh. The railways were to bring the Memsahibs to India and put a stop to that. I have assumed that transition in mores to be taking place, creating a new distance between ruler and ruled that was to harden to a more rigid apartheid after the Mutiny of 1857. The Victorian male couldn’t permit his women the same intimate insights into India which he had allowed himself before his ladies made the crossing over the ‘black water’.
4. Assailed as the British felt on all sides by an irrational India with its dark sensual gods and ‘primitive’ customs, they created in their imagination defensive roles for themselves as the inheritors of rational civilisation. They constructed residencies and public buildings in classical style, attempting to realise in external marble what they felt unable to realise internally in their far from securely stable minds. The books of the period are full of engravings showing proud classical facades in clearings in dense jungle, with creeper and mangrove festooning the edges of the scene. It is an eloquent juxtaposition. Mark Bence-Jones, in his Palaces of the Raj (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), describes the Residency at Hyderabad, with its Durbar Hall lined with Ionic columns, and a staircase which ‘was adorned with sculpture: the Apollo Belvedere, Leda and the Swan’ (not Pasiphaë and the Bull to complete the circle but almost there!) and ‘Venus Rising from the Sea’. ‘The mirrors in neoclassical frames, reflected the Durbar Hall to infinity.’ It reads almost like the description of a traditional set for Phèdre at the Comédie-Française!
It is more than
a convenient point of contact. It represents the effort of one era, with its values threatened, to define itself in terms borrowed from another, which would seem best to support and prop up what was felt to be most shaky. The drama of Britain and India was constantly seen in these terms. Even as late as 1924 (the year of A Passage to India), Bennet Christian Huntingdon Calcraft Kennedy could write: ‘We are here to govern India as delegates of a Christian and civilised power. We are here as representatives of Christ and Caesar to maintain this land against Siva and Khalifa.’ And the cleaned-up classicism of the corresponding architecture, deriving as it does from Greece and Rome via Palladio and Wren, is still, as David Gebhard writing about Lutyens’s New Delhi Residency has it, ‘a favourite political symbol in our century ranging from the megalomania of Albert Speer and Hitler to the New Deal of Roosevelt’. This belief in our being the chosen heirs of Greece and Rome gives a special poignancy to those pictures of the classical facade of the Lucknow Residency after the Mutiny, shattered by rifle-fire and shell, and littered with skulls. This kind of Residency and the life lived within it seemed to fit almost exactly Martin Turnell’s summary of the dramatic and political function of the palace in the plays of Racine. They are ‘not simply impersonal buildings which provide a setting for the tragedy … They represent a particular order …’
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 12