We are aware from the first of an almost suffocating tension in the air, combined with a desperate effort to maintain some sort of control, which frequently breaks down. The tension is pervasive; it is also contagious. It is the atmosphere which produces fascinating and frightening revelations about human nature – about ourselves.
The palaces vary in style … they have one thing in common. There is something of the prison about them. We have the impression that the community is somehow confined within their walls. The sense of confinement is partly psychological, but in some parts of the palaces we shall find one or two members of the community are literally prisoners …
The palaces are huge, dark, claustrophobic. They give the occupants the alarming impression that they are constantly being watched, that their lives are in danger in that disaster may overtake at any moment.
There are winding corridors with innumerable rooms leading off them. But we, the visitors, are only admitted to a single room. The whole of the drama is concentrated inside it … at the same time we are aware that the room, or more accurately, the palace, is a world within a world it is trying to dominate.
VII
Couplets keep the cat on the hot tin roof. Each spirit has its own custom-built treadmill. After the metronome, the comic pacemaker of the Misanthrope couplet, I wanted a more organic model for my iambics. I wanted to return the iamb back to its sources in breath and blood. In the silences one should hear the heart beat. Jean-Louis Barrault, writing of the alexandrine in Phèdre, says:
Le coeur, qui egrène, jusqu’à la mort, les deux temps de son tam-tam obsédant: systole–diastole; systole–diastole. Brève–longue; brève–longue etc: le coeur bat l’iambe.
The heart, which echoes, until death, the two times of its obsessive tom-tom: systole–diastole; systole–diastole. Short–long; short–long etc.: the heart beats the iambic …
It was this heartbeat, this bloodthrob that marked the time of my metric. The heart as ‘tam-tam obsédant’ leads us straight back too to British India, where, another woman writes in her memoir, ‘the throbbing tom-toms became almost like our heartbeats’:
I sensed the gods of India were there
behind the throbbing heat and stifling air.
Heart beat like a tom-tom, punkah flapped
backwards and forwards and my strength was sapped.
I felt you mocking, India, you brewed
strange potions out of lust and lassitude,
dark gods mocking, knowing they can claim
another woman with the Judge’s name,
picking off the family one by one,
each destroyed by lust and Eastern sun.
Facing Up to the Muses
* * *
1988
μουσάων Ἑλικωνιάδων ἀρχώμεθ᾽ ἀείδειν
From the Muses of Helicon let us begin to sing.
Hesiod, Theogony, line 1
Let’s kick off with the Muses – and I use the words ‘kick off’ advisedly, as I want to make a revelation about the sporting interests of the Muses that may well surprise you. For the last four years I’ve been to Delphi for the annual symposium on ancient Greek drama, and I’ve just returned from Delphi, where I’m preparing, for the ancient stadium, for this year’s Festival a sort of reconstruction of that fragmentary satyr play of Sophocles, the Ichneutae, ‘The Trackers’. My piece is called The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus as it is also an account of the discovery of the tattered papyrus in the deserts of Egypt by the Oxford papyrologists, Grenfell and Hunt. I am giving Delphi the doubtful privilege of hosting a thiasos of British satyrs.
Last year, I went to Delphi in the company of my friend and unflagging inspirer Oliver Taplin. We were both going to speak at the symposium, from our different, though related, vantage points, on Greek theatre, he as the scholar, me as the poet and man of the theatre with his smattering of ancient Greek. Our journey together made me think of that anonymous Elizabethan play, The Pilgrimage to Parnassus (1598), in which there are two pilgrims, like us, going to Parnassus, called Philomusus and Studioso, said to be ‘well met in faith in the field of Poetrie’. We had a day free before we were supposed to be under the shadow of Mount Parnassus in Delphi to give our talks on and to debate Greek drama, so I suggested that we make a pilgrimage of our own and we hired a car at the Athens airport and drove out into the country rather than spend a night in the noise and poisonous nephos. So we drove slowly to Delphi and looked at Boiotia and Mount Cithaeron, where Oedipus had been exposed as a baby and where the Maenads had torn Pentheus to pieces, and the turning off to Distomo, near which is the famous crossroads where Oedipus had unwittingly killed his father, Laius. I had also suggested that we use the spare time to visit the Archaeological Museum of Thebes, which I had been to four times before, but which Dr Taplin had not yet visited. I don’t need to dwell on our overnight stop at Porto Germano, on the Corinthian Gulf under Cithaeron, where we swam and ate charcoaled crayfish and drank retsina drawn from a great barrel. I wouldn’t want you to think that we were waylaid, as were Philomusus and Studioso in their Pilgrimage to Parnassus, by the aptly named Madido, who tells them:
This Parnassus and Helicon are but the fables of the poetes, there is no true Parnassus but the third lofte in a wine taverne, no true Helicon but a cup of brown bastard. Will youe travell quicklie to Parnassus, do but carrie your drie feet into some drie tavern, and straight the drawer … will bring you a cup … that will make you speak leaping lines and dauncing periodes.
The blandishments of Madido have been the ruin of many a poor poet, and though we were not seduced by our waylayer, we thoroughly enjoyed the retsina of our Boiotian ‘drawer’. And I should like to remind you, in passing, of how that great Greek scholar, and former president of the Classical Association, E. R. Dodds, wrote in his autobiography, Missing Persons, of a day which he called ‘one of the most unalloyed satisfactions of my life’, ending, as it did, with ‘the pleasures of drinking retsina in the late sunshine’. On the way back to his ship he whispered to his companion, ‘I know now what happiness is – today I have been completely and without qualification happy.’ These ‘unalloyed satisfactions’, these days of ‘happiness … without qualification’ are very important to us when we have to, as we all do, face up to tragedy, and I mention these things only to contrast with a Classics don (of all people!) whom I overheard after a week’s open-hearted generosity from his Greek hosts expressing himself ‘glad to be going back to civilisation’. And he didn’t mean Periclean Athens but Mrs Thatcher’s Britain.
The next morning, after another swim in the Corinthian Gulf, we set off for Thebes and the museum. On the way I was enthusing about some of the objects that I’d seen in this collection: the red-figure skyphos by the Brygos painter, with a leopardskin-clad satyr brandishing a long phallic ramming stick, which had been one of the images I had pasted into my notebook when I began work on the fragmentary Ichneutae, as had the rather pawky terracotta Silenus, who is saluting the viewer with his right hand and otherwise engaged with his left. I was also enthusing about the clay larnax from Mycenean Tanagra, whose calcified contents were borne aloft into immortality by a dragonfly poised on each corner. I gave a detailed guide to the treasures we were about to see and had thoroughly whetted the appetite of my companion by the time we drove into Thebes to find, as so often can happen in Greece, that the museum was mysteriously closed. This was very disappointing, and it put us in the mood for some other side pilgrimage on our way to Parnassus, but after looking at a map of the region we decided to forget about it and drive on directly to Delphi. But not too long afterwards we passed a sign reading ‘ASKRI’. ‘That must be the ancient Askra where Hesiod was born,’ said Dr Taplin, and braked. ‘Let’s go there!’ cried Philomusus and Studioso together, and we turned left into a dusty side road. The drive to Askri took us longer than we expected, but we passed by timeless Greek images that gave me a sense of happiness ‘without qualification’, that sort of ‘unalloyed sati
sfaction’ that E. R. Dodds derived from his wild cyclamen and sun-filled retsina: the blue bee boxes; the tins strapped to the pine trees catching the oozed resin to flavour the retsina; four goats on their hind legs stretching their necks to gobble figs from the tree, an image I’d seen on a fifth-century vase. But then, as if to remind us that happiness without qualification can only exist in Golden Ages that are mythical or locked in Hesiod, we were suddenly jolted out of our Boiotian well-being back into our times by a vast, untended, smouldering pile of rubbish and old lorry tyres giving off a foul Phlegraean smell. The fire had obviously been burning for days. It was probably that jolt into mephitic modernity and because we were making our new pilgrimage to the birthplace of Hesiod that made Dr Taplin quote those lines from the poet’s Works and Days about the Fifth Age of mankind, the Age of Iron, when Zeus would destroy the whole race of meropon anthropon, ‘men gifted with speech’ (lines 180–1):
Ζεὺς δ᾽ ὀλέσει καὶ τοῦτο γένος μερόπων ἀνθρώπων, εὖτ᾽ ἂν γεινόμενοι πολιοκρόταφοι τελέθωσιν.
And Zeus will destroy this race of men gifted in speech when they come to have grey hair on their temples when they are born.
We both fell quiet, I remember, our ‘unalloyed satisfactions’ somehow undermined by these thoughts, and I think we were both thinking the same thing, that even if it hadn’t been the Fifth Age, the Age of Iron, for poor old Hesiod, then we of the late terrible twentieth century would certainly have to say:
νῦν γὰρ δὴ γένος ἐστὶ σιδήρεον (176),
‘This really is the Age of Iron.’ After some moments of this brooding, suddenly troubled silence, Oliver turned to me and said did I know there had been poliokrotaphoi, babies born literally with their hair already grey, in Japan as a result of the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And with these chilling thoughts we arrived at a village with three kapheneia, all facing outwards towards the square, all full of men drinking coffee, clicking their worry beads and reading the newspapers (the two activities go together in the Age of Iron!) and looking out and watching life passing by, which now happened to be Philomusus and Studioso. The village sign had said ‘Panaghia’, so I leaned out of the car and said, ‘Where is Askri, please?’ ‘It’s here,’ said one old man. There was little evidence of poor old Hesiod, and in any case, come to think of it, didn’t the poet himself write pretty grudgingly and dismissively about his birthplace, a ‘miserable hamlet near Helicon’ (Works and Days, 639–40):
… ἄγχ᾽ Ἑλικῶνος ὀιζυρῇ ἐνὶ κώμῃ,
Ἄσκρῃ, χεῖμα κακῇ, θέρει ἀργαλέῃ, οὐδέ ποτ᾽ ἐσθλῇ.
‘Askri, lousy in winter, terrible in summer and not much good at any time.’ Scarcely approvable by the local tourist board. It was probably the remembered curmudgeonly, grousing voice of old Hesiod that induced Dr Taplin to turn the car round and begin to head back the way we came. At that point, the man I’d asked directions of made one of those eloquently economical Greek gestures that managed to convey with a slight movement of the wrist, ‘Why the hell have you come to Askri only to turn your car round?’ His gesture rather shamed us into stopping, and we got out and ordered a coffee and maybe (though still mindful of the blandishments of Madido), maybe an ouzaki and began talking to the men. ‘Why had we come to Askri? Had we lost our way?’ Dr Taplin, whose modern Greek puts mine to shame, explained that he was a teacher of ancient Greek at Oxford and that I was a poet, and that we had wanted to pay homage to the birthplace of Hesiod. One of the men pointed to me and said, ‘He is a synadelphos Hesiodou, a brother of Hesiod.’ ‘Of course,’ said another, ‘Hesiod’s actual brother, Perses, he was a lazy bugger like me. Spent all his time in the kapheneion!’ Then they said, like a chorus, if we’d come so far, and were really making a pilgrimage to Hesiod, we should go a little further still to the Valley of the Muses, and the Mouseion. They began to draw maps of various complicated tracks on cigarette packets, until finally, unable to transfer the directions to paper, one of the men said he’d come with us. We all got into the car and went along a very rough road for quite some time, until we came almost to the end of the valley and could make out on the left a hollowed-out space covered with vegetation and thorns but with the unmistakable shape of an ancient theatre.
It turned out to be the Mouseion, where the ancient Mouseia, the poetry festivals in honour of the Muses, were held. It was quite a climb up once we left the car behind and the mountainside was covered with sharp thorns. Our guide, who was sensibly shod in good boots, went ahead of us and kept shouting, ‘Agathai, agathai!’ – ‘Thorns, thorns!’ There was nothing we could do to avoid them. We were both wearing sandals bought from Melissonos, the poet/sandal-maker of Pandrossou Street in Monastiraki (I give you his address as this is an unashamed commercial break!), and although they are the best and most poetical sandals you can buy, they were the least appropriate footwear for our present steep pilgrimage through thorns, and very soon our feet were cut and bleeding and we were beginning to wonder why we had bothered. But when we finally stood in the overgrown place that would have been the orchestra, I realised that we had been led there for our inspiration. As perhaps befits our different though intimately related vantage points on ancient theatre, we both stood in that orchestra, Philomusus and Studioso, ‘well met in faith in the field of Poetrie’, but facing in opposite directions. Dr Taplin, who has gained his insights by gazing deeply in his direction, looked over the thorn-covered orchestra and over to the level plains of Boiotia and what would have been Lake Copais, the source of juicy eels and juicy Aristophanic jokes, and across to Aulis, where the Greek fleet was stalled until Agamemnon had his daughter, Iphigeneia, butchered, and from where Hesiod made his one and only sea voyage to Chalcis, where he won a tripod for his poetry at the funeral games of Amphidamas, and brought his prize back to his valley and had it dedicated in the spot where we were now actually standing. He was excited by the view, but I scarcely heard his catalogue of discoveries as I was transfixed by one of my own. We were standing almost back to back, and I was trying to imagine what it would have been like to read my poems in that place when it had been a theatre with an audience looking over my head towards Boiotia. I tried to cover the sweep of the auditorium now bristling with the thorns that had scourged our feet, and I raised my head to take in what would have been the very back row and found myself facing up to the ridge of a mountain, and my hair literally began to stand on end. The mountain was, of course, Helicon and the spectators on the ridge none other than the Muses. They looked down on the poet performing his work. And the poet had to face up to the Muses.
In that Pilgrimage to Parnassus where I found Philomusus and Studioso, Ossa is not piled on Pelion but Helicon is piled on Parnassus, so that to reach the summit one would have needed a whole thiasos of sherpas. On their gruelling climb the two pilgrims have this conversation:
PHILOMUSUS
Thinks thou oure softe and tender feet canne bide
To trace this roughe, this harsh, this craggie waye
That leadeth unto fair Parnassus Hill?
STUDIOSO
Why man, each lazy groom will take the paine
To drawe his slow feete ore the clayie landes,
So he may reste uppon a faire greene banke.
These pilgrims feete which now take weary toile
Maie one day on a bedd of roses rest
Amidst Parnassus shadie laurell greene.
This is pretty miserable stuff from the same year as Hamlet. And it’s probably due to the fact that the author thought of the abode of the Muses as a ‘bedd of roses’. What we later pilgrims had discovered was no bed of roses, only unending thorns. And could we say that the laurels were still green in this Fifth Age of mankind? Hadn’t Christopher Marlowe written, only five years after Philomusus and Studioso had made their ascent of Helicon/Parnassus, that ‘burned is Apollo’s laurel-bough’? And were the Mu
ses still up there in the Fifth Age of mankind? Or had they left the earth as Hesiod predicted Aidos and Nemesis would do when there would be no remedy against evil? In the Theogony, Hesiod describes the flow of sweetness of the Muses as ‘inexhaustible’, but nearer our time Byron called the Muses ‘the weary nine’, and Keats had looked to Helicon and found that:
… all is dark
Around thine aged top …
(Endymion)
‘The sun of poetry is set,’ he said. There have been discouraging reports also about the fountain of inspiration on Helicon, the spring of Hippocrene, from George Wheler in the seventeenth century, who found ‘the famous haunt of the nine Sisters … frozen up’, to the American Paul W. Wallace in 1973, who drank from the fountain of the Muses and found its taste ‘so foul that we drank it only because nothing else was available’. How much wearier the nine will be a hundred and fifty years on from Byron in the latter end of the twentieth century, how much darker the summit of the Muses’ haunt. This weariness of the nine, this erosion of the affirmative spirit in our times, this darkness, this nephos on Helicon has been made darker by two world wars, the terrors of Nazism and the fearful conflagrations unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, creating the literal poliokrotaphoi of Hesiod’s Fifth Age. These years which I described addressing Keats over the time that divides us:
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 13