The Dyer's Hand and Other
Essays
Random House, Hardback,
1962.
8vo. xii+527 pp. Foreword by the author [xi-xii].
Making, Knowing and Judging*
III. The Well of Narcissus
IV. The Shakespearean City
Interlude: West's Disease
Postscript: Infernal Science
Postscript: Rome v. Monticello
Red Ribbon on a White House
Postscript: The Almighty Dollar
VII. The Shield of Perseus
Postscript: The Frivolous & The Earnest
Postscript: Christianity & Art
VIII. Homage to Igor
Stravinsky
Translating Opera Libretti (Written in collaboration
with Chester Kallman)
* An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University
of Oxford on 11 June 1956.
==========================================
This attempt for a review is
gratefully dedicated to Steve (aka j.a.lesen) who first inspired me to explore
Mr Auden's mind.
A collection of 34 essays running to more than 500
pages altogether and exploring the foundations of human nature itself, The Dyer’s Hand is a formidable book
that takes time and effort to get through. It’s worth it. It has been my first
encounter with Mr Auden’s writing, and so auspicious has it proved that it
certainly won’t be the last one. I had thought that I would be introduced to
his work by The Mirror and the Sea,
where he might just finish what Shakespeare started four centuries ago, or by The Age of Anxiety, because I am deeply
fascinated with Leonard Bernstein’s eponymous Second Symphony for Piano and Orchestra, but it so happened that Mr Auden’s prose came first.
I don’t know about his poetry, but Mr Auden certainly
writes magnificent prose. My only complaint is his slight propensity to use obscure
words such as “numinous”, “manichean” or “pelagian”. But that’s probably my own
fault; I should expand my meagre vocabulary. Apart from this minor detail, Mr
Auden’s prose is beautifully crafted, compulsively readable and immensely
stirring on multiple levels. It’s a rich, direct, vigorous, elegant, and melodious
prose, with vast yet precise vocabulary and masterful use of punctuation. The
truly priceless thing is that this versatile weapon – for a writing style, no
matter how outstanding, is but a means – is backed up by a most fascinating
mind, a rare combination of powerful intelligence and emotional involvement.
Add to this remarkable candour and a subtle sense of humour, and you are in for
the most compelling read imaginable – as clear from the very first paragraph of
this book:
It is a sad fact about our culture that a
poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by
practicing it. All the poems I have written were written for love; naturally,
when I have written one, I try to market it, but the prospect of a market played no
role in its writing.
On the other hand, I have never written a
line of criticism except in response to a demand by others for a lecture, an
introduction, a review, etc.; though I hope that some love went into their
writing, I wrote them because I needed the money.
The word “criticism” may be a little misleading. It
implies something dry, academic, confused, altogether boring to the extreme:
this is precisely what Mr Auden’s writing is not. He may well be opinionated,
high-handed and on occasion even dogmatic, but he has good reasons to think as
he does, and he usually states them with utmost clarity. And what a pleasure,
what a privilege to disagree with such a fine mind!
Further in this one-page long preface, Mr Auden
remarks that the problem with such commissioned pieces is that the relationship
between form and content is arbitrary. A lecture must be so-and-so minutes
long, a review must be so-and-so words long, and there is no guarantee that it
will fit the subject well; sometimes the author has to “omit or oversimplify
arguments”, sometimes he has to “pad as inconspicuously as possible”. He
finishes with a most revealing paragraph worth quoting:
A poem must be a closed system, but there
is something, in my opinion, lifeless, even false, about systematic criticism.
In going over my critical pieces, I have reduced them, when possible, to sets
of notes because, as a reader, I prefer a critic’s notebooks to his treatises.
The order of the chapters, however, is deliberate, and I would like them to be
read in sequence.
The remark about notebooks accords well with Mr
Auden’s generous review of Somerset Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebook (1949), an insightful collection from the
kitchen of another great creative writer. I might as well warn you that
comparisons – or, rather, parallels – with Maugham will occur frequently in the
following paragraphs. As for the abridgment, it appears to be quite true. Some
of the finest essays in the book – “Reading”, “Writing”, “Hic et Ille”, “The
Poet and the City” – do consist of separate notes. They range in length from a
single sentence to a half page, seldom longer, and make the reading easier
without diluting the message.
I have to admit to some cheating as regards the order
of reading. The first time I jumped to the Shakespearean Part IV having not yet
finished Part III; nor did I read everything from the next three sections
before the last one, Homage to Igor Stravinsky. On re-reading I followed
conscientiously the order chosen by the author. I have found, not surprisingly,
that Mr Auden does have a point. Though each piece is entirely self-sufficient,
and almost embarrassingly rich in food for thought, the book on the whole does
benefit from reading without skipping of pieces.
Before going into a fairly appalling detail about
some personal highlights, it is useful to bear several caveats in mind.
First and most important of all, Mr
Auden’s essays, though they deal with pretty much everything under the sun, are
mostly concerned with authors and literature, especially but not only poets and
poetry. Therefore they require readers
of vast and varied reading experience. Well, this certainly disqualifies me. I
have read but a single short story by D. H. Lawrence or Henry James, and not even
a single line of verse by Robert Frost or Marianne Moore. The name of Byron is
mostly familiar to me in its adjective form, Byronic. I know absolutely nothing
of Kafka. I have never heard the name of Anzia Yezierska, the authoress of Red Ribbon on a White House.
Above all, one should be familiar with a good deal of
Shakespeare. It doesn’t make much sense reading “The Joker in the Pack” and
“Brothers & Others” without intimate knowledge of Othello and The Merchant of
Venice, respectively. The whole book is peppered with numerous
Shakespearean references, some of which are pretty substantial. For example,
“Balaam and His Ass” includes an extensive discussion of The Tempest. The number of casual references to a play, a character
or a sonnet is enormous. It’s probably safe to assume that Mr Auden knew the
Shakespeare canon by heart; he certainly gives that impression. The numerous
links with the Bard are invariably intriguing, to say the least. But if one
doesn’t know the works in question really well, they will fly high above one’s
head, sadly unnoticed (as no doubt happened many times with me).
(By the way, this reminds me of the book’s only one and
purely technical defect: a short index would have been immensely helpful;
despite the fine thematic organization of the contents, cross-references, with
Shakespeare and not only, abound in all pieces.)
But great writers are nothing if not great inspirational
forces. As a matter of fact, Mr Auden was one of the main reasons for my
finally overcoming a solid dose of Shakespearean fears. “The Joker in the Pack”
and Verdi’s Otello combined forces
until I was compelled to read the tragedy of the Moor, no matter how difficult
I found the language. What a momentous event! A few plays later I was convinced
that Shakespeare would be a lifelong project of great fascination and huge
benefit. I owe this largely to Mr Auden and I am grateful for it. I have little
doubt that there will be other similar experiences in the future. The Dyer’s Hand is the rare kind of book
that gets better and better with the reading of other books, especially by
authors discussed in detail by Mr Auden.
Last and least, the reader should be warned that the
book is full of quotations, and quite a few of them are in foreign languages.
Mr Auden was apparently something of a polyglot. The language of Shakespeare is
more or less English, but quotes from Wagner’s libretti or Goethe’s Faust
are always given in the original German; Dante’s Inferno is usually quoted in Italian, and most of Paul Valery’s
thoughts are in French. This is all for the better as every translation is inevitably
accompanied by a certain loss of rhythm, sound and even meaning, especially
when it comes to poetry. But occasionally it’s a little taxing for the reader,
all the more so if your knowledge of foreign languages is as poor as mine.
Now, finally, let’s look seriously inside this
stupendous book. It is not only respect, but also common sense, to do so in the order suggested by Mr Auden.
I have the irreverent intention to supply some highly irrelevant speculations
about the symbolic meaning of the order as well as of the titles of the
separate sections.
It is not for nothing that “Reading” and “Writing” form the Prologue of the book. These two essays
present the reader with a vivid impression of Mr Auden’s singular personality:
a perfect preparation for the rest of the volume. They are the most fragmented,
the most epigrammatic and most quotable pieces in the book. I make no apology
for the extensive selection of quotations which follows. They are the best
possible review. Besides, there is a great deal of wisdom between these lines.
Consider the following excerpts from “Reading”:
In relation to a writer, most readers believe
in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like,
but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
To read is to translate, for no two
persons’ experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he
interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought
to interpret literally. In learning to read well, scholarship, valuable as it
is, is less important than instinct; some great scholars have been poor
translators.
As readers, most of us, to some degree,
are like those urchins who pencil mustaches on the faces of girls in
advertisements.
Though a work of literature can be read in
a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical
order; some readings are obviously “truer” than others, some doubtful, some
obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why,
for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the
greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a
dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite
number of ways.
We cannot read an author for the first
time in the same way that we read the latest book by an established author. In
a new author, we tend to see either only his virtues or only his defects and,
even if we do see both, we cannot see the relation between them. In the case of
an established author, if we can still read him at all, we know that we cannot
enjoy the virtues we admire in him without tolerating the defects we deplore.
Moreover, our judgment of an established author is never simply an aesthetic
judgment. In addition to any literary merit it may have, a new book by him has
a historic interest for us as the act of a person in whom we have long been interested.
He is not only a poet or a novelist; he is also a character is our biography.
Good taste is much more a matter of
discrimination than of exclusion, and when good taste feels compelled to
exclude, it is with regret, not with pleasure.
Pleasure is by no means an infallible
critical guide, but it is the least fallible.
Between the ages of twenty and forty we
are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning
the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow
and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass
with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying
to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. […] When
someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, “I know what I
like,” he is really saying “I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of
my cultural milieu,” because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a
man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty,
if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become
what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.
If good literary critics are rarer than
good poets or novelists, one reason is the nature of human egoism. A poet or a
novelist has to learn to be humble in the face of his subject matter which is
life in general. But the subject matter of a critic, before which he has to
learn to be humble, is made up of authors, that is to say, of human
individuals, and this kind of humility is much more difficult of acquire. It is
far easier to say – “Life is more important than anything I can say about it” –
than to say – “Mr. A’s work is more important than anything I can say about
it.”
There are people who are too intelligent
to become authors, but they do not become critics.
What is the function of a critic? So far
as I am concerned, he can do me one or more of the following services:
1)
Introduce
me to authors and works of which I was hitherto unaware.
2)
Convince
me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them
carefully enough.
3)
Show
me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never
have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
4)
Give
a “reading” of a work which increases my understanding of it.
5)
Throw
light upon the process of artistic “Making.”
6)
Throw
light upon the relation of art to life, to science, to economics, ethics,
religion, etc.
The first three of these services demand
scholarship. A scholar is not merely someone whose knowledge is extensive; the
knowledge must be of value to others. One would not call a man who knew the
Manhattan Telephone Directory by heart a scholar, because one cannot imagine
circumstances in which he would acquire a pupil. Since scholarship implies a
relation between one who knows more and one who knows less, it may be
temporary; in relation to the public, every reviewer is, temporarily, a scholar,
because he has read the book he is reviewing and the public have not. Though
the knowledge a scholar possesses must be potentially valuable, it is not
necessary that he recognize its value himself; it is always possible that the
pupil to whom he imparts his knowledge has a better sense of its value than he.
In general, when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his
quotations than from his comments.
The last three services demand, not
superior knowledge, but superior insight. A critic shows superior insight if
the questions he raises are fresh and important, however much one may disagree
with his answers to them. Few readers, probably, find themselves able to accept
Tolstoi’s conclusions in What Is Art?,
but, once one has read the book, one can never again ignore the questions
Tolstoi raises.
The one thing I most emphatically do not
ask of a critic is that he tell me what I ought
to approve of or condemn. I have no objection to his telling me what works and
authors he likes and dislikes; indeed, it is useful to know this for, from his
expressed preferences about works which I have read, I learn how likely I am to
agree or disagree on works which I have not. But let him not dare to lay down
the law to me. The responsibility for what I choose to read is mine, and nobody
else on earth can do it for me.
The critical opinions of a writer should
always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are
manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what
he should avoid. Moreover, unlike a scientist, he is usually even more ignorant
of what his colleagues are doing than is the general public. A poet over thirty
may still be a voracious reader, but it is unlikely that much of what he reads
is modern poetry.
Very few of us can truthfully boast that
we have never condemned a book or even an author on hearsay, but quite a lot of
us that we have never praised one we had not read.
Attacking bad books is not only a waste of
time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only
interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such
display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a
bad book without showing off.
One cannot blame the reviewers themselves.
Most of them, probably, would much prefer to review only those books which,
whatever their faults, they believe to be worth reading but, if a regular
reviewer on one of the big Sunday papers were to obey his inclination, at least
one Sunday in three his column would be empty. Again, any conscientious critic
who has ever had to review a new volume of poetry in a limited space knows that
the only fair thing to do would be to give a series of quotations without
comment but, if he did so, his editor would complain that he was not earning
his money.
Reviewers may justly be blamed, however,
for their habit of labeling and packaging authors. At first critics classified
authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that
is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the
Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the
writers of the ‘30’s, ‘40’s, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling
authors, like automobiles, by the year. Already the decade classification is
absurd, for it suggests that authors conveniently stopped writing at the age of
thirty-five or so.
A writer, or, at least, a poet, is always
being asked by people who should know better: “Whom do you write for?” The
question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer.
Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for
me and for me only. Like a jealous lover, I don’t want anybody else to hear of it.
To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read
with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.
Let me here interrupt Mr Auden’s elaborate yet
graceful prose to inject a tiny amount of modern perspective. What is the
relevance of his words fifty years after they were printed in this book?
Well, to my mind every word from the above quotes is
violently relevant today, perhaps even more so than in the old, pre-Internet
times, when information was less accessible but genuine knowledge (as opposed
to sham showing off) was more common.
Take for example Mr Auden’s remarks about condemning
books and authors on hearsay, attacking bad books by showing off, or labeling
authors year by year. How many people have condemned Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code on hearsay, I wonder? Until
not so long ago it was the latest fashion. Even if we grant some of the more detailed,
if vitriolic, reviewers that they have actually read at least part of the book,
how much of their “reviews” is nothing but mere showing off how knowledgeable
about the history of Christianity they are? Far too many people never could
comprehend that better research does not necessarily make a better novel, or
vice versa, and they are barking up the wrong tree. Nor have they often shown
the common sense to judge a book within its genre.
Nothing of this stupefying nonsense is a modern
invention. Far from it. The chances are that the phenomenon is as old as
literature itself. But it may be argued that today it is stronger than ever
before, partly because it is relatively easy to obtain a global perspective.
Equally relevant are Mr Auden’s amusing, but also saddening, thoughts on
“labeling and packaging” of authors. Enormous amount of fiction is produced
each and every year – only to be forgotten on the next one; none of the wise
fellows who select “Best Novel of 2012” ever give a thought what chances it has
to survive one year more. Nowadays we also have greater-than-ever separation
into genres and subgenres, one more inane than the other, all of them as
ephemeral as the morning dew. Then again, if they flourish, if there is a
public big enough to support them, we deserve them.
We have been slow to take Mr Auden’s hint.
But these are fairly
trivial matters (or are they?), and I am doing Mr Auden an injustice by
spending too much time on them. His analysis of critics and reviewers, his
speculations about the “daydream” of every author, his reflections about
writers being parts of our own biography: all these, and many others, are
nuggets, pieces of pure gold. The last paragraph above, far from being “a silly
answer”, is a profound statement which reaches the bottom of the seemingly
bottomless well of literary creation. As for the compelling idea about
established authors and our lives, it holds true for our favourite authors and
our characters as well. Every new writer one starts exploring is an adventure
of the spirit. It may just prove to be of paramount personal importance.
Now back to Mr Auden and his reflections on “Writing”.
I have allowed myself the impertinence to insert some personal remarks in
square brackets, mostly referring to some (at least to me) interesting (dis)similarities
with Maugham:
Literary gatherings, cocktail parties and
the like, are a social nightmare because writers have no “shop” to talk.
Lawyers and doctors can entertain each other with stories about interesting
cases, about experiences, that is to say, relate to their professional
interests but yet impersonal and outside themselves. Writers have no impersonal
professional interests. The literary equivalent of talking shop would be
writers reciting their own work at each other, an unpopular procedure for which
only very young writers have the nerve.
No poet or novelist wishes he were the
only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive,
and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
Every writer would rather be rich than
poor, but no genuine writer cares about popularity as such. He needs approval
of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he
believes he has is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can only be
reassured by those whose judgment he respects. It would only be necessary for a
writer to secure universal popularity if imagination and intelligence were equally
distributed among all men.
[Awesome argument against the universal appeal of
great art. Highbrow, cynical or snobbish, call it what you will, but don’t
refuse to consider it. Leaving aside, for the sake of simplicity, the profound
differences between Western and Eastern cultures, even the most universally
admired creative forces that the Western civilization has ever produced,
together with some of their finest works, have had their merciless detractors.
Tolstoy denounced King Lear in
particular and Shakespeare in general, Stravinsky was scathing about
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Glenn Gould about his Appassionata, for Joseph Kerman Tosca
is a “shabby little shocker”, and so on and so forth. It’s easy to dismiss
these as “blind spots”. But since the examples can easily be multiplied, maybe
there is more in them than that. And maybe there isn’t.]
How happy the lot of the mathematician! He
is judge solely by his peers and the standard is so high that no colleague or
rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter
to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics
and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were
content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the
waste pipe.
All works of art are commissioned in the
sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until
what he believes to be a good idea for a work “comes” to him. Among those works
which are failures because their initial conceptions were false or inadequate,
the number of self-commissioned works may well be greater than the number commissioned
by patrons.
[Cf. Maugham’s defense of patronage as expressed in
the essay “Reflections on a Certain Book” from the collection The Vagrant Mood, 1952.]
The degree of excitement which a writer
feels during the process of composition is as much an indication of the value
of the final result as the excitement felt by a worshiper is an indication of
the value of his devotions, that is to say, very little indication.
It is true that when he is writing a poem,
it seems to a poet as if there were two people involved, his conscious self and
a Muse whom he has to woo or an Angel with whom he has to wrestle, but, as in
an ordinary wooing or wrestling match, his role is as important as Hers. The
Muse, like Beatrice in Much Ado, is a
spirited girl who has as little use for an abject suitor as she has for a
vulgar brute. She appreciates chivalry and good manners, but she despises those
who will not stand up to her and takes a cruel delight in telling them nonsense
and lies which the poor little things obediently write down as “inspired”
truth.
[Here is one example of casual, Audenesque insight into
Shakespeare, thrown in out of the blue, as if by pure chance. Only a man fully
immersed in the Bard can make it. We should be grateful. Aren’t you going to
read Much Ado with a slightly
different mind next time, keeping in mind this beautiful comparison between
Beatrice and the Muse?]
To keep his errors down to minimum, the
internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be
Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical
housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon, and even, perhaps, hated
by all others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant
who considers all poetry rubbish.
The
intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection
of the life or of the work.
(Yeats.)
This is untrue; perfection is possible in neither. All one can say is that a writer who, like all men, has his personal weaknesses
and limitations, should be aware of them and try his best to keep them out of
his work. For every writer, there are certain subjects which, because of
defects of his character and his talent, he should never touch.
[Maugham could not have agreed more. Cf. “But [writing]
is a profession that has disadvantages. One is that though the whole world,
with everyone in it and all its sights and events, is your material, you
yourself can only deal with what corresponds to some secret spring in your own
nature. The mine is incalculably rich, but each one of us can get from it only
a definite amount of ore. Thus in the midst of plenty the writer may starve to death.
His material fails him and we say that he has written himself out. I think
there are few writers who are not haunted by the fear of this. […] I have
continued with increasing assiduity to try to write better. I discovered my
limitations and it seemed to me that the only sensible thing was to aim at what
excellence I could within them.”, The
Summing Up, 1938.]
The integrity of a writer is more
threatened by appeals to his social conscience, his political or religious
convictions, than by appeals to his cupidity. It is morally less confusing to
be goosed by a traveling salesman than by a bishop.
[Cf Maugham’s comments on (mis)using fiction as
propaganda in, for example, “The Art of Fiction”, the opening essay in Ten Novels and Their Authors, 1954. As
for the writer’s cupidity, see his unflinching defence of writing for money –
which, it can’t be repeated too often, is an entirely different thing than
compromising one’s integrity for money – in The
Summing Up, 1938: “One of the minor sages of Chelsea has remarked that the
writer who wrote for money did not write for him. He has said a good many wise
things (as indeed a sage should) but this was a very silly one; for the reader
has nothing to do with the motive for which the author writes. He is only
concerned with the result. Many writers need the spur of necessity to write at
all (Samuel Johnson was one of them), but they do not write for money. It would
be foolish of them if they did, for there are few avocations in which with
equal ability and industry you cannot earn more money than by writing. […] It
may be that Shakespeare, Scott and Balzac did not write for the minor sage of
Chelsea, but it looks as though they did write for after ages.” Judging by his very
first words in The Dyer’s Hand, I surmise Mr Auden was of the same opinion.]
Some writers confuse authenticity, which
they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother
about. There is certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be
loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome
behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is
intrinsically admirable, but because it is his
remark, his act. Does not this
explain a good deal of avant-garde art?
[Cf. Maugham: “Subtlety is a quality of the mind, if
you have it you show it because you can't help it. It's like originality: no
one can be original by trying. The original artist is only being himself; he
puts things in what seems to him a perfectly normal and obvious way: because
it's fresh and new to you you say he's original. He doesn't know what you mean.”,
A Writer’s Notebook, 1949. Mr Auden’s
provocative insight into the avant-garde mentality is charming. Could it be
that this “desire to be loved” stems from genuine and dimly realised artistic sterility?]
Every work of a writer should be a first
step, but this will be a false step unless, whether or not he realize it at the
time, it is also a further step. When a writer is dead, one ought to be able to
see that his various works, taken together, make one consistent oeuvre.
[Since I suffer from completism, a surprisingly rare
disease among booklovers, I find this passage very thought-provoking. When I am
deeply fascinated by a certain author, I want to read all of his works. I want to
explore his best and his worst, to have a clear and accurate idea of his personality
as expressed in his writings (which does not necessarily coincide with the one
in his private life, for which I couldn’t care less), of his command of the
English language, of his quirks, mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. It’s amazing,
and that’s not putting too strongly, how revealing about a writer’s mind
different parts of his oeuvre may be. So far the completist method pays off
handsomely indeed!]
[Maugham, as so often happens, is the supreme
example. This may be because he is the only author with whose (nearly) complete
works I am fairly well familiar, but it may also be because he was somewhat
preoccupied with the pattern of his life and indeed knew his mind extraordinarily
well. So his oeuvre is remarkably organized and, given its size and diversity,
very consistent. Be that as it may, if one wants to know Maugham intimately,
one needs to read substantial portion of his novels, short stories, plays and
essays, including Don Fernando
(1935), The Summing Up (1938) and A Writer’s Notebook (1949), his most
personal non-fiction volumes.]
[My experience with other writers, though less
complete, points out in the same general direction. Only Arthur Clarke and
Oscar Wilde, both of them powerful and personal if very different masters, have
I read extensively so far, and their respective outputs definitely include
masterpieces in many different genres, all of them very much worth reading.
Bertrand Russell, Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare are in the process of
being read complete, but these are huge projects that will take many years to
complete (even the first round). Nevertheless, the hazy outlines do already indicate
high probability of obtaining reproducible results. (What a sentence!)]
[In short, the most comprehensive, the most accurate,
the most important, the most revealing – in short, the best – (auto)biography
of a great writer is his oeuvre. When we are talking of such intensely personal
writers, there is no such thing as “the real man behind his works”. The real
man is contained within the works
themselves. What others, including his family and closest friends, saw from the
outside may or may not be the same man. That doesn’t matter.]
[I am not quite sure what Mr Auden means by
“consistent”, but I surmise one thing he doesn’t mean is consistency of
opinion. Surely no one can expect this in a lifetime of active living. Nor does
it seem common among great writers. Some of Maugham’s views hardly changed after
his student years, that is true, but some of them did change a good deal, in a
few cases out of recognition. Bertrand Russell frankly admitted that many of
his opinions had changed since his youth, and was proud of that. Arthur Clarke
made no secret of his own “failures of imagination”. Yet there is a certain, if
fanciful, kind of consistency in the writings of all these great men. Opinions
may change, but the fundamental yearnings to understand human nature, our past,
present and future, remain the same.]
In theory, the author of a good book
should remain anonymous, for it is to his work, not to himself, that admiration
is due. In practice, this seems to be impossible. However, the praise and
public attention that writers sometimes receive does not seem to be as fatal to
them as one might expect. Just a good man forgets his deed the moment he has
done it, a genuine writer forgets a work as soon as he has completed it and
starts to think about the next one; if he thinks about his past work at all, he
is more likely to remember its faults than its virtues. Fame often makes a
writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
When a successful author analyzes the
reasons for his success, he generally underestimates the talent he was born
with, and overestimates his skill in employing it.
[Cf. Maugham: “I have more character than brains and
more brains than specific gifts.”, The
Summing Up, 1938. Did Maugham underestimate the “talent he was born with”?
Perhaps. It may also be that character and brains – character especially – are
gifts by birth, not acquired post-natal skills.]
It takes little talent to see clearly what
lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point
that organ.
The greatest writer cannot see through a
brick wall but, unlike the rest of us, he does not build one.
[Cf. Maugham: “Most people cannot see anything, but I
can see what is in the front of my nose with extreme clearness; the greatest
writers can see through a brick wall. My vision is not so penetrating.”, A Writer’s Notebook, 1949. The “brick
wall” is a fascinating example of the overwhelming importance of the context.
With the first part of the sentence Mr Auden seems to say exactly the opposite
of Maugham. But when the second part is added, both statements come to pretty
much the same thing – because “things mostly do, you know”, as Andrew Wyke from
Anthony Shaffer’s play Sleuth might
have replied.]
[Another example of similar context-orientated riddle
is concerned with Maugham and Hemingway: the former said writing is a whole-time
job, the latter said it is not. Yet both of them – probably – meant the very
same thing. Maugham certainly meant that a writer writes, not only when he is
at his desk, but all the time while living his life. I am not sure what
Hemingway meant, but I surmise he thought that one must gain experience of life
in order to write something meaningful about it, an opinion Maugham would have
agreed wholeheartedly with.]
Only a minor talent can be a perfect
gentleman; a major talent is always more than a bit of a cad. Hence the
importance of minor writers – as teachers of good manners. Now and again, an
exquisite minor work can make a master feel thoroughly ashamed of himself.
[Cf. Maugham’s first person narrator: “It is very
difficult to be a gentleman and a writer.”, Cakes
and Ale, 1930.]
[Maugham’s opinion on talent and how it differs from
genius was fascinatingly inconsistent. “Genius and talent are very different
things. Many people have talent; it is not rare: genius is. Talent is adroit
and dexterous; it can be cultivated; genius is innate, and too often strangely
allied to grave defects.”, Ten Novels and
Their Authors, 1954. “I do not believe that genius is an entirely different
thing from talent. I am not even sure that it depends on any great difference
in the artist’s natural gifts. For example, I do not think that Cervantes had
an exceptional gift for writing; few people would deny him genius. Nor would it
be easy in English literature to find a poet with a happier gift than Herrick and
yet no one would claim that he had more than a delightful talent.”, The Summing Up, 1938.]
[Maugham also thought minor writers to be important;
but for a different reason, as a kind of “window in time”. “It has sometimes
seemed to me that if posterity wants to know what the world of today was like
it will not go to those writers whose idiosyncrasy has impressed our contemporaries,
but to the mediocre ones whose ordinariness has allowed them to describe their
surroundings with a greater faithfulness. I do not mention them since, even
though they may be assured of the appreciation of after ages, people do not
like to be labelled as mediocre. But I think it may be admitted that one gets
the impression of a truer picture of life in the novels of Anthony Trollope
than in those of Charles Dickens.”, The
Summing Up, 1938.]
A poet has to woo, not only his own Muse
but also Dame Philology, and, for the beginner, the latter is the more
important. As a rule, the sign that a beginner has a genuine original talent is
that he is more interested in playing with words than in saying something
original; his attitude is that of the old lady, quoted by E. M. Forster – “How
can I know what I think till I see what I say?” It is only later, when he has
wooed and won Dame Philology, that he can give his entire devotion to his Muse.
[This is strikingly relevant to Shakespeare! Compare the
dazzling verbal acrobatics in his early plays – up until and including Romeo
and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream
– with the much higher concentration in the great tragedies and the mature
comedies, and finally with the austerity of The
Tempest. I also wonder, as regards Somerset Maugham and Bertrand Russell,
if the fling with purple patch they did have in their youth played some part in
their complete mastery over simplicity later. This is probably simplifying the
matter too much; but it’s worth a thought.]
My
language is the universal whore whom I have to make into a virgin. (Karl Kraus.)
It is both the glory and the shame of
poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent
his words and that words are products, not of nature, but of human society which
uses them for a thousand different purposes. In modern societies where language
is continually being debased and reduced to nonspeech, the poet is in constant
danger of having his ear corrupted, a danger to which the painter and the
composer, whose media are their private property, are not exposed. On the other
hand he is more protected than they from another modern peril, that of
solipsist subjectivity; however esoteric a poem may be, the fact that all its
words have meanings which can be looked up in a dictionary makes it testify to
the existence of other people.
The difference between verse and prose is
self-evident, but it is a sheer waste of time to look for a definition of the
difference between poetry and prose. Frost’s definition of poetry as the
untranslatable element in language looks plausible at first sight but, on
closer examination, will not quite do. In the first place, even in the most
rarefied poetry, there are some elements which are translatable. The sound of
the words, their rhythmical relations, and all meanings and association of
meanings which depend upon the sound, like rhymes and puns, are, of course,
untranslatable, but poetry is not, like music, pure sound. Any elements in a
poem which are not based on verbal experience are, to some degree, translatable
into another tongue, for example, images, similes and metaphors which are drawn
from sensory experience.
Owing to its superior power as a mnemonic,
verse is superior to prose as a medium for didactic instruction. […] Verse is
also certainly the equal of prose as a medium for the lucid exposition of
ideas; in skillful hands, the form of the verse can parallel and reinforce the
steps of the logic. Indeed, contrary to most people who have inherited the
romantic conception of poetry believe, the danger of argument in verse – Pope’s
Essay on Man is an example – is that
verse may make the ideas too clear
and distinct, more Cartesian than they really are.
“The unacknowledged legislators of the
world” describes the secret police, not the poets.
The condition of mankind is, and always
has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet:
“For God’s sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle
or fetching bandages,” what just reason could he give for refusing? But nobody
says this. The self-appointed unqualified nurse says: “You are to sing the
patient a song which will make him believe that I, and I alone, can cure him.
If you can’t or won’t, I shall confiscate your passport and send you to the
mines.” And the poor patient in his delirium cries: “Please sing me a song
which will give me sweet dreams instead of nightmares. If you succeed, I will
give you a penthouse in New York or a ranch in Arizona.”
[Cf. Maugham: “Notwithstanding, when men in millions
are living on the border-line of starvation, when freedom in great parts of the
inhabited globe is dying or dead, when a terrible war has been succeeded by
years during which happiness has been out of the reach of the great mass of the
human race, when men are distraught because they can see no value in life and
the hopes that had enabled them for so many centuries to support its misery
seem illusory; it is hard not to ask oneself whether it is anything but
futility to write plays and stories and novels. The only answer I can think of
is that some of us are so made that there is nothing else we can do. We do not
write because we want to; we write because we must. There may be other things
in the world that more pressingly want doing: we must liberate our souls of the
burden of creation. We must go on though Rome burns. Others may despise us
because we do not lend a hand with a bucket of water; we cannot help it; we do
not know how to handle a bucket. Besides, the conflagration thrills us and charges
our mind with phrases.”, The Summing Up,
1938.]
The Dyer’s Hand opens with one of the longest and most
substantial pieces in the book. “Making, Knowing and Judging” is some thirty
pages long, ostensibly an inaugural address, but really a magisterial essay
about a poet’s formative years. Surely, however, you don’t have to be a
coming-of-age versifier in order to enjoy Mr Auden’s reflections. I may even be
so bold as to suggest that his conclusion about the most auspicious moment in
the life of any young poet is actually relevant to any art and those who
practice it as a vocation. Note that we meet again our old friend, the Censor:
We must assume that our apprentice does
succeed in becoming a poet, that, sooner or later, a day arrives when his
Censor is able to say truthfully and for the first time: “All the words are
right, and all are yours.”
His thrill at hearing this does not last
long, however, for a moment later comes the thought: “Will it ever happen
again?” Whatever his future life as a wage-earner, a citizen, a family man may
be, to the end of his days his life as a poet will be without anticipation. He
will never be able to say: “Tomorrow I will write a poem and, thanks to my
training and experience, I already know I shall do a good job.” In the eyes of
others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a
poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The
moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a
man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
The essay is one of the most autobiographical in the
whole book. There are many personal touches, all of them offered with Mr
Auden’s charming modesty and humour. For instance, the first “Master” he
adopted was Thomas Hardy, “a good poet, perhaps a great one, but not too good”. Anglo-Saxon and Middle
English poetry were among his “strongest, most lasting influences” ever since
he attended a lecture given by Prof Tolkien; the only thing he remembered was a
magnificent recitation of a long passage from Beowulf by the professor. One Christmas he was presented with De la
Mare’s Come Hither, an anthology
which thought him “at the start that poetry does not have to be great or even
serious to be good.” Especially revealing are Mr Auden’s remarks on the
confusing issue that “to be worth attacking a book must be worth reading”:
The greatest critical study of a single
figure that I know of, The Case of Wagner,
is a model of what such an attack should be. Savage as he often is, Nietzsche
never allows the reader to forget for one instant that Wagner is an
extraordinary genius and that, for all which may be wrong with it, his music is
of the highest importance. Indeed it was this book which first thought me to
listen to Wagner, about whom I had previously held silly preconceived notions. Another
model is D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in
Classic American Literature. I remember my disappointment, when, after
reading the essay on Fenimore Cooper which is highly critical, I hurried off to
read him. Unfortunately, I did not find Cooper nearly as exciting as Lawrence
had made him sound.
Well, this is the perfect recommendation to read
Nietzsche’s critique on Wagner, a book about which I hold some “silly
preconceived notions” myself. The only way to know just how silly those notions
are is to read the thing. The most fascinating among Mr Auden’s autobiographical
revelations are those about music, a vast topic which will be discussed in
detail later. Until then keep in mind this telling reference to Italian opera
(and note the subtle merging of personal memories with reflections of universal
import):
Fashion and snobbery are also valuable as
a defense against literary indigestion. Regardless of their quality, it is
always better to read a few books carefully than skim through many, and, short
of a personal taste which cannot be formed overnight, snobbery is as good a
principle of limitation as any other.
I am eternally grateful, for example, to
the musical fashion of my youth which prevented me from listening to Italian
Opera until I was over thirty, by which age I was capable of really
appreciating a world so beautiful and so challenging to my cultural heritage.
The defense of snobbery is timeless; so, to a lesser
extent, is the point about the relationship between age, opera and cultural
background. The latter I can corroborate from personal experience. I was
introduced to opera fairly late – when I was about twenty – yet it was much too
early. Being a bit slow-witted myself, a full decade had to pass before I could
even begin to appreciate Italian opera, not to mention German or Russian one.
And I am still in the very beginning of an endless quest, and one in which
snobbery (= the self-conscious limitation to works I could fully respond to) is
very desirable. As for opera as cultural challenge, this is an immense subject,
stirring on a number of levels, which is way beyond the present piece, not to
mention my capacity.
There is only one essay in the book which I find
consistently dull. This is “The Virgin and the Dynamo”. An epigraph by Virginia
Woolf about a square and an oblong sets the tone; I am sure it’s full of
meaningful symbolism, but to my mind it is ridiculous nonsense. It is by no
means untypical of Mr Auden to venture boldly into the metaphysical, producing
complex passages that require concentration from the reader, but he generally
remains marvellously lucid. Not so here. When he discourses on the two “real
worlds”, the “Natural World of the Dynamo, the world of masses, identical
relations and recurrent events” and the “Historical World of the Virgin, the
world of faces, analogical, relations and singular events”, Mr Auden lost me.
When he added the two “Chimerical Worlds”, the “magical polytheistic nature
created by the aesthetic illusion” and the “mechanized history created by the
scientific illusion”, he lost me completely. But this piece, I repeat, is the
sole exception in an otherwise uncommonly consistent book. And even here, among
lots of obscure ramblings, there are several shrewd observations that give me
pause:
Without Art, we should have no notion of
the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods.
In those who profess a desire to write
poetry, yet exhibit an incapacity to do so, it is often the case that their
desire is not for creation but for self-perpetuation, that they refuse to
accept their mortality, just as there are parents who desire children, not as new
persons analogous to themselves, but to prolong their own existence in time.
The sterility of this substitution of identity for analogy is expressed in the
myth of Narcissus.
“The Poet and the City” might have been titled “The
Artist and the Society”; this lacks the brevity of the original, but it
reflects its vast scope more accurately. Unfortunately, there is no way to
convey this scope here – except, perhaps, by quotations. Historically speaking,
Mr Auden’s eclectic interests, quite diverse yet interrelated, range from
Ancient Greece to his own times; thematically, he discusses everything from the
subtle difference between worker and labourer, or between crowd and public, to
party politics.
In accepting and defending the social
institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we but
clearer-headed; they knew that labor as such is slavery, and that no man can
feel a personal pride in being a laborer. A man can be proud of being a worker
– someone, that is, who fabricates enduring objects, but in our society, the
process of fabrication has been so rationalized in the interests of speed,
economy and quantity that the part played by the individual factory employee
has become too small for it to be meaningful to him as work, and practically
all workers have been reduced to laborers. It is only natural, therefore, that
the arts which cannot be rationalized in this way – the artist still remains
personally responsible for what he makes – should fascinate those who, because
they have no marked talent, are afraid, with good reason, that all they have to
look forward to is a lifetime of meaningless labor. This fascination is not due
to the nature of art itself, but to the way in which an artists works; he, and
in our age, almost nobody else, is his own master. The idea of being one’s own
master appeals to most human beings, and this is apt to lead to the fantastic
hope that the capacity for artistic creation is universal, something nearly all
human beings, by virtue, not by some special talent, but due to their humanity,
could do if they tried.
This is a compelling and powerfully expressed
argument. And strikingly relevant to Maugham’s views as expressed in The Summing Up. “The artist is the only
free man.”, he stated bluntly, because it is only the artist, and perhaps the
criminal, who can make his own pattern in life; all other vocations offer only
predestined patterns, full of dreadful rules and limitations which all but take
one’s freedom away. Maugham would also have agreed that the notion of artistic
creation being something universal is nothing more than a popular delusion –
often with tragic consequences:
Youth is the inspiration. One of the
tragedies of the arts is the spectacle of the vast number of persons who have
been misled by this passing fertility to devote their lives to the effort of
creation. Their invention deserts them as they grow older, and they are faced
with the long years before them in which, unfitted by now for a more humdrum
calling, they harass their wearied brain to beat out material it is incapable
of giving them. They are lucky when, with what bitterness we know, they can
make a living in ways, like journalism or teaching, that are allied to the
arts.
Neither would Maugham have disagreed about the perils
of employment. Unlike Mr Auden, Willie didn’t distinguish between labour and
work, but he was certainly against the glorification of either. In some of his
early notes, jotted down around 1896 when he was but 22 years old, Maugham was quite
uncompromising:
We hear much of the nobility of labour;
but there is nothing noble in work itself. [...] The fact is simply that men in
their self-conceit look upon their particular activity as the noblest object of
man.
Work is lauded because it takes men out of
themselves. Stupid persons are bored when they have nothing to do. Work with
the majority is their only refuge from ennui; but it is comic to call it noble
for that reason. It requires many talents and much cultivation to be idle, or a
peculiarly constituted mind.
[A
Writer’s Notebook, 1949.]
So much for parallels with Maugham. I really mean it.
There have been so many so far that I might be giving the utterly false impression
that Mr Auden’s prose can’t stand alone. Let’s get back to “The Poet and the
City”.
I cannot agree with Mr Auden that “in the purely
gratuitous arts, poetry, painting, music, our century has no need, I believe,
to be ashamed of its achievements”. I believe the opposite. I don’t know about
poetry, and the situation with prose is perhaps not that bad, but as far as
painting and especially music are concerned, the last century has seen the most
atrocious examples since the Dark Times between the Antiquity and the Middle
Ages. Mr Auden certainly agrees about architecture and some other utile arts:
“No previous age has created anything so hideous as the average modern
automobile, lampshade or building, whether domestic or public. What could be
more terrifying than a modern office building?” That said, the author doesn’t
seem to endorse his own point of view about most of the gratuitous arts. He has
some especially persuasive arguments why art is not what it used to be,
although he formulates them in a rather obscure way.
There are four aspects of our present Weltanschauung which have made an
artistic vocation more difficult than it used to be.
1) The loss of belief in the eternity of
the physical universe.
[…]
2) The loss of belief in the significance
and reality of sensory phenomena.
[…]
3) The loss of belief in a norm of human
nature which will always require the same kind of man-fabricated world to be at
home in.
[…]
4) The disappearance of the Public Realm
as the sphere of revelatory personal deeds.
Fortunately, these four points are explained with
beautiful lucidity in the paragraphs which
I shamelessly reduced to “[…]”. This doesn’t mean they are particularly easy to
understand or imagine, nor that one should agree with them. I have my own
doubts about any of the four counts. But they at least provide a plausible, if
controversial, explanation why so much of the so called avant-garde has been so
dismal. The disaster may have been inevitable, largely function of the insanely
unstable zeitgeist. No one, I believe, would deny that the last century saw by
far the most extraordinary scientific and technological progress in human
history. Art might have been the price to pay for that. Harsh saying, perhaps,
but not altogether groundless. Let’s have a closer look at Mr Auden’s four points,
again using mostly his own words.
1) is largely self-evident. Mr Auden thinks that man
might never have become an artist had he not had before his eyes the apparently
everlasting world. For human life is obviously transitory and at least one of
the artist’s aims is to outlast it with his creations. But science, especially
“physics, geology and biology have replaced this everlasting universe with a
picture of nature as a process”, and the artist no longer has a permanent
model; so he is “more tempted to abandon the search for perfection as a waste
of time and be content with sketches and improvisations.” I find this argument
rather weak. Only a pathologically imaginative artist would be bothered by the
end of the universe, or even our tiny Solar system, after time periods well
beyond the minds of more or less all people.
2) is a more powerful argument. Again science is the guilty party, because
it “has destroyed our faith in the naïve observation of our senses”. Therefore,
an artist can be true only to his own, purely subjective sensations and
feelings; and there is no guarantee that these are of any value, much less
universal one. Compelling as it is, there is something fishy about this
argument, too. Surely, the data obtained by our senses, dismally personal as it
may be, is no more ambiguous than the words of a language. Even music,
sculpture or painting, admittedly more emotional and less intellectual arts
than literature, that is more dependent on the senses, could hardly be affected
so much by sensory subjectivity as to perish into the hideousness of the
twentieth century. Much like the first point, this one appears to be a little
too concerned with pathological cases.
3) is another matter. Here Mr Auden argues that the
“ever-accelerating transformation of man’s way of living” makes it impossible to
imagine what life will look like just a few decades from now. This is
startlingly prescient. It is the fact that our society has been transformed
with an “ever-accelerating” speed ever since Mr Auden penned these lines that
makes this argument disturbingly relevant. Otherwise the net effect on the arts
in the same, stultifying one. In the author’s words:
The artist, therefore, no longer has any
assurance, when he makes something, that even the next generation will find it
enjoyable or comprehensible.
He cannot help desiring an immediate
success, with all the danger to his integrity which that implies.
Of course there is something to be said against this
argument as well. For one thing, it doesn’t seem to affect the productivity of
the artists; for another, it seems to me that at least great art, the one
destined to become “classic”, should deal with the basics of human nature, and
these change little. But it remains to be seen whether anything produced today
would be considered valuable in half a century. Who knows if by that time half
of today’s classics wouldn’t be forgotten.
4) proposes that, since the public and private life
has been reversed since the ancient Greeks, “the arts, literature in particular,
have lost their traditional principal human subject, the man of action, the
doer of public deeds”. This is highly unconvincing and may account, at best,
for the decline of a very small portion of the arts. Even the greatest
statesmen, no matter how public their deeds, are just human after all. There is
no reason why art shouldn’t deal adequately with them, even though the social
aspect would of course be more difficult in our relentlessly globalising world.
Rather more tantalising is the question about the
gratuitous and utile component of art. What is art, really? Somerset Maugham
maintained that art is an emotional language that all may understand and that
the artist should create for the sole reason of disembarrassing his soul.
Bernard Shaw couldn’t disagree more. He considered art as an intellectual
weapon of pure propaganda, designed and performed for one reason only: to
change people’s minds. Tolstoy’s What Is
Art? I haven’t read yet, but now that Mr Auden has mentioned it, I
certainly will. Of course the truth is somewhere in the middle. But where
exactly? This is a difficult question. I should like to believe it’s an
important one as well. At any rate, Mr Auden is stimulating on the subject:
A poet, painter or musician has to accept
the divorce of his art between the gratuitous and the utile as a fact for, if
he rebels, he is liable to fall into error.
Had Tolstoi, when he wrote What Is Art?, been content with the
proposition, “When the gratuitous and the utile are divorced from each other,
there can be no art,” one might have disagreed with him, but he would have been
difficult to refute. But he was unwilling to say that, if Shakespeare and
himself were not artists, there was no modern art. Instead he tried to persuade
himself that utility alone, a spiritual utility maybe, but still utility
without gratuity, was sufficient to produce art, and this compelled him to be
dishonest and praise works which aesthetically he must have despised. The
notion of l’art engagé and art as
propaganda are extensions of this heresy, and when poets fall into it, the
cause, I fear, is less their social conscience than their vanity; they are
nostalgic for a past when poets had a public status.
Unfortunately, but perhaps wisely, Mr Auden doesn’t
give his own opinion what art is. The question may very well be one of those to
which no ultimate answer is possible. It certainly has been asked too many
times, and too many wildly divergent answers have been given. My own views on
the subject are pretty confused. I believe art, especially in the early stages
of one’s experience of it, is a primarily emotional phenomenon. Yet it would be
ridiculous to deny that, especially in later stages, it also has a considerable
intellectual appeal. Is sheer escapist entertainment a valuable form of
“spiritual utility”? I should think so, yes. But what exactly is art? I haven’t the least idea. Is it right to use art as
propaganda? I don’t think it is. But who would dare deny that some of Shaw’s best
plays, no matter how blatantly propagandistic, are also genuine works of art,
whatever the definition?
The trite conclusion of all this is that one should
experience art, rather than write about it. That said, I am grateful to Mr
Auden that he wrote so much about it. To finish with his reflections on the
subject, here is another searing observation about the troublesome relationship
between art and society:
Some writers, even some poets, become
famous public figures, but writers as such have no social status, in the way
that doctors and lawyers, whether famous or obscure, have.
There are two reasons for this. Firstly,
the so-called fine arts have lost the social utility they once had. Since the
invention of printing and the spread of literacy, verse no longer has a utility
value as a mnemonic, a devise by which knowledge and culture were handed on
from one generation to the next, and, since the invention of the camera, the
draughtsman and painter are no longer needed to provide visual documentation;
they have, consequently, become “pure” arts, that is to say, gratuitous
activities. Secondly, in a society governed by the values appropriate to Labor
(capitalist America may well be more completely governed by these than
communist Russia) the gratuitous is no longer regarded – most earlier cultures
thought differently – as sacred, because, to Man the Laborer, leisure is not
sacred but a respite from laboring, a time for relaxation and the pleasures of
consumption. In so far such a society thinks about the gratuitous at all, it is
suspicious of it – artists do not labor, therefore, they are probably parasitic
idlers – or, at best, regards it as trivial – to write poetry or paint pictures
is a harmless private hobby.
So much for art for writing’s sake.
Last but not least, the title of Part II as well as
of the whole book probably comes from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111:
O! for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners
breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a
brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed;
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will
drink
Potions of eisell 'gainst my strong
infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance, to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure
ye,
Even that your pity is enough to cure me.
I have the outrageously fanciful notion that the staining
of the dyer’s hand is a visual symbol of the communication with a great mind
through literature. It’s a strange experience, curiously one-sided and passive,
at first glance, yet in many ways more active, multifarious and stimulating than
many a conversion with friends and acquaintances. One’s nature may not be
“subdued”, but it is bound to be enriched and “renewed”, perhaps even improved.
What the sonnet might mean in the context of Mr Auden’s life and poetry I dare
not suggest. This will have to wait until I am familiar with The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, ed.
Edward Mendelson, six volumes published so far (1988-2010), two more to come.
The Well of Narcissus, as one might guess from the title, deals
with things like mirrors, reflections and the self. It certainly opens with a
bang. “Hic et Ille” is a very amusing collection of (mostly very short) notes,
some uproariously hilarious, some deliciously funny, some terribly serious.
Consider the opening and one naughty passage about the cute guy from the title:
Every man carries within him through life
a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.
A parlor game for a wet afternoon – imaging
the mirrors of one’s friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a
discreet little pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on
the back; whenever one looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away
but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another,
like an extra ace.
[…]
Narcissus does not fall in love with his
reflection because it is beautiful but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set
free in a few years by its fading.
“After all,” sighed Narcissus the
hunchback, “on me it looks good.”
The contemplation of his reflection does
not turn Narcissus into Priapus: the spell in which he is trapped is not a
desire for himself but the satisfaction of not desiring the nymphs.
“I prefer my pistol to my p…,” said Narcissus;
“it cannot take aim without my permission” – and took a pot shot at Echo.
But such flippancy is truly exceptional. Mental
mirrors are indeed a very serious subject. And Mr Auden knows it. As obvious by
the very first lines, he is not concerned with Hamlet’s famous description of
acting “as 'twere the mirror up to nature”, nor with the different
personalities which reportedly co-exist, harmoniously or not, in the minds of
some people but of which mostly artists are terribly conscious. It is our own
self-mirrors, those that are part and parcel of every human being, that are discussed here. It’s an ever-fresh
subject of universal appeal. One doesn’t need to be pathologically
self-conscious to grasp the deep and far-reaching implications. I can do no
more here than merely outline them by pertinent quotations, starting with one
of Mr Auden’s most famous aphorisms (given here, like almost nowhere else, with
some of its context):
Every autobiography is concerned with two
characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. […] If the
same person were to write his autobiography twice, first in one mode and then
in the other, the two accounts would be so different that it would be hard to
believe that they referred to the same person. In one he would appear as an
obsessed creature, a passionate Knight forever serenading Faith or Beauty,
humorless and over-life-size; in the other as coolly detached, full of humor
and self-mockery, lacking in a capacity for affection, easily bored and smaller
than life-size. As Don Quixote seen by
Sancho Panza, he never prays; as Sancho Panza seen by Don Quixote, he never
giggles.
An honest self-portrait is extremely rare
because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by
the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an
ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces
artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.
[…]
Literary confessors are contemptible, like
beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the
public that buys their books.
[…]
Anxiety affects the Body and the Mind in
different ways: it makes the former develop compulsions, a concentration on
certain actions to the exclusion of others; it makes the latter surrender to
daydreaming, a lack of concentration on any thought in particular.
[…]
A daydream is a meal at which images are
eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their
images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and
with little relish.
[…]
The image of myself which I try to create
in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image
which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.
[…]
We can imagine loving what we do not love
a great deal more easily than we can imagine fearing what we do not fear. I can
sympathize with a man who has a passion for collecting stamps, but if he is afraid
of mice there is a gulf between us. On the other hand, if he is unafraid of
spiders, of which I am terrified, I admire him as superior but I do not feel
that he is a stranger. Between friends differences in taste or opinion are
irritating in direct proportion of their triviality. If my friend takes up
Vedanta, I can accept it, but if he prefers his steak well done, I feel it to
be a treachery.
When one talks to another, one is more
conscious of him as a listener to the conversation than to oneself. But the
moment one writes anything, be it only a note to pass down the table, one is
more conscious of oneself as a reader than of the intended recipient.
Hence we cannot be as false in writing as
we can in speaking, nor as true. The written word can neither conceal nor
reveal so much as the spoken.
[I don’t believe the last statement is entirely true.
To my mind, the written word is much truer, much more revealing, than the
spoken one, or at least it is capable of being so. Only with great writers, whose
complete writings are confessions, am I sure that this is the case. An ordinary
journalist, a shallow propagandist, a vending machine for trashy thrillers, or
the other folk with hidden agendas, which usually are quite obvious, do not
fall in this category.]
Almost all of our relationships begin and
most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical
barter, to be terminated when one or both partners run out of goods.
But if the seed of a genuine disinterested
love, which is often present, is ever to develop, it is essential that we
pretend to ourselves and to others that it is stronger and more developed than
it is, that we are less selfish than we are. Hence the social havoc wrought by
the paranoid to whom the thought of indifference is so intolerable that he
divides others into two classes, those who love him for himself alone and those
who hate him for the same reason.
Do a paranoid a favor, like paying his
hotel bill in a foreign city when his monthly check has not yet arrived, and he
will take this as an expression of personal affection – the thought that you
might have done it from a general sense of duty towards a fellow countryman in
distress will never occur to him. So back he comes for more until your patience
is exhausted, there is a row, and he departs convinced that you are his
personal enemy. In this he is right to the extent that it is difficult not to
hate a person who reveals to you so clearly how little you love others.
One last point about “Hic et Ille”. It demonstrates with
rare eloquence Mr Auden’s passion for clarity and precision. If The Dyer’s Hand is anything to go by –
and I’m pretty sure it is! – this is something highly characteristic of the
author. No hazy definitions, no fuzzy descriptions, no obscure reflections. Consider
Mr Auden’s discourse on vanity and pride, one of the wisest passages in the
whole book as far as I am concerned:
He
who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietzsche.)
A vain person is always vain about something. He overestimates the
importance of some quality or exaggerates the degree to which he possesses it,
but the quality has some real importance and he does possess it to some degree.
The fantasy of overestimation or exaggeration makes the vain person comic, but
the fact that he cannot be vain about nothing makes his vanity a venial sin,
because it is always open to correction by appeal to objective fact.
A proud person, on the other hand, is not
proud of anything, he is proud, he exists proudly. Pride is
neither comic nor venial, but the most mortal of all sins because, lacking any
basis in concrete particulars, it is both incorrigible and absolute: one cannot
be more or less proud, only proud or humble.
Thus, if a painter tries to portray the
Seven Deadly Sins, his experience will furnish him readily enough with images
symbolic of Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Anger, Avarice, and Envy, for all these are
qualities of a person’s relations to others and the world, but no experience
can provide an image of Pride, for the relation it qualifies is the subjective
relation of a person to himself. In the seventh frame, therefore, the painter
can only place, in lieu of a canvas, a mirror.
“Balaam and His Ass” is a sheer masterpiece. Had it
contained nothing else, the book would have been well worth having for this
essay alone. It is a powerful analysis of the curious relationship between master
and servant as an ingenious device of self-revelation in literature. Yet again
I am knocked down by jaw-dropping awe when I am confronted with Mr Auden’s vast
scope. And I mean vast. This is the list
of the major master-servant couples he deals with in the course of this essay (few
others, which he mentions only briefly, are omitted for the sake of sanity):
Prospero – Caliban/Ariel (Shakespeare, The Tempest)
Lear – The Fool (Shakespeare, King Lear)
Tristan – Kurvenal, Isolde – Brangane (Wagner, Tristan und Isolde)
Don Giovanni – Leporello (Mozart/da Ponte, Don Giovanni)
Don Quixote – Sancho Panza (Servantes, Don Quixote)
Faust – Mephistopheles (Goethe, Faust)
Fogg – Passepartout (Verne, Eighty Days Around the World)
It is useless to even try to summarise this essay,
let alone analyse it, not least because I am reasonably familiar only with the
first four master-servant couples. It is long and intricate piece, separated
into nine parts yet continuous (no convenient fragmentation to notes), full of
multilingual quotations and epigraphs, fascinating cross-references and provocative
observations. I will limit myself to quoting Mr Auden’s admirable justification
why the master-servant relationship is of such great importance. It is not for
nothing, surely, that some of the finest works for the page and the stage have
explored it in great detail:
To present artistically a human
personality in its full depth, its inner dialectic, its self-disclosure and
self-concealment, through the medium of a single character is almost
impossible. The convention of the soliloquy attempts to get around the
difficulty but it suffers from the disadvantage of being a convention; it presents, that is, what is really a dialogue
in the form of a monologue. When Hamlet soliloquizes, we hear a single voice
which is supposed to be addressed to himself but, in fact, is heard as
addressed to us, the audience, so that we suspect he is not disclosing to
himself what he conceals from others, but only disclosing to us what he thinks
it is good we should know, and at the same time concealing from us what he does
not choose to tell us.
A dialogue requires two voices, but, if it
is the inner dialogue of human personality that is to be expressed
artistically, the two characters employed to express it and the relationship
between them must be of a special kind. The pair must in certain aspects be
similar, i.e., they must be of the same sex, and in others, physical and
temperamental, polar opposites – identical twins will not do because they
inevitably raise the question, “Which is the real one?” – and they must be
inseparable, i.e., the relationship between them must be of a kind which is not
affected by the passage of time or the fluctuations of mood and passion, and
which makes it plausible that wherever one of them is, whatever he is doing,
the other should be there too. There is only one relationship which satisfies
all these conditions, that between master and personal servant.
It may be pointed out in conclusion that “Balaam and
His Ass” is the perfect “sequel” to “Hic et Ille”, another telling proof that the
order of the contents is carefully chosen and not without a sense of drama. After
all, the master-servant relationship is the next stage in character development
after the self-mirror. For my part, the best thing I can say about this essay
is that it has changed my next revisiting The
Tempest, King Lear, Don Giovanni and Tristan und Isolde. Even better than this, it has inspired me to
read for the first time Verne’s Fogg’s adventures and Goethe’s version of the
most famous, if not the most original, barter ever which has consigned
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to a nearly
complete oblivion.
“The Guilty Vicarage” and “The I
Without a Self” are the “disappointing” pieces in Part III. The quotation marks
are important for at least two reasons. First, the essays are disappointing
only by the sky-high standards of “Balaam and His Ass”, perhaps inevitably so
as they discuss somewhat less exalted subjects. Second, the disappointment is
at least partly due to my own failure of appreciation, for I am complete
stranger to detective fiction and Kafka respectively. Nevertheless, both pieces are entertaining and
stimulating. “The Guilty Vicarage”, which deals, among other things, with such
legendary detectives as Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French and Father Brown, is
an excellent companion piece to Maugham’s “The Decline and Fall of the
Detective Story”, which concentrates on the hard-boiled masters Hammett and
Chandler. As for Kafka’s disturbed mentality, Mr Auden makes an excellent case
that his works are worth checking out. I hope it won’t happen like D. H.
Lawrence and Fenimore Cooper in his, Auden’s, case.
For my money, The
Shakespearean City is the finest part of the book. Excluding the two
interludes and the postscript, because all of them are something of an
off-topic, the rest four essays range from masterpiece to supreme masterpiece.
“The Globe” is a perfectly fascinating comparative
analysis of Greek and Shakespearean drama. I must say Mr Auden does not inspire
me to do something about my profound ignorance of the former. He argues that
Elizabethan drama was “an attempt to synthesize [Greek tragedy and morality
plays] into a new, more complicated type.” More specifically, he opines that
there are three things – Time, Choice and Suffering – whose significance has
been greatly altered since ancient times. Only the first one do I find of
suspicious relevance. What does the time frame of a play really matter? Whether
the action is confined to the time of playing only, as in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or extends from the mythological past to the
distant future, as in Back to Methuselah,
a play must stand or fall because of more important matters than that. Choice
and Suffering fit the criteria:
In a Greek tragedy everything that could
have been otherwise has already happened before the play begins. It is true
that sometimes the chorus may warn the hero against a course of action, but it
is unthinkable that he should listen to them, for a Greek hero is what he is
and cannot change. […] But in an Elizabethan tragedy, in Othello, for example, there is no point before he actually murders
Desdemona when it would not have been possible for him to control his jealousy,
discover the truth, and convert the tragedy into comedy. Vice versa, there is
no point in a comedy like Two Gentleman
from Verona at which a wrong turning could not be taken and the conclusion
be tragic.
[…]
To the Greeks, suffering and misfortune
are signs of the displeasure of the gods and must therefore be accepted by men
as mysteriously just. One of the commonest kinds of suffering is to be
compelled to commit crimes, either unwittingly, like the patricide and incest
of Oedipus, or at the direct command of a god, like Orestes. These crimes are
not what we mean by sins because they are against, not with, the desire of the
criminal. But in Shakespeare, suffering and misfortune are not in themselves
proofs of Divine displeasure. It is true that they would not occur if man had
not fallen into sin, but, precisely because he has, suffering is an inescapable
element in life – there is no man who does not suffer – to be accepted, not as
just in itself, as a penalty proportionate to the particular sins of the
sufferer, but as an occasion for grace or as a process of purgation. Those who
try to refuse suffering not only fail to avoid it but are plunged deeper into
sin and suffering. Thus, the difference between the Shakespeare’s tragedies and
comedies is not that the characters suffer in the one and not in the other, but
that in comedy the suffering leads to self-knowledge, repentance, forgiveness,
love, and in tragedy it leads in the opposite direction into self-blindness,
defiance, hatred.
Mr Auden may not be especially inspiring about Greek
tragedy, but his insight into Shakespeare is unsurpassed. His note on the difference between
comedy and tragedy is a piece of priceless wisdom, and a very fine explanation
why the former is every bit as important a genre as the latter. The author goes
much farther than that. He starts with Dr Johnson’s famous remark that
Shakespeare’s tragedy “seems to be skill, his comedy instinct”, a somewhat
likely statement considering that the Bard’s early plays were predominantly
comedies; against this claim counts the fact that his best comedies and
tragedies were written, roughly, at the same time, at the turn of the
seventeenth century. In any case Mr Auden has another fish to fry. He contends
that, if Shakespeare excelled in comedies better than in tragedies, this is
because comedy gave him a greater scope to build upon the ancient limitations
within the limits of his own society. I admit I do not understand Mr Auden’s
first remark about Christian society that does not believe in the relation
between suffering and guilt (I should think it is exactly the opposite: no
other society cares more about it), but his reflections are hardly less interesting
for that:
It seems to me doubtful if a completely
satisfactory tragedy is possible within a Christian society which does not
believe that there is a necessary relation between suffering and guilt. The
dramatist, therefore, is faced with two choices. He can show a noble and
innocent character suffering exceptional misfortune, but then the effect will
be not tragic but pathetic. Or he can portray a sinner who by his sins –
usually the sins have to produce crimes – brings his suffering upon himself.
But, then, there is no such thing as a noble sinner, for to sin is precisely to
become ignoble. Both Shakespeare and Racine try to solve the problem in the
same way, by giving the sinner noble poetry to speak, but both of them must
have known in their heart of hearts that this was a conjuring trick. Any
journalist could tell the story of Oedipus or Hippolytus and it would be just
as tragic as when Sophocles or Euripides tells it. The difference would be only
that the journalist is incapable of providing Oedipus and Hippolytus with the
noble language which befits their tragedy, while Sophocles and Euripides, being
great poets, can.
But let a journalist tell the story of
Macbeth or Phedre and we shall immediately recognize them for what they are,
one a police court case, the other a pathological case. The poetry that
Shakespeare and Racine have given them is not an outward expression of their
noble natures, but a gorgeous robe that hides their nakedness.
This is taking a most unfair advantage of
Shakespeare. Admittedly, Macbeth is a
difficult tragedy to cope with, mostly because the protagonist is a criminal.
(For the same reason many do not consider Richard
III to be tragedy at all.) The Scottish general is obsessed with such
horrifyingly intense ambition, and already in the middle of the play he is so
much “in blood steeped”, that it’s not always easy to realize why one should
care for his downfall at all, let alone view it as a tragedy. On such grounds Macbeth may even be considered to be one
of Shakespeare’s “problem” or “unpleasant” plays. Yet it is surely one of the
most popular and best loved among all of his plays. What other reason could there
be for such reception but the fact that enormous number of people are able to
identify with Macbeth or his Lady?
(Well, there is at least one other
reason, but it’s so appalling that I don’t want to consider it at all. This is
the Hype Hypothesis. In simple words, this means that people do not identify
with Macbeth because they are not involved in the play at all: they are led by
the nose, and by the hype. Though I am pretty sure there are many such
biorobotic mannequins, politely but inaccurately called human beings, even I am
not cynical enough to propose that Macbeth’s evidently everlasting fame rests
on their moronic mentalities.)
Besides, Macbeth is quite an
exception among Shakespeare’s great tragic characters. One may find a lot to
dislike in Lear’s folly and wrath, Hamlet’s weird mixture of indecision and
impulsiveness, or Othello’s perplexing proclivities for self-aggrandizement and
self-humiliation, but none of them is even remotely as criminal as Macbeth. There is something inherently
noble in their natures, something that makes their suffering truly tragic, as
far removed from pathetic as possible. Mr Auden quotes complete the famous poem
of D. H. Lawrence about the triviality of Shakespeare’s characters and thinks
it is “not altogether unjust”. I think it tells much more about Lawrence’s
pathological bitterness than about Shakespeare’s characterization:
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
that such trivial people should muse and
thunder
in such lovely language.
Lear, the old buffer, you wonder his
daughters
didn't treat him rougher,
the old chough, the old chuffer!
And Hamlet, how boring, how boring to live
with,
so mean and self-conscious, blowing and
snoring
his wonderful speeches, full of other
folks' whoring!
And Macbeth and his Lady, who should have
been choring,
such suburban ambition, so messily goring
old Duncan with daggers!
How boring, how small Shakespeare's people
are!
Yet the language so lovely! like the dyes
from gas-tar.
At least it’s funny, if nothing else.
On the other hand, Mr Auden maintains that in
Christian society, due to its passion for sin and forgiveness, Shakespearean
comedy is greater in breadth and depth than the classical one. Since according to
Christianity all people are sinners, everybody can be subject of comedy, and
since punishment is largely substituted with forgiveness, the Christian comedy
ends with laughter both on the stage and in the audience; the classical one
ends with tears on the stage and laughter in the audience. Mr Auden finishes
with the startling statement that Shakespeare’s comedies are Christian, unlike
those of Ben Jonson which are classical. These passages will receive their
re-evaluation when I am better familiar with the Bard’s comedies.
Especially perceptive are several
passages about Shakespeare’s development, more specifically his apprenticeship
as a writer of chronicle plays. In short, the Bard was born in the right time,
when such plays could be produced in the theatre effectively, and the
exigencies of their complicated plots and ambiguous characters were invaluable
in his learning both the dramatist’s craft and the subtleties of human nature.
The longer version is, of course, the better one:
As a dramatic historian,
Shakespeare was born at just the right time. Later, changes in the conventions
and economics of the theatre made it an inadequate medium, and feigned
histories became the province of the novelist. Earlier, dramatic history would
have been impossible, because the only history which was recognized as such was
sacred history. The drama had to become secularized before any adequate
treatment of human history was possible.
[…]
The link between the
medieval morality play and the Elizabethan drama is the Chronicle play. If few
of the pre-Shakespearian chronicle plays except Marlowe’s Edward II are now readable, nothing could have been more fortunate
for Shakespeare’s development as a dramatist
than his being compelled for his livelihood – judging by his early
poems, his youthful taste was something much less coarse – to face the problems
which the chronicle plays poses. The writer of a historical play cannot, like
the Greek tragedians who had some significant myth as a subject, select his
situation; he has to take whatever history offers, those in which a character
is a victim of a situation and those in which he creates one. He can have no
narrow theory about aesthetic propriety which separates the tragic from the
comic, no theory of heroic arete
which can pick one historical character and reject another. The study of the
human individual involved in political action, and of the moral ambiguities in
which history abounds, checks any tendency towards a simple moralizing of
characters into good and bad, any equating of success and failure with virtue
and vice.
Mr Auden is no less enlightening in a
musical digression on Bernard Shaw. He summarises the style of the pugnacious
Irishman as “mixture of perspicacity and polemical exaggeration” – which may
well be the finest description of so complex a thing in so short a space. There is a fairly long
quote from Shaw’s 1898 preface to Mrs.
Warren’s Profession, one of his early “Plays Unpleasant”, which is such a
gem that is worth quoting in toto:
The drama can do little to
delight the senses: all the apparent instances to the contrary are instances of
the personal fascination of the performers. The drama of pure feeling is no longer
in the hands of the playwright: it has been conquered by the musician, after
whose enchantment all the verbal arts seem cold and tame. Romeo and Juliet with the loveliest Juliet is dry, tedious and
rhetorical in comparison with Wagner’s Tristan
und Isolde, even though Isolde be both fourteen stone and forty, as she
often is in Germany… There is, flatly, no future now for any drama without
music except the drama of thought. The attempts to produce genus of opera
without music (and this absurdity is what our fashionable theatres have been
driving at for a long time past without knowing it) is far less hopeful than my
own determination to accept problems as the normal material for drama.
At this point Mr Auden inserts a footnote which contains
brilliant insight into the musical quality of Shaw’s plays, in some aspects so
akin to opera. He finishes with these wise words which no admirer of Shaw can
afford to neglect:
For all his claims to be just a
propagandist, his writing has an effect nearer to that of music than most of
those who have claimed to be writing “dramas of feeling.” His plays are a joy
to watch, not because they purport to deal with social and political problems,
but because they are such wonderful displays of conspicuous waste; the conversational energy displayed by
his characters is so far in excess of what their situation requires that, if it
were to be devoted to practical action, it would wreck the world in five
minutes. The Mozart of English letters he is not – the music of the Marble
Statue is beyond him – the Rossini, yes. He has all the brio, humor, cruel
clarity and virtuosity of that master of opera buffa.
Life-long worshipper of Mozart and certainly not
devoid of keen appreciation of Rossini, Shaw would have agreed with this
estimation wholeheartedly. He would have been the first to admit that the finale
of Don Giovanni, ''beyond all
comparison the most wonderful of the wonders of dramatic music'' is his own
words, is indeed beyond him. Nothing to be ashamed of. It has been beyond quite
a few great composers.
Needless to say, Mr Auden completely disagrees with
Shaw. What a clash of titans! Achilles and Hector pale in comparison! In a
nutshell, the poet charges the dramatist with misunderstanding of their great
Elizabethan colleague as somebody only interested in the private and emotional
worlds of his characters, not enough concerned with thoughts, ideas and other such
niceties. Let Mr Auden explain the rest:
In actual fact, however, the revolt
of Ibsen and Shaw against the conventional nineteenth century drama could very
well be described as a return to Shakespeare, as an attempt once again to
present human beings in their historical and social setting and not, as
playwrights since the Restoration had done, either as wholly private or as
embodiments of the social manners of a tiny class. Shakespeare’s plays, it is
true, are not, in the Shavian sense, “dramas of thought,” that is to say, not
one of his characters is an intellectual: it is true, as Shaw says, that, when
stripped of their wonderful diction, the philosophical and moral views
expressed by his characters are commonplaces, but the number of people in any
generation or society whose thoughts are not commonplace is very small indeed. On
the other hand, there is hardly one of his plays which does not provide
unending food for thought, if one cares to think about it.
Last but not least, this essay is
remarkable because of some thoughts on Romeo
and Juliet, a play which Mr Auden seldom mentions and, so far as I can
remember, never discusses anywhere else in the book. He draws attention to the
neglected social background. The “star-crossed lovers” have become such a glorious
symbol of consuming passion, that they are often supposed to inhabit some
mythological setting of no importance. Unlike Tristan and Isolde, the
runners-up in the “Greatest Love Story” competition, they don’t:
Romeo and Juliet, for example, is by no means merely a “drama of
feeling,” a verbal opera about a love affair between two adolescents; it is
also, and more importantly, a portrait of a society, charming enough in many
ways, but morally inadequate because the only standard of value by which its
members regulate and judge their conduct is that of la bella or la brutta figura.
The disaster that overtakes the young lovers is one symptom of what is wrong
with Verona,
and every citizen, from Prince Escalus down to the starving apothecary, has a
share of responsibility for their deaths.
Though I do recognise the importance
of the social context, I don’t quite agree with its being more important than
the personal matters. Nor do I, at least for now, see the point of the figura-standard, but that is neither
here nor there. The passage will stay with me next time I am reading Romeo and Juliet.
“The Prince’s Dog” belongs to the huge
pile of “to-be-re-read-with-greater-profit-in-the-future” essays. The reason is
that it’s dedicated mostly to Falstaff, reportedly the greatest comic character
in literature, but one which
unfortunately I have yet to encounter personally. The same goes for other
characters – Richard II, Prince Hal – which are discussed in some detail in
this engrossing piece. For my part, the most fascinating passages are the musical
ones. Mr Auden, in his deliciously direct way, maintains that Falstaff has,
first, no place in Shakespeare’s history plays, and, second, he is out of place
even in his comedies, because he actually belongs to the world of opera buffa,
or rather to the one of Verdian music drama:
If it really was Queen Elizabeth who
demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive
critic. But even in The Merry Wives of
Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because
Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years
till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character
whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don
Giovanni.
Leaving aside the obvious century-slip in the years
(there are of course nearly three
hundred years between Shakespeare and Verdi), putting Falstaff in the exalted
company of Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni is yet another strong
recommendation to read those plays in which the “fat, cowardly tosspot”
appears. Verdi’s last work, called Falstaff
but based on The Merry Wives of Windsor,
has always been regarded as a “connoisseur’s piece”. In plain English this
means “not especially popular with the general audience, but highly esteemed by
the intellectuals”. Since I am not, never have been and in all probability
never will become, a connoisseur, this music drama is bound to remain outside
of my musical experience.
At the end of the above quote there is a most
interesting footnote which claims that the main reason why Verdi’s Macbetto “fails to come off” is that
“the proper world for Macbeth is poetry, not song; he won’t go into notes.” I
am not sure this is correct. The main reason for the failure is, I think, that
Verdi composed the opera much too early in his career, around 1847, that is
some forty years before he came to create Otello
and, six years later, Falstaff. True,
he did revise it as late as 1865, but not nearly as thoroughly as generally
presumed. Macbeth and his Lady may not be suitable for “song”, but opera is a
great deal more than that. It also includes, among other things, dramatic
recitatives and symphonic orchestra, both of great dramatic power. But the long
and very provocative subject of Mr Auden’s relations with opera will be
discussed later.
“Brothers and Others”, despite excessive and somewhat
tedious quoting of ecclesiastical authorities (including such luminaries as St.
Ambrose, St. Bernard of Siena, St. Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, Luther,
Deuteronomy), is a thought-provoking dissection of The Merchant of Venice. To begin with, Mr Auden offers a
provocative explanation why it should be regarded as one of Shakespeare’s
“Unpleasant Plays”, which I take puts it in the category of the so-called
(sometimes) “problem plays”, namely Measure
for Measure, All’s Well That Ends
Well and Troilus and Cressida,
none of which, alas, I have read so far. But after three readings and three
movie versions I know The Merchant
rather well. Mr Auden’s argument is compelling and certainly worth considering;
note also the important reference to the “Falstaffian” piece before:
In Henry IV,
Shakespeare intrudes Falstaff, who by nature belongs to the world of opera buffa, into the historical world
of political chronicle with which his existence is incompatible, and thereby, consciously or unconsciously,
achieves the effect of calling in question the values of military glory and
temporal justice embodied in Henry of Monmouth. In The Merchant of Venice he gives us a similar contrast – the
romantic fairy story world of Belmont is incompatible with the historical
reality of money-making Venice – but this time what is called in question is
the claim of Belmont to be the Great Good Place, the Earthly Paradise. Watching
Henry IV, we become convinced that
our aesthetic sympathy with Falstaff is a profounder vision than our ethical
judgment which must side with Hal. Watching The
Merchant of Venice, on the other hand, we are compelled to acknowledge that
the attraction we naturally feel towards Belmont
is highly questionable. On this account, I think The Merchant of Venice must be classed among Shakespeare’s “Unpleasant
Plays”.
Perhaps Mr Auden’s most revealing single sentence on The Merchant is that, if you remove
Shylock and Antonio, “the play becomes a romantic fairy tale like A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Though I
think this fairy-tale world is slightly more complex and ambiguous that the
author gives it credit for, he is definitely right that it is far less
problematic than Venice’s intensely mercantile
society – which, in turn, is a great deal more complicated, but also more
prosperous, than the feudal one in England of the history plays. Much
of the essay is indeed concerned with social issues, most notably with different
attitudes to usury; rather a dry subject, but one of paramount importance for
the plot. More interesting is Mr Auden’s decidedly pro-Shylock and anti-Antonio
case, which is almost – but not quite – the same as pro-Venice and
anti-Belmont. Significantly, he doesn’t go out of his way – as Harold Goddard
does – to make a noble hero out of Shylock, but he is quite convincing that
neither Antonio nor Portia, as symbols of the best Venice
and Belmont can
produce respectively, are any better than the Jew. In the process he also
supplies some revealing details about Shakespeare’s sources and what changes he
did introduce to them. A long quote will illustrate the point better than any
words of mine:
Had Shakespeare wished to show Shylock the
usurer in the most unfavorable light possible, he could have placed him in a
medieval agricultural society, when men become debtors through misfortunes,
like a bad harvest or sickness for which they are not responsible, but he
places him in a mercantile society, where the role played by money is a very
different one.
When Antonio says:
I neither lend nor borrow
By taking or by giving of excess
he does not mean that, if he goes into
partnership with another merchant contributing, say, a thousand ducats to their
venture, and their venture makes a profit, he only asks for a thousand ducats
back. He is a merchant and the Aristotelian argument that money is barren and
cannot breed money, which he advances to Shylock, is invalid in his own case.
[…]
Shylock is a Jew living in a predominantly
Christian society, just as Othello is a Negro living in a predominantly white
society. But, unlike Othello, Shylock rejects the Christian community as firmly
as it rejects him. Shylock and Antonio are at one in refusing to acknowledge a
common brotherhood.
[…]
In addition, unlike Othello, whose
profession of arms is socially honorable, Shylock is a professional usurer who,
like a prostitute, has a social function but is an outcast from the community.
But, in the play, he acts unprofessionally; he refuses to charge Antonio
interest and insists upon making their legal relation that of debtor and creditor,
a relation acknowledged as legal by all societies. Several critics have pointed
to analogies between the trial scene and the medieval Processus Belial in which Our Lady defends man against the
prosecuting Devil who claims the legal right to man’s soul. […] But the
differences between Shylock and Belial are as important as their similarities.
The comic Devil of the mystery play can appeal to logic, to the letter of the
law, but he cannot appeal to the heart or to the imagination, and Shakespeare
allows Shylock to do both. In his “Hath not a Jew eyes…” speech in Act III,
Scene I, he is permitted to appeal to the sense of human brotherhood, and in
the trial scene, he is allowed to argue, with a sly appeal to the fear a
merchant class has of radical social evolution:
You have among you many a purchased slave
Which like your asses and your dogs and
mules,
You use in abject and in slavish parts,
which points out that those who preach
mercy and brotherhood as universal obligations limit them in practice and are
prepared to treat certain classes of human beings as things.
Furthermore, while Belial is malevolent
without any cause except love of malevolence for its own sake, Shylock is
presented as a particular individual living in a particular kind of society at
a particular time in history. Usury, like prostitution, may corrupt the
character, but those who borrow upon usury, like those who visit brothels, have
their share of responsibility for this corruption and aggravate their guilt by
showing contempt for those whose services they make use of.
It is, surely, in order to emphasize this
point that, in the trial scene, Shakespeare introduces an element which is not
found in Pecorone or other versions
of the pound-of-flesh story. After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own
insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by
which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen forfeits
his goods and places his life at the Doge’s mercy. […] Shakespeare, it seems to
me, was willing to introduce what is an absurd implausibility for the sake of
an effect which he could not secure without it: at the last moment when,
through his conduct, Shylock has destroyed any sympathy we may have felt for him
earlier, we are reminded that, irrespective of his personal character, his
status is one of inferiority. A Jew is not regarded, even in law, as a brother.
[…]
Shylock is a miser and Antonio is
openhanded with his money; nevertheless, as a merchant, Antonio is equally a
member of an acquisitive society. He is trading with Tripoli,
the Indies, Mexico, England,
and when Salanio imagines himself in Antonio’s place, he describes a possible
shipwreck thus:
…the rocks
Scatter all her spices on the stream,
Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks.
The commodities, that is to say, in which
the Venetian merchant deals are not necessities but luxury goods, the
consumption of which is governed not by physical need but by psychological
values like social prestige, so that there can be no question of a Just Price.
[…]
Neither of them is capable of enjoying the
carefree happiness for which Belmont
stands. In a production of the play, a stage director is faced with the awkward
problem of what to do with Antonio in the last act. Shylock, the villain, has
been vanquished and will trouble Arcadia
no more, but, now that Bassanio is getting married, Antonio, the real hero of
the play, has no further dramatic function. According to the Arden edition, when Alan McKinnon produced
the play at the Garrick theatre in 1905, he had Antonio and Bassanio hold the
stage at the final curtain, but I cannot picture Portia, who is certainly no
Victorian doormat of a wife, allowing her bridegroom to let her enter the house
by herself. If Antonio is not to fade away into a nonentity, then the married
couples must enter the lighted house and leave Antonio standing alone on the
darkened stage, outside the Eden
from which, not by the choice of others, but by his own nature, he is excluded.
[…]
Portia we can admire because, having seen
her leave her Earthly Paradise to do a good deed in this world (one notices,
incidentally, that in this world she appears in disguise), we know that she is
aware of her wealth as a moral responsibility, but the other inhabitants of
Belmont, Bassanio, Gratiano, Lorenzo and Jessica, for all their beauty and
charm, appear as frivolous members of a leisure class, whose carefree life is
parasitic upon the labors of others, including usurers. When we learn that
Jessica has spent fourscore ducats of her father’s money in an evening and
bought a monkey with her mother’s ring, we cannot take this as a comic
punishment for Shylock’s sin of avarice; her behavior seems rather an example
of the opposite sin of conspicuous waste. Then, with the example in our minds
of self-sacrificing love as displayed by Antonio, while we can enjoy the verbal
felicity of the love duet between Lorenzo and Jessica, we cannot help noticing
that the pairs of lovers they recall, Troilus and Cressida, Aeneas and Dido,
Jason and Medea, are none of them examples of self-sacrifice or fidelity. […] Belmont would like to
believe that men and women are either good or bad by nature, but Antonio and
Shylock remind us that this is an illusion; in the real world, no hatred is
totally without justification, no love totally innocent.
I may add that Portia we can admire only until the
middle of the Trial Scene. Because of her bringing the law against Shylock’s
wealth and even against his life – even if we gloss over the fact that, since
Shylock is a Venetian, it’s a blatantly anti-Semitic law – she fails to confer
upon the Jew the very mercy she had been asking from him just a few minutes
earlier. How Christian! And what a powerful indictment against the good, old,
virtuous Belmont!
What’s more, in the same stupendous scene, it is Antonio who suggests
conversion to Christianity as part of Shylock’s punishment; and this, also, is
the final and perhaps most serious evidence against his sham saintliness. This
is the last nail in the Christian coffin so carefully prepared for the Jew.
Although Shylock does care for his daughter at least as much as Bassanio for
Portia, it is his wealth and his religion that are of the highest importance to
him. Portia and Antonio rob him from both.
Some think Shylock only gets what he deserves. I
think he is treated unjustly and with an abominable lack of charity. Against
the Christian background of both Venice and Belmont, he almost amounts
to a genuine tragic character. Almost. Mr Auden appears to express a qualified
agreement with this:
Recent history has made it utterly
impossible for the most unsophisticated and ignorant audience to ignore the
historical reality of the Jews and think of them as fairy-story bogeys with
huge noses and red wigs. An Elizabethan audience undoubtedly still could – very
few of them had seen a Jew – and, if Shakespeare had so wished, he could have
made Shylock grotesquely wicked like the Jew
of Malta. The star actors who, from the eighteenth century onwards have
chosen to play the role, have not done so out of a sense of moral duty in order
to combat anti-Semitism, but because their theatrical instinct told them that
the part, played seriously, not comically, offered them great opportunities.
Need I add that my first post-Auden read of The Merchant of Venice will be one with
a difference?
“The Joker in the Pack” is the superstar of Part IV. It
offers an interpretation of Othello –
or, to be more precise, of Iago’s notoriously tangled motivation – that is
extremely controversial yet uncommonly convincing. Only Isaac Asimov, so far as
I know, has had the audacity to express similar opinion about the malevolent Ancient.
This monumental piece opens with a shrewd and subtle
distinction between ”the villainous character”, such as Don John in Much Ado, Edmund in Lear, Richard III, Iago, of course, and perhaps Iachimo in Cymbeline, and “the merely criminal
character”, such as Antonio in The
Tempest, Angelo in Measure for Measure, Claudius in Hamlet and Macbeth. The explanation of
the profound difference between
them is best left in Mr Auden’s razor-sharp prose:
The criminal is a person who finds himself
in a situation where he is tempted to break the law and succumbs to the
temptation: he ought, of course, to have resisted the temptation, but
everybody, both on stage and in the audience, must admit that, had they been
placed in the same situation, they, too, would have been tempted. The
opportunities are exceptional – Prospero, immersed in his books, has left the
government of Milan to his brother, Angelo is in a position of absolute
authority, Claudius is the Queen’s lover, Macbeth is egged on by prophesies and
heaven-sent opportunities, but the desire for a dukedom or a crown or a chaste
and beautiful girl are desires which all can imagine themselves feeling.
The villain, on the other hand, is shown
from the beginning as being a malcontent, a person with a general grudge
against life and society. In most cases this is comprehensible because the
villain has, in fact, been wronged by Nature or Society: Richard III is a
hunchback, Don John and Edmund are bastards. What distinguishes their actions
from those of the criminal is that, even when they have something tangible to
gain, this is a secondary satisfaction; their primary satisfaction is the
infliction of suffering on others, or the exercise of power over others against
their will. Richard does not really desire Anne; what he enjoys is successfully
wooing a lady whose husband and father-in-law he has killed. Since he has
persuaded Gloucester that Edgar is a would-be
parricide, Edmund does not need to betray his father to Cornwall and Regan in order to inherit. Don
John has nothing personally to gain from ruining the happiness of Claudio and
Hero except the pleasure of seeing them unhappy.
Such a cornucopia of casual Shakespearean insight! This
is a hallmark of the truly great writers only. They mention just by the way, as
a kind of “digression”, things that hurl you into complete re-evaluation of
characters, scenes, even whole plays. Take as a fine example Mr Auden’s speculation
about Richard’s motives for wooing Anne. I have reached the same conclusion
myself, but I could never have put in the context of other villains that well.
Richard’s lack of desire for Anne was marvellously explored in the 1995
movie with Ian McKellen and Kristin
Scott Thomas. Now back to Iago and co.
This line of interpretation naturally leads to
Coleridge’s unjustly famous
“motiveless malignancy”. Unlike his famous predecessor, however, Mr Auden
endorses this explanation only to some extent. Moreover, he explains it better
and develops it further:
Coleridge’s description of Iago’s actions
as “motiveless malignancy” applies in some degree to all the Shakespearian
villains. The adjective motiveless
means, firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are clearly not the principal
motive, and, secondly, that the motive is not the desire for personal revenge
upon another for a personal injury. Iago himself proffers two reasons for wishing to
injure Othello and Cassio. He tells Roderigo that, in appointing Cassio to be
his lieutenant, Othello has treated him unjustly, in which conversation he
talks like the conventional Elizabethan malcontent. In his soliloquies with
himself, he refers to his suspicion that both Othello and Cassio have
made him a cuckold, and here he talks like the conventional jealous husband who
desires revenge. But there are, I believe, insuperable objections to taking
these reasons, as some critics have done, at their face value.
Bold, daring and audacious, but, as we shall see
presently, eminently well-argued and persuasive case. Mr Auden is quick to
recognise that, if Iago’s desire is to supplant Cassio, his plan is
thunderously unsuccessful. Othello’s “now thou art my lieutenant” in Act III,
Scene 3, surely doesn’t refer to the post itself but to the “private and
illegal delegation of authority”, namely the secret murder of Cassio. Mr
Auden’s arguments why Iago’s jealousy and lust for revenge shouldn’t be taken
seriously as motives are controversial, certainly, but I venture to suggest
that they are very well worth-considering:
As for Iago’s jealousy, one cannot believe
that a seriously jealous man could behave towards his wife as Iago behaves
towards Emilia, for the wife of a jealous husband is the first person to
suffer. Not only is the relation of Iago and Emilia, as we see it on stage, without
emotional tension, but also Emilia openly refers to a rumor of her infidelity
as something already disposed of.
Some such squire it was
That turned your wit, the seamy side
without
And made you to suspect me with the Moor.
At one point Iago states that, in order to
revenge himself on Othello, he will not rest till he is even with him, wife for wife, but, in
the play, no attempt at Desdemona’s seduction is made. Iago does not encourage
Cassio to make one, and he even prevents Roderigo from getting anywhere near her.
Finally, one who seriously desires
personal revenge desires to reveal himself. The revenger’s greatest
satisfaction is to be able to tell his victim to his face – “You thought you
were all-powerful and untouchable and could injure me with impunity. Now you see
that you were wrong. Perhaps you have forgotten what you did; let me have the
pleasure of reminding you.”
When at the end of the
play, Othello asks Iago in bewilderment why he has thus ensnared his soul and
body, if his real motive were revenge for having been cuckolded or unjustly
denied promotion, he could have said so, instead of refusing to explain.
This certainly makes sense of Iago’s enigmatic, not
to say ominous, last words: “Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: / From this time forth, I never
will speak word.”
Another highlight – in a piece that contains
virtually no “lowlights” – is Mr Auden’s penetrating analysis of the role of
Roderigo, a “headache” from a stage director’s point of view, an inconveneint
stage convention who neither speaks to nor is spoken to by anybody but Iago. Roderigo has
no analogue in Cinthio’s tale from which the Bard borrowed many elements. Iago
could easily do everything – tell Brabantio the bad news about his daughter,
provoke the drunken Cassio and later kill him – for which he relies on the
perfectly incompetent Roderigo. Why would Shakespeare introduce at all a
character who, in Mr Auden’s memorable words, “makes Iago as a plotter someone
devoid of ordinary common sense”? Quite a puzzle, isn’t it?
What’s more, again as pointed out by
Mr Auden of course, Iago has “the pleasure of making a timid conventional man
become aggressive and criminal.” This is an important detail which is quite often
overlooked. Roderigo may be a fool, but he is not, at least in the beginning,
an immoral person. Entirely under Iago’s influence, thanks to his constant
brainwashing, Roderigo becomes a would-be seducer of wives, a participant in
drunken brawls and, finally, a candidate-murderer of innocent man. Unlike
Iago’s using him as his “purse”, the transformation of Roderigo is, not just
immoral, but completely irrational. Iago has no grudge against him. In no way
does he profit from his moral degradation. One excellent explanation of this
conundrum leads us to the heart of the matter:
Why should Iago want to do
this to Roderigo? To me, the clue to this and to all Iago’s conduct is to be
found in Emilia’s comment when she picks up the handkerchief:
My wayward husband hath a
hundred times
Wooed me to steal it… what
he’ll do with it
Heaven knows, not I,
I nothing but to please
his fantasy.
As his wife, Emilia must
know Iago better than anybody else. She does not know, any more than the
others, that he is malevolent, but she does know that her husband is addicted
to practical jokes. What Shakespeare gives us in Iago is a portrait of a
practical joker of a peculiarly appalling kind, and perhaps the best way of
approaching the play is by a general consideration of the Practical Joker.
Mr Auden goes to a good deal of trouble
to explain the nature of the Practical Joker and his deeds; neatly enough,
these consist entirely of practical jokes. The matter is entirely serious,
however, and I couldn’t for the life of me put it in a better way than Mr Auden
did fifty years ago:
Practical jokes are a
demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of
nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not
always require a serious motive for deceiving another.
Two men, dressed as city
employees, block off a busy street and start digging it up. The traffic cop,
motorists and pedestrians assume that this familiar scene has a practical
explanation – a water main or an electric cable is being repaired – and make no
attempt to use the street. In fact, however, the two diggers are private
citizens in disguise who have no business there.
All practical jokes are
anti-social acts, but this does not necessarily mean that all practical jokes
are immoral. A moral practical joke exposes some flaw of society which is
hindrance to a real community or brotherhood. That it should be possible for
two private individuals to dig up a street without being stopped is a just
criticism of the impersonal life of a large city where most people are strangers
to each other, not brothers; in a village where all inhabitants know each other
personally, the deception would be impossible.
[…]
All practical jokes,
friendly, harmless or malevolent, involve deception, but not all deceptions are
practical jokes. The two men digging up the street, for example, might have
been two burglars who wished to recover some swag which they knew to be buried
there. But, in that case, having found what they were looking for, they would
have departed quietly and never been heard of again, whereas, if they are
practical jokers, they must reveal afterwards what they have done or the joke
will be lost. The practical joker must not only deceive but also, when he has
succeeded, unmask and reveal the truth to his victims. The satisfaction of the
practical joker is the look of astonishment on the faces of others when they
learn that all the time they were convinced that they were thinking and acting
on their own initiative, they were actually the puppets of another’s will.
Thus, though his jokes may be harmless in themselves and extremely funny, there
is something slightly sinister about every practical joker, for they betray him
as someone who likes to play God behind the scenes. […] The success of a
practical joker depends upon his accurate estimate of the weaknesses of others,
their ignorances, their social reflexes, their unquestioned presuppositions,
their obsessive desires, and even the most harmless practical joke is an
expression of the joker’s contempt for those he deceives.
The whole thing, as you could see,
started innocently enough: the example with the diggers is more suitable to
hidden camera show than to Iago. But then it developed, gradually yet
inexorably, into chilling stuff that fits our “honest hero” like a glove.
Better actually: like a skin. Mr Auden may, perhaps, be gently accused of
putting the cart before the horse, for his general description of the practical
joker is an almost too accurate portrait of Iago. But this doesn’t make his
reflections less relevant, especially when the Ancient is directly referred to
or even quoted:
But, in most cases, behind
the joker’s contempt for others lies something else, a feeling of
self-insufficiency, of a self lacking in authentic feelings and desires of its
own. The normal human being may have a fantastic notion of himself, but he
believes in it; he thinks he knows who he is and what he wants so that he
demands recognition by others of the value he puts upon himself and must inform
others of what he desires if they are to satisfy them.
But the self of the
practical joker is unrelated to his joke. He manipulates others but, when he
finally reveals his identity, his victims learn nothing about his nature, only
something about their own; they know how it was possible for them to be
deceived but not why he chose to deceive them. The only answer that any
practical joker can give to the question: “Why did you do this?” is Iago’s:
“Demand me nothing. What you know, you know.”
[…]
The practical joker despises
his victims, but at the same time he envies them because their desires, however
childish and mistaken, are real to them, whereas he has no desire which he can
call his own. His goal, to make game of others, makes his existence absolutely
dependent upon theirs; when he is alone, he is a nullity. Iago’s
self-description, I am not what I am,
is correct and the negation of the Divine I
am that I am. If the word motive is given its normal meaning of a positive
purpose of the self like sex, money, glory, etc., then the practical joker is
without motive. Yet the professional practical joker is certainly driven, like
a gambler, to his activity, but the drive is negative, a fear of lacking
concrete self, of being nobody.
Among the many things that make Mr
Auden’s treatment of Iago unique is The Scientific Connection. (This sounds
almost like “The French Connection”. Remember this cool 1971 noir masterpiece
with Gene Hackman?) This is, to my prejudiced mind, well-nigh spellbinding. It
has completely revolutionised my perception of Iago’s character. I consider it
a fortunate coincidence – well, as I have mentioned many, many paragraphs ago,
it wasn’t exactly a coincidence – that my first readings of Othello happened at the same time as those
of “The Joker in the Pack”. The whole play opened like a giant box full of
presents. It was an amazing experience. Unfortunately, it was next to
impossible to re-capture it, and it’s happened but seldom with other works;
it’s a fortuitous event indeed. Anyway, towards the end of his essay Mr Auden launches
The Scientific Connection (my term, of course, not his) and somewhat abridged
it sounds like this:
As Nietzsche said,
experimental science is the last flower of asceticism. The investigator must discard
all his feelings, hopes and fears as a human person and reduce himself to a
disembodied observer of events upon which he passes no value judgment. Iago is
an ascetic. “Love” he says, “is merely a lust of the blood, and a permission of
the will.”
[…]
Iago’s treatment of
Othello conforms to Bacon’s definition of scientific enquiry as putting Nature
to the Question. If a member of the audience were to interrupt the play and ask
him: “What are you doing?” could not Iago answer with a boyish giggle, “Nothing.
I’m only trying to find out what Othello is really like”? And we must admit
that his experiment is highly successful. By the end of the play he does know
the scientific truth about the object to which he has reduced Othello. That is
what makes his parting shot, “What you know, you know,” so terrifying for, by
then, Othello has become a thing, incapable of knowing anything.
And why shouldn’t Iago do
this? After all, he has certainly acquired knowledge. What makes it impossible
for us to condemn him self-righteously is that, in our culture, we have all
accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. […] We
are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an
uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe
that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to realize that
correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical
imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, “What can I know?” we ask,
“What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” – to entertain the possibility that
the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge we can live up to
– that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral. But, in that case, who are
we to say to Iago – “No, you mustn’t.”
Indeed! Iago is an epitome of the what is generally
called “basic research”. I don’t think anybody has ever described it more
eloquently than Homer Adkins (1892 – 1949): “Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the
air and, where it lands, painting a target.” Iago explores a previously
uncharted field and without any preliminary data. He has, at best, a vague idea
of the final results, and certianly no way to predict them. At the same time,
his impartiality and objectivity, not to mention intelligence and common sense,
are in themselves admirable qualities, indispensable for every scientist and
not to be despised in the rest of mankind. By no means are they enough to live a full life! But
it is nonetheless obligatory to have them, and to cultivate them, if we are not
to descend to the level of our ape ancestors.
Mr Auden’s tremendous investigation of Iago’s
multifarious mind, bringing out psychological, social and philosophical issues
many Shakesperean scholars have never thought of, is one of the finest tributes
to his unique mind and superb pen in the whole book.
Though Iago is the prima donna of the
essay, and Mr Auden never lets you forget this, his comments on the other
characters are pointed, racy, funny and scarcely less insightful. Consider several
arrows shot through the hearts of Cassio and Desdemona:
Cassio is a ladies’ man,
that is to say, a man who feels most at home in feminine company where his
looks and good manners make him popular, but is ill at ease in the company of
his own sex because he is unsure of his own masculinity.
[…]
Cassio is a ladies’ man,
not a seducer. With women of his own class, what he enjoys is socialized
eroticism; he would be frightened of a serious personal passion. For physical
sex he goes to prostitutes and when, unexpectedly, Bianca falls in love with
him, like many of his kind, he behaves like a cad and brags of his conquest to
others.
[One cannot but appreciate Iago’s
judgment of Cassio. It is stunningly accurate. It will be remembered that Iago
provokes him to boast about his affair with Bianca in the hidden presence of
Othello who makes all the wrong conclusions. Now let’s strangle Desdemona in
print. Mr Auden’s hands are every bit as powerful as Othello’s:]
Everybody must pity
Desdemona, but I cannot bring myself to like her. Her determination to marry
Othello – it was she who virtually did the proposing – seems the romantic crush
of a silly schoolgirl rather than a mature affection; it is Othello’s adventures,
so unlike the civilian life she knows, which captivate her rather than Othello
as a person. He may not have practiced witchcraft, but, in fact, she is spellbound.
Then, she seems more aware
than is agreeable of the honor she has done Othello by becoming his wife.
[…]
Before Cassio speaks to
her, she has already discussed him with her husband and learned that he is to
be reinstated as soon as it is opportune. A sensible wife would have told
Cassio this and left matters alone. In continuing to badger Othello, she
betrays a desire to prove to herself and to Cassio that she can make her
husband do as she pleases.
[…]
Though her relationship
with Cassio is perfectly innocent, one cannot but share Iago’s doubts as to the
durability of the marriage. It is worth noting that, in the willow-song scene
with Emilia, she speaks with admiration of Ludovico and then turns to the topic
of adultery. Of course, she discusses this in general terms and is shocked by
Emilia’s attitude, but she does discuss the subject and she does listen to what
Emilia has to say about husbands and wives. It is as if she had suddenly
realized that she had made a mésalliance
and that the sort of man she ought to have married was someone of her own class
and color like Ludovico. Given a few more years of Othello and of Emilia’s
influence and she might well, one feels, have taken a lover.
I completely concur – except for the
first sentence. I cannot bring myself to pity Desdemona because I intensely
dislike her nagging submissiveness. All the same, I must admit that I have recently
developed certain respect for her deceptively weak character and mighty manipulative
powers.
Othello, of course, also enjoys a
wealth of Audenesque insights. These include intriguing parallels with jealous
husbands from Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale as well as with the
social ostracism of Shylock (yes, it pays to know “Brothers and Others” in
advance). For my part, his best shot is the one on the nature of Othello’s love
for Desdemona, yet another moment in this play epically suitable for
conflicting interpretations. (Come to think of it, Othello may well be as full of these as Hamlet, the golden standard in the “genre”.) Mr Auden bets on the
spiritual side and, if I may add, so do I:
If Othello had simply been
jealous of the feelings for Cassio he imagined Desdemona to have, he would have
been sane enough, guilty at worst of a lack of trust in his wife. But Othello
is not merely jealous of feelings which might exist; he demands proof of an act
which could not have taken place, and the effect on him of believing in this
physical impossibility goes far beyond wishing to kill her: it is not only his
wife who has betrayed him but the whole universe; life has become meaningless,
his occupation is gone.
This reaction might be
expected if Othello and Desdemona were a pair like Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra
whose love was an all-absorbing Tristan-Isolde kind of passion, but Shakespeare
takes care to inform us that it was not.
When Othello asks leave to
take Desdemona with him to Cyprus, he stresses the spiritual element in his
love:
I therefore beg it not
To please the palate of my
appetite
Nor to comply with heat,
the young affects
In me defunct, and proper
satisfaction,
But to be free and
bounteous in her mind.
Though the imagery in
which he expresses his jealousy is sexual – what other kind of images could he
use? – Othello’s marriage is important to him less as a sexual relationship
than as a symbol of being loved and accepted as a person, a brother in the
Venetian community. The monster in his own mind too hideous to be shown is the
fear he has so far repressed that he is only valued for his social usefulness
to the City. But for his occupation, he would be treated as a black barbarian.
A little earlier, while analysing the
scene with the Venetian Senate, Mr Auden makes the significant remark that the
rest of the senators do share Brabantio’s negative attitude. The reason for
their not expressing it openly is sheer hypocrisy, additionally stimulated by
their astute judgment of the current situation. The danger of the Turkish fleet
is imminent and far from negligible. Venice needs Othello’s military prowess
here and now. So it’s much better not to offend him, but, on the contrary,
rather defend him against Brabantio’s invective. The thought of Venice using
Othello like that for many years, praising his abilities as a warrior but never
really admitting him into the inner circle of Venetian nobility, is among the
most disturbing consequences of the play (and Mr Auden’s writing, of course).
Now that Mr Auden has mentioned betrayal
by the whole universe and the meaninglessness of life – so wonderfully
expressed in Othello’s words (to himself): “If she be false, O, then heaven
mocks itself!” (III.3.) – he made me think about the profound pessimism of
Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth. They all, for one reason or another, reach similar
conclusions, though the intensity and the details may differ greatly. It has sometimes
been suggested – by musicologist Deryck Cooke, for example – that among the
“Big Four” Othello alone lacks a
metaphysical dimension, a deeper meaning beyond the domestic tragedy. Well,
this may not be the case. Indeed, if Mr Auden’s conclusions in this essay, or
at any rate most of them, are accepted, the metaphysical superficiality of Othello can no longer be sustained.
Not that I agree with everything in “The Joker in the
Pack”. Indeed, I may disagree with Mr Auden more often than I have indicated so
far, or will indicate later. As a rule, only the more productive disagreements
are mentioned. There are several here as well.
For example, I don’t understand why one of Iago’s
goals should be self-destruction. I wish Mr Auden had elaborated a little bit more
on that. One of his chief reasons seems to be Roderigo’s part which, as already
mentioned, is redundant and endagers Iago’s plots rather than help them. But I
think this is pretty tenuous. Perfectly plausible reason for Roderigo’s awkward
meddling with the plot, including the greater danger, is that he makes it much
more exciting. Not only Shakespeare, but Iago as well, no mean dramatist
himself, would hardly fail to appreciate this. It is true that once the Moor
and Desdemona are destroyed Iago would be out of job, but I don’t see what
prevents him from finding another occupation. There is, certainly, no need to
postulate that he aims at “nothingness” and suffers from suicidal inclinations.
I am inclined to think that in this case Mr Auden extrapolated – or rather the
reverse, what is the opposite of extrapolation? Intrapolation? – a little too
much from his general description of the professional practical joker.
I don’t agree with his musical
connection, either, no matter how fascinating it seems at first glance. At one
place the author suggests a highly contentious link with Otello, namely that Iago’s “I am not what I am” receives its
“proper explanation” is the “Credo” from Act II of Verdi’s music drama. Mr
Auden quotes an abridged version of Boito’s text which omits the central part,
but retains the essence:
Credo in un Dio crudel che m'ha
creato
Simile a se, e che
nell'ira io nomo.
Dalla viltà d'un germe o
d'un atomo
Vile son nato,
Son scellerato
Perchè son uomo:
E sento il fango
originario in me
E credo l'uom gioco
d'iniqua sorte
Dal germe della culla
Al verme dell'avel.
Vien dopo tanto irrision
la Morte.
E poi? La Morte è il
Nulla.
In the 1993 translation by Avril
Bardoni for DECCA this becomes:
I believe in a cruel God
who created me in his own
image
and who in fury I name.
From the very vileness of
a germ
or an atom, vile was I
born.
I am wretch because I am a
man,
and I feel within me the
primeval slime.
And I believe man the
sport of evil fate
from the germ to the
cradle
to the worm of the grave.
After all this mockery
then comes Death.
And then?... And then?
Death is nothingness
To my mind, this is more far-fetched
than convincing. Such self-consciousness makes Iago look like something dangerously
close to caricature. Who can take so blatant a villain seriously? Despite
Verdi’s extraordinary music, this “Credo” always leaves me disappointed –
especially after I became familiar with Shakespeare’s vastly superior original.
Nowhere in the play does Iago refer to his being vile, and I am pretty sure he
doesn’t think he is. Much less does he mention sheer nonsense like “evil fate”
or “cruel God”. This counts very much to Shakespeare’s credit.
I can’t say I agree with Mr Auden
that “it cannot be said that the practical joker satisfies any concrete desire
of his nature”. Iago sure does. He certainly derives enormous pleasure from his
practical jokes. This is no mean desire, indeed it is the most important one.
Iago may well be seen as the supreme hedonist. That his pleasures are
antisocial and misanthropic, that is another story. The main point remains
valid.
Nor do I agree that those who deal with the play
“must be primarily occupied, not with its official hero but with its villain”. It
may be true that “all the deeds are
Iago’s” (Mr Auden’s emphasis), and he does have plenty of soliloquies, but
Othello is every bit as complex and vividly drawn as the villain of Venice. True, he is a
little short on soliloquies, but all
of his scenes, above all those with the Venetian senate, Iago and Desdemona,
are as powerful as anything ever put on the page or the stage. If people in
general are more concerned with Iago, this is because they are more Iago-like
themselves. Such nobility and honesty as Othello’s is indeed rare in this
world, far rarer than his gullibility which often, and unjustly, takes the
upper hand.
By the way, to finish where we started, in the
beginning of the essay Mr Auden gives an excellent reason why he concentrates
on Iago. I don’t quite agree, as I don’t see why, if one does feel compassion
for Othello, it should outweigh the aesthetic respect one is compelled to have
for Iago. But I do see his point, and he is certainly stimulating about the
peculiar one-man-show nature of this tragedy, although it is simply not true to
say that Iago is the sole agent of the fall from grace. He can always count on
Othello’s collaboration.
In most tragedies the fall of the hero
from glory to misery and death is the work, either of the gods, or of his own
freely chosen acts, or, more commonly, a mixture of both. But the fall of
Othello is the work of another human being; nothing he says or does originates
with himself. In consequence we feel pity for him but no respect; our aesthetic
respect is reserved for Iago.
Modern Shakespearean scholars don’t seem to take Mr Auden very
seriously. They seldom mention him in their “Further Reading” sections,
especially when they firmly disagree with him. Kenneth Muir has, in the New Penguin
edition of Othello, made an
impressive case that professional envy and personal jealousy are perfectly
plausible motives for Iago’s vile machinations. Nevertheless, the omission of
“The Joker in the Pack” is to my mind a serious fault in Mr Muir’s suggested
reading. On the other hand, Peter Holland, in the current Penguin Shakespeare edition of The Merchant
of Venice, does mention “Brothers and Others, calling it “typically
intriguing and quirky” and even mentioning The
Dyer’s Hand as its first publication in book form. Other Shakespearean
colleagues of his should follow the example.
Parts V and VI, Two Bestiaries and Americana,
I have found slightly less compelling. Not even Mr Auden, mighty inspirational
force though he is, can make me take seriously a cheap misanthrope like D. H.
Lawrence. He was not much more successful with Marianne Moore and Robert Frost,
or indeed American poetry in general. Nevertheless, as always, Mr Auden is generous
his with stimulating asides. The essay on D. H. Lawrence, for instance,
contains some fascinating bits about Walt Whitman, who had a beneficial
influence on no other English poet but this one according to the author, or
about the difficulty of assessing the merit of artists who are also prophets
with a message, like Lawrence and Blake (Bernard Shaw is another example, I
think). The same essay also contains this gem of comparison of formal and free
verse to art and religion:
The difference between formal and free
verse may be likened to the difference between carving and modelling; the
formal poet, that is to say, thinks of the poem he is writing as something
already latent in the language which he has to reveal, while the free verse
poet thinks of language as a plastic passive medium upon which he imposes his
artistic conception. One might also say that, in their attitude towards art,
the formal verse writer is a catholic, the free verse writer a protestant.
It is unlikely that “The American Scene” or “Red Ribbon on a
White Horse” would make me read the eponymous books by Henry James and Anzia
Yezierska, respectively. But the essays contain some absorbing “digressions”.
Two of them in particular, though ostensibly related to a certain period of
American (and European) history, strike me as timeless enough to note.
The travel ramblings of Henry James, as pompous as anything if
Mr Auden’s quotes are representative, give an ample opportunity to indulge in
some Euro-American contrasts. Chief among these is the rather deep question to
what extent America is right to reject the “romanitas”
on which the Old World was firmly built. Mr Auden defines the fundamental
proposition of romanitas as virtue
prior to liberty; the opposite, “which is not peculiar to America and would
probably not be accepted by many Americans, but for which this country has
come, symbolically, to stand, is that liberty is prior to virtue”. I have a
feeling that Mr Auden is more in favour of romanitas
than its rejection, but his position is subtler and more complex than I,
assuming I understand it correctly, can explain here. It is full of everything
from epigrammatic wisdom (“liberty is not a value but the ground of value”) to
positively seditious statements. Among the latter I found especially memorable
democratic snobbery and racial prejudice in America. The ambiguous relationship
between equality and liberty, not to mention of both with virtue, is a mighty
problem that every society at any time must cope with.
An America which does not realize the
difference between equality and liberty is in danger, for, start with equality
in order to arrive at liberty and the moment you come to a situation where
inequality is or seems to you, rightly or wrongly, a stubborn fact, you will
come to grief. For instance, the unequal distribution of intellectual gifts is
a fact; since they refuse to face it, the institutions of Higher Learning in
America cannot decide whether they are to be Liberal Arts College for the
exceptional few or vocational schools for the average many, and so fail to do
their duty by either. On the other, more sinister, hand, the Southerner,
rightly or wrongly, believes that the Negro is his inferior; by putting
equality before liberty, he then refuses him the most elementary human
liberties, for example, the educational and economic liberties that are the
only means by which the Negro could possibly become the equal of the white, so
that the latter can never be proven mistaken.
The essay on Anzia Yezierska, a Polish Jew who became an
American novelist (Red Ribbon on a White
Horse was her autobiography, published in 1950), goes into some detail
about another fundamental question which is even more independent of space and
time. This is the creative block that, at one time or another, affects even the
greatest artist, but if widespread and constant enough it may lead to sterility
on a national level. Never one to mince words or be afraid of expressing
unpopular opinions, Mr Auden bluntly states that this is happening in America
more often than anywhere else in the world. He considers the reason to be the “dominance
of the competitive spirit in the American ethos.” Would-be writers, and
would-be artists in general, would do well to consider carefully his argument:
The writer who allows himself to
become infected by the competitive spirit proper to the production of material
goods so that, instead of trying to write his
book, he tries to write one which is better than somebody else’s book is in
danger of trying to write the absolute masterpiece which will eliminate all
competition once and for all and, since this task is totally unreal, his
creative powers cannot relate to it, and the result is sterility.
Both essays have significant postscripts. They contain some of
Mr Auden’s most beautifully condensed arguments and deserve a few words on
their own.
“Rome v. Monticello”, as the title implies, is concerned with
the battle between the Roman and the Liberal outlook. Mr Auden agrees with the
obvious, namely that neither system is entirely correct because both “represent
an abstraction from historical reality”, but he then goes on to apply this commendably
balanced attitude to education. He reaches the somewhat startling, yet
convincing, conclusion that “progressive education is tending to carry its
distaste for conditioning and authority into a sphere where it is fundamental,
and threatening to produce a generation which may not think mechanically but
only because it cannot think at all; it has never learned how.” In short,
education should be more Roman and less Liberal.
“The Almighty Dollar”, again, looks with fresh eyes on a
hackneyed problem, in this case the different attitude to money in Europe and
America. Europeans value money because it brings power and freedom, and
consequently they try to make themselves just as rich as they try to make
others poor. In simple words, European riches are based on the exploitation of
the masses for the sake of aristocratic (or plutocratic) dominance. For
Americans making money is an end in itself and chiefly based on exploitation of
the land. The chief fault of Americans is supposed to be avarice. But Mr Auden
disagrees:
What an American values, therefore, is
not the possession of money as such, but his power to make it as a proof of his
manhood; once he has proved himself by making it, it has served its function
and it can be lost or given away. In no society in history have rich men given
away so large a part of their fortunes. A poor American feels guilty at being
poor, but less guilty than an American rentier
who has inherited wealth but is doing nothing to increase it; what can the
latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis?
In the Fifth circle on the Mount of
Purgatory, I do not think that many Americans will be found among the
Avaricious; but I suspect the Prodigals may be almost an American colony. The
great vice of Americans is not materialism but a lack of respect for matter.
The Shield of Perseus begins with a somewhat haphazard “Notes on the Comic”, most of them rather
obvious and rather dry. The only point I found worth remembering is why it’s
impossible to parody a writer you don’t admire. Because, Mr Auden observes, “in
the case of an author one dislikes, his own work will seem a better parody than
one could hope to write oneself.”
“Dingley Dell & The Fleet” and “Genius & Apostle” are
the longest pieces here. The first, as you might guess by the title, deals mostly
with Mr Pickwick’s fall from innocence. But Mr Auden is nothing if not far-reaching
and wide-ranging. He has a good deal to say about Don Quixote as well, for this
is another mythical (i.e. independent of his social milieu) character who loses
his innocence, only this happens with the return of his sanity, not through a
scrape with the law as in Mr Pickwick’s case. But I didn’t feel compelled to
pick up either work immediately.
Much more fascinating are Mr Auden’s philosophical reflections
on games and playing (less so on Edens and New Jerusalems). He means this in
purely philosophical sense; he certainly doesn’t mean professional sport.
Games, in Mr Auden’s stimulating theory, are an attempt to regain our lost
innocence, a closed system with its own rules that gives an intense and
absolute pleasure unrelated to anything outside it. Let Mr Auden explain;
paraphrasing his prose is like recomposing Chopin:
In a game the pleasure of playing, of
exercising skill, takes precedence over the pleasure of winning. If this were
not so, if victory were the real goal, a skillful player would prefer to have an
unskillful one as his opponent, but only those to whom, like cardsharpers, a
game is not a game but a livelihood, prefer this. In the game world the
pleasure of victory is the pleasure of just
winning. The game world, therefore, is an innocent world because the ethical
judgment good-or-bad does not apply to it; a good game means a game at the
conclusion of which all the players, whether winners or losers, can truthfully
say that they have enjoyed themselves, a point which is made by the Little Man’s
speech after the cricket match between Dingley Dell and Muggleton.
There is, of course, nothing wrong and much right with all
this. The problem arises when vital human activities – vital at least in our
perverse world – like law and politics become a form of game. Then the
situation becomes vicious indeed. Mr Auden illustrates both cases with
quotations from Dickens, but his disturbing conclusion completely transcends
time and place. Think how often even today in presumably civilised communities “the
ethical judgment guilty-or-not-guilty” is arrived at by means of “aesthetic
verbal combat between a prosecuting and a defending counsel”. A good lawyer is
not a lawyer who causes justice to be done but one who wins his cases. The more
hopeless the odds, the better the lawyer who wins against them! And yet such
odds are more likely to arise when the client is guilty than when he is
innocent. Can anything more perverse be imagined?
“Genius & Apostle” is mostly concerned with the plays of
Ibsen, Peer Gynt and Brand to be exact (although the tedious
Knight again appears in the end), but Mr Auden’s general reflections again
proved more interesting, if less convincing this time. The difference between
genius and apostle, the author argues, is that the first feels internal
compulsion to express himself, while the second is compelled from the outside, by
God as it were. So far, so good; one can easily imagine a genius who considers
his gifts God-given or a secular apostle who preaches from inner conviction,
but let that pass. However, Mr Auden claims that in the case of genius the
worldly recognition of his works is “an objective test” for his value, yet the
number of converts an apostle makes is not. This sounds strange to me. Jesus
may have joked about his Father and all that stuff, but it hardly matters since
the Gospels were written and a whole new religion founded anyway.
The postscripts to both essays are, as usual, meaty pieces,
never mind whether you agree with Mr Auden’s rather startling conclusions. “The
Frivolous & The Earnest” reaches a curious conclusion indeed, namely that there
are only two “intrinsically serious” occupations and these are unskilled manual
labour and the priesthood. All other professions do require, in one degree or
another, some talent and are therefore inherently, to various degrees,
frivolous. They are partly “game”, yet life itself is never a game because in
it “the loser’s score is always zero”. You can be only a spectator in a game,
but you can’t in life: you have to play. “Christianity & Art” is a rather
dystopian discussion about our modern, secular and materialistic society in
which genuine art cannot exist except in the company of “vast quantities of
phony or vulgar trash.” A man of remarkable intellectual honesty, Mr Auden
argues that “religious materialism” is no real improvement, because the artist
not only loses his personal identity at the expense of the official orthodoxy,
but he also loses his “sacred importance”: he is nothing but a hired
propagandist. Granted some oversimplification, these reflections are worthy of
some thought.
Another highlight of this part, for me, was the discourse on
Byron’s Don Juan. When I started The Dyer’s Hand, I knew little about
Byron and had read nothing of his works. When I finished it, I had read Byron’s
poetical works almost complete and knew the notorious poet better than I know
myself. I read the essay twice, once before and once after I read Don Juan. In the first case, it was a
major reason to complete the Byron canon; in the second it proved a fertile
ground for agreements and disagreements, mostly the latter.
It must be said that Mr Auden was not terribly well qualified
to write about Byron. He was evidently a fan, otherwise he would not have
bothered to write such a lovely “Letter to Byron” (1936,
1967), but he is also on
record that he finds Childe Harold
(1812-18) and the Turkish Tales (1813-14) “unreadable”. If this is not suspicious
enough, he also said only three of Byron’s poems, Beppo (1818), The Vision of
Judgement (1822) and Don Juan
(1818-24), were of “major importance”. He is only slightly more generous in
this essay:
Take away the poems he wrote in this
style and meter [ottava rima], Beppo, The Vision of Judgment, Don Juan, and what is left of lasting
value? A few lyrics, though none of them is as good as the best of Moore’s, two
adequate satires though inferior to Dryden or Pope, “Darkness,” a fine piece of
blank verse marred by some false sentiment, a few charming occasional pieces,
half a dozen stanzas from Childe Harold,
half a dozen lines from Cain, and
that is all.
This is, to say the least, not serious. The four cantos of Childe Harold contain altogether 510
stanzas. And only half a dozen are “of lasting value”? The three acts of Cain contain altogether 1794 lines. And
only half a dozen are worthy? This seems to me incredible. I should think that
either these works contain higher percentage of worthiness or they are
completely worthless.
Mr Auden has more to say about Byron in general than Don Juan in particular. About the latter
his only point I found worthy of some reflection is that it is not a satire but
a comedy. The difference between them is lucidly explained: “both make use of
the comic contradiction, but their aims are different. Satire would arouse in
readers the desire to act so that the contradictions disappear; comedy would
persuade them to accept the contradictions with good humor as facts of life
against which it is useless to rebel.” Now, this is interesting. For the rest,
all Mr Auden has to say is that Byron’s Don Juan is essentially passive,
disappointingly un-promiscuous and has nothing to do with the Hell-defying
libertine from Mozart’s opera. All this is quite obvious to anybody who takes
care to read even a single canto from the poem.
About Byron in general Mr Auden is generally ridiculous. He
agrees with Goethe that Byron is intellectually childish. He denies him the
ability to write “Poetry with capital P, to express deep emotions and profound
thoughts.” He is way too much influenced by poetic form. “The artistic failure
of Childe Harold is due in large
measure to Byron’s disastrous choice of the Spenserian stanza.” Really! Not
surprisingly, all three poems Mr Auden deigns to confer his approval upon were
written in ottava rima (on which he
spends inordinate amount of space, including a stanza from Tasso in the
original Italian). Mr Auden even writes, amazingly, that Byron’s “visual
descriptions of scenery and architecture are not particularly vivid, nor are
his portrayal of states of mind particularly profound”. Sorry, Wystan, I beg to
differ on all counts. We evidently read different poets.
To my mind, Mr Auden was evidently taken in by Byron. The
latter may well have written to Moore, in 1817, that literature is “nothing;
and it may seem odd enough to say I do not think it is my vocation”, but his
mammoth oeuvre tells another story. Byron lived to write, simple as that, and
his writings, though of course uneven, are remarkably consistent in their
probing of human nature. Mr Auden assumes, on no ground at all but his
beginning to use ottava rima, that
around 1818, with Beppo and Don Juan, Byron turned himself from a mediocre
poet into a great one, from one for whom literature was pastime to one for whom
it was vocation. This doesn’t seem credible to me at all.
Mr Auden finely says that Byron was “really a comedian, not a
satirist”, which is a reasonable simplification, but from this he seems to
infer that Byron never wrote anything serious, or at least anything serious of
any value. To me this is nonsense. Byron’s tragedies in blank verse alone are
enough to disprove it. As for Byron’s prodigious humour, I should say the truth
is precisely the opposite. He was never more serious than when he was in the
comic vein. Don Juan, ironically
enough, is the greatest example of this. Byron is a proof that those states of
man in which he is “amused and amusing, detached and irreverent” are by no
means “less important”, as Mr Auden simplistically thought, than earnest
passions. Indeed, I would reverse this argument.
Homage to Igor Stravinsky is the part where I most often find
myself in sharp disagreement with Mr Auden. It would be idle to pretend that I
have found his reflections on music and opera anywhere near as compelling and
illuminating as those on literature.
But I am pleased to report that Mr
Auden is evidently a great opera fan. This is not so often the case among great
writers, or if it is they sure keep silent about it; with the obvious
exception of Bernard Shaw, I can’t recall another notable writer of fiction who
was that fascinated with opera. It is strange, however, that Mr Auden virtually
never mentions anything about lieder. I should have expected that he, as a
poet, would be rather fonder of a genre in which, by common agreement, great
music is more often allied to great poetry than it is in opera. Rather to the
contrary, Mr Auden is the first writer in my experience who takes seriously the
libretto of Mozart’s last opera, Die
Zauberflöte, the classic example of inane and incoherent text set to
glorious music. Well, as it turned out, it’s not quite as inane and incoherent
as it seems.
Nevertheless, there are certain
points in “Notes on Music and Opera” which I cannot but disagree with. Most
notable among them is the following passage:
The paradox implicit in
all drama, namely, that emotions and situations which in real life would be sad
or painful are on the stage a source of pleasure becomes, in opera, quite
explicit. The singer may be playing the role of a deserted bride who is about
to kill herself, but we feel quite certain as we listen that not only we, but
also she, is having a wonderful time. In a sense, there can be no tragic opera
because whatever errors the characters make and whatever they suffer, they are
doing exactly what they wish.
This is one of the very few places in
the book where Mr Auden comes dangerously close to writing pure nonsense, especially
the claim that “in a sense, there can be no tragic opera”. What sense does that
make? By the same logic there can be no such thing as tragic art, including
theatre and literature. Whether one accepts the artist as a superior craftsman
or as an inspired superman, all artists are “doing exactly what they wish”. Surely
Mr Auden didn’t expect the soprano singing Violeta to drop dead in the end of La Traviata? Or a fine production of Hamlet to be crowned with four corpses
on the stage? To dismiss in this way any relevance to the tragic part of our
existence which art might have is, to put it mildly, high-handed. But let’s
take Mr Auden at his word and see if his claim can be justified specifically
about opera. To begin with, I wonder about his operatic experience.
I am told that since 1939 Mr Auden
lived mostly in America, yet
spent a great deal of time in Europe also, and
died as late as 1973. This means that he lived through some glorious for the art
of opera times. During the 1950s and the 1960s he must have had ample
opportunity to attend performances which are today treasured as the golden
standard and which, though they may possibly have been surpassed in the early
twentieth century, have never been equaled ever since. I wonder if he ever saw
and heard Boris Christoff as Philip II and Boris Godunov, Maria Callas and Tito
Gobbi as Tosca and Scarpia, or Mario del Monaco as Otello. If he did, he should
have known that tragedy does have a place on the opera stage.
Also in the above passage, Mr Auden greatly
exaggerates the pleasure of opera. Of course he does have a point. Everybody
who has ever sung a single note – on the opera stage or under the shower, no
matter – would hardly deny that there is a distinct sensual element in singing.
It is indeed undeniable. It is the same kind of physical exhilaration that
sport gives you. But singing improves considerably on that because, if you are at
least a little sensitive to music (not all singers are!), you can add to the
physical sensation the all-important emotional response. Please note that this
is an entirely different phenomenon that the purely physical response akin to
sport. This is something psychological, aesthetic, or spiritual if you like.
Since opera is by far the most strenuous form of singing, and there are
numerous passages of great beauty and/or dramatic impact, it would seem that Mr
Auden’s point is a valid one after all. I don’t think it is, but to make my point a short digression is necessary
here.
“Opera” is a vague term that covers
vast diversity of musical works for the stage. Some operas consist of separate
musical numbers and spoken dialogues in between that have nothing to do with
singing (hence described in German as Singspiel).
The classic example is Mozart’s Zauberflöte
(1791), but it is often forgotten that the original version of Bizet’s Carmen, composed nearly a century later,
was very similar in construction. Mozart’s “Italian” operas have the so-called
“secco recitatives” instead, something between singing and speech but closer to
the latter. During the nineteenth century recitatives became more and more
elaborate until they finally gave rise of the Wagnerian music drama; Verdi’s
last two works and Puccini’s most famous “operas” are music dramas in all but
name. Even among many “conventional” operas there are numerous subtle
differences: the vocal feast from the mature works of the bel canto masters
(Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti) is a very different animal than the middle Verdi
(Rigoletto, La Traviata and Il Trovatore),
not to mention his later works, where the music is servant to the drama, not
vice versa.
The best I can say is that Mr Auden
carried the art of generalization a little too far. It cannot be denied that
the vocal splendour of the bel canto masters – or even the early Verdi on
occasion – is often at the expense of both physical and psychological drama. In
this case it is indeed difficult to take opera seriously, as an art form
capable of saying anything significant about the human condition, for the
singers quite obviously relish singing their heads off even when their
characters are broken-hearted or dying. But this is not the whole of opera.
Take as an example Violetta, “La
Traviata” (“The Fallen Woman”) from Verdi’s eponymous masterpiece, so
mind-numbingly famous that it is seldom appreciated as the great tragedy it
actually is. The contrast between “Sempre libera”, her brilliant first-act cabaletta
that reflects the frivolous and superficial lifestyle as a party-loving courtesan
immune to any serious relationship, and “Addio del passato” from the last act,
a poignant tribute to her mature and meaningful happiness with Alfredo, cannot
have been greater; it is so great that very few sopranos have ever been able to
do equal justice to both arias. But the characterisation is nonetheless
masterful for that. I believe such characters and such music do have a genuine
tragic import and they do say something profound about ourselves that we ought
to know.
This is but one example. It can
easily be multiplied: Rigoletto, Tosca and Cavaradossi, Butterfly, Otello, Wotan,
Philip II, Boris Godunov, all these are tragic characters of superb
accomplishment. The same degree of importance, though in a very different way,
is true of the great comic characters in opera: Figaro, Falstaff, even Don
Giovanni and Hans Sachs, both of whom defy completely such shallow labels. The
fact that there are and have always been singers who degrade these parts in the
name of self-indulgent and show-stopping display, or that a distressingly
large proportion of the people who attend opera and buy recordings have no idea
what it’s all about, is by no means an argument against the art itself. It is
against the artists and the public. But that’s another story.
Another note of Mr Auden’s which
leaves me nearly speechless is his preposterous comparison of Puccini’s two
most famous works. It is not the comparison per se that I object to, although
it is pretty pointless, but Mr Auden’s argumentation for thinking as he does:
Again, I find La Boheme inferior to Tosca, not because its music is
inferior, but because the characters, Mimi in particular, are too passive;
there is an awkward gap between the resolution with which they sing and the
resolution with which they act.
Such statement shows an almost complete lack of understanding
what opera is all about. La Boheme is
a meltingly lyrical piece of drama, exclusively concerned with the love story –
and the inevitable conflicts – between Mimi and Rodolfo, two completely
ordinary creatures from the bohemian quarters of Paris. It is unimaginably
different than the brutal and violent world of Tosca, which exists against a well-defined political background and
in which the main conflict – note the difference! – is not between Tosca and
Cavaradossi, but between both of them and the villain Scarpia. Of course the
characters in La Boheme would be more
passive. But I for one do not sense any “awkward gap” between their music and
their feelings. To the contrary, they support one another marvellously. Those
two operas, instead of being victims of such comparisons, should be used as a
fine illustration of Puccini’s amazing versatility, something he is seldom
given credit for.
All that said, there are moments in
“Notes on Music and Opera” as full of Audensque wisdom as anything in The Dyer’s Hand. These include an
epigraph from Goethe which is just about the finest description of dramma per musica in a single sentence:
“Opera consists of significant situations in artificially arranged sequence.”
This hits the bullseye! People who are never tired of telling you how
improbable and inane opera really is are actually missing the point in a grand
style. I hasten to add that I have been guilty of this crime myself; but this
was in my distant youth only. The first thing to do in order to appreciate
opera is to accept its stupendous artificiality. This is merely the
entertainment package consciously designed by composer and librettist. When you
open it, there are inside many “significant situations”. Goethe well knew what
he was talking about.
The deliciously titled “Cav & Pag” deals with the two most
famous one-act operas in the standard repertoire: Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. It is very pleasant to read
something by somebody who takes these operas seriously. Too often they are dismissed
as lurid melodramas, gorgeously set to music of course, but irrelevant to life
as we live it. Mr Auden would have none of this high-handed nonsense. He
discovers all sorts of dark depths under the melodramatic surface. Jealousy is
an unfortunately timeless theme, after all. In any case, whether you enjoy the
philosophical discussion on naturalism and verismo
or the fascinating background how Giovanni Verga turned Santuzza into a
sympathetic wronged woman when he dramatised his own story for Duse, this is
the kind of essay that, even if it’s not among Mr Auden’s best, still makes you
look with fresh eyes on the old warhorses.
“Translating Opera Libretti” tends to be a little too
technical for my taste, making liberal use of cryptic stuff like iambic rhythms
and anapaestic quatrains, but it does contain some thought-provoking points. Messrs
Auden and Kallman made singing translations of three librettos in two
languages, Mozart-Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni,
Mozart-Schikaneder’s Die Zauberflöte
and the Weill-Brecht ballet chanté Die
sieben Todsünden. They make the strange claim that opera in translation is
justified on television because every word there can be heard, as opposed to a
live performance where only one in ten can (wrong on both counts), but they frankly
admit they did it because it was a fascinating exercise and well paid. It was
educational, too:
Any one who attempts to translate from
one tongue into another will know moods of despair when he feels he is wasting
his time upon an impossible task but, irrespective of success or failure, the
mere attempt may teach a writer much about his own language which he would find
it hard to learn elsewhere. Nothing can more naturally correct our tendency to
take our language for granted. Translating compels us to notice its
idiosyncrasies and limitations, it makes us more attentive to the sound of what
we write and, at the same time, if we are inclined to fall into it, will cure
us of the heresy that poetry is a kind of music in which the relation of vowels
and consonants have an absolute value, irrespective of the meaning of the words.
The authors predictably cover a good deal of ground in
remarkably small space. They start with some obvious points about vowels, syllables
and musical intervals, but they quickly switch to deeper matters like rhetorical
traditions in different languages. For instance, rhyming is much more common in
Italian and sounds natural even in tender or solemn pieces. But in English it
tends to be comical. When the Statue rebukes Don Giovanni at the graveyard with
“Ribalde, audace / Lascia’l morti in pace”, it is rightly observed that “here
any rhyme in English will sound absurd.” Italian libretti are chock-full with
passionate exclamations like Traditore!,
Scelerato!, Sventurato!, etc., and these are impossible to translate into
English because, for one thing, “most of our interjections are one or two
syllables long” and, for another, they are “mostly employed in slanging matches
between schoolboys or taxicab drivers.” They have to be exchanged with
declarative statements. For example, Traditore!
(“Vile seducer”) becomes something like “You have betrayed me!” This difference
alone tells you as much as anything about the temperamental differences between
Southern and Northern Europeans.
The section on arias is especially gripping. Messrs Auden and
Kallman make no bones that here, because arias as a rule are the high points of
the opera (musically, at least) and concerned with emotions rather than with
the action, the translator is justified in being much freer, including important
changes in the characterisation. To my mind, this is indefensible meddling, but
the authors consider it quite defensible in pre-Wagnerian and pre-middle-Verdian
times when composers, as a rule, didn’t work all that closely with their
librettists. Two of their examples, both from Don Giovanni, would illustrate perfectly what they mean.
Don Ottavio’s aria “Dalla sua pace”, one of
the most beautiful moments in the whole opera, goes like this:
Dalla sua pace
La mia dipende,
Quelche’al lei piace
Vita mi rende,
Quel che l’incresce
Morte mi da.
S’ella sospira,
Sospir’ anchio;
E mia quell’ira,
Qu’e pianto è mio,
E non ho bene,
S’ella non l’ha.
Which literally means: “Upon her peace / my peace depends /
what pleases her / grants me life / and what saddens her / gives me death. If
she sighs / I also sigh / mine is her anger / and her grief is mine / I have no
joy / if she has none.”
Messrs Auden and Kallman consider it “a bit distasteful” that
Don Ottavio should be so self-absorbed. She mustn’t be unhappy because it makes
him unhappy, indeed! No English male would
stoop so low in his protestations of love. Furthermore, the text contains the
same idea repeated, but Mozart gave the second stanza a completely different
musical setting. Therefore, our intrepid translators tried to supply “a lyric
which should be a) more concrete in diction, b) make Ottavio think more about
Donna Anna than himself, and c) less repetitive.” Their solution was the
following:
Shine, Lights of Heaven,
Guardians immortal,
Shine on my true love,
Waking or sleeping,
Sun, moon and starlight,
Comfort her woe.
O nimble breezes,
O stately waters
Obey a lover
Proclaim her beauty
And sing her praises
Where’er you go.
(da
capo)
When grief beclouds her,
I walk in shadow,
My thoughts are with her,
Waking or sleeping;
Sun, moon or starlight
Comfort her woe.
Donna Anna’s great scene towards the
end, just before the finale, goes like this:
Recitative:
Crudele? Ah no, mia bene. Troppo mi spiace
allontanarti un ben che lungamente la nostra
alma desia... Ma il mondo... o Dio! Abbastanza
per te mi parla amore. Non sedur la constanza
del sensibil mio core.
Cavatina:
Non mi dir, bell’idol mio,
Che son io crudel con te;
Tu ben sai quant’io t’amai,
Tu conosci la mia fè,
Tu conosci la mia fè.
Calma, calm’il tuo tormento,
Se di duol non vuoi ch’io mora,
Non vuoi chi’o mora
Non mi dir, bell’idol mio,
Che son io crudel con te;
Calma, calm’il, etc....
Cabaletta:
Forsè, forsè un giorn’il cielo
Sentirà pietà di me.
Which literally means [recitative]: “Cruel? O no, my dear. Too
much it grieves me to withhold from you a joy that for a long time our soul
desires. But, the world... O God! Do not weaken the constancy of my suffering heart.
Sufficiently for you Love speaks to me. [Cavatina & cabaletta:] Do not tell
me, my dearest dear / That I am cruel to you; / You know well how much I love
you, / You know my fidelity, / Calm your torment / If you do not wish me to die
of grief. / Perhaps, one day, Heaven / Will take pity on me.”
Messrs Auden and Kallman, appalled at the “appalling banality”
of Da Ponte’s words which make Donna Anna “very unsympathetic”, set out to fix
that. So they wrote a virtually new text, dragging in some moon imagery from
the Graveyard Scene where the Don remarks it is a cloudless night with a full
moon, or other words to that effect. So this Donna Anna serenades the Moon,
rather than talking to Don Ottavio, and “effective use might be made of the
Neoplatonic contrast between the music of the spheres which her “spiritual” ear
catches from the moon and the carnal music of this world as represented by the
supper music.” Our vigilant translators changed the stage direction from “a
darkened room” to one flooded with moonlight, and wrote:
Recitative:
Disdain you, Hear me, my dearest! None
can foretell what the rising sun may bring, a day of sorrow or a day of
rejoicing. But, hear me! Remember, when the jealous misgivings of a lover beset
you, all the stars shall fall down ‘ere I forget you!
Cavatina:
Let yonder moon, chaste eye of heaven
Cool desire and calm your soul;
May the bright stars their patience
lend you
As their constellations roll,
Turn, turn, turn about the Pole.
Far, too far they seem from our dying.
Cold we call them to our sighing;
We, too proud, too evil-minded,
By sin are blinded.
See, how bright the moon shines
yonder,
Silent witness to all our wrong:
Ah! but hearken! O blessed wonder!
Out of silence comes a music,
And I can hear her song.
Cabaletta:
“God will surely, surely wipe away thy
tears my daughter,
O thy dark His light shall break.
God is watching thee, hath not
forgotten thee,
On thy dark His light shall break.”
God will heed me, sustain me, console
me.
On my dark His light shall break.
Traduttore, traditore! Words of wisdom! Good or bad, musical or not, these verses
present a different Don Ottavio and a different Donna Anna. That’s for sure. Do
these characters suit better Mozart’s music? I don’t think so. Are the
Auden-Kallman words less banal than Da Ponte’s original? Hardly!
“Music in Shakespeare” is an exhaustive discourse of just that
and really belongs to Part IV. In this fine coda, Mr Auden certainly lives up
to his fame as one of the most perceptive Shakespearean commentators. Consider
a few examples that will, I promise, make you pay more attention to the songs
in Shakespeare’s plays.
Much Ado About Nothing, Act II, Scene 3, Balthazar sings “Sigh no more, ladies” to
Don Pedro, Claudio and Benedick (in hiding). Mr Auden thinks, and I agree, that
it is not too far-fetched to suggest that the song “arouses in Benedick’s mind
an image of Beatrice, the tenderness of which alarms him.” His reaction
afterwards is suspiciously violent, and the song’s lyrics, dealing with the irresponsibility
of men and the folly of women who take them seriously and recommending good
humour and common sense as an antidote, suite the character of Beatrice to
perfection. As for Claudio, music for him is merely an excuse for lovesick
daydreaming: “as yet he is less a lover than a man in love with love. Hero is
as yet more an image in his own mind than a real person, and such images are
susceptible to every suggestion.” As always with Auden on Shakespeare, he is
generous with his casual insight into the characters. Consider this brief but
penetrating analysis of “the war of the sexes” to end all such wars:
Beatrice and Benedick resist each
other because, being both proud and intelligent, they do not wish to be the
helpless slaves of emotion or, worse, to become what they have often observed
in others, the victims of an imaginary passion.
As You Like It, Act II, Scene 5, Amiens sings to Jacques “Under the
greenwood tree”. This is a brilliant stroke of Shakespearean irony, but it
needs a solid knowledge of the historical background to appreciate it. We’ve
been told Jacques is a sour individual, perpetually unsatisfied with the world,
always ready to start a discord; a man, in fact, with no music in him. Earthly
music in Shakespearean time was considered, at best, a crude approximation of
the celestial music of the spheres, which is made in Heaven by unfallen
creatures and therefore perfect, so an unmusical person is automatically
suspicious; he smacks of devilish discord (there is no music in Hell, only the
most discordant din imaginable). But we find Jacques enjoying greatly the song.
There is, indeed, music in him. Mr Auden concludes with another startling
insight. Jacques is the only person in the play who in the end “chooses to
leave his wealth and ease”. This is because he is the only one “whom the carnal
music of this world cannot satisfy, because he desires to hear the unheard
music of the spheres.”
Mr Auden gives plenty of other examples how knowledge about
music in Shakespeare’s time can increase your appreciation of his plays.
Consider the recognition scene in Pericles
(Act V, Scene 1). This would make no sense if you are not familiar with “the
music of the spheres” and what it implies. Even the Clown’s little joke in Othello (Act III, Scene 1) that “to hear
music the general does not greatly care” becomes ominous in this context. Mr
Auden concludes with The Tempest, a
play which held a special place for him and one which certainly doesn’t end,
like the other late romances, “in a blaze of joy – the wrongers repent, the
wronged forgive, the earthly music is the true reflection of the heavenly.” But
here Prospero spoils everything. He is “more like the Duke in Measure for Measure than any other
Shakespearean character”, he dispenses justice not because it is more
harmonious but because it is more powerful, and he is finally a man “who longs
for a place where silence shall be all.” There is no music in him either, much
less anything like even the crudest approximation of the music of the spheres.
But there is plenty of music in The Dyer’s Hand. There is plenty of everything in this stupendous
book. It is one of the very, very few volumes which everybody should read.
Othello (1990)
Othello (1995)
