NARNIAN SENTIMENTALITY?

Trailing clouds of glory do we come...

                                                                    Wordsworth

 

In interviews on children’s literature, two prestigious children’s authors have given their verdicts on The Chronicles of Narnia.  Philip Pullman expressed his loathing: “I hate them with deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling away.”   J K Rowling, by contrast, expressed her admiration; though sharing with Pullman the observation that Lewis had a sentimental view of children.

            I find this an odd adjective to use about a writer who believed in the reality of The Fall.  Sentimental views of children, in my experience, tend to derive – one sees it in educational theory – from adaptations of Rousseau: children are born good, but are corrupted by their social environment.   By contrast, for a subscriber to the doctrine of the fallen human condition, children are affected by The Fall no less than adults: though constrained, generally, by lack of power.  This view is not negated by Christ’s dictum of becoming like a little child.  The implication of Christ’s words seems to be that believers should be dependent on God as children are dependent on their parents.  Nowhere does Christ make the suggestion that children are without sin. 

            The children in Narnia are not a particularly pleasant bunch, and even the best of them – Lucy – has her very-human failings.  In The Magician’s Nephew, Polly and Diggory squabble and bicker, and Diggory make the foolish decision to strike the bell that awakens Jadis the Witch.  He tries to excuse this later by stating he was a bit bewitched at the time, until Aslan forces him to admit that the choice was all his own.  In Lion, Edmund bullies Lucy and betrays his siblings.   Lewis is sometimes damned – especially by those who have never read Surprised by Joy, or even, possibly, Narnia – as an upholder in the Chronicles of the public-school system. Far from lauding schooldays as the happiest time of one’s life, “that horrid school” is seen as the reason that Edmund first began to go wrong. 

            In The Horse and his Boy, Shasta and Aravis – class is an issue – score points against each other.  Aravis callously frames her servant, who is flogged as a result.  Shasta had once thrown stones at a cat.  Both Aravis and Shasta are punished by Aslan in proportion to their crime.  Susan, in Prince Caspian, behaves towards Lucy with realistic sisterly bitchiness; and Lucy – the one closest to Aslan and the first to see the direction in which he wants them to go – is overruled in her perceptions by her older siblings.  In Susan, we see the early signs of apostasy.   The Telmarine school – and Lewis, after all, has been unfairly compared in his educational attitudes to Frank Richards, creator of Billy Bunter – is boring, sterile and joyless.  Eustace, in Dawn Treader, is the unpleasant product both of educational methods that Lewis loathed and of a misguided upbringing.  These in addition to being a fallen being, until this trio of misfortunes is “undragoned" by Aslan.   In the same book Lucy, via a spell, listens in to a conversation between two of her schoolfellows.  Lucy’s best friend betrays her; but only because the friend – “‘She is weak, but she loves you. ’”  –  is afraid of the other girl. 

            Experiment House’s belief in the inherent goodness of children means, in The Silver Chair, that bullies are seen as “interesting psychological cases”.  But their victims are also flawed.  In the process of showing off her head for heights, Jill Pole sends Eustace over the cliff.  The children squabble with each other in a manner reminiscent of Polly and Diggory, forget the signs that Aslan has given them, and allow themselves to be diverted into Harfang Castle. 

            Only in The Last Battle are children favourably depicted throughout, and even then the apostasy of Susan, now an adult, is confirmed.  Overall, the depiction of children in the Chronicles is as unsentimental and unsparing as the depiction of the disciples in the Gospels. 

 

I think, however – and one must treat the views of an author who has captured the devotion of a whole generation of children with due respect – that Rowling does have a point.  An undoubtedly-sentimental view of children – prevalent among the Victorians, but probably impossible since Freud – was the belief that, as part of their innocence, they were without sexual awareness.  If this is what Rowling means by Lewis’ sentimentality, then there is a case to answer.  Certainly – especially in The Goblet of Fire – she explores adolescent emotional tensions much better than Lewis does: who does not, in fact, explore them at all. 

            Rowling then, it seems to me, is both right and wrong about Narnia.  It is true that boy-girl romantic tensions are missing, and that this absence is an arguable weakness in the series.   But it is not true that the absence is because of a sentimental view about childhood sexuality.  Rather, it was an area that Lewis – who had read his Freud – acknowledged, but chose not to visit. 

 

THE TWO CITIES

When I read A Tale of Two Cities as a teenager, had anyone asked me the meaning of the title I would have smiled at the oddity of the question.   Surely it was obvious?  The two cities were London and Paris, with a contrast between the right way of doing things (British reform) and the wrong way of doing things (French revolution).  The significance of ‘city’ in the paragraph that follows, bypassed me completely:

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way

across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him,

a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance.  In the fair city of

this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon

him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope  that

sparkled in his sight.  A moment, and it was gone.  (Chapter 5: ‘The Jackal).

 

            A Tale of Two Cities is not one of my favourite Dickens novels.  Sydney Carton is of interest to me primarily as precursor of the far more powerfully-achieved Eugene Wrayburn of Our Mutual Friend, and there is a child death that far exceeds in mawkishness anything in The Old Curiosity Shop. And the idea contained within the above extract seems to me to be more successful than the way in which it is expressed.   Indeed, whether or not there are two cities, there are certainly two novels within this one book:  one marked by poverty of execution (if that is not an unfortunate word in the context of the guillotine), and the other by magnificence of thematic conception.   I read the first early in life, and have only slowly come to see the significance of the second: the great potential that – like Sydney Carton’s life – might have been and never was.   

           

Let me dispose at once of my initial misreading.  British society, as depicted in A Tale of Two Cities is not markedly better than French society.  Barnaby Rudge dealt with the Gordon Riots of 1780: an event within a decade of the French Revolution that could have escalated into something comparable, and Dickens retained a horror of the power of the British mob.  The second chapter of Cities – ‘The Mail’ – creates an atmosphere of darkness, suspicion and general lawlessness.  The legal system in the novel is as arcane as in Bleak House, and far more overtly savage: but for Carton, Darnay would have been found guilty and subjected to barbaric punishment.  At the burial of the spy, Roger Cly, the mob  takes control.  It remains good humoured – it is allowed, by and large,  to do what it wants – but it could have turned nasty.

 Given all this, and the ferocious social metaphors in Dickens’ later novels – fog, prison bars, dust heaps – British society and French have little to choose between them: both are in desperate need of transformation.

            Paris and London, then, are not the cities of the novel, but simply two of the many other contrasts within it.

 

In the De Civitate Dei  of Saint Augustine there is another pair of  contrasted cities: the Earthly and the Heavenly.  But the Heavenly City is not simply the one you go to when you die.  Both ‘cities’ are active in the world and in this life: manifesting themselves in two contrasting models of behaviour.  Dante, although a Thomist, draws on this idea for the afterlife. The Inferno is a city in conflict with itself; The Paradiso, a city in harmony.

            Consciously or otherwise, Dickens also copies this model.  A Tale of Two Cities has contrast built into its structure.  Darnay and Carton (physical) and Madame Defarge and Miss Pross (character) are  images of each other.  When Madame Defarge and Miss Pross struggle together, culminating in the death of the former, Dickens describes it as the battle between hate and love.  Extend this analogy to society as a whole and you have two ‘cities’ that are neither London nor Paris, but two approaches to changing the fabric of society: violence, or the change of heart.  You can get rid of Monseigneur by assassinating him – in which case he will come back in a new form – or you can get rid of him permanently by changing him into Charles Darnay: who voluntarily renounces his privileges.  

           

Dickens has been seen simplistically as a social reformer whose function as a novelist was to attack specific contemporary social abuses.  But, even on such a reductive view, some of the targets he attacked were already in decline.  Dickens, as most careful readers of his work have perceived, was concerned less with the abuse itself than with the condition of the human heart that had allowed the abuse to arise in the first place.  Bleak House, for instance, is anachronistic; it is difficult to decide when exactly it is meant to be set.  And that sort of blurring is part of the intention: Tulkinghorn is  as timeless as the Law in The Book of Romans.  Dickens is not simply attacking the British legal system at a particular point in its history, but an inhuman legalism that could arise at any place in any age: the principle of the law creating work for itself and, in the process, of “making hay of the grass which is flesh”.

Citing Dickens as belonging to the ‘change of heart’ school, George Orwell says of him: “His whole ’message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently, the world would be decent.”

            This may, indeed, may be the only real solution for society’s ills, but it is a solution only if people act on it.  As long as there are significant numbers who wish to remain – or become – Monseigneur rather than to become Darnay, or who follow the way of Madame Defarge rather than of Miss Pross, then the good society can never be more than partially achieved. And if life in this world is to be always and forever flawed, then there is a temptation to look to the life beyond.  Hence – in what is Dickens’ most overtly-religious novel – the theme of resurrection: Jerry Cruncher as the stealer of corpses; and Carton, musing on the way to the scaffold.

            The pseudonym ‘Evrémonde’ is significant in this regard as well.  It recalls the medieval play Everyman, particularly by its mingling of English and French within the same word.  In the course of his journey, Everyman abandons his companions the Senses.  All that are left are his Good Works to take with him into the next life: which is where they will achieve their greatest significance.

            It seems to me – although I would not press the point – that there is probably another pilgrimage invoked as Carton makes his final journey.  Bunyan’s landscape may be in the background as Carton focuses on the Heavenly City, and turns away from  the City of Destruction.

 

Again I would not wish to press the point, but it seems to me that there is one more contrast implied by Carton’s vision quoted at the beginning of this essay.  Even if I am reading things that are not there, I feel that Dickens might have approved: given the sense of longing in the novel for social justice.

            In the Book of Revelation – another work with contrasts inherent in the structure –  Babylon, the type of all earthly cities, is destroyed.  The heavenly Jerusalem survives.  The river of the water of life flows down the middle of this city’s street, and within its walls is the tree of life; with leaves for the healing of the nations.  

RICHMAL CROMPTON AND THE PHARISEES

I sang in my chains.

                                                          Dylan Thomas

 

I have never been an unqualified admirer of the William books.  There are too many stories, and only so many situations in which a perennial eleven year old can find himself.  An element of tired repetition creeps in.  And the formula that worked for 1922 is uneasy in the era after World War Two.  There is an uncertainty about William in the modern world, and in the later books – for me, at least - the series loses its direction.

Crompton, also, was the victim of her own success.  The William series began life as books for adults about children.  Popularity turned them into books for children about children.  It is in these stories that the false note is most consistently struck: when William’s contrived stupidity and destructiveness  lead the reader – this reader anyway – into sympathy for the unoffending victims whose lives have been disrupted or whose property has been damaged.  Quantity becomes the ruin of quality.

But the quality is there: in Crompton’s oeuvre, it is well worth extracting the metal from the ore.  And in the best of the stories – those written for adults in the period between the wars – there is gold to be found.  In this world of Bolshevism and butlers, bohemians and Bands of Hope, there is vivid characterisation, acute social observation, acid wit, writing of a very high order, and a timeless message.

 

A striking feature about William is how far he is drawn to those outside his own social class: even, sometimes, to tramps and burglars.  He eagerly gives the earless and shifty Mr Blank (‘William’s Burglar’) the details of all the properties in the neighbourhood, including descriptions of the doors and windows of his own house.  Other heroes are the sweep, and the removal men (‘The Fête – and Fortune’) who swear at each other and give him a piece of cold sausage.  When William swaps clothes with Helbert, the gipsy boy, (‘William’s Extra Day’) William feels gratitude; although Helbert has by far the better deal. 

Taken to London (‘William’s Evening Out’), he responds with contempt to middle-class streets and shops.  What he yearns for is the glimpse he has had of “...a world of street urchins who fought  and wrestled and gave vent to piercing whistles., and hung on to the backs of carts, and paddled in the gutter, and rang front door bells and fled from policemen.”  

William’s choices – rejected by his family - for his Christmas party include the milkman, and Fisty Green the butcher’s boy.  Encountering Eglantine, the cockney chimney sweep’s daughter in ‘Not Much’, William is “blissfully happy walking along beside her.”

            When it comes to females, however, it is not simply the case that William is drawn only to the working class.   William likes – and is liked by - females with a particular kind of personality, who between them cover the whole social spectrum.

  In ‘William Below Stairs’ - when he is mistaken for the  new Boots in the household where his father is to dine - the kitchen-maid winks at him and giggles, and loves his conversation; but the house-maid treats him with contempt, and the Cook with hostility. 

            If William likes Eglantine, he also likes the quintessentially middle-class Joan from next door.  She, in turn, adores him.  So does Lady Barbara d’Arcey (‘Kidnappers’): “seven years old... fair, frilly, fascinating.”   So does Rosemary, daughter of Clarice Verney “the famous actress”.  (‘William the Showman’).

            Neither is William’s appeal to the opposite sex limited to those of his own age.  Grown up females of a certain type are also attracted to him: and he to them.  There is Miss Cannon, the love of Robert’s life, (‘William the Intruder’) whose face dimples when she laughs, and who prefers William to Robert; or Miss Holding, (‘William - The Avenger’) who cries with laughter at William’s revenge on her obnoxious suitor, Clarence;   or Miss Fairlow (‘William the Showman’) who gives William her butterfly collection, and makes fun of The Higher Thinkers.    All are very middle class; each one is a dreamer; each one has a glorious sense of humour; and each is, in her own way, a rebel against convention. 

            That, I think, is the conflict at the heart of the William books.  William and Joan give away the food for William’s Christmas party to a girl whose father has been newly-released from prison, and William and his Outlaws (‘William Advertises’) champion Mr Moss the sweet seller against the chain of Mallards sweet shops, but the prevailing tone is  not anti-capitalist, as such. The war in William is a war not against the middle class, but against middle-class respectability, and the ultimate source of this, I think, is not in Freud (despite the superego) nor in Das Kapital, but in the pages of the New Testament.

 Nothing is more typical of the spirit of the William books than the episode in Mark in which the Pharisees condemn the disciples for plucking ears of corn on Sunday.  In their defence, Christ cites the example of David, who gave his men the sacred bread to eat.  Even more calculated to awaken distaste in Pharisees of all eras – although Christ does not refer to it – would have been the episode in which David sang and danced before the Ark of the Covenant.  Regrettable religious ‘enthusiasm’. 

If there is a ‘message’ in the William books, then it is the reply - “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” - that Christ gave to the Pharisees for their oppressive and meaningless rules.  Crompton’s war was a war with the Pharisaic spirit of her own era.  When William responds to those whom his mother describes as “common”, he is drawn not to their class, but to their vitality: those who, being unrespectable, have not had the chance to be frozen by respectability.

William is like a new version of The Lord of Misrule, traditionally appointed on Twelfth Night: briefly turning the established order of things on its head until the restoration of normality.

At his worst, William is simply an agent of chaos; but at his best he is an agent of joy: bringing life and colour and liberation to the dead and grey and stifled world of social convention.  Thus the morose and silent parrot of ‘Not Much’ that screams with excitement when William is in view.

William works his magic on the old.  In ‘The Cure’, Great-Aunt Jane is revived from a potentially-fatal illness when – her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright – she watches William and Francis fight each other at her bedside:  ‘“Go it William!  ...Get one in on his nose!”’

            In ‘Aunt Jane’s Treat’, another Great-Aunt Jane finds temporary liberation from the narrowness of her upbringing in the fun of the fair.  Comparably, in another story, Grandfather Moore, whose only recourse to defiance is a refusal to go to bed when he should, compounds his rebellion by sneaking off with William to the circus. 

Even the great and famous fall under William’s spell.  In ‘What What Delayed the Great Man’, a member of the Cabinet, due to address a political meeting, finds his way instead to William’s play in the stable.  William’s father, investigating the noise, discovers that “A wistful-looking old man was an absorbed spectator of the proceedings.”   And in ‘William Advertises’, The Duke of  Ashbridge is bored almost to tears by the vicar’s wife and the  Sale of Work committee.  Encountering The Outlaws, “With a lightening of the heart he recognised more entertaining company.”

In contrast to the self-imprisoned, there are those unfortunates that have imprisonment thrust upon them.  There can be no more potent image of imprisonment than a parrot on a perch. The William books are full of liberated animals:  parrots that fly out through open windows, dogs that escape their chains, cows that escape their fields, insects that escape their boxes, wild animals that escape their cages.  Very often, William has played a part in bringing about the situation.

            The other great image of imprisonment in the stories is that of that of hapless captive audiences: bored and dispirited recipients of the improving material – whether total abstinence, or nut cutlets, or some aspect of high culture - relentlessly foisted upon them.    

            In ‘William and the Early Romans’, there are three groups within the audience.  “Some there were who had come to sleep and had already attained their object.” Then there are those who “... knew that to be really cultured you had to make yourself see beauty in things you knew in your heart to be ugly.”  But the majority experience “a sudden glorious conviction that something was wrong, and from their faces the expressions of boredom were disappearing as if by magic.”  The Professor’s last words are drowned in the general hilarity.    In one story after another, one audience after another is rescued by laughter from some new diminution of its capacity for joy. 

 

Richmal Crompton was a survivor of polio and breast cancer: illnesses with consequences you live with, rather than change.  Enduring the status quo, rather than being able significantly to alter it, seems to be the political viewpoint of William.  In ‘William Enters Politics’, the Liberals and Conservatives both want to reduce the price of bread, and William, deciding there is nothing to choose between them, ends up dismissing both groups with contempt.  In ‘The Weak Spot’ Jameson Jameson’s flirtation with Bolshevism ends when the members of the younger generation claim the possessions of their older siblings.   For Crompton, I think, the social condition is the human condition.  To be alive is to be in prison; the best you can hope for is a temporary escape. 

            For every instance of escape in Crompton, there is also an instance of return.  Great Aunt Jane returns to the self-imposed restrictions of her Plymouth-Brethren upbringing. Ginger’s aunt’s parrot - after disrupting a temperance meeting with ribald comments and vulgar sniggers, and driving the Outlaws to frenzy by its ability to evade capture -  voluntarily returns to its cage.  Toto, the diminutive missing dog of ‘The Outlaws Deliver the Goods’, is found – though “jaunty, abandoned and debauched-looking” - on his way home.  Dog and parrot both know who feeds them.  Even William, after his night out in London, returns “to the bosom of outraged respectability.”

            On the other hand, all those who escape find renewal in their temporary freedom.  Each infuriated workman who pursues William down the road with curses, returns refreshed to his task.  Sir Giles Hampton, the great actor, likewise returns to London “cheered and invigorated”.  As with Crompton’s mocking parrots, how well you cope with life’s imprisonment depends upon your state of mind. 

 

Richmal Crompton’s war was with the officious, whereas the threat to us today is from the official.  Developments in technology have given officialdom unprecedented powers to interfere with every aspect of our lives.  The old adage that “Nanny knows best” – or thinks she does – has never had more potency.  But if the weapons have changed, the enemy is still the same.

            Richmal Crompton is an ally in that ongoing battle; her gift of laughter a defence  and defiance against the solemn and the self-important, who would seek to paint our world in ever duller shades of grey. 

 

THE TELLER AND THE TALE

 

 

“Be ye therefore perfect.” 

                                                                        Matthew 5.5.48

 

 “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”  Thus D H Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature.   I first came across that statement – at second hand - as a student, and I have been wrestling with the implications ever since.  

            It is one of those profound and difficult concepts that get deeper the more you think about them.  Keats’ dictum – or maybe only Keats’ urn’s dictum – “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty’” is another such.

Do truth and beauty share such a link?  Well maybe, and maybe not.  Maybe there is beauty in the truth of a mathematical formula.  But what if you manage to prove to a colleague that his beautiful wife has been cheating on him with his best friend?   Truth it may be, but it is hardly a beautiful truth, any more than confirming a terminal illness for a child would be.  And insofar as the woman has been lying to him, then beauty has not been truthful.   Lawrence’s Teller and Tale throw up similar paradoxes for me, and even if they are irresolvable, they throw an interesting light on some aspects of creativity.

            Never trust the artist.  Does that include the Lawrence who is making the statement?   In which case, is the statement itself unreliable?  In which case, why should the tale be any more reliable than the person who produced it?  Or has the statement become the ‘tale’ once it has been made, and independent of its originator?  And so on.  It is all very difficult.

 

 I think one of the things Lawrence was arguing for in his statement was not to confuse a writer’s work with a writer’s life.  Are they, in fact, separable?  That depends, presumably, on the type of writer.  Fine if the writer is simply exploring experience, and not passing comment or judgement.  But if the writer is didactic – Lawrence himself is arguably a case in point – conceives of art as propaganda and wants his/her audience to think or behave in particular ways, then we are entitled to ask if such writers have followed their own precepts.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for instance, is a novel with a message:  escape the dehumanizing effects of the Machine Age through sex.  Some readers of the work have undoubtedly taken this as a recipe for personal fulfilment, and responded accordingly in both language and sexual behaviour; but how far Lawrence himself escaped the effects of the machine by this means, I don’t presume to know...

Perhaps I picked a bad example.  More promising, perhaps, is Rousseau’s Emile. Emile has been a significant influence in formulating theories of education.  It comes as a shock, therefore, to find that Rousseau dumped each of his own offspring on the steps of the nearby Foundling Hospital.  Does that then, negate his right to tell the rest of us how to bring up children?  Does the unreliability of the life of the teller undermine the validity of the tale?  Or did Rousseau have true perceptions – the real-life Emile was a young aristocrat whom Rousseau tutored, evidently with success – even if he could not fulfil them in his own life with his own family?  A prophet shall have honour everywhere except in his own home town. 

Or, to keep the biblical theme, “Physician, heal thyself.”   When I was at university, the senior doctor in charge of student health walked with two sticks.  I remember a friend of mine laughing about him and saying he hardly inspired confidence in the university’s health service.

As it happened, the doctor in question had sustained injuries in the war, and was crippled in ways not curable this side of eternity.  That emphatically did not stop him from being efficient and caring, or from curing people less radically damaged than himself.  Perhaps the same even holds true for mental health.  In Equus, the child psychiatrist Martin Dysart is able to heal the minds of others, while remaining a psychological mess himself.    In Lawrence’s terms, with each of these instances the ‘tale’ is reliable, even when the ‘teller’ is not. 

 

Actors, and the confusing in the minds of some of the public between the actor and the role portrayed are of particular interest in considering Lawrence’s dictum.

Let us take the case of Rock Hudson.  Rock Hudson played a succession of  macho ‘rock-like’ male roles.  Female cinema goers  who took him at face value swooned about him and – presumably - fantasized about him.  Which is the point: fantasy.  At Hudson’s death – from an Aids-related illness  -  the speculation about him definitively emerged in the public arena..  Hudson had been a homosexual,  with a personality and private life quite unlike what was portrayed on screen.  The ‘teller’ – Hudson – was clearly very unlike the tale.  Why, then, should we trust the tale?  The tale was a lie.  Hudson’s personality and sexual orientation were the reality.

 Or were they?  Presumably some of the types he was portraying are real types that were recognised as such by cinema audiences.   Hudson’s ‘truth’ was his ability to portray them convincingly.  By this line of argument, his own personality is an irrelevance: the ‘teller’ is the scriptwriter, and the ‘tale’ is Hudson’s portrayal of the script on screen. 

(The converse also holds true. Thus, The Importance of Being Earnest: “I hope you haven’t been secretly good all the time?” Larry Hagman was, in real life, unlike the devious JR of Dallas.  Television audiences are often surprised by the demeanour – even the accents – of villains from the soaps when they appear on various chat shows.  And so on.) 

We are all familiar with the concept of not shooting the messenger.  The messenger is only delivering the message; he is not responsible for creating it.  Since an actor has not written his /her own lines, is the actor akin to the messenger?

But can the messenger be so separated from the message?  ”More things… than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  Which of the last two words you emphasize profoundly affects the meaning, and will depend on your reading of Hamlet’s character.  Different actors interpret Hamlet in different ways, and so – in effect – give different messages.

Or consider the case of Pheidippides the Athenian runner who sought help from the Spartans before the Battle of Marathon.  Pheidippides is supposed to have run 159 miles in two days.  The message itself was one thing, the physical stamina was another, without which the message would not have been delivered in time..  But we cannot ignore the moral dimension to the runner either: the sense of urgency for Greece, and loyalty to his own community.  In that sense the message is not something apart from the messenger: the two are bound up together. 

And that is the point. Isn’t the tale the product of the teller?    If the teller is morally flawed, won’t the flawed morality spill over into the text as well? If the teller says one thing while doing another isn’t that hypocrisy?  What of D J Enright’s poem ‘A Portrait of the Artist as Hypocrite’:

            One treats of love, and yet he beats his wife

            One hates the human race

            Yet gives his fee to waifs and strays.

If a plumber beats his wife, that is not our problem as his customers, provided his preoccupation with his domestic situation does not impinge on his fitting of our central heating.  On the other hand, to find he beats his wife is significant when it relates to the marriage guidance counsellor who is advising us.

Which is the artist: plumber (craftsman) or counsellor (moralist)? Prior to the Romantics, we would probably have said the former; with Wordsworth, the latter. 

In Renaissance times, artists were admired for their skill with words or paint or stone.   Of course, the artist’s world view could not be exempt: it would be shown in the  choice of subject matter, and in the way he (in those days, almost exclusively ‘he’) depicted it.  But the artist was, first and foremost, a craftsman.

The Romantics changed all that.  Poets had finer emotions than the norm..  They were exempt from the standards applied to ordinary people. A poet was not just someone enjoying a particular skill with words, but a great soul. We looked to a poet’s life, as well as to his/her work for guidance on how to live. 

In this, of course, Bohemians relieved from ordinary human conventions were free to be spectacularly bad.  “Epater le bourgeois.”  Baudelaire’s “poète maudit”.  In this case, the artist’s life becomes part of the entertainment value, doing things the rest of us don’t dare to do.  Teller and tale: the life and the work are inextricably bound as integral components of the total package.   Many, indeed, take far more interest in the details of a writer’s life than they do in what was actually written.   Deeds – especially salacious deeds – are much more fun than words.  I myself am not exempt from this.  I’ve never read William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, but I do know that he shot his wife. 

 Morality – whether a writer advocates one thing and practises another - is one strand of the problem.  Another is the vexed issue of personal experience.  Can a male writer create convincing female characters?  And vice versa.  Can a middle-class writer depict a convincing working-class character?  What about other races?  What, indeed, about anybody other than oneself: assuming the reliability of one’s own perceptions. Where does it end?

 To me the valid-only-from-personal-experience standpoint is akin to the theory that you can’t know something’s wrong unless you’ve done it yourself.  But you don’t need to have done it yourself to feel that serial rape is wrong; or to be aware of the results of sticking your hand in the fire, or of eating a Destroying Angel mushroom, or the consequences for your stomach of committing hara kiri.  Accept the reality of  the gift of empathy, and you can accept that those possessing it can convey valid and realistic experiences, even if only imagined.

When I first read ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, I assumed without question that the poet must have  been an eyewitness of the event.  I later discovered that the thing had been composed in a Cambridge college by a writer who had never been near a battlefield.  And yet the poem  probably conveys the mood of the moment much more effectively  than an offering from a real-life soldier who had been there could have done.  The poem presents a valid experience of the loss of a charismatic leader, irrespective of who wrote it.  What matters is the literary skill; not the actual experience.

When Shirley Valentine came out, innumerable women testified to how well it reflected their inner thoughts and longings.  And yet it was written by Willy Russell.

“See see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament.”   Doctor Faustus is a play with a very clear understanding of Christian doctrine, even if Marlowe himself appears to have been an atheist.  In Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte imagined emotions denied to her in real life; and yet real-life lovers have found the intensity of experience conveyed to be wholly convincing.  Similarly the speeches in which Juliet expresses her fears and longings; although Shakespeare was never a young woman.

Shakespeare was neither Jew, nor Moor, nor even an outsider; yet audiences through the ages have felt the reality of Shylock’s or Othello’s social alienation..  As far as we know, Shakespeare never murdered a king, or anyone else for that matter; yet few of us doubt the reality of Macbeth’s feelings of guilt.  There may be autobiographical elements in The Sonnets, but all the protagonists – including even the ‘I’ of the narrator – may be simply literary conventions; and the only definite truth is the ruinous effect of time.  The teller is uncertain, but we can rely on the tale about growing old. 

 

Lawrence’s theory applies to religion quite as much as to literature.   The prophets are a case in point.  Thus Jeremiah:  “The word of the Lord came to me.”  The ‘tale’ is something arising from outside, not from within..  Thus Isaiah:  “Woe is me, for  I am a man of unclean lips”.  Although he is  unfit for the message to be conveyed., the purity of the tale is separable from the frailty of the teller.  The same is true of Israel itself:  the integrity of the revealed message somehow survives even within a wayward and backsliding nation.

            “Do as I say, not as I do.”  Is religion  invalidated by the failure of those charged with its presentation to the world?  The Donatist heresy is an interesting case in point.

            The Emperor Diocletian had demanded to be worshipped.  Some Christians within the Empire refused and were duly persecuted, but other succumbed.  When the waverers later tried to be readmitted into the Church, the Donatists – named after their uncompromising bishop Donatus – refused to accept them back.  Their weakness had permanently disbarred them.

            Augustine, by contrast, cited The Lord’s  Prayer.  “Forgive us our trespasses.”  It is accepted that we will fail.  What matters is not making mistakes, but the genuineness of our contrition.  Peter’s three denials of  Christ are countered by the three affirmations to feed Christ’s sheep.  Christ’s injunction to his followers to seek perfection is an aspiration,  rather than a reality this side of death. 

As The Book of Common Prayer puts it:  “The Unworthiness of the ministers hinders not the effect of the Sacrament.”  The sacraments “...be effectual because of Christ’s institution and promise, although they be ministered by evil men.”  The tale is greater than those who tell it? 

 

As a final thought in this meander through the implications of Lawrence’s dictum, I imagine  he was also saying a writer may not fully understand his/her own work.  You do not have to subscribe to theories about the death of the author to see the validity of that viewpoint. 

            Holden Caulfield does not understand his own dream about children falling off the cliff when they come to the end of the field of rye.  As it is, he has the words wrong: there is no ‘catcher’ in the song.  Children must grow up.

            That, of course, is an imperfect analogy:  Salinger understands the significance if Holden doesn’t.   But I remember  a poem shown to me by a teenage girl about a dream she had had.  It was all about going through a doorway, and her reluctance to do so.  She asked me what I thought it meant.  Reading it, I said it was about fear of becoming an adult.  She agreed with me; although that had not been her conscious intention. 

When Isaiah said “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son,”  he was thinking about King Hezekiah.  When he spoke of the suffering servant, he was probably thinking of the nation of Israel.

  When Plato wrote in The Republic of the virtuous man being punished by his society, scourged and blinded and crucified, he was thinking back to the death of Socrates.

It was later ages who saw significance in the words of Isaiah and Plato of which they themselves would probably – certainly, in the case of Plato - have been unaware.  It may be hoped that both now share – as contributors to the greatest narrative of all – that same deeper understanding enjoyed by later readers of what they originally wrote.

 

MALORY'S MERLIN

Part of the interest of the ballads that have come down to us is their sense of a Christian perspective overlying a much older view of things.   Thus, for instance, in The Wife of Usher’s Well we have the Martinmass and the tree of Paradise, but also a sense of ancient sacred wells, and pagan nature curses.  And Malory’s Merlin is a similarly interesting blend of contrary traditions.

            Merlin appears within a page or two of Le Morte Darthur to sort out King Uther’s problems: ‘”Well, my lord,” said Sir Ulfius, “I shall seek Merlin, and he shall do you remedy…”’

            This abrupt reference without explanation is similar to the introduction of John the Baptist into Mark’s Gospel.  And for much the same reason; in each case the narrator can assume pre-existing familiarity with the subject matter on the part of his audience.   Malory from time to time comments “as it says in the French book”, thus highlighting his own role as collator of a range of diverse material.    In Merlin’s case, Malory could draw on the French Suite de Merlin and on Geoffrey of Monmouth, giving the wizard a long ancestry back into a pagan past.

 

One of Merlin’s pagan characteristics is his love of disguise; stretching back, probably,  into traditions of the shape changer.  When Ulfius finds him, he is disguised as a beggar.  And when Balin and Balan encounter him, he is again “disguised so that they knew him not.”  On another occasion he appears to Arthur as an archer, “befurred in black sheepskins”, and holding wild geese.  Sometimes, this appears to be just for the fun of the thing, but the power can also be used for morally dubious purposes: as when Merlin enables King Uther to look like the Duke of Cornwall – Merlin himself disguised as the Duke’s follower, Sir Jordanus to add authenticity – so that the Duke’s wife is tricked into sleeping with the King. 

The duplicity of the coupling is continued in its outcome: the offspring being collected, unchristened, at birth by Merlin for fostering with Sir Ector.  The non-christening is a red herring – Arthur is baptised shortly afterwards by a holy man – but the secrecy about his origins leads directly to the bloody civil war Arthur is obliged to wage against the rebel kings who refuse to accept his authority.  Why should they: they do not know about his parentage.  It’s the sort of behaviour you might find in the Old Testament, but there the relevant prophet would be inveighing against it, rather than being personally implicated.   

At other times, however, Merlin appears to have more moral purposes for his disguises: as when he appears to Arthur first as a child of fourteen and then as an old man, in order to test his responses.  Seeing Merlin as the latter, Arthur is willing to listen to him, and Merlin points out that if Arthur had been willing to listen to the child as well, he might have learned much.  Truth can come in many forms.  And Arthur seems to take this on board: he later makes a point, for example, of consulting with a range of advisers before declaring war on the Emperor of Rome.

Christianity, in accommodating itself to paganism, blessed some strands and demonised others.  In Merlin, the Christian tradition did both.  The Lady Nenive fears Merlin because “he was a devil’s son”: the product, that is to say, of an incubus and a human mother.  This doubtful parentage, curiously enough, does not appear to make him evil in any significant sense; other than to account for his magical powers.  Once the issue with King Uther is behind him, Merlin gives sound political advice to those who need it, and holds the fragile structure of the warring society together while he is still in a position to do so. 

Merlin appears to defer to the Archbishop of Canterbury over the issue of finding a new king, but it is Merlin rather than the Archbishop who is Arthur’s moral and spiritual adviser:    “the most part the days of his life he was ruled much by the counsel of Merlin,”  When God disapproves of aspects of  Arthur’s behaviour – excessive slaughter of the enemy in the war against the  eleven kings, or Arthur’s unintentional incest with his half-sister – it is Merlin whom God sends to reprimand him, much like Nathan the prophet reprimanding David.   And if we define a prophet as one who not only comments on the contemporary situation but who also predicts the future, then Merlin really comes into his own. 

With Merlin’s prophecies we are very much in the territory of Macbeth.  (Malory would not have known this; although Merlin, being prophetic, might have).  If you are given a vision of the future, is that a future that will happen regardless of what you do, or is it a future that will happen unless you intervene to prevent it?   A pagan fatalism, in other words, is contrasted with a Christian concept of human choice and free will.   This need not have been intentional.  Those who admire the golden patina of the Acropolis marble sometimes forget that this is an accident of time: in its heyday, the Parthenon would have been brightly, even gaudily, painted.  In the same way, what looks like a theological exploration may simply have arisen from Malory’s imperfect attempt to impose order on his rambling French sources, and failing to tie up all the loose ends. But intentional or other wise, what we have is an extraordinarily interesting example of the fate/free will problem. 

The issue with King Pellinore is an early exercise in predicting the future.   Pellinore is making a nuisance of himself by fighting passers-by.  The greenhorn Griflet undertakes to challenge him.  Merlin is against permitting this. ‘“It were a pity to lose Griflet for he will be a passing good man when he is of age…  And if he adventure his life…”      Here, it seems, Merlin is simply saying what any one with an eye to spotting talent might say: that Griflet has potential and should wait a bit, and not risk his life.  And King Arthur can remove the risk by not making him a knight.  The inexperienced Arthur  uses his free will, and asserts his independence, by foolishly knighting  Griflet, who equally foolishly takes off after Pellinore.  Insofar as Merlin has made a prediction he gets it both right and wrong.  Griflet is desperately wounded but, “through good leeches he was healed and saved.”

In the next phase Arthur, deciding to sort out King Pellinore himself, and riding out accordingly, “was ware of three churls chasing Merlin, and would have slain him.”  The lack of explanation is part of the charm of the narrative, as if while walking down the High Street one rescued an acquaintance – an event so routine as not to require explanation – from the three yobs who had set on him.  It seems a sort of rule of thumb in Le Morte Darthur that unknown males will attack each other on sight.  Malory’s contemporary audience would doubtless have been reminded of the Wars of the Roses.  (Modern readers will be familiar with the concept through television images of city centres when the pubs close). Merlin responds, significantly that, ‘”I could have saved myself and I willed.”  (Italics mine).   But thou art more near thy death than I am, for thou goest to thy deathward, and God be not thy friend.”’  As a prophecy, this is much more clear cut than with Griflet: “Don’t do it, or you will die!”  Arthur, of course, ignores it.

When Pellinore duly overpowers Arthur, Merlin offers him a choice: ‘”Knight, hold thy hand, for and thou slay that knight thou puttest this realm in the greatest damage that ever was realm.”

Pellinore, hearing it’s King Arthur, raises his sword to kill him “for dread of his wrath” and in perfect exercise of his free will.  However, the fulfilment of this particular prophecy about Arthur would invalidate the others made about him. Merlin, therefore, is obliged to make fate take a hand by casting Pellinore into an enchanted sleep. This enables Merlin to make his simplest and most direct prediction about the future: ‘”…he is but asleep and will awake within this hour.”

Although Merlin makes it known – why didn’t he do so in the first place? – that Arthur is Uther Pendragon’s son, the civil war continues.  Arthur realises he needs to marry to settle things down.  Is there a particular woman?  asks Merlin, as if he doesn’t know.  When Arthur cites Guenivere, Merlin wishes it could be some other damosel, but he appreciates that once a man’s heart is set, there’s no going back.  Merlin, after all, should know: since he later makes the same mistake himself.

Merlin proceeds to warn Arthur that Guenivere will be “not wholesome for him” because Lancelot – whom at this stage Arthur hasn’t even met – will love her, and she him.  And this makes a nonsense of Merlin’s question.  For how can he know this will happen if he didn’t know who Arthur would choose?   And if he did  know who Arthur would choose, why bother to ask the question?  Perhaps in the hope that Arthur will change his mind; only he can’t change his mind, because of the prophecy about Guenivere and Lancelot.  Here we are in deep theological waters about foreknowledge indeed, and Merlin doesn’t know his way out of them any more than Malory does. 

Significantly, although he knows the effects will be disastrous, once King Arthur’s choice is made Merlin duly contacts Guenivere’s father to bring about the marriage.   It is another aspect of the effectiveness with which Merlin is portrayed that although he is magical, he is also very human.  And in this particular task he is no different from any other political adviser who, sensing that his superior has made an unwise decision, is nevertheless obliged to carry it out.  Merlin illustrates precisely that devotion to duty, and the resultant conflict of loyalty, that brings about the ruinous final outcome and gives the story its peculiar force.  Malory, after all, writes as one who had experienced The Wars of the Roses.

The danger from Morgan le Fey is a slightly different issue.  Morgan knows about the qualities of Excalibur and its accoutrements. Merlin warns Arthur of the need for vigilance: “for he told him how the sword and the scabbard should be stolen by a woman from him, that he most trusted.”  What’s the point of vigilance, one might ask, if the things are going to be stolen anyway?  To switch mythologies for a moment, the answer is the same as that given for the army of heroes in Valhalla.  Yes that army will be defeated in the final battle, but without its existence that end would come a great deal sooner. If vigilance cannot prevent the theft, then it can delay its occurrence.      If human action cannot change the big events, yet it can influence them.

Merlin’s two greatest prophecies relate to Arthur’s final destruction, and to his own.  The consequences of Arthur’s incest will reach far beyond himself: ‘“for ye have lain by you sister, and on her ye have begotten a child that shall destroy you and all the knights of the realm.”’ Despite his sin, however, Arthur will die ‘“a worshipful death,”’ whereas Merlin’s fate will be, ‘”to be put in the earth, quick.”   (‘Alive’, that is to say: not ‘soon’, or ‘rapidly’). 

By degrees, Merlin fleshes out the details of Arthur’s fate: “the prophecy that there should be a great battle beside Salisbury, and Mordred his own son should be against him.”   and “Merlin told King Arthur that he that should destroy him and all his lands should be born on Mayday.”                                                                                                                                                

In an episode that recalls both Herod and Oedipus, Arthur has all the known male children born on Mayday cast out to sea in an open boat: “and some were four weeks old, and some less.”   Mordred, of course, survives, is fostered, and is later brought to Arthur’s court.  The parents who have lost their children blame Merlin.   

 

Merlin’s demise is a wonderful exercise in realistic psychology.  King Pellinore – still making a nuisance of himself, but inadvertently this time - brings to the Court Nenive, one of the damosels of the Lady of the Lake. At the sight of her “Merlin fell on a dotage”: managing to imply simultaneously that he is both doting and senile.

If Merlin is besotted with her, then she, in her turn “…made Merlion good chere tylle sche had lerned of hym all manner of thynges that sche desyred.”   Including, presumably, the means of his destruction:  a nice blend of women’s lib and the only way of getting rid of him.

            Merlin again warns the king that he – Merlin – will be “put in the earth quick” and predicts how much the King will miss him.  Arthur, reasonably enough, asks why Merlin can’t use his crafts to ensure it doesn’t happen, but is told it cannot be.

            In this respect, Merlin is just like the elderly millionaire who, in a cool moment, is perfectly well aware that the pretty young thing is really only after his money; but yet in her presence is totally unable to help himself.  

            Having crossed the Channel together, Merlin shows Nineve – while they are sightseeing - a great cavern beneath a stone. She invites him to demonstrate what’s in there, and promptly traps him: thereby freeing herself permanently of his attempts to seduce her.

 

Thereafter, Merlin simply fades from the story, but is still present as an absence.  In a very real sense, by bringing about the one prophecy, he ensures the fulfilment of the other.  For, deprived of his best counsellor, Arthur is powerless to prevent the chain of events that will lead to The Round Table’s inevitable destruction.