Source of picture:

http://tonymusings.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/on-wine-and-tf-powys.html

The Comic Vision of T. F. Powys

Laurence Coupe

The Powys Review, 4, 2 (summer 1984), pp. 72-6

Please note that I have made occasional alterations to the phrasing in this article, in the interests of clarity.

T. F. Powys has suffered not only from neglect but, where attention has been given, from a twofold misapprehension. He was taken up briefly by the critical journal Scrutiny in the thirties; thereafter a consensus somehow emerged that his art was ‘folk’ and ‘tragic’. There having been little challenge to the application of these terms, he is still taken by those who feel no real obligation to read him as a gloomy modern equivalent of Bunyan.

I wish to argue that in terms of both structure and vision Powys is a profoundly comic writer. I do not mean simply that his work contains humorous observations and incidents but that he consciously uses the traditional pattern of comedy, based ultimately on fertility myth and ritual, for his own serious purpose.

Q. D. Leavis did some unwitting damage early on: linking Powys with the rural memoir writer George Sturt, she spoke simply of the rich idiom of ‘the old culture of the English countryside’ as opposed to the ‘inflexible and brutal’ jargon of modern suburban life: spoke of that and of little else.(1) But only a decade ago Raymond Williams felt able to dismiss even such a rich work as Mr. Weston’s Good Wine under the category of ‘regional novel’.(2)

An early booklet-length study of the fiction tells us that we ‘must take account of Powys’s preoccupation with Death.’(3) Thirty years later, with little evidence of any general interest in between, the first full-¬length account of his fiction appears, but only to conclude that ‘he was ultimately a tragic writer’.(4)

The one critical comment on T. F. Powys which, for me at any rate, comes close to apprehending his true spirit is brief and parenthetical, made by William Empson in his account of the development of the pastoral form: ‘his object in writing about country people is to get a simple enough material for his purpose, which one might sum up as a play with Christian imagery backed only by a Buddhist union of God and death.’(5) Here we are at least beyond folk wisdom; and it would be a strange Buddhist who saw anything as tragic other than man’s attempt to resist the fact of mortality.

***

We probably all know where the title Mr. Weston’s Good Wine comes from: Emma by Jane Austen. Let us remind ourselves, though, of the specific context. It is chapter 15, where Emma is forced to sit in a two-seater carriage with the odious Mr. Elton as they bid farewell to their evening’s host, Mr. Weston. Emma’s interest in the clergyman has hitherto amounted only to plotting his marriage to her young protegee Harriet Weaver. Otherwise she finds him simply tiresome, and now she is rightly apprehensive: ‘She believed he had been drinking too much of Mr. Weston’s good wine, and felt sure that he would want to be talking nonsense.’ Far worse than this occurs though: Mr. Elton seizes Emma by the hand and begins making violent protestations of love to her.

Emma, of course, belongs to the narrative genre which we call comedy: not merely because of its author’s sense of humour but also, and more importantly, because of its structure. From the Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence and from Shakespeare we know that structure to be based on a move from ignorance to knowledge, frustration to fulfilment, isolation to identity. Emma, once she has understood the error of her presumption, may marry Mr. Knightley. The episode to which we have referred offers one illustration of that crucial period of sexual confusion which precedes the triumph of harmony.(6)

T. F. Powys, who knew Sir James Frazer’s pioneering work of cultural anthropology, The Golden Bough, very well, would have understood that comedy ultimately — Jane Austen’s included — derives from fertility myth and ritual. It is essentially about the tension between winter and spring, death and life. Just as in tragedy the fertility god disappears and in a sense dies, so in comedy he revives and reappears to be restored to the fertility goddess. Whether we know that god as Dionysus, Adonis or Tammuz, we say the original power is that of Eros.

On the psychoanalytical level also, the structure of comedy is clearly erotic: the drive towards the union of lover and beloved. Hence nothing — even the author, unless he wishes to make a display of being ironic — is allowed to prevent the sexual realization at the end, no matter how deep and intractable the period of confusion at the centre of the play or novel. Unlike normal life, art may present us with the triumph of the pleasure over the reality principle.

Here we are obviously invoking the work of Sigmund Freud. But if we take death itself to be the ultimate reality with which we must come to terms, we may see Freud in his later work as coming to see sexuality and mortality as complementary rather than antagonistic. That is, he  suggested that all behaviour is an attempt to release tension: a release which may seem be temporarily attained by means of sexual activity but which is only final in death. In that sense Thanatos comprehends Eros.

***

All this may seem a long way from fiction which has seemed to most critics a folksy by-product of English literature. Let us be clear about what exactly happens in Mr. Weston’s Good Wine.

I think that it is fair to say that Mr. Weston, the benevolent old wine merchant, is God; and his assistant Michael is the archangel of the same name. They come in their Ford car to the village of Folly Down with a list of potential customers. In order to sell their product they stop all the clocks at seven in the evening: time gives way to eternity. There are two wines; or rather, the wine is of two strengths: the lighter one is that of love, the darker that of death. As Mr. Weston himself says, his wine is ‘as strong as death and as sweet as love’. Love and death, Eros and Thanatos, are described by Powys elsewhere as ‘the two great realities’.

So the central symbol of the book is wine. But an attendant one is that of the spreading oak tree and its mossy bed beneath. Here various virgins, procured by the evil Mrs. Vosper, are seduced by Martin and John, the sons of Squire Mumby. One such was Ada Kiddle, who subsequently drowned herself: she drank the dark wine of Thanatos. The blame for all such sin is attributed by the village to the sexton, Mr. Grunter: he is Adam, still attempting to act as if he were in Eden, seeing no shame in his reputation (which he rather enjoys).

Customers for the light wine include Luke Bird and Jenny Bunce, who are given to each other in marriage and so testify to the power of Eros. ‘To be happy with another, in all the excitement and the glamour of the spring, is the proper thing to do. Luke longed in his heart to commit, to rejoice in the commital of, the most wanton excesses of love.’ But there are others who yearn to succumb to Thanatos, notably the vicar Mr. Grobe, who lost his faith after the death of his wife. His daughter Tamar, who is obsessed by the possibility of an angelic lover, is finally carried off into the skies by Michael himself: in her fulfilment Eros and Thanatos are shown to be one.

An important part of Mr. Weston’s task is to bring the Mumby sons to repentance. Having revealed his true identity to Grunter, he leads John and Martin to the graveyard, where they expect to find his good wine but where the sexton has unearthed Ada Kiddle:

‘My good wine, gentlemen,’ said Mr. Weston.

Though the worms had destroyed Ada’s beauty, her shape was still there, and Mr. Grunter regarded her compassionately. He saw Ada as if she were a picture, which is the way that all wise countrymen regard the world or anything in it that seems a little curious or out of the common …

‘You are a liar and a cheat,’ Martin shouted at the wine merchant. ‘You promised us wine, and you show us the rotted corpse of a whore. Is this your wine?’

Mr. Weston said nothing.(7)

Powys may perhaps be dismissed as having a morbid, even a sadistic streak (consider his story ‘The Baked Mole’). But to do so is to miss his real thematic interest: not a passing attention to sexual life as a sort of spice by which to relish all the more the fear of death but a realization of the final identity of the two great realities of Eros and Thanatos.

At the close of the novel, Mr. Weston himself is ready to drink the strong wine of death: he orders Michael to set fire to the car:

Michael did as he was told. In a moment a fierce tongue of flame leaped up from the car; a pillar of smoke rose above the flame and ascended into the heavens. The fire died down, smouldered, and went out.

Mr. Weston was gone.(8)

The Biblical associations are hard to ignore. Yet throughout the novel their persistence has not overridden the profane, rural idiom which pleased Mrs. Leavis; and of course its strength has to be acknowledged, without making the mistake of justifying the novel solely on such terms.

What is more pertinent is to demonstrate the way in which the ‘folk’ idiom is informed by the spiritual dimension; or conversely the way in which that dimension is substantiated by that idiom. Consider the moment at which Grunter (Adam) recognizes Mr. Weston (God):

‘I have work for you to do, John Grunter,’ he said.

‘And who be thee to command folk?’ asked the clerk.

Mr. Weston uncovered his head and looked at him. Until that moment he had kept on his hat.

‘Who be thee?’ asked Mr. Grunter in a lower tone …

‘I know thee now,’ said Mr. Grunter.

‘Then tell no man,’ said Mr. Weston.

Mr. Grunter looked happy; he even grinned.

‘I did fancy at first,’ he said, in a familiar tone, ‘that thee was the devil, and so I did walk down church aisle behind ‘ee to see if thee’s tail did show.’(9)

Mr. Weston’s disappearance at the end of the novel is clearly not a touch of homely whimsy: God enters into the death which he has created; or, following Empson, God and death are shown to be identical. We may be reminded of an earlier tale by Powys, ‘The Only Penitent’, in which Tinker Jar (God) asks Mr. Hayhoe (Adam) for forgiveness for creating all the evils of the world and in particular for allowing his own only son to be crucified. Mr. Hayhoe is only able to grant it because his effort to counter Jar’s confession with a reminder of the good things in the world — love included — fails in the face of Jar’s reminder of the fact of individual annihilation. That is why Mr. Hayhoe has finally to forgive Jar: he invented death. It is God we must thank for death.

Mr. Weston’s Good Wine is not, then, a tragedy in any acceptable sense. True, it concentrates to a large extent on the aftermath of the death of Ada Kiddle — though that death has taken place before the story begins. True, Mr. Grobe and his daughter accept the darker wine; but there is no sense of protest or loss. Where death is presented not as the terrible contradiction of life and love but as their realization, ‘tragedy’ is not an appropriate term. This book is in fact a comedy in the sense that it follows the structure of pagan fertility myth, involving the ever-recurrent springtime victory of life over death; Powys simply accepts that the corresponding autumnal victory of death over life is not a fate to be feared but a comic resolution more desirable even than that of love.

Given this emphasis it is not surprising that he makes constant allusion to another book, profoundly comic in structure, which long before that of T. F. Powys resolves in its own way the dichotomy between love and death: I mean the Christian Bible.

In traditional Christian theology there is an inextricable link between sexual love and the fact of death. Put simply, angels do not breed; they are immortal and immaterial. Only fallen man, with the animals, must reproduce his kind and so attempt an immortality of generation. According to St. Augustine, Adam and Eve enjoyed a sexless joy in Eden, but after the fall they entered into a world of individual death and birth, death and birth . . . and so a world of sex. Thus T. F. Powys presents us with the image of the mossy oak tree bed on which both wines are drunk. The possibility of such identity — sex and death as one — gives his language its paradoxical force. This brings him close not so much to Bunyan as to Shakespeare (Lear’s ‘I will die like a smug bridegroom’) and Donne (‘A bracelet of bright hair about the bone’).

Again, in Unclay John Death is sent by God to gather up Joseph Bridle and Susie Dawe, but loses his parchment of names and so spends the whole summer resting from his usual labour of ‘scything’ and finds delight in love. As he explains to the parson’s wife:

‘When a deathly numbness overcomes a body, when the flesh corrupts, and the colour of the face is changed in the grave, then I have done for a man more than love can do, for I have changed a foolish and unnatural craving into everlasting content. In all the love feats, I take my proper part. When a new life begins to form in the womb, my seeds are there, as well as Love’s. We are bound together in the same knot. I could be happy lying with you now, and one day you will be glad to lie with me.’(10)

It is to miss the point, as does H. Coombes, to protest that there is too little distinction drawn in this novel between the erotic and the morbid intrigues of the protagonist.

As we have suggested earlier, in the later Freud also we find identity where others –the earlier Freud included — have seen conflict. Eros and Thanatos have a common end; or rather the final fulfilment of Eros is in Thanatos. Hence Powys’s fiction, which owes as much to Freud as to St Augustine, amounts to an interrogation of the comic structure and in doing so offers us a new comic vision. In the major novels — Mr. Weston and Unclay — as in Fables and the more realistic stories such as ‘Lie Thee Down, Oddity! – the final victory is not over death but over fear of death. Death is truly a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Hence T. F. Powys is no disciple of Nietzsche: he sees the eternal recurrence of individual birth, experience and death as acceptable only because the recurrence is not eternal for the individual. He is closer to Swift: nothing strikes him as worse than the fate of the immortal Struldbruggs. Life is only possible given death; death is the very form of life. The difference from Swift is that for Powys a positive emerges: we begin to live only when we know we will die.

But to return to the Christian perspective: Coombes’s book contains page after page of conjecture as to whether T. F. Powys was an orthodox believer. Perhaps such efforts miss the mark: what matters more is to see how he adapts the language of orthodox belief to his own ends.

The good wine that Mr. Weston brings to Folly Down must surely remind us of that drunk at the last supper by Jesus. The early Christians, conscious of that event, understood that their communion, their affirmation of community in the person of the risen Christ, must involve the sharing of wine. The term for such an occasion was ‘Agape’ or ‘love feast’, from the Greek word for spiritual love. Scriptural commentators often suggest that Agape is something opposed to Eros, but strictly speaking it comprehends it. It also comprehends Thanatos, since what makes the love feast possible is the conviction that death, the last enemy, is no longer a threat given the resurrection of Christ.

What T. F. Powys does is to work within the language of orthodox Christian belief but without subscribing to its premises. It is not so much that he agrees with Nietzsche that God is dead but that he agrees with Schopenhauer (and so with the Buddhism of Empson’s aside) that God is death.

When Luke Bird and Jenny Bunce drink the lighter wine, and find fulfilment in Eros, they enjoy a foretaste of the darker wine of Thanatos, of the final mature acknowledgement of the fact that we are born to die. The comedy of T. F. Powys is Christian in structure; but what matters is the way he draws on Christian mythology in order to explore the depths of the human psyche and to reveal the spiritual succour it can draw from aligning itself with the natural order.

With most writers it is difficult, or impossible, to deduce a vision from a structure. The author of King Lear is not necessarily a cosmic pessimist; after all he is also author of All’s Well That Ends Well. But Powys is the exception who proves the rule. We may wince when we come across gift books containing the ‘wit and wisdom’ of Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and others. Powys, though, is one of the few writers who does seem to insist that we consider the beauty of his art to be its truth. Thus we can we imagine a gift book, admittedly not one that everybody would find congenial, in which we find the following from Unclay:

When the sun of Love rises, and a man walks in glory, he may be sure that a shadow approaches him — Death.

Love creates and separates; Death destroys and heals.(11)

With the publication last year of R. P. Graves’s The Brothers Powys, we may hope that a revival of interest in the brother Theodore is due. This article is written in the hope that that revival will necessitate a serious revaluation, not another invitation to savour the rustic gloom of a literary eccentric. For T. F. Powys’s art, like Mr. Weston’s wine, is truly ‘as strong as death and as sweet as love’.

Notes

1 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932; repr. Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 170.

2 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973; repr. St. Albans: Paladin, 1975), p. 302.

3 William Hunter, The Novels and Stories of T. F. Powys (London: Gordon Frazer, , 1930; repr. Beckenham: Trigon Press, 1977), p. 14.

4 H. Coombes, T. F. Powys (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960), p. 157.

5 William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935; repr. 1979), p. 7.

6 See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

7 T. F. Powys, Mr. Weston’s Good Wine (London: Chatto and Windus, London, 1927; repr. 1975), p. 292.

8 Ibid., p. 316.

9 Ibid., p. 262.

10 T. F. Powys, Unclay (London: Chatto and Windus,1931), p. 325.

11 Ibid., p. 57.

Edgell Rickword: Modernist or Marxist?

Laurence Coupe

Stand, 22, 3 (Summer 1981), pp.38-43

Note: This is a slightly revised version of the original review-article.

Essays and Opinions 1921-31, Carcanet

Literature in Society: Essays and Opinions 1931-78, Carcanet

Behind the Eyes: Collected Poems and Translations, Carcanet

There are two Edgell Rickwords. There is what we might call the ‘Pelican Guide’ Edgell Rickword, the man who edited the magazine that inspired Scrutiny and ‘Eng. Lit.’ as we know it — The Calendar of Modern Letters — but who came to nothing after making the mistake of taking Marx seriously. Now, at last, thanks to Carcanet, we can see the other Edgell Rickword: a leading poet and critic of the twenties whose political development was in keeping with the character and talent of the man; the Marxism complements the Modernism.

Rickword’s preoccupation has always been the need to assert and explore the rich potential of the individual mind, as something threatened by the sterile anxieties of our age — or, as Alan Young puts it in his introduction to the first volume of essays, ‘the struggle in art and in society between the free intellect and the dead convention’. It is because the individual matters that society must be changed.

Born in Colchester in 1898, Rickword received a conventional grammar-school education, was con¬verted early to socialism, and fought in the First World War (receiving the Military Cross). He briefly read French at Oxford (leaving after four terms because the course stopped before Baudelaire), began reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, wrote the first critical study in English of the poet Rimbaud (1924), and edited The Calendar of Modern Letters (1925-27). Having produced three important volumes of verse (1925, 1928, 1931) he joined the Communist Party and worked for Left Review in the thirties, completing the decade with a seminal Marxist study of Milton. He helped edit the journal Our Time throughout the Second World War, and has since been undertaking a complete revaluation of the English radical tradition.

Rickword’s early writings emerge from the aftermath of war. Having lain ‘in sodden trenches’ alongside his fellow soldiers

and loved them for the stubbornness that clings
longest to laughter when Death’s pulleys creak

he is appalled to see them now ride

… silent on the train
to old-man stools; or sell gay-coloured socks
and listen fearfully for Death …

And in his prose too he resists the post-war vacuity, calling for a new sense of the individual that, as it gained mythological breadth and depth, would facilitate a new social cohesion: called for a Hero, in other words:

A Hero would seem to be due, an exhaustively disillusioned Hero (we could not put up with another new creed) who has yet so much vitality that his thoughts seize all sorts of analogies between apparently unrelated objects and so create an unbiased but self-consistent, humorous universe for himself …

and so for us. The poems, dedicated to this figure, are a protest against, not our ‘dissociation of sensibility’ as understood by Rickword’s contemporary, T. S. Eliot, but our alienation as understood by Karl Marx:

and the I retreating down familiar paths
rears its defence against the terrible sun and in its figurative way rebuilds the altar and brothel of legitimate state
adjacent, with mean fanes darkening our streets.

Rickword, says Jack Lindsay, depicts the capitalist city as ‘hell itself objectified on earth in loneliness amidst crowds, frustration amidst expansion’.(1) So we read:

Deprived of freedom in time, space and love
they seek enfranchisement in the air beyond
the city’s silent rows of gnawing roofs,
expecting joy within the mouth of doom …

In 1925, Rickword outlines his plans for a complete ‘Re-creation of Poetry’. Tired of the ‘social queasiness’ that inhibits him from expressing what he calls the ‘negative’ emotions — a significant part of himself, that is — he asks what has become of the ‘fact of personality’ and the transformation of this material into art. The briskness of tone here, the scientific deliberateness – ‘fact’ – is as clearly tactical as Eliot’s comparison of poetic composition to a chemical reaction (see his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’), but with a different end in view. Rickword is adopting the language of 19th century positivism in order to facilitate a Modernist, anti-positivist, poetic. But the immediate enemy is the inheritance of 19th century poetry itself:

An effect of the triumph of the romantic movement in the last century has been to separate the poet from the subjects which abound in ordinary social life and particularly from those emotions engendered by the clash of personality and the hostility of circumstances.

Thus, Rickword’s theory is clearly at odds with that of Eliot, who speaks of the extinction of personality, continual self-sacrifice. That said, they have more in common than their choice of vocabulary suggests: the refusal to reduce literature to mere self-expression. Having conceded that affinity, however, we must note Rickword’s resistance against the full severity of Eliot’s formulation of ‘impersonality’. Hence we find him making a plea for a process analogous to the dramatic catharsis:

A poem must, at some point or another, release, enable to flow back to the level of active life, the emotions caught up from life and pent in the aesthetic reservoir. Otherwise the poem is an artifice, a wax effigy in a glass case, a curiosity.

It is a critical commonplace that Eliot’s poetry, despite his own early protestations, was always highly personal and idiosyncratic, sustained by a characteristically neurotic energy – which is not to say that he did not find what he elsewhere called an ‘objective correlative’ appropriate to the particular emotion he wished to
communicate.

Rickword gets it right in his own review of Eliot’s Collected Poems, again in 1925. We are impressed, he says, on the one hand by ‘the urgency of the personality’ which comes close to breaking through ‘the aesthetic fabric’, and on the other by ‘the technique which spins that fabric’:

for it is by his struggle with technique that Mr. Eliot has been able to get closer than any other poet to the physiology of our sensations (a poet does not speak merely for himself) to explore and make palpable the more intimate distresses of a generation for whom all the romantic escapes had been blocked.

That parenthetical aphorism is Rickword’s own guiding principle: ‘a poet does not speak merely for himself’. And when he came to reject Eliot, it was because of the latter’s increasing disregard for that responsibility to his generation which was at least implicit in the very ideal of ‘impersonality’. In the pages of Eliot’s own journal The Criterion, which offered hospitality to a variety of right-wing Christian thinkers, Rickword saw ‘impersonality’ become ‘orthodoxy’, individual talent weighed down by scholastic tradition, while the criticism itself became rhetoric – the rhetoric of reaction, elitism, contempt.

Contempt is a ‘negative emotion’ associated with the name of Jonathan Swift, to whom Rickword points as a master of the sort of poetry required today. But he is quite clear, in a separate and later essay on Swift, that this contempt is at the service of a larger, more generous emotion and endeavour:

… it is not some inherent, ineradicable beastliness in individual men and women, as the bourgeois critics prefer to see it, which is the object of his magnificent fury, but the irresponsibility of man towards man which results when every item of personal worth has been translated into ‘exchange value’.

Rickword ‘re-creates’ Swift’s invective in his own poetry, for example, his ‘Hints for Making a Gentleman’:

Let library shelves sustain from reach
the facts experience may teach;
and Swift and Schopenhauer be banned
past grasp of most inquiring hand;
such pessimists are all suspect
for they may teach him to correct
the blind insurgent ego-lust
that goads this paladin of dust
and gives him in his rage for pelf
rule of all creatures but himself.

In his prose ‘Apology for Yahoos’ (written for The Calendar) Rickword offers an ironically anthropological account – Gulliver having written ‘before the observation of primitive races had been developed into a science’ – of modern society’s faith in ‘Love’’ and ‘Law’. These principles he sees as derived from its obsession with ‘Luxury’, the process of ‘eliminating the physical reminders of their animal origin’.

Rickword’s regard for Swift may seem excessively high. Would he not have done better to look to Pope for guidance, as possessing the greater balance, the finer humanity? This is a wide debate, not to be settled here. What we can say is that Swift demonstrated for Rickword the possibilities of a political, anti-capitalist poetry. In this emphasis, he anticipates the revaluation of tradition suggested, much later, by the scholar-critic F. W. Bateson:

It is time Swift’s status as a poet was reconsidered. Although his verse is uneven and often slipshod, at his best he seems to me to be one of the great English poets. I prefer him to Pope. Pope is a supreme talker in verse, endlessly vivacious and amusing, but it is difficult to take him or his opinions very seriously … Swift, on the other hand, though he restricted himself to light verse, is fundamentally one of the world’s most serious poets.(2)

Before he came to Swift, or re-asserted the ‘negative emotions’, Rickword discovered, independently of Eliot, the Metaphysicals. In his own verse, he is particularly close to Donne – and a long way from Eliot. Here is his witty celebration of the interplay between mind and matter, imagination and reality, drawing on an ingenious religious conceit, as articulated in the opening lines of ‘To the Sun and Another Dancer’:

The sun that lightened the first Easter Day
traced in the arc of his familiar way
the choreography of Resurrection,
which works on our world now, the true reflection
whereby the sun-foot dancer draws the dead
out of the sepulchre of formless dread;
and as the sun still seems to our slow wit
to attend on us when we derive from it
all vital qualities, these verses show
no revelation you did not bestow.

Rickword, at his best, effects a Modernist transformation of Donne’s Metaphysical grammar. Roy Fuller was right to remind us that ‘one would miss the full flavour of a couplet like the following if one hadn’t in mind the then current discussions about the essentially random nature of the motion of particles’.(3) Here it is:

Dawn is a miracle each night debates,
which faith may prophesy but luck dictates

We need only add that the reference does not, of course, explain the freshness of the language.

Seventeenth century Metaphysicals (English), eighteenth century satirists (English) … and now we come to nineteenth century Symbolists (French). Rickword’s desire to keep the past alive in the present, for the future, was as keen as Eliot’s. But where Eliot began identifying himself with Charles Baudelaire, and in particular with his sense of sin (‘Baudelaire was man enough for damnation’), Rickword was increasingly convinced of the genius of a later poet, an extreme ‘Symbolist’, Arthur Rimbaud. Few people in 1924 were concern¬ing themselves with that adolescent genius when Rickword produced his critical study, Rimbaud: The Boy and the Poet (extracts are included in the first volume of essays, the translations are in Behind the Eyes); now, of course, his reputation is secure, though as challenging as ever.

What is remarkable about the book in retrospect is that though, as one might expect from an exploratory volume, it dwells on Rimbaud’s precocious ‘Messianism’ (since taken up to his disadvantage), there is strong emphasis on the poet’s social awareness and on his political concerns (the cause of the Paris Commune in particular). Enid Starkie’s apparently exhaustive account of the poet’s career, written fourteen years later, insufficiently documents Rimbaud’s absorption in the utopian socialism of his day.

It is not possible to illustrate neatly the part played by his adopted genius in the formation of Rickword’s style: you can spot more easily his influence on Hart Crane, whom Rickword evidently converted to Rimbaud. What is important is to recognise a general determination to rescue language and thought from the mercilessly platitudinous logic that we are taught to call ‘common sense’, and which ultimately denies life:

… and women grown
too docile under habits not their own;
bright incarnations damned to trivial calls
like shirted angels nailed to bedroom walls;
and all tense lives subdued to what they seem,
shed their coarse husks and, naked in Time’s stream,
stand up unsullied out of the sun’s beam.

It was Rimbaud’s radical contempt for ‘dead convention’, artistic or social, which Rickword found congenial, and which Eliot may have found ‘heretical’.

For, though Rickword was the first critic to praise or even understand Eliot, he was also a fierce opponent of that tendency to reaction which revealed itself in the pages of the latter’s journal The Criterion: Eliot’s praise for Mosley, Pound’s advocacy of Mussolini, general Bloomsbury snobbery and, as already mentioned, right-wing theological debates. Too all of this Rickword meant The Calendar to be an antidote. Throughout his journal’s duration he was a socialist – giving his wholehearted support to the general strike of 1926 – and by the following decade he was a committed communist.

It is possible to see Rickword’s Marxism as some¬thing extraneous, perverse even: an abandonment of artistic integrity, something to be apologised for. This would be unfair. The Calendar had been a literary magazine with a political emphasis; Left Review was a political magazine that encouraged progressive literature. In his essay ‘Culture, Progress, and the English Tradition’, Rickword reminds us that the politically active writers of the thirties are only following the example set by Milton, Swift, Words¬worth … and he might have added Cobbett and Hazlitt (there are studies of all five included in Literature and Society). Not that Rickword’s Marxism is a vulgar, sterile application of economic theory to artistic practice. He castigates Philip Henderson for just that:

Society was feudal, it became bourgeois, it is going to be socialist – so much he knows; but of the interplay of the classes, the dialectical relationship between them, which is the law of humanity in motion, he realises nothing, or at any rate, does not apply it to the subject matter in front of him.

Nor is he indulgent of those ‘public- school’ Marxists who put his critical successor F. R. Leavis off Marxism, pointing out ill¬-considered language in Auden’s ‘Spain’ — ‘the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting’; and his own poem on the Spanish civil war, ‘To the Wife of a Non-interventionist Statesman’, urgent and serious, contrasts favourably with Auden’s aloof weariness:

From small beginnings mighty ends,
from calling rebel general friends,
from being taught in public schools
to think the common people fools,
Spain bleeds, and England wildly gambles
to bribe the butcher in the shambles …
Five hundred dead at ten a second
is the world record so far reckoned;
a hundred children in one street,
their little hands and guts and feet,
like offal round a butcher’s stall
scattered where they were playing ball …

Yet on the whole it is the early Auden — socially responsible Modernism — that comes closest to Rickword’s ideal. Thus he complains, as the younger writer goes into retreat:

Auden is too good a poet to fall back into the simple exploration of individuality, after having originated a poetry of the social type along the lines of which there are so many fertile experiments to be made.

Rickword’s criticism in the thirties is as immediately concerned with contemporary creation as that in the twenties. Yet he himself, apart from the poem on Spain, produced no more verse for thirty-odd years. It would be misleading, I think, to see his renunciation of poetic speech as evidence of a disillusionment with either art or life. ‘A poet’, Rickword had said, ‘does not speak merely for himself’: it is not helpful to say, with the finality of jargon, that the Modernist poet became the Marxist functionary, any more than to say of Rimbaud that the Faustian genius became the mere gun¬runner’. As Michael Schmidt remarks of Rickword’s development:

Some of his critics believe that Marxism was responsible for his giving up poetry. And yet, without the development of his social conscience, his poetry would hardly have attained the commitment, range, and power that it did, before he moved beyond it.(4)

To assume the primacy of poetic praxis over political is to surrender to the empty idealism that Rickword has consistently opposed: an idealism that would ultimately prefer art to life, spirit to matter, idea to action, word to deed. However much we may regret the loss to English poetry involved in his decision, we must surely admire the struggle of a committed individual for integrity, totality, and against alienation, to which an ostensibly divided career — poet, critic, polemicist — bears ironic witness.

Notes

1 Jack Lindsay, After the Thirties, London, 1956, p.23

2 F. W. Bateson, English Poetry: A Critical Introduction, London, 1950, p.123

3 Roy Fuller, Professors and Gods, London, 1973, p.36

4 Michael Schmidt, Fifty Modern British Poets, London, 1979, p.187

King Lear: From Christ to Cordelia

Laurence Coupe

The English Review 6, 4 (April 1996), pp. 2-6

[Originally published under the title ‘King Lear: Christian Fairy Tale’]

This article explores King Lear as both a play of conventions and a play on conventions. It debates the relation between tragedy and comedy, reality and fantasy. Seeking to link Cordelia’s plight with that of Cinderella, it argues that both stories are more fantastic than realistic. Above all, it proposes that Christianity itself, the ultimate ‘source’ of Lear, involves an imaginative logic which takes us beyond narrow definitions of tragedy.

***

Perhaps it goes without saying that Shakespeare’s comedies are not realistic. Think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Much Ado About Nothing: they follow a set formula of young love triumphing over adversity by the most unlikely means. We accept that the story follows a formula, beginning ‘once upon a time’ and ending with the characters living ‘happily ever after’. Indeed, it is this structural principle which, strictly speaking, defines them as ‘comedy’ – not the clowning, joking and bawdy, which are additional treats, as it were.

On the other hand, we often talk of the tragedies as something more than a game or ‘play’. Perhaps this is because we have a prejudice in favour of classical, Greek notions of dignity and seriousness, thinking of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex as the ideal to which Shakespeare was aspiring. Thus we expect Hamlet and King Lear, for instance, to reveal the rational truth about adult life, not to feed our childish imaginations. We accept the Dream as ‘juvenile’ but want Lear to be ‘mature’. Even though the latter has its Fool and more than a few moments of farce, we think that, because it leads to misery and death, it is more ‘real’. We overlook that what is involved is, again, a structural principle, no more true to life than that of comedy. What counts in both cases is the convention: what is suggested by the particular form chosen.

Once we have accepted the notions of convention and choice, we will be less inclined to impose our prejudices on this or that play, and grant Shakespeare the right to produce whatever he finds imaginatively effective. This may include playing off one form against another, savouring the tension between tragedy and comedy, which are, after all, complementary rather than exclusively opposed. (In the words of Williiam Blake: ‘Excess of sorrow laughs; excess of joy weeps.’) In doing so, as a playwright working within a Christian context, he is only following the example of the Bible. The fall of Adam and Eve from their innocent state of happiness in the garden of Eden (tragedy) necessitates the crucifixion of God’s son, Jesus (tragedy), which in turn allows for the resurrection of the one true Christ and the salvation of all humanity (comedy).

Tell me the old, old story…

For a ‘mature’ tragedy, King Lear has as absurd a plot as you could wish. A foolish old king (Lear) poses a preposterous love test. Two wicked elder daughters (Goneril and Regan) indulge him; the youngest (Cordelia) refuses, and is banished. In another family, again with a foolish father (the Duke of Gloucester), the honest son (Edgar) is maligned by his scheming half-brother (Edmund) and has to flee for his life, resorting to disguise as a beggar (Poor Tom) in order to survive, but never having his identity suspected. Soon the king’s wicked daughters begin to show their true colours by taking over the kingdom themselves….

Need we go on? It should be obvious that we are in the world not of reality but of fairy tale. Only while this one begins ‘once upon a time’, it would be difficult to describe the characters as living ‘happily ever after’. Given that this is a Christian rather than a classical drama, perhaps we should allow for things not being as simple as they seem. (Here, of course, I am in no way dismissing the achievements of the great Athenian playwrights.)

Fairy tales are usually comic in shape, but it is interesting to note the affinities between a popular example, ‘Cinderella’, and the tragedy of King Lear. In the most familiar version, a mixture of the transcriptions of Charles Perrault in 1697 and the Brothers Grimm in 1812, the plot is as follows. A young, beautiful heroine is spurned and savagely mistreated by a wicked stepmother. Her elder sisters are given anything they wish, while she is denied everything. But eventually she meets and, after much confusion of identity, finally marries her prince. Love and innocence triumph over hatred and experience.

But what of King Lear – written nearly a century before Perrault and two centuries before Grimm? True, we have two selfish, grasping sisters, and even a ‘Prince Charming’ (the King of France) who wishes to marry the heroine at whatever cost. These happen to anticipate the fairy tale we know, but of course Shakespeare himself was working with a much earlier version. According to the novelist and cultural historian Marina Warner, in her book From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (1994) this was the already archaic tale discovered and transcribed by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. In this tale, called ‘Love Like Salt’, most of the comic trappings are absent, with one single theme predominating: the parent-child conflict and its outcome. This, then, is what we might call the old, old story.

In the Perrault and the Grimm versions, the parent responsible for the heroine’s suffering is the stepmother; the father is a shadowy and, presumably, very weak figure – if the way he allows the girl to be treated is anything to go by. But in Lear, the father takes centre stage: there is no wife, and it is he who is directly responsible for Cordelia’s plight. This is best explained by Shakespeare’s use of the archaic source. In the Monmouth version we find not only the same focus on the father, but also his same outrageous demand for protestations of love from his three daughters, drawing a similarly cryptic challenge from the youngest. After pronouncing the word ‘Nothing’, Cordelia elaborates only to the extent of appealing to her natural, filial ‘bond’; the young heroine of the earlier story declares that she loves her father ‘as meat loves salt’. Both replies provoke outrage.

There are differences, however, the most important being the endings. Though ‘Love Like Salt’ treats the heroine’s wedding as only incidental to the main plot, the point is made quite clearly that she survives to enjoy a permanent reconciliation with her father. Cordelia, however, returns from exile for only a brief moment of forgiveness before the hatred that Lear has unleashed, by his unnatural demands, destroys them both. Thus we call the one a ‘comedy’ and the other a ‘tragedy’. But – and this must be emphasised – what unites them is the element of fantasy, of make-believe.

The valley of decision

We could put this last point another way by saying that King Lear is a kind of game – a ‘play’ – in which we are invited to explore what might just happen if a father were to offend against nature, a king against kingship. As Lear himself unwittingly foretells, in his angry riposte to Cordelia’s reply: ‘Nothing will come of nothing.’ We are compelled from then on to witness both king and kingdom reduced to ‘nothing’.

It is at Dover that this process of destruction reaches its climax. But it is there also that we are given signs of a meaning beyond catastrophe. As we read in the Bible, though human wickedness is great, ‘the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision’ (Joel 3:13-14). The decision, of course, is not left to ‘the Lord’ alone: his people have to choose the path of salvation or damnation, hope or despair. Dover might be seen, then, as an image of choice, a valley of decision’, rather than a real place.

When Lear wakes up there, in the French camp, we must bear in mind that, in banishing Cordelia and giving away a divided kingdom, he has denied the order of nature. Now, significantly, he is unsure whether he is in hell (‘bound upon a wheel of fire’) or, seeing his faithful daughter, in heaven (‘Thou art a soul in bliss’). Postponing both, he opts after defeat to treat the prospect of captivity with Cordelia as a means of escape to an earthly paradise. He hopes to regain the innocent world which Adam and Eve originally inhabited. He wants to undo the consequences of the fall:

… so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news (V.iii.11- 14).

It is probably better for the reader to share Lear’s sense of possibility than to trust to the reality represented by Edgar, whose faith in the merely natural order of things seems inflexible, un-Christian. Thus he forces his father, Gloucester – first morally, now physically, blind – to see the error of suicidal despair, by deceiving him into thinking he has plunged over Dover’s cliffs. Later he announces to his scheming half–brother Edmund:

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.
That dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes (V.iii. 170-3).

The imaginative logic of the play takes us beyond such natural ‘justice’, such law.

Cinderella, Cordelia, Christ

If we want to understand the love that transcends all law, we have to see what Cordelia comes to signify in the course of Act IV. First she is described, appropriately enough, in regal terms, as ‘a queen / O’er her passion’: unlike Lear, she is a true monarch, ruling herself as she might be expected to rule her people. Later, she is likened, more boldly now but yet rightly, to a goddess, whose tears are said to be ‘holy water’ from ‘sacred eyes’. Finally, and most importantly of all, ‘Thou hast one,’ her messenger tells Lear, ‘Who redeems nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to’ (IV.vi.206-9).

Here we have to respond fully to the Biblical associations: the ‘twain’ are not only the ‘she-devils’ Goneril and Regan, but also Adam and Eve; the ‘general curse’ describes not only the chaos of the kingdom but also the fallen condition of all humanity; and the ‘one’ is simultaneously Lear’s youngest daughter and Jesus Christ. Like him she is sacrificed; as with his death hers is seen as redemptive, cleansing Britain of Lear’s legacy of sin. In other words, we have gone beyond the ‘gods’ invoked stoically by Edgar (‘The gods are just, and of our peasant vices make instruments to plague us” and aggressively by Edmund (‘Now gods, stand up for bastards!’) to the one ‘God’ whom the play finally celebrates. Thus Cordelia may be said to atone to the Father on behalf of the father.

From Cordelia as Cinderella to Cordelia as a Christ-figure may seem a long leap, but in the vastly creative world of Shakespeare’s drama it is not impossible. Nor should we forget that the Christian story is one of the most marvellous examples of the game, the serious game, of ‘What if?’ What if, it asks us, the meek were to inherit the earth? What if the only way to gain your life were to lose it? What if, most outrageously of all, a slaughtered lamb (the crucified Jesus) were to rise and overcome ‘the dragon’, Satan, and marry the ‘bride’ who is his church, as we read in the Book of Revelation? Here is the resilient logic of fairy tale: failure leading to triumph, tragedy leading to comedy.

King Lear offers no definite vision of the future. We are left only with the worthy moralising of the new king (‘The weight of this sad time we must obey…’), because Edgar belongs to the tragic convention of law. The sacrificial love of Cordelia transcends this world, and it is up to us to try to comprehend it. As with the fairy tale, we have to enter into the contract of imagination: we have to rethink both ‘maturity’ and ‘reality’. As with the Christian story, we have to be able to see the spiritual potential in the most extreme tragedy. Or, to put it another way: we have to be willing to understand why Shakespeare’s visionary predecessor, the medieval Italian poet Dante, should call his great work about a journey from hell to heaven a ‘comedy’ – a work which is now universally known as The Divine Comedy.

***

The article was directly inspired by conversations with Tony Walker of Southport College, whom I wish to thank. I am also grateful to Marina Warner for her encouragement of my interest in myth and fairy tale over the years. (Laurence Coupe)

The Presence of the Past in 

Waiting for Godot

Laurence Coupe

The English Review, 5, 1 (September 1994), pp. 19-22

This article relates a particular literary past to the present of Beckett’s play. Taking his cue from T.S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Laurence Coupe demonstrates how Beckett ‘takes on’ canonical texts (Shakespeare, Dante, the Bible). Far from these being academic allusions, Beckett manages to treat them as vitally relevant to his own needs and to appropriate them for our own age.

***

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, though about half a century old, is still regarded as a very strange play. To acknowledge what is familiar about it need not deprive the play of its power; rather, it might help affirm its creative credentials. For if we still find it challenging, this is surely something to do with its radical relation to established literary texts. As T. S. Eliot pointed out in his influential essay of 1919, there is no easy way to separate ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. The literary legacy — the ‘canon’ — would become a dead weight were it not for those modern writers who, far from evading it, make it crucially relevant to their own needs. Beckett is one such writer: with him the past becomes present.

Welcome to Purgatory

Waiting for Godot, then, must be seen in context. Indeed, there is a context announced for it already, in the author’s own earlier work. I am thinking of his short story ‘Dante and the Lobster’, included in Beckett’s first prose volume More Kicks than Pricks (1934). The plot centres on a day in the life of one Belacqua Shuah, a Dublin student researching into Dante’s Divine Comedy, a major visionary poem of the early fourteenth century concerning the afterlife.

Belacqua is attracted to that text because he likes pondering the themes of damnation and salvation; in the poem Dante imagines himself travelling from the depths of Hell to the heights of Heaven. Moreover, Shuah has an affinity with it because he shares his own first name with that of one of Dante’s characters: the figure whom the poet meets as he travels up the Mount of Purgatory, which lies halfway between the infernal and celestial realms. Dante’s Belacqua is being punished for the sin of idleness, which means that he delayed his repentance until the very last moment. Now he is forced to repent at length, lingering alone on the mountain, with the bliss of heaven a long way off.

Here in this world, Beckett’s Belacqua also lingers and loiters a good deal. Indeed, it takes him all his time to prepare his lunch (burnt toast, gorgonzola, salt, mustard and cayenne) and then to collect a lobster from the fishmonger for his aunt. After several awkward episodes, he arrives at her house, where he is surprised to find that the creature is still alive. His aunt mocks him for his naivety, explaining how lobsters are cooked as she prepares it for the pan of boiling hot water. The story ends as follows:

She lifted the lobster clear of the table.

It had about 30 seconds to live.

Well, thought Belacqua, it’s a quick death, God help us all.

It is not.

‘Dante and the Lobster’ gives us Beckett’s vision in brief. Living is a matter of suffering, as in purgatory, but without the consolation of an assured future. All one knows for certain — though, like Belacqua Shuah, we may try and take refuge in cliche — is that life is long, and pain is profound. The name of Dante may not have been on the lips of all the critics when Waiting for Godot was first performed in English in 1955. But perhaps we can see, with the advantage of having the complete works, that the familiar landscape of all Beckett’s writing is the Mount of Purgatory, as depicted in the second of the three books of The Divine Comedy. Again and again, his characters are ‘waiting’, as Vladimir and Estragon wait for ‘Godot’. And we do not even crudely have to identify that elusive figure with the God whom the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche announced to be dead, in order to see that between Dante and Beckett the emphasis has shifted. Where once Purgatory was the route from Hell to Heaven — a stage on the journey of redemption — it now marks the boundaries of our meaningless and intolerable lives.

Consider Lucky’s tortuous speech in Act I of Waiting for Godot. If, in essence, his is a theo­logical argument such as we frequently find in Dante, it is one that is taking place after the death of God. Though we constantly assume the existence of a sky-father who ‘for reason unknown’ rewards some souls and punishes others, humanity is seen to ‘waste and pine’. Though we seek to blind ourselves to this truth by physical activity, we will, ‘in spite of… the tennis’, eventually have to face the fact that we live in an ‘abode of stones’.

When in Act II Pozzo and Lucky appear for the second time, and soon collapse in a helpless heap on the ground, Vladimir is delighted because this gives him and Estragon something to do, relieving the tedium of their existence. He desperately enthuses to Estragon:

Vladimir: We wait. We are bored. [He throws up his hand.] No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let’s go to work! [He advances towards the heap, stops in his stride.] In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!

Thus our condition, in this ‘abode of stones’, is revealed to be paradoxically both purgatorial and purposeless. Beckett’s vision derives from Dante’s traditional Christian universe; but without divine meaning the cosmos turns out to be chaos.

If Eliot is right about tradition then what both ‘Dante and the Lobster’ and Waiting for Godot have allowed us to do is to read the present in terms of the past and the past in terms of the present. Belacqua in Purgatory, in no hurry for salvation, has now caught something of the character of Belacqua in Dublin, burning his toast and reluctantly fetching his aunt’s lobster. Nor can the landscape of Purgatory itself ever be the same now that we have seen Vladimir and Estragon, tormented by time, as they wait by a bare tree on a bleak country road.

‘Do not presume…’

Behind Waiting for Godot lies The Divine Comedy; behind The Divine Comedy lies the Bible. The scriptures too are invoked by Beckett. But the experience of the play is not that of catching the odd, disposable allusion; rather, a pattern starts to emerge. Early in Act I Vladimir, having been ticked off by Estragon for leaving it too long to empty his bladder, quotes a half-remembered line: ‘Hope deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?’ His friend neither knows nor cares, being preoccupied with his boots, but the reference is vital. Turning to the Biblical source we read the following: ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick, but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life’ (Proverbs 13:12).

Here we need to remind ourselves that in the beginning, the Bible tells us, Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden and did not know suffering or death. Then, prompted by the serpent, they chose to defy God and eat the fruit of ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. The result was that they were driven out of the garden, and the way was barred to ‘the tree of life’ (Genesis 2-3). Vladimir and Estragon have inherited this loss. The road they are travelling leads nowhere; and though the tree by which they wait, which is bare throughout Act I, suddenly in Act II acquires ‘four or five leaves’, this is hardly a guarantee that the ‘life’ of Eden has been restored. Moreover, though Vladimir may remark at the end of the play that ‘Everything’s dead but the tree’, his and Estragon’s main interest is whether or not it will do to hang themselves on: it will not. Contrast this painful symbolism with Dante’s welcome of a sure sign of salvation coming out of suffering: ‘The tree renewed itself, which before had its boughs so naked’ (Purgatory, XXXII, 59-60).

So all our two wanderers are left with is the realisation that they have fallen:

Estragon: We’ve lost our rights?
Vladimir [distinctly]: We got rid of them.

Significantly, when the former is asked by Pozzo for his name, he replies ‘Adam’. Again, when Estragon later tries to attract the attention of Pozzo and Lucky by calling out ‘Abel’ and ‘Cain’ (the names of Adam and Eve’s sons), Pozzo responds to both titles: as Estragon remarks, ‘He’s all humanity.’ In other words, he has unknowingly admitted our fallen condition, in which we are all as much capable of evil (Cain) as of good (Abel).

But what of Christ, and the possibility of redemption? Vladimir is certainly interested in the crucifixion, and the story of the repentant thief; or, at least, he hopes that telling it ‘will pass the time’:

Vladimir: Two thieves, crucified at the same time as our Saviour. One –
Estragon: Our what?
Vladimir: Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other…  [he searches for the opposite of saved] … damned.

In a rare interview Beckett once quoted St Augustine’s reflection on this story: ‘Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved: do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.’ What appealed to him, he said, was ‘the shape’: a typically ambiguous observation, since the symmetry of the statement allows for it to be read both optimistically and pessimistically. On the whole, of course, the evidence of Waiting for Godot is that Beckett’s interpretation of what is often called the good book is decidedly gloomy. When Estragon compares himself to Christ, Vladimir objects (typically, on geographical rather than theological grounds):

Vladimir: Where he lived it was warm, it was dry!
Estragon: Yes, and they crucified quick!

Unaccommodated man

However negative the Biblical context of Waiting for Godot, one could hardly accuse Beckett of avoiding the challenge of the scriptures. The faith to which they testify may not be available to him, but they offer a pattern of meaning against which to test his despair. Dante is re-read in a similar way. If we look carefully, we might also detect the presence of Shakespeare, another pillar of the tradition. Indeed, in this case the influence might, at first, seem even more direct. But again, we have to be careful in comparing source and use.

Take King Lear. In Act 3 the old king, driven to madness, wanders on the heath followed by the motley entourage of his Fool, the banished Earl of Kent and ‘Poor Tom’ (the Duke of Gloucester’s maligned son, in disguise as a beggar). The dialogue reaches heights of absurdity comparable to that of Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky (another quartet of misfits); but again, mixed in with the madness are moments of awful truth. Pointing to ‘Poor Tom’ and appealing to the other three, Lear asks:

Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! There’s three on’s are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare forked animal as thou art. (III.iv.105-11)

At such moments of insight in the bleak, storm-tossed wilderness we may not feel there is much effort needed to see Beckett as traditional. Waiting for Godot seems to be exactly about this vision of humanity.

We may recall also the last great speech by the blood-steeped hero of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Besieged in his castle and hearing of his wife’s death, he manages to attain a lucidity as terrifying as that of the old king on the heath:

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (V.v.24-28)

Could there be a better description of the progress of Vladimir and Estragon throughout the two acts of Waiting for Godot?

Indeed, Vladimir’s own conclusions are not unlike Lear’s and Macbeth’s. Remembering Pozzo’s insight (‘They give birth astride of a grave…’), he elaborates:

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. [He listens.] But habit is a great deadener. [He looks again at Estragon.] At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. [Pause.] I can’t go on! [Pause.] What have I said?

Absurdity then and now         

Do we conclude, then, that whereas the Bible and Dante have to be forcibly taken over by Beckett, his world-view has already been anticipated exactly by Shakespeare? This would be, I feel, misleading. For the vision of ‘unaccommodated man’ is Lear’s, not the author’s of King Lear; and the vision of the ‘tale / Told by an idiot’ is Macbeth’s, not the author’s of Macbeth. After all, the last words of both works go to other characters, representa­tives of a new beginning. Moreover, the same playwright also wrote Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night: festive comedies, in which such nihilism is very firmly put in its place. By contrast, Vladimir speaks — if the evidence of Waiting for Godot as a whole, and ‘Dante and the Lobster’, is to be believed — with Beckett’s full authority.

Another way of putting this is that, though the absurd vision is only one dimension of Shakespeare’s repertoire, in our age it has become central. Thus, while the great tragedies may offer Beckett a model of despair, he can only use it by extending it beyond the dramatic limits originally imposed. An insight born of extremes — Lear’s anguish, Macbeth’s guilt — has been treated as absolute and universal. Shakespeare too has had to be read against the grain. But then, this is just the kind of daring that we need from an ‘Individual Talent’ if ‘Tradition’ is to be kept alive.

Laurence Coupe