The Beckoning Fair One continued...
THE WHITE GODDESS was published some years after the demise of Graves' relationship with Riding, but her influence as Muse - oracular, fiercely intelligent, and somewhat daft - clearly informs the entire book. Graves invokes her in the dedication to the book's second edition (1952), a revision of the poem in the original volume.
"All saints revile her, and all sober men ...
In scorn of which I sailed to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom I desired above all things to know
Sister of the mirage and echo.
"Whose broad high brow was white as any lepers,
Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips,
With hair curled honey-colored to her hips.
" with so huge a sense
Of her nakedly worn magnificence
I forget cruelty and past betrayal,
careless of where the next bright bolt may fall."
Graves goes on to describe the Muse or White Goddess as "a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair." This, minus the blonde tresses, is an accurate physical description of the woman who first sand-blasted Graves' fragile psyche back in 1926. Graves later writes
The White Goddess is anti-domestic; she is the perpetual "other woman," and her part is difficult indeed for a woman of sensibility to play for more than a few years, because the temptation to commit suicide in simple domesticity lurks in every maenad's and muse's heart. (ibid., pg. 503)
One's initial instinct is to scoff at this pronouncement. But, in a sublime irony, after Riding married Schuyler Jackson she did at last succeed in committing suicide, of the domestic sort. As Richard Perceval Graves slyly observes, "she abandoned [poetry] in 1939 as an inadequate means of telling the final truth about things" and retired with her husband to a quiet life in Florida, where she worked on a study of langugage, published after her death as A NEW FOUNDATION FOR THE DEFINITION OF WORDS AND SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAYS (University Press of Virginia, 1997) - a worthy project, but, one can't help but think, a bit of a comedown for the sibylline author of the COVENANT OF LITERAL MORALITY THE FIRST PROTOCOL, whose acolytes in earlier days compared her to Jesus Christ, and who called herself Finality.
Still, numerous women artists have opted out of simple domesticity (which is never all that simple, anyway) to pursue their own muses, male or female. In fiction we find the poignant Monster in Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Colette's Cheri. There is also Jane Bowles and her Moroccan female muse, "the wild and cunning, the fearful and the tough, the powerful and the childlike" Cherifa; the British writer Lady Caroline Blackwood, who could safely claim the Triple Crown of 20th century Musedom - a novelist of some note, she also played muse to painter Lucien Freud, composer Israel Citkowitz, and poet Robert Lowell; Margaret Wise Brown, who had passionate attachments to the actress Michael Strange (nee Blanche Oelrichs, once wed to John Barrymore) and James Stillman Rockefeller Jr. In THE LIVES OF THE MUSES, Francine Prose provides a thoughtful assessment of the relationship between George Balanchine's muse, the dancer Suzanne Farrell; yet makes no mention of Isadora Duncan and her notorious muses, the designer Gordon Craig and especially the Russian poet Sergei Esenin, of whom Duncan said
You know, I'm a mystic. While I slept my soul left my body and ascended into the world where souls meet - and there I met the soul of Sergei. (ISADORA: A SENSATIONAL LIFE, Peter Kurth, 2001)
Today the popular image of Duncan seems risible, what with her flowing scarves and her proclamation that "All my lovers have been geniuses; it's the one thing upon which I insist." But in trading the Mystic for the MFA, artists (and their adherents) have sacrificed something:
The sense of illumination and fulfillment that comes alike to the lover, the poet, the philosophic or religious mystic, [that which] seems to give the clue that makes intelligible to us the poet's representation of transition from joyful love, through pain and frustration, to spiritual ecstasy, as continuous. [Bodkin, pg. 189]
Francine Prose nails the essence of the Muse as yearning, and the relationship between muse and artist as both erotic and discursive. "The muse is often that person with whom the artist has the animated imaginary conversations, the interior dialogues we all conduct, most commonly with someone we cannot get out of our minds." What Prose misses, I think, is the mystical element, the Mystery that animates this conversation between a poet and her muse. As Anne Sexton puts it ,"And we are magic talking to itself/noisy and alone"("You, Doctor Martin").
Laura Riding, in the eerie and incantatory "Poet: A Lying Word," becomes the poet invoking herself as Muse.
It is a false wall, a poet: it is a lying word. It is a wall that closes and does not. This is no wall that closes and does not. It is a wall to see into, it is no other season's height. Beyond it lies no depth and height of further travel, no partial courses. Stand against me then and stare well through me then. Like wall of poet here I rise, but am no poet as walls have risen between next and next and made false end to leap. A last, true wall am I you may but stare me through. And the tale is no more of the going: no more a poet's tale of a going false-like to a seeing. The tale is of a seeing true-like to a knowing: there's but to stare the wall through now, well through. Laura Riding, "Poet: A Lying Word," in SELECTED POEMS: IN FIVE SETS, Faber & Faber, 1970
Sappho in one of her fragments (these are from poet Anne Carson's brilliant 2002 translation) gives us perhaps the most succinct description of the artist's relationship to her Muse -
I long and seek after
In another fragment, Sappho testifies to the effect of an encounter with what the British writer Oliver Onions named the Beckoning Fair One -
never more damaging O Eirena have I encountered you
Always, the interplay between Beckoner and beckoned is fraught: the threat of one being consumed or obliterated by the other is constant. Yet it is precisely this tension, this tango macabre, that underscores the erotic nature of the relationship between artist and muse, suspended as it is between longing and dread, the yearning to possess and the knowledge that capture is so often destructive of the very object of desire.
II.
I first encountered John Fowles' work twenty-five years ago. I was in the hospital post-surgery, hooked up to an IV morphine drip; THE MAGUS was the sole book I'd brought with me, though friends who visited gave me John Cheever's recently-published COLLECTED STORIES, which I also was reading - if "reading" is the correct description for what I did in the dazed, hallucinatory state I occupied during my recovery. I'd entered the hospital not knowing if I'd make it out again, and I'm not sure why I chose THE MAGUS to accompany me on what I was terrified would be a one-way trip. The novel's cover resembled that of GOAT'S HEAD SOUP, not my favorite Rolling Stones album. There were intimations of magic, which I liked; but these were very vague, and I do recall realizing fairly early on that the book contained no real magic, at least not what I called magic. I'd never read anything by Fowles, though I had notions of a successful writer who dealt in louche subjects - adultery, kidnapping; something about butterflies, a childhood passion of mine. I was on a D.H. Lawrence kick at the time, and in fact Lawrence is not a bad literary companion to Fowles, though I didn't realize that for many years.
This was all during a brief, unhappy hiatus in what was too-quickly passing for my life. I'd been forced to move back in with my parents, having flunked out of university and subsequently proved myself very bad at anything but drinking and taking drugs. Back in New York, I got a job at a bookstore, which was where I found THE MAGUS, recently reissued in a revised edition. I borrowed it but never paid for it: in a state somewhere between panic and exhilaration at finding myself still alive, I quit the store and moved out of my parents' house two days after I was released from the hospital, returning to D.C. to make a second stab at becoming a writer.
I'd like to say THE MAGUS was instrumental in all this, but it wasn't. The truth is, I remembered almost nothing of the book save a dreamy impression of blinding blue sky, a stone stairway, some masks; though I suspect it may have colored an iconic dream I had the night before my surgery. The fact is, I hated the book, and subsequent rereadings haven't done much to change my mind. Nicolas Urfe, the protagonist, is an insufferable prig. God knows why all the women in the novel throw themselves at him: he's arrogant and smug, and the women themselves seem tired vestiges of an earlier time, English "birds" with too much eyeliner, too-bright clothes, voices too loud or too soft by turns.
I returned to THE MAGUS recently, in an effort to see what others see in it; or, no - to be honest, to see what one other sees in it. Fowles is a writer noted for his use of a muse - his late wife, Elizabeth - and I have an epistolary muse, V, who is a careful reader of Fowles' work. V once commented that his side of our correspondence consisted of "gestures to evoke your response," and so when V gestured at Fowles, I paid attention. This is what writers do when their muses beckon.
Of contemporary writers, John Fowles probably best charted that perilous terra incognita where muse and artist meet, most successfully in THE COLLECTOR (1964) and THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN (1969), though also in other works, including THE MAGUS (1965; revised 1977) and MANTISSA (1982), a book-length conversation between a writer and the muse Erato. "Perhaps it is that I am hunting the woman archetype," Fowles wrote in his journal in 1954. But his quarry is not so much the Eternal Feminine, but the Mystery she represents; a mystery that, for Fowles, was often entwined with the natural world. Fowles' biographer, Eileen Warburton, notes that "Knowledge of the natural world ... was a profoundly felt experience, a near mystical identification" (JOHN FOWLES: A LIFE IN TWO WORLDS, Viking 2004). In a 1949 entry in his journal, when he was 23, Fowles writes
Being a poet, divining beauty, is like divining nature - a gift. It does not matter if one does not create. It is enough to have the poetic vision. To see the beauty hidden. As I did tonight - I felt it all exactly in a moment, such a rush of impressions that they can hardly be seized. (John Fowles, THE JOURNALS: VOLUME I, edited and with an introduction by Charles Drazin, Jonathan Cape, London, 2003, pg. 4)
Fowles' best work deals with the attempt to "seize" this moment of mystical apprehension, both in his life and his fiction, as evidenced, first, in a journal entry from March 1950, and then in an epiphanic scene from THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN (1967) -
The wood is deserted and I walk quietly down the paths, listening to birds, feeling content to be in the real country again and alone, after so long. I still feel the old pantheistic sympathy, the feeling that I know everything that's going on, the delight in little things, little scenes, in the ever changing atmosphere of each second. A great tit's cap, brilliantly glossy and iridescent in the day's brightness. Jays screeching, a missel-thrush, robins, singing. Fragrant blossoms, Clumps of primroses, and the sweet taste of violets. [ibid. pg 26]
The trees were dense with singing birds - blackcaps, whitethroats, thrushes, blackbirds, the cooing of woodpigeons... Charles felt himself walking through the ages of a bestiary, and one of such beauty, such minute distinctness, that every leaf in it, each small bird, each song it uttered, came from a perfect world... He stood... astonished perhaps more at his own astonishment at this world's existing so close, so within reach of all that suffocating banality of ordinary day.
It seemed to announce a far deeper and stranger reality.
THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, p 240-250
This "deeper and stranger reality," the secret world hidden within our own mundane one, is the Mystery at the heart of John Fowles' work. It is a mystery inextricably tied to a green Eros, a woman glimpsed in the wild places, the lost domain. The eponymous French Lieutenant's Woman, Sarah Woodruff, is first seen by the novel's male protagonist Charles Smithson in "a little south-facing dell, surrounded by dense thickets of brambles and dogwood; a kind of minute green amphitheatre." Sweet woodruff is an herb used in making May Wine, traditionally drunk on May Day, the neopagan's Beltane and a day sacred to Graves' White Goddess. Sarah Woodruff indeed functions as an avatar of the Goddess or Muse, first intriguing, then obsessing, and eventually deranging Charles.
Fowles first encountered the fictional notion of the lost domain in 1963. This is when he read Alain-Fournier's short novel THE WANDERER. As a young teenager Fournier (born Henri Henri-Alban Fournier, 1886) fell under the spell of the French Symbolists; a few years later he visited London, where he was equally entranced by the written and visual work of the Pre-Raphaelites (who helped inspire the Symbolist movement). At nineteen Fournier had the same sort of fleeting, yet obsessive encounter with a young woman that derailed the fictional Charles Smithson. In 1913, a year before his death, Fournier said of her, "That was really the only being in the world who could have given me peace and repose. It is now probably that I shall never achieve peace in this world." Fate didn't give him much a chance to: a soldier in the first months of World War I, he died in an ambush at Saint-Remy on September 22, 1914.