The Beckoning Fair One continued...
I will admit to finding THE WANDERER thin gruel, its prose not improved by being overheated; very much an adolescent's novel, and, I think very much a male adolescent's fantasy. Seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes is idolized by his younger friend Francois Seural, the book's narrator; the early part of the novel is taken up with dull schoolboy hijinks and schoolyard warfare: bullies, wicked teachers and the like. Then Meaulnes runs away, and stumbles upon a strange village that seems lost in time, medieval in its architecture and also the dress and behavior of its inhabitants. A child-wedding is being celebrated, and Meaulnes is caught up in the excitement of the preparations. He has a brief encounter with a lovely young girl named Yvonne de Galais and immediately falls in love with her. The following day Meaulnes leaves the strange village, but he spends the rest of his life in a vain quest to find the road back to the Lost Domain, to recapture the sense of enchantment of that first meeting with Yvonne, and all the potent yearning and rapturous desire of adolescence. And while he does eventually find her - though not in the village where they first met - not even marriage to Yvonne can make him happy. The poor girl dies at any rate, soon after the birth of their daughter.
Still, the novel continues to have its admirers, including the artist Jamie Wyeth, and Fowles had a profound sense of recognition upon reading it.
LE GRANDE MEAULNES. This is the first time I have read it. A strange experience, Crusoe-like, seeing those footprints in the sand, knowing that after all one is not the first on this island. Because the green ghost behind every line in Le GM is brother to that I want in THE MAGUS ... the purpose is the same. Mystery, pure mystery.[JF JOURNALS, pg 582]
The essence of this "green ghost," the unworldly longing and sense of immersion in a deeper and stranger reality that the everyday, is summed up in a brief passage from THE WANDERER -
There he [Meaulnes] was, mysterious, a stranger in the midst of this unknown world, in the room he had chosen. What he had found surpassed all his hopes. And it was enough now for his joy to recall, in the high wind, the face of that girl who turned toward him ... (THE WANDERER, translated by Francoise Delisle, Houghton Mifflin, 1928, pg 94)
"The face of that girl who turned toward him" eerily prefigures Sarah Woodruff as Charles first sees her, standing on the quay at Lyme Regis.
She turned to look at him - or as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not so much what was positively in that face which remained with him after their first meeting, but all that was not as he expected.
Again and again, afterwards, Charles thought of that look as a lance; and to think so is of course not merely to describe an object but the effect it has. (FLW, pg 17)
This piercing look is the gaze of the Muse that transfixes the observer, Graves' "next bright bolt" hurtling to freeze the artist, Medusa-like, so that s/he returns, again and again, willingly or not, to that first inspired instant of enchantment. It is the stare of The Beckoning Fair One, who in Oliver Onions' chilling story destroys the middle-aged novelist Paul Oleron when he tries to "recapture that first impression" of "the new unknown, coy, jealous, bewitching Beckoning Fair !" Onions' portrait of the doomed novelist attempting to do this is uncannily (I might say, depressingly) acute.
His fantastic attempt was instantly and astonishingly successful. He could have shouted with triumph as he entered the room; it was as if he had escaped into it. Once more, as in the days when his writing had had a daily freshness and wonder and promise for him, he was conscious of that new ease and mastery and exhilaration and release. The air of the place seemed to hold more oxygen; as if his own specific gravity had changed, his very tread seemed less ponderable. The flowers in the bowls, the fair proportions of the meadowsweet-colored panels and mouldings, the polished floor, and the loft and faintly starred ceiling, fairly laughed their welcome. Oleron actually laughed back, and spoke aloud.
"Oh, you're pretty, pretty!" he flattered it.
Then he lay down on his couch.
"The Beckoning Fair One," in WIDDERSHINS by Oliver Onions, 1911, pg. 75
Oleron has rented an old house in which to complete his novel. It is a house with an unfortunate history. The previous resident, also an artist, died a suspected suicide, though it's apparent to the reader that he has been literally consumed by the house's rapacious Muse. But there is never a sense in Onions' superb tale that the Beckoning Fair One is just a ghost, the revenant of a mere mortal woman. Rather she is a destructive, ravishing force brought to life by the artist's own obsessive desire to create; in Oleron's case, the burning need to write
a novel with a heroine so winsome, capricious, adorable, jealous, wicked, beautiful, inflaming, and altogether evil, that men should stand amazed. She was coming over him now; he knew by the alteration of the very air of the room when she was near him; and that soft thrill of bliss that had begun to stir in him never came unless she was beckoning, beckoning. (BFO, pg. 99)
Fowles best describes his own experience of writing through or about his particular Beckoning Fair Ones in his 1977 essay "Hardy and the Hag" (John Fowles, WORMHOLES: ESSAYS AND OCCASIONAL WRITINGS, Jonathan Cape, 1998). It's a fascinating piece of work, despite some very silly Freudian trumpery about the origins of creativity in auto-erotic attachment of the male infant to his mother, a theory which Fowles says "helps to explain why all through more recent human history, men have seemed better adapted - or more driven - to individual artistic expression than women." I can't say if I'm better adapted than my masculine counterparts, but I'll state here that I have made ample use of muses, always male, in my own work, and hope that readers can make the great leap of faith that Fowles (as well as Robert Graves) was unable to, in imagining both male and female objects of desire.
Fowles calls his muse figure "The Well-Beloved," after the Hardy novel which inspired the essay; "a young female sexual ideal of some kind, to be attained or pursued (or denied) by himself [the writer] hiding behind some male character." The writer's obsession with this ideal becomes powerful enough to have repercussions in his daily routine. "Against this constant emotional fugue must be set the real presence of the woman the novelist spends his life with." In Fowles' case, this real presence was his wife, Elizabeth, the woman who had acted as muse for both THE MAGUS and THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN. She was also Fowles' best reader and editor, guiding him towards the famous double endings of THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN - "The mystery of Sarah... is not answered... In fact to my way of thinking this novel should end with no answer but only an implied one of tragedy." [JF: A LIFE IN TWO WORLDS, p 195]
John and Elizabeth Fowles remained faithful to each other during their 33-year-marriage. Still, in "Hardy and the Hag" Fowles writes about "imaginative infidelity" and the "erotic elusiveness, unattainability" of "the hunt of the Well-Beloved," that perennially doomed quest of any artist; "its attainment no more feasible than that the words on the page can become the scene they describe."
Fowles' Well-Beloved appears, in one form or another, in nearly all his works. The 19th century gave us untold examples of other Beckoning Fair Ones, including Keats' Belle Dame Sans Merci, wild-eyed and perilous, as well as the hauntingly enigmatic women who filled the canvases of the Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff,
simultaneously near to and far from the scrutiny which tried to annex her. Always, and simultaneously, vague and precise. Always and simultaneously single and double. Always and simultaneously sensual and absent, strong and delicate. Motionless, even when threatened by the serpent. Threatened by it? Its accomplice, rather. [SYMBOLISTS AND SYMBOLISM, Robert L. Delevoy, trans. by Barabara Bray, Rizzoli, 1978]
This sense of a being eternally straddling two worlds - the real world, and the artist's vision embodied in its presiding spirit - is what defines the muse as a liminal creature. And through his creative process - itself a liminal experience - the artist also becomes a liminal being. I think this is what gives encounters between artist and muse their sense of psychic peril: this constant passage between the borders of the real and the imagined, with the constant threat of one or the other becoming trapped - by creative sterility or simple domesticity, by madness or murderous violence - on the wrong side of the threshold.
And if all else was falling away from Oleron, gladly was he letting it go. So do we all when our Fair Ones beckon. Quite at the beginning we wink, and promise ourselves that we will put Her Ladyship through her paces, neglect her for a day, turn her own jealous wiles against her, flout and ignore her when she comes wheedling ... but in the end all falls away. She beckons, beckons, and all goes ... (BFO, pg 85)
Fortunately the artist has some arrows in her own quiver to keep the Fair Ones at bay, chief among them the willingness to acknowledge, from the outset, the futility of any attempt to capture and detain a muse, on the page or in a penthouse. This is creative self-preservation on the artist's part. As Fowles puts it,
... the Well-Beloved is never a face, but rather the congeries of affective circumstances in which it is met; as soon as it inhabits one face, its erotic energy (that is, the author's imaginative energy) begins to drain away. (JF, "Hardy and the Hag")
I can attest to the success of this artistic catch-and-release program: if the creative endeavour is a battle (which it often is; for me, anyway), winning it - completing the novel, the painting, the performance - can be both exhausting and depressing: ultimately no one cares as much as the artist (certainly not our Beckoning Fair Ones), and she's left like the triumphant knights at the end of E.R. Eddison's THE WORM OURUBOROS, heartbreakingly crestfallen at the realization that their great, world-shattering war is over: NOW what are they going to do?
Fortunately a benign goddess waves her hand and, as in Valhalla, the battle begins anew. And so with writing.
The cathartic effect of tragedy bears a resemblance to the unresolved note on which some folk music ends, whereas there is something in the happy ending that resolves not only the story, but the need to embark upon further stories. If the writer's secret and deepest joy is to search for an irrecoverable experience, the ending that announces the attempt has one again failed may well seem the more satisfying. (JF, "Hardy and the Hag")
My first Beckoning Fair One made a fairly dramatic entrance thirty years ago, in a numinous dream that transformed my life. Since then others have come and gone, and sometimes even that first muse returns - older now, as I am, but still recognizable, still unsettling, still tied to the sound of the night wind in the leaves - and takes up residence in my head, not to be dislodged till I give him his place on the page. This is a good haunting: it makes for good hunting, bringing the muse to ground.
But inevitably there comes a day, or week, or month, or year, when a Fair One does not beckon. I've learned then to heed the poet Theodore Roethke's quiet statement of faith in one's own power to create -
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.
- "It was beginning winter"
Art is change, writing is change, as life is. I think the essence of the relationship between artist and muse is that it is an acknowledgement that one of us - the artist - has been changed by the latter: willingly or not; permanently, in a life's work, or for the short term , in one book, one poem, one song, one film. What remains on page or canvas is the record of that change. Muses come and go, just as artists do, but for a little while, at least - as long as the song lasts, as long as the story does - we can subvert the laws that keep the Beckoning Fair Ones in one world and ourselves in another, and shimmer briefly on the same plane.
In her life, Laura Riding fought hard to get the last word; Robert Graves stole much of her fire for THE WHITE GODDESS (and I'm glad he did), but I will give his Muse the last word here, and quote from her lovely long poem "Benedictory" - an artist's blessing if ever there was one.
The mystery wherein we
Accustomed grew as to the dark
Has now been seen enough -
I have seen, you have seen.
* * *
It seems not now distressful
Or yet too much delighted in.
It was a mystery endured
Until a fuller sense befall.
* * *
A blessing on us all, on our last folly,
That we part and give blessing.
Yet a folly to be done
A greater one to spare.
* * *
For in no wise shall it be
As it is, as it has been.
A blessing on us all,
That we shall in no wise be as we were.