The wise visitor to the Scillies does not drive straight to Penzance and board a helicopter or a ship, but instead finds time, so long as the weather is clear and the visibility good, to go out first to Land’s End. And there they float, an eternal stone armada of over a hundred ships, aloofly anchored off England; mute, enticing, forever just out of reach. The effect is best later in the day, when they lie in the westering sun’s path, more like optical illusions, mirages, than a certain reality. I say ‘they’, but the appearance at this range is of one island; which has a justice in it, since in remote antiquity all the larger islands except St Agnes very probably were conjoined.
At Land’s End you already stand on territory haunted by much earlier humankind. Their menhirs and quoits and stone lines brood on the moors and in the granite-walled fields; and even today the Scillies can in certain lights lose the name we now call them by and rebecome the Hesperidean Islands of the Blest, Avalon, Lyonesse, Glasinnis, the Land of the Shades; regain all the labels that countless centuries of Celtic folklore and myth have attached to them. Adam and Eve braved the sea, probably as long as four thousand years ago. Their burial places are scattered all over the present islands, and so densely in places that one suspects the Scillies must have been the ultimate Forest Lawn of megalithic Britain, though interment there would have been an ambition not only of the dying: the spirits of the dead could not cross water, and the living may well have cherished that thirty-mile cordon sanitaire between themselves and their ancestors. Whatever the reason, the islands hold an astounding concentration of nearly one fifth of all such tombs in England and Wales—far more than Cornwall, which is already rich in them.
Some of the great boulders (naturally carved by Atlantic wind and rain, split and isolated by the Ice Age) that the earliest settlers found there would have profoundly impressed, and baffled, them. They are so splendidly wrought and monumental—especially on Gugh and the south side of St Agnes—that it is as if some earlier incarnation of Henry Moore had played a huge joke (in one case a huge phallic joke) on posterity. The pluperfect one lies on the furze moor just above Porth Askin, exquisitely posed and pedestalled in a rainwater pool. It would grace the forecourt of any twentieth-century skyscraper; and, much higher praise, not disgrace the most fastidious Zen garden. Perhaps it was these magnificent stones that seeded the legend of the lost land of Lyonesse and the associated myth of Atlantis; of a simpler, nobler, vanished world and culture.
There is a more likely origin of the legend. The ancient Celtic inhabitants of Cornwall and the islands almost certainly had contacts with a culture if not nobler, at least more advanced, whose ships would have appeared out of the south-west, even though their homeland lay in quite another direction. The Phoenicians were the great trading, exploring, and seagoing race of antiquity. According to Strabo, they discovered the Atlantic sometime before 1000 B.C.; their colony at Cadiz dates from about that time. By an irony, they were both the most commercial and the most mysterious of ancient civilizations—mysterious because they left so few traces of their existence. Their barter-currency presumably lay most in perishable goods, which makes them the despair of archaeologists. What is quite definitely known is that they coveted tin, which they used not only as a metal but as a dye mordant (stannous chloride); and that they regarded its British source as one of their most precious trade secrets. The Phocian Greeks who colonized Marseilles in about 600 B.C. discovered this source at some later date; and Herodotus knew that the tin came from islands called the Cassiterides (from the Greek kassyo, ‘to stitch together’, and kassiteros, ‘tin’), but otherwise only that they were located somewhere very far off in northern Europe. The first coherent account was by Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century B.C.:
The inhabitants of that part of Britain which is called Balerium [Land’s End] are very fond of strangers, and from their intercourse with foreign merchants, are civilized in their manner of life. They prepare the tin, working very carefully the earth in which it is produced. The ground is rocky, but it contains earthy veins, the produce of which is ground down, smelted, and purified. They beat the metal into masses shaped like astralgi [dice] and carry it to a certain island lying off Britain called Ictis [St Michael’s Mount].
Strabo’s report, from about the beginning of our era, runs as follows:
The Cassiterides, opposite to the West Parts of Britain, situated as it were in the same climate with Britain, are ten in number and lie near each other, in the ocean toward the north from the haven of Artabri. One of them is desert, but the others are inhabited by men in black cloaks, clad in tunics reaching to the feet, girt about the breast, and walking with staves, thus resembling the furies we see in tragic representations. They subsist by their cattle, leading for the most part a wandering life. Of the metals, they have tin and lead, which, with skins, they barter with the merchants for earthenware, salt, and brazen vessels.
Artabri is near Cape Finisterre, the north-western land’s end of the Iberian peninsula. Both Pliny and Solinus, writing a little later, confirmed the identification of the Cassiterides with the Scillies. Tin-smelting pits that can be dated to 300 B.C. have been found near St Just. It seems probable that the tin on the Scillies themselves was always more exposed and easily exploited, even largely exhausted by Roman times. But the island metal was still mined in the sixteenth century, and found in workable quantities as late as the eighteenth; and no doubt the islands remained a depot for the mainland ‘exporters’ long after local supplies ran out.
In short, though positive proof is lacking, there does seem strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that mysterious strangers were descending on the extreme south-west of Britain, and regularly, from at least Homer’s time, and possibly even before it. I believe myself that this is where the northern version of the Atlantis corpus of legends springs from. A comparison with the kind of myths that the conquistadors in America, or the first explorers in Polynesia, gave birth to is illuminating. Man has never liked rational explanations of why strangers are more intelligent and technologically advanced than he.
I should have made a very poor hand on Ulysses’ boat, since I have never in my life gone past an island without wishing that I could have landed on it, and even in less than traditionally romantic circumstances. I had the longing only very recently, on a tour round Manhattan; would have had our launch stop at all those forsaken islets with their dilapidated warehouses and weed-jungles. In some way they put to shame the far more famous island they surrounded, and remained of their kind, where it has become a termite-heap. True islands always play the sirens’ (and bookmakers’) trick: they lure by challenging, by daring. Somewhere on them one will become Crusoe again, one will discover something: the ironbound chest, the jackpot, the outside chance. The Greek island I lived on in the early 1950s was just such a place. Like Crusoe, I never knew who I really was, what I lacked (what the psychoanalytical theorists of artistic making call the creative gap), until I wandered in its solitudes and emptinesses. Eventually it let me feel that it was mine, which is the other great siren charm of islands: they will not belong to any legal owner, but will offer to become a part of all who tread and love them. One’s property by deed they may never be; but humans long ago discovered, had to discover, that that is not the only way to possess territory.
It is this aspect of islands that particularly interests me: how deeply they can haunt and form the personal as well as the public imagination. This power comes primarily, I believe, from a vague yet immediate sense of identity. In terms of consciousness, and self-consciousness, every individual human is an island, in spite of Donne’s famous preaching to the contrary. It is the boundedness of the smaller island, encompassable in a glance, walkable in one day, that relates it more closely to the human body than any other geographical conformation of land. It is also the contrast between what can be seen at once and what remains, beyond the shore that faces us, hidden. Even to ourselves we are the same, half superficial and obvious, and half concealed, labyrinthine, fascinating to explore. Then there is the enisling sea, our evolutionary amniotic fluid, the element in which we too were once enwombed, from which our own antediluvian line rose into the light and air. There is the marked individuality of islands, which we should like to think corresponds with our own; their obstinate separatedness of character, even when they lie in archipelagos.
It is not only the geologists and ecologists who feel that in the Scillies; the islanders do themselves. In the old days there were different nicknames for the men of each island. Those of St Mary’s were Bulldogs; of Tresco, Caterpillars (perhaps for the moonlit files of smugglers); of Bryher, Thorns (all thorn trees on the Scillies are blown askew, and Bryher people were supposed to look ‘lopsided’). St Martin’s men were Ginnicks, a word whose meaning R. L. Bowley says is lost, though I see Joseph Wright has it down (admittedly from a county on the opposite seaboard of England) as a synonym for ‘neat’. On St Agnes you were a Turk because you looked Spanish—the imputation being against the women of that island. St Agnes is nearest the dreaded Western Rocks, and has given first shelter to more shipwrecked sailors than all the other islands together. It must therefore have seen Spanish Armada men, who everyone in the south-west knows may have been failures at sea but were terrors in bed. I have a ‘Spanish’ great-aunt and uncle myself, so I believe every word of it. (‘Turk’ simply means ‘not English’: that is, outlandish.)
Despite the much greater intercommunication and intermarriage of modern times, this separatism, or patriotism, has not quite disappeared. The respectively most ‘foreign’ and most ‘native’ of the five presently inhabited, Tresco and Bryher (though St Martin’s might also claim the latter distinction), lie not much more than a long stone’s throw apart. I sat once with a young Bryher wife. She came originally from Bristol, but she talked about the mainland’s not seeming ‘real’ anymore. Then she looked out the window and across the narrow channel. ‘Even Tresco,’ she added; and I remembered Armorel, of whom more in a minute. Armorel felt rather the same about Bryher, which in another direction lies only a slightly longer stone’s throw from her own island of Samson.
Island communities are the original alternative societies. That is why so many mainlanders envy them. Of their nature they break down the multiple alienations of industrial and suburban man. Some vision of utopian belonging, of social blessedness, of an independence based on cooperation, haunts them all. Tresco is leased and managed by the Smith family, who have generally brought in outsiders to work there. I asked another native of Bryher what he thought of Tresco. He spat over the lee gunwale of his boat, which may seem ungrateful, in view of all that the Smiths become Dorrien-Smiths have done, and are still doing, for the economy and conservation of the Scillies as a whole; but the spitting was, I knew, not against man, but against principle. He was prepared to make the most of his summer living ferrying holidaymakers to the place; he allowed the charms of its modern hotel, its jolly pub, its famous subtropical gardens; but he would leave the Scillies altogether sooner than live on Tresco himself. And he used finally a phrase that was almost one of pity, as if speaking of a fat girl trying to be a ballerina: ‘It’s not island,’ he said.
Of course all islanders have to be handy with boats, but genuine nesomanes are not sailors. Centuries of professional mariners have wished the entire Scillies sunk a hundred fathoms deep, and most other small islands with them. Yachtsmen may enjoy archipelago-cruising, but their true marriage is with the moving island under their feet, whereas the attachment of the fanatic is to all that the passing craft will never know. The surrounding sea is an indispensable part of the setting for this obsession, but it is not of its essence. It is the isolater, not the isolation. The ships it carries on its horizon are like arrows that have missed their target, space vehicles heading for some other planet. They may photograph the surface, but they will never know the interior.
However, it is not for nothing that since remotest antiquity the domain of the siren has been where sea and land meet; and it is even less for nothing that the siren is female, not male. Something deeper than aboriginal sexual chauvinism—the fact that ship-handling was always a man’s affair—lies behind this. It is odd, if you think about it, that Ulysses should feminize both his bulwark and its age-old greatest enemy, the reef, the rock, the uncharted shore; almost as if being wrecked were the result of a quarrel between women, eternal destroying Scylla versus eternal launching Helen of Troy.
I think we must read here a paradox about possession, or possessibility. Good sailors have always married their ships as well as their wives. A recent book showed that even those sailors in stone ships, offshore lighthouse-men, can still enter into a very curious emotional relationship with their towers; not at all the sort of thing that the economic view of man as mere smoke in the wage-labour wind allows for. But of course to possess is always to want to possess more. No earlier man ever went voyaging for fun, or risked the sirens for the sheer hell of it; he went to find land, food, tin, gold, trade, lebensraum . . . power of some kind. His voyage was undertaken in what he already possessed, though never as securely as he wanted, and towards what he wanted to possess in addition, though never as certainly as he imagined. Eons of empty marriages to pretty faces lie behind the siren; Adam may have delved in the literal earth, but he never scratched much beyond the surface of Eve’s mind and nature. It was she, after all, who provoked the very first voyage, outward bound from Eden with her dimwit of a husband.
The historically very abrupt discovery of the charms of the seaside has always seemed to me one of the most bizarre happenings in the cultural history of Europe. Before 1750, it is almost as if everyone felt about coasts as many people feel today about airports. Of course one goes to them if one has to travel by air; of course one lives by them if one’s livelihood depends on it or if other circumstances oblige; but who in their right mind would ever go to an airport from choice, just for idle pleasure? The analogy may seem absurd, but that makes our apparent long blindness to the very real pleasures of the seaside even more mysterious. It is true that well up to 1700 most foreign tourists descending on European beaches came with cannon trained and cutlass in hand. The last place to pass a happy holiday in the summer of 1690 would have been on the Dorset or Devon coast. Admiral Tourville’s French fleet spent most of that season cruising close inshore looking for towns to sack; Teignmouth was burned to the ground, and other places bombarded. And it is also true that the very notion of ‘holiday’ was, in all but its original and literal sense, for most of the world a late-Victorian invention. Yet a mystery does remain: how can something so nice have been ignored for so long?
The change came, like most major human changes, from a conjunction of two factors. Humans can follow reason against pleasure, and pleasure against reason, but when the two combine, they are irresistible. In this case the medical profession and the first Romantics spoke as one. The doctors discovered the medicinal value of sun-bathing—and even sea-drinking, in the early days. The Romantics discovered nature and the picturesque. The sea was therefore judged good for both body and aesthetic soul; for me, in a word. The annual conferences of the Amalgamated Union of Sea Sirens must have been gloomy affairs in the early eighteenth century; everywhere they were being declared redundant by the new lighthouses, the improved navigational methods. Then suddenly a miracle: they had a brilliant idea. Instead of combing their tresses and facing out to sea, they would comb their tresses and face inland. Instead of corrupting sailors, they would pervert the landlubbers.
This abrupt acquisition of new victims can be very accurately dated in the case of my own town of Lyme Regis. Here there was a third factor involved as well: international politics. Again and again during the first decade of the eighteenth century, Lyme was beseeching Her Majesty in Council, and the Duke of Marlborough, to send cannon and powder against the ‘insults of enemy privateers’. Then followed thirty years of silence on the matter. In 1740 John Scrope was sent by the Privy Council to inspect the town, and reported that ‘by the long peace their Fire Arms have been so much neglected that upon a late inspection of them there was not a musquet in the Town that could be fired, so that the town is in a neglected and defenceless condition’. Six nine-pounders were sent, so Lyme was no longer defenceless; neglected it remained, but in that ‘long peace’ salvation had been brewing.
By 1750 the place was moribund, a warren of hovels, with all but two of its former opulent medieval and Tudor houses in ruins. Its harbour was in decay, an early victim of gigantism, far too ‘tight’ and shallow for the merchant ships of the time. Its one other ancient industry besides sea trading, serge-weaving, was being throttled—as everywhere else in the west of England—by the better-organized and more competitive north of the country. Nobody ever visited it, nor easily could visit it even if they wanted to, since there was not a single carriage road. It was as near dead as one can imagine; and our coasts were sick with hundreds of towns in an exactly similar state.
But in 1770 an alert, far-sighted, and exceptionally generous man descended on the corpse. He was Thomas Hollis, a benefactor of Harvard and an early socialist before the name—a radical, a philosophe. He told Lyme that its only hope was to make itself a little more presentable, and showed it the way to start. He bought the hovel property in the town not to profit from it, but simply to have it sledgehammered to the ground. He cleared a little central square (now lost again; such is human progress); he proposed an assembly room. He suggested to the astounded natives that it was pleasant to stroll by the sea, and made a start on a marine parade; and he did even better by pulling off a great publicity coup, persuading the most famous Englishman of his time to bring his sickly young son—one day to be as famous as his father—to Lyme for the air and climate. If it was good enough for the Earl of Chatham and young William Pitt, it was very soon good enough for many others. Hollis, a much greater human being than either Pitt, performed this small miracle in only four brief years, before his death in 1774.
By 1800 the main industry of Lyme had become what he foresaw and what it has remained ever since: catering to those who came, and come, to the sea for pleasure. It took place as suddenly as this, between 1750 and 1780, in countless other small coastal towns all over Britain. The sea, its water, its air, the light and relief it gave landscapes, became the rage. Lyme had its most famous literary visitor in 1803 and 1804, when Jane Austen arrived with her family, and it is interesting to note the contrast between her judgements of the place itself and of its society. The latter got very low marks indeed from the mercilessly fastidious young woman, but she grew positively Wordsworthian—if not downright brochuristical—when it came to the natural setting. The lift, the allegro that takes place in Persuasion when the action moves to Lyme is completely typical of the people of this time. They had discovered what we are now taught to covet and love from infancy. I think there has been no nicer sea change in social taste—even though in 1800 it was still reserved for the well-circumstanced—in our history.
The hidden intention of that invisible turned-round siren installed on every beach was not at first perceived. For many decades sea-bathing remained what it had been to Jane Austen, a medicinal activity. Quite probably even fewer were actually bathing in the sea than at the very beginning of the mania, since along every promenade and front had sprung purpose-built interior (and warmed) sea-baths; and those who still braved Neptune direct did it from wheeled cabins. But the Victorian spirit was dominant long before 1836, and it was that age which began to see the siren plainly—that is, to sense the always implicit eroticism and sexuality of the beach.
No one saw those qualities more clearly than the Reverend Francis Kilvert, who loathed the ‘detestable custom of bathing in drawers’ and twice—and delightedly—shocked public beaches by refusing to wear them. In 1873 he wrote (one may take his ‘ignorance’ with all the salt in the English Channel), ‘I had in my ignorance bathed naked . . . however some little boys who were looking on at the rude naked man appeared to be much interested in the spectacle, and the young ladies who were strolling near seemed to have no objection.’ Two years later he was on the Isle of Wight during July:
The morning was blue and lovely with a warm sun and fresh breeze blowing from the sea and the Culver Downs. As I walked from Shanklin to Sandown along the cliff edge I stopped to watch some children bathing from the beach directly below. One beautiful girl stood entirely naked on the sand, and there as she half sat, half reclined sideways, leaning upon her elbow with her knees bent and her legs and feet partly drawn back and up, she was a model for a sculptor. There was the supple slender waist, the gentle dawn and tender swell of the bosom and the budding breasts, the graceful rounding of the delicately beautiful limbs and above all the soft and exquisite curves of the rosy dimpled bottom and broad white thigh. Her dark hair fell in thick masses on her white shoulders as she threw her head back and looked out to sea. She seemed a Venus Anadyomene fresh risen from the waves.
But the Lolita-haunted Kilvert was a century ahead of his time in erotic honesty, and few others of his age would have admitted such thoughts, let alone committed them to paper. Still, they must have harried even the most timid and conventional. One may dress against other eyes, but not against the caress or shock of water on the most private skin. Decent Christian gentlemen and advisers of youth made such a thing of the manly cold bath because they feared terribly what might go on in a warm one. As late as 1882 the town council of Lyme was still threatening severe penalties for any male degenerate who dared venture within fifty yards of the ladies’ cabins.
Our museum has a very revealing family album of 1886. It gives a delightfully vivid picture of what a seaside holiday was like in that year: prawning, mackerelling, tennis, walking, fossilling, sandcastling, sketching, photographing, making fun of the locals . . . but not a single word about taking one’s clothes off and swimming. The one other thing just as conspicuously absent, to our own age’s eyes, is symptomatic: despite the many—and evidently lively and attractive—young people of both sexes in the family, there is also not the faintest hint of any romantic attachment, even jocularly expressed.
‘Sea-bathing tends to invigorate the whole nervous system,’ pronounced Modern Etiquette in 1889. ‘However, as an agent for promoting the softness and delicacy of the skin, and the bright hues of the complexion, it is inferior to the warm or tepid bath. It is better not to bathe in the sea until two hours after a meal, and the circulation should be promoted by friction and the aid of a good, brisk walk.’ The lady authoress goes on, too, to warn against ‘exposure to the ray of the sun in summer. It is very injurious to the skin, causing it to tan.’ This latter concern probably explained why the fashionable months for sea-bathing in Jane Austen’s time were October and November: one had at all costs to preserve one’s ability to blush. Nothing was more erotic to nineteenth-century man than a milky cheek turning pink.
But all this middle-class nonsense was doomed. The seaside jaunt had become more and more of a national habit, ever since Sir John Lubbock’s Bank Holiday Act of 1871. Even Modern Etiquette had to confess, and approve of, the fact that ‘of late ladies have taken very much to rowing’. Punch, for its part, had been hinting at the sexual charms of the seaside since at least 1864, when that trendsetting (and trend-mocking) Parisian George du Maurier joined its staff; and even then, he was only taking up a line that late-Georgian cartoonists such as Rowlandson and Cruikshank had been as frank about as our own age. It was fully accepted by the 1890s. The jolly opportunities for studying the female form, for having the chance encounter, constitute the main theme of that charmingly illustrated series on popular European coasts by the French artist Mars—a series aimed quite as much at Anglo-Saxon audiences as at Gallic ones. All those hiked skirts and peeping lower calves, that wind-dishevelled hair, young Belle Epoque beauties in disarray . . . from there it was only a short step (facilitated by Tommy Atkins’s discovery of French popular art in his brief reliefs from the horror of the trenches) to the splendid vulgarities of the kind of postcard that George Orwell immortalized. I suspect we have still not fully recognized the debt that sexual—and perhaps political—liberation owes to the seaside holiday.
The beach has now become the principal public pleasure area, closer and closer to the bedroom, of all advanced Western—and Eastern—societies. It is where one goes to spoil one’s own naked body, to find sex and romance, to release; for an oblivion on all routines, fixed hours, formalities. It may have become increasingly difficult to escape the world at the seaside of high summer; but even there, workaday identity at least can be lost. All through every August I listen to the sound of children’s voices floating up from the beach into my own seaside garden. They are within a quarter-tone of being screams of extreme terror; but they remain screams of extreme pleasure. The subtle siren plies her trade, and meets very little resistance now.
Since the proximity of the sea melts so much in us, the island is doubly liberating. It is this that explains why indigenous small-island communities, at least in the long-discovered temperate zones, are on the whole rather dour and puritanical in their social ways and codes. They have to protect themselves against the other perennial temptation of the island: dropping the necessary inhibitions of mainland society. Islands are also secret places, where the imagination never rests. All isolation, as the cold-bath merchants also knew, is erotic. Crusoes, unless their natures run that way, do not really hope for Man Fridays; and islands pour a stronger wine of forgetfulness than any other place on all that lies beyond the horizon. ‘Back there’ becomes a dream, more a hypothesis than a reality; and many of its rituals and behaviours can seem very rapidly to be no more than devices to keep the hell of the stale, sealess, teeming suburb and city tolerable.
The puritans, from Homer on, have always suspected islands, and wished their addicts the fate allotted Odysseus and his men. William Golding repeated the ancient warning in The Lord of the Flies: such literal isolation will breed swine—self-destruction—whether through lotus-eating or through loss of mainland law. I think it is significant too that the most self-revealing novel Thomas Hardy ever wrote, The Well-Beloved, is set on the quasi-island of Portland. It is a story full of incest, of repressed eroticism, of narcissistic guilt on the part of its tortured author. He makes much play between the pagan and the Christian view of life, the illicit and the licit; and makes it very clear that the illicit inhabits the old Portland (and his own complicated psyche) precisely because of its detachment from the mainland, both physically and psychologically.
I have always thought of my own novels as islands, or as islanded. I remember being forcibly struck, on my very first visit to the Scillies, by the structural and emotional correspondences between visiting the different islands and any fictional text—the alternation of duller passages, ‘continuity’ in the jargon of the cinema, and the separate, island quality of other key events and confrontations—an insight, the notion of islands in the sea of story, that I could not forsake now even if I tried. This capacity to enisle is one I always look for in other novelists; or perhaps I should say that none I admire lacks it. It is a capacity that lies quite literally at the heart of what has often been called the first modern novel, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; and it lies equally at the heart of the very first novel of all. The island remains where the magic (one’s arrival at some truth or development one could not logically have predicted or expected) takes place; and it rises strangely, out of nothingness, out of the onward dogwatches, mere journeying transit, in the writing.
The Scillies have a Victorian novel partly devoted to them. This is Sir Walter Besant’s Armorel of Lyonesse, first published in 1890 and not possible much before that date, since it shows the ‘new’ young woman of the time in all her brave and earnest glory. One must in art derive the species from the Pre-Raphaelites, but the vogue for her sturdy, glowing cheeks, her impetuous frankness, her comparative emancipation, probably began with another novel ten years earlier than Besant’s, Sabine Baring-Gould’s Mehalah. The similarly eponymous Mehalah is also an expert oarswoman and girl-mistress of an island, though of a very different kind from Armorel’s Samson. The two books, like their two once-famous and now-forgotten authors, make for an interesting contrast. Baring-Gould, an embittered High Anglican clergyman, took the puritan view of islands, which allowed him to write a much darker and finer story. Swinburne noted its powerful echoes of Wuthering Heights, another essentially ‘island’ book, for all its geographical setting; and I have sung Mehalah’s praises elsewhere myself.
Besant was a better man than he was a writer: a lifelong champion of the underprivileged, and a patron saint to all American and British authors, since he was the first to campaign consistently and effectively for their legal and commercial rights. The London scenes in Armorel are rather too full of stock characters and stock melodrama to make the book any but a very minor work of its period. Yet for thirteen chapters in the beginning, when Besant describes the life of his young heroine on the now-uninhabited island of Samson, he does achieve something better, a strange sea-idyll, or island pastoral; he even achieves a genuine echo of a much more ancient girl on an island, and not only because that far more famous idyll, which I shall come to, also begins with the saving of a selfish, handsome stranger from drowning.
We may smile today at the passionately idealistic tomboy Armorel, who is several light-years removed from our own notions, both political and physical, of the aware and attractive young woman; but something of the honesty and independence that islands bestow, and of their ancient magic, does glow through these pages . . . one doesn’t forget Armorel, or her spirit, indeed one may even regret them, since the conditions of solitude and of self-dependence in which such character can emerge are now gone from the world. But they are, still today, a little less lost in the Scillies than anywhere else in Britain south of the northern isles.
The first novel in world literature is woven of islands and the sea, and of solitude and sexuality, which is why it has had a greater influence on subsequent storytelling, both thematically and technically, than any other single book in human history. It also first demonstrates (with a complexity and subtlety that still escape all probability) the value for the form of the archipelagic structure I spoke of earlier. A novelist can no more afford not to be steeped in it than can a Christian in the Bible, a philosopher in Plato, or a Socialist in Marx. It is the sine qua non of all serious study or practice of fiction.
I am one of those heretics who believe the Odyssey must have been written by a woman. The heresy is not new among authors. Samuel Butler believed it, and produced some convincing circumstantial evidence; and so did Robert Graves in our own time. Whoever did write it seems to have been markedly more knowledgeable about domestic matters, the running of a large household, than about nautical ones. The one bit of showing-off in the latter field—the description of the boat Odysseus builds to escape from Calypso’s island—is shipyard stuff, not seagoing expertise; and in the very first pages nothing is more striking than the loving detail bestowed on the provisions for Telemachus’ voyage, and the total absence of such detail when it comes to the craft itself. Throughout history it has been man who worships and polishes the vehicle, and woman who packs the suitcases.
Transparently also the writer is obsessed by all the things—especially young female things—that keep husbands away from their proper place at home. There is that repeated, vivid eye for the interior decor and life of the palaces of Nestor, Menelaus, and Alcinous—how guests are received, how they are bathed, how dressed, how fed, even how the laundry is done—that ubiquitous sympathy for the feminine ego, from the glittering grande-dame entry given Helen of Troy to Calypso’s sadness; the love of describing clothes and jewellery; the kindness shown older women, and the flagrantly greater interest, in the Land of the Dead, taken in the female ghosts. . . .
Butler, who was no Kilvert, decided that the authoress was hiding behind the nicest (morally) of the waylaying island girls, Nausicaa. If the writer must be hidden behind a character, I should plump myself for Penelope, or rather, for the theory that Scheherazade was not the first woman to know that letting a man hear all he imagines is one very good way to put him under your spell. Who would want the cold, salt reality after such a telling?
Here as in so many other matters, and for obvious physical and social reasons, it seems probable that if man went out and brought home the raw material, it was always woman who cherished, ‘cooked’, and wrought it. With men, it was always the challenge of getting; with women, the elaboration of the got. We know that women tend to be the main ‘carriers’ of folk song and folklore among primitive peoples. Men must perforce have a closer knowledge of external reality, however superstitious they are; and women a closer knowledge of the internal imagination, of the storeroom of the reported image, not the directly apprehended one. Weaving and embroidery lie at the heart of all storytelling, as they do at the root of all decoration. The Greeks knew it. Their very word for a recited epic, rhapsody, means simply ‘stitched song’. Plaiting the real with the imagined defines all art; and I think it no coincidence that (like Circe and several other women in the book) Penelope takes to weaving as both her pastime in her long wait and her excuse for her fidelity.
The more one looks at the internal evidence, the more convincing it becomes. Who steals the very first chapter of the great story? For whom is most sympathy evoked? Not the absent Odysseus, but his abandoned wife and all her domestic problems, most strikingly that of a son well on his way to becoming another Orestes. And what is the emotional climax? The night of reunion in book 23, when even dawn is delayed in awe, on the command of the divinity who has finally brought patient wife and wandering husband together again—another woman, the wisdom-goddess Athene. (The actual final book, 24, is a mere tidying up of loose ends.) No man who has ever risked or provoked the shipwreck of a marriage by his own selfishness has ever doubted the profound affirmation of female wisdom in that climactic passage; or for that matter had to wonder why the ancients personified wisdom as a woman. Even more significantly, Athene is a pre-Greek deity. She was the protectress of palaces in the Mycenean age in which the story is set, and also the goddess of arts and crafts . . . a women’s goddess, if ever was.
We know that behind the Homeric legend of the Trojan War lay a very real conflict in the last centuries of the second millennium before Christ, over trading power and land to settle. It was between a loose confederation of Mycenean pirate-kings and the holders of the gate, the Bosporus, to the coveted Black Sea. We also know that ‘Homer’ was writing several centuries after these events and by no means (though one may argue over how conscious the irony is) with undivided admiration for the Mycenean part in them. Few of the male heroes—human or divine—are very attractive, or allowed to be happy, and especially when they are away from home. Zeus and Poseidon move only to punish; moving men invite punishment. Penelope’s suitors are continually being told to go home; and refusing to do so, duly meet their end in a bloodbath, a mirror-image of the agonies that Odysseus, the sole survivor of his Ithacan squadron, has been through on his own travels.
What bouquets there are for men go to those who have either stayed or resettled at home: Menelaus, Nestor, Alcinous, the prince-shepherd Eumaeus, Old Man Laertes. The enigma, of course, is Odysseus himself. In one light he is the least attractive character of them all, with his compulsive lying, his suspiciousness, his infidelity, his vindictive anger—but then his very name means the ‘one with enemies’, the ‘victim’, or in modern terms, the paranoiac. In this aspect it is difficult not to see him inside a much more recent myth, against a background of tiny islanded townships in that other wild ocean of the American West; and most certainly there not with the face of the noble sheriff, but much more with that of a Lee Marvin or a Jack Palance—the unscrupulous, pathological killer. Dryden found two perfect adjectives for this aspect of him in his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘dire’ and ‘insatiate’ Odysseus.
If that were all there was to him . . . but there remains his courage, his onwardness, his questing, his surviving, his shrewdness, his humour, his fallibility; his quintessential maleness, with all the faults and virtues, as close-woven as the shroud-cloth on his wife’s loom, of that biological conditioning. One has only to compare him with the heroes of the other ancient Greek travel-sagas: Heracles, Perseus, Bellerophon, Jason of the Argo. Those men are myth-puppets from the nursery of the imagination. Odysseus is real, and human, however mythical and supernatural the circumstances in which he finds himself. If his vice is that he cannot stay out of the game, his own cheating—mainly done merely to survive—is petty compared with that of the other players, the gods who control the way things are; which makes him universal man, and justifiably paranoiac.
The Odyssey is fundamentally an analysis of the mechanism and the justice of this paranoia. Odysseus’ greatest and most implacable enemy, Poseidon, is the god of the great medium of his temptation, the sea. His return from Troy is therefore both a penance for past sins and a running demonstration of why they came about. Again and again he or his men have their agony prolonged because of their own greed or pointless aggression. His one virtue is his longing to return home, to find Penelope— that is, wisdom—but (despite the night of reunion) Homer puts a great question mark over this. The savage massacre of the suitors, the hanging of the corrupted maids, the mutilation (‘with a sharp knife they sliced his nose and ears off, they ripped away his privy parts as raw meat for the dogs, and in their fury they lopped off his hands and feet’) of the shepherd Melanthius, all suggest that the paranoia remains. And there is a famous thread left lying loose at the end, the fact that Odysseus knows from Tiresias that he must make one more voyage still: ‘till you reach a people who know nothing of the sea and never use salt with their food’. That is, he must travel forever, on this planet, in search of an unattainable, his own landlocked, peace. The sea, the invitation to the unknown, will remain his unassuaged demon.
The Odyssey has always strongly reminded me of one side of a later literature, also written in a time of struggle for power and search for lebensraum, of quasi-ritualized aggression, of brute male greed for prestige and property, and all in the context of another line of ambitious sea-pirates. The period following the Norman Conquest was also that in which the first women writers of our era began to use storytelling—based, as with Homer, on material from long before their own time—gently to suggest better ends in life to their menfolk. The key vehicle for this new worldview was once again the story of wandering adventure, though their protagonists’ sea was more often the forest than the literal one. But true sea voyages and islands are by no means absent from these tales, and I have already suggested that the parallel between the old, vast, mystery- and wolf-filled forests of Europe and the sea was very strong.
What is significant is that writers such as Marie de France and Christine de Pisan chose to send out so many latter-day knightly versions of Ulysses on their voyages of self-discovery; and that their very frequent final demonstration was that true wisdom always lay at home, or quite certainly not in the overt original purpose of the journey. It is very instructive to read the Odyssey and Marie de France’s stories side by side, not just for the central similarity of attitude to the quest theme, but for the common little touches of humour, the psychological accuracy underlying the delight in the fabulous (the ability to make fabulous beings behave humanly), the obsession with domestic behaviour and domestic objects, the preponderant role played by the relationships between men and women—a shared set of sensibilities and preoccupations that we know, in the latter case, did not belong to a man.
Even if one must take the orthodox scholarly view, and make Homer the male bard that tradition has always maintained he was, it seems to me certain that he was composing quite as much for a feminine audience as for a masculine one, and from an essentially feminist point of view—that is, a civilizing one—using very much the same techniques as those early-medieval writers. Scholars have delighted in seeing the Iliad and the Odyssey as anthropological crossword puzzles all of whose clues lead to solutions in obscure religious symbolisms: Penelope becomes the centre of a duck-goddess cult, Odysseus a sacrificial king, and so on. Of course that is a part of it. But I think no one who has wandered round the palace complexes of Knossos or Mycenae can believe that even in that time (long before Homer’s own), there cannot have been, behind the picturesque sacred groves and golden boughs, ordinary men and women with practical social problems; and quite sophisticated enough mentally (if their artifacts are anything to go by) to distinguish at least some of their contemporary relevance from their mythical representation.
Archaeology has time and time again proved that the Homeric descriptions of artifacts and techniques were very far from mythical; and the continuous and highly realistic central theme running behind all Odysseus’ ordeals and adventures is the predicament of the wife left to rule in her husband’s absence. This must have been a very familiar one in an age of universal piracy. No theme is more often repeated in the Odyssey than the upset wreaked on the economy of Odysseus’ palace—that is, on any island-state without a firm hand in control. There was, of course, within the chronology of the story, a very recent example of just this problem not far from Ithaca—the adultery of the queen of Mycenae with Aegistheus, their murder of her husband, Agamemnon, on his return from Troy, their own murder in turn by Orestes . . . forced marriages, usurpations of power, internecine and family strife, endless petty war. And why? Very largely because of male stupidity and arrogance, that inability to be satisfied with what one has, that perpetual lust to amass more, possess more, score more— and that last in a very modern sense, since female slaves were a not-unimportant part of the Mycenean marauder’s hoped-for booty.
The sea was the road to this lust; and also an escape from wisdom and the wives at home. Odysseus exists in a web of women of all sorts, both the wise and the wicked; and again and again he is saved from the wicked ones by Penelope and Athene. The vivacious, game-playing, and deliciously polymorphic goddess can be read as a spirit version of Penelope, an Ariel to her Prospero, since she is obviously half in love with Odysseus herself, reproachful of his other women, yet not for a moment jealous of his wife. She even makes the latter more beautiful than she already is, using a divine cosmetic to bleach her skin ‘whiter than ivory’. She is a wish fulfilment of the woman left at home, in other words; or of the writer and his or her audience.
The sea and its islands thus become the domain of what cannot be controlled by wisdom and reason; the laboratory where the guinea-pig Odysseus must run through the mazes; where the great ally of reason, the conscious, gives way to the rule of the unconscious and the libido, that eternal and oceanic unsettler of domestic peace and established order. Since it is Odysseus’ own unconscious that drives him on, its sea-domain is peopled by women. There is perhaps no more brilliant antedating of Freud in all ancient literature than that meeting Odysseus has, on the dark shores of the River of Ocean at the end of his furthest voyage, with his own dead mother, Anticleia.
As my mother spoke, there came to me out of the confusion in my heart the one desire, to embrace her spirit, dead though she was. Thrice in my eagerness to clasp her to me, I started forward with my arms outstretched. Thrice, like a shadow or a dream, she slipped through my arms and left me harrowed by an even sharper pain.1
In that brief image lies the genesis of all art: the pursuit of the irrecoverable, what the object-relations analysts now call symbolic repair.
. . .
In many ways, in the cunning structure of the Odyssey, the novel actually begins with Odysseus and Calypso on Ogygia. The name Ogygia may be related to the word ocean; it carried a connotation for the Greeks of great antiquity, primevality. But the island was also highly sinister because it lay in the west, perhaps in the Atlantic. I suppose that today the west, because of the association with summer holidays (or in America, with the notion of new frontiers and California), bears a generally pleasant sense, but it was not so as recently as Elizabethan times, when the west wind was the evil wind, the bringer of storm and disease; and it was even less so in ancient times. The best trading and colonizing opportunities undoubtedly lay westwards for the eastern Mediterranean peoples; but the very word for ‘west’ in Greek, skaios, has an evil, threatening sound. The ancient Egyptians associated the direction with death. Greek ornithomancers faced north to ply their craft, and good bird omens always passed on the right, or eastwards. This explains the antediluvian deseil, the Mithraic equivalent of the Christian’s sign of the cross before some difficult enterprise: the sunwise or right-hand turn. Ships used to make it, sometimes three turns, before a long voyage. All journeys ‘to the left’ were inherently dangerous.
Athene makes this danger very clear when she delivers a report on Odysseus during a cabinet meeting on Olympus.
The island is well-wooded and a goddess lives there, the child of the malevolent Atlas, who knows the sea in all its depths. . . . It is this wizard’s daughter who is keeping the unhappy man from home in spite of all his tears. Day after day she does her best to banish Ithaca from his memory with false and flattering words; and Odysseus, who would give anything for the mere sight of the smoke rising up from his own land, can only yearn for death.
This, of course, represents Athene-Penelope’s official view of the wicked girl, whose name is Calypso. Odysseus himself backs it up when he comes to tell the story of his time on Ogygia later in the text. Calypso, he says, was ‘wily’; ‘never for a moment did she win my heart’. But then he immediately plunges on: ‘Seven years without a break I stayed. . . .’ Now, this is far longer than he stays anywhere else—even the voluptuous Circe rates only one year—and indeed accounts for over a third of his two decades of wandering.
Furthermore, between these two unkind reports on the girl in book 1 and book 7, we actually meet her in book 5, where Homer gives us a rather different story. Athene has nagged at her father again, and Hermes is dispatched to Ogygia to tell Calypso she must give Odysseus up, as the gods have further plans for him. Taking the form of what sounds suspiciously like a gannet for the journey (further evidence that the island is either in the extreme western Mediterranean or in the Atlantic itself ), he steps on shore ‘from the blue waters’ and walks along the strand to the great cave where Calypso lives. What greets his eyes is very similar to what Besant’s hero sees when he first visits Armorel’s farm on Samson; and if it is meant to turn the reader off, it is singularly unsuccessful.
A big fire was blazing on the hearth and the scent from burning logs of split juniper and cedar was wafted far across the island. Inside, Calypso was singing in a beautiful voice as she wove at the loom and moved her golden shuttle to and fro. The cave was sheltered by a verdant copse of alders, aspens, and fragrant cypresses, which was the roosting-place of feathered creatures, horned owls and falcons and garrulous choughs, birds of the coast, whose daily business takes them down to the sea. Trailing round the very mouth of the cavern, a garden vine ran riot, with great bunches of ripe grapes; while from four separate but neighbouring springs four crystal rivulets were trained to run this way and that; and in soft meadows on either side the iris and the parsley flourished. It was indeed a spot where even an immortal visitor must pause to gaze in wonder and delight.2
But not this immortal visitor. After the usual civilities and a cup of tea (brewed ambrosia), the major god and very minor goddess get down to distinctly barbed business. Let me forsake the translation of E. V. Rieu for a moment and put it in more modern, multicorporation terms.
‘How nice to see you,’ says Calypso, ‘and to know that after all the head office hasn’t completely forgotten I even exist.’
‘My dear girl, if you imagine I’d ever come to a godforsaken place like this of my own free will, you’re out of your mind. I’ve never had a more boring journey in all my life. You provincials don’t realize what a desert you live in.’ He looks round and yawns. ‘It’s this miserable what’s-his-name fellow you’ve taken on. The Old Man has other ideas for him. I’m instructed to tell you to remove your tiny claws. Right?’
Calypso springs to her feet, hands on hips.
‘You miserable sods! Just because he’s not in the company. And I am. I haven’t even hidden it, we’re as good as married.’ Hermes shrugs, says nothing. ‘The sheer gall of it! When everyone knows you all spend your life at the head office having affairs and chasing secretaries. You’re such hypocrites; you do this all the time. And you needn’t think I don’t know why. One of those ghastly old female department heads has been nosing around again. They’re just jealous.’ Hermes examines his fingernails. Calypso is near tears. ‘Look, he would have drowned without me. I rescued him, I nursed him, I fell in love with him. I’m even teaching him how he can apply to join the company.’ Hermes raises his eyebrows. Calypso stares, sighs, at last surrenders. ‘All right. But the Old Man can damn well find the transport himself. I’m not going to.’
Yes, I am vulgarizing a sacred text; but not travestying a very attractive touch of mutinous hurtness in Calypso during that exchange. Hermes leaves. She goes out to find Odysseus moping as usual on the shore, staring out to sea, and realizes her cause is lost just as much with him as at Olympus; and there and then, like Circe, she decides to give him up with gentleness and good grace. She will help him build a boat, provision it for him, send him a fair wind to start out with. The ungrateful man is immediately suspicious: there must be some trick. Will she swear by the Styx (the one oath that even the gods could not break) that it is all above board?
She tells him, behind a half-teasing mask, one or two much-needed home truths then. He lets his cunning mind rule his human heart, she says; he ought to know that pity can be greater than sexual desire, that the truest love can sacrifice its own existence. She does swear by the Styx, but turns quickly away. Homer says that Odysseus walks after her. Let us hope that it is, for once in his life, to make an apology.
Calypso makes one last attempt, at supper that night. She warns him that more suffering is to come if he leaves; and promises that if he stays with her, he will gain immortality. They can live together till the end of time. And finally she asks how he can keep thinking of the ageing Penelope when he has a warm young goddess at his side. Odysseus is diplomatic and runs down his wife’s looks. True, she’s only mortal, but the sea calls, and as for the suffering . . . ‘Let this new disaster come. It only makes one more.’
It grows dark, and they have one last night of love. The next morning he is allowed to start building his escape boat.
The Calypso interlude is one of the most endearing in the whole Odyssey, a conflict between a dream and a reality, a case of a lonely woman hopelessly in love with a lonely man helplessly in love with his own destiny. It is also one of the most striking cases in all literature of humanity in the writer overcoming the inhumanity of convention. Calypso (whose name holds the skl in cipher) should by all the rules of myth be evil. The ‘good’ characters in the story report her as evil, the hero spurns her sexually, even her fellow gods sniff at her . . . I remember, the very first time I read the Odyssey as a schoolboy, hating Odysseus for leaving her. After many rereadings, despite my knowing that both inner and outer logic must make him leave, I still cannot quite forgive him; and that forked feeling, I am convinced, was not created by a man. At any rate I know how much I owe, as a writer of fiction, to the Calypso-Penelope dilemma; it has haunted my own and countless other novels, and always will.
Odysseus heads for Phaeacia, or Skeria, the modern Corfu. But Poseidon, furious that Olympus has relented (if not the authoress furious that her hero has forced her to write that he leaves Calypso’s island ‘with a happy heart’), dismasts the boat in a violent squall. It drifts in the gale; then another monster wave sinks it. Odysseus strips and swims for it. On the third day he comes to the coast of Corfu, but there is a huge surf, nothing but cliffs. He is carried onto the rocks: ‘He clung there groaning while the great wave washed by. But no sooner had he escaped its fury than it struck him once more with the full force of its backward rush and flung him far out to sea. Pieces of skin stripped from his sturdy hands were left sticking to the crag, thick as the pebbles that stick to the suckers of a squid when he is torn from his hole.’
Once more Athene comes to his aid and helps the exhausted man swim along the coast to the sandy cove at a river’s mouth; and there at last he can drag himself ashore. He covers himself in leaves under an olive, and sleeps. The next morning the daughter of the king of Skeria-Corfu, Nausicaa, comes with her maids to wash clothes at the river. They play with a ball, and Odysseus wakes. Quick as ever to find his feet, he seizes a branch to cover his nakedness and steps out with a flowery speech addressed to the beautiful princess. Yet another affair seems about to begin; but this time Odysseus is home. He is befriended by the king and queen and lent a ship to take him to Ithaca, where he will execute his bloodthirsty revenge. Even there, though, since he is in disguise to begin with, the odysseys do not cease: he keeps inventing new ones as a ‘cover’ for his presence, stories of Egypt and the Phoenicians. His old friend the shepherd Eumaeus tells another: a king’s son by birth, his life too was ruined by the sea and by piracy. Everywhere, then, the cruel, separating sea; and the folly of sacrificing all to it, when the only tangible and endurable Calypso-Circe-Athene is the one the sailor left behind in the first place, on his own safe home island and kingdom of Ithaca.
In my own first novel, The Magus—written, like all stories of its kind, under the vast aegis of the Odyssey—I used a famous quotation from T. S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
This does not happen to Odysseus when he at last lands on Ithaca, by a grim irony at the cave of Phorcys, one of Scylla’s putative fathers. He fails to recognize his own birthplace, partly because Athene has thrown a mist over the spot where he finds himself. In fact he is plunged into gloom. He doesn’t know what the people will be like, he doesn’t know where to hide the presents that Nausicaa’s parents have given him. He wishes he had never left Skeria-Corfu. He has obviously been tricked and marooned on some desert island. His first and supremely typical positive action is to check that none of the presents has been stolen by the Corfiot crew during the landing. (They have left, only to be turned into a reef on their homeward trip by Poseidon, in one last fling of rage.) He starts to weep on the barren shore. Only then does a handsome young shepherd—Athene, in disguise once more—appear and tell him where he truly is.
But that first anticlimax, like the curious hesitation on Penelope’s side when she does at last recognize him, before the emotion comes, is enormously shrewd; and it does, I think, put a vital accent on the hopelessness of Odysseus’ case, on his incapacity to do anything but undergo the experience, the turning of the wheel, even though it finally comes to rest exactly at the point where it started. Odysseus may be the wiser for it, but dire and insatiate, he is still condemned to sail on and on, round and round, from island to island, from experience to experience.
The only land where people ‘know nothing of the sea’ is death; and for better or for worse, the only answer to the mysteries of life lies in the voyage to the islands. In that long penultimate passage of the greatest novel, and greatest homage to the Odyssey, of our own century, another sailor, Leopold Bloom, is put to the dry question on his own return to Ithaca, at the end of his Dublin day. This is how its crux runs:
Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?
Ever he would wander, selfcompelled to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or of the silver king.
What would render such return irrational?
An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time through reversible space and an exodus and return in space through irreversible time.
What play of forces, inducing inertia, rendered departure undesirable?
The lateness of the hour, rendering procrastinatory: the obscurity of the night, rendering invisible: the uncertainty of thoroughfares, rendering perilous: the necessity for repose, obviating movement: the proximity of an occupied bed, obviating research: the anticipation of warmth (human) tempered with coolness (linen), obviating desire and rendering desirable: the statue of Narcissus, sound without echo, desired desire.
That is Odysseus: the voyage in the mind. The real Ulysses is whoever wrote the Odyssey, is Joyce, is every artist who sets off into the unknown of his own unconscious and knows he must run the gauntlet of the island reefs, the monsters, the sirens, the Calypsos and the Circes, with only a very dim faith that an Athene is somewhere there to help and a wise Penelope waiting at the end. No recurrent symbolism in the Odyssey is more pertinent than the long and deliberate stripping its hero undergoes: of his ships, of his men, of his hopes, of his clothes, even of his very skin on the cliffs of Corfu. Perhaps the only hope of self-escape for the ‘statue of Narcissus, sound without echo, desired desire’ lies in that moly bloom which Hermes hands the sailor at Circe’s door; and which James Joyce places (‘shall I wear a white rose’) at the very end of his mistress-piece in his own Molly Bloom: ‘yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so are we flowers all a woman’s body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today’.
I should like now to tell the story of a much later real-life Odysseus and his crew, and of the fortunate islands that they discovered. In view of the treasure their voyage eventually brought to light, I am delighted that the tale begins very close indeed to where I write: to be precise, in Lyme Regis, during bad Queen Mary’s reign. In 1554 the wife of a tradesman, John Somers, gave birth to a fourth son, who on 24 April was christened George. A decade later another citizen of Lyme, John Jourdain, also had a son, christened Silvester.
George Somers went early to sea, and by the 1590s had become a typical buccaneering Elizabethan captain with many Atlantic voyages and beard-singeing exploits to his credit. Thomas Fuller in his Worthies of England reports that he was a ‘lamb on the land . . . a lion at sea’; and at least part of his prowess was due to his excellence as a navigator. But by 1600 Somers seems to have settled for the lamb’s side of it and retired with his laurels, and loot, to Lyme and his wife. She was a local girl, Jane or Joan Haywood, and they were married in 1582, when she was eighteen. In 1603 he became a Member of Parliament for the town and was knighted. In 1604 he was elected mayor. But evidently, like any true Odysseus, he could not just live by the sea, he had to sail it.
In 1609 Somers, a founding member of the London or South Virginia Company, was appointed admiral of the fleet that was to take a new injection of settlers to the troubled colony. On 23 April he made his will, and a few weeks later sailed in the accurately (if variously) named Sea Adventurer or Sea Venture (three hundred tons), with nine other ships. Not only were the sailors and settlers Ithacan in their number—about five hundred—but the settlers, at least, sound identical in spirit, being (there were also women on board) mostly ‘youths of a most lewd and bad condition’. The majority were to take one look at Virginia and return to the fleshpots of England at the first opportunity. Also on board the Sea Venture were Sir George’s nephew Matthew, Silvester Jourdain, and very probably a number of other Lyme seamen.
However, long before they reached America, the Sea Venture parted company with its little flock. Here I will put the story in the capable hands of Lyme Regis’s first historian, George Roberts.
On the 25th July, the admiral’s ship, with the other commanders and their commission, and 150 men, parted company in the tail of a hurricane. The ship worked so much, and became so leaky, that the water rose in the hold above two tiers of hogs-heads. With all hands ba[i]ling and pumping for three days and nights without intermission, still the water seemed to increase. At last, all being spent with labour, and seeing no hope, they resolved to shut down the hatches. In this extremity, those who had ‘comfortable waters’ drank to one another as taking their last leaves, till a more joyful and happy meeting in the other world. Sir G. Summers [sic], the skilful seaman, sat all this time on the poop, scarce allowing himself leisure to eat or sleep, steering the ship to keep her upright, or she must have foundered. He unexpectedly descried land: upon the news all ran up, and from ceasing to [bail] nearly caused their destruction. They spread all sail, though they knew the land to be Bermudas—the land of devils and spirits, then dreaded and shunned by all men. The ship soon struck upon a rock, but a surge of the sea cast her off, and so from one to another, till she was most luckily thrown up between two, as upright as if she had been on the stocks. The wind having calmed, they got out, people, goods, and provisions, in their boats, and arrived in safety without the loss of a man; though some say a league, others half a mile from the shore.
Fallen into a land of plenty and pleasantness, the strangers were lavish in their praise of it. Sir George Summers, like another Aeneas, procured food for the whole company by catching fish with hook and line. They killed thirty-two hogs, which abounded there, said to have swam ashore from a Spanish ship, called the Bermudas, which was carrying hogs to the West Indies.
The Bermudas were first sighted, before 1515, by the Spanish sailor Juan de Bermudez. They were first named Virginiola by the shipwrecked men, then Somers or Summer Islands (the latter probably because of the mild climate, but perhaps also because ‘Summers’ is a common alternate spelling of Somers in Lyme documents of the time), and only later acquired their present name.
The Englishmen, as Englishmen will, attributed their good fortune to the fact that they were English; the island’s malevolence clearly extended only to wicked Catholic foreigners like the Spaniards and the French—though they were at first puzzled, it is true, by the mysterious noises at night, and worried, as superstitious seamen might well be, by the ubiquitous pigs. However, they quickly developed a fancy for their enforced home, despite its evil reputation, and in fact behaved exactly like Odysseus and his crew on Circe’s island of Aeaea after that first little contretemps, also having to do with pigs. The climate was delicious, there was wood and fresh water, palm-leaf for roofing and walling, seafowl (apparently petrels or shearwaters) ‘full and fat as . . . partridge’, turtle, fish ‘dainty as salmon’; and the pork had ‘more pleasant and sweet a taste than mutton in England’. Even the Bermuda crow had ‘as white flesh as a chicken’. Readers of contemporary travel-agency literature may notice a certain familiar ring (‘superb seafood, endless unspoiled beaches’) in these similes, and they will be quite right. Most of the gentlemen reporters on all the early American ‘ventures’ had a heavy financial stake in their success; if they did not quite yet show the monstrous blind eye exhibited by some Victorian emigrant-recruiters in Europe, they were very decidedly not interested in turning customers away.
The idyllic side of this first involuntary holiday in the Bermudas was short-lived. The soldiers, sailors, and settlers of the Sea Venture had scattered among the various islands, and quarrels and mutinies soon developed. In the first escape attempt, fourteen men set out in one of the Sea Venture’s boats for the American mainland. They were never heard of again. Somers then built two small boats, probably using a mixture of the Sea Venture’s timbers and the local juniper (Bermuda ‘cedar’). On 10 May 1610, the two pinnaces set out for Jamestown. They made the sixhundred-mile passage in only thirteen days, thanks once again to Somers’s seamanship and expertise in navigation; but they landed only to find the rest of the original expedition much less happy with their unshipwrecked lot. They were starving, and they had Indian troubles.
Somers eventually agreed to sail back to the Bermudas in company with Samuel Argall, the later kidnapper of Pocahontas, to fetch meat and fish for these less-than-brave New Worlders. He was separated from Argall, but arrived back in Bermuda in early November—only to die there on 9 November. The cause of death was a ‘surfeit of pig’. His last order to his nephew Matthew was to take a cargo of the ‘black hogs’ back to Jamestown. Perhaps the crew mutinied at the thought of taking live pigs on board and once more turning their backs on home; perhaps the new captain decided to have a grim revenge on their superstitiousness. At any rate, having buried his uncle’s heart and entrails in the islands, he secretly sealed up the presumably well-salted corpse in a juniper box, smuggled it aboard, and set sail for Lyme.
The ship made the voyage safely, in spite of its dark cargo. Sir George’s remains, carried ‘athwart and first ashore’ if tradition was obeyed, were interred on 4 June 1611, with full military honours, and lie to this day beneath the vestry floor in the church of Whitchurch Canonicorum. Somers had a manor farm in the parish, on a hill overlooking the sea and his birthplace. His wife, I am afraid, proved no Penelope. An entry in the Whit-church parish register records that on 12 July 1612, ‘Lady Sumers’ married a certain ‘William Raymond, Esquire’—no doubt a buccaneer of a different, safer kind . . . or perhaps a fool. When the will was proved in November of that year, it turned out that Matthew had inherited all of his uncle’s considerable real estate. It was evidently not quite pure piety that had made him risk Scylla’s fury by bringing that indisputably dead body back.
Silvester Jourdain had meanwhile sailed in another ship straight back to England from Virginia. It carried an official dispatch to the Company patentees, which was to be rewritten and published later that year as A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony in Virginia. This was drafted by William Strachey, another of the Bermuda survivors, who had also written a private—and much more truthful—account from Virginia in a letter dated 10 July 1610, which remained unpublished until 1625. But Jourdain evidently sniffed a scoop; or perhaps he wanted to play the mini-Homer. As soon as he was back, he rushed out a pamphlet entitled A Discovery of the Barmudas, otherwise called the Isle of Divels; and this was the first publicly available account of the extraordinary adventure.
Quite apart from his anxiety to get his pamphlet out, nothing is more probable than that Jourdain would have been in London in 1610 to tell the story to the many backers of the Virginia adventure. One person in particular who would have wanted to question him was the Earl of Southampton, a patron of the Weymouth and Harlow voyages to Virginia earlier in that decade, and another founder of the Company; and in the Southampton circle was a sharp-eared and myth-prone playwright with as good a nose for the topical as Sir George Somers had had for magnetic north. He was also no mini-Homer, though he had had some trouble adapting his gifts to the new fashion for the pastoral, a form concerned primarily with the contrast between nature and culture . . . the debit and credit of human progress and civilization. Like all men of his time, he had had a long love-hate relationship with the symbolism of the sea-voyage, and a particular obsession with death by water. It had first declared itself nearly twenty years before, in one of his earliest plays, and he must, in that winter of 1610, have remembered the relevant passage. A man recalls a nightmare:
Lord, Lord! methought, what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!
What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wracks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels.
All scatt’red in the bottom of the sea;
Some lay in dead men’s skulls. . . .
All through history, literary scholars have searched externally for sources, which approach is not necessarily wrong, but overlooks one very simple fact that any practising author could tell them. The major influence on any mature writer is always his own past work. The tyro dramatist from Stratford may, in the lines above from King Richard the Third, superficially have been trying to out-Marlowe Marlowe; but he was also sowing a seed for future germination. He knew the Aeneid much better than he did the Odyssey, but Odysseus’ experience already haunts this passage: the onward hubris and vaulting ambition of the voyage, the black stasis of shipwreck and drowning, the gateway beyond of ultimate revelation. Clarence’s dream stayed dry tinder, waiting for the Bermudan spark.
I must not let local patriotism run away with me. In fact Shakespeare seems to have taken rather more from Strachey’s letter, which he must have been shown, than from Jourdain. It is not at all unlikely that he met one, or even both, of them. But the key figure in the story is really the man whose bones lie under the vestry floor; who kept the Sea Venture afloat, who maintained some sort of order during that difficult winter on the islands, who organized the escape and brought it and the two writers he had aboard to a successful conclusion. I think it is to him, the only begetter in non-literary reality, that we most owe the one other exploration of the island metaphor that stands shoulder to shoulder with the Odyssey and Robinson Crusoe.
Like so many geniuses of the first order, Shakespeare seems to me to have saved his profoundest work till the very end. The Tempest (its first known performance, before the king, took place on 1 November 1611) may not have the greatest poetry, or the greatest penetration of human character. Its brevity (it is the shortest but one of all his plays), its enormous compression in time and space, its cuts, leaps, and discontinuities— all these can make it seem lightweight, no more than a sketch. But its lightweightness is that of Cézanne’s last watercolours or of the arietta from Beethoven’s last piano sonata: whatever such art may lack in substance, it gains, like a sublime thistledown, in altitude. The brusquenesses, even the clumsinesses, are those of supreme mastery, of a man sailed far beyond the barrier of mere technique; to where those lines I earlier quoted from T. S. Eliot assume their greatest force and justification.
The Tempest floats free in a way that no other of that formidable chain of masterpieces of the seventeenth-century years of Shakespeare’s life quite manages. Those others are for the world at large; this is for each. And that is why Shakespeare made his overriding metaphors the island and the sailor stranded in a place that he cannot fully understand . . . which both bewitches and is intensely cruel; which can hold both Calibans and Ariels, Antonios and Mirandas; which can be only too savagely ‘real’ and yet still an insubstantial pageant. Of course Prospero’s island no more lies in the Bermudas than it is, according to the story, set between Tunis and Italy— though the latter location strongly echoes those of both the Aeneid and the Odyssey. The Tempest is a parable about the human imagination, and thus finally about Shakespeare’s view of his own imagination: its powers, its hopes, its limits—above all, its limits. The play’s true island is our planet, in its oceanic sea of space.
Any specific and realistic shape the island location took in Shakespeare’s consciousness must have derived from his knowledge of the Strachey, Jourdain, and other, associated pamphlets, and I am not for a moment proposing the Scillies as an alternative; yet they were far more on Elizabethan and Jacobean minds than they are on ours today. This was because of their vital strategic importance during the chronic Armada scares of the period, which by no means began or ended with the debacle of 1588. In August 1601, the mayor of Lyme was urgently ordered to ‘set forth a barque . . . for the discovery of the Spanish fleet’; there was a major panic as late as 1628, when many Scillonians fled to the mainland. Given the difficulty of sailing in convoy, the Spaniards were well aware that they needed an offshore rendezvous before launching a final attack, and the Scillies were the obvious place for it. The problems of fortifying the islands (an effort first undertaken in 1548) and exploiting their value as an early warning system crop up continually in the State Papers of the period. The very notion of an ordained ruler’s having the would-be usurper wrecked and brought to justice would have remained highly attractive to anyone who had lived through the worst years of the Spanish threat. But there is something else on the Scillies that does bring us, symbolically, much closer to the play.
Two summers ago I spent a few days on one of the least-known and most beautiful of the larger European islands, the queen of the Baltic, Gotland. By pure chance one morning, out walking, I came through some fir trees on the edge of a remote strand on its eastern coast and stumbled on something that took me immediately back to the Scillies: a maze of beach pebbles laid in concentric rings, as if by some playful group of idle teenagers. But I knew I was staring down at something much more ancient and haunting than that. There is just such a maze on the western side of St Agnes, also standing on a little slope above the sea, and looking out towards the ships’ graveyard and seal-city of the Western Rocks.
It is near a farm called Troytown; but that name comes from the maze itself. Troy-fair and Troy-town are very old dialect words meaning ‘a mess’, ‘a confusion’ . . . ‘a maze’. These particular pebble mazes, usually of ten to fifteen yards in diameter, are found mostly in Scandinavia, where they have a very close association with coasts and islands. According to Geoffrey Grigson, they usually carry similar names there: Trojeburg, Tröborg, and so on. There is another famous one on Gotland, at Visby. R. S. Bowley says the St Agnes maze has been recorded for two hundred years and was ‘probably originally constructed by a bored lighthouse keeper’; but I think, with Geoffrey Grigson, that the evidence is very much against this. We know the Vikings knew Scilly, and the similarities with indisputably much older sea mazes in Scandinavia are too great.
We shall never know what ritual significance these mazes had for the Vikings, but in both Celtic and Mediterranean Europe the maze appears to have been associated with the tomb, and escape from it, with reincarnation. This is what lies at the heart of the Daedalus legend: the real labyrinth he escaped from in Crete was the maze-pattern of the very ancient spring fertility or ‘partridge’ dance (more accurately, the dance of the migratory and corn-field-haunting quail, still a prime harbinger of summer on every Aegean island). It certainly pre-dated Minoan Crete, and was probably originally performed on literal threshing floors, and only later on the symbolic threshing floor of the maze.
I have a fragment of antiquity standing beside me as I write this: a fat old pot from the third millennium B.C., excavated in one of the mountain plains just north of ancient Sumeria. In a kind of strip cartoon round its shoulder, stylized two-headed birds peck and bob in a field of corn; and among them one can see the most famous of Minoan-Cretan symbols, the labrys, or so-called double-headed axe. But the two triangles of which the latter is formed are in fact simply even more stylized headless birds. Another highly stylized symbol on the pot, of four inward-pointing triangles, is related: this stands for four deer, or cattle, running round a pool. A case in the British Museum is devoted to the elaboration of this design.
The labrys that supposedly guarded, or warned against entering, the labyrinth is no axe, but a dancing-bird symbol of fertility, or food. Labrys is not a Greek word, but I believe its origin can be plausibly guessed. One has only to say labr- to feel the mouth and lips move to peck in and gulp. There is a Greek adjective, labros, that means ‘forceful and greedy’—‘gluttonous’, by extension. Another word, labbax, denoted a sea-wolf. Labrum is Latin for ‘lip’; and the Romans’ labor, our ‘labour’, is based on an ancient sense of slipping away and its consequent suffering and anxiety (which we retain in the ‘labour’ of childbirth). The need to eat, the need to work to eat, the need to propitiate the forces that control fertility and climatic conditions . . . these are what the ancient labyrinth or maze truly signifies. Even the monster at its Cretan centre, the bull-man Minotaur, is a fertility symbol. I know that the maze on St Agnes was first built not by a bored lighthouse keeper of the eighteenth century, but by a Phoenician sailor two and a half thousand years earlier; and know equally well that no serious archaeologist would for a moment support such a hypothesis.
The maze is also a very ancient symbol of ingenuity in craftsmanship, of the ability to fabricate, to sew and weave, beyond ordinary skill—in other words, it is the prime proof of the artificer, or artist. If Minos stood for sea power, or exploitive commerce, and Scylla stood for its greatest enemy, hostile nature and the shipwreck, Daedalus stands for the producer who inspires the endless conflict between profit and its loss. Nothing could be more poetic, both symbolically and in justice, than the end of the Daedalus-Minos legend.
Minos keeps the great artificer and his son, Icarus, prisoners on Crete. Daedalus invents flight, but his son goes too close to the sun and ends up a victim of the first fatal air crash. Daedalus buries him, then flies on to Italy, and eventually to Sicily, where he works for King Cocalus (another ominous-sounding sea-name). Minos, not one to accept brain drain, sets out to find his disobedient inventor. He knows the fugitive is in hiding, so once arrived in Sicily, he sets a problem that he knows only Daedalus will be able to solve: the passing of a linen thread through the complex convolute chambers (the maze symbolism again) of a Triton shell. Daedalus is tempted and, by a brilliant piece of what Mr Edward de Bono would call lateral thinking, solves the problem. Minos now knows the scent is very warm. But King Cocalus’s daughters warn Daedalus, and a plot is made, neatly echoing the fate that Minos once callously left Scylla to meet. He is persuaded to take a bath. Daedalus constructs an ingenious pipe; as soon as the sea-emperor is in the tub, it is flooded with boiling water (or pitch, in another version), and he (Cretan sea power) is done for. Omnia vincit ars; and what are all the Somerses, Southamptons, Jourdains now but skulls and bones in Shakespeare’s cellar? It is not Odysseus who finally survives, but Daedalus. ‘O, my name for you is the best,’ cries Buck Mulligan to Stephen Dedalus at the beginning of Ulysses. ‘Kinch, the knifeblade.’
All of which may have escaped Shakespeare’s little Latin and less Greek; but mazes he would have known. They were much commoner—especially in the unicursal, as opposed to multicursal, form of the one on St Agnes— in the England of his day. They were usually made of turf, not shore pebbles. In another play drenched with magic, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare already has Titania lamenting their disappearance (quaint carries its old sense of ‘ingenious’ or ‘cunning’ here, not its modern one):
The nine-men’s-morris is fill’d up with mud:
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.
No doubt it was the Puritans who were historically responsible for the loss, at about this time, of the old morris floors and turf-mazes, with their superstitious associations. One explanation of Prospero’s final-curtain speech holds that it is a tacit apology to King James for the play’s references to magic, witchcraft, mazes, and demonology in general. It is not an explanation that satisfies me, though such ‘material’ may well have been suspect for the pious and conventional of the period. What is certain is that Shakespeare did deliberately plant the maze symbolism in The Tempest. The very structure is circular and maze-like, and there are a number of direct references. ‘Here’s a maze trod indeed,’ groans old Gonzalo, ‘through forthrights and meanders!’ Then Alonso in the last act: ‘This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod,/ And there is in this business more than nature/ was ever conduct of.’ At the very end, when Gonzalo blesses Ferdinand and Miranda, he adds, ‘For it is you that have chalk’d forth the way/ Which brought us hither.’ All of us have found ourselves, he says in conclusion, ‘Where no man was his own.’
It must be remembered too that the verb amaze, also used at key places in the play, had a far more literal connotation then—of trance, of almost total loss of normal bearings and physical capacity. ‘Half sleep, half waking’ is how Shakespeare himself glosses amazedly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Men of his time knew where the real monster lay in the labyrinth: not at its centre, but in the difficulties of finding the right path to it. To the more sophisticated Elizabethans and Jacobeans, the maze bore a close analogy to the ring-diagram of the Ptolemaic universe (with its anthropocentrism) and to astrology, where each planet-path symbolized an aspect of psyche; and perhaps also to the tortuous search for the philosopher’s stone. When Prospero says, ‘Now does my project gather to a head’ near the end of the play, he is certainly using the jargon of alchemy. The maze centre represented true self-knowledge.
One of the naive cuts in Francis Quarles’s Emblems of 1635—perhaps the most popular book, after Foxe’s Martyrs, of that soul-searching century— shows this interpretation very clearly, and even includes the association with the sea. Anima, the pilgrim soul, stands at the maze centre, holding a cord thrown down by an angel on a lighthouse with a burning cresset. At the beginning of the maze, a blind man follows his dog, and just outside it, drowning men raise their arms for help; two others try to clamber up the rocks on which the lighthouse sits. There are ships on the horizon. It is a very strange picture, since the maze (in this case of the multicursal type) seems set in the sea, with its passage cut in water. A stanza of the accompanying poem explains this bizarre conceit. The ‘labyrinth’ is the world:
This gyring lab’rinth is betrench’d about
On either hand with streams of sulph’rous fire,
Streams closely sliding, erring in and out,
But seeming pleasant to the fond descrier;
Where if his footsteps trust their own invention,
He falls without redress, and sinks without dimension.
And Gonzalo:
All torment, trouble, wonder and amazement
Inhabits here: some heavenly power guide us
Out of this fearful country.
The proving maze in The Tempest is constructed by Shakespeare’s imagination, hiding behind the mask of Prospero. At one level, it is very similar to our most familiar contemporary use of the word, in the laboratory maze for testing learning ability and behaviourism in animals; and as has been often pointed out (and like, I am afraid, a good deal of laboratory testing), it does at this level little but underline the obvious. True, two nice young people fall in love, but out of their own natures, not through magic. A fuddleheaded but kind old man, Gonzalo, remains fuddleheaded and kind to the end; two cynical, scheming politicians demonstrate by their final bitter silence that they will always be so; two seamen-buffoons and an Indian ‘savage’ stay unredeemed. Even the spirit Ariel seems anxious to be freed from playing assistant to any more such futile experiments. Only Alonso, who conspired in the usurpation, shows any plausible repentance; but he has very little to lose by changing sides—it is mere shrewd diplomacy—when his son is to marry the heiress to Milan.
It is certainly not difficult to read, even in Prospero himself, a suspicion that he has in vain tried to surpass that other sea-magician and pig-maker hiding behind Caliban’s Bermuda-inspired mother, Sycorax (from Greek sys, ‘sow’, and korax, ‘crow’)—that is, Circe. The ‘every third thought shall be my grave’ that he prophesies of his return to Milan is hardly a happy final note. He forgives, as Circe and Calypso forgive their visitor (his last command to Ariel repeats their last gift to Odysseus, the provision of a fair wind), but the forgiveness is also like theirs in its air of forced circumstance, of noblesse oblige. No hearts have changed.
I spoke earlier of Homer’s humanity’s overcoming convention in the treatment of Calypso, and I sense something similar in The Tempest: a wise sadness seeping into the ritual happy ending. The play may outwardly demonstrate true culture, or moral nobility, triumphing over both false culture and culturelessness; but it throws strange doubts and shadows on its own message and on its very form. The conflict revealed is the oldest in all art, and it takes place inside the artist: between the power to imagine and the use of imagining. Cui bono? To what purpose? What will it change? The question haunts every constructor of worlds that are not the one that is the case. Solution is not helped by that other secret every artist nurses, all the incommunicable pleasures of maze construction, of sea voyaging, of island discovering, that may be infused in the final product, but are never explicit in it. The truth is that the person who always benefits and learns most from the maze, the voyage, the mysterious island, is the inventor, the traveller, the visitor . . . that is, the artist-artificer himself.
I believe this is precisely what Shakespeare realized during the course of creating The Tempest: a terrible solipsism underlay the play. Who benefits most is the maker of it, Prospero-Shakespeare; and what he learns most is the dubious efficacy of the demonstration to all who merely undergo it, as opposed to the one who designs it. This is one major reason the maze running changes so little in the basic nature of the guinea pigs, and why there is that famous reference to Prospero’s drowning his books and turning his back thenceforth on magic. Three times Caliban tells Stephano and Trinculo that Prospero’s books must be destroyed before he can be murdered.
Of course this may seem supremely unimportant to the outsider, to all of us in the audience; enough that the maker here is a great poet and dramatist. The Tempest now has the status of a personal myth become universal; and like all myths, it allows of countless interpretations, maze upon maze, which makes it additionally delicious meat to an age so besotted by analysis and dissection, so devoted to daedalizing Daedalus. The growing tendency of our century is to reify, to put learning above living. It is even a fault in Prospero himself. We sometimes forget how he first lost his dukedom in Milan; here is his own notoriously stiff and knotted (in syntactical and metrical terms) account to his daughter. His reign in Milan was
. . . for the liberal arts
Without a parallel; those being all my study,
The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies.
He goes on:
I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
To closeness and the bettering of my mind
With that which, but by being so retir’d,
O’er priz’d all popular rate . . .
. . . Me, poor man, my library
Was dukedom enough. . . .
And the books that had been his downfall were, it will be remembered, secretly smuggled by old Gonzalo on board the boat that took him into forced exile. The ‘books’ are his imagination, and he cannot be parted from that, whatever the final talk of drowning, ‘deeper than did ever plummet sound’.
The climax of the self-doubt lies in that very last speech of the play, despite its surface flatness and near banality. One can take it as the trite request for applause, as much expected at the time as the flowery dedications to rich patrons that began most books. But it reads rather differently if we posit that Prospero really stands for Shakespeare’s own power to create magical islands of the mind; and that what has gone before (and far beyond The Tempest itself ) raises very considerable doubts about the ability of that power to change human nature in any but very superficial ways.
Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint: now, ’tis true,
I must be here confin’d by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be reliev’d by prayer,
Which pieces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
What is striking here is the repeated reference to imprisonment and release. The illusion, the magic, is over; but the innermost meaning, the conclusion from the maze heart of the imaginative power, is not. The prison for Shakespeare is in having failed to communicate (‘I must be here’—in the marooning artifice of the medium, on the stage—‘confin’d by you’) that the power to affect, and effect, by imaginative means is strictly dependent on precisely that same active energy of imagination in the audience that lay behind the work’s creation. The ‘spell’ is the audience’s literalness, or blindness. What makes the island ‘bare’, the ending ‘despair’, is the putting of art in the ‘bands’ of parenthesis, in the treatment of it merely as ingenious maze, external form, surface of text and image, entertainment.
It is almost as if Shakespeare had foreseen the very recent neo-Freudian theory of language and literature as the prime alienators of self from reality, a universal exploitation far worse than the social and economic ones. Something castrating haunts both the Greek and the Latin words for ‘I write’—grapho and scribo—which have a shared Indo-European origin meaning ‘to cut’. It is seen in all the ancient magical uses of the sign or symbol that forbids or proscribes. The text may demand action; but something in its external, objective, ‘other’ nature is always inherently alienating of action in all who did not perform the original action of its creation. In simplest terms, and at even the very highest level, it is someone else’s magic.
We are, in that epilogue, eons beyond the make-believe world of benevolent wizards and cowslip-dwelling sea nymphs. Only one wind will ever fill those sails, if the barrenness of our planet-island is ever to be truly left behind; and it is beyond even Shakespeare’s power to provide it.
But that the vital motive power must lie in the imagination of the beholder is implicit in the piece. It has, I think justly, been interpreted as a play with a cast of one; that is, its eleven main parts can all be seen as aspects of the one mind, as so many planets of different humours mazing and circling round a central earth. The central earth of The Tempest is clearly Prospero-Ariel, the imagination and its executor, the writer and his pen, forced to cohabit with all the other dispositions of the mind . . .and all stranded, like a schizoid Crusoe, on the island of the each. Hamlet and Lear and Macbeth are dreams of men. The Tempest is a dream of the only divinity men are allowed, and a statement of how literally island-small, compared with the all-controlling power of the gods of myth, it is—and always will be until it is shared and understood.
Every child who visits St Agnes has a hop round the Troytown maze; and I hope will long continue to do so, for I should hate to see it fenced in and museumized like Stonehenge. But to anyone who has lived for longer than a summer holiday on a remote island, I trust it will always mean rather more than a minute’s amusement—or amazement. Most who have been through that experience will know that the maze began at their first step ashore; and I should be surprised, even though the centre (given the present world shortage of Prosperos and Ariels) was not reached, if any in retrospect regret the exploration.
I first began to feel the releasing power of The Tempest when I lived on my island in Greece: the lack of a Prospero, the need of a Prospero, the desire to play Daedalus. It is the first guidebook to take for anyone who is to be an islander; or since we are all islanders of a kind, perhaps the first guidebook for anyone at all, at least the self-inquiring. More and more we lose the ability to think as poets think, across frontiers and consecrated limits. More and more we think—or are brainwashed into thinking—in terms of verifiable facts, such as money, time, personal pleasure, established knowledge. One reason I love islands so much is that of their nature they question such lack of imagination; that properly experienced, they make us stop and think a little: why am I here, what am I about, what is it all about, what has gone wrong?
Modern wreck-divers use the word crud, a dialect form of curd, to describe the coagulated minerals that form round any long-sunken metal object, and that have to be laboriously chipped and leached away before it can be exposed to sight again. Islands strip and dissolve the crud of our pretensions and cultural accretions, the Odyssean mask of victim we all wear: I am this because life has made me like this, not because I really want to be like this. There is in all puritanism a violent hostility towards all that does not promise personal profit. Of course, the definition of profit changes. ‘It may be thought,’ wrote Cromwell to the House of Commons after he had helped reduce the city of Bristol in 1645, ‘that some praises are due to those gallant men, of whose valour so much mention is made: their humble suit to you and all that have an interest in this blessing is that in the remembrance of God’s praises they be forgotten.’ The profit then lay in eternity, and the ticket to what was to be bought by an arrogant extreme of self-denial.
We have in our own century lost all faith in the remembrance of God’s praises. The profit now is tallied in personal pleasure; but we remain puritan in our adamant pursuit of it. Purveying recipes for pleasure has become a mainstay of popular publishing and journalism: where to go, what to enjoy, how to enjoy, when to enjoy, to such a clogging, blurring extent that our modern duty to enjoy is nowadays almost as peremptory—and destructive—as the old Puritan’s need to renounce pleasure, to ban the play, the dance, the graven image, and everything else that makes present life agreeable. It is all very well to create a permissive society. But we have not created the essential corollary of a pagan mind.
The true pagan mind, from Homer on, always knew that the laws of pleasure had very little to do with endless consumption, endless exhortation to experience, endless attempts to tell the individual in what his pleasure consists and to guide him through the labyrinth whose deepest values can only be self-discovered. We cannot all be labyrinth makers; but we can all learn to explore and trace them for ourselves. There used to be a guide to the famous maze at Hampton Court that showed the quickest route to take. Nobody who used it ever reached the centre, which lies not in the unravelled, but in the unravelling.
We have helicopters, motorboats, guided tours; all the facilities, all the knowledge. Shakespeare, despite that gold ring in his ear, very probably never saw a remote sea-island in all his life, so his is merely charming fantasy, overintricate and increasingly incomprehensible, like his rich language in this tired, etiolated period of our own; and he himself merely the world’s greatest dramatist, safe-throned on the peak of Parnassus, at a very great and alienating distance from you, me, and anything else relevant today. . . .
But now I am hopping into a sermon, and that will never do. Like all good islands, the Scillies can play their own pulpit. To those who cannot go there, will perhaps never go there, I can at least recommend Fay Godwin’s photographs, which represent very exactly what that wise visitor I began with will look for: the elemental compound of sky, sea, sand, rock, the forms and textures of simplest things, the cleansing, as the sea itself will cleanse, of overartifice, overknowledge, and overcivilization from the mind exhausted by our age’s mania for the secondhand, mechanical image. Our century has rightly learned to admire the Zen gardens of Japan for their austere simplicity; and most of Scilly remains one huge Zen garden of the Atlantic.
A medieval master of that faith was once asked by a novice which plant in a garden most pleased the Buddha. The old man thought, then answered:
‘The mirror.’
‘But master, a mirror has no leaves, no flower, no fruit.’
My sincere hope is that the slap the novice then received was freighted with every ounce of force still lying in the sage’s arm.
1. All quotations from the Odyssey are taken from E.V.Rieu’s translation, published by Penguin Books. I may also recommend Robert Fagles’s new translation (London and New York: Penguin, 1996).
2. Here I shall perhaps cite the name of a charming little orchid I was shown in Oregon the same spring that I wrote this essay. It is Calypso bulbosa.