Antic Hey-­Hey

Perhaps the saltiest observation Max Beerbohm made in Seven Men, a book whose saline content has remained as high and delightful as it was on its appearance thirty years ago, occurs in that matchless story of a literary vendetta, “Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton.” Writing about the preoccupation of contemporary novelists with sprites and woodland gods—Maltby, it will be recalled, was the author of Ariel in Mayfair and Braxton of A Faun in the Cotswolds—Beerbohm remarked, “From the time of Nathaniel Hawthorne to the outbreak of the war, current literature did not suffer from any lack of fauns.” I suppose this reflection has always struck me as especially astute because when I originally encountered it, back in 1923, I happened to be in a milieu where satyrs and dryads, Silenus and Bacchic revels, were as common as cattails in a Jersey swamp. Its impact was heightened, moreover, by the fact that I was just convalescing (although for a while my reason was despaired of) from the effects of a tumultuous, beauty-­bound best seller of the period called Wife of the Centaur, by Cyril Hume.

The place was Brown University, and the particular focus of all this mythological activity was a literary magazine by the name of Casements, on whose staff I had a brief, precarious toehold as assistant art editor. At least three-­quarters of the text of Casements each month was made up of villanelles, rondels, pantoums, and ballades in which Pan pursued laughing nymphs through leafy bowers, and it was my job to provide decorative headings and tailpieces to complement them. Fortunately, I had a steady hand and an adequate supply of tracing paper, and if my superiors had not accidentally stumbled on the two albums of Aubrey Beardsley I was cribbing my drawings from, I might have earned an enviable reputation.

My short and brilliant tenure had one positive result, however; I finally discovered what was inspiring the Arcadian jingles I illustrated. One afternoon, while dawdling around the dormitory room of our chief troubadour and waiting for him to shellac a madrigal about cloven hoofs in the boscage, I picked up a novel bound in orange and gold and read a passage he had underscored. “Ho!” it ran. “The centaur is born! Child’s body and colt’s body, birth-­wet and asprawl in the ferns. What mother will nourish this wild thing? Who will foster this beast-­god? Where will he grow? In what strange cavern will he make his bed, dreaming his amazing dreams? What shaggy tutor will teach him as he lolls with his head on nature’s breast? What mortal maid will he carry away to his upland pastures in terror and delight?”

“Hot puppies!” I burst out excitedly. “This isn’t prose—it’s frozen music! The gink who wrote this is the bee’s knees!”

“Yes, yes,” said the poet guiltily, plucking the book out of my hands. “I—er—I haven’t read it myself, but I guess it’s had a wide influence.” It was a Freudian slip on his part, which some instinct told me was worth investigating, and when I did, my suspicions were confirmed. Not only he but practically every bard on Casements had been using Wife of the Centaur as a water hole. The opportunities for blackmail were, of course, illimitable, and had my own nose been clean (the Beardsley complication was just breaking), I might have taken advantage of them. The truth is, though, that on reading the book I succumbed to its witchery so completely that I, too, began writing villanelles and pantoums in the same idiom. Sad to say, they never saw printer’s ink; my colleagues, jealous of the applause the verses might excite, stopped publishing Casements altogether, and overnight a potential Words­worth again became a drab little sophomore.

A week or so ago, standing with nostrils atwitch and a pocketful of rusty change over the bargain table of a Fifty-­ninth Street bookstore, I spotted a copy of Mr. Hume’s chef-­d’oeuvre and, unable to resist a cut-­rate sentimental pilgrimage into the past, gave it a home. Its effect, after a lapse of twenty-­seven years, was not quite as dynamic as I had anticipated. Rather than quickening me to an orgy of spondees and dactyls, it slowed down my heartbeat to that of a turtle’s and enveloped me in a profound slumber under a grape arbor, where I narrowly escaped being consumed by a colony of ants. It may sound unfair to suggest that they were attracted by the rich and sticky imagery of the book, but from now on I plan to restrict my open-­air reading to the World Almanac, with a Flit gun cocked across my knee to repel browsers.

Since Wife of the Centaur is the tale of a sensitive boy who grows up to be a poet, it quite properly begins with a salvo of rapturous and yeasty verse to help you adjust your emotional sights. The following, one of several quatrains introducing a fifty-­page pastiche of Jeffrey Dwyer’s childhood, gives a hasty but reliable preview of the feature picture:

The centaurs awoke! they aroused from their beds of pine,

Their long flanks hoary with dew, and their eyes deep-­drowned

In the primal slumber of stones, stirred bright to the shine!

And they stamped with their hooves, and their gallop abased the ground!

Jeffrey, it is shortly established, is an infant centaur, in what might be described as cushy circumstances; he attends an exclusive private school in Connecticut, preparing for Yale, and, when not saturating himself in The Oxford Book of English Verse, struggles tormentedly under the lash of awakening sex. The description of the process discloses him to be a pretty full-­blooded lad: “Lean desire wrapped his body in taut coils, oppressing him like pain. . . . Lust was a blind force, immeasurable, overwhelming, irresistible as a toppling wall of black water. . . . And desire, the gaunt beast, buffeted and shook him. . . . ‘God! God!’ . . . The air was a voice that hissed hot promises of forbidden mysteries, the trees were erotic minstrels singing old songs of shameful loves.” Luckily for Jeffrey, if not for the reader, his adolescent libido is channeled into writing verse before it lays waste the Nutmeg State, and while the samples furnished are hardly calculated to set the Housatonic on fire—packed as they are with fantasies of whitely radiant madonnas with golden coils of hair and cherry-­red lips moving in strange benedictions—it is clear that Calliope has destined the youngster for the business end of a quill.

The heroine of the book, a conventional maiden named Joan Converse, in the same affluent social stratum, now makes her advent with a clash of cymbals and another fifty pages of adolescent background. Joan’s sexual yearnings do not seem quite as turbulent as Jeffrey’s, but she gets a symbolical sendoff just as rousing: “Ohé hamadryad, lurking in yon covert of ruddy sumac, are your cheeks red with remembered dreaming? Hark! Hark, little maid with the limbs of a slim cascade—hark, for the young centaur tramples and neighs along the wooded hillside, no longer far away. And you do not flee, little maid with your rose-­petal cheeks? Ah, the centaur! Ho, hamadryad!” It is futile to begin slavering and speculating on the explosion the two will eventually create, though, because their paths do not converge for years, and by the time they do, at a Long Island house party, the third leg of the triangle is already in place. Jeffrey, during the interval, has been distinguishing himself at Yale as a poet and tosspot, and is currently dangling after Inez Martin, a heartless flirt whose eyes range from clear gray to transparent green with her varying moods. “She’s a willow beside a brook of running water, and the sun on both,” the poet epitomizes her to Joan, brokenly recounting the indignities Inez has subjected him to. Irksome as the maternal role is, Joan sensibly bides her time and is rewarded in the Easter vacation, when Jeffrey buckles under her own glamour in the rear seat of a Stutz. He kisses her roughly, impetuously; as she goes faint at the contact of his slim, strong hands, she notices that “they seemed to have an eager, fine life of their own. Tense and flexible and swift as blood horses.” Much to Joan’s chagrin, alas, it is merely a routine workout for the ponies. Reining them in before they can bolt, Jeffrey warns her that something horrible might have happened, that she must never let anyone again kiss her in such abandoned fashion. “ ‘Me least of all,’ he said harshly. Then he bent down and kissed the cool palm of her hand.” And so, in a bittersweet dying fall that combines echoes of Havre de Grace, Jergens Lotion, and the code of a Yale gentleman, is born the romance of Joan Converse, occupation hamadryad, and Jeffrey Dwyer, jongleur and centaur.

Actually, despite all the preliminary huffing and puffing, nothing concrete develops between them in the ensuing third of the story, for Jeffrey still has to fight the First World War and purge Inez from his system. He cleans up the first, and obviously easier, assignment in a brisk ten pages, throws himself into a journalistic career, and makes a superhuman but fruitless pitch for Joan’s rival. How greatly she disturbs him may be gauged from this saucy vignette: “Her blouse was deeply opened at the neck, showing a long V of glowing flesh with a faint shadow at the point. One foot was drawn up under her and Jeffrey caught a glimpse of a rosy knee with the stocking rolled below it. . . . Happiness pierced him suddenly like a flaming sword. His pulses beat to the rhythm of a wild prothalamion. . . . He! For him! He was to explore the shrouded mysteries that dwelt behind her eyes. Her Venus body and the youth of it, the promises he read in the sultry curves of her mouth . . . these were his to take and hold like a cup, to drink deep. . . .” The goodies, maddeningly, remain just out of reach; Inez has pledged herself to a wastrel named Jack Todd, and, sick with disillusion, Jeffrey plunges into a stormy cycle of wenching and boozing that climaxes in the arms of a lady of the town. Slowly and painfully, his equilibrium returns, a salvage operation that calls forth fresh flights of lyricism: “Now is the centaur weary of men and men’s ways. . . . Centaur, is your beast’s spirit broken? Is your man’s heart crushed utterly? No! For now the centaur shouts anew his loud defiance! . . . I will go back again to taste the bright hill-­water of my colthood and my nostrils shall know as of old the thin air of my mountain realms. I shall lie upon a bed of ferns under familiar constellations. . . . In the still of the night, in an hour when quiet comes upon the crickets and all the little creatures of the dark, I shall reach up with my hand and pluck that round honeycomb, the moon, out of the sky to feed my hunger.”

Reduced to prosaic, taxpayer’s lingo, this means that Jeffrey goes back to his prep school, engages in a purifying bull session with the headmaster, sobers up, finishes a novel called “Squads Right About” debunking war, and publishes it to wide critical acclaim. Joan, who meanwhile has lain obligingly dormant for a hundred pages waiting for her swain to unsnarl his glands, hereupon pops back into view. Just why she and Jeffrey should plight their troth at the Museum of Natural History, I was unable to fathom, except that it affords the hero an opportunity to indulge in some verbal pyrotechnics on science—or, rather, his conception of it. “Geology, Joan!” he exclaims. “God, but I love geology! Astronomy! The gorgeous tremendousness of it! Science for gods! . . . Your mind goes tramping through space like a hobo in spring, with spiral nebulas trailing at its ankles like gobs of cobwebs. You want to howl and kick suns around because then you realize that the human mind is the greatest created thing.” At any rate, after a plethora of similar brainy generalizations, Jeffrey providentially runs out of saliva, and the two dissolve into an embrace that leads to the altar and the next movement of the symphony, a section stylishly entitled “Lilith’s Garden.”

“Lilith’s Garden” is ecstasy unconfined by whalebone, chaperone, or censor, a honeymoon that makes most other fictional ones I can recall seem vapid by comparison. The newlyweds spend it at a seaside cottage on Long Island, whooping around the dunes and behaving in a thoroughly heathen and unfettered fashion: “At night on the beach, he would suddenly make a horrible face and howl, ‘I’m a remora!’ or ‘I’m a mandrake!’ or even ‘I’m a Calvinist!’ Then he would growl and come after her in great fantastic leaps, flinging out his arms and legs and she would squeal and try to double back to the deserted steamer rug.” The proximity of salt water, naturally, brings on a whole new rush of metaphor, and the hamadryad switches into a mermaid: “And when he kissed her mouth he tasted the brine of the deep places where her home was; and her dipping arms crept around his neck to draw him under and carry him down forever to a palace of pale coral where fish darted like birds in a garden.” As if these quincelike frivolities were already not sufficient to pucker up one’s lips, they are punctuated by scolding comments from an old Irish retainer of Joan’s playfully known as Madsy, a dialectician of the school of Harrigan and Hart: “Didn’t I hear the both of yez on the beach last night carryin’ on like wild pagan creatures? Half the night you was up behavin’ scandleous and undaicent as though there wasn’t that much of a Christian soul between yez! . . . When you might better have been in your bed you was out on the sand there schreechin’ like a pair of unredeemed catamounts. . . . Then you, Mr. Dwyer, takes and carries her upstairs, with the pair of yez drippin’ like Tim Connel’s ghost and him just after drownin’ himself for havin’ hit Father Mulligan a skelp wid an axe.” Alanna, and ’tis with a sigh of relief and the divil’s own skippin’ of pages that you finally claw your way out of the tunnel of love.

The culmination of Wife of the Centaur may be one of the mildest in letters, but I was never so glad to see a culmination in my life. It is, of course, Inez, the girl with the chameleon eyes, who motivates it; Jeffrey has barely settled down on a Connecticut hilltop with his bride when the enchantress slinks back into the plot and everything goes haywire again. Night after night, the harassed poet patrols the countryside, waging a losing fight against her allure and addressing rhetorical questions to the heavens: “Must all true metal be tempered in flame? Is every birth a long agony? Designer infinite. . . . Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?” Then, at very long last, comes blessed deliverance for all hands. Amid melting snows and adjectives, Jeffrey finds that the dross has burned away, and in a single burst of renewed creativeness composes two hundred and sixty lines of a saga called “The Brook.” “God, Joan! I’ve never written anything like it in my life before! It’s poetry . . . it’s great poetry!” But whether it is or not will forever rest a secret, because at this juncture the reader is swept up on a mountainous comber boiling with allusions to Botticelli, Pallas Athene, and the old surefire thunder of centaur hoofs, and is washed up, weak as a kitten, in the end papers.

The reaction of a forty-­five-­year-­old stomach to twenty-­five-­year-­old brandy is a physiological certainty, but surprisingly little information exists on how that organ responds to novels of the same vintage. My subsequent history, therefore, may have a trifling clinical value. For thirty-­six hours after completing Wife of the Centaur, I experienced intermittent queasiness, a tendency to howl “I’m a Philistine!” and an exaggerated revulsion for the printed page. A day or two later, while emptying a wheelbarrow of old books into a gully near my home, I saw (or thought I saw) a stout, bearded individual with four feet chasing a scantily clad maenad along a ridge. I returned home on the double and, having notified the local game warden, busied myself with indoor matters. Ever since, I have been hearing reedy sounds from the ridge, as of someone playing a rustic set of pipes. More than likely, the game warden got himself mixed up in a three-­handed saturnalia and they’re looking for a fourth. One of these evenings, as soon as I can get myself shod, I really must gallop up there and see.