The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  Highly coloured, allusive, audaciously tongue-in-cheek, the Ars Amatoria is from first line to last a series of surprising and provocative reversals, not only of established literary conventions but of anything that even the most alert and knowing reader might expect.

  Comic disproportion is its method. Petty concerns are illustrated with large examples, great matters with ones that are trivial. Moral tags are misapplied, old tales introduced on the most tenuous pretext and given new twists, arguments playfully exaggerated until they collapse under their own weight – it is the playfulness not the argument that we are meant to approve and be impressed by; psychological analysis, as in the recounting of Pasiphae’s passion for the bull, is pursued to the point where it becomes clearly and comically absurd. Seriousness is at every turn averted, but with so disarming a mixture of slyness and candour, and so much infectious joy in the doing of it, that to charge the poet with crime – lèse-majesté or libertinism or the corruption of youth – would be, to steal an image from a later Augustan, like breaking a butterfly on a wheel. Is this why it took Augustus so long to accuse and punish Ovid?

  In AD 8, a good seven years after the poem first made its spectacular appearance, Ovid was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea, a place from which, despite many appeals for clemency, he was never to return. The Ars Amatoria is cited as one part of his offence, and it is not difficult to see in the poem what the emperor might have found offensive.

  At its centre is a character that was to have a long history in poems of this kind, and not only in Latin – the modern lover; the carefree, pleasure-loving man-about-town who has dropped out of the world of serious civic duty and become a hero not of the battlefield or the law courts but of the bedchamber, where the only ‘virtue’ he recognises is play. The poem really is subversive – not in the challenge it offers to marriage and the new morality, or because it has the effrontery to claim for the lover the same ‘professional’ status as the farmer, the soldier, the holder of high public office, but because it makes the role it creates so invitingly attractive; most of all, because it establishes the lover/poet as the emperor of an alternative and privately constituted state. As John Donne, one of Ovid’s later incarnations, puts it, ‘She is all States, and all Princes, I / Nothing else is.’ The poem’s ostensible subject, the art of love, is a decoy. The real subject is the poet himself. To be a poet – to be the poet, Ovid – is to be a world unto yourself. The emperor’s world, the great world of Rome, is simply his scene of operations; at the most, ‘material’, to be treated as he will. That is the immodest claim. No wonder Augustus felt he needed to act.

  Around this lively and youthfully impulsive persona (the poet himself, we might note, was in his middle forties) Ovid organises a spectacular ado, a series of brilliant sideshows in which what is on display is the poet’s delight in his own talent; the range of his erudition, his verbal dexterity and wit, his inventiveness in painting scenes of sweeping grandeur but also, since he has what we would now call a cinematic eye, zooming in on illuminating close-ups. The poet can take literally anything into his poem in the assurance that what will hold it together is his own mercurial presence, as guide, confidant, provocateur, storyteller, picture maker, mock scholar, mock sage, magician, stage manager.

  At one moment he is leading us on a conducted tour of the city’s sights and monuments – with time out to comment on the usefulness of each as a pick-up place; in the next he is playing knucklebones or spillikins, or recommending hairstyles or footwear or health resorts, or diverting us with old tales retold. Of Pasiphae and her bull, of the birdman Daedalus, of Mars and Venus, Cephalus and Procris; throwing out hints along the way to a whole company of poets and playwrights and novelists to come.

  To the school of English poets we call Metaphysical, for example, who will find in his unexpected juxtapositions, his yoking together of disparate worlds and objects, the way to a new kind of imagery. To Molière for Les précieuses ridicules and Les femmes savantes. To a long line of eighteenth-century epistolary novelists. Even, perhaps, in his proposal that the safest way of transmitting a message is to write it on the back of the messenger, to a twentieth-century filmmaker, Peter Greenaway, for The Pillow Book.

  It is the protean inclusiveness of the Ars Amatoria, its joy in the variousness and contrariety of things, their lovely capacity for surprise and paradox, that has made it such a treasure-house of literary tropes and genres, such a gallery of pictures that need only the stroke of a brush to make them actual paintings. Titian, Rubens, Poussin and others had only to turn to the verbal pictures here – Bacchus in a chariot drawn by tigers, a drunken Silenus falling sideways off his ass, Cephalus stretched out in a grassy clearing – to discover the program, down to the smallest detail, for some of the greatest paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque.

  One of Ovid’s most sympathetic qualities for those who came later was his own sense of Lateness – of being, as he must have seen it, post-classical. But what he also demonstrated, and by brilliant example, was that all we need to make old material new is freshness of invention and a previously unconsidered point of view.

  Walking along the shore with Calypso, Ulysses maps the Trojan plain for her by drawing with a stick in the sand, and so Ovid embarks, once again, on the well-known story. But Ulysses has barely got started on his ‘epic’ when a wave sweeps up the beach, and in a wonderfully dramatic and affecting image Troy and all the old world of gods and heroes is once more obliterated.

  In the retelling of the Daedalus story, one of the most extended and fully imagined in the poem, an aerial view of the Greek islands Naxos, Paros and Delos – in itself a remarkable piece of image-making – is momentarily suspended while Ovid shows us his two birdmen from another angle; through the eyes now of a supernumerary angler on the beach below. More than fifteen centuries later, Brueghel would appropriate this extraordinary image for a famous painting, and four centuries later again, W. H. Auden will use it in an equally famous poem.

  The Ars Armatoria, mock serious as it is and focused only on the immediate and personal, has turned out, by a kind of miracle, to be timeless.

  To the wandering scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as to the authors of The Romance of the Rose and Chaucer in the fourteenth, Ovid seemed like a man of ‘modern’ sensibility, a contemporary out of his time; and he appeared that way also to the poets of the Renaissance. His dedication to what the Elizabethan poet George Chapman called ‘Ovid’s banquet of sense’ made him a natural alternative to the idealism of Petrarch and the Petrarchans. It was his unashamed joy in carnality, and in sensory phenomena of every sort, that led the seventeen-year-old Marlowe to translate the Amores while he was still at Cambridge, and for Frances Meres, writing in 1585, Shakespeare was the ‘sweet witty soul’ of Ovid mellifluously reborn, as in France it is what a rejuvenated Ronsard turned to in the second and third book of his Amours. When Goethe, in the fifth of his Roman Elegies, taps out his hexameters on the back of a sleeping girl, it is surely Ovid who is there in the shadows behind him, as it must have been Ovid, as much as any of the Italian painters, or Winckelmann with his promise of ‘classical ground’, that drew the great northerner into that area of his nature he called Italy.

  Ovid represents the playful, lightly irreverent element in our culture that once a place has been found for it we cannot do without. We have only to catch the echo of his voice in our own language, as we do in Sir Thomas Wyatt or the early Donne, or Sir John Suckling or Frank O’Hara, to recognise a lost but living contemporary whose boldness is a challenge to our own, and the charm of whose companionship remains, as it has always been, irresistible.

  Introduction to The Art of Love, translated by

  James Michie, Modern Library Classics, 2002

  RELATIVE FREEDOM

  THE TEMPEST IS A SPECIAL case among Shakespeare’s plays. The editors of the First Folio, as long ago as 1623, chose it to introduce their complete edition of the Works, and as the final statement of our greatest
writer playgoers have long felt that it ought to have some special significance, some special message even; it ought to be a summing-up, a gesture of farewell. Then too, it’s a play that is full of mysterious happenings; a fairytale with a shipwreck, an enchanted island, a magician with godlike powers, a prince who has to win the magician’s daughter by undergoing an ordeal and submitting to a test of chastity. Surely with all these properties of the folk-tale, the dream-play, it is also some sort of allegory, and it has, of course, especially in the past half-century, become a source-book for symbol-hunters and dream-mongers of every sort: Freudians, Jungians, Neo-Platonists, pullers of the Great Chain of Being. Prospero’s island, as he himself puts it, has certain ‘subtleties’. One of them is to appear in a quite different form to each person who looks at it. To Gonzalo it is green, to Alonso tawny, and for the most part what men see in it is a reflection of themselves.

  Of course I don’t mean by this that The Tempest has no meaning, or that we are to take it as mere whimsy, a sort of Jacobean Peter Pan. In fact another difficulty of the play is that it is so full of ideas that matter – questions that were just beginning to be asked in Shakespeare’s day and that we have been puzzling over ever since. Questions about the true nature of man, for example. Is he in essence innocent or inevitably fallen and corrupt, though redeemable either by education or through divine grace? Questions about the need for authority and order – we might remember here those extraordinary proto-Communist agitators of the early seventeenth century, the Diggers and Levellers, who with a simple rhyme, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?’ challenged authority, hierarchy and property, all three. Questions about Europe’s relationship to the New World, whose discovery had upset so many comfortable notions about man and his place in the universe, and raised new problems about civilised man’s rights over, and responsibilities towards, the inhabitants of the new lands – a subject we would now call ‘colonialism’.

  But first and foremost we need to remember that The Tempest is a comedy, perhaps the most sophisticated Shakespeare ever wrote. And since Shakespeare is, among other things, our greatest comic dramatist, that is to put the play in a very high category indeed.

  Or is it? Can a comedy really be great literature? As great, say, as Oedipus or Hamlet or King Lear? And what is comedy anyway?

  Let me say right away that comedy seems to me to be the greatest of all forms of drama, and comedy of a serious kind – comedy that doesn’t just fall about or send things up, but tries to make a full statement about life and its possibilities, that sort of comedy – is also the most difficult sort of drama to write.

  What tragedy presents us with is what we know is true but cannot bear to live with – the facts of what it is to be human: that death is inevitable; that outrageous accidents and muddles upset the best laid plans of men; that time is the destroyer of all things; that fate or the gods are more powerful than the wisest and best of us. Tragedy explores what it means to be subject to the contradictions of existence. It pushes out towards the limits of human necessity to discover that there is no escape: once a choice has been made it cannot be reversed; every event has its inevitable consequence; the clock goes on ticking. Great tragedies like Oedipus or Macbeth, great tragic moments like the end of Faustus, have for us the fascination of a nightmare – someone else’s nightmare. The world closes in around us. We are trapped by our very nature as men. But comedy somehow – and this is the point I want to make about it – opens the trap and sets us free again. The world of comedy is one in which we are not ruled by necessity after all. Some other quite miraculous force is at work within it to sort out the muddles, to restore lost daughters and wives, to wipe out old terrors, rectify misunderstandings, sometimes even to raise the dead and prove that old crimes were never really committed. All the possibilities are opened again and we get what we never get in real life, a chance to begin our lives over again. And this happens not because it is the way things are but because the comic dramatist makes it so. Comedy is an act of faith about the way things might be rather than a picture of how they are. To write a play like The Tempest you have to believe something, and the play is so liberating to us because it is itself a marvellous act of freedom on the part of the man who made it.

  So without pinning the play down to one of those schemes that critics are so fond of, in which Prospero equals the imagination, or the intellect or God, and Caliban, Ariel and the rest are dislocated bits and pieces of his psyche, I would like to suggest that The Tempest raises questions about our human limitations and possibilities that we might want, in the end, to call religious, and takes them back into the realm of politics and the ordinary affairs of daily living. Shakespeare’s play is a medium in which questions about freedom, responsibility, order, authority, compassion, forgiveness, self-knowledge – grace, even – are free to raise themselves and be acted out in the very fabric of the play; but they are acted out, not argued over, and almost never resolved.

  The key notion, perhaps, is the one we have already pointed to in talking about the total effect of the play itself: the notion of freedom. It presents itself in many different forms.

  There is, for example, Prospero’s freedom through his art to control nature and – in the last resort – the lives of the other characters in the play. It is, we might think, a freedom that is rather like the freedom of the artist himself, who also has control of the plot of his play and over the characters within it. But we must beware of equating the two. There are areas of the play that Shakespeare is aware of and Prospero is not, and areas also that lie outside Prospero’s control. Antonio, for example, remains free at the end of the play not to repent, not to join the happy circle of the redeemed. And there is the whole question of Ariel’s lack of freedom, his bondage to Prospero, and Caliban’s lack of freedom, his slavery. Both of these, it seems to me, raise questions about the sort of authority Prospero exercises in the play that ought to prevent our accepting too completely the notion that Shakespeare and Prospero speak as one.

  That question of Caliban’s slavery, for example. Is it, as some commentators suggest, simply a ‘natural’ aspect of Caliban’s role as ‘salvage man’? Isn’t there something in his great denunciation of Prospero in I, ii that challenges, in its very tone, the idea that civilised man’s rights over the savage are natural and absolute?

  This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,

  Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first

  Thou strok’st me, and made much of me; wouldst give me

  Water with berries in’t; and teach me how

  To name the bigger light, and how the less,

  That burn by day and night; and then I lov’d thee

  And show’d thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,

  The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile:

  Curs’d be I that did so! All the charms

  Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!

  For I am all the subjects that you have,

  Which first was mine own King: and here you sty me

  In this hard rock, while you do keep from me

  The rest o’ th’ isle.

  I ii 333–346

  Caliban is allowed to state his case and it stands – even after we have discovered that he has tried to rape Miranda and people the island with Calibans.

  Real questions are being raised here about the nature of Prospero’s authority and the reasons for Caliban’s loss of freedom that are connected with the whole political and moral world of the play. And a great deal of the play is concerned with questions of politics: Prospero’s abjuration of his political responsibilities at Milan; the acts of usurpation there, and Sebastian’s attempted act of usurpation on the island; the attempted usurpation of Stephano. And a great deal of the play is also concerned, as a corollary, with the ways in which men either retain their freedom or relinquish it to the will of others. We see Caliban fall into the trap of making himself the slave of a new master to be
rid of the old – and a worse master at that. We see Ferdinand put in much the same position as Caliban when he is set, like Caliban, to drawing logs. But his attitude is very different:

  I am, in my condition,

  A prince, Miranda: I do think, a King;

  I would not so! – and would no more endure

  This wooden slavery than to suffer

  The flesh-fly blow my mouth. Hear my soul speak:

  The very instant that I saw you, did

  My heart fly to your service; there resides,

  To make me slave to it; and for your sake

  I am this patient log-man.

  III i 59–67

  At his very first meeting with Miranda, in lines that must immediately link him with both Caliban and Ariel, he discovers a new kind of freedom in the idea of bondage itself:

  Might I but through my prison once a day

  Behold this maid: all corners else o’ the earth

  Let liberty make use of; space enough

  Have I in such a prison.

  I ii 493–6

  Ferdinand’s attitude to bondage is very different from the others’ – and Shakespeare shows it as just that, different, another way of looking at a complex question, but not an attitude that necessarily ‘places’ the other attitudes and demands our unqualified assent; any more than Prospero’s right to power is given our unqualified assent. Ferdinand’s attitude leaves the questions raised by Caliban and Ariel unanswered.

  One of the claims one would want to make for The Tempest, and for Shakespeare, is this peculiar capacity for letting every side of a question speak for itself; for presenting every side as part of a multi-faceted view. We should be very careful indeed before we dismiss any argument that the play allows to be expressed, and before we accept any speech from any character, even Prospero, as ‘trumping’ another character or his point of view.