The Laughter of Aphrodite

by Peter Green

  “Is that, too, a pledge?”

  He nodded. Against the light behind him the edged outline of his thick hair glowed, suddenly, like burning gold.

  I stood up, numb, as though in a dream. My lips framed the words I must say, yet I scarcely heard them: only his swift change of expression, the sudden tightening of his clasped fingers, told me that he had understood that brief whispered sentence.

  XII

  This is ridiculous. I really am losing my sense of proportion. No one could guess, from what I have written, that Cercylas was, without exception, the most intelligent, sympathetic, and amusing man it has ever been my good fortune to meet. As for my account of how I came to marry him, it makes me sound like Iphigeneia being led to the sacrificial slab at Aulis. Nothing could have been further than the truth.

  Indeed, when I re-read all I have written, I am astonished by the amount of sheer dishonesty that has found its way into nearly every episode. What an innocent, priggish, hard-done-by little genius I am making myself out for posterity! When I consider this self I have created, so laudable in all her motives, so dedicated to her art, so fundamentally pure even where the physical passions are concerned, I scarcely recognize her.

  Well, today I propose, while this mood of cheerful self-criticism is on me, to correct the picture a little. No one, certainly no poet, ever tells the whole truth; but at least I can do my best to fill in my more glaring omissions, and admit a few of my less palatable faults. (Once the words are actually written down, not even my admitted talent for self-deception will, I hope, allow me to suppress them. But one never can tell.) Besides—a preliminary exercise in candour—I am by no means sure, now, that my self-portrait is as flattering as I hoped. It does not satisfy me (at any rate not in my present mood) and after a couple of generations may well fail to impress anyone. By then, in all likelihood, the stylized mask we insist on our poets wearing will have changed beyond recognition.

  There is, too, a more immediate problem facing me. I must, soon, give some account—to satisfy myself no less than curious future generations— of the group, circle, salon, artistic centre (what should one call it?) which came to be known, half-ironically, as the “House of the Muses,” and which, for almost two decades enjoyed, under my direction, a remarkable—indeed an international—reputation. But by its very nature it always generated controversy; and already, only three years after its dissolution, it is fast becoming a myth.

  Or rather, as one might expect, two conflicting myths.

  On the one hand there is the establishment described by my more ardent admirers, jealous of what they regard as any slur on my character, eager to idealise the past. Their House of the Muses is something between a philosophy salon and a young ladies’ finishing school, and I the brilliant, fastidious teacher at whose feet girls from as far afield as Salamis or Pamphylia sat to be instructed in poetry and elegant deportment, perhaps even, like Erinna and Damophila, to catch the spark of my inspiration and become poets themselves. Some have even ventured to describe me as a priestess of Aphrodite: the aim, no doubt, was to emphasize my chastity and my devotion to religious matters, but—as might have been expected—less charitable people picked on the phrase and gave it a very different interpretation.

  According to them, my House of the Muses was little more than a high-class brothel, in which the only arts taught were those of the courtesan; and I myself a sexually insatiable monster, seducing most of my girl-followers, conniving at—or even myself procuring—their male lovers (whose attentions I afterwards shared), and flinging unseemly public abuse at members of a similar rival group when they contrived to entice away one of my own favourites. From this traffic I was, further, supposed to derive a very substantial cash profit.

  It hardly needs saying that these two myths (like the rival factions which propagated them) reflect, in unmistakable fashion, the social and political rivalries by which our unhappy city has been torn throughout my lifetime. The House of the Muses was, essentially, created both by and for the old aristocracy, whose ideals it upheld with steadfast devotion, and whose support it therefore commanded. In a sense I succeeded where Antimenidas and his friends failed so lamentably: perhaps this accounts for the almost insane violence of those who attacked me—all, one may note, in some way connected with the new regime.

  There: once again I have to pull myself up on the brink of specious and flattering self-exculpation. I was not conscious, at any time, of being a political figure in the true sense of the word: the House of the Muses existed simply and solely because it gave me pleasure and, latterly, provided me with a much-needed source of income. As for the way of life I expounded, that was no more than my natural heritage: I spoke for myself, and in so doing became an unwitting public symbol of the class that had bred me.

  How much truth, then, was there in each of these two myths? It would be tempting to accept the version put about by my friends: after all, I have tacitly accepted it already in most of what I have written. But such shabby subterfuges are for the living, who are vulnerable still. There is not, I fancy, much embarrassment in Hades.

  I composed that strange final sentence late last night, when the lamp was beginning to flicker, and the wine I had drunk to detach my mind from its surroundings. What did I mean? Why should I allude, in so casual a fashion, to my own death—and as though it were close upon me? Yet it is true that the idea of death has long obsessed me. When, at certain moments of deep emotional stress and despair, I experienced the desire to pinch out the flame of life within me, it was with a strange yearning pleasure, a dreamy sensuousness. Even as a child the map of Hades, put together in my imagination from the old myths, held an extraordinary allure for me: I saw myself lying on the dewy lotus-grown banks of Acheron, peaceful among the quiet dead. It was an escape from life, in the most literal sense.

  Why should I think of death now? I am unaccountably more relaxed and cheerful than I have been for months. I do not for one moment believe that I am suffering from cancer of the womb, as I hinted so dramatically a little while ago: it would be an ironic and appropriate twist of fate, but the physicians assure me I have nothing to fear. There will be no recurrence of the dreadful illness I endured five years ago, with its nightmare sweats and haemorrhages, its deep black drowning pits of despair, its apathy and flat exhaustion.

  I remember a cheerful Coan doctor reassuring me, as I lay on my day-bed under an awning, too weak even to move: “You mustn’t worry, Lady Sappho: it’s a natural symptom of your age, nothing more.” The tears rolled down my cheeks: perhaps I was laughing, who can tell? That smiling, jolly face: those devastating words, a judge’s sentence. The world seemed to recede from me, down an endless dark tunnel.

  But now, five years later, I feel intensely alive, in every fibre: fire scalds through my veins, I am consumed, exultant. Now, today, at this moment, I can still hope.

  There is a kind of knowing-and-not-knowing, an elusive and specious attitude to uncomfortable facts or emotions which enables one to deceive oneself no less effectively than other people. My childhood was not quite so innocent, nor my adult life by any means so fastidious, as I have hitherto contrived to suggest. Yet which of us does not—and with good reason—conceal some at least of our private actions and thoughts from the world? No. Let there be an end of excuses now.

  It is true, in the strictly physical sense, that Chloe was my first lover. Yet for years before we met I had experienced (with Andromeda above all but with other girls too, who mostly remained quite unaware of my feelings) a burning intensity of passion that was—I cannot emphasize this too strongly—something quite apart and distinct from ordinary, physical desire. I see, now, that I was deeply in love with Andromeda over a long period; but I never, at the time, acknowledged a physical dimension to my feelings—which perhaps was why I found some of Alcaeus’ hints and innuendoes so disturbing.

  It is easy to forget, also, how large a part of any poet’s emotional life is conducted in the mind and the imagination—so much more
real, for him, than the world of physical appearances, so tangible that he will slide at will from the real to the imaginary until, in the end, there is no clear frontier between them. The passions which stirred me were embodied in this secret world, this dream-dominion of pure, silver-clear, crystalline adoration, so that my creative imagination could dwell on some loved face or body and, in fantasy, find fulfilment there without disturbing the delicate balance of unknowing which governed my conscious thoughts. I burned, yet the fire was contained, transmuted. As I grew older, inevitably, the perilous frontier between desire and knowledge became less distinct: this was the time of nightmare, of knowing-and-not-knowing, when, waking, I closed my eyes deliberately to what my mind understood, but refused to accept. It is not hard to understand, now, that state of latent, unexplored desire which had so instantaneous and devastating an effect on Chloe.

  For my behaviour to Pittacus, though, I can find no such excuse: it was done knowingly, and from plain prurient curiosity. I refer, of course, to my description of his drunken attempt at rape, which, in one vital respect, does the old ruffian something less than justice. It is true that he made the attempt it is also true that I panicked in sheer revulsion before he had got well started. What, for obvious reasons, I refrained from mentioning is the fact, that I quite deliberately provoked him into it.

  I was bored; I had had a violent quarrel with my mother; and my imagination—never slow in this respect—had not been idle while he was upstairs in Aunt Helen’s room. By the time he came down I had convinced myself, quite wrongly, that I was ready for anything. If it was not a demure little sensualist who stood waiting by the couch on that spring afternoon (how self flattering one’s imagination can be!) it was not a mere innocent, frightened child, either; and I think, looking back, that I thoroughly deserved the sharp lesson I got. At least it convinced me I was not quite so grown-up as I supposed. As for Pittacus, he showed what, in the circumstances, I can only call great forbearance. If I had tried my little tricks on Myrsilus, or even on Deinomenes (he made no mistake about me, even after one chance encounter) the story might have had a very different ending.

  How much did that afternoon, in fact, change the whole course of my life? My extravagant assertion was, naturally, designed to make me out an innocent victim—just as, I now see, I have been trying to excuse my present embarrassing passion by a broad hint that it is a mere symptom of disease, for which I cannot be held responsible. But until I reached middle-age—indeed, till the aftermath of my illness—only girls ever engaged my full passions. I did not have a violent aversion to men; I was, quite simply, not aroused by them.

  On the other hand, I do not believe my passionate regard for the condition of virginity, or the sadness which the thought of its loss invariably engenders in me, has much to do with distaste for the sexual act. I suspect it is, rather, a legacy from the private, exquisite, intense world of my adolescent imagination: here, moving through the shadow-play of reality, I mourn that lost perfection still.

  My main objection to marriage was far more practical: I saw it as a permanent threat to my independence of mind and action. When Cercylas made it clear that he would respect me as an individual human being, I was prepared to accept his proposal. I must not give the impression (I suspect I may have done) that one condition of that acceptance was an agreement, on my husband’s part, to forgo his marital rights. The prospect of this experience did not much excite me; but I was not repelled by it, either.

  On the other hand (oddly when one considers my own nature), I find that men such as Alcaeus, whose passions are centred exclusively on boys, arouse a strong and instinctive antipathy in me. When I see the lovers he keeps—Lycus especially, with his long curled hair and shadowed eyes, his powder, his lipstick, his mincing, affected walk—I feel not only repulsion, but also a sense of personal outrage: by usurping a false femininity, these creatures somehow diminish my own womanhood.

  What I really dread, I suspect, is revealing, not excess of feeling, but rather a fundamental lack of it. Cold emotional self-centredness is not a comfortable characteristic to face in oneself: there is something inhuman about it, something crippling. Only, perhaps, through the sexual act have I ever been able to give myself completely and selflessly: devotion, of the kind which my cousin Meg has in such abundance, has always brought out my hardest, most ruthless side. That is not a pleasant admission, either.

  I have always thought Meg designed by nature for a life of passionate celibacy, deriving sexless, vicarious satisfaction from ministering to those emotions in others which she is afraid to confront in herself—or which, quite simply, she does not possess at all. As a result I have used her, without compunction or gratitude. I am quite sure that when she sent me the Egyptian doctor’s report on my mother’s death she was not being in the least malicious. The situation defeated her, that was all. She could not think what to say and so took the easy way out.

  Similarly, the most terrible thing about Chloe’s death, for me, was my own lukewarm reaction to it. After a day or so I simply felt nothing—no grief, at any rate, though I was intensely angry, on the practical level, at being left in so embarrassing a position. How many people, I wonder, after the death of someone they have loved feel, in their heart of hearts, as I did—yet shrink from the admission, even to themselves? Grief must be feigned, the social myths preserved.

  Indeed, my entire Sicilian exile, as I describe it, sounds like a beautiful, bedazzled dream. This it most certainly was not. I spent those years abroad working extremely hard at my art: I attended lectures, researched, wrote, studied choreography and musical technique, and in general laid the foundations of those varied skills, as teacher and creative artist, which I used to such good effect on my return to Mytilene. But hard work—particularly in a poet or a lady—is regarded as boring and undignified by well-bred people, who would much prefer to hear about the Muse’s inspiration, or the spring of Helicon—which, as Alcaeus once told me, has strong aperient qualities, not perhaps the best symbol for divine afflatus.

  How, I wonder, would they react to the knowledge that, two days after Chloe’s death, far from languishing in heartbroken bereavement like any properly-brought-up lady poet, I spent the morning studying with my music-teacher (a mild stimulant after Arion’s slave-driving), wrote a cheerful, not to say near-bawdy, commissioned wedding-song in the afternoon, did my regular two hours’ daily practice at the dancing-school, ate a large dinner after it, drank enough wine (but not too much) and spent half the night making love to Chloe’s exotic Spanish maid, long desired and now, at last, available?

  Yet how much of this, too—what I so presumptuously dare to call the truth—is self-mockery and self-deception? Tomorrow, in another mood, I may deny what I have said today, the glass may show me another, equally plausible face. The mask peels away to reveal a second mask behind it, and where shall the truth be found? Can anyone, can I, see Sappho as she really is?

  Nevertheless, I shall let what I have written stand, with all its ambiguities and contradictions. That, at least, is a kind of honesty.

  It isn’t true, Chloe’s death broke me up so completely I thought I would never recover from it. The account I wrote yesterday shows how completely one can distort the truth without ever straying from external facts. All I set down are the physical details—but how much implication there is behind them!

  I remember that day very well, the cold, bleak horror of it, the colour drained out of everything, the absurd little creature that was myself moving through it like a mechanical doll. No, I did not languish in bereavement as professional mourners or indifferent widows do, making the expected show of grief, playing a conventional part. My sorrow was too deep for such calculated dishonesty: I was literally stunned, and all I could do was cling to my day’s routine, some framework round my inner chaos.

  I suggest (do I not?) that because the wedding-song was cheerful and bawdy, I must have been feeling cheerful myself. But other poets, if not the public at large, will know, as I do, t
hat wit often springs from the deepest depression. When I say I was cold, that I felt nothing, Chic was true in the most literal sense: I felt nothing, my senses were anaesthetized by shock, as doctors can numb a limb by the administration of certain drugs.

  As for Chloe’s maid—again, convention will say this shows callous indifference. But in his heart of hearts, even the conventional moralist will know how closely linked are the mysteries of death and creation. After a funeral the sexual desire is strongest. We do not care to admit this, but it is true. And Chloe’s Spanish slave-girl was a part of Chloe; our love-making was, in one sense, an act of mourning and farewell. We poured libations to her spirit, the tears were streaming down our faces as we kissed.

  Why, now, should I have the temptation to destroy myself in the eyes of posterity, to blacken my motives, emphasize all my least likeable faults? Is it in fact the truth I seek? Know yourself, the oracular precept runs; was there ever a simpler, or a harder injunction?

  I wonder, now I come to think of it, why I have never, except in the most oblique and allusive way, mentioned my frequent private dream-visions of the Goddess? Perhaps because they no longer take place, and the Goddess herself has turned away from me—hard, in retrospect, to think of that smiling, affectionate countenance, so familiar for all its divinity, as a mask for cold capricious malevolence; harder to accept those cherished manifestations as something worse than mockery.

  But another, more commonplace reason may be that they, the visions, are—were—so comfortingly matter-of-fact: when a poet is honoured with divine epiphanies they should, one feels, have a fine revelatory frenzy about them. But I somehow established the same sort of personal relationship with the Goddess as I had done during my later childhood with Aunt Helen. Whenever there was a crisis in my private life—and when was there not?—I would pray for the Goddess to appear to me; and either that night or the next, she invariably did.