Speake to her, Hamlet, for her sex is weake.
Comfort thy mother, Hamlet, thinke on me.[12]
And how delicately the same sentiment is made oblique in the Folio—less immediately emotional. Compare the two scenes. In the Quarto we have suddenly a queen who is a bad man’s dupe. But a “good” woman. We have a little development on Horatio as the faithful heart-of-oak dumb-bell. The king becomes rapidly more important as the villain of the piece, and the whole play moves nearer to the accustomed forms of drama: hero, hero’s mother, villain, friend of hero, etc. It is a slick piece of work that even the critics would enjoy. But in the Folio? The whole scene is pointed like a pistol at the head of the protagonist. It is all part of the mouse-trap.
There it is, then. We have in the Folio a double existence: the Prince, who takes his place among the other characters—any jack in any pack of cards: and Hamlet, the creature of the void, poisoned in the bud and dying the Bastard Death,[13] with a loneliness and irony never before seen in literature.
Looked at from this point of view, how many iron-cold shades of irony we have to suffer in Hamlet? The real grin of the genius is carved in it. The importunities of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern finally answered by that superb whip crack: “I lack advancement.”[14] The desperate attempts at self-revelation before Ophelia. For, after all, her betrayal was the biggest one he had to face. In the Ophelia bits we will find the inner struggle most in evidence, because he was counting on her as an ally. But her stupidity—her persistent belief that it was the outward things which were causing his disease—finally alienated him. She became part of the outer struggle herself, and as such he turned against her. The pity of it was that she died, not for Hamlet, who was worth dying for, but for the Prince.
In the mad scene we have another simplification in the Quarto version. It is made quite clear that it is Polonius’s death which has caused her madness by the little verse: “His beard was white as snow!”[15] etc. But in the Folio she does not produce this definite indication of her thoughts until after Laertes appears. After her brother reminds her, in fact, of her father. Before that she has confused the two deaths: And seems to be talking about Hamlet. In the Folio, therefore, even this scene points ambiguously back at Hamlet. In the Quarto it is plain sailing. The poor girl is sent mad with grief at her father’s death. It is only too clear.
The last ironic throes of Hamlet’s own inner death are at the graveside. Here the complete disorganisation between the two Hamlets has never been so clear or so fearful. He is called upon, after all, to exhibit his formal sorrow for her death, when in his inner chronology Ophelia is already dead and buried and rejected. And it is this knowledge that produces the terrific outburst, the embarrassing strained shouting over the coffin. But he himself is clear enough about who is speaking from the mask: “Behold it is I, Hamlet the Dane!” This is the death-scene for him, which passes all understanding. One is struck dumb by the humour of his word-duel with Laertes. It has an irony which the Greeks could never have approached.
It has been said that Hamlet is an artistic failure.[16] And this is so, if one can only respect in literature the façade, the architecture, the externals. But no writer of any genius attempted artistic success. That is a myth which only the critics and the mediocrities concentrate on. I commend the Quarto to the attention of such literary grave-diggers.[17] It will please them hugely. The Prince can be explained, weighed, analysed, etc.
But as an epitaph there is one little omission from the Quarto which seems, to me at any rate, full of a profound significance. It is in the phrasing of the love-letter which Polonius reads to the king. It is an indication of how much Hamlet needed Ophelia to understand—to respect his inner struggle. Not that she, sweet, silly little wretch, would have been able to comprehend it—even if a modern critic had written it out for her in his own words.[18] After the scrap of verse in the Quarto we have, simply:
To the beautiful Ophelia: Thine ever most
unhappy Prince Hamlet![19]
And in the Folio something more curious, more significant of the real state of the disease. It was really an epitaph on Shakespeare himself:
O, dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers,
I have not art to reckon my groans, but
that I love thee best, O most best believe
it. Thine evermore, dear lady, WHILST
THIS MACHINE IS TO HIM HAMLET.[20]
This is not the voice of the Prince![21]
Hamlet, Prince of China
1938
NO ONE WILL PRINT THEM. I’ll tell you why.[1] You choose a title with the word Hamlet, and ring an old psychic chord in the cranium. You excite the critics in your first letter by some real death-rays on the subjects, immensely profound: then you begin rough-necking and capering the theme around in your second: AND THEN SUDDENLY the whole arena shifts round and empties for a duel between you and Fraenkel.[2] Your last letter is magnificent. MAGNIFICENT. It’s all magnificent, but why kill the book by calling it Hamlet? Because somehow it’s so unexpected, this tissue of mirth and magnificence. It’s all Henry Miller, PRINCE OF DENMARK. When I said in a previous letter that Hamlet’s major problems you had solved for yourself, I was nearer the mark than I realized. You cannot write anything about Hamlet because the place it occupies in the Heraldic pattern is below you. There is only going up, not down. This peculiar English Death[3] which is epitomized in the play is foreign to you. I say foreign, and I mean by that—China. The stratosphere. It was a stratosphere that Shakespeare inhabited, but only wrote about by accident. Your whole propensity is set towards the recording of the flora and fauna of that stratosphere. You have penetrated it further, and at a higher level. This is not Shakespeare’s fault. It was the fault of the damning literary formulae of his age. If he had faced the world as it is now, in which canon is no longer based on anything, he would have written things greater than you can IMAGINE. But poor fellow, he didn’t realize for a moment that what was the important thing was the description of his inner heraldic territory. Only sometimes the malaise shook him, tied him up, and presto, out of the folds fell a genuine bit of heraldry. When I say this I am not patting you on the back for being a better writer than Shakespeare, QUA WRITER. I am saying that you have realized yourself as a man more fully: also this important thing…In our age we have reached a point in writing when it is possible for the writer TO BE HIMSELF on paper. It’s more than possible. It’s inevitable and necessary. But for the Elizabethan writing was separated from living entirely. The self you put on paper then might have a HALL MARK: that is to say, it was recognizable by a few mannerisms, a style of moral thought, etc. But it no more corresponded to the author than Hamlet corresponds to you. The virtue of the Elizabethans was this: their exuberance was so enormous, so volatile, so pest-ridden, so aching and vile and repentant and spew-struck, that here and there, by glorious mistakes, they transcended the canon. But their critical apparatus was interested only in the NARRATION. Was it good Seneca, or wasn’t it?
If you look at the state of criticism now, you will find that a whole terminology of MYSTICISM has entered it. Even the critic has been trying to accustom himself to the disturbing factor which all this new ego-writing has brought to light. Lawrence is bad Seneca, Ben Jonson would have said, and meant it. The man can write, but having opinions about oneself is not enough. He lacks art. Off with his head! Now we have timely recognition that each man is entitled to his own reality, interpret it as he wants. THE HERALDIC REALITY.[4] To the Elizabethan all types of experience were easily alloyed, epitomized, and REDUCED TO THE COMMON DENOMINATOR OF THE INTELLIGENCE. Even now there are traces of that heresy about among writers—the flotsam left over from the cheap scientific hogwash of the last century. Fraenkel seems also to be one of these crows. But what you say clearly enough (damn it!), a thing I have been trying to say myself in private, is that there is only one canon: FAITH. Have you the faith to deliver yourself to the inner world of Gauguin, or haven’t you? The critics will get there
on about five p.m. next Tuesday. It’ll be the death of criticism, but their terminology is so full of VOICES OF EXPERIENCE and SPIRITUAL TERRITORIES that they’ll have to do something about it…
Yes, I like what Fraenkel says about you being at a critical pass in your writing. I feel that too. The next few years will show me whether you can support the theory of the ego-protagonist indefinitely. I rather think you can’t. I was surprised by Hamlet, because I thought that it was going to be a sort of opus: but Fraenkel has reduced it a little by introducing personalities. Its value therefore will be documentary. I’m amazed at the Pacific Ocean which you keep in your nib. The fertility. The immensely fructuous energy. The paper seems quite used up when once you have written something on it. That is why I’m impatient. These are letters from high latitudes, but the drama that’s coming as yet—the drama that you have up your sleeve—it scares me a bit. But it’s coming. I have an idea, that if any man can bust open the void and figure it out in a new dazzling mythology you can. And I have another idea, probably a bit repellant to you—that when you do give us this thing it will be full of a divine externality. IT will be a synthesis not only of the self you have explored so devastatingly in your two books, and of which these letters are a pendant, but also of the Chinese figures which you find in the stratosphere: AND THEIR STRUGGLE. It is that titanic war which I feel you are going to offer us; I don’t think the others understand properly…But Hamlet? Hamlet is going to be the title of this drama of yours. Hamlet squared, Hamlet cubed, Hamlet in an atmosphere which gives trigonometry cold fingers and logic blunt thumbs.
I wonder if I am right. It seems clear. Walking about this dead town[5] among the flies, etc. I had a long and fruitful think about that letter of Fraenkel’s. Poor fellow, he wants you to end inside a system. Perhaps even the Catholic system. He cannot bear to see such a high trapeze act without safety nets. He identifies himself so closely with your acrobatics that he vomits at each flutter of your tropical parasol. His only act of bravery is to do a clever trick with death. Death, after all—that is simple. It is here on the ground. But a trapeze…Well, this is impertinent and neither here nor there.
What I thought was this: you have been beating forward into this territory alone, quite alone.[6] In order not to go mad, you had to keep yourself with you as company. That self, the basis of your ego-protagonist work, you raised to a square root. It had to be or else you would have gone crazy. But there is a more terrible time coming. I can’t imagine what the work will be like. I can’t imagine you writing anything greater than you have and are: but there is some intelligence in my bones that now you are getting a grip on the stratosphere: the self, which you used as a defence against the novel terrors of this heraldic universe (as one might use smoked glass to look at the sun[7]), is diffusing itself: it is less necessary. You are looking round and beginning to see the shapes of things. That ultimate battle, which I tremble when I think about, is almost announced. IN IT ALL THAT IS YOU WILL BE SUBJECTED TO THE DRAMA. YOU WILL LOOSE YOUR POWER OVER THE ARMIES—and the result will be those immense mythical figures which will fertilize all our books for centuries…and our minds. I tell you this in confidence. It may be nonsense, but it’s what I feel. No artist as yet has reached the peak you have without being exhausted. Reading these letters I can see clearly that far from being exhausted you are refreshed by each new battle. This is because you travel so light, with such a little baggage.
And this brings me back to Hamlet…Shakespeare, Lawrence & Co. have been crippled from the start by being unable to realize themselves. Consequently the final drama, THE HAMLET, when they wrote it, was entangled in their diseases, held down by them. But you, it seems to me, are going into this final contortion with the purest mind we have yet had, by what propitious circumstances social, literary, and personal God only knows. I said PURE. That is why when you begin this Hamlet the veil of the temple will be rent in twain, and it’s no good asking people like Fraenkel to hand you the meat-axe for the job. My quarrel with your title is this: THE BOOK IS NOT YOUR HAMLET. And it’s a pity to waste the title on it, and have to call the real Hamlet Ophelia or something. It will never be your Hamlet because your correspondent finds the axe too heavy to lift. And even if he could lift it, it wouldn’t be your Hamlet, because that is something you can only do alone, in your own unorganized privacy.
What I say is this: you can write Hamlet, but in the book so far you have only written about Hamlet. Incidentally I should read Hamlet again—because you have the idea that it is purely a drama of the ideal. But there is more to it. Subtract the ideal and you have the framework of your own struggle, every great artist’s struggle, stated terribly. The ideal is secondary—though it is the main thing that disfigures Shaxpeer, all Englishmen really. (Englishmen have always been, in spite of the national anthem, slaves).[8] It is this lie which I want to tackle myself in England. Shax made a complete statement of it, but died from it. You, for your part, are going into it as blind as a hooded falcon, and undiseased in this particular way. There is no chance of a stillbirth…
When you do your own opus I hope you call it “Hamlet, Prince of China!”
These letters disturb me profoundly. I was awake a long time last night reading them over a few times, carefully, and brooding on the subjects they throw up. Particularly the subject of the artist. I was reading pieces of Black Spring and Tropic of Cancer,[9] and trying to isolate a few of the megrims that Fraenkel was trying to lay. It seems he has spotted a disease, but diagnosed it wrongly. The rotting cadaver of the idea, forsooth. There is no cadaver. It is not against this idea that the recoil takes place: and if Fraenkel were artist enough to understand what an artist is he would never have made such an elementary mistake. The trouble with him is that, for his purposes, he denies experience: he only admits types of experience. Hence the complaint when a bit of sunshine and a full belly makes you prod him into a piece of writing for a change. But I feel he is right when he says there is yet a battle to be fought. Last night I felt it, but I had no idea what it was. Then a shrewd remark of Nancy’s[10] started the fuse going and I was grubbing about among books and notes to try and lay it. The mechanism which Jung calls the guilt-responsibility, which you quoted. The germ of it is in there. I was thinking of Cezanne’s fear that society would get the grappins on him: of Gauguin’s insistence on what a hell of a fine billiards player he was: of Lawrence fervidly knitting, knitting, and trying to forget Sons and Lovers.[11] AND OF YOU EATING! Here are numberless types of the same ambiguous desire on the part of the artist to renounce his destiny. To spit on it. O Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup be taken from me. So that when Fraenkel complains that the first spring day makes you murder the idea he is really saying that no sooner is the larder full than you have the very natural desire to call it a shoemaker’s holiday[12] and a fig for Momus.[13] But in your books there are also numerous full larders. You say in big strident tones: I AM A MAN. THAT IS ENOUGH.[14] Because you know that an artist can hardly taste his food, he is so weak with virtue. If it were possible you would like to go on saying I AM A MAN ad lib.—in order to hide the more terrible stage whisper: I AM AN ARTIST: and from there to the ultimate blinding conclusion: I AM GOD!!![15] It is this role which confuses you by its limitless scope. And it is in this area of the soul that that germ of the final thunderclap is breeding.
Therefore I can see more clearly what actuates your disgust for Hamlet. Here is a something which is the reverse of the Miller coin. As a man you are realized: BUT YOU ARE TRYING TO AVOID SEEING CLEARLY THAT YOU ARE SHORTLY TO REALIZE YOURSELF AS AN ARTIST. I MEAN AS GOD. With Shakespeare and the other English it seems that they have only realized themselves imperfectly as men: and consequently that image when projected into the opus (the opus I am God) limits the scope of the final cataclysm: because to be God greater than anyone else has been it is first necessary to qualify as a greater MAN than anyone else. THIS IS THE EXACT NATURE OF THAT CHINESE STILL-LIFE I WAS TALKING ABOUT LAST NIGHT. As for Fraenkel, he spend
s his time trying to be God, but there is no man in his God to represent us. That is what poisons his systems. The trinity—Man, Mind, and Monster—is short by one head: MAN. That is why he pedals vaguely from place to place on that antiquated intellectual bicycle and murmurs sweet nothings about the universal sciences and TRUTH! As a writer I don’t think he’s realized himself…There are some people who can only realize themselves in the past. This is because they are afraid of death. The fascination of the past is the fascination of those things and people who have conquered, viz., passed thru and experienced DEATH…
These Hamlet letters are going to be very valuable as the log of that ultimate journey: I can feel the first peeled statement breaking from them. If only the issues could be cleared and instead of fighting Fraenkel’s obsolete battles for him you had time to concentrate on your own, which is more important, I’d be happier. I was thinking all night about Hamlet, Prince of China, and the colonizing of that empty territory out there, beyond Ararat and the Gobi and Thibet and Ecuador.[16] It tires me, this terrible subject. I have to keep going and having a snack and repeating to myself the magic incantation: I AM A MAN. THAT IS ENOUGH. For me it will be enough, I hope, if I ever am. My ambitions are hedge-hopping and clipped of wing. As for you, you are about to do something NEW. No one as yet has been what you are in the mammalian sense. The question is QUO VADIS?[17] Father and Son in all their glory—there remains only the ghost. YOUR HAMLET’S GHOST. Then, and only then, will it be laid…I am writing this letter extremely solemnly and passionately as a salute to you AS YOU ENTER THE INFERNAL REGIONS.
Prospero’s Isle
To Caliban
1939
TO THE ELIZABETHAN, travel abroad was a good deal more than a luxury or a pleasure; it was the duty of the nobleman as well as his right. The age was inevitably an age of gentlemen made conscious of their gentility by the rising power of the middle classes. Throughout the Tudor age the power of the landed nobles had been slowly but relentlessly clipped; under Elizabeth the process of centralization was carried on; and by the time James came to the throne the subjection was more or less complete. By then titles were for sale and the trespassing plutocrat could measure nobility against his bank-book. Already in the shining nineties the decay of nobility was being bitterly lamented, while the carpet knight had already arrived on the scene; Shakespeare himself, remember, joined in the unseemly scramble for arms and quarterings—the Non Sans Droit on his shield has a pleasantly defensive ring! As for the wild crowd of literary men—the gingerbread heroes of the pamphlet world like Nashe and Greene[1]—they never lost an opportunity of adding the dignity Gent to their title-pages; whatever their behaviour was like, their extraction, they gave the world to understand, was unquestionable.
From the Elephant's Back Page 8
