Prospero's Cell

by Lawrence Durrell

  10.7.37

  Temples were once numerous; Thucidides mentions temples to the Dioscori, Juno, and Alcinous; Jupiter Cassius was worshipped with sacrifices at Kassopi on the northern gulf.

  10.9.37

  The Greek permits himself one cerebral disturbance which from time immemorial has been capable of overturning the whole structure of the state: politics. Not the barren politics of abstractions and principles, but the warm cruel politics of the heart: hero-worship, the advancement of parties and personalities. In this alone we catch a glimpse of his bitter dualism of heart—an interior anarchy, which will not let him rest. I have been dipping into Jervis and wondering at the sameness of the general pattern; both in ancient and modern times it is the same impetus which carries affairs forward: arguments, obsessions, pride, panic, self-advancement.

  “Mnesippus, bent on reducing the town by starvation.…”

  “Being in need of money to pay his men Iphicrates attempted to ransome his numerous prisoners …”

  “Ctesicles attempted to restore order and unity.”

  Yet the anecdotal material in the history of this one small island is all the richer for the variety of its detail.

  10.14.37

  Periander, tyrant of Corinth, gave it as a present to his brutish son Lycophron who became its ruler. For a long time past bitter quarrels had been breaking out between them; at last a reconciliation took place, and so great was Periander’s relief that he wrote suggesting that they should exchange thrones. When the Corcyreans became aware of the intentions of the feared and detested father of Lycophron, they rose up in a panic and slew the son—which was, of course, the worst thing they could have done. In revenge for this Periander seized three hundred Corcyrean nobles who happened to be living in his domains and sent them as slaves to the dreadful Alyattes II. Fortunately, however, the ship bearing these unfortunates was blown into Samos by a northwester, and the indignant Samiots risked the wrath of Periander by rescuing them.

  10.15.37

  “… Of the affairs of this period,” writes Jervis, “little more than confused accounts remain. It appears from a fragment of Diodorus the Sicilian that not long subsequent to the battle of Ipsus, Cassander beseiged Corcyra by sea and by land, but he was obliged to raise the seige by Agathocles of Sicily himself who burnt the whole of the Macedonian Fleet and afterwards gave the island as a dowry to his daughter Lanassa, on her marriage with Pyrrhus, King of Epirus.

  Owing, however, to frequent intercourse with the East polygamy had become prevalent with Greek Princes; Pyrrhus was already married to two wives, one a Poeonian and the other an Illyrian Princess; and the attention he paid to them aroused the jealousy of the Syracusan lady. In order to revenge herself Lanassa retired to Corcyra.

  It is a landscape that does not nourish jealousies; certainly Lanassa’s broken heart was soon mended; for she sent a proposal of marriage to the great Demetrius Poliorcetes himself. This Prince was so handsome that, it was said, no sculptor could be found whose art could do justice to him. His reaction to this proposal was at once thoughtful and deeply considered as befitted a prince and a political man. As he had recently concluded a non-aggression pact with the terrible Agathocles her father, he thought it would fit in very well, if he sealed the pact by marrying the heart-broken Lanassa. A story for moralists.

  In Roman times, Agrippina touched here on her melancholy journey from Asia to Italy with the funeral urn of the noble Germanicus. Those few ashes hid all that was left of a world of ambition and pride and uprightness of character. She made only a short stay here “to calm the agitation of a mind pierced to the quick.”

  10.17.37

  Confused and out of key with their own lives Anthony and Octavia landed here from an impe rial galley, he was on his way to Syria, while she had decided to return slowly to Rome—and to a world of favors as empty as his embraces.…

  “A landscape for resolutions and partings,” says Zarian in an essay on famous visitors to Corcyra. “A landscape which precipitates the inward crisis of lives as yet not fully worked out.” This is from a passage which describes the meeting of Cicero and Cato in the shadow of the fortress in 48 BCE. The former was on his way to Italy to throw himself on Caesar’s mercy, the latter “not having yet despaired of the Commonwealth” was to set sail in company with Cneius Pompeius, for Africa.

  10.19.37

  Winter quarters for Consuls during the wars between Macedonia and Rome. The wind whitening the reedy stretches of Paleopolis and shrieking through the olive groves of Perama. On the northern escarpment the seas pounding at Peristeri (Island of Turtle-Doves), and running white and yellow with the undertow of silt from the Butrinto estuary. Civil servants yawning away a winter over wood fires making inventories of fodder and shipping. “In the last campaign between Pompey and Julius Caesar, the former increased his navy by the shipping of the isle; and had it occupied by the main body of the Fleet under M. Bibulus.”

  Here Titus, Vespasian’s son, watched with some impatience games given in his honor.

  10.20.37

  Geneseric, the ally of Attila, says Zarian, was a man who always trusted “that the winds would bear him to a land the inhabitants of which had provoked the divine vengance.” He frequently visited this indented coastline in person with his pennoned fleet; and after the Vandals came the Goths under the terrible crooked Totila, to pillage and burn.

  Having secured Rome, Totila had equipped 300 galleys manned by Goths and sent them down to conquer and ravage Greece. Justinian could only muster 50 sail and 5,000 men to oppose them. It was the Ice Age settling down on the Roman Empire; and for all the valor of Belisarius and Narses it could not be averted or withstood.

  10.21.37

  Somewhere in the lovely Valley Di Ropa you will come upon a small chapel-covered mound remarkable for the two superb umbrella pines growing thereon. Above you to the left rises the single crag of Peleka above this expanse of green. To the right, almost hidden by the dense woodland, you will see a long curving drive lined with trees which aims slowly round upon a house with peeling green shutters. The cypresses lining the road are perhaps the most ancient in the island; their plumes are almost black, and near the ground are powdered by the fine golden summer dust. Mournful and unkept to the outward view, the house lies hidden from the main road.

  This is the retreat of the Count D., and it is here that Zarian brought me one day to make the acquaintance of this celebrated recluse into whom the philosophic scepticism of a classical education had bit ten so deeply. The old Count, a man of about sixty, was stocky and heavily built; he possessed a pair of remarkable eyes set in a head which was a little too big for his body. But the small hands and feet gave a distinctly Byronic cast to one’s first impressions. When we first met it was some five or six years since he had first retired from the social life of the town to the calm of his country estate. In an island where loquacity and an overburdening sense of hospitality are the norm it was natural that he should rank as a recluse and an eccentric. Zarian had made his acquaintance in the course of some negotiations about the rent of a town house he was intending to lease from him, and something in the temper of his mind (Zarian was incapable of conducting business except in terms of Neapolitan opera) must have appealed to the Count, for they became immediate and fast friends. And now we spend the first week-end of every month staying in the old house as guests.

  10.27.37

  Count D. is interesting. Unlike the majority of recluses he is a hospitable man. Comfortably off, fond of his cellar and his immense library, he is content to spend summer and winter beyond the limited range of town amusements and gossip. He shoots, assists at olive pickings, and christens children; while the wine yield of his property is a constant and delightful concern. The house and gardens were built by an Italian architect, so that though the walks are unkept and the trees unpruned the whole place retains some of the formal humanist charm of the Italian country house.

  Here we spend our time in endless conversation
s. And here Zarian makes the effort of rising at dawn in order to verify the appositeness of the adjective “rosy-fingered,” which the Count maintains to be the most exact as well as the most moving adjective in all literature. Despite several dawns Zarian has not yet agreed with his friend upon this subject.

  The Count is a philosopher—“a philosopher,” he will tell you deprecatingly in his faultless English or lapidary French, “a philosopher who only sits and listens.” He speaks always with the most casual frankness about his own life and interests, his rather fine dark eyes fixed calmly upon his audience. He is filled with what Zarian (who is a born hero-worshipper and who finds a philosopher under every stone) calls “a speculative calm.” It is rather the calm of one in whom the romantic is dead; and in whom the harder cutting-edge of experience has reached the inner man. Despite the sweetness and repose he is a prey to metaphysical incertitudes such as the artist only encounters; this you may guess from the fine sets of much-thumbed European philosophers which line his bedroom. “Philosophy,” he said once, “is a doubt which lives in one like hookworm, causing pallor and lack of appetite. Suddenly one day you awake and realize with complete certainty that ninety-five per cent of the activities of the human race—to which you supposed you belonged—have no relevance whatsoever for you. What is to become of you?”

  On another occasion he said:

  I am popularly supposed to have retired here because of the death of my wife. It is convenient but not true. Two years before she died I woke up one morning, dressed very swiftly, and stood at the window of my room looking down on the harbor. I was visited by an extraordinary idea. I have had, I thought to myself, all the women I could want, and all the amusement I can possibly bear. Something has changed. I could not analyze the change—was it in me, or in the disposition of the world around me? It was a kind of detachment—an idea not born within the conceptual apparatus but lodged in the nervous system itself. I had become different as a person. Anyone else would have gone away and written a book about it; but I did not want to bring this personal discovery within the range of the conceptual apparatus, and thereby spoil it by consciousness. I retired, it is true, but you will see from my life as it lies around me, that what I am after is not the interpretation of the Principle of x, as I call it; but I wish to interpret the ordinary world of prescribed loyalties and little acts like shooting or lying or sleeping through the Principle. It is the oblique method of dealing with the platonic fire, after all, that betrays experience. Therefore if you come to me, like Zarian, and ask me why I am not writing down these discoveries, I can only reply that that is not what I mean by philosophy. I am enduring, and that is enough.

  It is for these remarkable flights that Zarian admires him so; and not the less for his gravity and the charm of his address. “If only he would write a book,” says Zarian, the thirsty literary man, “it would be a work of genius.” Then he adds rather more slowly: “and if he can live without the thought of suicide.…”

  But the Count has, by an imaginative detour, avoided the impasse in which people too heavily endowed with sensibility or the need for expressing it, find themselves. The old house with its Venetian family portraits and tarnished silver radiates an absolute calm. Greek terra cottas lie piled in dusty cupboards—broken jars and oil-dips, all relics of the plough from this fertile valley.

  We dine late by candlelight; light almost as yellow as the moon outside the great windows of the dining-room; portraits of Venetian ancestors stare pallidly at us from the walls in their moldering frames. The floors are full of dry-rot.

  After the dinner the Count takes up a branch of candles and leads the way to the wine-covered terrace by the white southern wall on which the dapple of leaves silhouetted by moonlight stand out unmoving. Here we sit and talk away the greater part of the night. In the silences between our sentences we can hear the oranges dropping from the trees in the orchard—dull single thuds upon the mossy ground. The marble table is wet with dew. An owl cries, and the watchdogs at the lodge grumble and shake their chains.

  The Count smokes his homemade cigarettes in a short bone holder, stained with nicotine. Relaxing, and spreading out his hands against the moonlight as if to warm them at its white fire, he begins to talk. I have wasted all these words on describing the Count in the hope of isolating that quality in him which is so admirable and original, and when he begins to talk I grasp at once what it is. He is the possessor of a literary mind completely uncontaminated by the struggle to achieve a technique; he lacks the artifice of presentation, the corrupting demon of form. It is a mind with the pollen still fresh upon it.

  While we sit here Ourania the heavily made but beautiful peasant girl comes out in her bare feet, the corner of her blue headdress gripped modestly between her white teeth, and arranges glasses of Visino before us; “Would’st give me water with berries in’t?” says the Count reflectively—“have I never told you that Corcyra is Prospero’s island? This,” he indicates the glass in which Ourania has placed a spoonful of dark viscous raisin jam, “is one of the links in my chain of reasoning. I cannot think that the scholars would support me, but you, my friend,” turning to Zarian, “you would take a little pleasure in the knowledge that Shakespeare was thinking of Corfu when he wrote The Tempest. Who knows? Perhaps he even visited it.”

  It is the kind of opening which Zarian loves so much. His silver hair gleams in the moonlight. Taking his spectacles from his pocket, as if the better to follow the Count’s reasoning, he places them on his nose and says: “Now then, Count. Defend this contention.”

  The Count has taken a small silver-hiked pencil from the pocket of his cardigan and is busy tracing meaningless little shapes on the marble table. He dusts some specks of cigarette ash from his clothes, and writes the word SYCORAX before Zarian. “Look,” he says, “Caliban’s mother, the mysterious blue-eyed hag who owned the island upon which Prospero was cast—her name is almost too obvious an anagram for CORCYRA.” He pauses for an instant and raises his eyes to Zarian’s eager face. He is unable to resist smiling at his friend. “Shall I go on?”

  You will remember the Principle of x of which I was speaking? It struck me that perhaps in the work of the great artists I might find this outpost of the sensibility charted. In the course of my reading I stumbled upon The Tempest. I found what I was looking for in Prospero, but while I was reading the play I was struck by a few elements in it of a peculiarly Ionian nature. If you lose patience with the idea please tell me and I will stop. First of all, the shipwreck. Prospero s Island it is abundantly clear is somewhere off the main route between Tunis and Naples. I propose to disregard the claims for Lampedusa and Malta; and I think that if you observe the coloring of the text you will see that it is peculiarly Greek. Think of Caliban’s imprecation. “A southwest blow on ye, And blister ye all o’er,” and reflect to yourself whether this south-wester is not the worst evil that could befall an Ionian—sirocco weather. Then, to go a little further with Caliban; he enumerates the qualities of the isle as “The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.” I ask myself here whether the Venetian salt pans in the south of the island might not have been in his mind.

  The Count says this with a singular and deprecating sweetness; I can see that he anticipates Zarian’s protest.

  Zante has also a claim under that head. There was a prodigious trade with Zante during Elizabethan times; Lithgow mentions the currants which the English used in their puddings; and even if you read mere teachers of languages like Hollyband you find an unself-conscious reference to the island—proving that to the average Elizabethan merchant Zante was already well known. And of course the salt pans of Zante would be better known.

  The Count nods patiently.

  Perhaps too well known, not quite mysterious enough to furnish the imaginative background for the desert island of The Tempest. We are on delicate ground. Yet you must agree that the coloring is Mediterranean—“And thy broom groves, whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves, being lass-lorn
; thy pole-clipped vineyard and thy sea-marge, sterile and rocky-hard.” What do you say to that, my friend?

  Zarian is too patently seduced by the idea to say anything at all; in his mind I can see he is planning a whole article on this remarkable idea. He sits impatiently in his chair and waits for the Count to speak. The latter takes a turn up and down the terrace trying to remember further quotations to support this delightful fantasy. At each Zarian’s enthusiasm grows.

  “I must,” he says at last, “I must drink to this noble discovery. Count, this is a memorable addition to our knowledge about Corcyra.”

  “Then,” says the Count, in a voice mellow with pleasure and a certain triumph, “let us drink a glass of Visino—which I have christened Caliban’s Wine. ‘Water with berries in’t,’ is, to my mind, not coffee, as most of the commentators would have it, but —this unusual Ionian drink. Your health, my dear Zarian.”

  The health is unduly prolonged in a bottle of red Kastellani wine, while Zarian plunges deeper into the maze of surmise and conjecture. “We cannot be certain whether Shakespeare ever came here,” says the Count, “but we can ask ourselves two things. First, who is the ‘well-wishing adventurer’ who is described as ‘setting forth’ in the dedication to the sonnets? The second is this: Shakespeare was too well known to be the victim of an open piracy by 1609. But if he were out of the country it is possible that Mr. Thorpe might have had the courage to print the sonnets. The Tempest was written in 1611 they say.”

  At this point, Theodore, who always retires formidably to bed at nine-thirty, puts down his massive volume of medical lore, blows out his candle and comes to the window above our heads. He receives Zarian’s information about Shakespeare’s visit with sceptical good humor, remarks on the clearness of the night. Looking towards the west you can see a strip of glittering sea drawing a line between two black olive groves. Small breathless eddies of air come to us across the valley. Theodore sniffs appreciatively and says: “Jasmine,” before bidding us good night and withdrawing his bearded head from the window. The three of us walk down across the lawn and through the orchard towards the little circular Rotonde which houses the battered statue of a Roman nymph. “I trust,” says the Count, “that your wives are not offended with me for refusing to invite them to these meetings. If you permit me to say so, women tire me. Their presence introduces an atmosphere of politeness and favoritism; they will discuss poetry like angels until they notice a mirror in the corner of the room. They lack the magnanimity of the male mind.”