From the Elephant's Back (11 page)

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 spends 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.

All this has a certain bearing on the question of Shakespeare's problematical travels; his own testimony shows that, had the chance ever come to him, he would have been man enough of the age to take it.

He wondered that your lordship

Would suffer him to spend his youth at home,

While other men, of slender reputation,

Put forth their sons to seek preferment out

Some to the wars, to try their fortunes there;

Some to discover islands far away;

Some to studious universities.

For any or for all these exercises

He said that Proteus your son was meet,

And did request me to importune you

To let him spend his time no more at home,

Which would be great impeachment to his age