Unlikely Stories Mostly

Μ. POLLARD’S PROMETHEUS

IT WAS UNKIND OF THE JEWS TO GIVE the job of building the world to one man for it made him very lonely. Earlier people saw the creator as a woman giving birth, which is sore, but not sore on the head, and fulfils body and soul until the empty feeling starts. But these wandering shepherds were so used to featureless plains under a vast sky (not even the sea is vaster than the sky) that they thrust a naked man into formless void and left him there forever with nothing to remember, not even the sweetness of a mother’s breast.

Roman Catholics and the English parliamentary poet Milton evade the horror of this by placing the void below a mansion where God lives in luxury among angelic flunkeys. Satan, his sinister head waiter, provokes a palace rebellion resulting in a serious staff-shortage; so God, without leaving his throne, gives orders which create a breeding and testing ground (the earth) for a new race of servants (mankind). This notion is very reassuring to people with power and to those weaklings and parasites who admire them. Most citizens with a religion really do believe that heaven is a large private property, and that without a boss to command them they would be nobody. I reject this bourgeois image of God. If God is the first cause of things then he started in a vacuum with no support and no ideas except those arising from his passions. Some commentators present the void as a sort of watery egg on which God broods like a hen until it hatches. Oh yes, why not? This sweet notion is easily reconciled with the splitting of that grand primordial atom which scientists have made so popular. But I am better than a scientist. The Jewish Genesis intoxicates me by attributing all creation to a mind like mine, so to understand God I need only imagine myself in his situation.

First, then, black void, pure and unflawed by sensations. No heat, no cold, no pressure, no extent. What is there to do? Be. Being is all that can be done. But gradually a sensation does occur, the sensation of duration. We perceive that we have been for a long time, that we will be forever in this darkness unless we do something. The more we endure of our dark self the less we can bear it. We move from boredom to unease and then to panic-horror of an eternity like this. We are in Hell. So the cry “Let there be light” is not an order but a desperate prayer to our own unknown powers. It is also a scream rejecting everything we know by committing us to an unimaginable opposite. And there is light. And oh, what appalling vertigo we feel when eternity becomes infinity also and we find ourselves floating beside above beneath that dazzling blank bright breadth, height, depth with no content but ourselves. The light is too much for us, we turn to darkness again. And the evening and the morning are the first day.

Genesis says God saw the light, that it was good, but I cannot imagine him standing happily upon that boundless floor of light before he has peopled it with creatures. His first creature is water, a body compatible with his agitation and as formless as his thinking at this stage. Its sparkling movement reflects and refracts the light into every possible tone and tint, there is a rainbow in each drop of it. With this water he makes the sliding architecture of the sea and the steady, starry flood of the firmament. Unscientific? Good. I would have it so. I will skip most of the other stages. By the sixth day God is almost wholly incarnate. We taste earth and dew through a million roots, our leaves and blossoms sense and scent the air, we graze on our herbs and strike beaks into our squealing flesh while our unutterable doubt of the whole enterprise sneaks searchingly through sunlit grass in the body of the serpent. Our largest intellectual powers are almost (but not quite) realized in Adam, who kneels to study, in a puzzled way, his reflection in a quiet stream. The reflection causes a stiffening in his ureter which has to do with the attached seedballs, but the stiffening is not sufficient to impregnate the image in the water or the moist gravel under it. What other body do we need? Eve, of course, our last and most intricate creature. So Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bare Cain. And Cain knew his wife, who conceived and bare Enoch, who builded a city. And after more generations of knowing and conceiving, a Seventh-Day Adventist, Joseph Pollard, cleaved to his far more liberal wife Marie, who conceived and bare myself, the poet. If your education is adequate you already know I have been paraphrasing the start of my Sacred Sociology, printed privately at Dijon in 1934.

My infancy resembled that of God, my ancestor. I only dimly recall the dark time before I screamed into light, but I was in that dark, like all of us, and I screamed, and there was light. I may have found the light emptier than most. My mother once told me, in an amused voice, that as a baby I screamed continually until one day they sent for a doctor. He examined me minutely then said, “Madam, what you have here is a screaming baby.” Clearly she had never wondered what I was screaming for. Herself, probably. But soon my vocal chaos acquired the rhythm and colours of articulate speech and I named and commanded a child’s small universe. My command was not absolute. In my tenth year Marie Pollard eloped to Algiers with one of her husband’s business acquaintances. I sympathized with at least half the feelings which compelled her. Illness had made Joseph Pollard hard to live with. His fits of blinding rage destroyed a great deal of furniture and did not always spare the human body. But I am grateful to him. Paul Cezanne once said, “My father was the real genius. He left me a million francs.” Father Pollard was not such a genius as Father Cezanne, but in my eighteenth year he freed me from himself and the curse of earning my bread by succumbing to cancer of the spleen. The consequent income did not permit me to marry, or support a housekeeper, or to frequent respectable brothels; but I silenced the desperate hunger in my young heart by studying it, and the world containing it, and by learning to read all the great sacred books in their original tongues. And I depressed my professors at the Sorbonne by finally submitting no thesis. A poet need not truck with bureaucrats.

I am shy, fastidious and arrogant. I am unattractive, but do not need friends. I am a close reasoner, and love language. My poetic vision is deep, but lacks breadth. It is the drama of their infancy which makes men poets, but the writers of the greatest divine and human comedies are men of the world, they discover and represent that drama in commonplace streets, bedrooms and battlefields. I can only represent Gods, and lonely intelligences, and multitudes viewed from a very great distance. I will never be popular. To pay the printers of the Sacred Sociology and Child’s Dictionary of Abstractions* I went shabby and hungry for many days and these books made no great stir. An early act of folly cured me of seeking fame in the reviews. I sent Gide the Sacred Sociology with a letter indicating that his Protestant education had made him capable of appreciating it. He returned the copy with a seven-word comment: “Literature cannot be founded on Larousse Encyclopedias.” His rage, when his wife burned all his letters to her, still amuses me extremely. Bravo, Madame Gide! You hoarded these scribblings as long as you believed he had no other way of making love, but thrust them in the stove when you discovered he enjoyed that passion, physically, elsewhere. You refused to be a postbox through which the great man despatched himself to posterity, bravissimo. I am the opposite of Gide. I now address the public in order to be read by one woman I can reach in no other way. Love drives me to this. Gide was driven by vanity.

I am as old as my century. In the late sixties the respectable working men who frequent the café where I dine began to be ousted by students and other members of the lower intellectual classes. This led to an increase of prices and one day I told the manageress that I could no longer afford to patronize her establishment. A shade of unease came to her face and was instantly quelled. After a moment she indicated that, to a customer of long standing, a reduction of five per cent was permissible. She was not being friendly. She had been friendly twenty years earlier, but I then made certain detailed proposals which she construed as insults. She is one of those strict atheists who determine themselves far more completely than a priest determines a good Catholic. Over the years her splendid body had come to depend on the corset for its shape but I still found the sight of it entertaining; she knew this and cordially detested me. I told her that a fifteen per cent reduction might ensure my continued custom and, after quelling a distinct flicker of wrath, she agreed. I left the café proud to be a Frenchman. The change in clientele was due to myself. Though unpopular I had clearly become famous, and where else in the world would intellectual eminence receive such tactful regard? I remembered also that my mail had recently become abundant, though I only open envelopes from publishers and from the bank which manages my estate. I decided to give myself a holiday. I usually study in a small useful library containing no publications after 1765. Today, in a spirit of sheer caprice, I visited the Bibliothèque Nationale and investigated the history of my reputation.

My books had suffered from an absence of agreement upon how to regard them. In the thirties, the only period when I associated with a political movement, my support of the National Front led the surrealists and left wing generally to regard the Sacred Sociology as a satire against religion in the fashion of Anatole France; but Claudel called it a grand heresy revealing the truth through the agony of estrangement, Celine praised it as hilarious antisemitic comedy, and Saint-Exupéry noticed that it did not seek to deface or replace the scriptures, but to be bound in with them. In the forties the existentialists had just begun to bracket me with Kierkegaard when I printed A Child’s Plainchant Dictionary of Abstractions. This was thought an inept satire against dictionaries and final proof that I was not a serious thinker. Twelve years later a disciple of Levi-Strauss discovered that, though printed as prose, each definition in my dictionary was a pattern of assonance, dissonance, half-rhyme and alliteration invoking the emotions upon which words like truth, greed, government, distaste and freedom depend for their meanings. My definition of digestion, for example, if spoken aloud, soothes stomachs suffering from indigestion. This realization brought me the reverence of the structuralists who now used my dictionary as a text in three universities. I was often quoted in controversies surrounding the American linguist, Chomsky. It seemed that among my unopened mail lay an invitation to join the French Academy and the offer of a Nobel prize for literature. There was widespread speculation about my current work. My first two books were of different kinds and I still pursued the habits of study which had produced them. It was noted that five years earlier I had begun subscribing to a journal devoted to classical Greek researches. All things considered, there was a chance that, before the century ended my name might be attached to a metro terminus.

I left the Bibliothèque Nationale knowing a new epoch was begun. I had become magnetic. In the café, when I raised a finger to order a Pernod, the manageress brought it then turned her haunches on me in a manner less suggestive of the slamming of a door. The glances of the other customers kept flickering toward my meagre person in a way which showed it reassured them. I was filled with social warmth which I did not need to express, dismissing importunate journalists and research students with a blank stare or aloof monosyllable. This procedure greatly entertained the respectable working men. I came to notice a nearby face, a well-exercised face of the sort I like. The fine lines between the brows and the corners of the mouth and eyes showed it was accustomed to smiling and scowling and was often near to tears; the main expression was eager and desperate. My own face is too big for my body and bland to the point of dullness. My only lines are some horizontal ones on the brow which show I am sometimes surprised, but not often and not much. I arranged my features to indicate that if I was approached I would not be repellent, and after hesitating a moment she left her table and sat down facing me, vastly disturbing in the circumambient field of attention. We were silent until it settled.

She was in the mid-thirties with long, rather dry, straw-coloured hair topped by a defiant red beret. Her other clothes (baggy sweater, trousers, clogs) had been chosen to muffle rather than display her not very tall figure, which was nonetheless good. My personality is modelled upon August Dupin. I eventually said, “There is a book in your handbag?” She opened the bag and laid a thin pamphlet on the table between us. I could not read the author’s name, but it was not by me, so must be her own, or by her lover, or perhaps child. I said, “Poems?”

She nodded. I said, “Why do you approach someone so famous for taciturnity as myself? Have you been rejected by the more accessible celebrities?”

She said, “In approaching you I have not been guided by reason. You are an almost complete reactionary. I ought to despise you. But when a young girl your dictionary gave me an ineradicable respect for the meanings, the colours, the whole sense of our language. If your talent is not dead from disuse, if you are not wholly the dotard you impersonate, you may help me, perhaps. I so much want to be a good poet.”

I am not accustomed to challenges, my usual habits prevent them. Her words released into my veins an utterly intoxicating flood of adrenalin. I gazed on her with awe and gratitude. She had turned her face sideways and tears slid down the curve of her cheek. I lifted the little book and said playfully, “If I dislike this you will think me a dead man; if I love it there is hope for me?”

She said coldly, “I am not a fool.”

Her proud chin was at an angle as defiant as the beret, her small nose was as tip-tilted as a sparrow’s beak. The bridge may have been broken. I, who have never touched a woman tenderly in my life, longed to lift and cradle her protectingly. So much sudden new experience could overstrain an old heart. I pocketed the book, climbed down to the floor and said, “Madam, my habits are invariable, you may find me here whenever you please. I will have read your book in two days.”

For the second time in four years I allowed myself a holiday. On the sunlit pavement I was gripped by a walking frenzy. She had given me a precious part of herself (I stroked the book in my pocket) and defied me, and asked for help, and wept. I loved her, of course, and did not regret that this state, for me, would be painful and perhaps impossible. Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra found love painful and almost impossible. Phaedra and Medea found it quite impossible, but nobody doubts they were enhanced by it. I was enhanced by it. I am a wholly suburban Parisian who distrusts, as much as any provincial, that collection of stale imperial pie-crusts calling itself Paris. We require it to awe the foreigner who would otherwise menace our language and culture, but I refuse to be awed. So I was amused to find myself standing on one of the curving benches of the Pont-Neuf, my arms on the parapet, staring downstream at one of our ugliest* buildings with a strong sentiment of admiration and delight. Since I was physically unable to seduce her I must persuade her to seduce me. This required me to remain aloof, while feeding her with increasingly useful parts of my mind, cunningly sauced with flattery to induce addiction. Everything depended on her poems. If they were entirely bad I would lose interest and botch the whole business. I sat down and read.

I was lucky. The person of the book was intelligent, tough, and on the way to being a good writer. She was a feminist, vivisecting her mauled sexual organs to display the damage and making the surgery icily comic by indicating, in a quiet lip-licking way, “It’s even more fun when I slice up him.” Some poems showed her embracing and embraced by a lover and unable to tell him something essential, either because of his indifference or from her fear that big truths are too destructive to be shared by a society of two. It was entertaining to see a woman in these Byronic postures but she was potentially greater than Byron. Her best work showed respect for human pain at a profounder level than sexual combat. It was spoiled by too many ideas. A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seed-word is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, above which, however, they tower like precipices. My woman avoided banality (which has, indeed, swallowed hordes of us) by turbulent conjunctions. Her book was filled with centaurs because she had not fully grasped the complexity of actual people, actual horses. Her instinct to approach me had been sound. I could teach her a great deal.

I bought a note pad from a stationer in the Place Dauphin. It was Sunday. I entered the Louvre and fought my way through the polyglot mobs to the Maria de Medici salon where I always feel at home. The canvases adorning this temple to female government bubble with enough good-humoured breasts to suckle a universe. My favourite painting, which always gives me a wicked thrill, shows the Italian banker’s fat daughter handing over the tiller of state to her son, a boy with the clothes, rigid stance and far too solemn face of a very small adult. The ship of state has a mast with Athene beside it pointing the way, her curves compressed by armour which recalls the corsets of my manageress. The motive power of the vessel is provided by lusty women representing Prudence, Fortitude, etc., who toil at heavy oars with pained, indignant expressions which suggest that work comes to them as a horrible surprise. Unluckily there is no sofa near this painting. I settled before the canvases which show Maria’s coronation inaugurating a new golden age and there, in the severe language of literary criticism, wrote the first love-letter of my life. I was inspired. I filled twenty-four pages with minute writing before closing time, then walked home, corrected them in red ink, typed them, recorrected, retyped, then sealed them in a large manilla envelope of the sort used for preserving legal documents. My heart palpitated as I inscribed her name upon it.

I had said I would read her poems within two days. For a week I extended my lunch hour beyond the normal and on the eighth day her shadow fell across the print of the book I was reading. Without raising my eyes I placed the letter between us, saying, “You may wish to digest this in private.”

I heard the envelope torn, then looked up. She was giving the letter an attention which excluded myself and everything else. She read slowly, and some passages more than once. An hour elapsed. She slid the pages into her handbag, gave me a full, sincere smile and said, “Thanks. You have misunderstood my work almost completely, but your warped picture of it conveys insights which I will one day find useful. Thanks.”

She tapped the tabletop with her fingers, perhaps preparing to leave. I grew afraid. I said, “Will you now explain why, in our first encounter, you called me reactionary?”

“Your work explains that.”

“The Sacred Sociology?”

“Yes, for the most part.”

I sighed and said, “Madam, it is not my custom to justify myself or criticize others. Both practices indicate insufficiency. But to you I surrender. Your poems suggest you love freedom, and want a just communism to release human souls from the bankvaults of the West, the labour camps of the East.” “And from the hospitals and asylums!” she cried ardently. “And from the armies, churches and bad marriages!”

“Good. You desire a world-wide anarchic commonwealth where government may be safely left to a committee of retired housekeepers chosen by lot, like a jury.”

She smiled and nodded. I said, “Madam, I wish that also. For centuries men have been misled by words like God, fate, nature, necessity, world, time, civilization and history: words which hide from us our cause and condition. The bourgeois say that because of these things our state can change very little, except for the worse. But these words are nothing but names for people. We are our God, fate, nature, necessity, world, time, civilization and history. Common people achieved these limbs, this brain, the emotions and the skills and the languages which share them. We have made every blessing we enjoy, including sunlight, for the sun would be a meaner thing without our eyes to reflect it. The fact that man is infinitely valuable — that man is essentially God — underlies every sacred code. And when I say man is God I refer least of all to God the landlord, God the director, God the ruler with power to crush a majority for the good of the rest. To hell with these overpaid demiurges! My gratitude is to God the migrant labourer, the collectivized peasant, the slave of Rio Tinto Zinc and the American Fruit Company. He is the heavenly host whose body is broken day after day to nourish smart people like you and me. The Sacred Sociology tried to make news of this ancient truth. Did it fail?”

“Yes!” she said. “It failed. The good wine of truth cannot be poured out of filthy old bottles. I will quote something. Our largest intellectual powers are almost realized in Adam who kneels to study, in a puzzled way, his reflection in a quiet stream. It causes a stiffening in his ureter which has to do with the attached seedballs, but the stiffening is not sufficient to impregnate the image in the water or the moist gravel under it. What other body does he need? Eve, of course, our last and most intricate creation. Ha! You have done nothing but reaffirm the old lie that a big man made the world, then created a small man to take charge of it, then begot a woman on him to mass-produce replicas of himself. What could be more perverse? You have been deceived, Mr. Pollard. There is a great garden in your brain which is in total darkness. You have been taken in by the status-quo of men and women and what sex is about, much as people were taken in by the Empire and the Church. You don’t know how you have been oppressed because you have a penis.”

I was silent for a while then said, “Correct. You have put your finger exactly upon my weakness, which is sexual. Speak of work which does not refer to the sexes. Speak of my dictionary.”

She said, “It liberated me. My education was thoroughly religious in the worst sense but a cousin lent me de Beauvoir’s memoirs and your dictionary and they liberated me. At university you were my special study. Do you know how the professors use you? Not to free, but to bind. You are understood to support their systems. The students study commentaries on your book, not the book itself. I defended your assertion of the radical, sensual monosyllable. I was not allowed to complete the course.”

I nodded sadly and said, “Yes. I support common sense with uncommon intelligence so the bourgeois have appropriated me, as they appropriate all splendid things. But my book is called A Child’s Plainchant Dictionary of Abstractions. I wanted it set to music and sung in primary schools throughout France. Impossible, for I have no friends in high places. But if children sang my definitions with the voices of thrushes, larks and little owls they would get them by heart and easily detect fools and rascals who use words to bind and blind us. The revolution we require would be many days nearer.” “A dictator!” she cried scornfully. “You! A dwarf! Would dictate language to the children of a nation!” I laughed aloud. It is a rare relief when an interlocutor refers to my stature. She blushed at her audacity, then laughed also and said, “Intellectually you are a giant, of course, but you do not live like one. You live like the English authors who all believe the highest civic virtue is passivity under laws which money-owners can manipulate to their own advantage. The second Charlemagne* has made our country a near dictatorship. In Algeria, Hungary, Vietnam and Ireland governments are employing torturers to reinforce racial, social and sexual oppression. The intelligent young hate all this and are looking for allies. And you, whose words would be eagerly studied by every intelligence in Europe, say nothing.”

I said, “I have no wish to be the mundane conscience of my tribe. Our Sartre can do that for us.” I was sublimely happy. She saw me as a position to be captured. I longed for captivity; and if I was mistaken, and she only saw me as a barricade to be crossed, might she not, in crossing, be physically astride me for a few moments? My reference to Sartre was making her regard me with complete disdain. I raised an imploring hand and said, “Pardon me! I have no talent for immediate events. My art is solving injustice through historical metaphor and even there I may be defeated.”

“Explain that.”

I looked directly into her eyes. I had expected sharp blue ones, but they were mild golden-brown and went well with the straw-coloured hair. I said, “You asked for my help to become a better poet. I need yours to finish my last and greatest work. I lack the knowledge to complete it myself.”

She whispered, “What work?”

“Prometheus Unbound.”

I hoped this conversation would be the first of a series lasting the rest of my life. Her curt, impetuous words, together with a haunted look, as if she must shortly run away, had led me to speak of Prometheus at least a year before I intended, but it was now too late to speak of less important things. I asked her to be patient if I told her a story she perhaps knew already. She glanced at her wristwatch then nodded.

The early Greeks (I said) believed the earth was a woman who, heated by his lightningstrokes, fertilized by his rain, undulated beneath her first offspring, the sky. She gave birth to herbs, trees, beasts and titans. The titans can be named but never clearly defined. There is Atlas the maker of space, and Cronos whom Aristotle identifies with time. There is also Prometheus, whose name means foresight and torch. He was a craftsman, and moulded men from the dust of his mother’s body. The multiplying children of earth could not leave her. She tired of her husband’s lust, needing room for her family, room to think. She persuaded Cronos to castrate his dad with a stone sickle. The sky recoiled from her and time became master of the universe. When people came to live in cities they looked back on the reign of Cronos as a golden age, for in those days we were mainly shepherds and food-gatherers and shared the goods of the earth equally, without much warfare. But we had cyclops too, great men who worked in metal. Cronos feared those and locked them in hell, a place as far below the earth as the sky is above her. And when Cronos mated with his sister Rhea he became a cruel husband. He knew how dangerous a man’s children can be and swallowed his own as soon as they were born. The earth disliked that. She advised Rhea to give her man a stone when the next child came. Time, who has no organs of taste, swallowed this stone thinking it was yet another son. The boy’s mother called him Zeus and had him privately educated. When he was old enough to fight his father for the government of the universe he tricked the old man into drinking emetic wine and vomiting up the other children he had swallowed. These were the gods, and Zeus became their leader. The gods were more cunning than the titans, but less strong, and only Prometheus saw that cunning would replace strength as master of the universe. He tried to reconcile the two sides. When this proved impossible he joined the rebels.

The war which followed lasted ten years. Prometheus advised Zeus to release the cyclops from hell and when this was done they equipped the gods with helmet, trident and thunderbolt. Zeus won, of course, being supported by his brothers, by the earthmother, by the cyclops, by Prometheus and by men. What followed? The new boss of the universe confirmed his power by threatening mankind with death. Prometheus saved us by giving us hope (which allows us to despise death) and fire (which the gods wanted to keep to themselves). So Zeus punished Prometheus by crucifying him on a granite cliff. But Prometheus is Immortal. He writhes there to the present day.

“Madam,” I asked my woman, “do these matters seem savage and remote from you? This oppressed mother always plotting with a son or daughter against a husband or father, yet breeding nothing but a new generation of oppressors? This new administration crushing a clumsy old one with the help of the skilled workers, common people and a radical intellectual, and then taking control with the old threats of prison and bloody punishment.”

She nodded seriously and said, “It is savage, but not remote.”

I said, “Exactly. Our political theatres keep changing but the management always presents the tragedy of Prometheus or foresight abused. The ancient titans are the natural elements which shape and govern us when we live in small tribes. Foresight helps us build cities which give protection from the revolving seasons and erratic crops. Unluckily these states are also formed through warfare. They are managed by winners who enrich themselves at the expense of the rest and pretend their advantages are as natural as the seasons, their mismanagement as inevitable as bad weather. In these states the fate of Prometheus warns clear-sighted people not to help the commoners against their bosses. But wherever we notice that poverty is not natural, but created by some of us unfairly distributing what the rest have made, democracy is conceived. The iron wedges nailing Prometheus to his rock begin to loosen. This is why the poem which presents Prometheus as a hero was written for the world’s first and greatest democratic state. I mean Athens, of course.”

“Ancient Athens,” said my woman firmly, “oppressed women, kept slaves, and fought unjust wars for gain.”

“Yes!” I cried. “And in that it was like every other state in the history of mankind. But what made Athens different was the unusual freedom enjoyed by most men in it. When these men compared themselves with the inhabiters of the great surrounding empires (military Persia, priestridden Egypt, Carthage with its huge navy and stock-exchange) they were astonished by their freedom.”

She said, “Define freedom.”

I said, “It is the experience of active people who live by work they do best, are at ease with their neighbours, and responsible for their government.” She said, “You have just admitted that your free, active Athenians oppressed their neighbours and more than half their own people.”

I said, “Yes, and to that extent they were not free, and knew it. Their popular drama, the first plays which the common memory of mankind has seen fit to preserve, shows that warfare and slavery — especially sexual slavery — are horrible things, and at last destroy the winners and the empires who use them.”

“Which means,” cried my woman, looking more like a tragic heroine with every utterance, “that the Athenians were like our educated bourgeois of Western Europe and North America, who draw unearned income from the poor of their own and other countries, yet feel superior to the equivalent class in Russia, because we applaud writers who tell us we are corrupt.” After a silence I said, “Correct, madam. But do not be offended if I draw a little comfort from just one Athenian achievement: the tragic poem Prometheus Bound which was written by Aeschylus and is the world’s second oldest play. It shows Prometheus, creative foresight, being crucified and buried by the cunning lords of this world after they have seized power. But Prometheus prophesies that one day he will be released, and tyranny cast down, and men will see their future clear. Aeschylus wrote a sequel, Prometheus Unbound, describing that event. It was lost, and I can tell you why.

“The democracy of Athens, great as it was, flawed as it was, tried to become an empire, was defeated, and finally failed. All the great states which followed it were oligarchies. Some, like Florence and Holland, claimed to be republics, but all were oligarchies in which poets and dramatists were so attached to the prosperous classes that they came to despise, yes really despise, the commoners. They saw them as incurably inferior, deserving a tear and a charitable breadcrust in bad times, but potentially dangerous and at best merely comic, like the grave-diggers in Hamlet. No doubt the rulers of states thought Prometheus Unbound was seditious, but it must also have annoyed educated people by showing how slavish their best hopes had become. They could no longer imagine a good state where intelligence served everyone equally. In twenty-three centuries of human endurance and pain only one hero, Jesus of Nazareth, declared that a common man was the maker of all earthly good, and that by loving and sharing with him we would build the classless kingdom of heaven. And, madam,” I told her, “you know what the churches have made of that message. How cunning the winners are! How horrible!”

And I, who had not wept since I was a baby, shed passionate tears. I felt her grip my hand across the tabletop and though I had never before felt such pure grief for abused humanity, I have never felt such happiness and peace. It was a while before I could continue.

“But one day France, madam, yes our own France declared that democracy must return; that liberty, equality, fraternity are indivisible; that what the Athenians started, we will achieve. We have not achieved it yet, but the world will never know peace until we have done so. The main task of poetry today is to show the modern state the way to liberty and peace by remaking the lost verse-drama, Prometheus Unbound. I have completed half of it.”

She stared at me. I hoped she was fascinated. I described my play.

It starts with the supreme God (spelt with a capital G to separate him from lesser gods) standing on a mountaintop after the defeat of the titans. The sky behind him is a deep dark blue, his face and physique are as Michelangelo painted him, only younger — he looks about thirty. Round his feet flows a milky cloud and under the cloud, on a curving ridge, stands the committee of Olympus: Juno, Mars, Venus etcetera. These are the chorus. On two hills lower down sit Pan and Bacchus among the small agents of fertility and harvest: nymphs, fauns, satyrs and bacchantes with fiddles, drums, bagpipes and flutes. This orchestra makes music for the scene-changes. A dark vertical cleft divides the two hills. At the base of it is spread out a great tribe of common people who may as well be played by the audience. Their task is to enhance the play with their attention and applause until, at the end, the release of Prometheus releases them too. But at the start God’s gravely jubilant voice addresses the universe while the sky grows light behind him.

He speaks like any politician who has just come to power after a struggle. Together (he tells us) we have destroyed chaos and oppression. Prosperity and peace are dawning under new rules which will make everybody happy. Even the wildest districts are now well-governed. My brother Neptune commands the sea, storms and earthquake. My brother Pluto rules the dead. Let us praise the cyclops! The powers of reason would have been defeated without the weapons they made. They have been sent back to hell, but to an improved, useful hell managed by my son Vulcan. He is employing them to make the thunderbolts I need to coerce law-breakers. For alas, law-breakers exist, hot-heads who protest because my new state is not equally good to everyone. It is true that, just now, some must have very little so that, eventually, everyone has more; but those who rage at this are prolonging sufferings which I can only cure with the help of time … God is interrupted here by a voice from the ridge below him. Minerva-Athene, his minister of education, or else Cupid his popular clown, point out that the recent war was fought to destroy old time yet now God says he needs time to let him do good. Yes! (cries God) for time is no longer your tyrant, he is my slave. Time will eventually show how kind I am, how good my laws are, how well I have made everything.

Throughout this speech God’s nature is clearly changing. From sounding like the spokesman of a renewed people he has used the language of a lawmaker, dictator, and finally creator. At his last words the cloud under him divides and floats left and right uncovering the shining black face of the earthmother. It is calm and unlined, with slanting eyes under arched brows like a Buddha, and flat negro lips like the Sphinx. The white cloud is her hair, the ridge where the gods stand is her collarbone, the orchestra sits on her breasts, the audience in her lap. God, erect on top of her head, with one foot slightly advanced and arms firmly folded, looks slightly ridiculous but perfectly at home. When she parts her lips a soft voice fills the air with melodious grumbling. She knows that God’s claim to be a creator is false but she is endlessly tolerant and merely complains instead of shaking him off. Her grammar is difficult. She is twisting a huge statement into a question and does not divide what she knows into separate sentences and tenses.

EARTH

Who was before I am dark

without limbs, dancing, spinning

space without heat who

was before I am alight

without body, blazing, dividing

continents on rocking mud who

was before I am breathing

without eyes, floating, rooted

bloody with outcry who

was before I am a singing

ground, wormy-dark, alight

aloud with leaves, eyes and

gardeners, the last plants I grew who

uplifted you who

was before I am?

GOD

Who is before you now!

I grasp all ground, mother.

The gardeners you grew were common men, a brood

too silly and shapeless to be any good

outside my state, which has made them new.

They cannot remember being born by you.

They are my image now. I am who

they all want to obey, or if not obey, be.

EARTH

Not Prometheus.

GOD

Yes, Prometheus! Punishment is changing him into a cracked mirror of me.

There is a sudden terrible cry of pain. Two great birds with dripping beaks fly out of the cleft between the earth’s breasts. Light enters it and shows the crucified Prometheus, a strong man of middle age with a bleeding wound in his side. Though smaller than his mother he is a giant to the God who stands high above him and declares that this is the end of the titan who made men, and made them hard to govern, by giving them hope of better life. The great mother, with a touch of passion, tells God that though he is supreme he is also very new, and his state will perish one day, like all states, and only Prometheus knows how. God does not deny this. He says he has a lot of work to do and will reconsider the case of Prometheus when he has more time. He turns and goes down behind the earth’s head. The cloud closes over her. Prometheus, twisting his face up, asks the gods on the ridge to tell him the present state of mankind. They sing a chorus describing the passage of over two thousand years. Men combine into rich empires by many submitting to a few. They discover the world is vaster than they thought, and add new realms to tyranny. Liberators are born who create new religions and states, and the rulers of the world take these over and continue to tighten their grip. At last human cunning grasps, not just the world but the moon and the adjacent planets, yet half mankind dies young from bad feeding, and young courage and talent is still warped and killed by warfare. The controllers of the world fear the people under them as much as each other, and are prepared to defend their position by destroying mankind and the earth which bore them. This is the final state to which we have been brought by cunning without foresight. Prometheus cries out, “This cannot last!” From the middle of her cloud this cry is repeated by the great mother, then by the chorus and orchestra, and then (the cloud clearing) by God himself, who stands on the height with his arms flung sideways in a gesture which resembles the crucified Prometheus. God is also now a middle-aged man. He walks down from the height, sits on the edge of the cleft and tries to engage Prometheus in friendly conversation. He is sorry he punished Prometheus so harshly and promises not to set vultures on him again. When he came to power he had to be harsh, to keep control. People needed strong government, in those days, to drag them out of the idiocy of rural life. But the whole world now belongs to the city states. He is sure Prometheus knows that neither of them is completely good or completely bad, and have a lot to give each other. If they cooperate they can save mankind. He asks Prometheus for the secret of the force which will destroy him. Prometheus asks to be released first. God is sorry, but he cannot release Prometheus. If he did Prometheus would seize power.

GOD

I am not the stark power who chained you here.

I am softened by what you endured, while my laws

have made you a hard reflection of the tyrant I once was.

It cannot be right to enthrone

a killing revenge the world should have outgrown,

or if right, then right will make greater wrong.

PROMETHEUS

It is right to give back what you stole — liberty.

You see me as I am. You cannot see

who I will become when I am free.

Why do you think I will kill?

GOD

Your every glance threatens me terrible ill.

PROMETHEUS

I am in pain! My illness, the illness you dread, is yours, is you!

GOD

Then endure my terrible nature!

I must endure it too.

(God has lost his temper. Prometheus laughs bitterly.)

PROMETHEUS

At last you unmask, old man

and show what you are again:

the ruler of a kingdom kept by pain.

All history has added nothing to you

but a mad wish to be pitied for what you do.

I paused. My woman said, “What happens then?” I said, “I cannot imagine.”

She started laughing. I said, “To end happily my play needs a new character, someone we have already seen, without much interest, in the chorus, or even audience. The action until now is between a man, a big woman, and another man. To strike a balance the fourth character must be a woman. She is a new wisdom who will unite our imprisoned intelligence with the productive earth, reducing government from a form of mastery to a form of service. She is sensuous, for both governments and rebels keep asking us to crush our senses in order to gain an ultimate victory which never arrives. But she is not disorderly, not a beatnik, not careless. She is living proof that when our senses are freed from fear our main desire is to make the world a good home for everyone. I cannot conceive such a heroine. Can you conceive her? Could we conceive her together?” My woman looked thoughtful then said slowly, “I am qualified to assist you. I have been a daughter and a mother, a victim and a tyrant. I saw my father torment his wife into her grave. I have driven a man to suicide, or very nearly. I know how love heats and warps us, but I feel there is still hope for me, and the world.”

I said, “That indicates a kind of balance.” “I have climbed mountains in Scotland and Germany. I have swum underground rivers in the Auvergne.”

I said, “That also indicates balance, but a balance of extremes. The tension you feel must be nearly unbearable. We must connect the extremes where you squander so much energy with the centre where my knowledge lies chained and stagnant.”

Her mouth and eyes opened wide, she raised her chin and gazed upward like the Pythoness on the tripod when Apollo enters her. For nearly a minute she became pure priestess. Then her gaze shrank, descended and focussed on the table where my great, droll, attentive head rested sideways on my folded arms. A look of incredulity came upon her face. I had never before seemed to her so improbably grotesque. She pretended to glance at her wristwatch, saying, “Excuse me, I must go.”

“May I write to you, madam? A literary collaboration is perhaps best prosecuted by letter.”

“Yes.”

“Your address?”

“I don’t know — I am moving elsewhere, I don’t know where yet. I have many arrangements to make. Leave your letters with the management here. I will find a way to collect them.”

I said, “Good,” and achieved a smile. She arose, came to my side and hesitated. I signalled by a small headshake that condescension would be unwelcome. She turned and hurried out. I sat perfectly still, attending to the beaks of the vultures tearing at my liver. They had never felt so sharp. The manageress came over and asked if I felt well? I grinned at her and nodded repeatedly until she went away.

After that I waited. I could do almost nothing else. Study was impossible, sleep difficult. I addressed to her a parcel of worknotes for Prometheus Unbound and it lay on the zinc beside the till, but I was always sitting nearby for I wanted not to leave the only place where I might see her again. I waited a day, a week, three weeks. I was dozing over my book and glass one afternoon when I grew conscious of her talking to the manageress. She seemed to have been doing it for some time. They frowned, nodded, glanced towards me, shrugged and smiled. I was very confused and prayed God that when she sat facing me I would be calm and firm. She patted the manageress’s arm and walked straight out through the door. I screamed her name, scrambled down from the chair, charged into the crowded street and ran screaming to the right, banging against knees, treading on feet and sometimes trodden on. Not seeing her I turned and ran to the left. As I passed the café door I was seized and lifted, yes, lifted up by one who held her face to mine so that our noses touched, and whispered, “Mister Pollard, this conduct does you no good. I have a letter.”

I became very icy and hissed, “Put me down, madam.”

I should have asked to be taken home. I could suddenly hardly walk. I got to my table and opened the letter, noticing that my parcel lay uncollected beside the till.

My dear friend,

I no longer wish to be a poet. It requires an obsessional balancing of tiny phrases and meanings, an immersion in language which seems to me a kind of cowardice. As a man and poet I can respect you but only because you are also a dwarf For people of ordinary health and height, with a clear view of the world and a wish to do well, it is a waste of time making signboards pointing to the good and bad things in life. If we do not personally struggle towards good and fight the bad, people will merely praise or denounce our signs and go on living as usual. I must make my own life the book where people read what I believe. I decided this years ago when I became a socialist, but I still grasped, like a cuddly toy, my wish to be a poet. That wish came from the dwarfish part of me, the frightened lonely child who hoped that a DECLARATION would bring the love of mother earth, the respect of daddy god, the admiration of the million sisters and brothers who normally do not care if I live or die. Your critical letter had an effect you did not intend. It showed me that my declarations are futile. It has taken a while for the message to sink in. I am grateful to you, but also very bitter. I cannot be completely logical.

My sweet, you are the cleverest, most deluded man I ever met. Rewriting PROMETHEUS UNBOUND is like rewriting GENESIS, it can be done but who needs it? It is just another effort to put good wine in a filthy old bottle. I was touched when you poured over me your adolescent enthusiasm for ancient Athens but I also wanted to laugh or vomit. I am educated. I have been to Greece. I have stood on the Acropolis facing the Erichtheon and can tell you that Greece represents:

men against women war „peace business, play intellect, emotions authority, anarchy hierarchy, equality discipline, sensuality property-inheritance, sexuality patriarchy, everything

Yet you see civilization as an unfinished story the Athenians started and which a few well-chosen words will help to a satisfactory finish! You are wrong. The best state in the world was that primitive matriarchy which the Athenians were foremost in dismantling. Men were happy and peaceful when women ruled them, but so naturally wicked that they turned our greatest strength (motherhood) into weakness by taking advantage of it and enslaving us. Men have made hell of the world ever since and are now prepared to destroy all life in it rather than admit they are wrong. Masculine foresight cannot help our civilization because it is travelling backward. Even our enemies realize this. In the last fifty years they have driven us to the brink of the dark age. The rational Greek foundation of things has been unbuilt, unlearned. And you did not notice! My poor dwarf you are the last nineteenth-century romantic liberal. That is why a corrupt government wishes to make you a national institution.

Which brings me, beloved, to what you really want from me: cunt. In your eyes it probably looks like an entrance to the human race. Believe me, you are human enough without. No good was ever done by those who thought sexual pleasure a goal in life. I speak from experience. I divorced a perfectly nice husband who could only give me that stultifying happiness, that delicious security which leads to nothing but more of itself But if you require that delight you can have it by merely relaxing. As a national institution — a blend of tribal totempole and pampered baby — you are ringed by admirers you have so far had the sense and courage to ignore. Weaken, enjoy your fame and get all the breasts you want: except mine. When I first spoke to you I accused you of impersonating a dead man. That was jealousy speaking. I admired you then and I regret I unhinged you so easily. I did not want to do that. I love you, but in a way you cannot perceive and I cannot enjoy. So I also hate you.

I am a monster. The cutting words I write cut my heart too. I am under unusual strain. I am about to do something difficult and big which, if discovered, will end my freedom forever. My friends will think me insane, an unstable element, a traitor if they learn I have told you this. But you love me and deserve to know what I am leaving you for, and I do trust you, my teacher, my liberator.

Adieu.

Is printing the above letter for the world to read a betrayal of her trust? Is a secret police computer, as a result of this story, stamping the card of every female, blonde, brown-eyed, snub-nosed poet with a number which means suspect political crime investigate? No. This story is a poem, a wordgame. I am not a highly literate French dwarf, my lost woman is not a revolutionary writer manque, my details are fictions, only my meaning is true and I must make that meaning clear by playing the wordgame to the bitter end.

Having read the letter I sat holding it, feeling paralysed, staring at the words until they seemed dark stains on a white surface like THIS one, like THIS one. I was broken. She had made me unable to bear loneliness. And though we had only met twice I had shown the world that women could approach me. I sat at the table, drinking, I suppose, and in the evening a girl sat opposite and asked what I thought of de Gaulle’s latest speech? I asked her to inform me of it. Later we were joined by another girl and a young man, students, all of them. It seemed we were on the brink of revolution. I ordered wine. Said the young man, “Tomorrow we will not protest, we will occupy!”

“You must come with us, Mister Pollard!” cried the girls, who were very excited. I agreed and laughed and bought more wine, then grew enraged and changed my position. I quoted Marx to support de Gaulle and Lenin to condemn the students. The uselessness of discourse became so evident that at last I merely howled like a dog and grew unconscious. And awoke with a bad headache, in darkness, beside a great soft cleft cliff: the bum of my manageress. I had been conveyed into her bed. I was almost glad.

In the morning she said, “Mister Pollard, you know I have been a widow for seven months.”

I said nothing. She said, “Some years ago you made to me certain detailed proposals which, as a respectable, newly-married, very young woman I could not entertain. What you suggested then is now perfectly possible. Of course, we must first marry.”

Lucie, you have made me need you, or if not you, someone. Lucie, if you do not return I must fall forever into her abyss. Lucie, she makes me completely happy, but only in the dark. Oh Lucie Lucie Lucie save me from her. The one word this poem exists to clarify is lonely. I am Prometheus.

I am lonely.

* M. Pollard clearly wishes to consign to oblivion his translation of Carlyle’s French Revolution into heroic Alexandrines, published privately at Dijon in 1927.

*An insult to the home of the Academie Francaise.

*Charles de Gaulle, with no declared political programme, was ruler of France.