Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘I think it’s extraordinarily fine,’ she announced in the rather religious voice that seemed appropriate. He only nodded. The silence prolonged itself, more oppressive and embarrassing than ever. She made another and despairing effort. ‘Do you know, I think he’s really rather like you. I mean, the way he smiles. . . .’
Fanning’s petrified immobility broke once more into life. He turned towards her, laughing. ‘You’re irresistible, Pamela.’
‘Am I?’ Her tone was cold; she was offended. To be told you were irresistible always meant that you’d behaved like an imbecile child. But her conscience was clear; it was a gratuitous insult — the more intolerable since it had been offered by the man who, a moment before, had been saying that he had a fellow-feeling for those savages and that her ears had altogether too much to do with him.
Fanning noticed her sudden change of humour and obscurely divined the cause. ‘You’ve paid me the most irresistible compliment you could have invented,’ he said, doing his best to undo the effect of his words. For after all what did it matter, with little breasts like that and thin brown arms, if she did mix up the millenniums a bit? ‘You could hardly have pleased me more if you’d said I was another Rudolph Valentino.’
Pamela had to laugh.
‘But seriously,’ he said, ‘if you knew what this lovely God means to me, how much . . .’
Mollified by being once more spoken to seriously, ‘I think I can understand,’ she said in her most understanding voice.
‘No, I doubt if you can.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a question of age, of the experience of a particular time that’s not your time. I shall never forget when I came back to Rome for the first time after the War and found this marvellous creature standing here. They only dug him up in ‘sixteen, you see. So there it was, a brand new experience, a new and apocalyptic voice out of the past. Some day I shall try to get it on to paper, all that this God has taught me.’ He gave a little sigh; she could see that he wasn’t thinking about her any more; he was talking for himself. ‘Some day,’ he repeated. ‘But it’s not ripe yet. You can’t write a thing before it’s ripe, before it wants to be written. But you can talk about it, you can take your mind for walks all round it and through it.’ He paused and, stretching out a hand, touched a fold of the God’s sculptured garment, as though he were trying to establish a more intimate, more real connexion with the beauty before him. ‘Not that what he taught me was fundamentally new,’ he went on slowly. ‘It’s all in Homer, of course. It’s even partially expressed in the archaic Greek sculpture. Partially. But Apollo here expresses it wholly. He’s all Homer, all the ancient world, concentrated in a single lump of terracotta. That’s his novelty. And then the circumstances gave him a special point. It was just after the War that I first saw him — just after the apotheosis and the logical conclusion of all the things Apollo didn’t stand for. You can imagine how marvellously new he seemed by contrast. After that horrible enormity, he was a lovely symbol of the small, the local, the kindly. After all that extravagance of beastliness — yes, and all that extravagance of heroism and self-sacrifice — he seemed so beautifully sane. A God who doesn’t admit the separate existence of either heroics or diabolics, but somehow includes them in his own nature and turns them into something else — like two gases combining to make a liquid. Look at him,’ Fanning insisted. ‘Look at his face, look at his body, see how he stands. It’s obvious. He’s neither the God of heroics, nor the God of diabolics. And yet it’s equally obvious that he knows all about both, that he includes them, that he combines them into a third essence. It’s the same with Homer. There’s no tragedy in Homer. He’s pessimistic, yes; but never tragic. His heroes aren’t heroic in our sense of the word; they’re men.’ (Pamela took a very deep breath; if she had opened her mouth, it would have been a yawn.) ‘In fact, you can say there aren’t any heroes in Homer. Nor devils, nor sins. And none of our aspiring spiritualities, and, of course, none of our horrible, nauseating disgusts — because they’re the complement of being spiritual, they’re the tails to its heads. You couldn’t have had Homer writing “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame”. Though, of course, with Shakespeare, it may have been physiological; the passion violent and brief, and then the most terrible reaction. It’s the sort of thing that colours a whole life, a whole work. Only of course one’s never allowed to say so. All that one isn’t allowed to say!’ He laughed. Pamela also laughed. ‘But physiology or no physiology,’ Fanning went on, ‘he couldn’t have written like that if he’d lived before the great split — the great split that broke life into spirit and matter, heroics and diabolics, virtue and sin and all the other accursed antitheses. Homer lived before the split; life hadn’t been broken when he wrote. They’re complete, his men and women, complete and real; for he leaves nothing out, he shirks no issue, even though there is no tragedy. He knows all about it — all.’ He laid his hand again on the statue. ‘And this God’s his portrait. He’s Homer, but with the Etruscan smile. Homer smiling at the sad, mysterious, beautiful absurdity of the world. The Greeks didn’t see that divine absurdity as clearly as the Etruscans. Not even in Homer’s day; and by the time you get to any sculptor who was anything like as accomplished as the man who made this, you’ll find that they’ve lost it altogether. True, the earliest Greeks’ God used to smile all right — or rather grin; for subtlety wasn’t their strong point. But by the end of the sixth century they were already becoming a bit too heroic; they were developing those athlete’s muscles and those tiresomely noble poses and damned superior faces. But our God here refused to be a prize-fighter or an actor-manager. There’s no terribilità about him, no priggishness, no sentimentality. And yet without being in the least pretentious, he’s beautiful, he’s grand, he’s authentically divine. The Greeks took the road that led to Michelangelo and Bernini and Thorwaldsen and Rodin. A rake’s progress. These Etruscans were on a better track. If only people had had the sense to follow it! Or at least get back to it. But nobody has, except perhaps old Maillol. They’ve all allowed themselves to be lured away. Plato was the arch-seducer. It was he who first sent us whoring after spirituality and heroics, whoring after the complementary demons of disgust and sin. We needs must love — well, not the highest, except sometimes by accident — but always the most extravagant and exciting. Tragedy was much more exciting than Homer’s luminous pessimism, than this God’s smiling awareness of the divine absurdity. Being alternately a hero and a sinner is much more sensational than being an integrated man. So as men seem to have the Yellow Press in the blood, like syphilis, they went back on Homer and Apollo; they followed Plato and Euripides. And Plato and Euripides handed them over to the Stoics and the Neo-Platonists. And these in turn handed humanity over to the Christians. And the Christians have handed us over to Henry Ford and the machines. So here we are.’
Pamela nodded intelligently. But what she was chiefly conscious of was the ache in her feet. If only she could sit down!
But, ‘How poetical and appropriate,’ Fanning began again, ‘that the God should have risen from the grave exactly when he did, in 1916! Rising up in the midst of the insanity, like a beautiful, smiling reproach from another world. It was dramatic. At least I felt it so, when I saw him for the first time just after the War. The resurrection of Apollo, the Etruscan Apollo. I’ve been his worshipper and self-appointed priest ever since. Or at any rate I’ve tried to be. But it’s difficult.’ He shook his head. ‘Perhaps it’s even impossible for us to recapture . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished and, taking her arm, led her out into the great courtyard of the Villa. Under the arcades was a bench. Thank goodness, said Pamela inwardly. They sat down.
‘You see,’ he went on, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped, ‘you can’t get away from the things that the God protests against. Because they’ve become a part of you. Tradition and education have driven them into your very bones. It’s a case of what I was speaking about just now — of the things that have nothing to do with you coming by force of habit
to have everything to do with you. Which is why I’d like you to get Apollo and his Etruscans into your system while you’re still young. It may save you trouble. Or on the other hand,’ he added with a rueful little laugh, ‘it may not. Because I really don’t know if he’s everybody’s God. He may do for me — and do, only because I’ve got Plato and Jesus in my bones. But does he do for you? Chi lo sa? The older one grows, the more often one asks that question. Until, of course, one’s arteries begin to harden, and then one’s opinions begin to harden too, harden till they fossilize into certainty. But meanwhile, chi lo sa? chi lo sa? And after all it’s quite agreeable, not knowing. And knowing, and at the same time knowing that it’s no practical use knowing — that’s not disagreeable either. Knowing, for example, that it would be good to live according to this God’s commandments, but knowing at the same time that one couldn’t do it even if one tried, because one’s very guts and skeleton are already pledged to other Gods.’
‘I should have thought that was awful,’ said Pamela.
‘For you, perhaps. But I happen to have a certain natural affection for the accomplished fact. I like and respect it, even when it is a bit depressing. Thus, it’s a fact that I’d like to think and live in the unsplit, Apollonian way. But it’s also a fact — and the fact as such is lovable — that I can’t help indulging in aspirations and disgusts; I can’t help thinking in terms of heroics and diabolics. Because the division, the splitness, has been worked right into my bones. So has the microbe of sensationalism; I can’t help wallowing in the excitements of mysticism and the tragic sense. Can’t help it.’ He shook his head. ‘Though perhaps I’ve wallowed in them rather more than I was justified in wallowing — justified by my upbringing, I mean. There was a time when I was really quite perversely preoccupied with mystical experiences and ecstasies and private universes.’
‘Private universes?’ she questioned.
‘Yes, private, not shared. You create one, you live in it, each time you’re in love, for example.’ (Brightly serious, Pamela nodded her understanding and agreement; yes, yes, she knew all about that.) ‘Each time you’re spiritually exalted,’ he went on, ‘each time you’re drunk, even. Everybody has his own favourite short cuts to the other world. Mine, in those days, was opium.’
‘Opium?’ She opened her eyes very wide. ‘Do you mean to say you smoked opium?’ She was thrilled. Opium was a vice of the first order.
‘It’s as good a way of becoming supernatural,’ he answered, ‘as looking at one’s nose or one’s navel, or not eating, or repeating a word over and over again, till it loses its sense and you forget how to think. All roads lead to Rome. The only bother about opium is that it’s rather an unwholesome road. I had to go to a nursing home in Cannes to get disintoxicated.’
‘All the same,’ said Pamela, doing her best to imitate the quiet casualness of his manner, ‘it must be rather delicious, isn’t it? Awfully exciting, I mean,’ she added, forgetting not to be thrilled.
‘Too exciting.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s the trouble. We needs must love the excitingest when we see it. The supernatural is exciting. But I don’t want to love the supernatural, I want to love the natural. Not that a little supernaturalness isn’t, of course, perfectly natural and necessary. But you can overdo it. I overdid it then. I was all the time in t’other world, never here. I stopped smoking because I was ill. But even if I hadn’t been, I’d have stopped sooner or later for aesthetic reasons. The supernatural world is so terribly baroque — altogether too Counter-Reformation and Bernini. At its best it can be Greco. But you can have too much even of Greco. A big dose of him makes you begin to pine for Vulca and his Apollo.’
‘But doesn’t it work the other way too?’ she asked. ‘I mean, don’t you sometimes long to start smoking again?’ She was secretly hoping that he’d let her try a pipe or two.
Fanning shook his head. ‘One doesn’t get tired of very good bread,’ he answered. ‘Apollo’s like that. I don’t pine for supernatural excitements. Which doesn’t mean,’ he added, ‘that I don’t in practice run after them. You can’t disintoxicate yourself of your culture. That sticks deeper than a mere taste for opium. I’d like to be able to think and live in the spirit of the God. But the fact remains that I can’t.’
‘Can’t you?’ said Pamela with a polite sympathy. She was more interested in the opium.
‘No, no, you can’t entirely disintoxicate yourself of mysticism and the tragic sense. You can’t take a Turvey treatment for spirituality and disgust. You can’t. Not nowadays. Acceptance is impossible in a split world like ours. You’ve got to recoil. In the circumstances it’s right and proper. But absolutely it’s wrong. If only one could accept as this God accepts, smiling like that . . .’
‘But you do smile like that,’ she insisted.
He laughed and, unclasping his hands, straightened himself up in his seat. ‘But unhappily,’ he said, ‘a man can smile and smile and not be Apollo. Meanwhile, what’s becoming of your education? Shouldn’t we . . .?’
‘Well, if you like,’ she assented dubiously. ‘Only my feet are rather tired. I mean, there’s something about sight-seeing . . .’
‘There is indeed,’ said Fanning. ‘But I was prepared to be a martyr to culture. Still, I’m thankful you’re not.’ He smiled at her, and Pamela was pleased to find herself once more at the focus of his attention. It had been very interesting to hear him talk about his philosophy and all that. But all the same . . .
‘Twenty to four,’ said Fanning, looking at his watch. ‘I’ve an idea; shouldn’t we drive out to Monte Cavo and spend the evening up there in the cool? There’s a view. And a really very eatable dinner.’
‘I’d love to. But . . .’ Pamela hesitated. ‘Well, you see I did tell Guy I’d go out with him this evening.’
He was annoyed. ‘Well, if you prefer . . .’
‘But I don’t prefer,’ she answered hastily. ‘I mean, I’d much rather go with you. Only I wondered how I’d let Guy know I wasn’t . . .’
‘Don’t let him know,’ Fanning answered, abusing his victory. ‘After all, what are young men there for, except to wait when young women don’t keep their appointments? It’s their function in life.’
Pamela laughed. His words had given her a pleasing sense of importance and power. ‘Poor Guy!’ she said through her laughter, and her eyes were insolently bright.
‘You little hypocrite.’
‘I’m not,’ she protested. ‘I really am sorry for him.’
‘A little hypocrite and a little devil,’ was his verdict. He rose to his feet. ‘If you could see your own eyes now! But andiamo.’ He held out his hand to help her up. ‘I’m beginning to be rather afraid of you.’
‘What nonsense!’ She was delighted. They walked together towards the door.
Fanning made the driver go out by the Appian Way. ‘For the sake of your education,’ he explained, pointing at the ruined tombs, ‘which we can continue, thank heaven, in comfort, and at twenty miles an hour.’
Leaning back luxuriously in her corner, Pamela laughed. ‘But I must say,’ she had to admit, ‘it is really rather lovely.’
From Albano the road mounted through the chestnut woods towards Rocca di Papa. A few miles brought them to a turning on the right; the car came to a halt.
‘It’s barred,’ said Pamela, looking out of the window. Fanning had taken out his pocket-book and was hunting among the bank-notes and the old letters. ‘The road’s private,’ he explained. ‘They ask for your card — heaven knows why. The only trouble being, of course, that I’ve never possessed such a thing as a visiting-card in my life. Still, I generally have one or two belonging to other people. Ah, here we are! Good!’ He produced two pieces of pasteboard. A gatekeeper had appeared and was waiting by the door of the car. ‘Shall we say we’re Count Keyserling?’ said Fanning, handing her the count’s card. ‘Or alternatively,’ he read from the other, ‘that we’re Herbert Watson, Funeral Furnisher, Funerals conducted with Efficiency and Reve
rence, Motor Hearses for use in every part of the Country.’ He shook his head. ‘The last relic of my poor old friend Tom Hatchard. Died last year. I had to bury him. Poor Tom! On the whole I think we’d better be Herbert Watson. Ecco!’ He handed out the card; the man saluted and went to open the gate. ‘But give me back Count Keyserling.’ Fanning stretched out his hand. ‘He’ll come in useful another time.’
The car started and went roaring up the zig-zag ascent. Lying back in her corner, Pamela laughed and laughed, inextinguishably.
‘But what is the joke?’ he asked.
She didn’t know herself. Mr Watson and the Count had only been a pretext; this enormous laughter, which they had released, sprang from some other, deeper source. And perhaps it was a mere accident that it should be laughter at all. Another pretext, a different finger on the trigger, and it might have been tears, or anger, or singing ‘Constantinople’ at the top of her voice — anything.
She was limp when they reached the top. Fanning made her sit down where she could see the view and himself went off to order cold drinks at the bar of the little inn that had once been the monastery of Monte Cavo.
Pamela sat where he had left her. The wooded slopes fell steeply away beneath her, down, down to the blue shining of the Alban Lake; and that toy palace perched on the hill beyond was the Pope’s, that tiny city in a picture-book, Marino. Beyond a dark ridge on the left the round eye of Nemi looked up from its crater. Far off, behind Albano an expanse of blue steel, burnished beneath the sun, was the Tyrrhenian, and flat like the sea, but golden with ripening corn and powdered goldenly with a haze of dust, the Campagna stretched away from the feet of the subsiding hills, away and up towards a fading horizon, on which the blue ghosts of mountains floated on a level with her eyes. In the midst of the expanse a half-seen golden chaos was Rome. Through the haze the dome of St Peter’s shone faintly in the sun with a glitter as of muted glass. There was an enormous silence, sad, sad but somehow consoling. A sacred silence. And yet when, coming up from behind her, Fanning broke it, his voice, for Pamela, committed no iconoclasm; for it seemed, in the world of her feelings, to belong to the silence, it was made, as it were, of the same intimate and friendly substance. He squatted down on his heels beside her, laying a hand on her shoulder to steady himself.