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under our fingernails - superior to everyone we talk about - and damned
dull people to spend the six days with that it takes to read the novel.
'If you ever write such a book, you can have your main character a
superaesthete like us, but you must have as your observer a man who runs a
shop and is trying to pay off a large mortgage before his three children
start university.o I interrupted to make a stupid statement: 'I'm
not interested in shopkeepers,' and he replied: 'Then I fear that no
one will be interested in your novel.' At another point Devlan said, 'I
don't believe critics should try to write novels.' 'Why not?'
'Because we know too much.' 230 'But novelists are always
trying to serve as critics.' 'And usually making a hash of it.' We
had a long discussion on what themes were effectiv for a novel, and he
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made two points: 'Any activity of whict human beings are capable is just
material for a novel.' 'Do you mean that - any?' 'I can think of
none that I would bar.' 'Even incest?' 'Greek tragedy is replete
with great dramas involvinj incest. Treated with fire and fury and
retribution.' 'I don't know much about Greek tragedy.' 'Well, thi~
summer may be one opportunity to rectify an oversight that could be
inhibiting later on - when you come to grips with the inner meanings of
literature.' His second caveat on theme, forcibly stated, was: 'Any
novel about an abstract concept is bound to be a bad one. 11 you must deal
with an abstraction, write an essay. In your novel, write about people,
not prototypes. if you can shovv them trapped in the abstract principle
you may find yoursell with a very strong tale.' At some point in
almost every discussion, when I realized that Devlan was striving to teach
me all he knew, I sus- pected that he had the idea that I might be his
successor a! a critic who really grappled with the essence of narration,
and this suspicion was strengthened when he produced a paperback on the
tenth day, one that had been well thumbed: 'I pass this along as a
graduation present, Karl, You're ready now to memorize it - as a permanent
guide.' It was a long, reflective essay called Mimesis, by a Germar
scholar, Erich Auerbach, who had collected a series oJ brilliant
narratives starting far before the birth of Christ an~ ending
post-Virginia Woolf. He minutely analyzed eact,
style, pointing out where the writer had succeeded bril.
liantly and where he or she had foundered. Devian said 231
'Auerbach does your work for you,' and later when I dipped into
the essay, I quickly saw what he meant. It was then, on the night of our
eleventh day in Athens, that I told my mentor: 'These days have been
miraculous, a binding together of scattered and diverse ideas. You've
taught me at a new level. I'm beginning to think I may be ready to be a
professor.' Devlan said: 'You've proved it these last few days.'
Men acquire wisdom in two ways: by patient accumulation and analysis of
the evidence available and by epiphanies that in an instant illuminate
continents and centuries. My two-week excursion from Rome to Athens with
Devlan was an example of the first sort; what happened on the fifteenth
day was a stunning example of the second. Devlan saw on a bulletin board
in the office where he went to cash traveler's checks that in the theater
of Herodes Atticus, near the Acropolis, a touring German company had
been invited by the Greek Cultural Commission to give an open-air
performance of Agamemnon, by Aeschylus, first performed in Athens in 458
B.c. The poster explained that the play would be given in German, but with
Greek flautists and drummers to accompany the chorus. Without consult-
ing me, Devlan purchased two of the best seats and hurried back to inform
me of our good luck in being able to see one of the world's great
tragedies in its proper setting. As soon as I heard the news, at which I
rejoiced, I reacted as Devlan must have expected: 'Where can I get a copy
of the play to read?' 'I told you. It's to be in German. You'll
understand every word and I won't.' But he had carried with him a book
that he valued, an American volume, handsomely printed, which
contained in modem translation every tragedy that 232 has
come down to us from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Since each of the
dramatists had composed and put on the stage nearly a hundred plays, for a
publishing house to boast 'the complete Greek drama' seemed arrogant
until one realized that only a handful of tragedies by each of the writers
had survived: seven by Aeschylus, seven also by Sophocles, nineteen by
Euripides, with scattered parch- ments containing references by name only
to well over a hundred. Devlan, who knew the plays well, especially
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the great trilogy of which Agamemnon was the opening part, gladly
surrended the treasured book that had accompanied him to Greece on three
previous occasions, and I spent the after- noon reading and memorizing the
characters I was about to see: 'Agamemnon, the king of kings;
Clytemnestra, his adulterous wife; Aegisthus, the miserable cousin of the
king, who has become the lover of Clytemnestra during the king's long
absence at the Trojan War; and Cassandra, the beautiful doomed prophetess,
daughter of Priam, the defeated king of Troy, and brought back as
Agamemnon's mistress.' Well before the time to leave for the short
drive to the theater, I returned the anthology to Devlan: 'I'm ready,'
and off we went to hear the German troupe. As night settled over the
hills in which the action of the tragedy might have taken place more than
two thousand years before, the audience, composed mainly of tourists
eager to see a Greek play in such surroundings, watched as the
sentinel crawled out upon the roof of the palace, and lay
prostrate but hunched forward on his elbows. As the sky
darkened and stage lights came on in subdued colors, the watchman began
orating in German so strong and clear that I was startled: he could have
been shouting at a Lancaster festival, and in that instant I accepted
German as the speech of the old Greeks and became one of them as the
sentinel 233
spoke words that some German classical scholar in Heidel-
berg had translated, and which now I converted almost automatically into
English: 'I have been lying on this roof for a year like a hound,
watching for the Atreides, propped on my elbows. I know far too well these
starry skies. Even so I must watch for the beaconfire that shall bring us
news that we have won the war at Troy.' Then came the powerfully
prophetic words hinting at the tragedy soon to envelop the doomed house of
Atreus: 'To keep myself alert I like to hum or sing but always my
song turns to lamentation for this House, no longer nobly governed as it
used to be.' Now the stage was enveloped in flames. The signal fires
have leaped across the hills. Troy has fallen! The Greeks have
triumphed! And great Agamemnon has come home, clothed in glory. But the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]