The song, more or less improvised, had to do with a young man who announces himself, in the first verse, to be a hickly swain new-come from the bosky outback: he sings what a splendid fellow he is, fit consort for a queen. In the second verse he’s accosted by an older woman who declares that while she doubtless appears a whore, she is in fact the Queen disguised; she takes the delighted singer to a crib in the common stews, which she asserts to be a wing of the palace reconstructed, at her order, to resemble a brothel: the trulls and trollops thereabout, she explains, are gentlewomen at their sport, the pimps and navvies their disguisèd noble lovers. Did the masquerade strike our minstrel as excessive? He was to bear in mind that the whims of royalty are like the gods’, mighty in implementation and consequence. Her pleasure, she discloses in the third verse, is that he should lie with her as with a woman of the streets, the newest fashion among great ladies: she’s chosen him for her first adventure of this sort because, while obviously not of noble birth, he’s of somewhat gentler aspect than the lot of commoners; to make the pretense real, he’s to pay her a handsome love-price, which she stipulates. The fellow laughs and agrees, but respectfully points out that her excessive fee betrays her innocence of prostitution; if verisimilitude is her object, she must accept the much lower wage he names. Not without expressions of chagrin the lady acquiesces, demanding only the right to earn a bonus for meritorious performance. In the fifth and sixth verses they set to, in manner described in salacious but musically admirable cadenzas; in the seventh the woman calls for fee and bonus, but her minstrel lover politely declines: to her angry protests he replies, in the eighth verse, that despite herself she makes love like a queen; her excellency shows through the cleverest disguise. How does he know? Because, he asserts, he’s not the rustic he has feigned, but an exile prince in flight from the wrath of a neighbor king, whose queen had been his mistress until their amour came to light. Begging the amazed and skeptic lady not to betray him to the local nobility so well masked, he pledges in return to boast to no one that he has lain with Her Majesty. As I fetched him from the stews wondering mellifluously whether his partner was a queen disguised as a prostitute or a prostitute disguised as a queen disguised et cetera, I was seized by two armored guards and fetched myself to a room above a nearby wineshop. The premises were squalid; the room was opulent; beside a window overlooking the Lion’s Gate sat a regal dame ensconced in handmaids.
What about the minstrel, she wanted to know: Was he a prince in mufti or a slickering rustic? Through my tremble I saw bright eyes in her sharp-bone countenance. I struck a chord to steady my hand, wrung rhymes from alarmed memory, took a breath, and sang in answer:
“As Tyrian robe may cloak a bumpkin heart,
So homespun hick may play the royal part.
Men may be kings in spirit or in mien.
Which make more kingly lovers? Ask a queen!
But don’t ask me which sort of queen to ask,” I added quickly; “I haven’t been in town long enough to learn the difference.”
The maids clapped hands to mouths; the lady’s eyes flashed, whether with anger or acknowledgment I couldn’t judge, “See he goes to school on the matter,” she ordered a plumpish gentleman across the room, eunuch by the look of him. Then she dismissed us, suddenly fretsome, and turned to the window, as one waiting for another to appear.
On with the story, cut corners: Clytemnestra herself it was, wont to rest from her market pleasures in that apartment. Her eunuch—Chief Minstrel, it turned out—gave me a gold piece and bade me report to him in Agamemnon’s scullery when I came to town, against the chance the whim should take Her Majesty to hear me again. Despite the goldhair wonder that rested on my chest as I reported this adventure next day, I was astonished after all that dreams come true.
“The King and Queen are real!” I marveled. “They want me to minstrel them!”
Fingering my forearm Merope said: “Because you’re the best.” I must go to town often, we agreed, perhaps even live there; on the other hand, it would be an error to put by my rustic origins and speech, as some did: in song, at least (where dwelt the only kings and courtiers we knew), such pretense always came a cropper. Though fame and clever company no doubt would change me in some ways, I should not change myself for them, it being on the one hand Merope’s opinion that worldliness too ardently pursued becomes affectation, mine on the other that innocence artificially preserved becomes mere crankhood.
“We’ll come back here often,” I told her, “to remind us who we are.”
She stroked my fingers, in those days scarcely calloused by the lyre. “Was the Queen very beautiful?”
I promised to notice next time. Soon after, we bid the goats goodbye and moved to Mycenae. Merope was frightened by the din of so many folk and wagons and appalled by everyone’s bad manners, until I explained that these were part of the excitement of city life. Every day, all day, in our mean little flat, I practiced my art, which before I’d turned to only when the mood was on me; eveningly I reported to the royal kitchen, where lingered a dozen other mountebanks and minstrels just in favor. Ill at ease in their company, I kept my own, but listened amazed to their cynic jokes about the folk they flattered in their lays, and watched with dismay the casual virtuosity with which they performed for one another’s amusement while waiting the royal pleasure. I hadn’t half their skill and wit! Yet the songs I made from my rural means—of country mouse and city mouse, or the war between the ants and the mice—were well enough received; especially when I’d got the knack of subtly mocking in such conceits certain figures in the court—those who, like the King, were deaf to irony—I’d see Clytemnestra’s eyes flash over her wine, as if to say, “Make asses of them all you please, but don’t think you’re fooling me!” and a coin or two would find their way meward. Flattering it was, for a nameless country lad, to hear the Queen herself praise his songs and predict a future for him in the minstrel way. When I got home, often not till sunup, I’d tell my sleepish darling all I’d seen and done, and there’d be love if the day hadn’t spent me, which alas it sometimes had. That first gold piece I fetched to a smith and caused to be forged into a ring, gift to the gods’ gift to me; but I mis-guessed the size, and fearing she’d lose it, Merope bade me wear it in her stead.
1½
Once upon a time I told tales straight out, alternating summary and dramatization, developing characters and relationships, laying on bright detail and rhetorical flourish, et cetera. I’m not that amateur at the Lion’s Gate; I know my trade. But I fear we’re too far gone now for such luxury, Helen and I; I must get to where I am; the real drama, for yours truly, is whether he can trick this tale out at all—not the breath-batingest plot in the world, but there we are. It’s an old story anyhow, this part of it; the corpus bloats with its like; I’ll throw you the bones, to flesh out or pick at as you will.
What I had in mind was an Anonymiad in nine parts, reflecting (so you were to’ve nudged your neighbor and observed) the nine amphorae and ditto muses; or seven parts plus head- and tailpiece: the years of my maroonment framed by its causes and prognosis. The prologue was to’ve established, hopefully has done, the ground-conceit and the narrative voice and viewpoint: a minstrel stuck on some Aegean clinker commences his story, in the process characterizing himself and hinting at the circumstances leading to his plight. Parts One through Four were to rehearse those circumstances, Five through Seven the stages of his island life vis-à-vis his minstrelling—innocent garrulity, numb silence, and terse self-knowledge, respectively—and fetch the narrative’s present time up to the narrator’s. The epilogue’s a sort of envoi to whatever eyes, against all odds, may one day read it. But though you’re to go through the several parts in order, they haven’t been set down that way: after writing the headpiece I began to fear that despite my planning I mightn’t have space enough to get the tale told; since it pivots about Part Four (the headpiece and three parts before, three parts and the tailpiece after), I divided Helen’s hide in half to insure
the right narrative proportions; then, instead of proceeding with the exposition heralded at the tail of the headpiece, I took my cue from a remark I’d made earlier on, began in the middle, and wrote out Parts Five, Six, and Seven. Stopping at the head of the tailpiece, which I’m leaving blank for my last words, I returned to compose Parts One, Two, and Three, and the pivotal Part Four. But alas, there’s more to my matter and less to my means than I’d supposed; for a while at least I’ll have to tell instead of showing; if you must have dialogue and dashing about, better go to the theater.
So, so: the rest of Part One would’ve shown the minstrel, under the eunuch’s tutelage, becoming more and more a professional artist until he’s Clytemnestra’s pet entertainer. A typical paragraph runs: We got on, the Queen and I, especially when the Paris-thing blew up and Agamemnon started conscripting his sister-in-law’s old boyfriends. Clytemnestra wasn’t impressed by all the spear-rattling and the blather of National Honor, any more than I, and couldn’t’ve cared less what happened to Helen. She’d been ugly duckling in the house of Tyndareus, Clytie, second prize in the house of Atreus; she knew Agamemnon envied his brother, and that plenty of Trojan slave-girls would see more of the Family Jewels, while he was avenging the family honor, than she’d seen in some while. Though she’d got a bit hard-boiled by life in Mycenae, she was still a Grade-A figure of a woman; it’s a wonder she didn’t put horns on him long before the war.…
In addition to their expository function, this and like passages establish the minstrel’s growing familiarity and preoccupation with affairs of court. His corresponding professional sophistication, at expense of his former naive energy, was to be rendered as a dramatical correlative to the attrition of his potency with Merope (foreshadowed by the earlier ring-business and the Chief Minstrel’s eunuchhood), or vice versa. While still proud of her lover’s success, Merope declares in an affecting speech that she preferred the simple life of the goat pasture and the ditto songs he sang there, which now seem merely to embarrass him. The minstrel himself wonders whether the changes in his life and work are for the better: the fact is—as he makes clear on the occasion of their revisiting the herd—that having left the country but never, despite his success, quite joined the court, he feels out of place now in both. Formerly he sang of bills and nans as Daphnises and Chloes; latterly he sings of courtly lovers as bucks and does. His songs, he fears, are growing in some instances merely tricksy, in others crankish and obscure; moreover, the difficulties of his position in Mycenae have increased with his reputation: Agamemnon presses on the one hand for anti-Trojan songs in the national interest, Clytemnestra on the other for anti-Iliads to feed her resentment. Thus far he’s contrived a precarious integrity by satirizing his own dilemma, for example—but arthritis is retiring the old eunuch, and our narrator has permitted himself to imagine that he’s among the candidates for the Chief-Minstrelship, despite his youth: should he be so laureled, the problem of quid pro quo might become acute. All these considerations notwithstanding (he concludes), one can’t pretend to an innocence outgrown or in other wise retrace one’s steps, unless by coming full circle. Merope doesn’t reply; the minstrel attempts to entertain her with a new composition, but neither she nor the goats (who’d used to gather when he sang) seem much taken by it. The rest of the visit goes badly.
2
Part Two opens back in Mycenae, where all is a-bustle with war preparations. The minstrel, in a brilliant trope which he predicts will be as much pirated by later bards as his device of beginning in the middle, compares the scene to a beehive; he then apostrophizes on the war itself:
The war, the war! To be cynical of its warrant was one thing—bloody madness it was, whether Helen or Hellespont was the prize—and my own patriotism was nothing bellicose: dear and deep as I love Argolis, Troy’s a fine place too, I don’t doubt, and the Trojan women as singable as ours. To Hades with wars and warriors: I had no illusions about the expedition.
Yet I wanted to go along! Your dauber, may be, or your marble-cracker, can hole up like a sybil in a cave, just him and the muse, and get a lifeswork done; even Erato’s boys, if they’re content to sing twelve-liners all their days about Porphyria’s eyebrow and Althea’s navel, can forget the world outside their bedchambers. But your minstrel who aspires to make and people worlds of his own had better get to know the one he’s in, whether he cares for it or not. I believe I understood from the beginning that a certain kind of epic was my fate: that the years I was to spend, in Mycenae and here [i.e., here, this island, where we are now], turning out clever lyrics, satires, and the like, were as it were apprenticeships in love, flirtation-trials to fit me for master-husbandhood and the siring upon broad-hipped Calliope, like Zeus upon Alcmena, of a very Heracles of fictions. “First fact of our generation,” Agamemnon called the war in his recruitment speeches; how should I, missing it, speak to future times as the voice of ours?
He adds: Later I was to accept that I wasn’t of the generation of Agamemnon, Odysseus, and those other giant brawlers (in simple truth I was too young to sail with the fleet), nor yet of Telemachus and Orestes, their pale shadows. To speak for the age, I came to believe, was less achievement than to speak for the ageless; my membership in no particular generation I learned to treasure as a passport out of history, or exemption from the drafts of time. But I begged the King to take me with him, and was crestfallen when he refused. No use Clytemnestra’s declaring (especially when the news came in from Aulis that they’d cut up lphigenia) it was my clearsightedness her husband couldn’t stick, my not having hymned the bloody values of his crowd; what distressed me as much as staying home from Troy was a thing I couldn’t tell her of: Agamemnon’s secret arrangement with me … his reflections upon and acceptance of which end the episode—or chapter, as I call the divisions of my unversed fictions. Note that no mention is made of Merope in this excursus, which pointedly develops a theme (new to literature) first touched on in Part One: the minstrel’s yen for a broader range of life-experience. His feeling is that having left innocence behind, he must pursue its opposite; though his conception of “experience” in this instance is in terms of travel and combat, the metaphor with which he figures his composing-plans is itself un-innocent in a different sense.
The truth is that he and his youthful sweetheart find themselves nightly more estranged. Merope is unhappy among the courtiers and musicians, who speak of nothing but Mycenaean intrigues and Lydian minors; the minstrel ditto among everyone else, now that his vocation has become a passion—though he too considers their palace friends mostly fops and bores, not by half so frank and amiable as the goats. The “arrangement” he refers to is concluded just before the King’s departure for Aulis; Agamemnon calls for the youth and without preamble offers him the title of Acting Chief Minstrel, to be changed to Chief Minstrel on the fleet’s return. Astonished, the young man realizes, as after his good fortune at the Lion’s Gate, how much his expectations have in fact been desperate dream:
“I … I accept [I have him cry gratefully, thus becoming the first author in the world to reproduce the stammers and hesitations of actual human speech. But the whole conception of a literature faithful to daily reality is among the innovations of this novel opus]!“—whereupon the King asks “one small favor in return.” Even as the minstrel protests, in hexameters, that he’ll turn his music to no end beyond itself, his heart breaks at the prospect of declining the title after all:
Whereto, like windfall wealth, he had at once got used.
Tut, Agamemnon replies: though he personally conceives it the duty of every artist not to stand aloof from the day’s great issues, he’s too busy coping with them to care, and has no ear for music anyhow. All he wants in exchange for the proffered title is that the minstrel keep a privy eye on Clytemnestra’s activities, particularly in the sex and treason way, and report any infidelities on his return.
Unlikeliest commission [the minstrel exclaims to you at this point, leaving ambiguous which commission is meant]! The King a
nd I were nowise confidential; just possibly he meant to console me for missing the fun in Troy (he’d see it so) by giving me to feel important on the home front. But chances are he thought himself a truly clever fellow for leaving a spy behind to watch for horns on the royal brow, and what dismayed me was less the ingenuousness of that plan—I knew him no Odysseus—as his assumption that from me he had nothing to fear! As if I were my gelded predecessor, or some bugger of my fellow man (no shortage of those in the profession), or withal so unattractive Clytemnestra’d never give me a tumble! And I a lyric poet, Aphrodite’s very barrister, the Queen’s Chief Minstrel!
No more is said on this perhaps surprising head for the present; significantly, however, his reluctance to compromise his professional integrity is expressed as a concern for what Merope will think. On the other hand, he reasons, the bargain has nothing to do with his art; he’ll compose what he’ll compose whether laureled or un, and a song fares well or ill irrespective of its maker. In the long run Chief-Minstrelships and the like are meaningless; precisely therefore their importance in the short. Muse willing, his name will survive his lifetime; he will not, and had as well seize what boon the meanwhile offers. He accepts the post on Agamemnon’s terms.
Part Three, consequently, will find the young couple moved to new lodgings in the palace itself, more affluent and less happy. Annoyance at what he knows would be her reaction has kept the minstrel from confiding to his friend the condition of his Acting Chief Minstrelship; his now-nearly-constant attendance on the