Tag: John Fowles

Rules of the Game

(David Wilkie, Blind Man’s Bluff: Sheffield Museums)

Sunshine, breeze. People walking or taking their dog for a walk or taking their phone for a walk, so intent upon that small screen that they will likely miss the apocalypse which, given the current derangements, may be sooner than expected and certainly sooner than hoped.

Oddly—or perhaps not—several features of recent and current news bring to mind Gilbert Murray’s The Stoic Philosophy. This was the Conway Memorial Lecture, delivered at South Place Institute, 16 March 1915, and published in volume form later that year.

Murray (1866-1957) is less well-known these days but was for many years an extremely familiar name in some circles: from 1908-1936 he was the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, and a very prolific translator and interpreter of ancient Greek literature and philosophy, particularly drama. He published almost a hundred books in all, including at least thirty volumes of translation and another twenty of classical studies. Born in Sydney, Australia, he came of an Irish Catholic family and was a consistent supporter of Irish Home Rule. His ashes are interred in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey

(Gilbert Murray)

He crops up several times in Ford Madox Ford’s letters in the period of the First World War, once as a signatory (one of 52) of a public letter, which appeared in The Guardian on 18 Sept. 1914, ‘British Authors and the War’, subheaded ‘Allies’ Righteous Cause’, setting out why the signatories supported Britain’s engagement in the war. His name was one of six which appeared both there and among the fifty signatories of another letter more than six years later, also published in The Guardian (1 Jan. 1921) but in several other newspapers also: ‘The State of Ireland. An Urgent Appeal for Mediation. Manifesto by the Arts and Professions’, a protest against the current policy being pursued in Ireland by the British government,[1] or, as Margaret Cole remembered it: ‘a propaganda campaign against the Black-and-Tans and the English occupation of Ireland’.[2]

The Stoic Philosophy is not a long book—a little more than 50 pages of Murray’s text, plus appendices and the Chairman’s introduction—and appeared at a serious historical juncture, just six months into the war which did not end war. It deals with major issues: philosophy, religion, history, the nature of matter, of reality: nevertheless, it seems to have been Murray’s comment on the 4th century BCE philosopher Zeno’s response to questioners that stuck in my head. Zeno of Citium is a major player here, being the founder of the Stoic philosophy, and Murray likens his strategy to that of the Duke of Wellington, when dealing with a subaltern who appears sceptical of the ageing Duke’s story, concerning an occasion during the Peninsula War when his servant opened a bottle of port and found that it contained a rat. The subaltern suggests that it must have been a very large bottle and the Duke retorts that it was ‘a damned small bottle’. The subaltern then comments that it must then have been a very small rat. The Duke replies that it was ‘a damned large rat’. ‘And there’, Murray concludes, ‘the matter has rested ever since.’[3]

Still, rats aside, there is plenty of interest in a relatively small space. Murray remarks of Zeno that ‘[t]he time of his coming is certainly significant. It was a time when landmarks had collapsed, and human life was left, as it seemed, without a guide’.

And: ‘Two questions lay before him—how to live and what to believe. His real interest was in the first, but it could not be answered without first facing the second. For if we do not in the least know what is true or untrue, real or unreal, we cannot form any reliable rules about conduct or anything else’ (22-23). And, towards the end: ‘Life becomes, as the Stoics more than once tell us, like a play which is acted or a game played with counters. Viewed from outside, the counters are valueless; but to those engaged in the game their importance is paramount. What really and ultimately matters is that the game shall be played as it should be played’ (50).

The game – or The Game. This does not mean—or need not mean—life viewed as trivial or to be taken lightly. It points towards a recognition of rules, of recognized forms and formations, though the outcome, the result—at, so to speak, the final whistle—is, of course, always the same.

I remind myself that the first volume of the novelist Nicholas Mosley’s Memoirs of Sir Oswald Mosley and Family was Rules of the Game (the second was Beyond the Pale).


In the year of Murray’s lecture, Sigmund Freud was thinking about literature, particularly fiction: ‘It is an inevitable result of all this that we should seek in the world of fiction, in literature and in the theatre compensation for what has been lost in life. There we still find people who know how to die – who, indeed, even manage to kill someone else. There alone too the condition can be fulfilled which makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves with death: namely, that behind all the vicissitudes of life we should still be able to preserve a life intact. For it is really too sad that in life it should be as it is in chess, where one false move may force us to resign the game, but with the difference that we can start no second game, no return-match. In the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need. We die with the hero with whom we have identified ourselves; yet we survive him, and are ready to die again just as safely with another hero.’[4]

In literature, and the arts generally, of course, you may break the rules of the game (once you have established to your own satisfaction what they actually are) without inflicting serious harm on others: while the same cannot confidently be said of politics, psychiatry, medicine or physics. Nor need its implications end with, or be restricted to, the human. In No More Parades, Ford Madox Ford has Christopher Tietjens thinking ‘good-humouredly’ about his official religion: God the great English landowner; Christ, an almost too benevolent land steward, son of the owner; the Third Person of the Trinity the spirit of the estate, ‘the Game, as it were, as distinct from the players of the Game.’[5]


An element of the game occurred also to John Fowles when, with the figures of Heraclitus and Pascal hovering about his shoulders, he wrote of what he sometimes termed the Godgame (working title of his novel The Magus): ‘Put dice on the table and leave the room; but make it clear to the players that you were never there before you left the room.’[6]

The first task is to identify the rules of the game, the second to understand them or, perhaps, to understand what understanding in this context might amount to. Or is it, before all else, to confirm that it is in fact a game? Or is the attempt to confirm that itself the game?

Perhaps a little early in the day for such philosophical demands – or stoicism in the face of such questions. Barely one coffee in – and many hours away from an aperitif. . .

But a supplementary question must be: what of those who ignore the rules of the game or fail to understand them or whose ego obscures too much of the world, the people in it, their motives for what they do or say or fail to do or say?


Sybille Bedford related the story of Aldous Huxley aboard a ship when, off North Borneo, a sailor was threatening to run amok with a dagger. While the ship’s officers conferred and the passengers stood huddled together, Huxley reflected on ‘the precarious artificiality of all that seemed most solid and fundamental in our civilization, of all that we take for granted. An individual has only to refuse to play the game of existence according to the current rules to throw the rule-observing players into bewildered consternation . . .
‘They are appalled, they are at a loss, they are helpless.’[7]

We have moved on from that, of course – and from more than the dagger, we fondly hope.

Notes

[1] The other five signatories to both letters were Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Jane Harrison, Arthur Quiller-Couch and May Sinclair

[2] Margaret Cole, Growing Up into Revolution (Longmans, Green & Co, 1949), 83.

[3] Gilbert Murray, The Stoic Philosophy (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, G. B. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), 24-25.

[4] Sigmund Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ (1915), in Civilization, Society and Religion, edited by Albert Dickson (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 79.

[5] Ford Madox Ford, No More Parades (1925), edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2011), 96.

[6] John Fowles, The Aristos (London: Pan Books, 1968), 21-22.

[7] Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (Two volumes, 1973; one volume edition, with a new preface, London: Pan Macmillan, 1993), 173.

The chosen destination

Lyme130919

The first strikingly cold day—when the heating takes an executive decision to fire itself up—renders the summer immediately distant. Complaints about humidity, the constant swallowing of water to ward off dehydration, the absurdity of pocketless clothes—all fled away. As for our last escape to the sea, that final foray in convincing summer weather, was it a week ago, two, more?

Lyme Regis is the chosen destination these days when we retreat to the sea. Retreat or advance? Katabasis or Anabasis? There are the odd days to recover from, or seek to outdistance, the mental breakdown currently being undergone by the United Kingdom. Otherwise, the more durable points are November, for the Librarian’s birthday, and sometimes, in early June, for the birthday, not of Thomas Hardy (nor that of Edward Elgar, Barbara Pym, John Lehmann or the Marquis de Sade) but of the Librarian’s mother. This involves a good deal of driving, or being driven, through Mr Hardy’s county although, as far as I’m aware, he never mentions Lyme in his writings, despite having visited the town twice, possibly three times.

Stretching eyes west
Over the sea,
Wind foul or fair
Always stood she
Prospect-impressed;
Solely out there
Did her gaze rest
Never elsewhere
Seemed charm to be.[1]

 

Fowles--french-lieutenants-pb    French_lieutenants_woman-film

The town’s more familiar literary associations now are with John Fowles’ long residence in the town and his 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, filmed by Karel Reisz in 1981 with a script by Harold Pinter, starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Louisa Musgrove falls from the Cobb and suffers a serious concussion. There is also, on a wall in Church Street, a plaque commemorating the occasion, on 11 November 1725, when the novelist Henry Fielding, with the assistance of his servant, tried to abduct Sarah Andrew (a distant cousin of whom he was enamoured), as she was walking to church with Andrew Tucker and his family. That is also, of course, the Henry Fielding who eventually became London’s chief magistrate and, with his half-brother John, founded the Bow Street Runners, the first police force in London.

We walk to the Cobb, sit or lean against the wall, watch the waves, boats, kayaks, swimmers, dogs, walkers and all those people busily engaged with fish and chips. Some places become uncomfortable very quickly when crowded – but somehow Lyme seems not to, perhaps because of the several beaches. And there is not only the sweeping sea view, the harbour, the Cobb itself, but also the public gardens, the beach huts, the sense of cohesion and singleness deriving in part from the steep roads down into Lyme so there’s never the feeling of its merely being on the way to somewhere else.

Lyme has spectacular scenery all around it and a nice spot from which you’re directed to view Charmouth, West Bay, Golden Cap, Portland. The Cobb is Lyme’s famous curving harbour wall, originally dating back to the thirteenth century, and is where the French Lieutenant’s woman stood; it’s certainly where we take our fish and chips—from Herbie’s, among the best you’ll taste but one portion will cater for two people unless their appetites are matters of record with local or national newspapers.

Lyme is first mentioned in 774, in connection with a manor granted to Sherborne Abbey and received a Royal Charter in 1284 from Edward I (6 feet 2 inches and thus ‘Longshanks’). Edward was also known as the ‘Hammer of the Scots’—and was the conqueror of Wales, which caused the poet and artist David Jones, aged twelve and ‘careful that no one was looking’, to spit on his tomb in Westminster Abbey.[2]

William_Hogarth_Coram

(William Hogarth, Thomas Coram: Foundling Museum)

It was the birthplace of Thomas Coram, whose portrait by William Hogarth was presented by the artist in 1740 to the Foundling Hospital which the retired shipwright Coram began , appalled by the numbers of abandoned children in the streets of London. Sir George Somers, discoverer of the Bermudas was also born here: when he died, he was Admiral of the West Virginia Company fleet ‘and accidental inspirer of Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest.’[3] One of his shipmates, Silvester Jourdain, wrote the first published account of the voyage and the shipwreck, Discovery of the Barmudas: The Isle of Devils, one of the three publications cited by Frank Kermode as being ‘directly relevant to The Tempest.’[4]

The remarkable fossil hunter and palaeontologist Mary Anning is another celebrated Lyme native. Born in 1799 into a poor family, she would operate with marked success in a field dominated by men, at a time when science ‘was still largely the province of the leisured gentleman amateur.’ An increasing numbers of visitors to Lyme, to meet Mary Anning and see her collections included Louis Agassiz and the King of Saxony. Fossil-hunting on the shore there was a hard and often dangerous affair but she had ‘the sharpest eyes in the business’, patience, persistence, courage and physical strength. She discovered Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, a Pterodactyl, fossil fish and coprolites. She died at the age of 47 and is buried in the churchyard of St Michael the Archangel, which has memorial windows for her and for Thomas Coram.[5]

Mary-Anning-via-BBC

(Mary Anning and her dog Tray via BBC)

On this last visit of the season, Lyme was looking its best, the air clear, the views long, the sea literally dazzling, even distant Portland standing out sharply. On the debit side, the Librarian was the victim of two attacks by Lyme’s already infamous seagulls: bombed once and raided once, the first occasion best not talked about, the second seeing the abrupt and violent theft of her ice-cream, the cornet whittled down to the perfect size and state—then gone, one swoop, one beak.

We already knew that the latest advice was to stare seagulls out – can this really work? But the Lyme seagulls have heard all that stuff in any case: they come from behind or from the side. Try staring me out now, sucker.

Next year: helmets and umbrellas.

 

 
Notes

[1] Thomas Hardy, ‘The Riddle’, The Complete Poems, edited by James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), 448. John Fowles uses this stanza as epigraph to the opening chapter of The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

[2] Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017), 15.

[3] John Fowles, A Short History of Lyme Regis (Stanbridge: The Dovecote Press, 2004), 18; also his ‘Islands’, in Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, edited by Jan Relf (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), 304-309.

[4] The Arden edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, edited by Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1987), xxvii.

[5] Information from Crispin Tickell, Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, with a foreword by John Fowles (Lyme Regis Philpot Museum, 1996), 11, 18.