Picked-Up Pieces (39 page)

becomes in Collier’s script

The loss in magnificence is well-nigh total, but Milton is already on record, and Collier is attempting a new thing.

His description of the Burning Lake and charred angels evokes Dresden, Hiroshima, and napalming; the conclave of the damned in Pandemonium draws imagery from Fascist rallies, even to a clenched-fist salute. Space flight—the fact and technics of it—infuses the heavy epic with easy momentum. In Milton, Satan’s passage from Hell to earth is a sloggy business, a piece of Renaissance exploration: “the fiend / O’er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare / With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way, / And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.…” In Collier, he generates speed as smoothly as an equation, and travels as a “dark ripple in space.” We ride “that wave of darkness, which is Satan in flight,” and, as under the eyes of our astronauts, the huge, curved horizons of earth and sun float into view. Milton, after Gabriel confronts Satan in Paradise, has Satan hide by circling the earth on the side of darkness;
though the possibility fits with Newtonian astronomy, it seems farfetched and uncomfortable in the verse, mixed with antique imagery:

For Collier, such an orbiting is a familiar stunt; Satan hangs in darkness “like a surfer awaiting the wave” and exultantly teases both sunset and sunrise in the course of his confident free fall. “Free Fall,” for that matter, would be a pretty good title for this movie, were it ever made.

When Satan arrives in Paradise, we arrive at hackneyed territory. Mr. Collier refreshes the fable with a lot of delightfully precise botany, some clever lighting, and an attentiveness to Eve’s dreams worthy of a psychoanalyst. But his retelling founders where most modern retellings do: he does not believe in God, and God is the most interesting character in the story. God has a plan and a hope; He experiences love and regret. Satan is just a successful saboteur by comparison, and Adam and Eve are a pair of gullible yokels. The God of Genesis brims with surprises; his question of Adam, “Who told you that you were naked?” has all the cunning of do-your-own-guilt paternalism since the world began. How affably, without a blink, the blame having passed from Adam to Eve to the serpent, does He curse the serpent first, and how obligingly, having delivered the curses to all three, does He squat down like a tailor and make for His two errant children, grown out of nudity, “garments of skins.” Adam and Eve are banished from Paradise not spitefully, as punishment for what cannot be undone, but as a simple Self-protective measure, to prevent the created pair, who have already eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and become “like one of us,” from eating now also from the tree of life and living forever; the cherubim and the flaming sword guard not the gates of Paradise but the path to the tree of life—not the way back but the way out. This pleasant plantation owner, safeguarding His prerogatives against a slave uprising, is a remote rustic ancestor of Milton’s God, a defensive monarch always ready to argue the legalities of His own decisions. To “justify the ways of God to men” was Milton’s announced purpose, and the thorny conundrums of Justice and Mercy, Free Will
and Divine Foresight, Liberty and Order, frame the Biblical events in a continual dialetic of serious political argument. Foreseeing Man’s Fall, God sends Raphael to Adam to

Milton then assures us, “So spake th’ Eternal Father, and fulfill’d / All Justice.” And Adam, when Eve complains that his failure to command “absolutely” permitted her to sin, answers in echo of God:

Mr. Collier is a modern atheist, and will have none of this. The long middle of Milton’s poem—Raphael’s exposition to Adam of the Christo-centric universe—he almost entirely omits. The theological reasoning that Satan was permitted to perpetrate evil “but to bring forth / Infinite goodness, grace, and mercy” elicits from Collier the scornful paraphrase “In other words, the prisoner was paroled in order that he might commit fresh crimes and incur a yet heavier sentence. Man, at the cost of death to all and damnation to many, was to serve as bait in this outrageous trap.” Mr. Collier then goes on to praise Satan as morally superior to God (“… he is the rebel against the Establishment, the defeated, the exile, the endungeoned, the resurgent, and the guerrilla.… We watch in vain for some example of his wickedness.… He inflicts no tortures”). Mr. Collier is of course entitled to his humanist pieties and left-wing wrath, but he has no artistic right to pump the Voice of God into the end of his scenario. The Voice has been labelled hollow. The plot that turns on the strictures of such a moral nonentity as Mr. Collier’s God falls to nonsense. You can have a sentimental Satan, and an adorable Jungian Adam and Eve, and an apple that is all vitamins and eroticism, but you
cannot have these and Jahweh too. By the time this script reaches its last shot (Satan smiling out of the screen at us, just like Walter Huston in that old Hollywood make of “The Devil and Daniel Webster”), the corniness betrays an inner chaos. The God of Genesis walking in His garden in the cool of the day had a blunt corporeal reality. The God of Milton derives actuality from the believer’s tortured strenuousness. Collier’s God is just a black hole in a funny old story that must (“
Must!
That’s the word now,” Adam says) have something profound about it.

What did attract this excellent British fantasist to
Paradise Lost
? Possibly its superficial shimmer of the fantastic, of the hallucinatory. The conceit of making it into cinema recalls an image Santayana uses, of Dante, in
Three Philosophical Poets:
after pages of praise for the medieval poet, Santayana adds the devastating demur “… he has no true idea either of the path to happiness or of its real conditions. His notion of nature is an inverted image of the moral world, cast like a gigantic shadow upon the sky. It is a mirage.” Some such mirage-sense of Milton’s poem may be at the root of the curious metamorphosis Collier has wrought. Of the assembly in Pandemonium his scenario says, “Perhaps this vast, dark sphere is Satan’s brain, and the luminous seraphs are the brain cells, glowing or flashing or dimming according to the electrical impulses that pass through them.” A frequent (and, I would think, technically implausible) feature of his script is the specification of elaborate trompe-l’oeil effects:

Satan ruffles a tree of dark leaves with light undersides so that from a hundred yards it exactly resembles Eve; Mulciber’s body goes transparent and becomes his palace; a vast horde of devils so disperses itself as to shadow forth the forms of Adam and Eve, like a marching band at half-time. What does Collier intend by such illusions except to transfer the entire cosmic epic to the realm of dream and subjective psychology? A movie screen has no substance; it exists only for our eyes, which in
turn—physiologists tell us—are specialized segments of the brain, the only ones that have surfaced and protrude through our skins.

But would these grandiose tricks—mist into angels, angels into “semi-abstract” tracery—work? Much is possible to the movie camera; but it remains a camera, a mirror of the external world’s texture and accidents. Though there is immense visual ambition in Mr. Collier’s directives to his hypothetical technicians, there is little that is effortlessly concrete. Phantasmagoria eclipses the luminously mundane. The human protagonists, for instance, are presumably naked until the fig leaves descend, but the script never brings Eve’s body to our awareness like these lines of Milton:

Collier’s “Apology” announces that his hero is Eve, yet she seems more the subject of speculation than an object of vivifying love. This kind of love Milton shows her when he has Adam say:

Collier’s Adam says:

Which is indeed bleak praise, if not blank verse. Milton has not been generally prized for the virtues of psychological tenderness or lively sensuality; Mr. Collier’s script leads us to realize how much of those virtues Milton possessed. And it leads us to suspect that in a fictional
universe there is no borrowed gravity; unless an author is writing for his life, images become mere “effects” and fly into space. Precision is a function of attention, and attention is a function of concern. Too diffidently Mr. Collier tells us, of the poem’s Christian content, “I do not share these beliefs, and I have substituted other ideas, also not profound in themselves, but which are more in accord with those commonly held today.” There are ideas here, but no possessing
idea
. Milton’s God may be a tedious old bluffer, but he fascinated Milton, and aligned the poet’s inspirations in one magnetic field. A phrase like “those thousand decencies that daily flow” holds a piece of felt reality up to a moral light, and transfigures all women, all wives. Mr. Collier’s Eve, on the other hand, is conceived unsteadily: eating the apple on her knees like a drugged porn queen, voting for life like some vociferous Shavian heroine, snivelling like a groupie when the angelic fuzz arrives, jerked through a series of attitudes by the dead strings of Genesis 3. The screenplay ends—for this viewer, at least—as a flicker of unweighted significances and symbols. The projector throws not a beam of light but a tatter of brilliancies.

A
BOUT THE
H
OUSE
, by W. H. Auden. 84 pp. Random House, 1965.

Thus, in his great
New Year Letter
of 1940, Auden distinguished between the two realms explored by his life-long search for “the City.” As a young man, his concern was more with “public space,” and he remains
the
poet
of the foreboding that preceded World War II, the lucid exhausted voice of “September 1, 1939” and the elegies to Freud and Yeats, both dead in 1939. As an aging post-war man, he has turned more toward the “inner space,” the landscape of his will and need and (from the same poem) “the
polis
of our friends.” His latest collection,
About the House
, celebrates this intimate city, the microcosm of his privacy, in almost doting detail. But the best of the poems are redeemed from triviality by the seriousness with which Auden considers his own comfort an episode in civilization.

The first, and superior, half of the book is a sequence of twelve poems inspired by the rooms of his recently acquired house in Austria. Each poem carries a personal dedication, and though the anonymous reader may be charmed by intimations of custom-tailored pertinence (a husband and wife get the cellar and attic respectively, and Christopher Isherwood is awarded the toilet), he is more likely to feel merely excluded; what with the Kennedys, the Glasses, the Sinatra Clan, the friends of Norman Podhoretz, and the Pop-Camp-Hip crowd, there seem enough in-groups in the Western world without a formal roll-call of Auden’s acquaintanceship. Plato’s vision of the Perfect City ruled by philosopher-kings seems somewhat impudently transmuted into genial snobbery:

Technically, the sequence is marred by the erratic interruption of “Postscripts”—short poems in another meter, often in the irksome form of haiku, tacked on wherever (however vaguely) appropriate. And it must be said that Auden, in developing each room into a cosmic instance and drawing significance from every nook, does not always avoid his besetting sin of, well, silliness. The steamy bath is extolled in an uncharacteristic non-meter which he explains as a “mallarmesque / syllabic fog,” and the stanzas to excrement include: