Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [12]
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TWO COMPENSATIONS FOR GROWING OLD are worth putting on record as the condition asserts itself. The first is a vantage point gained for acquiring embellishments to narratives that have been unfolding for years beside one’s own, trimmings that can even appear to supply the conclusion of a given story, though finality is never certain, a dimension always possible to add. The other mild advantage endorses a keener perception for the authenticities of mythology, not only of the traditional sort, but – when such are any good – the latterday mythologies of poetry and the novel. One such fragment, offering a gloss on the crayfishing afternoon, cropped up during the summer months of the same year, when I was reading one night after dinner.
The book, Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso – bedside romance of every tolerably well-educated girl of Byron’s day – now requires, if not excuse, at least some sort of explanation. Twenty years before, writing a book about Robert Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy, I had need to glance at Ariosto’s epic, Burton being something of an Ariosto fan. Harington’s version (lively, but inaccurate) was then hard to come by; another (less racy, more exact), just as suitable for the purpose. Although by no means all equally readable, certain passages of the poem left a strong impression. Accordingly, when a new edition of Harington’s Orlando Furioso appeared, I got hold of it. I was turning the pages that evening with the sense – essential to mature enjoyment of any classic – of being entirely free from responsibility to pause for a second over anything that threatened the least sign of tedium.
In spite of the title, Orlando’s madness plays a comparatively small part in the narrative’s many convolutions. This does not mean Ariosto himself lacked interest in that facet of his story. On the contrary, he is profoundly concerned with the cause – and cure – of Orlando’s mental breakdown. What happened? Orlando (Charlemagne’s Roland), a hero, paladin, great man, had gone off his head because his girl, Angelica, beautiful, intelligent, compassionate, everything a nice girl should be – so to speak female counterpart of Orlando himself – had abandoned him for a nonentity. She had eloped with a good-looking utterly boring young man. Ariosto allows the reader to remain in absolutely no doubt as to the young man’s total insignificance. The situation is clearly one that fascinates him. He emphasizes the vacuity of mind shown by Angelica’s lover in a passage describing the young man’s carving of their intertwined names on the trunks of trees, a whimsicality that first reveals to Orlando himself his own banal predicament.
Orlando’s ego (his personal myth, as General Conyers would have said) was murderously wounded. He found himself altogether incapable of making the interior adjustment required to continue his normal routine of living the Heroic Life. His temperament allowing no half measures, he chose, therefore, the complete negation of that life. Discarding his clothes, he lived henceforth in deserts and waste places, roaming hills and woods, gaining such sustenance as he might, while waging war against a society he had renounced. In short, Orlando dropped out.
Ariosto describes how one of Orlando’s friends, an English duke named Astolpho, came to the rescue. Riding a hippogryph (an intermediate beast Harington calls his ‘Griffith Horse’, like the name of an obscure poet), Astolpho undertook a journey to the Moon. There, in one of its valleys, he was shown all things lost on Earth: lost kingdoms: lost riches: lost reputations: lost vows: lost hours: lost love. Only lost foolishness was missing from this vast stratospheric Lost Property Office, where by