Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [13]
Journeys to the Moon were in the news at that moment (about a year before the astronauts actually landed there) because Pennistone had just published his book on Cyrano de Bergerac, whose Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune he used to discuss, when we were in the War Office together. Pennistone was more interested in his subject as philosopher and heresiarch than space-traveller, but, all the same, Cyrano had to be admitted as an example of a remark once made by X. Trapnel: ‘A novelist writes what he is. That is equally true of authors who deal with mediaeval romance or journeys to the Moon.’ I don’t think Trapnel had ever read Ariosto, feel pretty sure he had never attempted Cyrano – though he could surprise by unexpected authors dipped into – but, oddly enough, Orlando Furioso does treat of both Trapnel’s off-the-cuff fictional categories, mediaeval romance and an interplanetary journey.
Among other adventures on the Moon, during this expedition, Astolpho sees Time at work. Ariosto’s Time – as you might say, Time the Man – was, anthropomorphically speaking, not necessarily everybody’s Time. Although equally hoary and naked, he was not Poussin’s Time, for example, in the picture where the Seasons dance, while Time plucks his lyre to provide the music. Poussin’s Time (a painter’s Time) is shown in a sufficiently unhurried frame of mind to be sitting down while he strums his instrument. The smile might be thought a trifle sinister, nevertheless the mood is genial, composed.
Ariosto’s Time (a writer’s Time) is far less relaxed, indeed appallingly restless. The English duke watched Ariosto’s Time at work. The naked ancient, in an eternally breathless scramble with himself, collected from the Fates small metal tablets (one pictured them like the trinkets hanging from the necks of Murtlock and Henderson), then moved off at the double to dump these identity discs in the waters of Oblivion. A few of them (like Murtlock’s medallion at the pond) were only momentarily submerged, being fished out, and borne away to the Temple of Fame, by a pair of well disposed swans. The rest sank to the bottom, where they were likely to remain.
On the strength of this not too obscure allegory, I decided to go to bed. Just before I closed the book, my eye was caught by a stanza in an earlier sequence.
And as we see straunge cranes are woont to do,
First stalke a while er they their wings can find,
Then soare from ground not past a yard or two,
Till in their wings they gather’d have the wind,
At last they mount the very clouds unto,
Triangle wise according to their kind:
So by degrees this Mage begins to flye,
The bird of Jove can hardly mount so hye;
And when he sees his time and thinks it best,
He falleth downe like lead in fearfull guise,
Even as the fawlcon doth the foule arrest,
The ducke and mallard from the brooke that rise.
The warm windy afternoon, cottonwool clouds, ankle-deep wild garlic, rankness of fox, laboratory exhalations from the quarry, parade ground evolutions of the duck, hawk’s precipitate flight towards the pool, all were suddenly recreated. Duck, of course, rather than cranes, had risen ‘triangle wise’, but the hawk, as in Ariosto’s lines (or rather Harington’s), had hung pensively in the air, then swooped to strike. I tried to rationalize to myself this coincidental passage. There was nothing at all unusual in mallard getting up from the water at that time of day, nor a kestrel hovering over the neighbouring meadows.