THE BECKONING FAIR ONES

Some Thoughts on Muses

Essay for the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, May 17, 2004.

I.

There is a brief scene that has always haunted me in Peter Weir's film THE LAST WAVE (1973). David, the movie's urban lawyer protagonist (Richard Chamberlain in his most affecting role) has been having apocalyptic visions: he seems to have somehow tapped into the Australian aboriginals' Dreamtime. During a visit with his stepfather, an Anglican priest, the distraught David exclaims, "Why didn't you ever tell me there were Mysteries?"

And his stepfather calmly replies, "My entire life has been about a Mystery."

I've carried those last words with me for decades now (though certainly not in any Christian sense). My life, too, has been about a Mystery: trying to pin down the overpowering sense of imminence and the numinous that seems to emanate from certain landscapes and certain people, trying to locate that same essence in the work of individual writers and poets and artists who also seem to have glimpsed it -

And yet, what precisely is "it"? My childhood friend Katy called it The Door; I called it the Boy in the Tree, after the visionary figure I saw in a dream at seventeen. Robert Graves named it the White Goddess; his lover, the poet Laura Riding, called it "a false wall." In her brilliant, sui generis fantasy novel LUD-IN-THE-MIST (1926), the writer and poet Hope Mirrlees termed it "the Note." John Fowles knew the Mystery as the Lost Domain, the "domaine perdu" he encountered in Alain-Fournier's symbolist novel LE GRAND MEAULNES (Fr. 1913, English THE WANDERER, 1928) It is "the country of the blue" in Henry James' short story "Derogation" (19xx), as the Jamesian scholar Denis Donoghue explicates it in SPEAKING OF BEAUTY (2003), "the place of the imagination where it has nothing at heart but to be inventive and intelligent and to live up to its best possibility." If the Mystery evokes a sense of place, that place also contains an inhabitant: the genius loci of the Lost Domain, the Muse.

A muse! The very notion of an artist's muse has become so unfashionable as to be faintly embarrassing - like admitting to a taste for Cherries Jubilee or Beef Wellington or Ambrosia Salad, one of those outmoded culinary concoctions our parents and grandparents found sophisticated, back in an era of blowsy blondes and beefy leading men. Today the muse seems to be an endangered species, if not utterly extinct: unsurprising, when one considers that the muses were traditionally depicted as female, thereby limiting their options for procreation with others of their kind. Field guides to the species are almost non-existent, the most recent being Francine Prose's THE LIVES OF THE MUSES: NINE WOMEN AND THE ARTISTS THEY INSPIRED (2003), an intelligent and entertaining if not, ultimately, illuminating account of nine real-life, female muses, the number meant to correspond with the most popular conception of the cohort - Robert Graves referred to them as "the nine little muses" - which nowadays is less evocative of the Greek Mysteries than it is of nine hearty sorority gals, each with her own merit badge: Calliope (Epic Poetry), Erato (Love Lyrics), Melpomene (Tragedy), and so on.

Yet the earliest conception of the Muses was of three figures, not the nine who later consorted with Apollo. This Triad consisted of Aoide, Melete, and Mneme, daughters of Gaea and Uranus (and thus Titans); Hesiod's "Theogony" names, alternately, Mnemosyne as Gaea and Uranus's daughter, and the three Muses as Mnemosyne's children by Zeus. Aoide is the Muse of song; Melete of practice; Mneme (and Mnemosyne) of memory. "Mnemosyne, memory, the mother of the Muses, knows and sings the past as if it were still there," notes Jean-Pierre Vernant in "Greek Cosmogonic Myths;" and given that her sisters Melete and Aoide are related to practice and song, it is likely that the Triad Muses were, originally, priestesses or poets responsible for maintaining an oral tradition, and not merely a mythical conduit for inspiration.

The Muses may have inspired entire libraries-worth of song and story, but in their most archaic incarnation they left little in the way of a papyrus trail The first-century Greek historian Strabo first finds them on Mount Peiria in Thessaly; they then migrated south to Mount Helicon in Boeotia, a region of central Greece also associated with the cult of the immigrant god Dionysos. At Helicon the Muses' worship became subsumed into that of Apollo, at nearby Delphi.

But it is with Dionysos that the Triad Muses seem to show the greatest affinity. His cult seems to have originated in Thrace, in what is now Turkey. "... the Thraceians who colonized Boeotia consecrated Helicon to the Muses," writes Strabo in his GEOGRAPHIA, "and also the cave of the Nymphs called Leibethriades. And those who practiced ancient music are said to have been Thraceians, Orpheus and Musaeus and Thamyris, and the name Eumolpus [co-founder of the Eleusinian Mysteries] comes from Thrace."

Archaeological digs in Boeotia have also turned up cultic burials linked to Crete, another site affiliated with Dionysian rites (and, later, with those of Orpheus, Dionysos' legendary acolyte). I suspect that in their most ancient form the Muses are linked to Dionysos, that "womanish creature," and to what the great classicist Jane Ellen Harrison (who for some years lived with Hope Mirrlees) calls "the blind mad fury" of the God of Mysteries. Dionysos had his female followers, the ravening Bacchae, maenads whose worship of the god of ecstasy ends with them tearing Dionysos limb from limb then devouring his raw flesh. Thracian maenads slaughtered Orpheus as well, decapitating him; his head floated down the river Hebrus.
Yet even in these ancient stories, there is a link between muse and maenad -

"The head of Orpheus, singing always, is found by the Muses, and buried in the sanctuary at Lesbos," writes Harrison in PROLEGOMENA TO A STUDY OF GREEK RELIGION (1908). "Who are the Muses? Who but the Maenads repentant, clothed and in their right minds." (In an aside that resonates nicely in our current culture of body art, Harrison notes that the murderous maenads were punished for their acts by being tattooed with the image of a stag, the animal associated with Dionysian sacrifice, on the upper part of their right arms.)

Even now, thousands of years later, we perceive the elusive essence of the Muse as two-fold, both desirable and threatening; at her worst, psychologically, even murderously, devastating, to herself and others - though this identification of the Muse as strictly female is, today,
outmoded. The OED defines a muse as a poet's particular genius; genius in the sense of a tutelary god or attendant spirit presiding from birth. it is, I think, an eidolon not just of longing but of "the mystery of communicated knowledge," as Maud Bodkin states in ARCHETYPAL PATTERNS OF
POETRY (1934), "The eternal quality that belongs to the moment of vision, when the seer has lost himself within the vast complex essence of the thing seen ..."

The muse is the embodiment of an individual artist's obsession, and as such can as easily be male as female - though the notion of a male muse, or a female artist, seemed a dubious one to Robert Graves (1895-1985) , the 20th century's outstanding Muse mad scientist.

However, woman is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she is nothing. A woman who concerns herself with poetry should, I believe, either be a silent Muse and inspire the poets by her womanly presence, as Queen Elizabeth and the Countess of Derby did, or she should be the Muse in the
complete sense; she should be in turn Arianrhod, Blodeuwedd and the Old Sow of Maenawr Penardd who eats her own farrow.

(THE WHITE GODDESS, 1958 revised edition, pg. 500)

Graves backpedals a bit when he admits "This is not to say a woman should refrain from writing poems;" but his heart isn't in that utterance. If anyone could attest to the dangers of women writing poetry, it was Graves, who survived one of the 20th century's most noted and notorious Muses, the
poet Laura Riding, a woman who so perfectly and deliberately embraced the witchy, destructive, protean and devouring aspects of the Muse that she might have sprung full-grown from Medusa's head (or, if she'd lived a few decades later, Madonna's).

Graves had been physically and emotionally battered by his experiences in the trenches during the Great War - he suffered from crippling shell-shock, what we would now term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. When he met Riding, nee Laura Gottschalk, he was married to Nancy Nicholson, an artist and feminist who retained her maiden name; a bold thing to do in 1920s England. They had four children. By 1926, when Graves and Riding actually met, the pressures of supporting a family while attempting to create art - poetry for Graves, painting for Nicholson - was for both Robert and Nancy exacerbated by depression, illness, and poverty. The success of Graves' first two poetry collections, OVER THE BRAZIER (1916) and FAIRIES AND FUSILIERS (1917) was followed by the failure in 1920 of COUNTRY SENTIMENT. Graves' nephew and biographer, Richard Perceval Graves, observes that the poet "underwent a kind of personality crisis."Robert was later to reflect that by the beginning of 1926 "a process of personal disintegration was well under way" (ROBERT GRAVES: THE YEARS WITH LAURA, 1926-1940, 1990).

Enter Laura Riding. She was a coldly intellectual Manhattan-born poet who had briefly allied herself with the Nashville-based Fugitive poets (she had an affair with Allen Tate) before returning to New York. There she corresponded with Graves, and at the end of 1925 accepted Graves' invitation to join him in Europe and collaborate on a volume about modern poetry. Richard Perceval Graves quotes a family friend observing that "Robert always seemed happiest when he had found someone he admired who would give him direction."

Riding was prepared to do just that. Brilliant but domineering, seemingly inexorable in her need to be the authoritarian center of any group, she possessed the exact skills needed to wrest control of the rudderless Graves/Nicholson marriage. Laura Riding was also, frankly, a nut, but a nut on the grand scale of a Madame Blavatsky or L. Ron Hubbard, able to convince intelligent but emotionally susceptible people that she had insights and powers beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. Riding accompanied Graves' family (including children and nursemaid) to Egypt, where Robert had accepted a job as Professor of English at Cairo University. Once there she declared their quarters to be haunted, and indeed for the next fourteen years the entire extended family of Robert Graves and Nancy Nicholson was haunted, by the sinister, sibylline, predatory Riding.

Richard Perceval Graves' marvelous biography gives the details of their mad and often maddening relationship. Riding, while striking-looking, was not conventionally attractive. She relied upon a combination of acute intelligence and sexual frankness; oracular pronouncements about Poetry, Woolworth bijoux and intimations of occult knowledge to cast her spell upon a moveable feast of artists, writers, poets and their spouses, both male and female, enlarging the initial menage a trois with Graves and Nicholson to menages a quatre and cinq. She was not above using black magic to gain the attentions of a lover, and when all else failed, she attempted suicide: in 1929, when one of Riding's erstwhile lovers rejected her and backed out of the elaborate relationship daisy-chain she had devised, Riding drank Lysol and leaped from fourth-floor window. In a blackly comic couvade, the horror-stricken Graves ran down to a third-floor window and did the same. Both survived. Still nobody seems to have learned a lesson, since Laura continued to retain her near-supernatural hold on Graves, despite her refusal to sleep with him; and ten years later, when Riding entered a relationship with the poet Schuyler Jackson (whom she eventually married), she systematically and single-handedly drove Jackson's wife Kit into a mental institution, an act all the more unconscionable since it was carried out with Kit's four children as witnesses.

One doesn't so much feel Schadenfraude as genuine relief to know that the ruthless Laura Riding has now been relegated to that long, long list of Forgotten Poets, a lengthy footnote to the life of her one-time and best-known acolyte. Of course no one expects artists to be nice people, and from the wreckage of this floating world emerged some indisputable masterworks: Robert Graves' novels, poetry, and - most important for this essay - THE WHITE GODDESS : A HISTORICAL GRAMMAR OF POETIC MYTH (1948); a book that plays a bit fast fast and loose with history, etymology, and archaeology, but which captures as no other book does that elevated, almost supernatural, sense of peril and exhilaration which accompanies the creative process. .

I summarize Riding's relationship with Graves not because it is wickedly entertaining (though it is) but because it neatly encapsulates the two most crucial aspects of the Muse one finds in both fiction depictions and real life: her (or his) ineffable appeal, and her destructiveness. When it comes to the relationship between artist and muse, there often seems to be some obscure law of quantum physics in effect: both cannot occupy the same place at the same time, or one will be destroyed. Sometimes the artist consumes the muse, sometimes the reverse. Longtime, relatively stable relationships between artist and muse exist - that of Robert Graves and his second wife, Beryl Pritchard; James Merrill (himself no stranger to the occult) and David Jackson, Vladimir and Vera Nabokov, John and Elizabeth Fowles. But these are outnumbered by those creative dramas that explode (often with serial muses) like fireworks on a string: Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Isadora Duncan and Sergei Esenin, Robert Lowell and Carolyn Blackwood.

THE WHITE GODDESS was published some years after the demise of Graves' relationship with Riding, but her influence as Muse - oracular, fiercely intelligent, and somewhat daft - clearly informs the entire book. Graves invokes her in the dedication to the book's second edition (1952), a revision of the poem in the original volume.

"All saints revile her, and all sober men ...
In scorn of which I sailed to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom I desired above all things to know
Sister of the mirage and echo.

" Whose broad high brow was white as any lepers,
Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips,
With hair curled honey-colored to her hips.

" with so huge a sense
Of her nakedly worn magnificence
I forget cruelty and past betrayal,
careless of where the next bright bolt may fall."

Graves goes on to describe the Muse or White Goddess as "a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair." This, minus the blonde tresses, is an accurate physical description of the woman who first sand-blasted Graves' fragile psyche back in 1926. Graves later writes

The White Goddess is anti-domestic; she is the perpetual "other woman," and her part is difficult indeed for a woman of sensibility to play for more than a few years, because the temptation to commit suicide in simple domesticity lurks in every maenad's and muse's heart.

(ibid., pg. 503)

One's initial instinct is to scoff at this pronouncement. But, in a sublime irony, after Riding married Schuyler Jackson she did at last succeed in committing suicide, of the domestic sort. As Richard Perceval Graves slyly observes, "she abandoned [poetry] in 1939 as an inadequate means of telling the final truth about things" and retired with her husband to a quiet life in Florida, where she worked on a study of langugage, published after her death as A NEW FOUNDATION FOR THE DEFINITION OF WORDS AND SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAYS (University Press of Virginia, 1997) - a worthy project, but, one can't help but think, a bit of a comedown for the sibylline author of the COVENANT OF LITERAL MORALITY THE FIRST PROTOCOL, whose acolytes in earlier days compared her to Jesus Christ, and who called herself Finality.

Still, numerous women artists have opted out of simple domesticity (which is never all that simple, anyway) to pursue their own muses, male or female. In fiction we find the poignant Monster in Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Colette's Cheri. There is also Jane Bowles and her Moroccan female muse, "the wild and cunning, the fearful and the tough, the powerful and the childlike" Cherifa; the British writer Lady Caroline Blackwood, who could safely claim the Triple Crown of 20th century Musedom - a novelist of some note, she also played muse to painter Lucien Freud, composer Israel Citkowitz, and poet Robert Lowell; Margaret Wise Brown, who had passionate attachments to the actress Michael Strange (nee Blanche Oelrichs, once wed to John Barrymore) and James Stillman Rockefeller Jr. In THE LIVES OF THE MUSES, Francine Prose provides a thoughtful assessment of the relationship between George Balanchine's muse, the dancer Suzanne Farrell; yet makes no mention of Isadora Duncan and her notorious muses, the designer Gordon Craig and especially the Russian poet Sergei Esenin, of whom Duncan said

You know, I'm a mystic. While I slept my soul left my body and ascended into the world where souls meet - and there I met the soul of Sergei.

ISADORA: A SENSATIONAL LIFE, Peter Kurth, 2001

Today the popular image of Duncan seems risible, what with her flowing scarves and her proclamation that "All my lovers have been geniuses; it's the one thing upon which I insist." But in trading the Mystic for the MFA, artists (and their adherents) have sacrificed something:

The sense of illumination and fulfillment that comes alike to the lover, the poet, the philosophic or religious mystic, [that which] seems to give the clue that makes intelligible to us the poet's representation of transition from joyful love, through pain and frustration, to spiritual ecstasy, as continuous.

[Bodkin, pg. 189]

Francine Prose nails the essence of the Muse as yearning, and the relationship between muse and artist as both erotic and discursive. "The muse is often that person with whom the artist has the animated imaginary conversations, the interior dialogues we all conduct, most commonly with someone we cannot get out of our minds." What Prose misses, I think, is the mystical element, the Mystery that animates this conversation between a poet and her muse. As Anne Sexton puts it ,"And we are magic talking to itself/noisy and alone"("You, Doctor Martin").

Laura Riding, in the eerie and incantatory "Poet: A Lying Word," becomes the poet invoking herself as Muse.

It is a false wall, a poet: it is a lying word. It is a wall that closes and does not. This is no wall that closes and does not. It is a wall to see into, it is no other season's height. Beyond it lies no depth and height of further travel, no partial courses. Stand against me then and stare well through me then. Like wall of poet here I rise, but am no poet as walls have risen between next and next and made false end to leap. A last, true wall am I you may but stare me through. And the tale is no more of the going: no more a poet's tale of a going false-like to a seeing. The tale is of a seeing true-like to a knowing: there's but to stare the wall through now, well through.

Laura Riding, "Poet: A Lying Word," in SELECTED POEMS: IN FIVE SETS, Faber
& Faber, 1970

Sappho in one of her fragments (these are from poet Anne Carson's brilliant 2002 translation) gives us perhaps the most succinct description of the artist's relationship to her Muse -

I long and seek after

In another fragment, Sappho testifies to the effect of an encounter with what the British writer Oliver Onions named the Beckoning Fair One -

never more damaging O Eirena have I encountered you

Always, the interplay between Beckoner and beckoned is fraught: the threat of one being consumed or obliterated by the other is constant. Yet it is precisely this tension, this tango macabre, that underscores the erotic nature of the relationship between artist and muse, suspended as it is between longing and dread, the yearning to possess and the knowledge that capture is so often destructive of the very object of desire.

II.

I first encountered John Fowles' work twenty-five years ago. I was in the hospital post-surgery, hooked up to an IV morphine drip; THE MAGUS was the sole book I'd brought with me, though friends who visited gave me John Cheever's recently-published COLLECTED STORIES, which I also was reading - if "reading" is the correct description for what I did in the dazed, hallucinatory state I occupied during my recovery. I'd entered the hospital not knowing if I'd make it out again, and I'm not sure why I chose THE MAGUS to accompany me on what I was terrified would be a one-way trip. The novel's cover resembled that of GOAT'S HEAD SOUP, not my favorite Rolling Stones album. There were intimations of magic, which I liked; but these were very vague, and I do recall realizing fairly early on that the book contained no real magic, at least not what I called magic. I'd never read anything by Fowles, though I had notions of a successful writer who dealt in louche subjects - adultery, kidnapping; something about butterflies, a childhood passion of mine. I was on a D.H. Lawrence kick at the time, and in fact Lawrence is not a bad literary companion to Fowles, though I didn't realize that for many years.

This was all during a brief, unhappy hiatus in what was too-quickly passing for my life. I'd been forced to move back in with my parents, having flunked out of university and subsequently proved myself very bad at anything but drinking and taking drugs. Back in New York, I got a job at a bookstore, which was where I found THE MAGUS, recently reissued in a revised edition. I borrowed it but never paid for it: in a state somewhere between panic and exhilaration at finding myself still alive, I quit the store and moved out of my parents' house two days after I was released from the hospital, returning to D.C. to make a second stab at becoming a writer.

I'd like to say THE MAGUS was instrumental in all this, but it wasn't. The truth is, I remembered almost nothing of the book save a dreamy impression of blinding blue sky, a stone stairway, some masks; though I suspect it may have colored an iconic dream I had the night before my surgery. The fact is, I hated the book, and subsequent rereadings haven't done much to change my mind. Nicolas Urfe, the protagonist, is an insufferable prig. God knows why all the women in the novel throw themselves at him: he's arrogant and smug, and the women themselves seem tired vestiges of an earlier time, English "birds" with too much eyeliner, too-bright clothes, voices too loud or too soft by turns.

I returned to THE MAGUS recently, in an effort to see what others see in it; or, no - to be honest, to see what one other sees in it. Fowles is a writer noted for his use of a muse - his late wife, Elizabeth - and I have an epistolary muse, V, who is a careful reader of Fowles' work. V once commented that his side of our correspondence consisted of "gestures to evoke your response," and so when V gestured at Fowles, I paid attention. This is what writers do when their muses beckon.

Of contemporary writers, John Fowles probably best charted that perilous terra incognita where muse and artist meet, most successfully in THE COLLECTOR (1964) and THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMEN (1969), though also in other works, including THE MAGUS (1965; revised 1977) and MANTISSA (1982), a book-length conversation between a writer and the muse Erato. "Perhaps it is that I am hunting the woman archetype," Fowles wrote in his journal in 1954. But his quarry is not so much the Eternal Feminine, but the Mystery she represents; a mystery that, for Fowles, was often entwined with the natural world. Fowles' biographer, Eileen Warburton, notes that "Knowledge of the natural world ... was a profoundly felt experience, a near mystical identification" (JOHN FOWLES: A LIFE IN TWO WORLDS, VIking 2004). In a 1949 entry in his journal, when he was 23, Fowles writes

Being a poet, divining beauty, is like divining nature - a gift. It does not matter if ones does not create It is enough to have the poetic vision. To see the beauty hidden. As I did tonight - I felt it all exactly in a moment, such a rush of impressions that they can hardly be seized.

John Fowles, THE JOURNALS: VOLUME I, edited and with an introduction by Charles Drazin, Jonathan Cape, London, 2003, pg. 4

Fowles' best work deals with the attempt to "seize" this moment of mystical apprehension, both in his life and his fiction, as evidenced, first, in a journal entry from March 1950, and then in an epiphanic scene from THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN (1967) -

The wood is deserted and I walk quietly down the paths, listening to birds, feeling content to be in the real country again and alone, after so long. I still feel the old pantheistic sympathy, the feeling that I know everything that's going on, the delight in little things, little scenes, in the ever changing atmosphere of each second. A great tit's cap, brilliantly glossy and iridescent in the day's brightness. Jays screeching, a missel-thrush, robins, singing. Fragrant blossoms, Clumps of primroses, and the sweet taste of violets.

[ibid. pg 26]

The trees were dense with singing birds - blackcaps, whitethroats, thrushes, blackbirds, the cooing of woodpigeons Š Charles felt himself walking through the ages of a bestiary, and one of such beauty, such minute distinctness, that every leaf in it, each small bird, each song it uttered, came from a perfect world Š He stood Š astonished perhaps more at his own astonishment at this world's existing so close, so within reach of all that suffocating banality of ordinary day.

It seemed to announce a far deeper and stranger reality.

THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, p 240-250

This "deeper and stranger reality," the secret world hidden within our own mundane one, is the Mystery at the heart of John Fowles' work. It is a mystery inextricably tied to a green Eros, a woman glimpsed in the wild places, the lost domain. The eponymous French Lieutenant's Woman, Sarah Woodruff, is first seen by the novel's male protagonist Charles Smithson in "a little south-facing dell, surrounded by dense thickets of brambles and dogwood; a kind of minute green amphitheatre." Sweet woodruff is an herb used in making May Wine, traditionally drunk on May Day, the neopagan's Beltane and a day sacred to Graves' White Goddess. Sarah Woodruff indeed functions as an avatar of the Goddess or Muse, first intriguing, then obsessing, and eventually deranging Charles.

Fowles first encountered the fictional notion of the lost domain in 1963. This is when he read Alain-Fournier's short novel THE WANDERER. As a young teenager Fournier (born Henri Henri-Alban Fournier, 1886) fell under the spell of the French Symbolists; a few years later he visited London, where he was equally entranced by the written and visual work of the Pre-Raphaelites (who helped inspire the Symbolist movement). At nineteen Fournier had the same sort of fleeting, yet obsessive encounter with a young woman that derailed the fictional Charles Smithson. In 1913, a year before his death, Fournier said of her, "That was really the only being in the world who could have given me peace and repose. It is now probably that I shall never achieve peace in this world." Fate didn't give him much a chance to: a soldier in the first months of World War I, he died in an ambush at Saint-Remy on September 22, 1914.

I will admit to finding THE WANDERER thin gruel, its prose not improved by being overheated; very much an adolescent's novel, and, I think very much a male adolescent's fantasy. Seventeen-year-old Augustin Meaulnes is idolized by his younger friend Francois Seural, the book's narrator; the early part of the novel is taken up with dull schoolboy hijinks and schoolyard warfare: bullies, wicked teachers and the like. Then Meaulnes runs away, and stumbles upon a strange village that seems lost in time, medieval in its architecture and also the dress and behavior of its inhabitants. A child-wedding is being celebrated, and Meaulnes is caught up in the excitement of the preparations. He has a brief encounter with a lovely young girl named Yvonne de Galais and immediately falls in love with her. The following day Meaulnes leaves the strange village, but he spends the rest of his life in a vain quest to find the road back to the Lost Domain, to recapture the sense of enchantment of that first meeting with Yvonne, and all the potent yearning and rapturous desire of adolescence. And while he does eventually find her - though not in the village where they first met - not even marriage to Yvonne can make him happy. The poor girl dies at any rate, soon after the birth of their daughter.

Still, the novel continues to have its admirers, including the artist Jamie Wyeth, and Fowles had a profound sense of recognition upon reading it.

LE GRANDE MEAULNES. This is the first time I have read it. A strange experience, Crusoe-like, seeing those footprints in the sand, knowing that after all one is not the first on this island. Because the green ghost behind every line in Le GM is brother to that I want in THE MAGUS ... the purpose is the same. Mystery, pure mystery.

[JF JOURNALS, pg 582]

The essence of this "green ghost," the unworldly longing and sense of immersion in a deeper and stranger reality that the everyday, is summed up in a brief passage from THE WANDERER -

There he [Meaulnes] was, mysterious, a stranger in the midst of this unknown world, in the room he had chosen. What he had found surpassed all his hopes. And it was enough now for his joy to recall, in the high wind, the face of that girl who turned toward him ...

THE WANDERER, translated by Francoise Delisle, Houghton Mifflin, 1928, pg 94,

"The face of that girl who turned toward him" eerily prefigures Sarah Woodruff as Charles first sees her, standing on the quay at Lyme Regis.

She turned to look at him - or as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not so much what was positively in that face which remained with him after their first meeting, but all that was not as he expected.

Again and again, afterwards, Charles thought of that look as a lance; and to think so is of course not merely to describe an object but the effect it has.

FLW, pg 17

This piercing look is the gaze of the Muse that transfixes the observer, Graves' "next bright bolt" hurtling to freeze the artist, Medusa-like, so that s/he returns, again and again, willingly or not, to that first inspired instant of enchantment. It is the stare of The Beckoning Fair One, who in Oliver Onions' chilling story destroys the middle-aged novelist Paul Oleron when he tries to "recapture that first impression" of "the new unknown, coy, jealous, bewitching Beckoning Fair !" Onions' portrait of the doomed novelist attempting to do this is uncannily (I might say, depressingly) acute.

His fantastic attempt was instantly and astonishingly successful. He could have shouted with triumph as he entered the room; it was as if he had escaped into it. Once more, as in the days when his writing had had a daily freshness and wonder and promise for him, he was conscious of that new ease and mastery and exhilaration and release. The air of the place seemed to hold more oxygen; as if his own specific gravity had changed, his very tread seemed less ponderable. The flowers in the bowls, the fair proportions of the meadowsweet-colored panels and mouldings, the polished floor, and the loft and faintly starred ceiling, fairly laughed their welcome. Oleron actually laughed back, and spoke aloud.

"Oh, you're pretty, pretty!" he flattered it.

Then he lay down on his couch.

"The Beckoning Fair One," in WIDDERSHINS by Oliver Onions, 1911, pg. 75

Oleron has rented an old house in which to complete his novel. It is a house with an unfortunate history. The previous resident, also an artist, died a suspected suicide, though it's apparent to the reader that he has been literally consumed by the house's rapacious Muse. But there is never a sense in Onions' superb tale that the Beckoning Fair One is just a ghost, the revenant of a mere mortal woman. Rather she is a destructive, ravishing force brought to life by the artist's own obsessive desire to create; in Oleron's case, the burning need to write

a novel with a heroine so winsome, capricious, adorable, jealous, wicked, beautiful, inflaming, and altogether evil, that men should stand amazed. She was coming over him now; he knew by the alteration of the very air of the room when she was near him; and that soft thrill of bliss that had begun to stir in him never came unless she was beckoning, beckoning.

BFO, pg. 99

Fowles best describes his own experience of writing through or about his particular Beckoning Fair Ones in his 1977 essay"Hardy and the Hag" (John Fowles, WORMHOLES: ESSAYS AND OCCASIONAL WRITINGS, Jonathan Cape, 1998). It's a fascinating piece of work, despite some very silly Freudian trumpery about the origins of creativity in auto-erotic attachment of the male infant to his mother, a theory which Fowles says "helps to explain why all through more recent human history, men have seemed better adapted - or more driven - to individual artistic expression than women." I can't say if I'm better adapted than my masculine counterparts, but I'll state here that I have made ample use of muses, always male, in my own work, and hope that readers can make the great leap of faith that Fowles (as well as Robert Graves) was unable to, in imagining both male and female objects of desire.

Fowles calls his muse figure "The Well-Beloved," after the Hardy novel which inspired the essay; "a young female sexual ideal of some kind, to be attained or pursued (or denied) by himself [the writer] hiding behind some male character." The writer's obsession with this ideal becomes powerful enough to have repercussions in his daily routine. "Against this constant emotional fugue must be set the real presence of the woman the novelist spends his life with." In Fowles' case, this real presence was his wife, Elizabeth, the woman who had acted as muse for both THE MAGUS and THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN. She was also Fowles' best reader and editor, guiding him towards the famous double endings of THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN - "The mystery of Sarah Š is not answered Š In fact to my way of thinking this novel should end with no answer but only an implied one of tragedy." [JF: A LIFE IN TWO WORLDS, p 195]

John and Elizabeth Fowles remained faithful to each other during their 33-year-marriage. Still, in "Hardy and the Hag" Fowles writes about "imaginative infidelity" and the "erotic elusiveness, unattainability" of "the hunt of the Well-Beloved," that perennially doomed quest of any artist; "its attainment no more feasible than that the words on the page can become the scene they describe."

Fowles' Well-Beloved appears, in one form or another, in nearly all his works. The 19th century gave us untold examples of other Beckoning Fair Ones, including Keats' Belle Dame Sans Merci, wild-eyed and perilous, as well as the hauntingly enigmatic women who filled the canvases of the Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff,

simultaneously near to and far from the scrutiny which tried to annex her. Always, and simultaneously, vague and precise. Always and simultaneously single and double. Always and simultaneously sensual and absent, strong and delicate. Motionless, even when threatened by the serpent. Threatened by it? Its accomplice, rather.

[SYMBOLISTS AND SYMBOLISM, Robert L. Delevoy, trans. by Barabara Bray,
Rizzoli, 1978]

This sense of a being eternally straddling two worlds - the real world, and the artist's vision embodied in its presiding spirit - is what defines the muse as a liminal creature. And through his creative process - itself a liminal experience - the artist also becomes a liminal being. I think this is what gives encounters between artist and muse their sense of psychic peril: this constant passage between the borders of the real and the imagined, with the constant threat of one or the other becoming trapped - by creative sterility or simple domesticity, by madness or murderous violence - on the wrong side of the threshold.

And if all else was falling away from Oleron, gladly was he letting it go. So do we all when our Fair Ones beckon. Quite at the beginning we wink, and promise ourselves that we will put Her Ladyship through her paces, neglect her for a day, turn her own jealous wiles against her, flout and ignore her when she comes wheedling ... but in the end all falls away. She beckons, beckons, and all goes ...

BFO, pg 85

Fortunately the artist has some arrows in her own quiver to keep the Fair Ones at bay, chief among them the willingness to acknowledge, from the outset, the futility of any attempt to capture and detain a muse, on the page or in a penthouse. This is creative self-preservation on the artist's part. As Fowles puts it,

... the Well-Beloved is never a face, but rather the congeries of affective circumstances in which it is met; as soon as it inhabits one face, its erotic energy (that is, the author's imaginative energy) begins to drain away.

JF, "Hardy and the Hag"

I can attest to the success of this artistic catch-and-release program: if the creative endeavour is a battle (which it often is; for me, anyway), winning it - completing the novel, the painting, the performance - can be both exhausting and depressing: ultimately no one cares as much as the artist (certainly not our Beckoning Fair Ones), and she's left like the triumphant knights at the end of E.R. Eddison's THE WORM OURUBOROS, heartbreakingly crestfallen at the realization that their great, world-shattering war is over: NOW what are they going to do?

Fortunately a benign goddess waves her hand and, as in Valhalla, the battle begins anew. And so with writing.

The cathartic effect of tragedy bears a resemblance to the unresolved note on which some folk music ends, whereas there is something in the happy ending that resolves not only the story, but the need to embark upon further stories. If the writer's secret and deepest joy is to search for an irrecoverable experience, the ending that announces the attempt has one again failed may well seem the more satisfying.

JF, "Hardy and the Hag"

My first Beckoning Fair One made a fairly dramatic entrance thirty years ago, in a numinous dream that transformed my life. Since then others have come and gone, and sometimes even that first muse returns - older now, as I am, but still recognizable, still unsettling, still tied to the sound of the night wind in the leaves - and takes up residence in my head, not to be dislodged till I give him his place on the page. This is a good haunting: it makes for good hunting, bringing the muse to ground.

But inevitably there comes a day, or week, or month, or year, when a Fair One does not beckon. I've learned then to heed the poet Theodore Roethke's quiet statement of faith in one's own power to create -

A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

- "It was beginning winter"

Art is change, writing is change, as life is. I think the essence of the relationship between artist and muse is that it is an acknowledgement that one of us - the artist - has been changed by the latter: willingly or not; permanently, in a life's work, or for the short term , in one book, one poem, one song, one film. What remains on page or canvas is the record of that change. Muses come and go, just as artists do, but for a little while, at least - as long as the song lasts, as long as the story does - we can subvert that laws that keep the Beckoning Fair Ones in one world and ourselves in another, and shimmer briefly on the same plane.

In her life, Laura Riding fought hard to get the last word; Robert Graves stole much of her fire for THE WHITE GODDESS (and I'm glad he did), but I will give his Muse the last word here, and quote from her lovely long poem "Benedictory" - an artist's blessing if ever there was one.

The mystery wherein we
Accustomed grew as to the dark
Has now been seen enough -
I have seen, you have seen.

* * *

It seems not now distressful
Or yet too much delighted in.
It was a mystery endured
Until a fuller sense befall.

* * *

A blessing on us all, on our last folly,
That we part and give blessing.
Yet a folly to be done
A greater one to spare.

* * *

For in no wise shall it be
As it is, as it has been.
A blessing on us all,
That we shall in no wise be as we were.