Despoiling Venus by Jack Lindsay (1935)

It's strange that Lindsay's first three novels of ancient Rome are regarded popularly as a trilogy, when this one, his fourth, is just as related to the other three as they are amongst themselves. No answer for that. Anyway, he has now developed a very toothsome prose style, having left off the poetic riffing so prevalent in the previous instalment, where short stabs of sentence were used in an attempt to build up a very immediate semblance of the feel of events. One of the other major pillars of his modus is his insistence on psychology - following an individual's mind through its many changes and tensions as events pull it into and out of shape. Here that is again key, as Marcus Caelius Rufus details the topography of his affair with, and love of, Clodia. It starts with fascination and flirtation, and then develops into strong obsession, all fairly faithfully recorded by Lindsay's passionate, muscular style. Then a point is reached where Marcus is drunkenly forced into an odd action by Clodia, then reacts to having done what he's done in hindsight quite strangely, then teams up with her previously despised brother Clodius in a not quite believable way, and then nervously and unaccountably commits a murder: an extraordinary string of events where Lindsay's insistence on psychology completely undoes him. The hoops through which he has had to jump unbalance his story terribly. What I'm not sure about is how much of this is recorded history; in which case, has he developed a theory about how this series of events unfolded on the one hand, a theory about who these people were and what moved them on the other, and desperately tried to meld the two? If so, the result is a dog's dinner from a psychological point of view. His muscularity and passion keep up, which kept this reader involved, but of course my appreciation of the plot was fatally compromised. At the end, he seems aware of this, and has Marcus break from Clodia and Clodius very finally, as if coming up for air. In his meditation on what happened he puts the whole thing down to the frustration he and the already married Clodia felt at not being able to commit themselves in wedlock. It's a feeble reasoning, and a mismatch for the character of Marcus, and indeed Clodia, as they have been built up. In much that it attempts this book is successful, but ultimately it's a case of a vital element failing.

Commonplace Book

'...Then I perceived that all such weakenings are the result of self-pity, the wish to be understood by a world which is interested intensely in a million things but not at all in understanding the bruised hearts of you and me.'

from Despoiling Venus (first part) by Jack Lindsay

Commonplace Book

'...One can never repeat too often to oneself that it is one's most simple-hearted impulses which are likely to get one a bad name.'

from Despoiling Venus by Jack Lindsay (first part)

Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (1935)

This is the third historical novel by Lindsay set in the Roman world. The other two have had essentially the same modus operandi: that of setting many strands of surrounding story alongside the great events which are being recounted. This one is a little different in that it has a core storyline which the great events themselves surround. Thus the background is Antonius and Cleopatra and those final months in Alexandria waiting and wondering what Octavianus will do, with Antonius depressed and drinking too much and Cleopatra despising him, failed attempts to patch up personally and make good political moves tripping them both up. The foreground is owned though by one of Antonius' young slaves, Victor, and by a middle-class Greek girl he meets, Daphne. Daphne's father is a classics-obsessed semi-ascetic, working at the Museion, for whom Daphne figures as an appendage only. She's lonely, quickly growing up, and falls for Victor, not minding when he reveals that he's a slave. Victor is locked into all the intrigues of the court, suffers wholesale decampments in Antonius' restlessness, endures tests of his loyalty and strength, manipulates to get free time in which to meet Daphne, survives the lunge downward into depression and confusion of his master. There's another 'character' in all this which is to my mind critical - it is the ancient city of Alexandria. Victor and Daphne move around its shaded lakes with their clumps of wild trees and thickets and their twinkling sun-bathed water, its busy ochre-coloured streets with the sun baking overhead, its harbour and the rough-edged quay districts tightly packed around it, even out to the Pharos, lovingly described in its stony mystery of many levels, the big bright blue sky over all. Eventually the defeat comes, Antonius and Cleopatra are dead, as is Daphne's father, and Victor and the now heavily pregnant Daphne must set off south along the Nile, in search of a former friend of Antonius who has promised Victor a place with him on his farm, Lucilius. Along the way their boat is attacked and they escape up onto the bare desert hills, to an unfinished tomb where Daphne gives birth. And in coping with that on their own, they find the strength and inspiration to begin their new life. Every now and then Lindsay indulges himself a little too much in what I would call impressionistic riffing - short stabs of sentence, all pulled together into one paragraph, like thought-shards drifting back and forth through an idea or construction. Conversely, a lot of the time that works well and helps to make for the most emotionally satisfying and distinctly coloured of the three novels in this sequence.

Commonplace Book

'Close together, they found peace, and the warmth of oblivion. Tenderly, hardly moving. It was closeness, and surrender, the veiling of both their egoisms. Trust me, I trust you. Sweet, sweet, sweet. Bird-cry without the haunting cruelty of the bird. Peace of a kind, and a mounting sweetness. But not freedom, not the security of striding the streets of purpose. And yet a deeper purpose. And yet he wept, a little.'

from Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (Second Part, Chapter XII)

Commonplace Book

'...A world forever wailing. The present was in throes of the future and there was no rest. There was no present, only a dying past and an unborn future; and humankind stood on that cloven point, that nothingness, and tried to create happiness and loyalties, to dream of justice. Was it heroism or madness?'

from Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (Second Part, Chapter XI)

Commonplace Book

'The wandering preacher, whom the lovers had wholly forgotten, had risen from his crouching posture, and now approached. He stared at the shrinking pair from under his bushy brows.

"There is no love," he said austerely. "There is only lust. When will you attain the directness of animals and the purity of human beings undeceived by words? Love is no more than a distortion of the mind, the evil of hungry words, words that merge into one another, distorting meanings, eating away the whole face of life with their mange. In sheer lust there is meaning. But love is entirely evil, the child and the begetter of suffering! spawn of the prying, dissatisfied mind! Be humble and learn wisdom!"'

from Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (Second Part, Chapter VII)

Commonplace Book

'...For by now the night had taken on a magical aspect, neither of daylight nor of darkness, and the Sarapeion was a dream-building which dwelt always in this strange dimension of lamplight that dwarfed the earth and made all-embracing the home of the god. The centre cell was particularly frightening; the lights, the warmth, the unexplained movements of everyone, the awe of the colossal Sarapis with his curly ambrosial locks and beard, all seemed to direct attention towards - or rather to divert it too obviously from - the closed cell before which the fountain clashed its lithe belly-dance, like a bejewelled naked harem-girl, and within which surely lurked some god-ogre for whom the temple with its flame and ritual was the oven steaming the flesh of the chosen victims.'

from Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (First Part, Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'What was she thinking?

He despaired of ever knowing, forgetful how little he knew his own thoughts, how in the failing moments before sleep he glimpsed the enormous silence of dream, wherein all the world's words were only the frenzied life of a colony of insects from under a single turned-over stone, compared with the spaces of ocean and burning desert and windy mountain-crest and night of stars.'

from Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (First Part, Chapter IV)

Caesar is Dead by Jack Lindsay (1934)

This is the second of the trilogy, and a much spicier read than the first. Where that one had long periods of grim sticking-with-it, this one travels at a fair tick. There were a couple of moments where I thought it had run a little thin on steam, but on the whole it was strongly involving. This section is the story of Caesar's murder and the reactions of the main senators, power-players and the populace to it; the striving to replace him, the adoration of him, the gladness among some that his influence was over, and the regret of his passing among others, exemplified in renewed economic chances, closed off possibilities, the political-hope-and-dream-machine having its character irremediably changed. There are a whole series of relationships at the core of the book, men and women of many castes and affiliations: Antonius and his searing wife Fulvia, Amos the young Jew and his love for an Egyptian maid Karni, Gallus the poet and his drunken fascination for the reciter Cytheris. Their matchings are trouble-laden, foolish, animalistic, often fated, but always rich. Lindsay's attitude to the depiction of these presumably reveals those he had toward men and women and their partnering across the board and all through time. This book has one notable failing: the author's attempt to match the facts with invented psychology. In trying to imagine why the main players did what they did when they did Lindsay struggles to find believable meaning. A good example is the initial rise of Octavianus, who seems suddenly to come to the fore when other players' efforts are unsuccessful. Even though all around are very well versed in who could possibly have a claim to the leadership and to Caesar's name and position, Lindsay avers that Octavianus had simply been forgotten about. That being the case doesn't really bear scrutiny psychologically. But this middle novel is lively, sensual, intensely coloured and deeply enjoyable.

Commonplace Book

'...There is only one pain, she knew now, and that is not to be able to give oneself, not to be able to share one's heart; and the richest hearts of all die choked by their own overbrimming wealth, for no one can take what they offer...'

from Caesar is Dead by Jack Lindsay (Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'Alone in her bed she lay, and between waking and sleeping thought of Caesar. There had been little enjoyment is his arms, save during those days on the Nile; and yet she longed for him, no one else. Slowly the lotus of sleep closed petals about her, closed on her limbs the flower-cosmetics of her fine breeding, her glistening will. Is it the man, or the power in the man? But how separate them?

The lotus-body opened petals, restlessly dreaming the coming of Caesar.'

from Caesar is Dead by Jack Lindsay (First Part, Chapter I)

Rome For Sale by Jack Lindsay (1934)

This novel stands in sharp contrast to its predecessor, which was a sprightly inventive comedy. Here Lindsay shows his mettle in historical terms, with a complex and well-tensioned understanding of the conspiracy of Catalina to overthrow the corrupt Senate in ancient Rome, and establish a dictatorship in the name of the masses. With a vast array of characters, and his very fine understanding of the workings of their minds, and the tangents of thought brought about by the historical context, one would imagine that this second novel would be a surefire amplification of his credentials. But something perhaps in his passion for the material stymies this book, or perhaps the fault lies elsewhere. The effect is a becalming. The entire first half feels like a hopping from tile to tile and back again in a vast mosaic - the narrative drive is disturbingly missing. So while there is grandness of intent, vastness of scale, depth of vision into humanity, this enormous vehicle stalls nevertheless. Only when we reach the election, intended by Catalina as the catalyst for his actions, does the fire of onward energy match the huge intent. For a good portion of the last half he keeps this up, and then a tailoff begins. The final scenes of Catalina's death in battle are, though, stirring and beautiful.

Cressida's First Lover by Jack Lindsay (1932)

I wasn't expecting a great deal of this and was pleasantly surprised. Lindsay was the son of the more famous Norman, and had a long career of 60 years or so where he never quite reached notability in the broader sense. This, his first novel, is a strange amalgam of the tone of a 30s romp and the setting of ancient Greece. Cressida is concerned that her life is going by and no lover is presenting himself. Caught while entering a tryst with a sentry, her sailor captors whisk her off into adventure. She kills their leader, roams a foreign land, meets and beguiles a young prince, amuses herself intriguing with his grotesque father, makes jealous a prospective princess and her interfering mother, fascinates an oily advisor who plans a revolt, and escapes when everything gets a little too hot! All the while, of course, manipulating like mad to keep everybody on side. Some of her inventions and twists on a sixpence are lovely. Lindsay makes this, with elegant, well-modulated prose, a pleasure, if a slightly guilty one. I shall be interested to see whether he returns to comedy in subsequent novels - he's good at it. There are one or two moments where the prose loses control and becomes efflorescent, but on the whole this is a joy. The stuff of which TV adaptations could easily be made.