[ilds] Revenge and the Persian Lady

[Bruce Redwine]

Charles, I'll go along with Eliot and his colloquial habits for historical incidents.  But I still see the situation as essential modern, contemporary, mainly because of biographical fact.  I suspect the Persian trappings are just there to throw the reader off and disguise Durrell's feelings.  Which, I think, are not at all kind in 1961, as Eve Cohen makes her "long slide into fat."  Durrell's a prude about describing sex, so too about nasty impulses.

Couldn't the lines, "He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty, / The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron" -- couldn't they come right out of Justine and apply, vindictively, to her and Eve Cohen?  And "Branding-iron!"  Are we as readers being allowed a peek into Durrell's private torture chamber?  And the disjunctive line, the anacoluthon, "It would have been simple---three paces apart!"  What does that mean?  I suggest, "It would have been simple" has the common, colloquial meaning of crime fiction, i.e., "It would have been simple" [to have hit her, stabbed her, strangled her, shot her, etc.]  I.e., some act appropriate to the man's feeling that he's been "dis-figured" by her gaze.  This is a dueling pair, three paces apart.


Bruce


-----Original Message-----
>From: slighcl <slighcl at wfu.edu>
>Sent: Feb 28, 2008 12:10 PM
>To: Bruce Redwine <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net>, ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>Subject: Re: [ilds] syllabary and codes
>
>On 2/28/2008 10:34 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
>> Why do I think the poem is contemporary with composition?  The colloquial diction for one:  "Say what you like . . . " 
>
>>         Next day he deliberately left the musical city
>>         To join a boring water-party on the lake.
>>         Telling himself 'Say what you like about it,
>>         I have been spared very much in this business.'
>
>
>I think that I prefer to allow "A Persian Lady" to be ancient or modern 
>in its historical moment, with my reading swinging back and forth 
>between those ambiguous points of reference, "/his time and ours/."
>
>Eliot is there too, Bruce, and the colloquial is a sign that he is one 
>of the shadows behind the poem. 
>
>And we should recall that Eliot used the regularly colloquial voice for 
>figures modern /and /historical--cf. 'breezy' Tiresias, who also worked 
>the typing pools of Georgian London, of course; but also the voice from 
>"The Journey of the Magi" (1936):
>
>>         'A cold coming we had of it,
>>         Just the worst time of the year[. . . .] 
>
>Eliot's sort of ventriloquism sets its taproots--dry or otherwise--in 
>the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning.

>Bill Godshalk has access to one of Durrell's unpublished limericks, "My 
>Parsee Maiden."  That limerick comes from somewhere near the same moment 
>as "A Persian Lady."  Perhaps Bill would transcribe it for our 
>entertainment?
>
>C&c.
>
>***
>> A PERSIAN LADY
>>
>> Some diplomatic mission---no such thing as 'fate' ---
>> Brought her to the city that ripening spring.
>> She was much pointed out---a Lady-in-Waiting---
>> To some Persian noble; well, and here she was
>> Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance.
>> By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches,
>> By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels.
>>
>> He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty,
>> The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron:
>> The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes;
>> How would one say 'to enflame' in her tongue,
>> He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty?
>> When their eyes met he felt dis-figured
>> It would have been simple---three paces apart!
>>
>> Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go,
>> The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes
>> Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory.
>> Next day he deliberately left the musical city
>> To join a boring water-party on the lake.
>> Telling himself 'Say what you like about it,
>> I have been spared very much in this business.'
>>
>> He meant, I think, that never should he now
>> Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow
>> Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires,
>> The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke,
>> Grey temple, long slide into fat.
>>
>> On the other hand neither would she build him sons
>> Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry
>> Which was the fashion of his time and ours.
>> She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact
>> Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins
>> In a biography the year of birth and death.
>>
>> 1964/ 1961