Glenn Hughes: an imaginary lecture

A Work In Progress 
5

Glenn Hughes gave the students some more information about Aldington. 

 

“He was only nineteen when Pound introduced him to Hilda Doolittle. She was six years older than Aldington.  They were both interested in classical literature and mythology, and they were both poets nurtured by Ezra Pound.  They got married after a honeymoon in Capri when he was 21.  H.D. was a very striking woman!  She looked fragile to the outside world, but inside she was sparkling with joy.  She was like Calypso once you had entered her space.  You could never leave until she let you go once you had started talking to her.  They had been separated about ten years when I was in Paris with them in 1928. They got on very well together then, she said he reminded her of his old pre-war self.  She wrote to me about it after she left Paris.  I was doing a book on the Imagists then and I had wanted to meet her in person.  Babette, my first wife, and I were staying in Aldington’s country cottage in England at that time and I’d come over to Paris to meet H.D.  She normally lived in Switzerland then.”

“It’s just unfortunate that birth control was more hit and miss in those days.  She humiliated Aldington by having a child with another man while he was off fighting in the trenches.  Their own child had been stillborn.  She also competed with her husband as a poet.  She compared herself to Ariadne being abandoned by Theseus in one of her poems.  She told me that Pound visited her once in the maternity hospital and said: 

“My only real criticism is that this is not my child. This tells you how close Pound and H.D. had been when they lived in Philadelphia.  In our screenplay, Pound can be the Bacchus character who rescues Ariadne.  Do you remember the myth?  Theseus had slain the Minotaur and taken Ariadne away by boat but then he abandoned her.  Let’s draw a triangle on the board.”

He took chalk and drew a triangle.  Against the points of the triangle, he wrote the names of Aldington, Pound, and H.D.   

“Now, H.D. compared herself to Ariadne.” He added Ariadne to the same point of the triangle as H.D.  “So. Theseus can go with Aldington and Bacchus with Pound,” he said, adding their names to the board.  Let’s play with this idea a little.  Can we make a screenplay out of it?  Can we embed a mythic story?  Can we be relevant to today’s world?

“I brought up Catullus before.  He once wrote a long poem that embedded the story of Theseus and Ariadne inside another myth, one about a marriage which set the stage for the Trojan War and at the end of his poem he wrote some lines that could be interpreted as highly critical of an impending marriage in Rome, that of old Pompey and Caesar’s young daughter, a marriage to cement the First Triumvirate in the last days of the Roman Republic.

“In his epyllion, Catullus embeds the story of Theseus and Ariadne within the story of Peleus and Thetis.  These are classical myths and less well known today but his, probably small, audience of highly educated readers would have known them well.  The poem starts.” Hughes explained, “by incorporating another famous story, the Argonautica, the one about Jason and Medea.  First, the Argo, supposedly the first wooden ship, on its voyage to Colchis inspires wonder in the nymphs who make themselves visible to the Argonauts.  Catullus envisages nymphs naked to the waist treading water as they admire the ship.  This causes, an Argonaut, Peleus, to fall in love with Thetis, a nymph so beautiful Prometheus was compelled to warn Zeus to leave her alone; it was destined Thetis would have a son who would be mightier than his father.  You’ll remember that turns out to be Achilles.  

"When it occurs, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis is a momentous occasion well attended by the gods.  Catullus would have assumed his audience knew the back story well.  An uninvited guest, Eris, goddess of discord, introduces a golden apple into the festivities inscribed with the words “For the Most Beautiful.”  I think you all know the story.  The resulting Judgement of Paris leads to Helen’s abduction by Paris.  This was revenge for Jason’s abduction of Medea if you believe Herodotus.  The Trojan War that followed soon thereafter led to the death of Achilles, child of Peleus and Thetis.  So, you can see, this poem becomes much more interesting if you understand the allusions Catullus is making.  He concludes by saying that the gods no longer deign to mix with mortals.  

Before he gets to this stark summary of current Rome, he has given us an analog description of the world he lives in by weaving three mythic stories together which reference three heroes, two abductions and a marriage.  Now”, he asked the class: “At the time that Catullus was writing, why was a marriage myth of interest?  We can only surmise but it seems quite likely to me that this poem has something to do with the First Triumvirate taking power in Rome where the deal was sealed with a marriage, the marriage of Caesar’s young daughter to Pompey, a man thirty years older.”

“If Catullus was born in 84 B.C., he would have been 24 at the time of the First Triumvirate in 60 B.C., a political alliance that was confirmed by a marriage.  There are records of Caesar dining at the Verona house of his father.  If his father invited Caesar to dinner and Catullus was present, that would make Catullus privy to the state of Roman politics.  Is it possible he had met Caesar’s daughter?  An interesting thought! Julia was about 18 years old when she married.  At the marriage of Pompey and Caesar’s daughter, Julia, Catullus and his father may have been present.  If they were present the Parcae, the Fates, instead of foretelling the glorious exploits of Achilles during the Trojan War, as in the Catullus epyllion, might now be predicting an imminent Civil War that would replace the Roman Republic with an Empire.  Jason, Peleus and Theseus have transformed into Crassus, the richest man in Rome then, Pompey, a war hero, and Caesar, another hero.  It is the marriage of Pompey and Caesar’s daughter, Julia, that is being celebrated without participation by any of the gods.  Of course, this is just my surmise, but,” and here he stopped to ask his class: “Don’t you think this could make a good movie?”

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

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