Lost in the Funhouse (25 page)

So, so: the rest of Part One would’ve shown the minstrel, under the eunuch’s tutelage, becoming more and more a professional artist until he’s Clytemnestra’s pet entertainer. A typical paragraph runs:
We got on, the Queen and I, especially when the Paris-thing blew up and Agamemnon started conscripting his sister-in-law’s old boyfriends. Clytemnestra wasn’t impressed by all the spear-rattling and the blather of National Honor, any more than I, and couldn’t’ve cared less what happened to Helen. She’d been ugly duckling in the house of Tyndareus, Clytie, second prize in the house of Atreus; she knew Agamemnon envied his brother, and that plenty of Trojan
slave-girls would see more of the Family Jewels, while he was avenging the family honor, than
she’d
seen in some while. Though she’d got a bit hard-boiled by life in Mycenae, she was still a Grade-A figure of a woman; it’s a wonder she didn’t put horns on him long before the war.…

In addition to their expository function, this and like passages establish the minstrel’s growing familiarity and preoccupation with affairs of court. His corresponding professional sophistication, at expense of his former naive energy, was to be rendered as a dramatical correlative to the attrition of his potency with Merope (foreshadowed by the earlier ring-business and the Chief Minstrel’s eunuchhood), or vice versa. While still proud of her lover’s success, Merope declares in an affecting speech that she preferred the simple life of the goat pasture and the ditto songs he sang there, which now seem merely to embarrass him. The minstrel himself wonders whether the changes in his life and work are for the better: the fact is—as he makes clear on the occasion of their revisiting the herd—that having left the country but never, despite his success, quite joined the court, he feels out of place now in both. Formerly he sang of bills and nans as Daphnises and Chloes; latterly he sings of courtly lovers as bucks and does. His songs, he fears, are growing in some instances merely tricksy, in others crankish and obscure; moreover, the difficulties of his position in Mycenae have increased with his reputation: Agamemnon presses on the one hand for anti-Trojan songs in the national interest, Clytemnestra on the other for anti-Iliads to feed her resentment. Thus far he’s contrived a precarious integrity by satirizing his own dilemma, for example—but arthritis is retiring the old eunuch, and our narrator has permitted himself to imagine that he’s among the candidates for the Chief-Minstrelship, despite his youth: should he be so laureled, the problem of quid pro quo might become acute. All these considerations notwithstanding (he concludes), one can’t pretend to an innocence outgrown or in other wise retrace one’s steps, unless by coming full circle. Merope doesn’t reply; the minstrel attempts to entertain her with a new composition,
but neither she nor the goats (who’d used to gather when he sang) seem much taken by it. The rest of the visit goes badly.

2

Part Two opens back in Mycenae, where all is a-bustle with war preparations. The minstrel, in a brilliant trope which he predicts will be as much pirated by later bards as his device of beginning in the middle, compares the scene to a beehive; he then apostrophizes on the war itself:

The war, the war! To be cynical of its warrant was one thing—bloody madness it was, whether Helen or Hellespont was the prize—and my own patriotism was nothing bellicose: dear and deep as I love Argolis, Troy’s a fine place too, I don’t doubt, and the Trojan women as singable as ours. To Hades with wars and warriors: I had no illusions about the expedition.

Yet I wanted to go along! Your dauber, may be, or your marble-cracker, can hole up like a sybil in a cave, just him and the muse, and get a lifeswork done; even Erato’s boys, if they’re content to sing twelve-liners all their days about Porphyria’s eyebrow and Althea’s navel, can forget the world outside their bedchambers. But your minstrel who aspires to make and people worlds of his own had better get to know the one he’s in, whether he cares for it or not. I believe I understood from the beginning that a certain kind of epic was my fate: that the years I was to spend, in Mycenae and here
[
i.e.
, here, this island, where we are now],
turning out clever lyrics, satires, and the like, were as it were apprenticeships in love, flirtation-trials to fit me for master-husbandhood and the siring upon broad-hipped Calliope, like Zeus upon Alcmena, of a very Heracles of fictions. “First fact of our generation,” Agamemnon called the war in his recruitment speeches; how should I, missing it, speak to future times as the voice of ours?

He adds:
Later I was to accept that I wasn’t of the generation
of Agamemnon, Odysseus, and those other giant brawlers
(
in simple truth I was too young to sail with the fleet
),
nor yet of Telemachus and Orestes, their pale shadows. To speak for the age, I came to believe, was less achievement than to speak for the ageless; my membership in no particular generation I learned to treasure as a passport out of history, or exemption from the drafts of time. But I begged the King to take me with him, and was crestfallen when he refused. No use Clytemnestra’s declaring
(
especially when the news came in from Aulis that they’d cut up lphigenia
)
it was my clearsightedness her husband couldn’t stick, my not having hymned the bloody values of his crowd; what distressed me as much as staying home from Troy was a thing I couldn’t tell her of: Agamemnon’s secret arrangement with me
 … his reflections upon and acceptance of which end the episode—or
chapter
, as I call the divisions of my unversed fictions. Note that no mention is made of Merope in this excursus, which pointedly develops a theme (new to literature) first touched on in Part One: the minstrel’s yen for a broader range of life-experience. His feeling is that having left innocence behind, he must pursue its opposite; though his conception of “experience” in this instance is in terms of travel and combat, the metaphor with which he figures his composing-plans is itself un-innocent in a different sense.

The truth is that he and his youthful sweetheart find themselves nightly more estranged. Merope is unhappy among the courtiers and musicians, who speak of nothing but Mycenaean intrigues and Lydian minors; the minstrel ditto among everyone else, now that his vocation has become a passion—though he too considers their palace friends mostly fops and bores, not by half so frank and amiable as the goats. The “arrangement” he refers to is concluded just before the King’s departure for Aulis; Agamemnon calls for the youth and without preamble offers him the title of Acting Chief Minstrel, to be changed to Chief Minstrel on the fleet’s return. Astonished, the young man realizes, as after his good fortune at the Lion’s Gate, how much his expectations have in fact been desperate dream:

“
I … I accept
[I have him cry gratefully, thus becoming the first author in the world to reproduce the stammers and hesitations of actual human speech. But the whole conception of a literature faithful to daily reality is among the innovations of this novel opus]
!
“—whereupon the King asks “one small favor in return.” Even as the minstrel protests, in hexameters, that he’ll turn his music to no end beyond itself, his heart breaks at the prospect of declining the title after all:

Whereto, like windfall wealth, he had at once got used.

Tut, Agamemnon replies: though he personally conceives it the duty of every artist not to stand aloof from the day’s great issues, he’s too busy coping with them to care, and has no ear for music anyhow. All he wants in exchange for the proffered title is that the minstrel keep a privy eye on Clytemnestra’s activities, particularly in the sex and treason way, and report any infidelities on his return.

Unlikeliest commission
[the minstrel exclaims to you at this point, leaving ambiguous which commission is meant]
! The King and I were nowise confidential; just possibly he meant to console me for missing the fun in Troy
(he’d
see it so
)
by giving me to feel important on the home front. But chances are he thought himself a truly clever fellow for leaving a spy behind to watch for horns on the royal brow, and what dismayed me was less the ingenuousness of that plan—I knew him no Odysseus—as his assumption that from me he had nothing to fear! As if I were my gelded predecessor, or some bugger of my fellow man
(
no shortage of
those
in the profession
),
or withal so unattractive Clytemnestra’d never give me a tumble! And I a lyric poet, Aphrodite’s very barrister, the Queen’s Chief Minstrel!

No more is said on this perhaps surprising head for the present; significantly, however, his reluctance to compromise his professional integrity is expressed as a concern for what Merope will think. On the other hand, he reasons, the bargain has nothing to do with his art; he’ll compose what he’ll compose whether laureled or un, and a song fares well or ill irrespective of its maker. In the long run Chief-Minstrelships and the like are
meaningless; precisely therefore their importance in the short. Muse willing, his name will survive his lifetime; he will not, and had as well seize what boon the meanwhile offers. He accepts the post on Agamemnon’s terms.

Part Three, consequently, will find the young couple moved to new lodgings in the palace itself, more affluent and less happy. Annoyance at what he knows would be her reaction has kept the minstrel from confiding to his friend the condition of his Acting Chief Minstrelship; his now-nearly-constant attendance on the

No use, this isn’t working either, we’re halfway through, the end’s in sight; I’ll never get to where I am; Part Three, Part Three, my crux, my core, I’m cutting you out; _____; there, at the heart, never to be filled, a mere lacuna.

4

The trouble with us minstrels is, when all’s said and done we love our work more than our women. More, indeed, than we love ourselves, else I’d have turned me off long since instead of persisting on this rock, searching for material, awaiting inspiration, scrawling out in nameless numbhood futile notes … for an
Anonymiad
, which hereforth, having made an Iphigenia of Chapter Three, I can transcribe directly to the end of my skin. To be moved to art instead of to action by one’s wretchedness may preserve one’s life and sanity; at the same time, it may leave one wretcheder yet.

My mad commission from Agamemnon, remember, was not my only occupation in that blank chapter; I was also developing my art, by trial, error, and industry, with more return than that other project yielded. I examined our tongue, the effects wrought in it by minstrels old and new and how it might speak eloquentest for me. I considered the fashions in art and ideas, how perhaps to enlist their aid in escaping their grip. And I studied myself, musewise at least: who it was spoke through the
bars of my music like a prisoner from the keep; what it was he strove so laboriously to enounce, if only his name; and how I might accomplish, or at least abet, his unfettering. In sum I schooled myself in all things pertinent to master-minstrelling—save one, the wide world, my knowledge whereof remained largely secondhand. Alas: for where Fancy’s springs are unlevee’d by hard Experience they run too free, flooding every situation with possibilities until Prudence and even Common Sense are drowned.

Thus when it became apparent that Clytemnestra was indeed considering an affair—but with Agamemnon’s cousin, and inspired not by the passion of love, which was out of her line, but by a resolve to avenge the sacrifice of Iphigenia—and that my folly had imperiled my life, my title, and my Merope, I managed to persuade myself not only that the Queen might be grateful after all for my confession and declaration, but that Merope’s playing up to coarse Aegisthus in the weeks that followed might be meant simply to twit me for having neglected her and to spur my distracted ardor. A worldlier wight would’ve fled the
polis:
I hung on.

And composed! Painful irony, that anguish made my lyre speak ever eloquenter; that the odes on love’s miseries I sang nightly may have not only fed Clytemnestra’s passions and inspired Aegisthus’s, but brought Merope’s untimely into play as well, and wrought my downfall! He was no Agamemnon, Thyestes’s son, nor any matchwit for the Queen, but he was no fool, either; he assessed the situation in a hurry, and whether his visit to Mycenae had been innocent or not to begin with, he saw soon how the land lay, and stayed on. Ingenuous, aye, dear Zeus, I was ingenuous, but jealousy sharpens a man’s eyes: I saw his motive early on, as he talked forever of Iphigenia, and slandered Helen, and teased Merope, and deplored the war, and spoke as if jestingly of the power his city and Clytemnestra’s would have, joined under one ruler—all the while deferring to the Queen’s judgments, flattering her statecraft, asking her counsel on administrative matters … and smacking lips loudly
whenever Merope, whom he’d demanded as his table-servant at first sight of her, went ‘round with the wine.

Me too he flattered, I saw it clear enough, complimenting my talent, repeating Clytemnestra’s praises, marveling that I’d made so toothsome a conquest as Merope. By slyly pretending to assume that I was the Queen’s gigolo and asking me with a wink how she was in bed, he got from me a hot denial I’d ever tupped her; by acknowledging then that a bedmate like Merope must indeed leave a man itchless for other company, he led me to hints of my guiltful negligence in that quarter. Thereafter he grew bolder at table, declaring he’d had five hundred women in his life and inviting Clytemnestra to become the five hundred first, if only to spite Agamemnon, whom he frankly loathed, and Merope the five hundred second, after which he’d seduce whatever other women the palace offered. Me, to be sure, he laughed, he’d have to get rid of, or geld like certain other singers; why didn’t I take a trip somewhere, knock about the world a bit, taste foreign cookery and foreign wenches, fight a few fist-fights, sire a few bastards? ‘Twould be the making of me, minstrelwise! He and the Queen meanwhile would roundly cuckold Agamemnon, just for sport of it, combine their two kingdoms, and, if things worked out, give hubby the ax and make their union permanent: Clytemnestra could rule the roost, and he’d debauch himself among the taverns and Meropes of their joint domain.