Ancient Greece has Elegant Variations for the Beast with Two Backs.

Since that which Helen did and ended Troy . . .*

Apart from drawing on the limitless resources of a first class scholar-brain, poet Robert Graves in his Greek Myths (1955) is a master of the the Elegant Variation (i.e. the ‘practice of never using the same word twice in the same sentence or passage,’ according to Fowler), in this instance the reluctance of Graves’s poetic impulse to repeat the verbing of the act of coitus. Yet it’s a unique effect achieved by him in blunt worldly English prose. And in his poetry, too, these characteristic soldierly conceits in plainest English may be observed and relished. 

 

A typical bravura performance is Graves’s cautionary verse, Down, Wanton, Down! where he writes, ‘Love may be blind, but Love at least / Knows what is man and what mere beast . . . ’  There’s no cheap innuendo but the wit of a would-be lover laying siege to his intended and ‘. . . sworn to reach / The ravelin and effect a breach . . .’

 

A shaving mirror Heracles.

These examples of Graves’s poetic facility are as inventive as the seducer Zeus’s metamorphosing deceptions. Zeus, libidinous son of a Titan, and husband to his sister, Hera, is a shape-shifting lover to innumerable ensnared victims with whom he ‘consorts’. And, of course, we may imagine Graves’s identification with Olympian gods and heroes is the more intense for his resemblance to Heracles, son of Zeus and legendary lover,  for surely the similarity did not escape his notice each time he regarded his own flattened nose in his shaving mirror (‘Crookedly broken nose – low tackling caused it . . .’) 

 

Heracles . . . bellicose warrior with flattened nose.

 

Fifty nights of Herculean bed-hopping.

Doubtless, the resemblance did not end at Graves’s nose. Graves’s identification with the legendary Heracles/Hercules can be measured by the zest with which the poet relates Hercules’s Thirteenth Labour: ‘Heracles lodged at Thespiaie for fifty nights running.’ Thespius, king of Thespiae, ‘. . . had fifty daughters’ [and] ‘fearing that they might make unsuitable matches, he determined that every one of them should have a child by Heracles . . . Some say, however, that he enjoyed them all in a single night . . . ’

 

(Note: Lest the charge of flippancy be levelled against me for these musings on the fate of women at the hands of those who return triumphant from the martial field, please refer to the Soviet Weekly for January 17 1946 and certain testimonies from demobilised soldiers returning from the Manchzhurskaya Strategicheskaya Nastupatelnaya Operaciya (Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation) of the previous year. https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/09/correction-notice-soviet-weekly-january.html

 

So, for your interest, here then are itemised the robust demotic verbing Robert Graves (a venerated WW1 combatant) deploys in his Myths, though it’s entirely possible there are other not dissimilar usages in his masterly and soldierly despatches of salacious goings-on reported from the Heights of Olympus I have regrettably overlooked.

bed with

bedded

begot on her

caught at last and got with child

[with whom] he companied 

couple with

courted by

covered her

do as he pleased with her

enjoyed each other

tried to force her

[woman is] no more than an inert furrow

[in which] the husbandsman plants his seed

[with whom] he lay for nine nights

lay together

forced her to lie with him

forcibly married

mounted

on whom he begot

outrage her

taken to wife

took his pleasure (cf. verb pleasure)

touched her to some purpose

trod her triumphantly (Zeus in guise of swan)

ravished her

violated her

violent love made to her

had his will of 

yielded to embraces

 

 

*Sonnet VI (Fatal Interview, sonnet sequence 1931) by Edna St. Vincent Millay. 

Post scriptum August 4 2024 : The obituary appeared this month of the Surrealist artist/magician/wildman, Salford-born Tony Shiels, who once exhibited in St Ives a work called The Two-Backed Beast constructed from a piano strapped to a harmonium, which he doused with turpentine and set alight . . . at once a simile and a metaphor for consummation, if my reading of his vision is correct.

 

 

The Virtue of Poverty

 A naked bulb

sheds more

light

 

                                                                                                                                             Photo: Derekskey Flickr Creative Commons

He took her soft hand. It felt cold; the contraction of her heart had stopped her blood circulating. He squeezed it repeatedly, as if passing a secret message. She wasn't expecting this – or so she pretended – and tried to take her hand away. But he did not let her. 

‘What’ve you done?’ 

‘We’ll discuss that later.’ 

‘But you haven’t tried to get in touch with me.’ 

He bent towards her and kissed her cheek as he whispered in her ear, ‘Later . . . later . . .’ 

‘But this is what I’ve come for.’ 

‘You’ll get what you’re after . . . but later . . .’

She opened her mouth to speak but he stopped her with a long and heavy kiss saying sharply, ‘Later.’ 

Nature played one of her infinite tunes with joyful bravura, which seemed like a miracle. But soon the tune died away receding into oblivion and leaving behind a suspicious silence and a feeling of langour full of sadness. He lay on his side on the bed while she stayed where she was on the settee, exposing her slip and the drops of sweat on her forehead and neck to the unshaded light of the electric bulb. He looked at nothing and wished for nothing, as if he had accomplished what was required of him on earth. When his eyes turned in her direction, they denied her completely, as though she had been some strange object sprung from the womb of night, and not that enchanting person who had set him on fire: a dumb thing with no history and no future. He said to himself that the game of desire and revulsion was no more than an exercise in death and resurrection, an advance perception of the inevitable tragedy, matching in its grandeur such fleeting revelations of the unknown, in its infinite variety, as are granted. 

Extract from      
    حضرةالمحترم     
 Respected Sir (1975)     
by     
Naguib Mahfouz     
(Nobel Prize in Literature 1988)   

 

Citation for Arabian narrative art.

Naguib Mahfouz . . .‘ through works rich in nuance – now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous – has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind.’ His ‘authorship deals with some of life’s fundamental questions, including the passage of time, society and norms, knowledge and faith, reason and love. He often uses his hometown of Cairo as the backdrop for his stories . . . ’

Nobel Prize citation.

Antidote to ‘polemicised literature’?

Certainly, the 1975 novel quoted above is profound in describing the anguish of a low-born aspirant striving – ultimately in vain – to compete in a rigidly hierarchical administration of ‘networkers’ in which preferment depends less on merit and more on the caste system of a well-connected elite, a condition of existence universal in its occurrence by its being unconfined by cultural boundaries. In this regard, one is reminded of Nobel laureate (1972), Heinrich Böll, whose novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (or, How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead), an exemplar of simple unadorned prose, has the power to similarly inspire empathetic recognition worldwide without inviting the label of ‘polemicised literature’.

See also

The Utility of Art as a Social Function according to Heinrich Böll

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-utility-of-art-as-social-function.html