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Written words speak your mind
The abrasion is still healing and I am stuck with frequent applications of glop for the next week, but the infection in my eye has begun to clear remarkably and it makes a real difference. No wonder Stewart's Merlin traveled so successfully as an itinerant eye doctor, like Marcus Flavius Aquila three centuries before him. They can't exist in the same continuity if Sutcliff's Arthurian novels are to grow out of her Roman ones, but they are part of the same constellation in my head, the same nets of allusion. I had forgotten the touch of Kipling in The Hollow Hills (1973), in the lineage of the sword which Stewart does not call Excalibur: "It was easy to believe that the old smith, Weland himself, who was old before the Romans came, might have made this last artifact before he faded with the other small gods of wood and stream and river, into the misty hills, leaving the crowded valleys to the bright gods of the Middle Sea." I hope I noticed before how she makes Merlin double for the Fisher King, even to wounding him—though it is not the cause of his childlessness, which he chose long ago—in the thigh. Because I am re-reading her romantic suspense as well as her Arthuriana, I have been thinking for a couple of nights about a passage that pulled me up short when I discovered it in My Brother Michael (1959), where I hadn't remembered it at all:
I said, "It's this confounded country. It does things to one—mentally and physically and I suppose morally. The past is so living and the present so intense and the future so blooming imminent. The light seems to burn life into you twice as intensely as anywhere else I've known. I suppose that's why the Greeks did what they did so miraculously, and why they could stay themselves through twenty generations of slavery that would have crushed any other race on earth. You come here thinking you're going to look at a lot of myth-haunted ruins and picturesque peasants and you find that . . ." I stopped.
"That what?"
"No. I'm talking piffle."
"It's good piffle. Go on. What do you find?"
"You find that the tomb of Michael Lester is as moving and important as the 'tomb of Agamemnon' at Mycenae, or Byron or Venizelos or Alexander. He, and the men like him, are a part of the same picture." I stopped, and then said helplessly, "Greece. Damn it, what is it that it does to one?"
He was silent a moment, then he said, "I think the secret is that it belongs to all of us—to us of the West. We've learned to think in its terms, and to live in its laws. It's given us almost everything that our world has that is worth while. Truth, straight thinking, freedom, beauty. It's our second language, our second line of thought, our second country. We all have our own country—and Greece."
I can't agree with this passage—I have no second country, unless an imaginary one, and while it makes a change that the characters admire the present rather than just the past of Greece, besides my professional side-eye on the miraculous uniqueness of the culture, since the last time I read this novel I have become even more alienated from invocations of the inheritance of the West. And yet even if I missed most of it in school, I can't say that I grew up outside the Western canon. I've just been quoting the echoes of two empires that I got without effort toward either. I named my cat after a great trickster according to the Odyssey and Shakespeare. Here he is, grooming beautifully under the lawn chair currently residing in the summer kitchen. Even as a child, I never confused Mary Stewart with Mary Renault, but you see why they, too, constellated in my brain.
I said, "It's this confounded country. It does things to one—mentally and physically and I suppose morally. The past is so living and the present so intense and the future so blooming imminent. The light seems to burn life into you twice as intensely as anywhere else I've known. I suppose that's why the Greeks did what they did so miraculously, and why they could stay themselves through twenty generations of slavery that would have crushed any other race on earth. You come here thinking you're going to look at a lot of myth-haunted ruins and picturesque peasants and you find that . . ." I stopped.
"That what?"
"No. I'm talking piffle."
"It's good piffle. Go on. What do you find?"
"You find that the tomb of Michael Lester is as moving and important as the 'tomb of Agamemnon' at Mycenae, or Byron or Venizelos or Alexander. He, and the men like him, are a part of the same picture." I stopped, and then said helplessly, "Greece. Damn it, what is it that it does to one?"
He was silent a moment, then he said, "I think the secret is that it belongs to all of us—to us of the West. We've learned to think in its terms, and to live in its laws. It's given us almost everything that our world has that is worth while. Truth, straight thinking, freedom, beauty. It's our second language, our second line of thought, our second country. We all have our own country—and Greece."
I can't agree with this passage—I have no second country, unless an imaginary one, and while it makes a change that the characters admire the present rather than just the past of Greece, besides my professional side-eye on the miraculous uniqueness of the culture, since the last time I read this novel I have become even more alienated from invocations of the inheritance of the West. And yet even if I missed most of it in school, I can't say that I grew up outside the Western canon. I've just been quoting the echoes of two empires that I got without effort toward either. I named my cat after a great trickster according to the Odyssey and Shakespeare. Here he is, grooming beautifully under the lawn chair currently residing in the summer kitchen. Even as a child, I never confused Mary Stewart with Mary Renault, but you see why they, too, constellated in my brain.
no subject
Yes: the point is very much not that classical Greece actually sucks, but the selectivity of its appropriation as the fount of all good things. I would not have such a tire-screeching response to this passage if the narrator's question just went unanswered. The idea of coming to a place expecting it to be the tourist version of itself and finding that it's real enough to shake you to the bone is beautiful. Of course the recent history means as much as the ancient. But then the narrative gets all possessive—and the character speaking is a classics master at a grammar school, an authority; he teaches ancient Greek while the narrator knows only Latin—and it loses me, perhaps even more sharply because I am supposed to be in the same position as the speaker. I don't dispute the inheritance of empire, but I reserve the right to feel ambivalent about it.
Britons are inheritors of Greece except when there's some other trait that's been apportioned by the lineage makers elsewhere that they want to claim: the something-something of the Celts, the something-something of the Germanic tribes, etc.
The melting pot of America!
All human culture is the heritage of all of us, as humans. You don't have to have a genetic connection to love it.
I agree with you. I love a lot of things I have no blood-right to and for obvious reasons tend to get rather worried when people invoke heredity as the most important reason to care about something.
Considering some other place your "second country," on the other hand, in some kind of woo-woo special exclusionary way, based on your whacked-out cherry picking of its cultural signifiers and your old-boy superiority-complex connection-making, is totally something else again. Do Not Recommend.
The novel really is not so proprietary elsewhere, which was one of the reasons this passage surprised me (the other being that I didn't remember it when I have been reading her books for almost thirty years and some of them like The Crystal Cave are functionally ingrained in my working memory). If any of the suck fairies posited by Jo Walton visit Mary Stewart, generally I think of them as falling in the line of period-typical sexism, although a number of her novels even push back strongly on that front. But this was just whang bang national chauvinism with an extra side of that sort of self-aggrandizing philhellenism; there's an anti-communist strain in the novel, too, which I didn't register for years but which underscores the reference to "the West." Stewart was obviously not going around with a μολὼν λαβέ tattoo or anything, but it jars.