Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [12]
The book, Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso – bedside romance of every tolerably well-educated girl of Byron’s day – now requires, if not excuse, at least some sort of explanation. Twenty years before, writing a book about Robert Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy, I had need to glance at Ariosto’s epic, Burton being something of an Ariosto fan. Harington’s version (lively, but inaccurate) was then hard to come by; another (less racy, more exact), just as suitable for the purpose. Although by no means all equally readable, certain passages of the poem left a strong impression. Accordingly, when a new edition of Harington’s Orlando Furioso appeared, I got hold of it. I was turning the pages that evening with the sense – essential to mature enjoyment of any classic – of being entirely free from responsibility to pause for a second over anything that threatened the least sign of tedium.
In spite of the title, Orlando’s madness plays a comparatively small part in the narrative’s many convolutions. This does not mean Ariosto himself lacked interest in that facet of his story. On the contrary, he is profoundly concerned with the cause – and cure – of Orlando’s mental breakdown. What happened? Orlando (Charlemagne’s Roland), a hero, paladin, great man, had gone off his head because his girl, Angelica, beautiful, intelligent, compassionate, everything a nice girl should be – so to speak female counterpart of Orlando himself – had abandoned him for a nonentity. She had eloped with a good-looking utterly boring young man. Ariosto allows the reader to remain in absolutely no doubt as to the young man’s total insignificance. The situation is clearly one that fascinates him. He emphasizes the vacuity of mind shown by Angelica’s lover in a passage describing the young man’s carving of their intertwined names on the trunks of trees, a whimsicality that first reveals to Orlando himself his own banal predicament.
Orlando’s ego (his personal myth, as General Conyers would have said) was murderously wounded. He found himself altogether incapable of making the interior adjustment required to continue his normal routine of living the Heroic Life. His temperament allowing no half measures, he chose, therefore, the complete negation of that life. Discarding his clothes, he lived henceforth in deserts and waste places, roaming hills and woods, gaining such sustenance as he might, while waging war against a society he had renounced. In short, Orlando dropped out.
Ariosto describes how one of Orlando’s friends, an English duke named Astolpho, came to the rescue. Riding a hippogryph (an intermediate beast Harington calls his ‘Griffith Horse’, like the name of an obscure poet), Astolpho undertook a journey to the Moon. There, in one of its valleys, he was shown all things lost on Earth: lost kingdoms: lost riches: lost reputations: lost vows: lost hours: lost love. Only lost foolishness was missing from this vast stratospheric Lost Property Office, where by far the largest accretion was lost sense. Although he had already discovered in this store some of his lost days and lost deeds, Astolpho was surprised to come across a few of his own lost wits, simply because he had never in the least missed them. He had a duty to perform here, which was to bring back from his spacetrip the wits (mislaid on an immeasurably larger scale than his own) of his old friend and comrade-in-arms, Orlando. It was Astolpho’s achievement – if so to be regarded – to restore to Orlando his former lifestyle, make feasible for him the resumption of the Heroic Life.
Journeys to the Moon were in the news at that moment (about a year before the astronauts actually landed there) because Pennistone had just published his book on Cyrano de Bergerac, whose Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune he used to discuss, when we were in the War Office together. Pennistone was more interested in his subject as philosopher and heresiarch than space-traveller, but, all the same, Cyrano had to be admitted as an example of a remark once made by X. Trapnel: ‘A novelist writes what he is. That is equally true of authors who deal with mediaeval romance or journeys to the Moon.