The best of the worst
Moralising thus on the awful warning implicit in the shelf-life of books once deemed luminous with eternal verities, I dusted off my old Everyman of Edward Bulwer Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii, the novel which in 1834 'involved society in the raptures of an immense sensation'. Tourists raced off to Italy demanding to be shown the exact location of its most thrilling episodes, classical scholars gravely commended its archaeological accuracy, and no less than nine German musicians based theatrical compositions on the story, its title lifted in any case from an opera by Giovanni Pacini produced in Naples sever- al years earlier.
The drama is there for the taking. Glau- cus, a rich young Athenian idler living in Pompeii, loves the beautiful Ione, whose brother Apaecides has fallen under the influence of the sinsister Alexandrian magus Arbaces. Poor deluded Apaecides is merely a pawn in the wizard's grand stratagem for ensnaring Ione and carrying her off to Egypt, where his mystical plans for world domination can be carried out unhindered. Having tried to ravish her, he then kills Apaecides and pins the murder on Glaucus, who is condemned to face a hungry lion in the arena. When, in the nick of time, a vital witness denounces Arbaces before a crown maddened by the lion's sur- prising lack of interest in its prey, Vesuvius chooses this moment to erupt. It isn't, I fancy, spoiling the climax too much to add that Glaucus and Ione do not end up as fragments of pumice-stone.
Like almost everything by Lytton The Last Days of Pompeii is an infuriating mix- ture of the slipshod and the vulgar with a brilliance which now and then, viewed in the proper light, looks as near as dammit like genius. No wonder Dickens took hints from him, or that he was later admired by writers as far off in outlook and discourse as Thomas Mann and Jorge Luis Borges.
You'd scarcely guess this from the narra- tive's periodic lurches into laborious histor- ical reconstruction or from Lytton's employment of a style which hurtles us towards an absolute empyrean of tushery. The plodding authenticity of Diomed's din- ner party in Book IV, full of 'World of Interiors' detail about 'seats veneered with tortoiseshell and ornamented with costly embroideries' and 'hyssop for the finishing lavation', is hardly more tolerable than hearing Arbaces exclaim, 'Queen of climes undarkened by the eagle's wing, unravaged by his beak, I bow before thee in homage and in awe' or Tone's retort, 'Thou ravest! These mystic declamations are suited . rather to some palsied crone selling charms in the market place.'
Yet underneath the thick layers of pinch- beck, Bristol paste and greasepaint lies another book entirely, a work of a far greater prescience and complexity than we might guess from the tawdry costume drama being played out in the foreground. What had impressed visitors to Pompeii from its earliest discovery was the tangible immediacy of a daily life whose most tri- fling details the boiling lava and storms of volcanic ash, by smothering, had preserved for ever. Formerly so lofty in its remote- ness, the classical past suddenly grew uncomfortably close and 'of the earth, earthy'.
The Last Days of Pompeii has barely begun before we realise that its setting is the reign of William IV rather than the age of the Emperor Titus. The hero Glaucus and his effete patrician friends, with their pomaded locks and designer tunics, are the elegant loungers of post-Regency St James's, just as 'one's muttonheaded rival Julia, fussing over hairdressers and scent bottles, comes straight off the dance floor at Almack's. The blink of an eye turns the noble gladiator Lydon and his sparring partners into a swell mob of modern prize- fighters, while Pansa the aedile, grubbing for votes as the people's friend, may sound like a parliamentary cliché but is by the same token timelessly recognisable.
The Roman fancy dress allows Lytton to charge the erotic atmosphere in ways which subvert the book's more solemnly avowed purposes as a historical reconstruction. Arbace's attempted seduction of Ione takes place against a backdrop of shifting shad- ows, hazy visions and cloying perfumes. The blind waif Nydia, whose intervention becomes crucial at various moments in the plot, is driven as much by physical desire for a Glaucus she can apprehend only through her remaining senses as by any more idealistic impulses. Elsewhere, a pow- erful whiff of homoeroticism breezes across the narrative. Lydon, it is implied, ought to vanquish his gladiatorial opponent Tetraides simply because he is the tastier- looking, and when Glaucus, oiled and near- naked, strides into the arena to face the sulky lion, the crowd positively drools.
It is the character of Arbaces, however, who most obviously intrigues his creator and whose darkening menace points towards Lytton's deeper aim in writing the book. The Egyptian's 'otherness', to use the fashionable term, is classic. He is alienated from the Pompeians not merely by looking so blatantly like a foreigner, but through his explicit scorn for the supernatural, for ritual as anything more than cosmetic, for faith as an obtuse credulity. What sur- rounds him, however crudely, with fear and fascination is the lonely, friendless dimen- sion of moral autonomy in which he has chosen to live.
Whether after all Lytton meant Arbaces as anything greater than the villain of a murder story is beside the point. Art often intends more than it conceives, and Arbaces, irreligious, anarchic world-shaker, belongs to the book's broader vision of an imminent new age, more serious, more confident, yet fraught with unimagined doubts and fears. Thus even the early Christians, joined at length by Glaucus and Ione, are treated ambivalently, as a bunch of gloomy evangelicals offering the dubious promise of martyrdom in exchange for sal- vation. Over them all hangs the baleful smoke of Vesuvius, harbinger not just of doom to Lytton's own generation of cyni- cal, world-weary London Pompeians, but of the turbulent Victorian lava-flow poised to rush in upon it. Don't junk your Last Days. It may look like a tipful of tosh, but of all bad books it is surely the best.
Jonathan Keates
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