TOUT ENTIERE EROTIQUE
Oliver Knox puts The Spectator's editor
right about Racine
Ce nest plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachee: C'est Venus tout entiere a sa proie attachee.
(Phedre, Act I, scene 3.) `A VIVID image, but I would not have thought expressed with such vividness as to justify the line's fame . . . I really would like some reader to put me right' (Frank Johnson, Diary, 9 September).
I am surprised that the editor of The Spectator is so luke- warm about Phedre's way of confessing her total takeover by Venus. To me Racine's two lines, giving a glimpse of irre- sistible invasion by passionate love, deserve all the fame they have. Most implacable of goddesses, Venus buries her talons inescapably into her victims. Thanks to television wildlife pro- grammes I suppose that many may imagine some particularly disagreeable bird of prey in the Serengeti, or even Olympians being able to change their form and their usual functions at will — an outsize vulture. Nor need Venus even be beautiful in this role; only cruel, savage, unrelenting, horrid.
Lytton Strachey's epicene admiration of Racine's famous lines made my blood chill as an adolescent: still does. (Though I suppose one might remember here that some of Strachey's own celebrated sexual torments were of a different order. One thinks of his comment to the tribunal which was testing the integrity of his pacifism. What would he do if he was present when German soldiers were attempting to rape his sister? Answer: 'I should i-i-i-interp-p-p-pose myself.') Maurice Baring wrote that in Phedre, Racine gives us 'the eternal tragedy of the woman who is the prey of an involun- tary criminal passion'. A Latin equivalent of Venus tout entiere comes in Horace's Odes. It is of an almost equal power and simplicity, and I sometimes wonder if these lines inspired Racine:
In me tota ruens Venus Cyprum deseruit, nec patitur Scythis et versis animosum equis Parthum dicere nec quae nihil attinent.
Venus has deserted Cyprus [i.e. left her native island and visited me on my Sabine farm], and swoops upon me entire.
She puts up with no talk of Scythians or of Parthians proud to shoot with their horses' backs to the enemy, nor with any talk other than love. (Odes, Book 1, 19.)
A great tribute to erotic over military might. The ineluctability of sexual possession, from the masculine point of view, was expressed in a more robust, Clintonesque way by the English pornographer who wrote, 'A prick has no con- science', though we can all agree (including the editor, I hope) that Phedre's tongue was more eloquent than most modern ones.
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