Love's revenges
Germaine Greer
In the Lion's Mouth Kathleen Raine (Hamish Hamilton £4.95) Once sitting with her husband on a heather moor, Kathleen Raine's mother realised, as any LSD user might do, that the moor was 'alive'. Her daughter, born in Ilford, saw Ilford as dead and yearned for a different landscape, a life more 'real' than the lives of men and women. Hers cannot be called dissatisfaction with reality, for as a trained biologist, she exulted over inner realities of animal, vegetable and mineral. She saw no parallel to their fine and musical organisation in the chaotic, inexpressive lives of the merely human. The vast mass of human • beings seemed to her as they seemed to Yeats, Pound and T.S. Eliot, superficial, degraded, only half alive.
The third and last volume of Kathleen Raine's autobiography deals with her love for Gavin Maxwell, in whom she saw, not a human being, but the landscape of her childhood, which she set in Northumbria, far from semi-urban Ilford, all sky, wind and wild beauty.
I found in him what I had found in no other person, a knowledge which had always been mine: not a scientist's love of nature (though he was a naturalist of some distinction) but a knowledge by participation, the knowledge nature has of itself; for both of us nature had been, and still was, a region of consciousness. 'We two were born on the self-same hill'; and there is something in the very light, the taste of wet wind, clouds, moors sweet with heather or white under snow, that in him and me alike had wedded our imaginations to a certain kind of place, and to no other; as curlews will nest only on moors, gull and guillemot on rocky ledges by the sea.
Kathleen Raine committed herself to Gavin Maxwell wholly, creating the ideal Platonic love, feeding it incessantly in her imagination, assuming communion wherever she wished it to exist, unaware not only of the essential otherness of her love object, but even of the vindictive forces within her own soul which would punish her for such overweening disregard of their claims.
One cannot wonder that Maxwell does not emerge as a character, for the poet's absorption in the archetypes of her imagining precludes the emergence of any character, even her own.
The unregenerated reader, swept off his feet by visionary prose, cannot quite suppress the furtive wish for a photograph or two upon which to hang these flying pennants for labels, a curriculum vitae to relieve his thrice-encircled, honey-dew-fed dazzlement. Such vulgar statistical intelligence is not offered. Kathleen Raine's preoccupation might be called inner truth, if it were not for the fact that the inner Kathleen Raine is quite unknown to herself, and must be guessed at by the reader in despite of her own assertions. In the Lion's Mouth is a masterpiece of unconsciousness, unconsciousness of the rights, claims, feelings and treacheries of others, but more bewilderingly, total unconsciousness of her own motives, the mire and blood of her own human veins.
Kathleen Raine's notion of the real her is no one which father, mother, husbands, lovers or even children could share: The person the world may have seen has been rather a cloak of invisibility than my real presence, perhaps more so than with most people, because so little of my life has been lived where I wished, or with whom I wished; so that I must often have seemed elusive and undependable.
She wrote this at the beginning of her first volume, Farewell Happy Fields, thus revealing herself to all those who had supported her, as more elusive and undependable than ever. What she saw as her.real self was never to be realised: that she denied the reality of the self that hurt others is the sin that her silent years must expiate.
For all her cultured ruthlessness, Kathleen Raine was as naïve as any despised lifordian. A woman of the world could never have been so taken in by Gavin Maxwell's caveat: 'He told me, early in our acquaintance, that he could not love me with erotic desire . . . He was, he explained to me, homosexual.'
When the sophisticated homosexual rep resents himself as the helpless victim of an immutable disability, he is lying. So, it proved, was Gavin Maxwell, who had then a mistress, and later married. He was, as many homosexuals are, capable of heterosexual intercourse: he preferred another kind. He ought not to have exploited the fantasy passion of the poet, but it suited him to and he did. Raine laidhis flattering unction to her soul, imagining vainly that she was the woman he would have loved if he had been able. She became his undemanding helpmeet, sustained only by her notion of their love, which she elaborated tirelessly, usually in Maxwell's absence. The reader cringes at Maxwell's bitchery and wonders helplessly why the poet could not see it, except when he said during a harrowing scene, 'Poor Kathleen, you look like a fat squaw'. Hoist with the petard of her own snobbism, she cannot even protest when he excludes her from the ranks of his equals.
Of course, Mijbil, Maxwell's pet otter, met his death while being cared for by Kathleen Raine, and of course she cursed Maxwell by the rowan tree, which was for her the symbol of their vatic communion, as who wouldn't? Better to be the witch who destroyed his life, than the fat squaw who house-sat when he had more exciting game in mind.
The poet's acceptance of, indeed, her insistence of the role of witch, is ostensibly part of her allegiance to ancient, mystical forms of cognition. To the jaundiced reader it is of the ilk of popular astrology, tablerapping, telepathy and general softheadedness, like the low poeticism into which Kathleen Raine, otherwise an imperious, demanding, fastidious soul, occasionally allows herself to sink.
In the Lion's Mouth tells us of the concluding stages of the voyaging of a soul: it is perhaps because Kathleen Raine interpreted her beginning in the light of her end that we feel that she has got nowhere. The only experiences that interest her are those that Freud would have called 'oceanic', the religious apperception of the onenes'S of all created things. Kathleen Raine is a mystic without a dogma, a bard without a myth, unless it be her own witchhood. Her tragic story is the best evidence for her own view of the degeneracy of our society, what she calls the leaf-fall of civilisation'. That a woman of such emotional power and wild courage, with such a gift, should turn and turn fruitlessly in search of a god worthy of her fealty is truly appalling. Even while Kathleen Raine is transfixed by the 'deathless winged delight' that is the purpose and satisfaction of her poet's existence, she is desolate. There is no spirit in her machine, although the machine may itself be alive. She does not, will not carry, her holy joy in created things from the relatively simple orchestrations of the moors and cliffs, to the diapason closing full in man. Her demands of human beings are slighting, blasphemous: her tragedy is the tragedy of out-worn paganism.
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