Demons of the Green World: From Caliban to Anthony Blanche

Nickolas Grace as Anthony Blanche

The sacred groves of the literary wood echo with the voices of characters who resist all definition and thwart all comparison. There the trees are filled with bright birds whose songs are never quite alike. There the air is awash, as it were, with angels, with unrepeatable contractions of essence and existence. This must be the case if only for the tenuous yet insistent mode of existence characters enjoy, for the tenacious intangibility of their being, whereby they spring from the page into the variety of minds inclined to them. 

For all this, harmonies emerge. Just as the songs of the mockingbird and of the brown thrasher mingle in the ear, so true characters call to each other in companionable timbres across continents and centuries. We hear one such harmony between Caliban, the timeless chanting monster of Shakespeare’s Tempest, and Anthony Blanche, the stuttering, discord-dealing aesthete of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Both shed light on the modern crisis of identity, language, and beauty.

Much has been made of the Shakespearean green world, that pristine enclave of Belmont or the Athenian wood where the world is ordered, virtue flowers forth, and the perilous journeys of human relations are brought to harbor. Never, though, does Shakespeare present us these worlds unsullied. Nor can he, as long as they are peopled. Whether a Lorenzo and Jessica inject their inauspicious allusions to love or a mischievous Puck dabs the juice of the moonflower on the wrong lover’s eyes, some shade of melancholy seems always to creep into these Edens, reminding us that wherever we go upon the earth, the knowledge of good and evil slithers along behind.

The greenery of Prospero’s island shimmers in especially dubious shades. The ousted Duke of Milan holds sway by virtue of his magic books. And while his rule may be more benevolent than that of the witch Sycorax, Caliban’s moon-wielding dam, yet his order is the slave-driver’s, at least with respect to Ariel and Caliban, both flitting or crawling at the borders of human being.

Fyodor Paramonov as Caliban, 1905

Indeed, one of the most persistent questions Caliban inspires is, “What is it?” He is called tortoise, fish, and monster, and is made up under such guises in productions of the play. On the other hand, there is man enough in him to plot Miranda’s rape and, at least ostensibly, thereby to people the green world with Calibans. Then, too, he has under Prospero’s tutelage attained to a linguistic facility which is nothing but Shakespearean. Consider the lovely roughness of such a passage as this: 

All the infections that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him
By inchmeal a disease! His spirits hear me,
And yet I needs must curse. But they’ll nor pinch,
Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i’ th’ mire,
Nor lead me like a firebrand in the dark
Out of my way, unless he bid ’em. But
For every trifle are they set upon me,
Sometimes like apes, that mow and chatter at me
And after bite me; then like hedgehogs, which
Lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount
Their pricks at my footfall. Sometime am I
All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness. Lo, now, lo!
Here comes a spirit of his, and to torment me
For bringing wood in slowly. I’ll fall flat.
Perchance he will not mind me.

The things of this world swirl in lissome array on Caliban’s tongue; they flow forth to name what the Prosperous magic sets upon him for punishment and in turn to call down the ill powers of nature against Prospero. The original kindness of his master, whether through the application of brutality or the sickness in the soil of Caliban’s heart, has issued only in this, that Caliban can curse withal.

Far from Prospero’s island, in the green, dreaming world of Charles Ryder’s early days at Oxford, Anthony Blanche likewise plies a stuttering, glimmering tongue. We meet him first on the balcony of Sebastian Flyte’s Christ Church rooms, weeping the Tiresian lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. There Anthony stands both within and without, separated as much, perhaps, from his comrades at luncheon as from the appreciative, curious crowds below, reading those lines of Eliot’s which swirl at the heart of the intellectual and artistic foment of the moment. In the intoxication of those lines, as in that of a Brandy Alexander or of his own incisive aesthetic, Anthony’s affected stutter falls away, leaving only the cold candor of his language.

If Anthony shares with Caliban that linguistic facility of the stranger at the heart of paradise, it is perhaps because he, too, with the fish-man, endures the uncertainty of identity. In reading Tiresias, he aligns himself with Eliot’s symbol of androgyny, that blind bird of manly plume and female breast. On meeting him and seeing him strike his postures and stammer, we must ask once again, “What is it? What have we here?” Even in his being tossed into Mercury Fountain by Boy Mulcaster and the rest of Oxford’s effete company of roughs, there spreads some ripple of Caliban’s piscine elusiveness.

In remaining unknown, in speaking from the eccentric radicality of their own linguistic-ontological complexes, Caliban and Anthony become the voices of aesthetic criticism within their worlds. Caliban may only ever have seen two women, Sycorax and Miranda, yet his assessment that the latter exceeds the former as greatest surpasses least seems, from the testimony of Prospero and Ferdinand, an accurate analysis of the qualitative bounds of the beautiful. And in Miranda’s paragonal loveliness he seeks to beget in beauty, to follow the erotic urge of Plato’s Symposium. His education has given him eyes for the beautiful, even if he can only relate to it through violence.

Likewise Anthony, for all his oddity, remains for Charles, and for us, a kind of socio-aesthetic compass. He sees the sickness of the Flyte family as plainly as he sees the “creamy English charm” of Charles’ most exotic landscapes. As Caliban is drawn to Miranda, so is Anthony to Sebastian, floating along in the wake of his Ganymedean beauty. And in Sebastian’s beauty Anthony sows endless dissolution, culminating in the Levantine flight from Samgrass.

With the crisis of identity and the crisis of the tongue, then, comes critical capacity. The eccentricity whereby the aesthete is cast to the verge of society allows him to feel more keenly the radical gravity of his time. The currents of that time play all the more acutely—perhaps excruciatingly so—on the societal roots of his own being, stretched to the utmost in his being outcast.

For Caliban and Anthony, the critical office becomes, as it so often threatens to become for philosophers, artists, propagandists, and teachers across modernity, an office of destruction, a pulpit for the utterance of curses. It need not be so. The eccentric may, like St. Francis, by drawing nearer the source of spiritual light, ascend to that aesthetic which rejoices in a leper’s beauty and seeks to rebuild a crumbling temple. Or again he may, with exiled Dante, revolving faster and faster as he moves from the cold infernal center of the universe, press asymptotically nearer the divine vision whereby time is enfolded in the eternal. In so doing his words turn to benediction.

The peace of the green world skitters off into the undergrowth as we, inquiring and expectant, pass through. Fish-men appear to us, speaking our own tongue with words beyond our compass. Unctious stammerers chivvy us from our studious burrows. Calibans and Anthonys, forever within and without, earn a hard kind of transcendental vision. They see the beauties we fashion, the worlds we idolize, through their own pied, cracked lenses. They seed beauty with discord and look for a harvest of their own raw enlightenment. Such antithetical eyes may guide us, if we learn how to look, to the revision of our art, our friendship, our language. Then the world around us may flush with greenery—even those spare, sometimes gnarled shades of the laurel, the olive, and the yew—and the soil of the soul grow fertile again.

Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel Only the Lover Sings. His new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrated by sculptor Timothy Schmalz, was published this year in celebration of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death.