Virgil's presence is omnipresent on the pages of C.'s excellent book, showing how deeply and pervasively his influence still speaks to contemporary women writers, even when they are reacting against the persistence of the patriarchal culture they find extolled in it. Virgil's presence is a term by which C. means less a guiding shade of the dead past than a writer so fully alive to the richness of language that he reads us back to ourselves, through the exaltations and perplexities of our shared mortal condition. At its grandest, and most elemental, as when Anchises speaks in the underworld of the Aeneid, the text assumes the voice of a Wordsworthian spirit that ‘moves within all things’ (spiritus intus alit …) and is the source of their creaturely ‘fear and desire’, as well as of their ‘grief and their delight’. C.'s approach to influence is not so much a claim for ‘relevance’, since that is always relative, and less exciting as literature, but rather as a recognition of scope; and it is in the sweeping, great-heartedness of Virgil's concerns, and the plenary ways they generate correspondingly big-hearted approaches in the writers C. cites, that the reader encounters instances by which the book is made revelatory.
Perhaps the most powerful writing C. cites comes from descriptions of London during the blitz, a city under siege, like Troy in the great Book 2 passages of the Aeneid. In A.S. Byatt's The Little Black Book of Stories, the mind is darkly impressed upon by the invasion:
Death was close. Friends you were meeting for dinner, who lived in your head as you set off to meet them, never came, because they were mangled meat under brick and timber. Other friends who stared in your memory as the dead stare whilst they take up the final shape your memory will give them, suddenly turned up on the doorstep in lumpen, living flesh, bruised and dirty, carrying bags of salvaged belongings, and begged for a bed, for a cup of tea.
And here's a passage from the Medieval scholar Helen Waddell's recollection of burning London:
If all else goes from the schools, let us at least keep the second book of Virgil. I speak of it with passion, for something sent me to it on that September afternoon when the Luftwaffe first broke through the defenses of London, and her river burned. You remember the cry of Aeneas waking in the night, the rush, arming as he went, the hurried question – ‘Where's the fighting now?’ and the answer:
Come is the ending day, Troy's hour is come.
The ineluctable hour …
The Aeneid reminds us, and perhaps was meant to remind Augustus too, that the Romans' Trojan ancestors were boat-people, fleeing from a ravaged city. As I am writing this review, over 300 migrant workers, and refugees fleeing Syria, died when a boat sank off the coast of an Italian island. Ruth Fainlight's poetry, by way of allusion to Virgil, is proleptically attuned to their desperation and helplessness:
It is not a Celtic twilight but more a Virgilian one by which Evan Boland depicts Irish immigrants fleeing starvation and poverty:
In a perceptive reading of Janet Lembke's translation of Virgil's Georgics, C. shows how Virgil's language is ready-made to alert our attention to global warming:
At Georgics 1.43 Virgil describes the snow melting on the mountains in early spring: Vere novo, gelidus canis cum montibus umor / liguitur. Day-Lewis's translation depicts a fairly benign process: ‘Early spring, when a cold moisture sweats from the hoar-head / Hills’ but Lembke uses a far more modern term ‘meltwater,’ which is becoming inextricably associated with global warming: ‘At spring's beginning, when ice-cold meltwater runs down / from the mountains.’
There are equally precipitant instances of threatening and potentially catastrophic climate changes in Georgics 2, when the effects of flooding become, as C. says, ‘all too recognizable to a contemporary reader’, and which Lembke renders as ‘and the silt dumped on towns by Campania's flooding river’. Here is Virgil's great song of the earth, speaking to us through what could be a small town in the American midwest, but is at the same time the image of imperilled community – a community as fragile as that of the bees.
That a strong case can be made for reading the Aeneid beholden to traditional narratives of ‘silencing women’ (i.e. four of the most powerful women in the epic are killed off: Dido, Creusa, Camilla and Amata) has not led women writers to turn away from the text. In discussing Ursula Le Guin's treatment of the Lavinia character, C. notes that it is ‘one of the many instances through the Aeneid where a woman's history has passed unnoticed, has been untold’, but that ‘awareness and articulation of these moments at least offer her [Le Guin] the opportunity to revisit them and voice the female experience’.
All the same, sometimes I believe I must be long dead, and am telling this story in some part of the underworld that we don't know about – a deceiving place where we think we're alive, where we think we're growing old and remembering what happened when we were young, when the bees swarmed and my hair caught fire, when the Trojans came.
Le Guin has convincingly caught the Virgilian tone of eloquent mourning, whose pathos is sometimes a hauntingly interlocked register of the estranged living and the disenchanted dead, and which for me hearkens back to the stunning moment when Andromache sees Aeneas long after the fall of Troy, and asks, in the voice of a shell-shocked war-victim: ‘Can you be real?’ And then: Hector ubi est?
Another recurring allusion that speaks to the terrifying helplessness of being silenced, and feelings of exclusion, is that of the Greek generals in the underworld, which, as here described in a schoolgirl memory by Evan Boland, also occasions the birth of a poet:
They raised exiguam vocem – a feeble voice. In the words of the Latin the cry mocked them … For that moment I could make a single experience out of the fractures of language, country and womanhood that brought me here. The old place of power and heroism – the stairs and bricks of an alien building, the sting of exile – were gathered into a hell of old inscriptions and immediate force. In the face of that underworld, and by the force of poetry itself, language had been shown to be fallible. The heroes had spoken, and their voices had not carried. Memory was a whisper, a sound that died in your throat. Amidst the triumphs of language and civilization it was a moment of sheer powerlessness. It was something I would look back to when I became a poet.
One of the most potent recurring tropes in the book is the figure of the Sibyl, the female priestess through whom the god speaks, and more specifically Cassandra, the unheeded prophetic voice of catastrophe. But also the Sibyl as teacher of the classics, before her ancient leaves have been blown away by the changing winds of education. In a novel by Margaret Drabble, an elderly woman enrols in an evening class, and reads the Aeneid in Latin. What she says in praise of her instructor are words I would apply to the author of Sibylline Sisters:
Maybe all classics teachers are excellent. They sing in the dark and shore up the ruins. They play with tragic brilliance the endgame.
