I picked up a copy of James Elroy Flecker's Hassan in a second book shop in Edinburgh recently (while Mr Cornflower was buying fish). I bought it because I was interested in the context of the Golden Road to Samarkand, on which I touched in a earlier post. I didn't expect to really enjoy it, thinking it would be overblown, sentimental and arch. I was right!
It's a short play, detailing the adventures of Hassan, who is a humble confectioner rasied to sudden greatness by luck and the caprice of the Caliph of Bagdad, Haroun al Raschid. He is flattered, but soon shocked by the vileness and cruelty of the Caliph, and flees with his poet friend Ishak, disguished as pilgrims. The poem, which forms a dialogue at the very end of the play, pictures them in a caravan, impatient to depart. The book is very late Victorian in feel, so it's a shock to find that it was published in 1922 (although two passages, one of sexual passion, one of torture, although elliptical are almost pornographic in the Beardsley tradition - that should have given me a clue). It is melodramatic, with a romantic and childishly simple view of the cruel and gorgeous east; much of the dialogue reads like parody, but I don't think it is.
He has a fine ear for words on occasion, but it often lets him down. So he can write garbage like:
HASSAN: Selim, what do you here?
SELIM: Plunge not the finger of enquiry into the pie of impertinence, O my uncle.
And then produce glories like this:
Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
And softly through the silence beat the bells
Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
In the same year as this was published, an American Englishman called T S Eliot produced the defining poem of the C20th, Waste Land. Astonishing that while Hassan was being tortured in the name of an outdated vision of romance, Eliot was looking forward, redefining poetic form, and despairing of civilisation:
"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water."
We do not know if Eliot and Flecker ever met. If so, I think they would have had little to say to each other, almost talking different languages. But it's a fun thought - Eliot got on alright with Betjeman, whose poetry must have seemed antiquated and toylike to him.
As a child of the 50s myself, I am often struck by how old fashioned the 50s and indeed the 60s and 70s were, and how easy it is to forget that. But Hassan in the 50s, I'm astonished!
Posted by: Lindsay | Sunday, 30 September 2007 at 09:37 PM
Indeed, ancient though I sometimes feel, the 1920s is before my time. It was revived in London sometime in the 1950s.
Posted by: Harriet | Tuesday, 25 September 2007 at 09:28 AM
Indeed there's a Caliph, an important but not the leading figure - though I fear he is cruel and fickle. The play must have lasted longer than I thought if you saw it - I had presumed it a short lived thing, old fashioned when produced and out of favour before the 1920s were out - obviously not!
Posted by: Lindsay | Sunday, 23 September 2007 at 08:10 PM
Hassan! That brings back a few memories. I saw the play in London when I was but a small child -- my father was in it -- as the Caliph? is there such a person? and my mother designed the costumes which were very beautiful, all based on Persian miniatures. The film actor Laurence Harvey was in it and I had a childish crush on him.
I remember one bit of the play:
At the [something] of the day
When all to Mecca turn to pray
And I towards thy bed, Yasmin.
That sent shivers down my spine just thinking about it!
Posted by: Harriet | Thursday, 20 September 2007 at 09:20 AM