The Truth about Ercole
By IAIN HAMILTON
SOME talk of Alexander, but I of Hercules. Of Ercole, rather, for it was the modern form which Peter Peasack- Thwarton gave himself as a nom-de-plume after his first successes. He was a nullity modishly disguised in narrow trousers, cuffed sleeves and a velvet collar. His writing, similarly, was an inner emptiness hung about with outré metaphors and other artful figures. Travel pieces, profilettes, wriggling little appreciations of doom and gloom and damna- tion, intimate interviews with voguish welders and workers in reinforced concrete, an occasional venture into the far-flung spaces of poetical science-fiction—for two or three years one had seen his pretty balloons waywardly ascending from the shiny pages of the magazines. He had even achieved a volume, Ercole's Commonplace Book, which was moderately praised by his mandarin friends in the Sunday newspapers. But 1 did not come across him until the first night of his play, 0 My Darling Proserpine, which was given in a smart, garlic-smelling cellar, decorated with dubious symbols, near Victoria Station. I was there in the role of a dramatic critic and therefore was put out to be presented, before finding my camp-chair, to the author: it is much better for the creators of the still-born corpses which one dissects to remain no more than impersonal abstractions. But here he was, an elegant if diminutive suit of clothes surmounted by a face like a Hallowe'en turnip- lantern, and from the wide, serrated slice of mouth came sounds of an engaging oddity. He composed himself at my side.
The lurid lights in the tiny auditorium expired jerkily into the garlicky gloom, the stage curtain parted, and a female person, classically draped, was discovered immobile upon a low plinth. At her feet knelt a handsome youth in ragged jeans and tartan shirt. He presently uttered this curious hexameter : Move lovely lily, sprout my moses staff I At this the lovely lily moved indeed. She twitched; her hand flew to her face; she sneezed, lost her balance, and stepped clumsily from the plinth. The audience united in a coarse guffaw, and at my side little Ercole sat bolt upright, biting his nails. The players, who were not very well trained, one thought, burst into laughter themselves. One might have thought the evening ruined beyond repair, but in fact it was saved: the audience was now disposed to take the obscurely allegorical entertainment as a farce, and the, actors played up wickedly, uttering the ridiculous lines with ferocious gravity and moving like novices at the ballet. Nobody understood a word, but that scarcely mattered. I have never heard such laughter, not even in the Palladium. Ercole had scored yet another resound- ing succes d'estime and when the lights went up I saw that he had long ago persuaded himself that the turn his piece had taken was not in the least unexpected. It was impossible not to feel something like affection for the little turnip; he was so grotesquely successful. As an Edwardian brigade bore down to carry him off rejoicing, he touched my arm. " Be kind," he said. " Be a nice man." Between this and his disappearance from the London literary scene, of which there is something to be said, there occurred his Inferno Nuovo, into which for devilment he put Alan Pryce-Jones, Roy Campbell, Bertrand Russell, Boag Lulty, Philip Toynbee and many other prominent figures, and also the famous catalogue of the exhibition, Old Gargoyles in New Guises, which he arranged at the Tate. But most readers will remember this well, and also the famous law-suit when, accused of plagiarism by Sir A. B. C., he proved without difficulty that the passages in question had already been " lifted " by Sir A. B. C. from Macquarrie on the Mammals of Benbecula. Success, success, success, all spun out of the void. It might have gone on forever. And so people still speak of his abdica- tion and disappearance as the greatest literary mystery of 1952.
In the autumn of that year I was invited to travel to Syracuse, with various other journalists, authors, and theatre and film people from London and Paris, for a festival of Euripidean tragedy. Ercole, I learned, was joining us in Paris, and sure enough, at Orly, just as the Constellation was about to taxi off to the runway, Ercole staggered on board, carrying a guitar. He plumped into the seat on the other side of the gangway from mine, fastened his safety-belt clumsily, and fell asleep immediately, the guitar between his knees. When the air hostess tried to remove it, his arms tightened and she could not get it away. So he slumbered on until we were over Lake Geneva, when he started up, looked into my face and snickered. " Hamilton, isn't it ? I ought not to like you. What a ghastly paragraph you wrote about my poor old Proserpine. —My goodness, what's this ? "
" Your guitar." " With all that mother-of-pearl and horrid filigree ? Besides, I've never owned a guitar in my life. How very bizarre."
He stood up, holding the guitar out helplessly. The aircraft lurched, Ercole staggered, and the guitar twanged proudly upon the golden head of Mademoiselle Veronique Deslandes, a large lady, from the Comedic Frangaise sitting in front of me.
Life, it has been observed, frequently follows art, and Often, if I may be permitted to add to the observation, art of a ionic- what low character. Little Ercole, the air pocket, the &itiar, the great blonde—one looked round to see if the Three StOoges were present. And, true also in this to the art of low coinedy, the absurd incident seemed to establish a bond between these two. They stretched their legs together on the burning tarrnac of Milan, Rome, and Naples, the while Ercole's ardent gizle inclined over the fourteen inches of vertical distance which separated his eyes from those of Mademoiselle Deslandes.
During our fortnight in Syracuse I had no more than a few words with Ercole, for our party, like all expeditions of its sort, had divided immediately on arrival into various reciprocally hostile groups, and Ercole and Mademoiselle Deslandes were in the most uppish of all. Lesser beings, sidling past the tables under the largest judas tree in the gardens of the Villa Ionia, would hear these two taking it in turns to read aloud from a clandestine Spanish translation of The Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, and see the lizards on the path scatter at the sudden giggles issuing from the shady corner where Ercole's pink gaberdine suit and oyster-silk waistcoat glowed tastefully. There was more in the air than Euripides (whose songs, for the sake of Magna Graecia, a university student was engaged to sing in the gardens after dinner). On the second last day of our stay our hosts gathered us together into cars and coaches and carried us far inland among the rolling brown hills to see the sights and to picnic, uncomfort- ably, among the mosaics and fishponds of a Roman villa. On a crest nearby rose the broken columns of a belvedere, and one or two boys were at hand with mules to help us up to the view. Mademoiselle Deslandes, ignoring the frenzied protests of the other Parisian women in the party, drained her glass of Coca-Cola, mounted, and was led away. In a few moments she was gallantly followed by Ercole, whose beast was as disproportionately large as hers was small. The rest of us, less energetic, reclined among the ruins and watched them winding up the slope. We saw the leading mule, on reaching the crest, begin to buck, and to our dismay Mademoiselle Deslandes slid over the beast's head, quite, gently, and dis- appeared over the edge. Little Ercole dismounted in a flash and made his short legs fairly twinkle up the slope. By the time I had got moving, he too had disappeared from view. What tragic scene would meet my eyes ? But I could hear the young muleteers laughing. With reason. For here was Mademoiselle Deslandes, intact and magnificent, trudging'; up from the watercourse below with Ercole, muddy and unem- barrassed in her arms. " Oh, la, la ! " she said, " ma poupqe heroique ! " He beamed, more turnip-like than ever. They did not leave with us on the following day, and thlece were knowing looks exchanged as we left the Theocritan shores behind and below. And this vrns Ercole lost to London.
But the end is odder than one might suppose. I havF a friend, a novelist, who lives at Mondello, near Palernid, and from him a few weeks ago I had news of Ercole. Mademoiselle Deslandes, noW Mrs. Peasack-Thwarton, had in 1949 inheriOd from a Sicilian great-uncle .a small estate on the edge of 1.1: Conca d'Oro, and there live the happy, if strangely match' pair today. Replying to my friend, I asked him whether Er.: still wrote. " He boasts," I learned, " that he has touched neither typewriter nor pen since he set foot on Sicily. He rides round the estate, abuses the workmen, drinks three litres of volcanic wine daily, swims with an underwater gun miles out into the Golfo, shocks the local gentry with his rudeness, and keeps that great missus of his under his thumb. No one dare call him Ercdle now. He is Peter to his friends....
And that is the truth about Ercole.
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