A Cult of Disturbance
DEMETRIOS CAPETANAKIS was ' born in Smyrna on January 22nd, 1912. He took his degree in political science and economics at Athens University, and later became a doctor of philosophy at Heidelberg. He came to England with the aid of the British Council in 1939, and died in Westminster Hospital on March 9th, 1944, at the age of thirty-two. When he arrived in England he had studied English only for a few months ; but at the time of his death five years later he had not only acquired a profound knowledge of English literature but had published a number of critical essays in impec- cable English and a series of short poems which attracted imme- diate attention when they appeared in English periodicals. The present volume contains studies of Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Proust, Stefan George, Charlotte Bronte and Thomas Gray, short papers on English and Greek poetry, Capetanalds's own poems and tributes to him by English and Greek friends. , "The peculiar fascination of his studies of poets and philosophers," writes Mr. Lehmann in his introduction, " lay in a combination of immense erudition and an unflagging curiosity about life, so that what he wrote out of his erudition had the excitement of something he might have lived through." There is no doubt that Capetanakis was an extremely gifted young man. His essays are written with a passion and seriousness which are unusual in this country where literature is still regarded as a "superior pastime." He was a philosopher as well as a poet—the most im- portant of these essays were intended as part of a volume which would have included long studies of "Plato and Kierkegaard and probably St. John of the Cross—and seems to have regarded philosophy and literature as twin methods of exploring reality. "All the great English poets disturbed the balance inherent in the spirit of their language," he said in a paper called A View of English Poetry, and in a criticism of some contemporary English writers he commends one of them because his work is one of "the most complete expressions of philosophical anxiety that I know." "Those whose mind is disturbed by this anxiety," he went 'on, "cannot be satisfied with the meaning which life seems to have. They are always looking for another, more satisfactory, more pro- found meaning hidden behind the appearances of the world. . . . But no one knows how to read the cryptogram!' These are the criteria which he applied to all literature. It must be "disturbing," must shock us out of conventional habits of mind, must be the expression of "philosophical anxiety." The consistent application of these tests to literature gives his critical work a remarkable coherence, but it is not without its dangers. When he wrote in the last verse of a poem called Detective Story: "` It was great fun! ' they said ; yet their true love
Throbbed in their breasts like pus that must be freed.
The porter found the weapon and the glove, But only our despair can find the creed."
'or again in A Saint in Piccadilly: "The meaning of the cryptogram is faint, But his desire is clear. He rushes out And, hungry for the humblest end, the saint Picks up the lowest person seen about."
. we feel, uneasily, that the " creed " and the " cryptogram " are intellectual concepts which have not ben dissolved into the poetic experience.
The same approach probably caused him to rate some of the younger poets of the 'thirties too highly, and to do a good deal less than justice to T. S. Eliot, whose poetry "in its latest phase . . . has become too detached to be disturbing or compelling in any way." But it was very successful when applied to writers like Rimbaud and Dostoevsky. "There are two kinds of writers," he said in a capital essay on Dostoevsky : "those whose world is pro- tected by a hedge and whose truths are unambiguous, and those whose world is not protected by anything against the powers of nothingness and whose truths are bound to be ambiguous, since, for them, there is no line c:It demarcation between the things which are and the things which are not. Jane Austen is a typical example of the first, Dostoevsky of the second group of writers. . . . Jane Austen was protected by a hedge of unquestionable values. . . . Dostoevsky's famous houses with their narrow, high and steep stair- cases leading into complete silence and darkness, are not surrounded by protecting walls ; they have no locks for keeping evil out."
This is also the basis of his criticism of Stefan Geoige, who is described as "undoubtedly one of Hitler's forerunners" and an exponent of "State poetry." "There are two kinds of poetry," he said. "The one gives more certainty, more solidity, to our existence, the other dissolves it." The artisans of the police State encourage "State poetry," because it "could be an extremely useful means in their hands for changing the people of their States into citizens and soldiers as they want them," but there is no place "for poetry that could change one into a being of a dream." Altogether this is an attractive and arresting book, and we must lament the premature death which deprived us of so promising a writer.
MARTIN TIJIMELL.
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