The Story of Apollo
Golding, Louis
October 15, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 607 THE STORY OF APOLLO By LOUIS GOLDING THE title is rather misleading. I do not intend to tell in a few paragraphs the story of Apollo in the sense that...
...And I took care not to look Apollo straight in the cold blank eyes...
...So he became mine...
...I have owned them, but not for long...
...and tea-cloths and dish-cloths are hung up to dry on that clothes-rack...
...Or was it that the athletes, the hearties, ragging the rooms of all the gentlemen in the back quad who wore spectacles, ragged my room also and mounted my Apollo upon the pedestal of a scarlet Dutch cheese...
...And I had taken down from my walls my Burne-Joneses and Rossettis, and hung in their places Cezannes and Van Goghs...
...They consider his planes in the last degree satisfactory...
...They give the family the disadvantage of the doubt...
...And when I took him up to wash, his eyes fell upon my Apollo, my half-crown idol, and he said nothing...
...And then, not long ago, a superior young man came straight from the Congo, by way of Montparnasse, to stay in our spare room...
...More avidly than any wolfhound such possessions eat a man out of house and home...
...Norman Angell recently sketched for us The Story of Money...
...If I was forced to leave him behind I came back more rapturously to him than to my kith and kin...
...I had not forgotten him...
...When he retired for the night, he no longer found Apollo there...
...The bleached anatomies of swordfish and marmoset lay to right and left of him...
...The company that not a few marble Apollos have kept for a millennium or two in sunken Aegean grottos, that plaster Apollo kept in the watery twilight of my curiosity shop...
...The clever young men were beginning to talk of the age of Phidias and Praxiteles as sickly and sentimental...
...None the less he duly accompanied me from Oxford home and from home to Oxford at the beginning and end of the vacations...
...They could not stand anything later than the sixth-century Apollo at Delphi...
...He did no more than that...
...He comes from Dahomey...
...But surely Apollo could not have been in the slightest degree endangered by a baroque bronze...
...But I had to pretend I was surprised and annoyed about it...
...If the Zadkine and Dobson and Maillol enthusiasts among your friends see a plaster Apollo on the dining-room mantelpiece, they don't blame you for it...
...I have since owned a Tanagra figurine, a Maillol terra-cotta, a sixteenth-century Spanish bambino, an early copy of a Greek fawn...
...And when once that happens, there's no knowing what else may happen to him—and to my masterpiece from Dahomey...
...He cost me half a crown...
...He is slightly chipped as to the nose...
...He took up his position in the spare bedroom...
...Neither Apollo nor I ever quite recovered from that indignity...
...Wells, for instance, gave us in a single volume The Outline of History or Mr...
...If I spent a week end in a Derbyshire farmhouse Apollo came with me...
...His form is so significant that they sit down and fan their foreheads, they feel so faint and happy...
...But he kept his eyes fixed on the narrow marble mantelpiece...
...Dining-rooms are public places...
...I am to indicate my belief that he may some day recover something of his former eminence—something, I dare not say how much...
...But my friends from Montparnasse and Bloomsbury titter with excitement about him...
...and there is no steam of adoration for the nostrils of Apollo other than the smell of dish-cloths and tea-cloths drying...
...He is so ugly that my teeth ache when I look at him...
...No, the Apollo whose history I wish to record briefly is a quite specific godling...
...Thirty pennies that Lizzie in my school basement should have received from me in return for her Jersey caramels dropped into Apollo's money-box...
...He had the place of honor on the top shelf of my most important bookcase...
...I saw in the rooms of a wealthy contemporary a seventeenth-century Italian bronze, but of a sleekness, a vitality, I cannot hope to indicate...
...And yet before the end of my first term something had happened to Apollo, and to me, or to both of us...
...Surely that is to anticipate a whole decade of aesthetic development...
...I cannot say...
...But on my fourth term he did not come back with me to Oxford...
...As for the place of honor in my own room, on the top shelf of the chief bookcase where the signed first editions are, a carved god of the Negroes stands there...
...So lonely I bowed my head to my plaster Apollo of the golden period, with a slight sense of guilt...
...No possession I have had before or since gave me greater joy...
...I did not mention him to my friends in Oxford, but if they came to see me they had to do obeisance to him...
...Just with that sense of guilt I listened to Tannhauser and read Ruskin...
...Apollo had betaken him to the place where he stands now, the centre of the kitchen mantelpiece, behind the clothesrack that goes up and down on a pulley...
...I slept miserably all night and crept back next morning to my own room and addressed myself to my peasant carvings from Tyrol—Saint Veronica, Saint Joseph, Saint Anne, Saint Florian...
...And then Apollo climbed two flights of stairs...
...Apollo has a broken nose and cost half a crown, but I think I have not yet come to the last chapter of his story...
...After a time, they refused...
...They were bluff unsentimental people, but they comforted me...
...Apollo's nostrils and mine curled with anger and apprehension...
...And yet there are moments when I feel that Apollo cannot be left there much longer behind the dish-cloths and the teacloths...
...I would need all the space that Sir James Frazer allowed himself in The Golden Bough if I sought in any such generic sense to tell the story of Apollo...
...He knew, of course, all, and more than all, that the dons had to teach about the classics...
...Of course I had done it myself...
...That may have been at the bottom of it...
...But he lifted his eyebrows...
...I am to tell the story of his decline...
...He occupied a high place in my Pantheon once, a supreme place, I might say (but I was young then...
...Nobody else would have dared to touch Apollo...
...But although Apollo remained at home, he still remained a very important personage...
...The price asked for him was half a crown...
...Once, on my return from a visit to a tribe of Aztec totems which an intransigent friend declared to be the only valid sculpture in existence, I pretended that the sheets in my own bed felt damp, and insisted on spending the night in Apollo's spare room...
...There he stayed for a long time, several years...
...I am to indicate the lowly nature of the altar on which he stands now...
...I first met him in the subaqueous gloom of a curiosity shop in the Doomington Road...
...That happened for three terms...
...He went up to share my studies with me in Oxford...
...He was surrounded by bottles in which a host of pallid snakes writhed in their final and fixed convolutions...
...Once or twice I observed him rocking on his pedestal, but tremulously, like a birch leaf...
...He inclined his head and listened, smiling faintly...
...And I hardly know how it happened, but I rose to find the Apollo had left my study and had landed in the middle of the mantelshelf in the dining-room...
...He may any day find his way up to the mantelpiece of the spare room...
...Sometimes, when everybody was out of the house, I used to creep in to have a word or two with him...
...The fourth term it did not happen...
...He is a plaster cast...
...But he permitted himself to be cynically interested in the French symbolistes and parnassiens...
...I yearned after him greatly...
...I do not intend to tell in a few paragraphs the story of Apollo in the sense that Mr...
Vol. 12 • October 1930 • No. 24
