The Bees Beat Him That Time Surely
When I talk about turning my inner eye to the hives of the Bees and becoming, “bee-coming” if you like, a bee aficionado, a bee-person, like the little girl in the Roald Dahl story who, fed on royal jelly, grows up to become an enormous round Bee, I am joking: and not only because I know where hobbyist urban beekeepers stand in the pitiless eyes of the world. I am not going to buy a terrifying bleached white beekeeper’s outfit, I am not going to go anywhere near the only bug I can tolerate (because they are furry, bees are like little whirring flying kittens, I always say), and I am going to go on being horrified and repelled every time Nabokov talks— in this book of his interviews (Strong Opinions) I am still reading—about butterflies: the anti-bees, the horrors. My interest is not really an apicultural interest and my affection is not the murderous affection of the pin-wielding cabinet-collecting gentleman genius. No! I am a friend to the bees and that is all. I’ve got something to say about Nabokov, too. but first you got to follow me through the thicket of bees.
The thing about the quaint old custom of telling the bees whenever there’s been a birth or a death or someone’s gotten banned from Twitter, the thing about that is on the face of it you would think, maybe, that the act of telling is mysterious and primeval. It ought to put you in mind of groaning holes in the ground that go straight to the cold core of the earth. think of those sinkholes that open up everywhere, cracking the pavements, think of farmers tilling their fields and mowing right over the opening of a new volcano and wondering at this new hole to the beyond, and the terrible heat or cold wafting up or sucking down from the terrible below. To tell the bees ought to be opening the Ark of the Covenant, ought to be parting the veil; sticking your face in a beehive ought to be like opening your eyes into the clutching darkness of a neolithic tomb, to feel yourself buried by the earth’s monstrous upheavals in close tunnels under packed earth! to waver on the threshold of the doorway between life and death!—
—that’s how talking to the Hive ought to be, but that isn’t what it’s like. What’s it’s like is just this: bees are gossips. Little round furry gossips who will not only die of simple curiosity like you or me, but will kill you if you know some good rumor and don’t let them in on it: as Hilda Ransome relates in The Sacred Bee, with her report of the woman in Sussex whose child died because nobody told the bees it had been born. Bees are like like F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus saying to Katharina Cavalieri, “Come, give me some gossip;” affable and flirtatious because he knows he is going to get it, but oh, such a scowl as he would scowl if you gave him no gossip.
If we don’t know it, it isn’t worth knowing, is what the Bee says, and a thing not worth knowing were better off not having happened: and with that unassailable logic they unmake what they haven’t heard about. In this same way, if a man should die and the Bees not be told about it, he will come back to the living again, and the bees won’t be kind to hear you complain about it when he rises up from the clay and shambles home. How his widow shrieks! and how innocent the bees are! how earnestly confused. Why shouldn’t he be at the door, they say, that’s where all the alive men knock at the end of the day, when the sun goes down, they say, and I’m sure we would have heard about it if he had died, don’t you think so? and the other bees all hum Yes, yes, we would have heard, we would have heard. He can’t be dead, for we weren’t informed, and until he is dead he cannot lie down. So you have to be careful.
(Can you turn this bee-obsession with following the proper forms to your own advantage, can you undo things you would just as soon have undone by not telling the bees about it? I wouldn’t try it. I think that somehow, some way, they’d figure out they’d been tricked, and a bee who has been tricked is the most frightful thing in the world. Aeschylus didn’t put any bees in the Oresteia, do you know why? He was afraid to. Afraid and he couldn’t make it fit, the bees don’t respect Athena. Why should they? They all know who their mother is. Athena herself is humiliated before the bees. Athena especially.)
(Do you know the line in the beginning of the Agamemnon where the watchman says he knows a lot of things he could tell, if he felt like it, but an ox is standing on his tongue? “o’er my tongue hath passed / an ox with heavy tread,” in Anna Swanwick’s so-so translation of 1865. Isn’t that great? “Can’t go into it, a great ox stands on my tongue,” real “You’ll have to speak up, I’m wearing a towel” energy.)
another thing about the Ancients and the bees: we know from some papyrus or other that a certain Dromon wrote to a certain Zenon demanding a kotyle of Attic honey to bathe his eyeballs in. Some God told me to tell you to get one of your guys to buy me a full kotyle of Attic honey, he wrote, to put in my EYES! This is true and not embellished, you can look it up. Bees make men go right out of their minds, never trust a man on the subject of bees. Porphyry, Porphyry wrote that the Bee was “just and sober”, and that was a lie. A bee can get drunk as a lord, and they will, too, if you put them in the way of fermented fruits. If you tell a drunken bee your secrets you are in for a bad time because not only might they spread it around outside the hive, they will get confused on the details.) Porphyry also called the bee “ox-begotten,” and of course he was not the only one who thought so, and I will say only that the life of an Ox was in olden times a very busy and onerous one, full of tongues to stand on and bees to beget, to say nothing of fields that needed plowing.
Anyhow I love the bees very well, like I say, from a prudent distance. All things dearly beloved have a certain identity with the lover, or the lover thinks they do, and I am the bees, I think: the bees are me. I love gossip, I love to be in the know, I love to be told and I love to tell. I love music, and so do the bees, so they say in Westphalia.
but make no mistake, if a large bee were to swoop down upon me and carry me off, I would simply not enjoy it. I am not going to put up a front about this, I am not invested in seeming “tough” in the face of a bee as large as an ox. All my familiar friendly talk about the doings in the beehive would be as dust and ashes in my liar’s mouth if I were to hear the humming of an approaching swarm of bees that suddenly swelled to a deafening roar as the bees grew to an enormous size and carried off me and my eleven companions. That is a fact and I am not one to dispute the facts. The catastrophe I allude to is the one drawn so well by H.J. Ford in the Green Fairy Book, in his illustration for “Rosanella” by the Comte de Caylus, of the scene which goes as follows:
One day the Queen gave a large garden-party, and just as the guests were all assembled, and Prince Mirliflor was as usual dividing his attentions between the twelve beauties, a humming of bees was heard. The Rose-maidens, fearing their stings, uttered little shrieks, and fled all together to a distance from the rest of the company. Immediately, to the horror of all who were looking on, the bees pursued them, and, growing suddenly to an enormous size, pounced each upon a maiden and carried her off into the air, and in an instant they were all lost to view.
and the illustration, which you are seeing in your mind’s eye right now if you had the book as a child, is too powerful to insert here, there is no way for me to prepare the unready. If you want to see the bees, suddenly grown to enormous size, abducting the twelve beautiful maidens, you can scroll all the way down to footnote [3]. but I won’t put such a thing here. it is too much.
A bee has got to be as big as an ox to inspire that kind of horror, is the thing, whereas a butterfly will give you the shakes just being the regular smallish size that it is. We all have different loves, and the greatest of mine is Mammals, with bees a noble exception for reasons already discussed. do butterflies get to use the secret door to my affections, slipping in under the bee exemption? No, no, never, no.
Now: if you know three things about Nabokov, one of them is the Lepidoptera business. and in my opinion his love of butterflies—if you can call catching, killing, mounting, and dissecting a creature loving it, and you can’t—is on the same plane as his stated indifference to music: absolutely inexplicable and obscurely frightening, and I want them to mean something I can connect and decipher, something other than just that Nabokov had a few wrong ideas about the good and the beautiful, as do we all. As I said elsewhere, his earlessness for music, his fury at the Radio and so on, this seems:
—Freud, as I later discovered and then forgot how I discovered it, perhaps did not hate music as much or as comprehensively as was once believed, but he certainly understood it no better than he understood dreams, and biographers seem to agree that in his spoiled youth he threw tantrums over his sister’s piano practice until his mother got rid of the offending instrument, to please him (and it truly makes me sick to think of; he blighted his sisters’ lives and I would gladly descend into hell to punch him in his ghost paunch, or else to play piano at him, which would pain him more.) In any case I still do think that Freud’s poignant wish to annihilate oompah bands from the beer gardens of the world has a certain harmonious accord with Nabokov’s declaration that if he could construct “a mosaic of time and space to suit [his] desires and demands,” it should include “a warm climate, daily baths, an absence of radio music and traffic noise, the honey of ancient Persia,” and a few other things of no great interest to us at this time. My loathings are simple, he said: “stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.”
Speaking seriously, not to say he was not also serious in the previous, Nabokov described his loathing as an incapacity and not a prejudice: “I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes.” His substitution of chess for music, in the hall of earthly pleasures, goes to show as well as anything else he said how little he understood what the pleasure of music even is—as how can one, who has never felt it? You might say, if your senses were as peculiarly exclusive as his, that chess is a form of mathematics and music is a form of mathematics, that both have shape and progression in time, and so they are forms of each other. He did not say that, though, and besides, it isn’t so; things that can be described with numbers are no more alike on that basis than things that can be described in words. It is facile to say that his insensibility to—really, enjoyment of—the cruelty and grotesquerie of butterfly hunting is the mirror of his inability to get his ears around a succession of notes, insofar as his hatred of cruelty and great feeling for beauty, both avowed with a frequency and an apparent earnestness I do take at face value, were the passionate avowals of one who perceives without access, who can draw from memory the architectural diagram of a palace he has never been inside. Facile, but I did say it.
but do bear in mind I didn’t say I believed it, and in fact I don’t. People have gone to great lengths to connect his personal peculiarities to his fictional effects, either because they believe the connection is real or because they think parallelism makes for a nice effect of their own (which it does, it does, who knows this better than I) and it is embarrassing every single time. Far be it from me to embarrass myself in this way, when I have so many other ways available to me. And besides, what do I know about it, really.
Anyhow you may imagine Nabokov and Freud together in the quiet car of that great Train they both boarded some time back, hating one another’s company but unable to ever leave for a regular car with no Quiet rules, for fear of encountering a jolly noise with a bit of rhythm to it. They are still there, to this day.
—and you see that with his mention up there of the “honey of ancient Persia,” Nabokov has brought us back around to the bees. “My own life is fresh bread with country butter and Alpine honey,” he once said, showing off.
That was the end, except for the endnotes, one last thing about Virgil and another thing about Aristotle:
[1] Virgil, Ransome says (in The Sacred Bee, where else), “had the greatest respect for the intelligence of the bee,” and so much is true so far, but she doesn’t stop there: “When Virgil wrote about bees in the Georgics, he enters into their life so heartily that we feel he must have been brought up among them.” (emphasis mine.)
—What a claim! what a revelation, if true! I take this seriously and I have learned a lot from Hilda Ransome, so I have consulted my Spargo & my Comparetti, I carefully scanned all applicable indexes (see below) and chapters, I walked down all the dimly lit memory corridors of a long-ago seminar on the Georgics, but I can find no support for this suggestion that Virgil was fostered among the bees; still less that he was as a bee himself. for, while it is true he walked comfortably around in Hell with Dante and many other places as well, he was his own size all the time: that size being incompatible with early life among the bees as a peer, a comrade, a small brother. A boy cannot live among bees so unnoticed as the proverbial swan among ducklings. and so with a heavy heart I call Ransome a liar on this point. though I continue to trust her on other matters.
[2] Ransome in The Sacred Bee quotes a wonderful note from Lady Gregory appended to her 1921 play Aristotle’s Bellows, which play I don’t know about except I know that the cast calls for two cats. the note says:
“Aristotle of the Books was very wise, but the bees got the best of him in the end. He wanted to know how they did pack the comb […] he made a hive with a glass cover on it and put it over them, and thought he would watch them, but when he put his eye to the glass they had covered it with wax […] He said he was never rightly killed till then. The bees beat him that time surely.”
[3] the frightful picture. Look away! oh how horrible it is