Desert Island Styx

Announcer: As part of our season celebrating The Devil and all his Works, a special literary edition of Desert Island Styx.

Magma: Our castaway this morning is somebody who has played a major part in all our lives. He goes by many names: The Adversary, Old Scratch, Beelzebub, Leviathan, Belial, Antichrist, Lucifer or, as Robert Burns put it: “Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie.” Welcome. With so many names, printing your stationery must be hellish?

Satan: It used to be but nowadays I tend to use email, Twitter or a direct whisper into the ear in the dead of night.

Magma: Is there a particular name you’d like me to use?

Satan: Any human name will do nicely but I’m rather fond of Satan. It’s a classic and doesn’t have that awkward definite article to fuss over.

Magma: This plethora of names has something to do with your childhood; could you tell us a little about your early years?

Satan: I was raised by foster families all over the world: wherever people feared harm from the elements, beasts or other people. Many will try to tell you different but the first things to be worshipped are always the bad things, the scary things: the things that’ll kill you. You list some of my Judeo-Christian names but I had pagan guardians, ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Buddhists, Brahmins, and Hindus. Summer holidays were fantastic: I never knew where I’d be or who I’d be hanging with.

Magma: Let’s have your first poetry choice.

Satan: It’s got to be Dante. He’s like the eye of a needle: you can’t go through him so you have to take your camel around him … no, that’s not quite right. Either way, he’s impossible to ignore and I do find his portrait of me entertaining, if a little crude:

O what a marvel smote me with amaze
When I beheld three faces on his head!
The one in front showed crimson to my gaze;
Thereunto were the other faces wed
Over the middle of each shoulder’s height,
And where the crest would be, their union made.
(Inferno, Canto XXXIV)

I was never crazy about that three-headed Trinity look, but it was big in the Middle Ages. It’s much more melodious in the Italian, of course, but this translation by Laurence Binyon was recommended by my good friend Ezra Pound.

Magma: So you’re saying Pound is with you, then?

Satan: Of course. I’m encircled by poets on fire down below. But not Dante. We agreed that if he judged a local competition, did a couple of workshops and an evening reading, we’d let him out of Hell.

Magma: That’s very lenient of you.

Satan: Of course his Inferno is very political: Dante’s hell is full of Florentines and Popes and factions who’d wronged him. It’s one of the earliest poetry spats. And for all the claims made about Italian cuisine, he has my three mouths chomping on Brutus, Cassius and Judas for eternity. Thank God for the Pizza Diavola.

Magma: Your next choice?

Satan: I’ll stick with the big guns for now: Paradise Lost.

Magma:Because you’re the hero of the piece I suppose.

Satan: That’s not strictly true, you know. Milton was poet-in-residence and what you tend to get in Paradise Lost is the whole story, not just a museum tour. And have you noticed that he invents action cinema as he goes, full of great special effects?

but the sword
Of Michael from the armoury of God
Was given him tempered so, that neither keen
Nor solid might resist that edge …
Then Satan first knew pain,
And writhed him to and fro convolved; so sore
The griding sword with discontinuous wound
Passed through him:
But the ethereal substance closed,
Not long divisible;
(Paradise Lost, Book VI)

Magma:Ouch.

Satan: If you really want to talk about ‘the Devil and all my works’, you can find my best work in
Paradise Lost. In fact, I sometimes think I created work itself.

Magma: How do you mean?

Satan: Well, I don’t know if you’ve read Genesis lately, but it’s a whole lot of “moving on the surface of the waters” and “separating light from darkness” and “seeing that it was good” and so on and so forth. It’s all done with divine thought: there’s no labour involved. I project-managed a mighty bridge connecting earth to Hell. Without me, Adam and Eve would have tinkered in their little garden forever and mankind would have achieved nothing.

Magma: Wouldn’t that have been bliss?

Satan: God, no. Imagine a world without curiosity, knowledge, reason, science, art, culture. There was no culture in Eden, no poetry. What did I say about that forbidden fruit?

O sacred, wise and wisdom-giving plant,
Mother of science, now I feel thy power
Within me clear, not only to discern
Things in their causes, but to trace the ways
Of highest agents, deemed however wise.
(Paradise Lost, Book IX)

Magma: But you did this out of envy.

Satan: Well, they don’t call me the enemy of mankind for nothing. For me that’s a bonus but now you have Shakespeare, Palladio, Mahler, Rembrandt and Hitchcock. Of course, you also have Ron Howard but let’s move along.

Magma: Your next selection?

Satan: Back to Milton and my crowning glory: the misery between man and woman. I get blamed for all manner of things. There are all these films where I hatch elaborate plots to kill innocents and arrange fantastical accidents, but all I had to do was to set man and woman against each other. Simple but effective:

Thus fenced, and as they thought, their shame in part
Covered, but not at rest or ease of mind,
They sat them down to weep, nor only tears
Rained at their eyes, but high winds worse within
Began to rise, high passions, anger, hate,
Mistrust, suspicion, discord, and shook sore
Their inward state of mind, calm region once
And full of peace, now tossed and turbulent:
(Paradise Lost, Book IX)

You see, what a lot of people don’t realise is that, like Milton, I’m a bit of a Puritan too.

Magma:It must bother you that Paradise Regained washes away all your bad work?

Satan: Well, who reads that? It’s not exactly The Godfather Part II is it? The ‘disappointing sequel’ is one of my inventions too, you know, and very neatly linked to the love of money.

Magma: How about your fourth choice?

Satan: I can’t ignore Faust, so four and five are Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Goethe’s Faust.

Magma: No Shakespeare yet?

Satan: Well, apart from the usual adages and a little business with Brutus, I never thought he took me that seriously. Too secular by half, that man.

Magma: You said “he”, so can you confirm that Shakespeare was one man: the son of a glover from Stratford-upon-Avon?

Satan: Well, that would be to spoil one of the things I love most about Shakespeare: the way he can fuel a wild goose chase and use up a life. You know about Delia Bacon? A sorry tale all round. Anyway, Marlowe was writing around the time I was having a bit of a Golden Age: superstition, witch- hunts, burnings, religious strife, torture in the name of God were convulsing the civilised world. But there are whiffs of modernity in Dr. Faustus.

FAUSTUS: How come it then that thou art out of hell?
MEPHISTOPHILIS: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
(Scene III)

Okay, he’s in hell because he once “tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,” but every time I think of that line, I hear Robert Lowell’s Skunk Hour from 1959:

I hear
my ill spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat …
I myself am hell;

Yes, it paraphrases Paradise Lost but it shows how I’ve entered the psyche, the very cells of modern man, and all the fantastical grotesquery of evil can be folded away in the great dressing up box of legend.

Magma: That’s very purple.

Satan: Well, Milton didn’t deck me out in purple wings by mistake. Anyway, my favourite scene is the countdown to the loss of Faustus’s soul. Everybody loves a climactic countdown and since I brought Death into the world and the Almighty dangled each soul over Hell, each lifetime is an unwinnable race against the clock:

The clock striketh twelve.
FAUSTUS: O, it strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell.
Thunder and lightning.
O soul, be changed into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean – ne’er be found.
My God! my God! look not so fierce on me!
(Scene XIV)

Magma: Your view of human life is rather pessimistic.

Satan: Well, I’m Satan, what did you expect? But Goethe’s a lot more upbeat than Marlowe and funnier than you’d think, if you can take all those end rhymes. And he even has God say this:

LORD: Such rogues as you I can well tolerate.
For man’s activity can slacken all too fast,
He falls too soon into a slothful ease;
The Devil’s a companion who will tease
And spur him on, and work creatively at last.
(Faust Part One)

Magma: That makes you sound like the good guy.

Satan: Terrible isn’t it? But Faust does drive his pregnant lover to despair, infanticide and execution, so it’s not all bad from my point of view. I like the sheer verve and the chaos of metres and forms. And of course working on Faust was a lifelong obsession for Goethe and like I said before, I love a good consuming monomania.

Magma: But things end pretty badly for you in Part Two don’t they?

Satan: Such a shame we don’t have time to discuss that now. Must press on; everything’s been a bit old hat so far, don’t you think?

Magma: And only male poets up to now.

Satan: Thought that would get your goat. Far be it from me to spread equality and fairness, but wait and see.

Magma: So do you have much time for contemporary poetry? Do you get to many readings?

Satan: I attend every poetry reading and if you concentrate you’ll sense me whenever a poet chews gum all through their set; reads from their sequence, Theseus on The Underground; gesticulates to illustrate the sinking of the sun; eats up another’s time with overrunning lines or turns to the unresponsive audience and says, “So are you not used to Post-Fusion Avant Bogle-Bop around here?”

Magma: It sounds like you hate poets.

Satan: I’m The Devil: I hate people and, though sometimes it’s not obvious, poets are people after all.

Magma: So how about some modern poems?

Satan: I’m keen on Ted Hughes’s Crow. It reads like Satan’s very own Genesis:

God tried to teach Crow how to talk.
‘Love’, said God. ‘Say, Love.’
Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea
(Crow’s First Lesson)

It’s also like a modern Paradise Lost, celebrating my greatest work once more.

And Crow retched again, before God could stop him.
And woman’s vulva dropped over man’s neck and tightened.
The two struggled together on the grass.
God struggled to part them, cursed, wept –
(Crow’s First Lesson)

Magma: Any other modern favourites?

Satan: Hard to mention Hughes and not Sylvia Plath. The unwinnable, unceasing war between some of their admirers is nectar to me. And Daddy shows how misery addles the family tree:

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that,

Recently I do seem to be quite popular with the ladies.

Magma:How do you mean?

Satan: Well, and I’m sure there are exceptions, the likes of Milton and Goethe have given way to Plath and Sharon Olds whose first book was even called Satan Says. The epic canvas has shrunk and curled itself up within the human cell. Listen to Sharon Olds:

I am trying to write my
way out of the closed box
redolent of cedar. Satan
comes to me in the locked box
and says, I’ll get you out. Say
My father is a shit. I say
my father is a shit and
Satan laughs and says, It’s opening.
(Satan Says)

On the page, even her lines are cabin’d, cribb’d, confined.

Magma: Well that’s two examples, anyone else?

Satan: I believe your laureate is a woman at the moment and I’m on close terms with many past laureates. I have tunnels beneath Westminster Abbey, you know.

Magma: Carol Ann Duffy, yes.

Satan: Well she wrote a poem called The Devil’s Wife. A little presumptuous I thought but she conjures up the Moors Murders well:

The Devil was one of the men at work.
Different. Fancied himself …
We’re the same, he said, That’s it. I swooned in my soul.
We drove to the woods and he made me bury a doll.
(The Devil’s Wife: Dirt)

I must stress that there were no children in Eden. I never harmed a child. Mankind outdoes the Devil many a time.

Magma: Gosh, this is heavy stuff. Is there anything you read to cheer yourself up?

Satan: Well, and we’re back with Faust, Chris Emery’s Dr. Mephisto lets the Devil have a little fun and reminds me that eternal damnation can be a Godsend:

Mephisto tires easily of quadrilles and gavottes,
and all the Moaning Minnies in the Theatre of Hate.
He’s wiped out his entourage of shipwrights and chefs
with bowel cancer and Nembutals …
Mephisto dreams
he’s climbing into bed with Louise Brooks.
She’s startlingly black & white and really quite lascivious.
All page boy haircut and cupid’s bow lips.
(Mephisto Sleeps)

Magma: Okay, if you could only take one of these books with you, which would it be?

Satan: It’s got to be Paradise Lost. Along with The Bible, it’s like a family photo album.

Magma: And for a luxury?

Satan: Could I have a human couple? In case I get bored?

Magma: I don’t think that’s possible. You’ve got form in that area.

Satan: Shame. Well in that case, The World at War box set.

Magma: Satan, thank you very much.

Satan: You’re welcome. Love the name Magma by the way: reminds me of home.