Angels & Insects: Two Novellas

by A. S. Byatt

  ‘I do not think women ought to trouble themselves much with theology.’ She had found that sentence chilling and rebuffing at the time—she had put a lot of work, in a desultory way, into understanding the involutions and niceties of the Theodicaea, only to arouse one of Arthur’s most lordly letters, which always made her, conscious of her provincial lack of social grace, her female lack of educated talk, wince a little with anxiety and some other, undefined feeling. It was hard now, at sixty-four, to remember that Arthur had been only twenty when he wrote that, and twenty-two when he died. He had seemed like a young god. Everyone he knew had known he was a young god. He had not been so lordly when they were face to face, he had been flushed—partly because of the circulatory problem which made him ill, even then—and his hands had been damp, and his narrow mouth anxious. But they had been face to face, in all, for only four weeks before their engagement, and three more short visits before his death. He had treated her like a mixture of a goddess, a house-angel, a small child and a pet lamb. This was, she supposed, not unusual. It had not seemed unusual. She had loved him passionately. She had thought of him most of the time, most days, after that first nervous embrace on the yellow sofa.

  She turned back to the spirit writings. They were all, all reproaches, bitter reproaches, aimed to hurt. They were pointed.

  Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.

  Your silliness o’ercasts me much with thought.

  Lost Remains.

  People are always angry and disappointed, thought Emily Jesse. She had wanted so much to speak to lost Arthur, to be reassured that she was forgiven for not having been able to be what Arthur’s sister Julia Hallam called a ‘dedicated Nun’. But it might be that Arthur, too, like his family, like Alfred, did not really forgive. She had a letter in her bureau from her nephew, Hallam Tennyson, named like her own son, Arthur Hallam Jesse, for lost Arthur, and like him, godson to old Mr Hallam, who had been so excessively kind to herself, as a memorial, in memoriam.

  My dear Aunt,

  You may imagine my surprise when it was brought to my attention that a copy of Arthur Hallam’s Remains, inscribed to you by his Father, had been offered for sale by a bookseller in Lyme Regis. My Father and I assume that the Volume was sold inadvertently—though how that could happen is not clear to him or to me—and have immediately secured its safety. It is here in our Library, where we shall keep it, until you advise us differently. You will understand my Father’s feelings on making this unhappy discovery …

  She was convinced that it was the sale of the Remains that had attracted the spirit displeasure. It might even be Arthur’s own displeasure, though she wanted to hope that Sophy Sheekhy had, through some process of animal magnetism and aethereal telegraphy, managed to communicate the buzzing of Hallam Tennyson’s disapproval, of Alfred’s disappointment. It was true that she should not have sold the Remains. It was in execrable taste to have sold the Remains, of which old Mr Hallam had had only a hundred copies privately printed, for his son’s close friends and family, the testimony to his genius, tragically cut off. There were writings in there about Dante and divine Love, about sympathy and Cicero. There was the spirited review of Alfred’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), which had aroused the sneers of the tetchy Christopher North at the young critic’s ‘superhuman—nay, supernatural—pomposity’ and caused a flurry of impotent protective rage in all the Tennysons for both the young men, Alfred, morbidly sensitive to criticism, and Arthur, only apparently, proudly, more robust. There were also poor Arthur’s poems, including those reverently breathed to herself, and some to one of his previous loves, Anna Wintour, whose graces, as young men will, he had enumerated to his Emily, sitting on the yellow sofa, offering her himself, and all that he had so far become in his short life. Anna’s poems, Emily thought, were on the whole better than her own, more lively, less full of sweet incense and the thrill of sanctification. There was also a poem inviting her, Emily, to enter the Temple of Italian poetry, assuring her that the feast of music, ‘this pleasure thou dost owe me’, would not wrong her gentle spirit

  or make less dear

  That element whence thou must draw thy life;—

  An English maiden and an English wife.

  This poem reminded her of her struggles to master Italian, to please him. It was odd that the spirits should have cited with such precision one of his translations from the Vita Nuova. He had shown her them with such pride, but they were not in the Remains. Old Mr Hallam had taken it upon himself to burn them, finding them ‘rather too literal and consequently harsh’. She had rather liked the harshness—it had a kind of male forcefulness, a kind of directness she had been taught to value. Old Mr Hallam had taken much upon himself, including the guilt of having separated the lovers, and the care of Emily’s sad future, which was to be beside his own sad future. She had tried, she thought. She was not brought up to find the rigorous formality of the Hallams easy. She liked Ellen, the younger sister, who was like Arthur, without the dramatic tension of sexual difference, but with a kind of sympathetic ease. But the friendship had not really survived. Had not survived her marriage, that was.

  She had not exactly taken a decision to sell the Remains. The house was full of books, and now and then she, or Richard, shipped off a basket or two, to make room for new ones. She remembered now perhaps glimpsing the binding of the Remains between other books shifted from the same shelf. She had seen, and pretended not to see. She hoped Arthur might forgive her. She found the objects which attracted the devotion of his worshippers—including herself, including that desperate fainting girl—almost too much to bear. She was not at all sure Arthur would forgive her. His writings were the best part of himself. His truncated future. She should not have sold the Remains, intentionally or unintentionally. She was at fault.

  She had never liked the Remains, partly at least because it reminded her, always and sickeningly, of that terrible Letter.

  ‘He died at Vienna on his return from Buda, by Apoplexy, and I believe his Remains come by Sea from Trieste’

  She had not liked, in those early days, to think of the terror of the fate of those flesh and blood Remains, and yet had been drawn to do so. The body decayed in earth, the spirit went free. Someone told her Arthur’s heart had been shipped in a separate iron casket. There had been an Autopsy. He had been cut up and wounded, poor Arthur, dead and unfeeling—‘the Physician endeavour’d to get any Blood from him—and on Examination it was the general Opinion, that he could not have lived long’. He had been dismembered and searched as he began on the process of his dissolution. She had spent his absence imagining his return—the outstretched hands, the smiling eyes, the large brow with the ‘bar of Michelangelo’ of which he was so proud, in the bone over the eyes. She could not in those days stop herself imagining what was to come of all that. She had not lived next to a churchyard for nothing. The Thing coming so slowly across the sea filled her with horror, which she never expressed to a soul. Arthur himself might have understood. He had introduced a joke about the stinking corpse of the fair Rosamond into his criticism of Alfred’s use of ‘redolent’ to describe the perfumes in the garden of the Arabian Nights. ‘Bees may be redolent of honey; spring may be “redolent of youth and love”; but the absolute use of the word has, we fear, neither in Latin nor in English any better authority than the monastic epitaph on Fair Rosamond: “Hie jacet in tomba Rosa Mundi, non Rosa Munda, non redolet, sed olet, quae redolere solet.” ’ Or perhaps he wouldn’t have. You have to be touched to the quick, to touch dead flesh with the imagination and rest there, as she had done in all those months of illness and grief. Alfred too had been there. Alfred too had said nothing, but it was clear throughout In Memoriam that his imagination had faced and probed what remained, or ceased recognisably to remain, of that much-loved form.

  Old Yew, which graspest at the stones

  That name the under-lying dead,

  Thy fibres net the dreamless head,

&nbs
p; Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.

  Now that was both gruesome and in some way beautiful, making the dead a part of nature. Worse, more savage, was

  I wage not any feud with Death

  For changes wrought on form and face;

  No lower life that earth’s embrace

  May breed with him, can fright my faith.

  The breeding of ‘lower life’ had also haunted her own dreams—indeed had begun to cease to do so only shortly before In Memoriam, published in 1850, seventeen years after Arthur’s death and eight years after her own marriage, which should have purged some of the horrors. In Memoriam had reawakened much that had lain quiet. Alfred’s mourning had been long and steadfast. It put hers, however fierce, however dark, however passionate, ultimately to shame. Nevertheless she had moments of violence. On receiving Hallam Tennyson’s letter, alone in her drawing-room, she had strode up and down as though the room were too small, and cried out to emptiness, ‘Let him buy it back then and scent it with violets!’ Violets budded all over In Memoriam. ‘My regret / Becomes an April violet / And buds and blossoms with the rest.”

  Arthur had written, in that savaged review, of Alfred, ‘When this Poet dies, will not the Graces and the Loves mourn over him, “fortunataque favilla nascentur violae”?’ and Alfred had turned the compliment on dead Arthur, mourning him in violets. In grim moods, of which she had her share, Emily Jesse had compared the Remains to Isabella’s pot of basil, which produced balmy perfumed leafits because it was watered by grieving tears and drew

  Nurture besides, and life, from human fears,

  From the fast mouldering head there shut from view.

  It was wrong, she knew it was wrong, to see Arthur in terms of mouldering heads and moral oppression. When he came to Somersby he had made it into a real Summerland of its own, a land of Romance. She could see him now, leaping down out of the gig into the lane, under the trees, embracing Alfred, Charles, Frederick, his Cambridge friends, smiling amiably at the younger boys and the assembled garden of girls, Mary the beauty, Cecilia the intelligent, Matilda the damaged innocent, Emilia, Emily, the wild and shy. ‘I love you all,’ he had told them, sitting out on the lawn in the evening light, ‘I am in love with every one of you, however romantic, however prosaic, however strange and fantastic, however resolutely down-to-earth.” He had put up his arms in a great circular gesture embracing them all, which echoed, or more properly was echoed, in the gestures of the witch-elms, in In Memoriam, the trees who ‘Laid their dark arms about the field’. She remembered them reading Dante and Petrarch aloud, she remembered singing and playing the harp, and Arthur’s watching, delighted, ear and eye, gave the music a kind of perfection of intention and resonance they never had when the family played and sang only to itself. And this too, Alfred had captured perfectly, perfectly, in the poetry of memory, in memoriam, so that though her own phantom voice still sounded in phantom moonlight in her private recollection, it was always accompanied by his words.

  O bliss, when all in circle drawn

  About him, heart and ear were fed

  To hear him, as he lay and read

  The Tuscan poets on the lawn:

  Or in the all-golden afternoon

  A guest, or happy sister, sung,

  Or here she brought the harp and flung

  A ballad to the brightening moon.

  She thought Arthur had at first been undecided whether he was to be in love with Mary or with herself. She was quite a sharply noticing girl when not bursting with passionate feeling, and she herself at first had only shared the general Tennyson-worship of this bright being. He sat down and wrote poems to both of them, to Emily and Mary, he admired both pairs of dark eyes, he brought back little posies of wild flowers for both girls from his ramblings with Alfred in the woods. He had a kind of accomplished town-flirtatiousness with women, which alarmed Emily more than the composed Mary, and caused her to see herself as a country-mouse, though before his arrival she had seen herself, particularly on horseback, as a wild Byronic heroine, only waiting for her elegant Prince to remove her to her proper sphere. She quite decided he would love Mary, whom she also loved, and loved to this day, sharing with her the visionary hopes and delights of the New Jerusalem Church and the spiritualist discoveries.

  And then they had come upon each other in the Fairy Wood, he and she, when the whole rambling family had somehow become separated. It was April 1830 and the weather was all watery and silver-gold light, and the sky was full of movement, long racing ribbons of clouds, and veils of water, and rainbow-flashes, and the trees were both sombre-stemmed and alive with a veil of bright green buds, and the earth smelled mouldy and was spattered all over with pale windflowers and glossy yellow celandine. And she had stood at one side of the glade, breathing fast because she had been running, and he had stood at the other, with the light behind him like a halo and his face in shadow, Alfred’s friend, Arthur, and he had said, ‘You look, you really look, like a wandering fairy or dryad. I never saw anything so beautiful in my life.’ Some women, remembering this scene, might have remembered a vision of themselves to fill the space at her side of the glade, or to balance his eager, smiling one at his, but Emily was not a mirror-gazer, she carried no such self-image. She could not even remember what she had been wearing. Only the energy of his pleasure at seeing her, and her stepping towards him, for this moment not Alfred’s friend, but a young man who saw her and was full of equally balanced apprehension and anticipation. So she had walked towards him across the flower-carpet, in the smell of leaf-mould, and he had taken both her hands and said, ‘You know I have been falling in love with you for what seems like forever, and can only really have been four weeks?’

  She always thought of the centre of her love for Arthur in this way, of two creatures joining hands in a leafy, flowery thicket. Such a thicket, Arthur said, for he shared, indeed created the sacredness of that moment, as was the English type, such as might have been met in Malory or Spenser, of the eternal sacred groves of Nemi and Dodona. He addressed his letters to Nem, to dearest Dod, a childish lisping of something daemonic, or so she hoped. He compared her to the Fair Persian in Alfred’s Recollections of the Arabian Nights, ‘tressèd with redolent ebony, / In many a dark delicious curl’. He compared their grove in the Fairy Wood to the ‘Blackgreen bowers and grots’ of that rich vision, and recited, in his clear, modulated voice, higher than Alfred’s rich grumble, the vision of the Nightingale in the grove.

  The living airs of middle night

  Died round the bulbul as he sung;

  Not he: but something which possessed

  The darkness of the world, delight,

  Life, anguish, death, immortal love,

  Ceasing not, mingled, unrepressed,

  Apart from place, withholding time …

  Somersby in those days was a place created and rendered timeless by the imagination, which sang like the Nightingale. Alfred’s Ode to Memory, like the Recollections of the Arabian Nights, was a young man’s first recording, he said, of the sense that he already had an irrevocable Past of his own, his childhood reading, the earthly Paradise he made out of the garden. As they got older the Tennysons more and more remembered the Rectory garden in his words:

  Or a garden bowered close

  With plaited alleys of the trailing rose,

  Long alleys falling down to twilight grots,

  Or opening upon level plots

  Of crowned lilies, standing near

  Purple-spikèd lavender:

  Whither in after life retired

  From brawling storms,

  From weary wind,

  With youthful fancy re-inspired,

  We may hold converse with all forms

  Of the many-sided mind,

  And those whom passion hath not blinded,

  Subtle-thoughted, myriad-minded.

  My friend, with you to live alone,

  Were how much better than to own

  A crown, a sceptre, and a throne!


  Emily Jesse shuffled the spirit papers in her gipsy hands as she found herself caught again in the thicket of thoughts that surrounded timeless Somersby, made by men, made for men. There was Alfred, desiring to live alone with his friend, to whom he gave, without irony, Coleridge’s epithet of high praise for Shakespeare, ‘myriad-minded’. It was not that she was jealous of Alfred—how could she be? It was she, Emily, Arthur meant to marry, it was her approach that made him catch his breath, it was on her lips that he pressed those nervous, urgent kisses. He was eager for marriage, he burned for it, that was clear enough. Alfred was different. Alfred had most terribly tried the patience of Emily Sellwood, sister to Charles’s much-loved wife, Louisa. He had teased out their engagement, on, off, on, off, over twelve long years, marrying her finally in 1850, the year of In Memoriam, when she was thirty-seven, and her youth was irrevocably gone. Emily Jesse had received desperate letters in her time from Emily Sellwood, begging her for some assurance of continuing love and friendship, whilst Alfred gloomed and equivocated, and went away, and wrote. It was curious, Emily Jesse always thought, that Emily Sellwood would tell again and again the story of meeting Alfred in Holywell Wood, when she was walking there with Arthur.

  ‘I was wearing my light-blue dress,’ Emily Sellwood would say, ‘and Alfred suddenly appeared through the trees in a long blue cloak, and said to me, “Are you a dryad or a Naiad or what are you?” And I was suddenly quite sure that I loved him, and I have never wavered in that love, whatever the temptations, whatever the pain.’