by A. S. Byatt
Ah yes, the young, said Dr Wharfedale. I gather you have trouble with student protest on your campuses? This question, like Celia’s question about altars, produced an eddy of silence. Then a series of disjunct answers. The country, one said, was threatened from outside, and economically unstable, expanding too fast, maybe. The culture was authoritarian and hierarchical, had always been so. Respect for ancestors and hierarchy was part of the national character. If now this was being questioned it was because the students were better fed and had high expectations. They also cannot remember, as we older folk can, the days of oppression, the days of colonial rule, the days when our language was forbidden and our works of art carried away to foreign museums. They do not value what we subversively fought to preserve. They wish to bring down. For the sake of bringing down. Like students everywhere, Dr Wharfedale pacifically said. The assembled professors considered him with suspicion, or so it seemed to Celia. I have noticed, Dr Wharfedale said, that when you speak, you always put your hands across your mouths, so. Is this a form of politeness? Or shyness, perhaps? It is because we believe it is very rude, very aggressive, to show anyone else our teeth, they answered. Very dangerous, it was once believed.
“Sometimes I think, to be quite truthful,” said Celia’s left-hand neighbour, “that I have wasted the whole of my life. It has all been very interesting, perhaps, all this Wordsworth and Milton and George Eliot, but I am not sure it has had any real value.”
Celia, still thinking about the student will to reject, considering her neighbour’s youth, hurried too rapidly to agree.
“I too have wondered what it is all for, in this world we live in. My students grumble that Milton has no right to ask them to know Virgil or Ovid or even the Bible, which to them is not particularly holy and which they haven’t learned at school, as I did. I am not a Christian, why should I ask them to read Paradise Lost? But I am too old to change. These things are my roots.”
“Well,” said her neighbour. “Well, that is not exactly what I meant. Do you know what is meant by Third World literature?”
“Oh yes,” said Celia, again too rapidly, for she did not know. She knew what the Third World was. It was an economic entity defined in relation to two prior worlds. And she had examined degrees in places where the only literature taught was written by women, or blacks, or homosexuals, voices contradicting or modifying a voice, now unheard, that had once claimed to be the best that was thought and said in the world. She did not like, as a woman, to be thus marginalized. She did not like all these separate differences to be lumped heterogeneously together in one anger. The Third World was not one, it was many. Except when it faced the First World, from which she came, as an enemy.
“I think perhaps we should be studying Third World Literature. We should think about imperialism. And economic imperialism.”
There was a place in the city where it had been supposed she desired to go, where you were clutched by the arm from shack doors by fluent girls and eager grandmothers, come buy, come buy, Gucci bags, St Laurent battleblouses, Zeiss cameras, Sony Walkmen and Cabbage Patch dolls, the mimetic products of the miracle, indistinguishable from their platonic forms and a tenth of the price. You could buy a teeshirt with a tomato-pink and brassy Iron Lady, or one with mushroom-cloud and capering mutants proclaiming, “We’ve learned to live with the Bomb.” Vanity Fair, Celia had self-righteously thought, and had corrected herself, no, economic growth.
She turned kindly to her radical young neighbour.
“Perhaps you should study it. Perhaps you should. I am told I should. But Milton and George Eliot are my roots, I do not want them to vanish from the world.”
“Nor do I. But it may not be of great importance if they do.”
She turned to him again and said, “I know how you feel.”
He put his hand across his lower face. “I wonder if you do. No, I don’t think you do.”
It was then she made the mistake of asking his name. His face expressed, she could read it, baffled hurt succeeded by indignation and contempt. He brought from his pocket, wordlessly, the circular disc that had been pinned to his coat during their earlier deliberations and had been removed now, for they had all become friends, had exchanged ideas, they knew each other, did they not? He was not like Professor Sun, he was Professor Sun. Not to have known him was to annihilate everything that had been said or acted, to break the frail connections that had been made. She had failed to distinguish between oriental faces. You can’t tell them apart, she might just as well have said. She had lost face absolutely. Her hand went up to her mouth. She told the truth.
“Tonight you look twenty years younger.”
He said frostily, with his old attacking note. “I am forty-six. Young for a professor.”
“You look twenty-six.”
“Yes. Well.”
All the way home, through the day-long dark of the perpetual night of flying, she brooded on this failure. She thought about the delicate process by which we recognize faces. Something in the brain constructs a face from circular elements, a visual equivalent of the hypothetical deep structure of language. Infants in their hospital cots are teased or titillated by perceptual research workers, who dangle over them paper suns or moons, adding eyes maybe, or a smiling mouth, sketched universals. And from there to the exact particular, how does the mind move? In the national museum of that country hall after hall of Buddhas and Boddhisattvas smile, unvarying and various. Their hands speak a language Celia could not read, mudras that call power from the earth, or evoke infinity. No two were the same, though they were all one. The idea of England from the air was small, dense, disagreeable and irrelevant, though to what it was irrelevant, she could not exactly have said. It was required that one think in terms of the whole world, and it was not possible. Later, in deference to Professor Sun, she would read a book by a francophone West African in which she found a curious key to the confused towers. This black man was incensed by his compatriots’ collusion at the imposition of a deviant Western cosmography on the lively animism of his people. Their poets and teachers, he said, kowtowed to the miscalled universal values of Western literature which were the product of ideology and superstition. Take the shiny glass and steel skyscrapers erected on African soil by Western bourgeois capitalism. These silly buildings omitted the thirteenth floor in order to propitiate foreign ghosts, witches and spirits. Dr Wharfedale had ascertained that their lecture tower lacked a fourth floor in deference to antagonistic local powers. Celia fancied that the world was perhaps after all ruled by Milton’s God, who walked among his subjects and observed them building, with bricks and black bituminous gurge, an ambitious tower of universal human speech, which might obstruct heaven towers. So, in derision, he set a various spirit upon them, who razed their native language from their tongues, and replaced it with a jangling noise of words unknown.
Celia had always before been sorry for the amicable men of Babel, who had surely desired a good thing? This jealous god was only a local deity, Israelite and seventeenth-century Puritan. But the dialect of the tribe was the human speech of particular men. The universals haunted by the mocking various spirit were the plate-glass tower, the machine gun, the deconstructive hubris of grammatologists and the binary reasoning of machines. The rational silver man-made wings hung fragile over the empty dark. Somewhere briefly below, at some point, lay a plain, westward of Eden, where the builders had been frustrated in the days of Nimrod, where a group of nomads, who knew the place well, sat around an oasis, and looked up indifferently at its winking trajectory, a few communications satellites, and the indiscriminate bright flux of the Milky Way.
ON THE DAY THAT E. M. FORSTER DIED
This is a story about writing. It is a story about a writer who believed, among other things, that time for writing about writing was past. “Our art”, said T. S. Eliot, “is a substitute for religion and so is our religion.” The writer in question, who, on the summer day in 1970 when this story takes place, was a middle-aged married woman w
ith three small children, had been brought up on art about art which saw art also as salvation. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Death in Venice, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Or, more English and moral, more didactic, D. H. Lawrence. “The novel is the highest form of human expression yet attained.” “The novel is the one bright book of life.” Mrs Smith was afraid of these books, and was also naturally sceptical. She did not believe that life aspired to the condition of art, or that art could save the world from most of the things that threatened it, endemically or at moments of crisis. She had written three brief and elegant black comedies about folly and misunderstanding in sexual relationships, she had sparred with and loved her husband, who was deeply interested in international politics and the world economy, and only intermittently interested in novels. She had three children, who were interested in the television, small animals, model armies, other small children, the sky, death and occasional narratives and paintings. She had a cleaning lady, who was interested in wife-battery and diabetes and had that morning opened a button-through dress to display to Mrs Smith a purple and chocolate and gold series of lumps and swellings across her breasts and belly. Mrs Smith’s own life made no sense to her without art, but she was disinclined to believe in it as a cure, or a duty, or a general necessity. Nor did she see the achievement of the work of art as a paradigm for the struggle for life, or virtue. She had somehow been inoculated with it, in the form of the novel, before she as a moral being had had anything to say to it. It was an addiction. The bright books of life were the shots in the arm, the warm tots of whisky which kept her alive and conscious and lively. Life itself was related in complicated ways to this addiction. She often asked herself, without receiving any satisfactory answer, why she needed it, and why this form of it? Her answers would have appeared to Joyce, or Mann, or Proust to be frivolous. It was because she had become sensuously excited in early childhood by Beatrix Potter’s sentence structure, or Kipling’s adjectives. It was because she was a voyeur and liked looking in through other people’s windows on warmer, brighter worlds. It was because she was secretly deprived of power, and liked to construct other worlds in which things would be as she chose, lovely or horrid. When she took her art most seriously it was because it focused her curiosity about things that were not art; society, education, science, death. She did a lot of research for her little books, most of which never got written into them, but it satisfied her somehow. It gave a temporary coherence to her perception of things.
So this story, which takes place on the day when she decided to commit herself to a long and complicated novel, would not have pleased her. She never wrote about writers. Indeed, she wrote witty and indignant reviews of novels which took writing for a paradigm of life. She wrote about the metaphysical claustrophobia of the Shredded Wheat Box on the Shredded Wheat Box getting smaller ad infinitum. She liked things to happen. Stories, plots. History, facts. If I do not entirely share her views, I am much in sympathy with them. Nevertheless, it seems worth telling this story about writing, which is a story, and does have a plot, is indeed essentially plot, overloaded with plot, a paradigmatic plot which, I believe, takes it beyond the narcissistic consideration of the formation of the writer, or the aesthetic closure of the mirrored mirror.
On a summer day in 1970, then, Mrs Smith, as was her habit when her children were at school, was writing in the London Library. (She preferred to divide art and life. She liked to write surrounded by books, in a closed space where books were what mattered most. In her kitchen she thought about cooking and cleanliness, in her living room about the children’s education and different temperaments, in bed about her husband, mostly.) She had various isolated ideas for things she might write about. There was a story which dealt with the private lives of various people at the time of the public events of the Suez landings and the Russian invasion of Hungary. There was a tragi-comedy about a maverick realist painter in a Fine Art department dedicated to hard-edge abstract work. There was a tale based, at a proper moral distance, on her husband’s accounts, from his experience in his government department, of the distorting effects on love, marriage and the family, of the current complicated British immigration policy. There was a kind of parody of The Lord of the Rings which was designed to show why that epic meant so much to many and to wind its speech into incompatible “real” modern events. None of these enterprises attracted her quite enough. She sat on her not comfortable hard chair at the library table with its peeling leather top and looked from shelved dictionaries to crimson carpet to elegantly sleeping elderly gentlemen in leather armchairs to the long windows onto St James’s Square. One of these framed a clean, large Union Jack, unfurled from a flagpole on a neighbouring building. The others were filled by the green tossing branches of the trees in the Square and the clear blue of the sky. (Her metabolism was different in summer. Her mind raced clearly. Oxygen made its way to her brain.)
It was suddenly clear to her that all her beginnings were considerably more interesting if they were part of the same work than if they were seen separately. The painter’s aesthetic problem was more complicated in the same story as the civil servant’s political problem, the Tolkien parody gained from being juxtaposed or interwoven with a cast of Hungarian refugees, intellectuals and Old Guard, National Servicemen at Suez and Angry Young Men. They were all part of the same thing. They were part of what she knew. She was a middle-aged woman who had led a certain, not very varied but perceptive, life, who had lived through enough time to write a narrative of it. She sat mute and motionless looking at the trees and the white paper, and a fantastically convoluted, improbably possible plot reared up before her like a snake out of a magic basket, like ticker-tape, or football results out of the television teleprinter.
It would have to be a very long book. Proust came to mind, his cork-lined room stuffed with the transformation of life into words, everything he knew, feathers on hats, Zeppelins, musical form, painting, vice, reading, snobbery, sudden death, slow death, food, love, indifference, the telephone, the table-napkin, the paving-stone, a lifetime.
Such moments are — if one allows oneself to know that they have happened — as terrible as falling in love at first sight, as the shock of a major physical injury, as gaining or losing huge sums of money. Mrs Smith was a woman who was capable, she believed, of not allowing herself to know that they had happened. She was a woman who could, and on occasion did, successfully ignore love at first sight, out of ambition before her marriage, out of moral terror after it. She sat there in the sunny library and watched the snake sway and the tape tick, and the snake-dance grew more, not less, delightful and powerful and complicated. She remembered Kékulé seeing the answer to a problem of solid state physics in a metaphysical vision of a snake eating its tail in the fire. Why does condensation of thought have such authority? Like warning, or imperative, dreams. Mrs Smith could have said at any time that of course all her ideas were part of a whole, they were all hers, limited by her history, sex, language, class, education, body and energy. But to experience this so sharply, and to experience it as intense pleasure, to know limitation as release and power, was outside Mrs Smith’s pattern. She had probably been solicited by such aesthetic longings before. And rejected them. Why else be so afraid of the bright books?
She put pen to paper then, and noted the connections she saw between the disparate plots, the developments that seemed so naturally to come to all of them, branching and flowering like speeded film, seed to shoot to spring to summer from this new form. She wrote very hard, without looking up, for maybe an hour, doing more work in that time than in times of lethargy or distraction she did in a week. A week? A month. A year even, though work is of many kinds and she had the sense that this form was indeed a growth, a form of life, her life, its own life.
Then, having come full circle, having thought her way through the planning, from link to link back to the original perception of linking that had started it all, she got up, and went out of the Library, and walked. She was overexcite
d, there was too much adrenalin, she could not be still.
She went up and down Jermyn Street, through the dark doorway, the windowed umber quiet of St James’s Piccadilly, out into the bright churchyard with its lettered stones smoothed and erased by the passage of feet. Along Piccadilly, past Fortnum and Mason’s, more windows full of decorous conspicuous consumption, down an arcade bright with windowed riches like Aladdin’s cave, out into Jermyn Street again. Everything was transformed. Everything was hers, by which phrase she meant, thinking fast in orderly language, that at that time she felt no doubt about being able to translate everything she saw into words, her own words, English words, English words in 1970, with their limited and meaningful and endlessly rich histories, theirs as hers was hers. This was not the same as Adam in Eden naming things, making nouns. It was not that she said nakedly as though for the first time, tree, stone, grass, sky, nor even, more particularly, omnibus, gas-lamp, culottes. It was mostly adjectives. Elephantine bark, eau-de-nil paint on Fortnum’s walls, Nile-water green, a colour fashionable from Nelson’s victories at the time when this street was formed, a colour for old drawing-rooms or, she noted in the chemist’s window, for a new eyeshadow, Jeepers Peepers, Occidental Jade, what nonsense, what vitality, how lovely to know. Naming with nouns, she thought absurdly, is the language of poetry, There is a Tree, of many One. The Rainbow comes and goes. And Lovely is the Rose. Adjectives go with the particularity of long novels. They limit nouns. And at the same time give them energy. Dickens is full of them. And Balzac. And Proust.
Nothing now, she knew, whatever in the moral abstract she thought about the relative importance of writing and life, would matter to her more than writing. This illumination was a function of middle age. Novels — as opposed to lyrics, or mathematics — are essentially a middle-aged form. The long novel she meant to write acknowledged both the length and shortness of her time. It would not be History, nor even a history, nor certainly, perish the thought, her history. Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction. But it would be written in the knowledge that she had lived through and noticed a certain amount of history. A war, a welfare state, the rise (and fall) of the meritocracy, European unity, little England, equality of opportunity, comprehensive schooling, women’s liberation, the death of the individual, the poverty of liberalism. How lovely to trace the particular human events that might chart the glories and inadequacies, the terrors and absurdities, the hopes and fears of those words. And biological history too. She had lived now through birth, puberty, illness, sex, love, marriage, other births, other kinds of love, family and kinship and local manifestations of these universals, Drs Spock, Bowlby, Winnicott, Flower Power, gentrification, the transformation of the adjective gay into a politicized noun. How extraordinary and interesting it all was, how adequate language turned out to be, if you thought in terms of long flows of writing, looping tightly and loosely round things, joining and knitting and dividing, or, to change the metaphor, a Pandora’s box, an Aladdin’s cave, a bottomless dark bag into which everything could be put and drawn out again, the same and not the same. She quoted to herself, in another language, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” Another beginning in a middle. Mrs Smith momentarily Dante, in the middle of Jermyn Street.
