by A. S. Byatt
I had almost forgotten what was perhaps her favourite tale, the perfect example of the fecklessness and neglect to which my father, before he found her, had been subject. Two of the sisters — she was never quite sure which — Gladys and Sylvia, Sylvia and Lucy — had gone out into the fields to play, taking with them the baby, my father, whom they had put, for safety, into a horsetrough and had wholly forgotten, returning without him, remembering his whereabouts only when, many hours later, my grandmother asked where he was. The child had been discovered, my mother said, by searchers, lying half in and half out of the water in the stone trough, as the dark fell, quite abandoned. She always affected to find this story amusing, and always instilled into it a very understandable note of bitter indignation against everyone, the girls, the mother, the father, the state of affairs that could allow this to happen. When my father returned to it in Amsterdam it was with a kind of Arcadian pleasure. “We ran wild,” he said with retrospective delight, “we had so few restrictions, we had each other and the fields and the stables — we had an amazingly free childhood, we ran wild.” His little room in the Dutch hospital was warmly lit, for a hospital room. He had bad days when he huddled under the blankets and shivered with final cold. He had good days when he sat up and talked about the world of his childhood, the pony and trap, the taste of real fresh bread, the journeys they made in the ponytrap to the races and came back in the dusk singing all together, the poems they wrote, the amazing variety of wild flowers there then were. “I grew up before the motor-car,” he said. “You won’t really be able to imagine. It was a world of horses. Everything smelled, rather pleasantly, of horses. The milk was fresh and tasty. There were real apples and plums.”
During those weeks, during that unaccustomed talking, which despite everything was pleasant and civilized, as he meant it to be, he did try to construct a tale, a myth, a satisfactory narrative of his life. He talked about what it was like to be part of a generation twice disrupted by world war; he talked about his own ambitions, and more generally about how he had noticed that it was harder for those who felt they had achieved nothing to die. He talked above all about his childhood and particularly, perhaps, though not illuminatingly, about his father. He talked of how his Aunt Flora’s coffin had been refused houseroom, even for a night, by relatives who disapproved of her religious views. He knew he was dying. He had set out because he sensed he was very ill. But we were told before him, and more specifically, how fast and of what he was dying. He was surprised about the cancer. “I had no idea,” he said to me, with a kind of grave amusement at having been caught out in ignorance, ignoring evidence. “It never occurred to me that that was what they were worried about.” And, on another occasion, casually, but with a certain natural rhetorical dignity that was part of him, “You mustn’t think I mind. I’ve nothing to regret and I feel I’ve come to the end. Don’t misunderstand me — no doubt in the near future there will be moments of panic and terror. But you mustn’t think I mind.” He said that for my sake, but he was a truthful man. He was already steeling himself against the panic and terror, which were in the event much briefer and more cramped than we then supposed.
He had often said before, though he didn’t repeat it, at least to me, during those weeks, that a man’s children are his true and only immortality. As a girl I had been made uncomfortable by that idea. I craved separation. “Each man is an island” was my version of a delightful if melancholy truth. I was like Auden’s version of Prospero’s rejecting brother, Antonio, “By choice myself alone”. But during those extreme weeks in Amsterdam I thought about origins. I thought about my grandfather. I thought also about certain myths of origin which I had pieced together in childhood, to explain things that were important, my sense of northernness, my fear of art, the promised end. By a series of elaborate coincidences two of these had become inextricably involved in what was happening. The first was the Norse Ragnarök, and the second was Vincent Van Gogh.
We went to see the Götterdämmerung, in Covent Garden, on the last night of my father’s doomed Rhine-journey. I had a bad cough, which embarrassed me. Now whenever I cough I see Gunter and Gutrune like proto-Nazis in their heavy palace beside the broad and glittering artificial water, and think as I thought then, as I always think, when I think of the 1930s, of my father in those first years of my life knowing and fearing what was coming, appalled by appeasement, volunteering for the RAF. When I was clearing his things I found a copy of the “Speech Delivered in the Reichstag, April 28th 1939, by Adolf Hitler, Führer and Chancellor”. It was stored in a box of family photographs, the only thing in there that was not a photograph, as though it was an intimate part of our family history. At the time, because I was thinking about islands, I remember very clearly thinking about the similarities and dissimilarities between Prospero and Wotan. I thought, in the red dark, that the nineteenth-century Allfather, compared to the Renaissance rough magician, was enclosed in Victorian family claustrophobia, was essentially, by extension, a social being, though both had broken rods. When Fricka berated Wotan, I thought with pleasure of my father, proceeding slowly and freely along the great river.
My favourite book, the book which set my imagination working, as a small child in Pontefract in the early years of the war, was Asgard and the Gods. Tales and Traditions of our Northern Ancestors. 1880. It was illustrated with steel engravings, of Wodan’s Wild Hunt, of Odin tied between two fires, his face threatening and beautiful, of Ragnarök, the Last Battle, with Surtur with his flaming head, come out of Muspelheim, the gaping Fenris Wolf about to destroy Odin himself, Thor thrusting his shield-arm into the maw of the risen sea-serpent Jörmungander. I remember the shock of reading about the Last Battle in which all the heroes, all the gods, were destroyed forever. It had not until then occurred to me that a story could end like that. Though I had suspected that real life might, my expectations were gloomy. I found it exciting. I knew Asgard backwards before my mother told me about Sylvia, that is certain. I remember sitting in church, listening to the story of Joseph and his coat of many colours and thinking that this story was no different from the stories in Asgard and less moving than they were. I remember going on to think that Ragnarök seemed “truer” than the Resurrection. After Ragnarök, a very tentative, new, vegetable world began a new cycle, washed clean of blood and fire and gold. I may, I see now, rereading the book as I still do, have been influenced in these childish steps in literary theory and the Higher Criticism by the tone of the authors of Asgard, who rationalize Balder and Hodur into summer and winter, who turn giants into mountain ranges and Odin’s wrath to wild weather, and who talk about the superior truths illustrated by the beautiful Christian stories. They are not Frazer, equating all gods gleefully with trees, but they set you on course for him. I identified Our Northern Ancestors in my mind with my father’s family, wild, extravagant, stony, large and frightening. They were something of which I was part. They were serious gods, as the Greeks, with their love-affairs and capriciousness, were not. The book was, however, not my father’s, but my mother’s, bought as a crib for the Ancient Icelandic and Old Norse which formed an obligatory part of her degree course. I can’t remember if she gave it to me to read, or if I found it. I do remember that she fed the hunger for reading, there was always a book and another book and another. She never underestimated what we could take. She was not kind to her children as social beings, she screamed at invited friends, she felt and communicated extremes of nervous terror. But to readers she was generous and resourceful. I knew she had been the kind of child I was, speechless and a reader. I knew.
It was with my mother, on the other hand, that the Van Gogh myth originated. Her family name had a Dutch shape and sound to it. Her family came, in part, from the Potteries, from the Five Towns, and a myth had grown up with no foundation in evidence, that they were descended from Dutch Huguenots, who came here in the time of William the Silent, practical, warm, Protestant, hardworking craftsmen, with a buried and secret artistic strain. This Dutch quality w
as a kind of Gemütlichkeit, the quality with which my mother had hoped to warm and mitigate the wuthering and chill of my father’s upbringing. In Sheffield, after the war, we had various reproductions of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh around our sitting room wall. There was one of the bridges at Arles, one of the sunnier ones, where the water is aquamarine and women are peacefully spreading washing. There were the boats on the beach at Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer, which I recognized with shock when I went there eight years later. There was a young man in a hat and yellow jacket whom I now know to have been the son of Roulin, the postman, and there was a Zouave in full oriental trousers and red fez, sitting on a bench on a floor whose perspective rose dizzily and improperly towards him. There were also two Japanese prints and what I think now must have been a print of Vermeer’s Little Street in the Rijksmuseum, a housefront of great peace and steadiness, with a bending woman in a passageway on the left. I always, from the very earliest, associated these working women in Dutch streets with my mother. I associated the secret inwardness of the houses, de Hooch’s houses even more than Vermeer’s, with my mother’s domestic myth, necessary tasks carried out in clear light, in their own confined but meaningful spaces. In my memory, I have superimposed a de Hooch on the Vermeer, for I remember in the picture a small blonde Dutch child, with a cap and serious expression, close to the woman’s skirts, who is my small blonde self, gravely paying attention, as my mother would have liked. The Sheffield house, in whose sitting-room these images were deployed, was one of a pair of semi-detached houses purchased as a wedding present for my father by his father, who could never, clearly, do things by halves, who thought, rightly, it would be an investment. We left one of these houses for Pontefract, during the war, for fear of bombs, and came back to the other. At the period when I most clearly remember the Van Goghs and the Vermeer/de Hooch the second house was in a state of renovation and redecoration. My grandfather had died, various large and dignified pieces of furniture had come to be fitted in, and there was money to spend on wallpapers and curtains. I remember one very domestic one, a kind of blush pink with regular cream dots on it, a sugar-sweet paper that my parents repeatedly expressed themselves surprised to like, and about which I was never sure. In my memory, the Van Goghs hang tamed on this delicately suburban ground, but in fact they cannot have done so. I am almost sure that paper was in the dining-room, where my Aunt Gladys was flustered by my enraged and aproned mother. In any case my earliest acquaintance with the paintings was as pleasantly light decoration round a three-piece suite. This was part of what he meant his work to be, sensuous pleasure for everyone. When did I discover differently? Certainly before I myself went to Arles, before Cambridge, in the 1950s, and saw that tortured and aspiring cypresses were exact truths, of their kind. When my father collapsed at Schiphol I was writing a novel in which the idea of Van Gogh stalked in and out of a text about puritanical northern domesticity. There was nowhere I would rather have found myself than the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. I was reading and rereading his letters. He wrote about the Dutch painters and their capacity to paint darkness, to paint the brightness of black. He wrote about the hunger for light, and about how his “northern brains” in that clear, heavy, sulphur yellow southern light were oppressed by its power. He was not cautious, he lived dangerously. He felt his brains were electric and his vision too much for his body. Yet he remained steadily intelligent and analytic, mixing his colours, thinking about the nature of light, of one man’s energy, of one man’s death. He painted the oppression of his fellow-inmates in the hospital in St Rémy. He was a decorous and melancholic northerner turned absolute and wild. He observed and reobserved his own grim red-headed skull and muscles without gentleness, without self-love, without evasion. He was truthful and mad. In the mornings I went and looked at his paintings, and in the afternoons I took the tram out to my father’s echoing hospital, carrying little parcels of delicacies, smoked fish, fruits, chocolates. In the afternoons and the evenings he talked. He talked, among other things, about the Van Gogh prints, which were obviously his own, his choice, nothing to do with my “Dutch” mother. He talked particularly about the portrait of the Zouave. That was on one of his good days. I had bought him some freesias and some dahlias. I had not realized, in all those years, that he was one of the rare people who cannot smell freesias. He claimed that on this occasion he could. “Just a ghost of a smell, just a hint, I think I can smell it …” he said. He helped me to mend one of the dahlias with sellotape, where I had bent its stem. “You can keep them alive,” he said, “if you keep the water-channels open. I’ve often kept things alive successfully for surprisingly long periods, that way.” He talked about Van Gogh’s Zouave, the one of the family prints I had liked least, as a child, because the floor made me giddy and because the man was alien, both his clothes and his face. It was, said my father precisely, “a very powerful image of pure male sexuality. Absolutely straightforward and simple. It was always my favourite.”
He looked at me over the tops of his little gold half-glasses and smiled. “Van Gogh went to find the Zouaves in the brothel in Arles,” I said. I was going to go on to say that Van Gogh believed that the expense of energy in sex was bad for his, or anyone’s art. But he wasn’t listening. He didn’t really think I knew anything about Van Gogh. He had the idea that he might get well enough to go round the Rijksmuseum and see the Vermeers. He did. My sister took him, alarmingly unstable and determined. He wanted to hear music. He wanted to fit things in. Sometimes I think he meant to shorten his time by living well, so that he would die quickly. The Dutch doctors put life into him with nitro-glycerine drips and blood transfusions. He told me one day, making a story out of it, how he had walked to the lavatory, lurching along walls, creeping along corridors, gripping bed foot and door knob, only to find a queue of other frail pyjamaed men. He told this story with a detached, comic anger. He was saying, in effect, “this is what we come to.” He was measuring his strength. On one of his better days he set out on the same journey quite gallantly. We had bought him some slippers. He was very troubled about the loss of his slippers and nailscissors, which had gone ahead of him, in the aeroplane he missed, to the home to which he never returned. My mother, who became obsessively angry about the taxi which had waited in vain for this aeroplane, was further enraged to receive someone else’s suitcase, in the event. “With a dirty shirt, and someone else’s dirty comb and used razor,” she said. My mother drew back from all human dirt and muddle. My father sat on the edge of his hospital bed, scrupulously clipping his toenails. His ankle, between his pyjama and his new slippers, was white, and smooth, and somehow untouched, covered with young, unblemished skin. I looked at it and thought how alive it was.
In the mornings I walked along dark canals. I liked the city. I remembered that Camus had said that its concentric canals resembled the circles of Dante’s Hell. I even bought a copy of La Chute to check the quotation, and carried it around with a paperback copy of Van Gogh’s Letters, to read over my solitary lunches. Its hero calls himself a juge-pénitent. He recalls the wartime history of the city, with ironic detachment. He pleads (in the legal sense). Amsterdam is, he says, “au coeur des choses. Avez-vous remarqúe que les canaux concentriques d’Amsterdam ressemblent aux cercles de l’enfer? L’enfer bourgeois, naturellement peuplé de mauvais rêves.” Despite my reason for being in the city, I didn’t find it hellish, more reassuring in its persistent sea-fretted solidity. The people were kind and reasonable. The university teachers had agreed to take cuts in salary and working hours, in order to avoid redundancy. My father, who had not walked along the canals, nor studied the brick house fronts, sat in his concrete-walled cell and worked out the social background of everyone he met, the surgeon, the Humanist visitor, the nurses, the other patients. Unlike Camus, he did not suppose that to be bourgeois was to incline towards hell, bad dreams and bad faith. But, in his generation, he found places on the social scale infinitely fascinating and important. The surgeon owned seagoing yachts and an empty pi
ece of Scotland where he fished salmon and shot grouse. My father, even in those weeks, was delighted by this discovery, by this contact with good breeding and success. He said to me of his own father, diagnostically and matter-of-fact, “I suppose we were lower-middle-class really. That was what we were.” He was being ruthlessly exact. He would have wished it otherwise. He talked to the surgeon in his professional voice, from behind his professional mask, more openly smiling than what I think of as his true self, the reflective, solitary face I watched, as he thought out his past, and his future. If he would have to ask his Maker to forgive his virtues, he was sure that they were virtues, and that he had exercised them. When he came home, to the London hospital, there was a strike on, the surgeons wore smeared gowns and the ancillary staff were brusque and sloppy. Amsterdam seemed a fitter place for him, somehow. Its strangeness was in a way life-giving.
To me, too. I took pleasure, despite everything, in mastering the train system, in reading words in a new language, in making friends with the Humanist, who was distressed by the approaching death of a teenage German heroin addict. I stumbled across the flower market, on the canal bank, where I bought him the dahlias. I sat in a restaurant in the Leidseplein and ate a huge bowl of mussels with a glass of good white wine, in the dying October sunlight. The table was in a little glazed front parlour, half outdoors, half in, which reminded me of the covered porch in my grandfather’s Bridlington house, where I had spent a holiday bedridden with measles. The windows were finely etched with floral and geometric patterns. These, too, I associate with my grandfather. I see as I write that the etched drinking glass and carafe that stand by his bed in my vision of his death are those that stood in fact by my bed, on the only overnight visit to Blythe House. I remember that we inherited these objects at his death. My father was allergic to shellfish. He had collapsed in court in Naples, in 1944, after eating lobster, and had developed huge hives on the bench in Hull, twelve years later, after a prawn cocktail. A police surgeon, examining him privily in a cell, had told him he must never eat shellfish again, and he never had, though he had taken intense pleasure in them. I did not feel bad about eating the mussels. There was too much else to feel bad about, and I would not have eaten them if he had been there, I think. I did feel bad about the paintings. I experienced my one moment of desolation during those weeks in the middle of the Rijksmuseum, among all the darkly ingenious still lifes, the heaps of dead books, mementoes mori, the weight of the varying sameness of past endeavour, the silence, my own incapacity to stop and feel curious.
