Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  A positive mind may well say, “Why can the spirits not show themselves in the light of day as well as in the dark?” Professor Morton’s reply to this is that we see how many natural processes are subject to fluctuations in light and dark. The leaves of a plant do not produce “oxygen” without sunlight, and Professor Draper has recently shown that the relative powers of different rays to decompose carbon move through the spectrum thus: yellow, green, orange, red, blue, indigo, violet. Now the spirits have steadily indicated that their materialism is best effected in those rays which are at the blue and indigo and violet end of the spectrum. If a seance could be lit by a violet ray from a prism we might see marvels. I have found that a small quantity of indigo light from a thick pane of glass over a lantern allows our spirit friends marvellous freedom to bring us gifts of a solid kind, or to make themselves airy forms, for a time, from the substance of the medium and of the gases and solids present in the room. They cannot work in harsh light, and past centuries have known this by experiment. Do not ghosts appear at twilight, and the Celtic races meet the messengers of the dead in what they call the Black Month?

  Now, a positive mind often brings with it a cloud of odylic fire of a disagreeable red or yellow colour, flaming and angry, which the medium and any other sensitive person may perceive. Or such a person may emit a kind of chill—like the cold rays from the fingers of Jack Frost—which may penetrate the atmosphere and prevent the aura, or the spiritual matter, from accumulating. I feel such freezing presences as a blow in my lungs, even before the cutaneous surface is aware of them. All exosmose action ceases, and the consequence is, there is no atmosphere out of which the spirit can produce manifestations.

  Perhaps the most terrible example of the effects of such a presence on the delicate operations of spirit communication is the damage wreaked by the self-regarding behaviour of the poet Randolph Ash at a seance I held at Miss Olivia Judge’s house, in the days when that group of marvellously sensitive women, the Vestal Lights, were gathered together under her roof for the purpose of sustained enquiry into spiritual Truth. Miss Judge has a beautiful house, Yew Tree Lodge, in Twickenham, near the river, and many marvellous things have happened there, many gatherings of the living and the departed, many signs and supremely comforting sounds and utterances. Elementals from the water play on her lawns and can be heard laughing at her window in the twilight. Her guests have been distinguished men and women: Lord Lytton, Mr Trollope, Lord and Lady Cotterell, Miss Christabel LaMotte, Dr Carpenter, Mrs de Morgan, Mrs Nassau Senior.

  At the date I speak of, we were engaged in a series of profoundly illuminating talks with our spirit friends and guides, and many marvels had been vouchsafed to us. It was made known to me, I think by Lord Lytton, that Mr Ash was greatly desirous of attending a seance. When I demurred—for it is often harmful to disrupt a circle which is working well together—I was told that Mr Ash had experienced a recent loss, and was in great need of spiritual consolation and comfort. I was still doubtful, but the case was forcefully pleaded and I agreed. It was a condition on Mr Ash’s part, that no one should know in advance of his identity or purpose in coming, so that, he said, he should not impinge on the naturalness of the circle. I agreed to this condition.

  It is not too much to say that upon Mr Ash’s entry into Miss Judge’s drawing-room I felt a blast of sceptical cold in my face and a kind of choking fog in my throat. Miss Judge asked me if I felt quite well and I said I believed I felt a chill coming on. Mr Ash shook my hand nervously, and the electricity of his touch revealed a paradox to me—beneath the congealed ice of his scepticism burned a spiritual sensitivity and force of unusual power. He said to me in a jocular tone, “So it is you who calls spirits from the vasty deep?” I told him, “You should not mock. I have no power to summon spirits. I am their instrument; they speak through me, or not, as they please, not as I please.” He said, “They speak to me too, through the medium of language.”

  He looked about him nervously and did not address the rest of the assembled company, which included seven ladies and four gentlemen, as well as myself. Of the Vestal Lights, all were present, as at all the previous sittings, to wit, Miss Judge, Miss Neve, Miss LaMotte and Mrs Furry.

  We sat around the table in near darkness, as was our custom. Mr Ash was not next to me, but on the right of the gentleman beside me—as was our practice, we all clasped hands. I felt still the weight of cold in my lungs and throat, and had to cough repeatedly, so much so that Miss Judge asked if I were ill. I said I was prepared to try if our friends would speak, but I feared they would not, as the atmosphere was inhospitable. After a time I felt a terrible coldness creeping up my legs and my frame began to tremble greatly. Many trances are preceded by a moment of nausea and giddiness, but the trance into which I now fell was preceded by the shaking of approaching death, and Mr Ritter on my right remarked that my poor hands were as cold as stones. I have no more conscious memory of the events of that seance, but Miss Judge kept notes which I reproduce as they stand:

  Mrs Lees shook all over and a strange raucous voice cried out, “Do not force me.” We asked if it was Cherry and were told, “No, no, she will not come.” We asked who it was again and were told “Nobodaddy” with a horrible laugh. Miss Neve said the undeveloped spirits must be playing tricks on us. Then there was a violent cracking and rapping, and several of us felt our skirts lifted and our knees patted by spirit hands. Mrs Furry asked if Adeline, her baby daughter, was present. The horrible voice cried out, “There is no child.” It then added, “Curiosity killed the cat” and other silly phrases. A large book, from the table beside Mrs Lees, was flung across the room amidst laughter.

  Miss Neve said that perhaps there was a hostile presence in the room. One of the other ladies present, who had never before displayed any skill as a medium, began to weep and laugh, crying out in German “Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint.” A voice spoke through Mrs Lees saying “Remember the stones.” Someone present cried out “Where are you?” and for answer we all heard the sound of flowing water and waves, with marvellous distinctness. I asked if there was a particular spirit present who wished to speak to one of our company. The answer came back through Mrs Lees, that yes, there was present a spirit who had had great difficulty in making itself known but might speak if anyone who felt themselves addressed were to follow the medium into the inner room. As she spoke, a marvellously sweet voice said, “I bring gifts of reconciliation,” and a white hand was seen hovering above the table, carrying a marvellous white wreath, with the dew still fresh upon it, and surrounded by a crown of silvery lights. The medium slowly rose to go into the inner room, and two of the ladies, both much moved, and indeed sobbing, rose to follow her, when Mr Ash cried out, “Oh, you shall not escape me,” and snatched at the air, crying out “Lights! Lights!” The medium collapsed in a dead faint, and another lady fell back in her chair and was soon seen, when the lights were put on, to be without consciousness. Mr Ash was clutching the medium’s wrist, which he claimed had been transporting the wreath, though how that could be, considering where it fell, and where the “gentleman” and the medium were found, defies understanding.

  Now here was chaos, and considerable danger, all caused by Mr Ash’s impulsive and destructive acts. Two delicate organisations disturbed—my own and that of the other lady, who was experiencing her first trance in these desperate circumstances. And the poet seemed quite unaware of the harm he might do to a disembodied mind attempting, heroically and with critical effort, to materialise itself in a new and experimental form. Miss Judge records that I myself lay with a chill and livid face, uttering deep groans. The poet meanwhile compounded his act of folly by releasing my wrist and rushing to the side of the other lady, seizing her by the shoulders, despite urgent assurances from the other Vestal Lights, that it was dangerous to disturb or startle a person so entranced. He was, they tell me, calling out in an uncontrolled and frantic manner, “Where is the child? Tell me what they have done with the child.” I understood at the
time that Mr Ash was enquiring after the spirit of a departed child of his own, but I am told that this could not be the case, as Mr Ash is childless. At this point a voice spoke through my lips, saying “Whose were the stones?”

  The other lady became very ill, very pale, her breathing irregular, her pulse weak and fluttering. Miss Judge asked Mr Ash to leave, which he refused to do, saying that he wanted an answer, and that he had been “practised upon.” I came to my senses at this point and saw him; he looked most horrid and uncontrolled, with veins standing on his brow, and a most thunderous expression. All round him was a fiery mass of dull red actinic light, seething with hostile energies.

  He seemed to me in that moment a demon and I asked, weakly, that he should be requested to leave. At the same time two of the Vestal Lights bore away the unconscious body of our friend. This lady did not recover consciousness for two whole days, to the great distress of the company, and when she did, seemed unable to speak and unwilling to eat or drink, so great was the shock to her delicate form of the terrible acts which had taken place.

  Mr Ash nevertheless took it upon himself to communicate, as a matter of fact, to various persons, that he had detected “cheating” at the seance, at which he represented his own position as that of a detached observer. He was far from that, very far, as I hope the account of Miss Judge, as well as my own, will bear witness. When he later wrote his cleverly insinuating poem, Mummy Possest, he was taken by the general public as a champion of reason against knavery. Happy are they who have been persecuted for truth’s sake—I suppose we must say—but there is no harder blow to bear than indirect malice, bred I am sure of impotent disappointment, for Mr Ash’s whole manner was that of a seeker betrayed by his own positivism into the frustration of any communication he might have received.

  And for my pain, and that of the other afflicted lady, not a thought, not a flicker of regard!!

  Blackadder had written to every public body he could think of who might be concerned with the Ash-LaMotte correspondence. He had lobbied the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, and had requested an interview with the Minister for the Arts, which had resulted in a dialogue with an aggressive and not wholly gentlemanly civil servant, who had said that the Minister was fully apprised of the importance of the discovery, but did not believe that it warranted interfering with Market Forces. It might be possible to allocate some small sum from the National Heritage Trust. It was felt that Professor Blackadder might attempt to match this sum from private sponsorship or public appeal. If the retention of these old letters in this country is truly in the national interest, this young man appeared to be saying, with his vulpine smile and slight snarl, then Market Forces will ensure that the papers are kept in this country without any artificial aid from the state. He added, as he saw Blackadder to the lift, through corridors smelling faintly of brussels sprouts and blackboard dusters, like forgotten schools, that he had had to do Randolph Henry Ash for his A-Level, and hadn’t been able to make head or tail of him. “They did go on so, don’t you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously,” he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths. As it creaked up, Blackadder said, “That’s not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously.” “So pompous, don’t you think?” returned the young man, smoothly impervious, closing the professor into his box.

  Blackadder, who had been immersed in Mummy Possest and the reminiscences of Hella Lees, felt grimly that Market Forces were invisible winds and odylic currents quite as wild and unpredictable as any interrupted by Ash’s Gaza Exploit. He also felt that Mortimer Cropper had a direct line to infinitely more powerful Market Forces than he himself, in the lower depths of the Museum. He had heard about Cropper’s sermon-lecture, invoking these. He was gloomily considering his next move, when he was telephoned by a television journalist, Shushila Patel, who had an occasional five minutes on the Arts on Events in Depth, a late-night news analysis programme. Ms Patel had taken against Cropper because he represented capitalist and cultural imperialism. She had asked around and had been told that James Blackadder was the expert to have on her programme.

  At first Blackadder was quietly but fiercely excited at the idea of putting the power of television behind his cause. He was not a broadcasting academic; he had never written a review outside a learned journal, had never spoken on the radio. He made sheafs of notes, as he would do on a conference paper, on Ash, on LaMotte, on National Art Treasures, on the effect of the discovery of the letters on the wrong interpretations advanced in The Great Ventriloquist. It did not occur to him to ask if Cropper would be present in person; he envisaged the broadcast as a kind of potted lecture. As it approached he began to feel a chill of apprehension. He watched the television and observed politicians, surgeons, planners and policemen being sternly and volubly interrupted by hostile interviewers. He woke sweating from nightmares in which he was required to sit his Finals again at a moment’s notice and with new papers on Commonwealth Literature and post-Derridean strategies of non-interpretation, or in which he was asked in a machine-gun stutter of rapid questions, what Randolph Ash had to say about Social Security cuts, the Brixton riots and the destruction of the ozone.

  They sent a car for him, a Mercedes driven by a chauffeur with a patrician accent who looked as though Blackadder’s mackintosh would dirty his clean cushions. This did not prepare Blackadder for the rabbit-warren of dusty cubicles and agitated young women in which he found himself on arrival. He sat bemused on a moquette bucket-couch, dating from the mid-1950s, staring at a water-cooler and clutching his copy of the Oxford Standard Ash. He was given a plastic cup of unpleasant tea, and told to wait for Ms Patel, who finally arrived, carrying a clipboard of yellow paper, and sat down beside him. She was extremely beautiful, fine-boned, with her black silk hair in a complicated knot and her neck decorated with a fine silver and turquoise lacy necklace. She wore a peacock blue sari, decorated with silver flowers, and she smelled of something lightly exotic—sandalwood, cinnamon? She smiled on Blackadder and made him feel, briefly, wholly welcome and desired. She then became businesslike, fetching out her pad and saying, “Well, what’s important about Randolph Henry Ash?”

  Blackadder had an incoherent vision of his own life’s work, a fine line here, a philosophical joke tracked down there, a sense of the shape of many men’s interwoven thought, none of which would go bluntly into words. He said, “He understood the nineteenth-century loss of religious faith. He wrote about history—he understood history—he saw what the new ideas about development had done to the human idea of time. He’s a central figure in the tradition of English poetry. You can’t understand the twentieth century without understanding him.”

  Ms Patel looked politely baffled. She said, “I’m afraid I never heard of him until I got onto this story. I did a literature course in my degree, but it was in modern American literature and postcolonial English. So tell me why we should still care about Randolph Henry Ash?”

  “If we care about history at all—”

  “English history—”

  “Not English. He wrote about Jewish history, and Roman, and Italian, and German, and prehistoric, and—English of course—”

  Why must the English now always apologise?

  “He wanted to understand how individual people at any particular time saw the shape of their lives—from their beliefs to their pots and pans—”

  “Individualism. I see. So why should we want to keep this correspondence in this country?”

  “Because it may illuminate his ideas—I’ve seen some of the letters—he writes about the story of Lazarus—he was very interested in Lazarus—and about nature study, the development of organisms—”

  “Lazarus,” repeated Ms Patel, blankly.

  Blackadder looked rather wildly about his dimly-lit, porridge-colored box. He was getting claustrophobia. He was wholly unfitted for one-sentence claims on behalf of Ash. He could not detach himself from Ash enough to see what
was not known. Ms Patel looked a little despondent. She said, “We’ve got time for three questions and a quickie to finish on. How about my asking you what is Randolph Ash’s importance to our society now?”

  Blackadder heard himself say, “He thought carefully and didn’t make up his mind in a hurry. He believed knowledge mattered—”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand—”

  The door opened. A bright female voice said, “I’ve brought your other speaker. This is right, isn’t it, this is the last item on Events in Depth? This is Professor Leonora Stern.”

  Leonora was resplendent and barbaric in a scarlet silk shirt and trousers, faintly Oriental, faintly Peruvian, with woven rainbow-coloured borders. Her black hair flowed on her shoulders, her wrists and ears and visible bosom were hung with suns and stars of gold. She shone in the small space by the water-cooler and emitted pulses of florid and musky scent.

  “I expect you know Professor Stern,” said Ms Patel. “She’s the expert on Christabel LaMotte.”

  “I was staying in Maud Bailey’s apartment,” said Leonora. “And they called her, and got me, that’s how it was. I’m glad to know you, Professor. We’ve got things to discuss.”

  “I’ve been asking Professor Blackadder a few questions about the importance of Randolph Ash,” said Ms Patel. “I’d like to ask you the same questions about Christabel LaMotte.”

  “Go ahead,” said Leonora, expansively.

  Blackadder watched with a mixture of fine distaste, technical admiration and sheer trepidation as Leonora built up a memorable thumb-nail miniature Christabel. Great neglected poet, little lady with sharp eyes and a sharp pen, great and unflinching analyses of female sexuality, of lesbian sexuality, of the importance of the trivial … “Good,” said Ms Patel. “Excellent, a major discovery, isn’t it? And I shall ask you at the end, what is the importance of this discovery—don’t answer now. It’s time to go to Make-up, or almost. I’ll see you in the studio in about half an hour.”