Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  31Recorded by Patience Meredith in a letter to her sister Faith, now in the possession of Marianne Wormald, great-granddaughter of Edmund Meredith.

  32See above, note 24, and in the unpublished Journal, November 25th 1889.

  33Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, Works (Standard edn 1955), vol. 13, pp. 65–6.

  26

  Since riddles are the order of our day

  Come here, my love, and I will tell thee one.

  There is a place to which all Poets come

  Some having sought it long, some unawares,

  Some having battled monsters, some asleep

  Who chance upon the path in thickest dream,

  Some lost in mythy mazes, some direct

  From fear of death, or lust of life or thought

  And some who lost themselves in Arcady …

  These things are there. The garden and the tree

  The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold

  The woman in the shadow of the boughs

  The running water and the grassy space.

  They are and were there. At the old world’s rim

  In the Hesperidean grove, the fruit

  Glowed golden on eternal boughs, and there

  The dragon Ladon crisped his jewelled crest

  Scraped a gold claw and showed a silver tooth

  And dozed and waited through eternity

  Until the tricksy hero, Herakles,

  Came to his dispossession and the theft.

  Far otherwise, among the northern ice

  In a high frozen fastness, in the waste

  Of jagged ice-teeth and tall glassy spikes

  Hidden from demons of the frost and mist

  Freya’s walled garden, with its orchard green

  With summery frothing leaves and bright with fruit

  Lay where the Ases came to eat the warm

  Apples of everlasting youth and strength.

  Close by, the World Ash rose from out the dark,

  Thrusting his roots into the cavern where

  Nidhogg the dark coiled with his forking tongue

  And gnawed the roots of life that still renewed.

  And there too were the water and the lawns,

  The front of Urd, where past and future mixed

  All colours and no colour, glassy still

  Or ominously turbulent and twined.

  And are these places shadows of one Place?

  Those trees of one Tree? And the mythic beast

  A creature from the caverns of men’s minds,

  Or from a time when lizards walked the earth

  On heavy legs as large as trees, or sprang

  From bank to bank in swampy primal creeks

  Where no man’s foot had trod?

  Was he a dark Lord whom we dispossessed?

  Or did our minds frame him to name ourselves

  Our fierceness and our guile, our jealous grasp

  At the bright stem of life, our wounded pride?

  The first men named this place and named the world.

  They made the words for it: garden and tree

  Dragon or snake and woman, grass and gold

  And apples. They made names and poetry.

  The things were what they named and made them. Next

  They mixed the names and made a metaphor

  Or truth, or visible truth, apples of gold.

  The golden apples brought a rush of words

  The silvery water and the horrent scales

  Upon the serpentining beast, the leaves

  All green and shining on the curving boughs

  (The serpentining boughs) that called to mind

  The lovely gestures of the woman’s arms

  Her curving arms, her serpentining arms,

  The forest wove a fence of its dark boughs

  For the green grass and made a sacred place

  Where the gold globes of fruit, like minor suns

  Shone in their shadowy caverns made of leaves

  So all was more and more distinct, and all

  Was intertwined and serpentining, and

  Parts of one whole, they saw, the later men

  Who saw connections between shining things

  And next saw movements (snatch and steal and stab)

  And consequential stories where the Tree

  Once stood in solitude and steady shone.

  We see it and we make it, oh my dear.

  People the place with creatures of our mind,

  With lamias and dryads, mélusines

  And firedrakes, sparking, sliding, wreathing on,

  We make commotion there and mystery

  Hunger and grief and joy and tragedy.

  We add and take away, we complicate

  And multiply the foliage and the birds—

  Place birds of paradise upon the boughs,

  Make the stream run with blood and then run clear,

  O’er grit of precious stones, diamonds and pearls

  And emerald green and sapphires and anon

  Wash these away and leave the pleasant sand

  Holding the traces of the water’s flow

  As it has done since time began, we say.

  I see the Tree all rugged-thick with bulk

  Of corky bark about its knotted base.

  You see it like a silver pillar, straight

  With breathing skin for bark, and graceful arms.

  The place is at the centre of a maze

  Where men have died in thorny culs-de-sac.

  The place is in a desert where men die

  From thirst in sight of it, nor know they see

  The true place, who have stumbled through a glare

  Of mirage upon mirage, vanishing

  Like melting ice, in the hot sun, or foam

  Breaking at tide’s edge, on the sifting beach.

  All these are true and none. The place is there

  Is what we name it, and is not. It is.

  —RANDOLPH HENRY ASH

  from The Garden of Proserpina

  As Roland was going down the area steps, a large woman in an apron leaned over the railings.

  “There isn’t nobody there any more, luv.”

  “I live here.”

  “Oh yes? And where was you when they took her off, after two days lying in pain under the letter-box too faint to squeak? It was me as noticed the milk-bottles and informed the Social Services. They took ’er off to Queen Mary’s.”

  “I was staying with friends in Lincoln. You mean Mrs Irving?”

  “Yah. ’Ad a stroke and broke ’er ’ip. I ’ope they ’aven’t cut off the electric. They do sometimes.”

  “I’m only back—” Roland began, before Londoner’s caution overtook him, and the thought of loitering burglars. “I’m only back until I can find another flat,” he said carefully.

  “Watch out for cats.”

  “Cats?”

  “When they come to take ’er off, they all come spitting and hissing out and ran off into the street. They make a nuisance of themselves, messing in the area, thieving in the bins. I telephoned the RSPCA to come and put them down. They say they’ll look into it. I don’t think there’s any shut in the house. They come out like bugs shaken out of a blanket. A dozen or more.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “You can smell them.”

  He could. It was the old smell of failure and sourness, with a fresh intensity to it.

  Inside, it was, as always, dark. He turned on the hall light, which did work, and discovered he was standing on a heap of unopened letters, addressed to him, mostly limp and damp. He gathered them up, and moved through the flat, putting on lights. It was early evening; the area windows were dark periwinkle blue. Outside a cat mewed and another, further away, uttered a brief howl.

  He said aloud, “Listen to the silence.” The silence gathered thickly round his voice, so that he wondered, after all, if he had really spoken.

  In the hall, in the light, the Manet portrait sprang ou
t at him. The solid-shadowed head, the sharply thoughtful face, looking out, past him, with its expression eternally curious and composed. The light in Roland’s hall caught the photographed painted light in the shiny thickness of the crystal ball. It illuminated the hints and traces of reflected light on the glass-contained jungle-ferns and watery sea-depth behind the head. Manet must have come close and peered at the light which made the life of those long-dead eyes.

  Opposite, the print of the G. F. Watts’s Ash rose silver-haired from its blackly shadowed trunk, the folded emptiness of the hinted frock-coat, and stared, prophetic perhaps, beautiful certainly, fiercely alert, like an ancient hawk at the solid and sensuous being opposite.

  They were recognisably the same man and yet utterly different, years apart, visions apart. Yet recognisably the same.

  Roland had once seen them as parts of himself. How much they had been that, to him, he only now understood, when he saw them as wholly distant and separate, not an angle, not a bone, not a white speck of illumination comprehensible by him or to do with him.

  He put the stove on in the hall, and the gas-fire in the living-room, and sat down on the bed to read his letters. One was from Blackadder, which he put immediately at the bottom of the heap. Some were bills and some were postcards from holidaying friends. There were also what appeared to be answers to his last routine set of job-applications. They had foreign stamps. Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Barcelona.

  Dear Dr Michell,

  I am happy to tell you that the Board of Studies in English has recommended that we offer you a post as lecturer in English in the University of Hong Kong. The post is tenable initially for a period of two years after which a review will take place.…

  The salary is …

  I hope very much that you will feel able to accept this offer. May I say how very much I admired your paper, “Line by Line,” on R. H. Ash, which you sent with your application. I hope to have the chance of discussing it with you.

  We should be glad of an early reply, as there was very strong competition for the post. We have tried to telephone, but there has been no answer.

  Dear Dr Michell,

  We are happy to tell you that your application for an assistant lectureship at the Free University of Amsterdam has been successful. The appointment is to begin in October 1988: it is understood that you will learn Dutch within two years of taking up your post, though the majority of your teaching will be in English.

  A prompt reply would be appreciated. Professor de Groot has asked me to tell you that he thinks very highly of your paper, “Line by Line,” on R. H. Ash’s vocabulary.…

  Dear Mr Michell,

  It is with great pleasure that I write to inform you that your application for the post of Lecturer in the Autonomous University of Barcelona has been successful, and that you are offered the position with effect from January 1988. We are particularly keen to strengthen our teaching in the nineteenth century, and your paper on R. H. Ash was very much admired.…

  Roland was so used to the pervasive sense of failure that he was unprepared for the blood-rush of success. He breathed differently. The dingy little room humped around in his vision briefly and settled at a different distance, an object of interest, not of choking confinement. He reread his letters. The world opened. He imagined aeroplanes and a cabin on the ferry from Harwich to the Hook, the sleeper from the Gare d’Austerlitz to Madrid. He imagined canals and Rembrandt, Mediterranean oranges, Gaudí and Picasso, junks and skyscrapers, a glimpse of hidden China and the sun on the Pacific. He thought of “Line by Line” with a great rush of the first excitement with which he had first mapped it out. The gloomy self-disparagement inspired in him by Maud’s theoretic certainties and sharpnesses vanished like smoke. Three professors had particularly admired it. How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one’s own existence. Nothing in what he had written had changed and everything had changed. Quickly, before his courage went, he opened Blackadder’s letter.

  Dear Roland,

  I am somewhat concerned to have heard nothing from you for some considerable time. I hope you will feel able to tell me about the Ash-LaMotte correspondence in due course. You may even care to know what steps have been taken to preserve it for “the Nation.” You may not; your proceedings in this matter are hard for me to understand.

  I am writing now, however, not on account of this, nor because of your unexplained absence from the British Library, but because I have had urgent telephone calls from Professor de Groot in Amsterdam, Professor Liu in Hong Kong and Professor Valverde in Barcelona, all of whom are anxious to appoint you. I would not wish you to lose these chances. I have assured them that you will reply as soon as you return, and that you are available. But I need instruction as to your plans in order to know how to protect your interests.

  I hope you are not ill.

  Yours

  James Blackadder

  After a moment’s needled irritation, in which he heard the whole of this message in Blackadder’s most sarcastic Scots, Roland realised that this was quite possibly a very generous letter—certainly kinder than he deserved. Unless it contained a hidden Machiavellian plan to re-establish contact and then savage him? This seemed unlikely; the threatening and repressive demon in the BM basement seemed in this new light partly a figment of his own subjected imagination. Blackadder had held his face in his hands and had seemed not to care to help. Now Roland could be free of him—and he was actively helping, not hindering, that freedom. Roland thought over the whole thing. Why had he run away? Partly because of Maud—the discovery had been half hers, neither of them could have shared with anyone else without betraying the other. He decided not to think about Maud. Not yet, not here, not in this context.

  He began restlessly to walk about the flat. He thought of telephoning Maud to tell her about his letters and then decided against it. He needed to be alone and to think.

  He became aware of a strange sound in the flat—a kind of sawing and scraping, as though someone was trying to force his way in. It stopped and then started again. Roland listened. The scraping was accompanied by a strange intermittent moaning cry. After a moment’s fear, he worked out that the cats were scratching at the matting outside his front door. In the garden, a full-throated feline howl rose and was answered from the area. He wondered idly how many they were and what would become of them.

  He thought about Randolph Henry Ash. The pursuit of the letters had distanced him from Ash as they had come closer to Ash’s life. In the days of his innocence Roland had been not a hunter but a reader, and had felt superior to Mortimer Cropper, and in some sense equal to Ash, or anyway related to Ash, who had written for him to read intelligently, as best he could. Ash had not written the letters for Roland or for anyone else but Christabel LaMotte. Roland’s find had turned out to be a sort of loss. He took the draft letters out of their safe place, inside a file on his desk marked Notes on Aeneid VI, and read them again.

  Since our extraordinary conversation I have thought of nothing else.

  Since our pleasant and unexpected conversation I have thought of little else.

  He remembered the day those dark leaves had flown out of R. H. Ash’s Vico. He remembered looking up Vico’s Proserpine. He remembered he had been reading Ash’s Golden Apples and had been looking for a connection between Vico’s Proserpina and Ash’s version of her in that poem. He took down his Ash from the shelf, sat at his desk, and read.