by A. S. Byatt
It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, a mise-en-abîme even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of good burgundy. And yet, natures such as Roland’s are at their most alert and heady when reading is violently yet steadily alive. (What an amazing word “heady” is, en passant, suggesting both acute sensuous alertness and its opposite, the pleasure of the brain as opposed to the viscera—though each is implicated in the other, as we know very well, with both, when they are working.)
Think of this, as Roland thought of it, rereading The Garden of Proserpina for perhaps the twelfth, or maybe even the twentieth, time, a poem he “knew” in the sense that he had already experienced all its words, in their order, and also out of order, in memory, in selective quotation or misquotation—in the sense also, that he could predict, at times even recite, those words that were next to come, or more remotely approaching, the place where his mind rested, like clawed bird feet on twig. Think of this—that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser’s golden apples in the Faerie Queene, Proserpina’s garden, glistening bright among the place’s ashes and cinders, may have seen in his mind’s eye, apple of his eye, the golden fruit of the Primavera, may have seen Paradise Lost, in the garden where Eve recalled Pomona and Proserpina. He was alone when he wrote and he was not alone then, all these voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places, an Irish castle, an unseen cottage, elastic-walled and grey round blind eyes.
There are readings—of the same text—that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are—believe it—impersonal readings—where the mind’s eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind’s ear hears them sing and sing.
Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.
Roland read, or reread, The Golden Apples, as though the words were living creatures or stones of fire. He saw the tree, the fruit, the fountain, the woman, the grass, the serpent, single and multifarious in form. He heard Ash’s voice, certainly his voice, his own unmistakable voice, and he heard the language moving around, weaving its own patterns, beyond the reach of any single human, writer or reader. He heard Vico saying that the first men were poets and the first words were names that were also things, and he heard his own strange, necessary meaningless lists, made in Lincoln, and saw what they were. He saw too that Christabel was the Muse and Proserpina and that she was not, and this seemed to be so interesting and apt, once he had understood it, that he laughed aloud. Ash had started him on this quest and he had found the clue he had started with, and all was cast off, the letter, the letters, Vico, the apples, his list.
“In the garden they howled, they lifted their voices and howled with hunger and desolation.”
Over his desk the little print of the photograph of Randolph Ash’s death mask was ambiguous. You could read it either way; as though you were looking into a hollow mould, as though the planes of the cheeks and forehead, the blank eyes and the broad brow were sculpted and looking out. You were inside—behind those closed eyes like an actor, masked: you were outside, looking at closure, if not finality. The frontispiece of his book was a photograph of Ash on his death-bed, the abundant white hair, the look of fatigue caught at a transient moment between the semblance of life and the set of death. These dead men, and Manet’s wary, intelligent sensualist and Watts’s prophet were all one—though also they were Manet and Watts—and the words too were one, the tree, the woman, the water, the grass, the snake and the golden apples. He had always seen these aspects as part of himself, of Roland Michell, he had lived with them. He remembered talking to Maud about modern theories of the incoherent self, which was made up of conflicting systems of beliefs, desires, languages and molecules. All and none of these were Ash and yet he knew, if he did not encompass, Ash. He touched the letters, which Ash had touched, over which Ash’s hand had moved, urgent and tentative, reforming and rejecting his own words. He looked at the still fiery traces of the poem.
What Ash said—not to him specifically, there was no privileged communication, though it was he who happened to be there, at that time, to understand it—was that the lists were the important thing, the words that named things, the language of poetry.
He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself.
He thought about the death mask. He could and could not say that the mask and the man were dead. What had happened to him was that the ways in which it could be said had become more interesting than the idea that it could not.
He felt hugely hungry. On the way to fetch himself a tin of sweetcorn he heard the cats again, crying, scraping at his door. He found a heap of tins of pilchards and sardines—he and Val had lived frugally, these were a staple. He opened one of these and put it into a saucer, put it down inside the entrance to the flat and opened the door. Faces looked up at him, triangular sleek black faces, golden-eyed, owlish whiskered faces, tiger-striped, a smoke-grey kitten and a heavy orange Tom. He put down his saucer and called, as he had heard the old woman call. For a moment they hesitated there, heads on one side, and he watched their nostrils spread and snuff the oil on the air. Then they came past him in a rush, on their bellies, and the food was gone, two heads, snatching and gulping, a battle of legs and sinuous bodies, a long cry of the disappointed. He opened more tins, and put down a row of saucers. Soft feet hurried down the area steps, white needle teeth tore at the fish flesh, satisfied fur coiled and purred around his ankles, setting off little electric sparks. He watched them. Fifteen cats. They looked up at him, clear green glass eyes, tawny eyes, yellow and amber eyes, their pupils narrowing to slits in the light of his hall.
He thought there was no reason why he should not go out into the garden. He went back through the basement, pursued by several padding beasts, and pulled open the forbidden bolts, against the grittiness of the rust. He had to move heaps of papers away from the door. (Val had said they were a fire hazard.) The central lock was a Yale, which he turned, propping the door open. The night air came in, cold and damp and earthy, and the cats came out with him, running ahead. He went up the stone steps, and round the wall, beyond the extent of his confined view, and stood in the narrow garden, under the trees.
It had been a wet October; the lawn was covered with damp leaves, although some of the trees were still green. They held up their complicated a
rms, black against the pink haze of street lighting which lay over, rather than mixing with, the black of the space beyond. In his imagination, when he could not get into the garden, it had seemed a large space of breathing leaves and real earth. Now he was out, it seemed smaller, but still mysterious, because of the earth, in which things were growing. He could see the espaliered peaches on the red bricks of the serpentining wall, which had once bounded General Fairfax’s Putney estate. He walked over and touched the wall, the baked bricks put up sturdily then, and still solid now. Andrew Marvell had been Fairfax’s secretary and had written poems in Fairfax’s gardens.
Roland was not sure why he felt so happy. Was it the letters, was it Ash’s poem, was it the opening of his future, was it simply being alone, which was something he needed ferociously from time to time and lately had missed?
He walked along the path, inside the wall, to the end of the garden, where a couple of fruit trees obscured the view of the garden beyond. He looked back at the gaunt house, across the lawn. The cats were coming after him. Their snaking bodies wove in and out of the shadows of the trees on the grass, now glossy in the light, now velvet black in the dark. Their eyes shone fitfully and intermittently, hollow reddish balls, with a bluish spark at the centre, green-streaked curves on the dark that glittered and were gone. He was so pleased to see them, he stood with a silly smile on his face. He thought of the years of their dank smell, the dripping cave he had lived in, and felt, now he was going—for that was certain, he was going away—simply friendly towards them. Tomorrow he would have to think how to arrange for their survival. Tonight, he began to think of words, words came from some well in him, lists of words that arranged themselves into poems, “The Death Mask,” “The Fairfax Wall,” “A Number of Cats.” He could hear, or feel, or even almost see, the patterns made by a voice he didn’t yet know, but which was his own. The poems were not careful observations, nor yet incantations, nor yet reflections on life and death, though they had elements of all these. He added another, “Cats’ Cradle,” as he saw he had things to say which he could say about the way shapes came and made themselves. Tomorrow he would buy a new notebook and write them down. Tonight he would write down enough, the mnemonics.
He had time to feel the strangeness of before and after; an hour ago there had been no poems, and now they came like rain and were real.
27
In certain moods we eat our lives away
In fast successive greed; we must have more
Although that more depletes our little stock
Of time and peace remaining. We are driven
By endings as by hunger. We must know
How it comes out, the shape o’ the whole, the thread
Whose links are weak or solid, intricate
Or boldly welded in great clumsy loops
Of primitive workmanship. We feel our way
Along the links and we cannot let go
Of this bright chain of curiosity
Which is become our fetter. So it drags
Us through our time—“And then, and then, and then,”
Towards our figured consummation.
And we must have the knife, the dart, the noose,
The last embrace, the golden wedding ring
The trump of battle or the deathbed rasp
Although we know and must know, they’re all one,
Finis, The End, the one consummate shock
That ends all shocks and us. Do we desire
We prancing, cogitating, nervous lives
Movement’s cessation or a maw crammed full
Of sweetest certainty, though with that bliss
We cease as in his thrilling bridal dance
The male wasp finds the bliss and swift surcease
Of his small time i’ the air.
—RANDOLPH HENRY ASH
The Mortlake conference was held in an unlikely atmosphere of gaiety and conspiracy. It was held in Beatrice Nest’s house, at her invitation. (Mortlake was agreed, conspiratorially, to be beyond the beam of Mortimer Cropper’s attention.) Beatrice made onion and cream tart, green salad and chocolate mousse, as she had once done for her graduate students. The tarts and mousse looked delicious, and Beatrice was happy. Concentrating on the matter in hand, the threat from Mortimer Cropper, she ignored the currents of tension between her guests, the things not being said, the things substituted for what was not being said.
Maud arrived first, looking severe and preoccupied, her green silk scarf again wound round her head and pinned with the jet mermaid. She stood in one corner, considering the silver-framed photograph of Randolph Henry Ash that stood, where those of father or lover might have stood, on Beatrice’s little secretaire. It was not a photograph of the late silvered sage, but an early one, with a mass of dark hair and an almost piratical look. Maud automatically began to analyse it semiotically; the solid silver arabesques of the frame, the choice of image, the fact that the sitter apparently met the onlooker’s eye, the still nineteenth-century pre-snapshot stare. The fact that the photograph was of the poet, not of his wife.
Maud was followed by Val and Euan MacIntyre. Beatrice did not quite understand this grouping. She had met Val from time to time, sullenly staring from the edge of the working group in the Ash Factory. She noted Val’s new, slightly defiant radiance, but with scholarly single-mindedness did not attempt to account for it. Euan complimented her on her presence of mind in overhearing and reporting Mortimer Cropper’s intentions, and pronounced the whole business to be very exciting, which, combined with the success of the tart and mousse, further changed Beatrice’s mood, which had initially been alarm and a sense of oppression.
Val and Euan were followed by Roland, who said nothing to Maud and began a long conversation with Val about the arrangements for feeding a horde of savage cats and the making of telephone calls to the Animal Welfare. Beatrice did not hear the silence between Roland and Maud, and was of course not aware that Roland was not telling anyone at all about Hong Kong, Barcelona and Amsterdam.
Beatrice herself had telephoned Blackadder, saying in a matter-of-fact way that she had made contact with Dr Bailey and Roland Michell and that they wanted to meet to discuss the Ash–LaMotte correspondence and something she had overheard Professor Cropper saying. When she opened the door to this final member of the group, he presented her, with a look of mingled embarrassment and amusement, to Professor Leonora Stern. Leonora was resplendent in a purple hooded woollen cape, fringed with black silk braid, which covered a kind of scarlet Russian tunic, in heavy silk, over wide black Chinese trousers. Leonora said to Beatrice, “I hope you don’t mind me coming. I promise not to harass anyone, but I have my own scholarly interest in all this.” Beatrice could feel her own round face failing to achieve a welcoming smile. Leonora said, “Oh, please. I’ll keep as quiet as a mouse. I can swear in advance I’m not out to snatch any manuscript, covertly or openly. I only want to read the damn things.”
Blackadder said, “I think Professor Stern may be of material help to us.”
Beatrice held open the door and they climbed the narrow stairs to the little first-floor drawing-room. Beatrice naturally noticed a certain complicated silence surrounding Blackadder’s nod of recognition directed at Roland, but she failed altogether to read the omissions of information or accusation in the long dramatic embrace between Leonora and Maud.
They sat around the edges of the room in armchairs and kitchen chairs with plates on their knees. Euan MacIntyre opened the discussion by saying that he thought he should explain his own presence, which was that of a kind of legal adviser to Maud, who was in his opinion certainly the heir to the ownership of the LaMotte letters, and almost certainly of the manuscripts of the Ash letters, though not of the copyright in these, which was vested in the heirs of Randolph Ash.
“Letters are the property of the recipient—as physical entities—but the copyright remains with the sender. In the case of these letters, it is clear that Christabel LaMotte requested the return of
her letters to her possession, and that Randolph Ash willingly complied. Roland and Maud, who have seen the whole correspondence, are quite clear on this. I have legal proof—a Will, signed and witnessed, of Christabel LaMotte, leaving all her manuscripts to Maia Thomasine Bailey, who was Maud’s great-great-great-grandmother. The true heir would, I suppose, be Maud’s father, who is still living, but he has already made a gift of what manuscripts came to his ancestress, at the time of this bequest, to Maud, who has deposited them in the Women’s Resource Centre at Lincoln. Maud has not told him yet of my discovery, and does not think he has taken any interest in the press reports of Professor Cropper’s large offers of money to Sir George Bailey, who believes himself to be the owner of the letters. Maud thinks, however, that there is almost no likelihood that her father would want to sell to the Stant Foundation, given her interest in the retention of the documents in this country.
