by A. S. Byatt
You say, but with no touch of scorn,
Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes
Are tender over drowning flies,
You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.
He had gone on again to praise Arthur’s direct struggles with his Doubt:
Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
But he himself watched the drowning flies in anguish of his own. They were alive, they struggled and whirred, they were dead. They were bodies and life was in them, they circled the edge of the jug of water, they buzzed, they were nothing. And Arthur, so bright with life? If he had known Arthur’s death, truly known the death of Arthur’s body, at the time when he had known Arthur’s life, he could not have loved him, they could not have loved each other. He had found that, not by thinking it out, but by writing it. He was not clever, like Arthur. He couldn’t write out an argument to save his life, he couldn’t build up a theory or defend a position. He had been a dumb member of the Apostles, he had decorated the chimneypiece and made sly, quiet jokes, and recited verses and accepted homage for his great gift, which seemed only partly to belong to himself, whoever he was. But he had thought it out, love and death, those pitiless abstractions, in that cunningly innocent form he had found for Arthur’s poems, a form that seemed so straightforward, primitive songlets or chants of grief, but could feel its way through an argument, through shifts and shifts of ideas and feelings, stopping and starting, a rhyme closed in a rhyme, and yet moving quietly and inexorably on. In this case, from abstract personified Love to pure animal sensuality, still sweetly singing on.
Yet if some voice that man could trust
Should murmur from the narrow house,
‘The cheeks drop in; the body bows;
Man dies: nor is there hope in dust:’
Might I not say? ‘Yet even here,
But for one hour, O Love, I strive
To keep so sweet a thing alive:’
But I should turn mine ears and hear
The moanings of the homeless sea,
The sounds of streams that swift or slow
Draw down Æonian hills, and sow
The dust of continents to be;
And Love would answer with a sigh,
‘The sound of that forgetful shore
Will change my sweetness more and more,
Half-dead to know that I shall die.’
O me, what profits it to put
An idle case? If Death were seen
At first as Death, Love had not been,
Or been in narrowest working shut,
Mere fellowship of sluggish moods,
Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape
Had bruised the herb and crushed the grape,
And basked and battened in the woods.
Since he had become an eminence he had taken, somewhat awkwardly, and particularly when he had taken too much port, to making pronouncements. He liked to say—watching his friends, his visitors, his devoted son, reach for their notebooks and pencils—things like, ‘Matter is a greater mystery than Mind. What such a thing as spirit is apart from God and man, I have never been able to conceive. Spirit seems to me to be the reality of the world.’ He got in an awful mess if he tried to elaborate on that kind of oracularity, and would say, with what he hoped was an engaging shaggy evasiveness, that he was no theologian. Spirit was a slippery word and a slippery thing. He liked the rotundity of ghost, the good old English word, the ghost in man, the ghost that once was man, the Holy Ghost, the ghosts he had written his Apostolic essay on, but spirit ran into all sorts of quibbling trouble. He nodded sagely when his friends castigated the crass materialism of the Age, but his imagination was stirred by matter, by the thick solidity of the hugely redundant quantity of flesh and earth and vegetation that either was or wasn’t informed by spirit. ‘The lavish profusion too in the natural world appals me,’ he had written, ‘from the growths of the tropical forest to the capacity of man to multiply, the torrent of babies.’ If man was not an angelic intelligence, his own thoughts were mere electric sparks emitted by a pale, clay-slimy mass of worm-like flesh.
I trust I have not wasted breath:
I think we are not wholly brain,
Magnetic mockeries; not in vain,
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;
Not only cunning casts in clay …
He knew well enough what it was like to feel he was his body. Be near me, he had urged his dead friend, when my light is low, when the blood creeps and the nerves prick. He knew what could be done with words like ‘creep’ and ‘prick’, he knew how to make solid the horrid vision of the nightmare world where
shoals of puckered faces drive …
Dark bulks that tumble half alive,
And lazy lengths on boundless shores;
Lovely thick words, ‘puckered’, ‘bulk’, ‘lazy’. Like ‘bruised’ and ‘crushed’ and ‘basked’ and ‘battened’. Fearful and enticing. But the other, the world of spirit, of light, resisted language and remained more ephemeral than ethereal. ‘Who will deliver me from the body of this Death?’ Saint Paul had asked wildly. Paul was a man who knew well about the mass of the nerves and the ghost trapped in their too-solid meshes. Saint Paul had written of the man caught up to the Third Heaven, ‘whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell’. He himself could escape from himself into a kind of waking trance, and by the strangest of methods, the steady repetition to himself of two words, his own name, until the pure concentration on his isolated self seemed paradoxically to destroy the bounds of that self, that consciousness, so that he was everything, was God, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it was) seeming no extinction but the only true life. He knew loss of sharp consciousness in many forms, had feared the family epilepsy in youth, had wandered in a mist like the hero of his own Princess or the battling armies in the Morte d’Arthur, but this loss of self by chanting the name of self was different. He had tried to write it in Arthur’s poems, hoping, like Dante at the opening of the Paradiso, to speak to those who had some idea of what it was to go out of oneself.
Trasumanar significar per verba
Non si porìa: però l’esiempio basti
A cui esperienza grazia serba.
He felt a kind of dissatisfaction with the transcendental aspects of Arthur’s poems which was at one simple level craftsman-like—they did not afford him the sense of lightness, so intimately connected with sensuous pleasure, that the grim bits did, or the accurate trees and birds and gardens and seashores which appeared and disappeared like precise visions. He had written and rewritten his attempt to convey the ‘waking trance’.
So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touched me from the past,
And all at once it seemed at last
The living soul was flashed on mine,
And mine in this was wound, and whirled
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world,
Æonian music measuring out
The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance—
The blows of Death. At length my trance
Was cancelled, stricken through with doubt.
Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame
In matter-moulded forms of speech,
Or even for intellect to reach
Through memory that which I became:
Till now the doubtful dusk revealed
The knolls once more where, couched at ease,
The white kine glimmered, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field:
He had been considerably per
plexed about how to put those two lines about the mingled souls. When he had first given the poem to the world it had read differently.
The dead man touched me from the past,
And all at once it seemed at last
His living soul was flashed on mine,
And mine in his was wound …
He had changed it. He had felt the first reading gave a wrong impression. He believed his trance did mean that he was whirled up and rapt into the Great Soul, of which perhaps both Arthur and himself were a part. They had talked together of the reasons why Dante’s Inferno was so much more compelling than the Paradiso, and had decided that it was to do with the inescapably sensuous nature of language, of words, which were breath, and tongue, and teeth, and the motions of this warm scribe my hand over the white paper, leaving its black trail. He wanted Arthur to be like the Beatrice of Dante’s Paradise. He imagined Arthur saying,
‘ ’Tis hard for thee to fathom this;
I triumph in conclusive bliss,
And that serene result of all.’
And quickly, quickly, the life of the poem itself slipped into the truth of qualification.
So hold I commerce with the dead;
Or so methinks the dead would say;
Or so shall grief with symbols play
And pinning life be fancy-fed.
But it was not Beatrice, but the doomed lovers, Paolo and Francesca, whose intertwined souls in their glimmering hellish flame had roused such pity, such sensuous pleasure, in generations of Dante’s readers.
The life of his poem was in the ease of the white cows and the field in the dark arms of the trees. He was proud of the good phrase ‘matter-moulded forms of speech’—that said in a nutshell what he wanted to say about the stubborn body of language, and so of his poem, Arthur’s poems. Now ‘mould’ was a good word, it made you think. It made you think of the body of this death, of clay, of things mouldering away. It was art, it was decay. Not only cunning casts in clay, he had written in his moments of doubt about the magnetic tics of the fleshly brain, though elsewhere he had added to his idea of ‘what is’ a pair of potter’s hands:
And what I am beheld again
What is, and no man understands;
And out of darkness came the hands
That reach through nature, moulding men.
Mould, mouldering. God livening the clay, God, or whatever it was, breaking it all down again.
And if that eye which watches guilt
And goodness, and hath power to see
Within the green the mouldered tree,
And towers fallen as soon as built—
That was a wonderful line, he thought, the terror of that eye seeing simultaneously the mould from which the green tree was moulded which contained the seeds of its own mouldering; there was in a few words the terror of mortality and meaningless eternity. ‘And lo, thy deepest lays are dumb / Before the mouldering of a yew … Whose fibres net the dreamless head, / Whose roots are wrapt about the bones.’ He had made some delightfully poignant images of his own poetic cries of grief as things natural as birdsong, the trill shaped in the feathered throat, ‘short swallow-flights of song that dip / Their wings in tears and skim away.’ ‘I do but sing because I must, / and pipe but as the linnets sing.’ One step away, the song of the creatures, from the despair of an infant crying in the night, and with no language but a cry.
He made yet another stab at the buttons, moving his beard out of his own way, where hairs were caught in his blunt fingers, in the white bone of the button. The spirit does but mean the breath. It was a long time since he had been moved to go over all that in his head like that, fighting old battles, suffering old pains. O last regret, regret can die. Regret was like himself, it stiffened and ached, it responded less quickly to stimuli; Arthur was gone so far away, and his regret and himself were moving towards Arthur, or towards annihilation, pari passu, less fluent than they had been, more sullen when they heard the call. That wasn’t the whole truth, the truth was that both he and Arthur had seeped into his poem, had become parts of its fabric, a matter-moulded kind of half-life he sometimes thought it was, something not independent, but not part of each, not a handclasp, but a kind of vigorous parasite, like mistletoe on dying oaks with its milky berries and its mysterious evergreen leaves. He had had all sorts of worries and wicked thoughts about his poem. Perhaps he was using it to keep alive a memory and a love it would have been stronger and more manly to let lie. Perhaps he was in some wrong way using his beloved to subserve his own gain, his own fame, or more subtly, making something fantastically beautiful out of the horror of Arthur’s dissolution, which it would have been wiser, more honest, to stare at in dumb and truthful uncomprehending pain, until its hurtful brightness either faded like a fire eaten away, or caused him to drop his own eyes. You could not make a man into a poem, neither the singer nor the sung, neither the rippling throat nor the still corpse.
And yet, and yet, and yet, if there was one thing he knew, it was that his poem was beautiful and alive and true, like an angel. If the air was full of the ghostly voices of his ancestors, his poem let them sing out again, Dante and Theocritus, Milton and the lost Keats, whose language was their afterlife. He saw it as a spinning circular cage in which he was a trapped bird, a cage like a globe, rimmed with the bright lines of the horizons of dawn and dusk. He saw it as a kind of world, a heavy globe, spinning onwards in space, studded with everything there was, mountains and dust, tides and trees, flies and grubs and dragons in slime, swallows and larks and carrier-birds, raven-glossed darkness and summer air, men and cows and infants and violets, all held together with threads of living language like strong cables of silk, or light. The world was a terrible lump of which his poem was a shining simulacrum. The world burst and slid and expanded into shapelessness of which his poem was a formally delightful image.
My own dim life should teach me this,
That life shall live for evermore,
Else earth is darkness at the core,
And dust and ashes all that is;
This round of green, this orb of flame,
Fantastic beauty; such as lurks
In some wild Poet; when he works
Without a conscience or an aim.
What then were God to such as I?
‘Twere hardly worth my while to choose
Of things all mortal, or to use
A little patience ere I die;
‘Twere best at once to sink to peace,
Like birds the charming serpent draws,
To drop head-foremost in the jaws
Of vacant darkness and to cease.
He was afraid—terribly afraid—of the temptations of overvaluing Art. Art was what came to him easily and furiously; he knew the temptation to work wildly without a conscience or an aim, singing away like the Nightingale. His friend Trench had told him in Cambridge with Apostolic seriousness and humorous rallying both together, Tennyson, we cannot live in Art!’ He had written The Palace of Art’ for Trench and Hallam, in which he had described his own Soul, for whom he had built a lordly pleasure-house, a high tower on a high crag, where she could sit proudly,
Joying to feel herself alive,
Lord over Nature, Lord of the visible earth,
Lord of the senses five,
saying,
I sit as God holding no form of creed
But contemplating all.
But his fantasied soul had been cast down from her tower into a nightmare world, and he himself had told Trench fervently, The god-like life is with man and for man’, and sent him his allegory with a dedicating poem saying,
And he that shuts Love out, in turn shall be
Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie
Howling in outer darkness. Not for this
Was common clay ta’en from the common earth
Moulded by God, and tempered with the tears
