Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  “You keep saying that,” she says to Hugh. “As though he’s a magician. Or shady.”

  “No, no, it’s nothing like that. On the contrary. It’s just that he appears to be so typical of something, and isn’t quite. You’ll see.”

  It is Hugh’s day off supply teaching. He is giving it up to take Frederica to meet Parrott, who might give her some manuscripts to read. This is kind of him, as he needs that sort of work himself, in order to write his poetry. He has become obsessed with Orpheus, is reading Rilke, is afraid that this is banal and is overwhelmed by the vision of the dead head still singing. He tries lines in his own head:

  The dead

  Head

  Eddies, is held

  Briefly by a crag, the blood

  Reddens the river briefly

  Becomes watery, water

  The song

  Runs on

  The dead eyes

  Are wet with the water

  “Do you like him?” says Frederica.

  “Parrott? Oh yes. Very much.” He thinks. “He’s religious. That’s what you don’t see at first.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “No, why should it be? Just surprising.” The poem is no good, it sounds soft, it should be cut and clear but running on.

  Number 2, Elderflower Court, does not feel quite safe on its joists. It is a tall, thin house, which is in fact joined back to back to other tall, thin houses, by makeshift doors in walls and bridging corridors across shafts of dim courtyard. The entrance hall is minute, and contains a school-mistressy table in oak and two armchairs with dusty padded seats and oak arms. There is a rather faded display of books, front-on, on a shelf in the wall. Within God Without God and Our Passions Christ’s Passion by Adelbert Holly. Within God Without God has a kind of Op Art black-and-white spiral, swirling into a vanishing black hole which is also the O in Holly. Our Passions Christ’s Passion has the same spiral, in blood-red and a flaming orange. They are elegant, and evidence of energy.

  Inside a cubby-hole opening out of the entrance hall is a lift, with a creaking iron trellis door, and a jerking, whining, ramshackle method of hoisting itself. Frederica and Hugh go up to the fourth floor and, almost ducking, travel round three sides of an uneven rectangle in dusty corridors painted bottle-green. Parrott’s office is in what must once, in Dickensian times, have been a servant’s attic. It has a sloping mansard ceiling and is painted in a colour resembling tobacco-stained onion skin. The floor is heaped with dusty books; there are shelves of dusty books; there is a desk piled high with dusty paper, on which are two photographs, a posed bride in veil and train, and a row of smiling babies in suits with frilly collars.

  Rupert Parrott is a small man, with a lot of tight dark reddish-blond curls, which are kept from being a mop only by rigorous training with scissors. His face and body show the same effects of discipline. He should be plump-cheeked but is not, quite. He should have a double chin, but it is barely perceptible, and the little paunch which should be beneath his lilac shirt and his pink-and-silver-spotted purple tie is also not really there, though the eye stubbornly tries to sketch it in. His mouth is, as Hugh has told Frederica, round, a little puckered, with soft lips drawn in. His eyes are blue and his nose nondescript. His voice has a public school drawl, which, with the impression of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t fleshiness, should make him seem slow. But the overall impression is of quickness, of energy, of an ease perturbed only by his own need to get going.

  Hugh introduces Frederica and explains her urgent need for work. Parrott asks her what her interests are, and she replies that they are rather narrowly literary, but that she is quick at learning and interested in everything, really. Parrott says that they pay a number of readers, almost all of them women, to work their way through the slush heap—that is, the unsolicited manuscripts that arrive in dozens every morning.

  “We pay them, I say, but not very much,” says Parrott, looking at Frederica, “because we haven’t got very much, and because there are so many intelligent women sitting at home with children, desperate for bits of work to do, you see.”

  “I see,” says Frederica.

  “The firm in the past,” says Parrott, “has concentrated on politics, standard thirties left-wing politics, Fabian analyses of leisure, that sort of thing. It was me that persuaded Gimson Bowers that religion could be a big seller. He’s an old-style socialist, takes a simplistic line, religion’s not true, it’s nonsense, why bother. I said I thought there was an interest, a definite interest—the established Church is in a sort of ferment, look at Honest to God, a quiet SCM pamphlet by a quiet bishop, a national bestseller, and what a furore. And there’s much more extreme stuff than the Bishop of Woolwich, much sexier, literally—sex and religion, both in the Church, and amongst all these new youth cultures. Death of God theology, exciting stuff. Charisma. Studies of charisma. The breaking up of our moral structure as we know it. All the trouble about Christine Keeler and Profumo and the Establishment—it’s all cracking up, the conventional visions we were happy to live by even if we didn’t believe them. And now it isn’t possible, and people want to read about it all, they want to know what to think. We’re moving into a period of moral ferment, moral realignment, fruitful chaos, people want to know what’s going on.

  “I thought of a series called something like Touchstones of Modern Thought. I really need a word like ‘beacons,’ but you can’t call anything beacons because it sounds like primary-school readers. And perhaps beacons are out of date anyway; they sound Napoleonic and we want to be in the white heat of spiritual energy, so to speak. Torches? Spearheads?”

  “Arrows of desire,” says Hugh. “Or warheads.”

  “Burning issues,” says Frederica.

  Rupert Parrott considers this.

  “Almost,” he says. “Not bad. Burning Issues in Religion. Burning Issues in Psychiatry. Burning Issues in Sociology. It isn’t quite right.”

  “Burning Issues in Witchcraft,” says Hugh.

  “Don’t mock. Witchcraft is a real issue. It’s on the increase. There’s a lot of interest in wicca, the Old Religion. I don’t share it—I’m tied up in Christianity—but readers do. They write in. It’s a serious interest.”

  He hands Frederica a book with a cover depicting a cross-legged prisoner in a padded cell in a dunce’s cap.

  LANGUAGE OUR STRAITJACKET

  BY ELVET GANDER

  Frederica opens the book. All the pages are blank.

  “It’s a dummy,” says Parrott. “Though he’d like that joke, that you opened up his anti-language book and found pure, pristine white space. He’s another of my discoveries. I discovered Canon Holly, I personally discovered Canon Holly, and I had the idea of writing to Gander, after I heard him talk at the Round House on the anti-psychiatry movement—very powerful stuff, the idea that it is the psychiatric institutions themselves that are disabling, that if we label people as schizophrenic and psychotic we reify these descriptions, we make people into madmen by calling them that. We published his first book, Am I My Brother’s Keeper?, you may have seen that, it had a considerable succès d’estime and sold a lot of copies.”

  Frederica studies the jacket. Elvet Gander is apparently a gnome-like person with deepset eyes, a long, thin nose, a curly mouth, not much hair and a deep suntan, though that may be the effect of the photograph, in which he is cut off at the waist, but is clearly sitting in a high, winged, throne-like chair, although he is wearing an open-necked shirt. The jacket copy says that Language Our Straitjacket is part of a whole new intellectual movement which questions the constricting forms of our civilisation, and asks if they may even be a function of our language, of the printed word more especially. It quotes Marshall McLuhan:

  “A state of collective awareness may have been the preverbal condition of men. Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the ‘Tower of Babel’ by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hol
d out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity.

  “Elvet Gander,” the jacket copy concludes, “accepts McLuhan’s premise that language divides, but questions his hope that Pentecostal understanding will be found in technology, or primarily in technology. He has his own daring ideas about how such understanding may be re-created and renewed.”

  “Interesting,” says Frederica.

  “You must go and hear him speak,” says Parrott. “He is charismatic. Truly charismatic.”

  “Charismatic” is a word he savours.

  He finds four manuscripts from the slush heap for Frederica to read, all novels, one neatly typed with large spacing, one messily typed and dog-eared, one a single-spaced carbon and one handwritten. The neatly typed one is The Voyage of the Silver Ship by Richmond Bly. The dog-eared one is Mad Dogs and Englishmen by Bob Gully. The carbon is A Thing Apart by Margot Cherry. The handwritten one is Daily Bread by Phyllis K. Pratt and has an attached letter. “I am sorry to send you my book in a handwritten state. There is in fact a typewriter in this house, but it is not in a state that will produce anything more legible than my manuscript. I hope you will be able to read it, and look forward to hearing your opinion of it.”

  Frederica agrees to write brief reports on all these works. As they go home, Hugh says, “It would be better, really, to write a novel, Frederica.”

  She looks stricken.

  “I know. I don’t have any ideas. I’ve been educated out of it. Have you noticed people who write novels never studied English literature? They did philosophy, or classics, or history … or nothing. Even thinking of it brings on a kind of panic. The only kind of novel I could write is the sensitive-student-at-Cambridge kind of stuff I know enough to flinch at and despise—”

  (Oh, but the bliss of talking about books, all the same, and not about houses, and things, and possessions.)

  She is limping along at great speed. Her limp is more pronounced. Hugh says, “Does your leg hurt?”

  “Yes. It won’t heal. Thomas is sending me to his doctor.”

  Frederica sits down in the evening in the Bloomsbury flat—in fact, at the same desk at which Alexander wrote The Yellow Chair—and begins work on these manuscripts. She reads. She cooks supper with Thomas Poole, and she, Lizzie, Leo, Simon and Thomas eat stuffed pancakes and fruit salad (Waltraut is at her English class). Leo is more relaxed: Simon is a kindly boy, and has taken him under his wing. Alan Melville telephones: tomorrow he has arranged an interview for her at the Samuel Palmer School. There are two part-time courses to be taught, on metaphysical poetry and the nineteenth-century novel.

  Frederica takes pleasure in writing her reports on the four novels.

  The Voyage of the Silver Ship by Richmond Bly

  The plot of this work, if it can be called a plot, concerns the determination of a group of misfits and magical beings to rediscover the land of their origins, Eled-Durad-Or, which is believed to be the home of ancestral beings able to live for ever, to communicate without speech, and to change the material world by the power of thought. The world in which the group live (Bonodor) has been enslaved by a dark Enchanter (Miltan) who has covered it with disfiguring mills (nineteenth-century mills, to judge from the architecture), tall chimneys and fastnesses with drawbridges, fire-throwers etc. operated by grinding technology. On the outskirts of the industrial wasteland are a few stunted woods and some sooty rivers. The friends are summoned by mysterious messages to a gathering at a hill of dust and ashes. They are mostly known by descriptions: the Tattered Man, the Hairy One, the Brownie, the Fool, the Half-Man (who is also half-goat), the Stone Spirit and Frog. This last is suspected throughout of being an emissary of the Enemy but turns out to be a sacrificial hero, whose grisly death in a stone doorway prevents the door from closing and makes it possible for the rest of the crew to enter Eled-Durad-Or.

  It is hard to differentiate between these beings, since they all speak in the same high style and find much—possibly most—of their experience inept for putting into words, e.g.:

  “Then was the Fool carried away into another sphere, where his spirit moved amongst the dark roots of the world like a blind being, and his whole body communicated with unutterable powers, so that he was nigh fainting because of his extreme apprehensions.”

  Many “adventures” are embarked on. There is a good scene where the crew are being hunted across an almost non-visionary i.e. almost concrete moorland by a pack of black dogs with red glittering eyes, and there is also a good scene, when, having managed to find the mooring place of the Silver Ship, they embark on the Utmost Sea and are becalmed amongst ice-floes and are attacked by a pod, or posse, or herd of dangerous narwhals which advance in gleaming and serried ranks, waving their horny lances. Mr. Bly is possibly more at home with herds of inarticulate creatures than with thinking human, or semi-human beings, or Frogs. There is little, even no, sexual interest in this tale. All the women (or female spirits) are inhabitants of, or visitants from, Eled-Durad-Or and are tall silvery figures with very beautiful belts who raise their arms frequently in interesting gestures I feel resemble the Dalcroze movements executed by Ursula and Gudrun by the lakeside in Women in Love. But nothing ever really happens to any of these characters. Every threat, even the great Borg on the Ice Mountain, dissolves into a visionary experience of the ineffable, and causes most of the characters to make long rhapsodic speeches. These could almost, but not quite, be scanned as blank verse, which makes them unpleasant to the inner ear.

  This story obviously has ambitions to be like Tolkien—because of genuine admiration, I should guess, and not out of a desire to emulate his sales. But it entirely lacks his narrative urgency, physical weather, real earth. It also lacks his merry humour, which might be thought to be a good thing, but is not, I assure you. The story also has all sorts of echoes (unintentional, I imagine) of The Wizard of Oz. It is a curiously vacant work, whose driving force appears paradoxically to be the desire to create and people an imaginary world.

  Mad Dogs and Englishmen by Bob Gully

  I cannot believe there is not already a book with this title. If I were asked to imagine one, I might imagine this one, in a gloomy mood. It is, I suppose, a picaresque narrative and describes the adventures of a sour-tempered Englishman in his twenties called Johnny Hipp who is hitch-hiking his way round the south of France. He is being relentlessly pursued by an unfortunate girl from his home town (Preston, Lanes.) called Deanna, who has hairy legs, spots, mild halitosis, dirndl skirts, greasy hair and a wart on her chin which is the object of some would-be Joycean paragraphs of execration. From Deanna’s handbag Johnny Hipp occasionally steals wads of currency. (“She does nothing to earn it and gets no pleasure from it and doesn’t need it, whereas I am in urgent need, and know how to get pleasure from life with only a minimum of dough.”) These thefts appear to be his only means of support, since he appears never to have worked, or done anything at all except bumming around and autostop. He is fed and housed by beautiful French and Italian women who stop their sports cars and take him up, apparently deducing from his unsavoury external appearance the rigour and dimensions of his “todger.” They come in several colours, “silky raven,” “shimmering platinum,” “flaming rousse,” but have identical globular breasts, honey-pots, and sweet-smelling pubic hair. He tends to leave them because he has seen an even better one out of the window of a restaurant or Ferrari waiting at a petrol station.

  There is a lot of food in this novel—mountainous cassoulets, wonderfully glistening aïolis, “brandad de morrue” (sic), “boullabaise” (sic) and so on. The meals are only a prelude to ravenous couplings, however, and the food is nothing beside the drink—mostly beer, oddly, considering the surrounding vineyards. But Johnny Hipp is also not averse to Pernod, Martini, white port, muscat, vin rosé (faute de mieux), cognac, armagnac, crème de menthe, Cointreau, Chartre
use and so on, all of which he regurgitates along with the food wherever convenient (or inconvenient). I have not done a page count but I think it is a damned close-run thing between copulation and vomiting. Any satire or irony is buried too deep beneath a sickly affection for Johnny Hipp and his stamina to be discerned. There is little dialogue. (“There was no need for mere words. I threw myself upon her and she opened wetly and the dialogue of bodies, disrupted by some mumblings and gruntings from my out-of-synch gut, began its rhythmic wallop.”)

  Johnny Hipp’s own appearance is probably, to a dispassionate outsider, at least as repulsive as Deanna’s is to him. He spends a lot of time lingering on the smells of his crotch, armpits and toenails, on his dirt-encrusted underwear, his filthy shoes, his stained shirts, his beard-stubble, as though these were all evidence of some goat-like virility mixed with honesty and lack of affectation which attract women as honey attracts flies (one of his own comparisons).

  His geography is insecure. He would need a jet plane to get from Cannes to Nîmes in the time he allots to the journey; Vence is nowhere near Montpellier as far as I can remember, and much of the Camargue is not open to road-users.

  The book, as you might suppose, ends exactly where it began, with Johnny Hipp, blear-eyed, hungover, belching and full of self-admiration waiting outside the gate of Aigues-Mortes (as he is when the book opens) to be picked up. Anyone in his senses (or her senses) would drive past quickly.

  A Thing Apart by Margot Cherry

  This novel is the history of a sensitive young working-class girl called Laura (she would not be called Laura if she were working class, and I suspect she is anyway lower-middle-class which everyone finds the least interesting origin, though it is what very many, perhaps most? people are). Laura gets a scholarship to Oxford to read English, and falls in love with a young man called Sebastian, who does not fall in love with her, and may even be in love with his best friend Hugh; they were at sol together, in the army together, and are now very brilliantly reading English together, and acting at OUDS.