Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  “What will happen?”

  “It’s not in my hands. I must talk to his father, and his aunts. I must talk to him. May I talk to him alone?”

  “If he wants to.”

  “I’m experienced in talking to children. I won’t worry him.”

  “He’s a bit on edge. I want to say—I don’t approve of sending little boys away to school, I think it’s dangerous and horrible, such little boys—but he’s like me, he’s a loner, he needs to run his own life, he’d hate it. Please understand that. He’d hate it. I hope I don’t sound shrill.”

  “No. Reasonable. Can you look after him?”

  “I’ve got all these good arrangements. I’ve got Agatha and Saskia. And a good school.”

  “It is. I know it.”

  “What will happen?”

  “There is always a predisposition in favour of the mother. Less, maybe, with boys. But judges tend to assume women will care better for little children. Rightly, in my view.”

  “There are a lot of other women, in his case. But I am his mother.”

  “You are. And I do see how much you care.”

  Back in Court, Hefferson-Brough has called Rupert Parrott to the stand. Parrott says he is proud to have published Babbletower, that it is an important, if controversial, book, that its message is deeply moral, and is a message for our times. He speaks in a light, pleasant, very slightly pompous voice, with exaggerated courtesy, a little old-fashioned. His blue eyes shine, his round cheeks are flushed and shining, the attention he gives to his questioners is just too intense, too considered. Hefferson-Brough asks him if he thought the book ran any risk of being thought outrageous, unacceptable, obscene, when he took it on.

  A. Well, yes, naturally. It’s strong meat, it’s strong stuff, it doesn’t pull its punches. But I was quite confident that the reading public, and the authorities, would take it for what it was—a serious and ambitious literary work. I felt its moment had come, and that I was there to bring it into the world. It says things about our society that need saying, need bringing into the light.

  Q. What sorts of things are these?

  A. Much has been made, by the Prosecution, of the scenes of sadistic treatment of little children in the dormitories. Those are in fact one of the things that made me recognise that the book had to be published. I recognised the dormitories and the tortures from my own schooldays—

  Q. You are an Erstwhile Hog? That is to say, an old boy of Swineburn School.

  A. Yes, I am. As you are yourself, I believe, and as is Jude Mason, the author of Babbletower. There are many fine things in Babbletower, but one of the finest is the depiction of what went on routinely in the dormitories of big schools—almost certainly still goes on.

  Q. Let me be clear. You are not claiming that murder took place in the dormitories of Swineburn?

  A. No, but almost, and nobody said anything. There is a conspiracy of silence. A climate of acceptance. Boys are thought to be nice, and teachers are supposed to be kind and considerate. This book tells the truth. It seems like wild fantasy but quite large chunks of it that I know about are sober fact. That is why I was so struck by it, initially. Later, I understood its other great merits. But it has an element of sober realism people lucky enough not to be Erstwhile Hogs may not assess properly.

  Q. You believe it is for the public good to know that things happen in real life which are not very far from the fantastic events depicted in Babbletower?

  A. On balance, yes, I do. I mean, I think public innocence about such things is no longer possible. Anyone who heard Fausto Gemelli’s evidence will agree that we live in a moral climate now where things are pretty generally discussed rather than hidden. We are less easily shocked—as a nation—than we were in the days of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. I think there are good and bad aspects to all this—I think Press reports can upset certain people, vulnerable people, almost certainly much more than imaginative works like Babbletower. Sir Augustine mentioned the Moors Murders. I think the reporting of them was terrifying and disturbing in a way this literary work isn’t. But I think we admit generally now that certain things go on that we once used—as a public community—to pretend didn’t exist. When Oscar Wilde was sent to prison the judge said, “It is the worst case I have ever tried,” and claimed that Wilde’s crime was “so bad” that he had to put “stern restraint” on himself to suppress the language he would rather not use, “which must rise to the breast of every man of honour who has heard the details of these two terrible trials.” There was one lone voice in the Press then that said the judge must have tried worse crimes, murders and extortions, and that society was guilty of hypocrisy. “Why does not the Crown prosecute every boy at a public or private school, or half the men in the Universities? In the latter places ‘coederism’ is as common as fornication, and everyone knows it.” There is a gap between what many or most people now know about human nature and what we are allowed to say. Those of us who suffered at school—as I did, and as I can see Jude Mason did—suffered also from the little boys’ normal conspiracy of silence. I think the public conspiracy of silence is as bad as the frightened conspiracy of little boys in dorms. We are grown-up men now. We live in a grown-up time. We have a right to responsible grown-up descriptions of the actions of which we are capable.

  (Scattered applause in the Court.) The judge asks for silence and requests that the interruption not be repeated.

  Sir Augustine asks Rupert Parrott only a few questions.

  Q. Mr. Parrott—you are a generally respected publisher. You have a reputation for being intellectually up-to-date, even avant-garde.

  A. I would say so, yes.

  Q. You publish Elvet Gander, who has enlightened the Court about degradation ceremonies and polymorphous perversity.

  A. You need not sneer at him. He is a serious thinker, much respected and admired, and I am proud to publish him. (Scattered local applause.)

  Q. I hope I was not sneering. You publish also Canon Adelbert Holly, who has told us that the essence of Christianity is masochism and the suffering and infliction of pain?

  A. I do. And am proud to publish him. I do not agree with all his points of emphasis. But he is a daring and a subtle theologian.

  Q. No doubt. No doubt. You feel a considerable sense of mission about Babbletower, do you not? You feel it represents a blow for sexual freedom, fearless, explicit description of hidden vices and horrors, do you not?

  A. I do. You try to make these feelings sound misguided or absurd, but they are not. It is a serious and beautiful and courageous book, confronting the dark fearlessly. I am, as I said, proud to be associated with it.

  Q. You feel also a sense of mission, I sense, about the revelation of the squalid school secrets you shared with Jude Mason and perhaps with that other Erstwhile Hog, my learned friend, the Counsel for the Defence.

  A. To an extent, yes.

  Q. To an extent. You do not think your judgement of Babbletower is perhaps twisted, perhaps vitiated, by your recognition of your schooldays in parts of it, in the dorms of La Tour Bruyarde? As Dr. Gander has reminded us, childhood wounds lie deep and fester. Might they not cloud your judgement?

  A. I don’t think so. I think they reinforce it. I would like to do away with the hypocrisy which made those sufferings possible and prolonged.

  The next witness for the Defence is the accused in the dock, Jude Mason himself. He stands in the box, eyes downcast at first, holding his fists close together in front of him; Frederica suddenly intuits that he is wearing imaginary manacles. She looks at his thin face and his eye-hollows and imagines the fall of his hair as it used to be before he was sanitised and tidied. He looks insubstantial, grey-skinned after his publisher’s pink, bony and brittle. Frederica wonders what has become of his smell, the frying grease, the rancid sweat, the body fluids. Does he now emit carbolic soap or Old Spice? Her nostrils imagine the sniff of fresh newsprint. She smiles. Samuel Oliphant rises to examine his client.

  Q. Tell
us your name.

  A. Jude Mason.

  Q. Is that your real name?

  A. Yes. It is not the name my parents gave me.

  Q. What was that?

  A. Julian Guy Monckton-Pardew. (A ripple of laughter in the Court.)

  Q. You changed your name?

  A. Many people do. I changed my name, and my life.

  Q. What sort of a family do you come from?

  A. I have none. They have cast me off. My father made a lot of money selling pork and veal pies to pubs. I am a vegetarian. Not out of virtue or anything. Out of squeamishness. My mother was a photographic model. Her name was Poppy. I called them Poppy and Pappy. We lived in Wiltshire. They had enough money to pay nannies and nurses and send me away to prep school at five and to Swineburn at thirteen so I can’t be said to have known them very well before we mutually cast each other off. I don’t know if they’re alive or dead. They don’t know if I am. That suits all of us.

  The sawing voice is monotonous but conveys an uneasy urgency: these are things the speaker has rehearsed and wants to say, not things reluctantly drawn from him.

  Oliphant. Mr. Parrott has already spoken about your experiences at Swineburn. Were you happy there?

  Jude. Oh, from time to time, blissfully and disastrously happy. It was those times that ruined my character and my life. Mostly I was miserable, frequently I was terrified. There was a great deal of refined cruelty in that school, as has already been suggested. A great deal.

  Oliphant. Cruelty exercised by whom?

  Jude. Oh, routinely by the masters. We were whipped all sorts of ways by all sorts of men, for all sorts of reasons. You survived better if you developed a taste for it, if you learned to cater to those who had a taste for it. Also the boys were cruel, in thumping, bashing ways and in subtle, teasing, nasty ways, as is no doubt normal everywhere. I imagine it was all quite normal.

  Oliphant. Did you survive?

  Jude. No. In short, no. Contrary to appearances, I have no taste for being hurt, just a lot of enforced experience of it. I did think it was inevitable and immutable and eternal, as little children do, and most adults conveniently forget.

  Oliphant. Were you a good student?

  Jude. I believe so. I was very good at languages. Poppy-mommy, my sweet mother, glimpsed perhaps half a dozen times a year, was, or is, I am told, partly French. She modelled rather naughty clothes sometimes. My French was good.

  Oliphant. And English literature and language?

  Jude. Ah. When I was a little boy the English master predicted a glorious future for me. Scholarships, university, poetry of the profounder kind. I was a stellar student in my early days. I was the star in all the plays, you know, in all the Shakespeare plays.

  Oliphant. What parts did you play?

  Jude. I was a delicious squeaking Cleopatra. The English master, Dr. Grisman Gould, was good enough to say that he had never seen a better one. I believed him at the time. Later, I took to doing friends. Horatio, you know, Kent, steady souls. I’d have liked to do Iago, but you don’t get school productions of Othello.

  Judge. Where is all this questioning leading, Mr. Oliphant?

  Oliphant. I am hoping to establish Mr. Mason’s literary background. As a help with the question of the literary merits of his book.

  Judge. I see.

  Oliphant. And my learned friend Mr. Hefferson-Brough has already linked Mr. Mason’s experiences at school with the seriousness of his purpose as a writer.

  Judge. Your client’s intentions are not relevant as to the question of obscenity.

  Oliphant. I understand that, my lord. But they are relevant as to literary merit, and the two are linked here, are very much linked, in the formative years of my client’s mind.

  Judge. Very well. But I do not think we need to examine closely all his lessons or amateur dramatic performances. He obviously enjoyed his dramatic performances.

  Jude. Not always, my lord.

  Judge. Indeed? Not always. Continue, if you please, Mr. Oliphant.

  Oliphant. You did not go to university, Mr. Mason?

  Jude. No.

  Oliphant. Although you might have been expected to?

  Jude. I was very unhappy. I ran away from the school. I ran away rather classically, or perhaps romantically would be a better word, in the middle of the night. I stole a bicycle and went all the way to Harwich. I got on a boat and went to Amsterdam. I messed around there a bit and then someone took me to Paris.

  Oliphant. You were sixteen?

  Jude. Yes. I don’t think my parents looked for me. I never heard of it if they did. I sent a postcard from Paris with a Poste Restante address and got a postcard back saying they didn’t want to know.

  Judge. Are we really to believe that is all the contact you had?

  Jude. I don’t know why you shouldn’t believe it. It’s true. It’s quite easy to stay hidden, my lord, if people have no real desire to find you. I was a disappointment, it has to be admitted. Poppy said continually I was a disappointment. She said it on the postcard. She can’t spell. She wrote it with one p. I probably sent a disappointing postcard. It had a sphinx on it, by Gustave Moreau. They were afraid I was decadent.

  Judge. So you sent the postcard to provoke them?

  Jude. It wasn’t much of a provocation, my lord, from a sixteen-year-old boy who had been living pretty rough for six months.

  Judge. That is as may be. I am interested in your veracity, you see.

  Jude. I am telling the truth, and nothing but the truth.

  Judge. But not the whole truth?

  Jude. You can’t tell the whole truth in one-line answers, my lord. I don’t think you’d like the whole truth if I told it. I really don’t. It isn’t very nice. But I haven’t told you anything untrue. I swore not to.

  Judge. Mr. Oliphant, please continue your questioning.

  Oliphant. In Paris, did you attempt to continue your studies?

  Jude. I decided to get a ticket to the Bibliothèque Nationale. I made various friends—various people looked after me a bit—I talked to people in cafés—I worked a bit in theatres and cinemas, showing people their seats. I got interested in French literature. A man I met told me about Fourier. He seemed odd, you know, and interesting, so I said I was working on him and went to the library and did work on him, and got interested. I am an auto-didact. I believe in auto-didacticism. Auto-didacts tend to study one thing at once, study it to death. I did Fourier, and then I went on to Nietzsche.

  Oliphant. And when did you start your own writing?

  Jude. There was never a time when I was not writing. I was writing when I was a very little boy, and before that I was telling stories to myself. I used to dress up in front of the mirror and act the stories. Once I acted a whole pantomime for Poppy and Pappy—it was Cinderella, I made all the costumes and played all the parts, I didn’t have any friends, though I did have a Nanny at that point who acted the Fairy Godmother and the Narrator. They clapped a bit, but they had to go out before I got to the glass slipper. I’m sorry, I see I’m boring you and being irrelevant, but you did ask for the whole truth and that was my first bit of writing. I’ve never ever told anyone all this before—not ever having been under oath—except one person. And that was a mistake.

  Oliphant. When did you start writing seriously?

  Jude. All that was serious. It was deadly serious. It was my real life. Much more real than the horrible school cells and teams.

  Oliphant. When did you start writing Babbletower?

  Jude. Well, in a way, then, when I was a little boy. Who was it said there are only five or six good plots? Anyway, I was always writing the same story. The story about the group of friends who run away to a better place and make a better life, a more beautiful life, a freer life, where they can do what they want. It’s the story of Cinderella and the story of Pilgrim’s Progress and the story of The Coral Island, I suppose. Getting out of the dungeon and the cinders and going to the ball or to heaven and sleeping in feather beds a
nd eating off gold plates. Only as I got older and more suspicious I saw that the place you make might turn out to be much like the place you ran away from.

  He is now, Frederica thinks, acting the great writer accounting for his great talent, modestly. Oliphant says firmly,

  Oliphant. But Babbletower is a grown-up book, not a childish fantasy.

  Jude. It is a grim grown-up book about childish fantasy. And about grown-up fantasy. It is also a grown-up fantasy itself, I have to admit. That’s not wicked. Fantasy is natural to human beings as honey is to bees. People are always saying things are as natural as honey, these days. Now what was …

  Oliphant. You have heard the very clear evidence of Professor Marie-France Smith. What did you make of her arguments?

  Jude. (The sawing note more pronounced.) Professor Smith is an academic and her account smells of the lamp, as they say, I believe. She makes my book sound all cut and dried, a trussed-up little plump thesis waiting to be roasted and consumed. I don’t recognise the terrible passions of my book in Professor Smith’s arid little “explanation.” I lived that story, Mr. Oliphant, I have lived through all those things—

  It is at this point that the first fleck of white foam, or crust, appears in the corner of Jude’s mouth. He pokes at it nervously, with the tip of his tongue.

  Oliphant. Well, you may dislike the emphases. But you did read Fourier, you say yourself, and you do maintain that Babbletower has a serious moral point, do you not?

  Jude. Does art ever have a “serious moral point”? It moves, it appals, it makes you chuckle, it delights, it despairs. All right, you don’t like my answers. You are right not to. I am behaving stupidly. I can’t help myself. But my book is not a stupid book, it is a good book, and is meant to enlighten and to move, not to harm and disgust. Those who cannot see that can’t read properly.

  For several more repetitive minutes, Jude and his Counsel joust around the ostensible “purpose” of Babbletower. Oliphant is patient with his client’s natural tendency to contradict, for rhetorical effect, points that are designed to help him. Jude is got to agree that his vision of human nature is “dark” and “pessimistic,” but not “perverted,” not “twisted.” He complains briefly about meaningless adjectives and is brought again to the point. He says that like Nietzsche he desires a “strong” pessimism, a “gay” despair. He asks if he may quote Nietzsche and is told to go ahead.