A.S. Byatt: Possession: A Romance (1991)
A book that I've always been distantly aware of but never expected
to read. However, my Dad bought me a copy and the day came when, afflicted
with toothache, I thought I'd give it a try And my toothache didn't put me off;
which was odd, because it had ruined Purcell and placed Leevi Lehto right out
of the question. Possession is really
a treat for duvet days; be aware that spoilers will follow.
[For the benefit of anyone who has not read Possession but is still determined to read my post about it, I should explain that it's set partly in Victorian times (where Randolph and Christabel are poets) and partly in the present day (where Roland and Maud are literary scholars).]
*
About the two poets:
They both had to be made, and they couldn't be made from
nothing. Randolph Henry Ash is Browning adapted: about 66% Browning. (There is
a little of Arnold,
too, so far as the Norse epic is concerned.) This is obliquely confessed,
inasmuch as so prominent a contemporary literary figure as Browning himself is never
mentioned within the text; nor do we ever hear the term "dramatic monologue"
(Ash once speaks of "dramatized monologues"). Byatt needed to be
cautious about muddying her presentation. But when Randolph Henry Ash's poetry draws
very close to Browning's, we are doubtless meant to notice it fondly.
e.g. Gods, Men and
Heroes (Ash, 1856); Men and Women (Browning,
1855).
"Mummy Possest"
(Ash); "Mr Sludge, the Medium" (Browning)
Cromwell (verse
play - Ash); Strafford (verse play -
Browning)
etc.
Or consider the Ash letter in which he talks not only about Paracelsus but D.D. Home.
And pause to admire Byatt's list of popular Ash poems, the ones that the
child Roland (Hang on, what was that I just said?... ) recalls his mother
reading aloud to him: "I grew up on [Ash's] idea of Sir Walter Raleigh, and
his Agincourt poem and Offa on the Dyke." With Ash, as with Browning
(thinking of Dramatic Lyrics), the genuinely
popular poems are evidently a different set from the ones discussed by textual
critics such as the adult Roland himself. This list evokes vague
memories of e.g. the "Cavalier Tunes" and "How They Brought the
Good News from Aix to Ghent" and "At the 'Mermaid'", though Ash
is conceived as sticking more closely to British themes, compared with
Browning's omnivorous European/Middle Eastern historical palate.
But when it comes to Ash's poetry, Byatt has a freedom to
deviate from her basic model. Sometimes indeed the poetry is very Browning-esque
-- say, the opening of "Swammerdam" --, but it is both Browning minus and
Browning plus. Ash inherits little of Browning's characteristic ellipses and
tics, the profuse language and simultaneous impediment of articulation that Chesterton
memorably compared to a knot in a piece of wood. In Ash's work there are no abbreviations - o' , i', 'twere, 'tis - and no
outrageous meters or newly-coined stanza-forms. Nor, as we've seen, does the
London-based Ash betray much of Browning's enthusiasm for Mediterranean scenes,
humanists, painters, musicians... On the other hand, Ash takes a particular
interest in Victorian science, geology, natural history and Darwinism (the
sorts of interest that we wish Browning
had had: though often a brilliant observer of nature's surfaces, he never seems
to want to understand them). Ash's blank verse is a little more
early-twentieth-century in manner than Browning's: for example, he favours the
short sentence that occupies the first half of a line:
But
I had other leanings. Did they come
These
things are there. The garden and the tree
Browning rarely if ever deploys that kind of clipped
expression. Or consider this, from elsewhere in "Swammerdam":
.... ride with
the wind
To
burning lands beneath a copper sun
Or
never-melted mountains of green ice
Or
hot dark secret places in the steam
Of
equatorial forests, where the sun
Strikes
far above the canopy, where men
And
other creatures never see her light
Save
as a casual winking lance that runs
A
silver shaft between green dark and dark.
That vision of tropical rainforest was unknown to earlier Victorian
poets, it was an idea that only became familiar later, in the age of aeroplanes
and ecology. (You might compare Ash in
this mode with slightly later and lesser-known writers such as William Canton (1845-1926)).
Christabel Lamotte's poetry cannot be pinned down to a
primary model in the same way -- nor was it so necessary. Being a comparatively
obscure (verging on amateur) author, we'd expect her to experiment with a
number of different styles and sometimes to be quite generic: that she'd
have an integrity of character rather than a formed manner. Her published short
lyrics are like Christina Rossetti ("Christabel's reputation, modest but
secure, rests on the restrained and delicate lyrics.." - as the early
twentieth-century Veronica Honiton is made to say, -- a sentence so exact in its satire that I felt sure I'd read it before). Christabel's unpublished lyrics are more like Emily
Dickinson. The extracts from Melusina and
the City of Is remind me as much of
Tennyson as anyone -- and they're very good.
*
Byatt has a lot of fun not just with Veronica Honiton, and
Dr Nest's Helpmeets, but with the
feminist essays of the present: Herself
Herself Involve, LaMotte's Strategies of Evasion. One of the things Byatt’s
book expresses very well is how the Victorian women can't quite seize on this
late-20th-century feminism, they are trapped in a patriarchal world and its thought-forms, and
must either be unhappy or make their happiness by negotiation with it: Blanche,
Christabel and Ellen all face the same conditions. The crippling burden of, for
instance, the word Man standing both for one gender and for human civilization
itself, is made very clear. Yet, this being a story still inflected by that
patriarchal inheritance, it recurrently arrives at situations where Ash and
Roland are notably good-natured, while Christabel and Maud are comparatively
hostile, unpredictable, untender. By "recurrently" I do not mean
overwhelmingly. But it is noticeable enough, especially in the light of Randolph Henry Ash's
final appearance as a highly sympathetic patriarch with a broad-brimmed hat, to
provoke reflection. Somehow he, the impulsive embracer on the common, the
impulsive wrecker of séances, - and the adulterer too - does not seem to risk
himself to anything like the extent Christabel does. And in fact she spares
him, as in a different way Ellen does too. They, more than Randolph, take responsibility for their
lives. It is somehow connected with this, I think, that much more of the novel
is seen through Roland's eyes than Maud's. At the end, this may even seem odd --
Maud after all is the one who has to adjust to her inheritance, yet we don't
know her thoughts. And in the one chapter where Randolph and Christabel appear
as characters in a novel, the presentation is chiefly through Randolph's eyes. Thus the book to a certain
extent perpetuates the conditions that its women struggle against: of finding
themselves objects of the gaze and the embodiment of one kind of mysterious Other.
Perhaps this was a necessary condition of the book being so easily a "Romance". I definitely think it goes some way to explaining why Possession was so much more widely popular and celebrated than
Byatt’s earlier books.
The Browning connection goes further still. To a certain
extent the relationship between Ash and LaMotte glances at Browning's courtship
of Elizabeth Barrett, that keen disciple of spiritualism. More than "glances",
really: the Brownings' letters are simply and absolutely the model for Byatt's
letters between the two clever poets who increasingly love each other; though
the letters in Possession are
a little less elliptical and have a whole lot more narrative. Anyway, it's the
events of Wimpole Street, above all, that are being re-imagined to more sharply focus on
Byatt's concerns. And this concealed background continues to resonate, in the
vague sense that Ash (like Browning) is allowed to act the part of a saviour,
bringing a kind of dangerous tonic in his own person. Powerfully as Possession exposes the crucial early
roots of feminism and the desperate need for it, it also allows itself to be
a comedy, to celebrate the completion of heteronormal love, to smile benignly on
everyone and to reflect, temperately enough, on "how far we've all come
since then".
*
Roland at one stage toys with the idea of writing some poetry of his own. Byatt's
conception of poetry in the 1980s is a mainstream one, and here is one of the
most lucid (because unguarded) descriptions of it that I've seen. True, it's a statement by a
novelist, but then mainstream poetry is intimately linked to mainstream novels.
It begins with Roland thinking more about readings -- he has
just read Ash's "The Garden of Proserpina" for the dozenth time -- and
in particular what he (or maybe Byatt) considers to be good readings: not dutiful
mappings and dissections, nor personal nor impersonal readings as such, but
Now
and then there are readings which 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 is 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 recognized, become fully cognisant, our knowledge.
Thus sensitized (no doubt the fundamental cause of Roland's euphoria is really the
unlooked-for but so-welcome news of three job offers).. Thus sensitized, Roland's wordlists begin to
come to life, crystallizing around the evening's accidental features -- not the
quantifiably important ones -- as if they were themselves revelatory:
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, "Cat's 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.
It's a pity that Byatt doesn't give us one line of Roland's
poetry. Perhaps she could not easily do so, perhaps this poetry (unlike the
Victorian poetry) could not be imitated without inappropriate laughter. At any
rate it's clear that Roland's is a very different way of conceiving the writing
of a poem from Ash's or LaMotte's.
*
"I
pretended to be their lawyer, in a hurry with important information, and got
told where they were. Which is, The Old Rowan Tree pub, on the North Downs, near, but not very near, Hodershall. Both of
them. That's very significant."
This is Euan MacIntyre talking about Hildebrand Ash and
Mortimer Cropper. When Byatt wants to get on with things and direct the whole
story towards a comedy-adventure story, she is breezily slipshod; that first
sentence covers two different phonecalls to two different people.
Euan's point about "near, but not very near" is
easy to understand. The rascally pair, we gather, are staying somewhere that in
itself would hardly point to Hodershall as their object at all -- say, ten miles
away. It needs the additional fact that they are there together to sharpen Euan's suspicions
to near-certainty. We infer that Ash and Cropper have deliberately avoided
parking themselves right on top of their intended sphere of operations, so as
not to arouse undue interest.
These inferences are all very clear, but when we turn the page and come
to the next chapter, it turns out that The Old Rowan Tree (now renamed the
Rowan Tree Inn) is only a mile from the isolated Hodershall churchyard, and is
in fact the nearest dwelling to it. So it seems that Byatt decided to relinquish the
good idea of Ash and Cropper being circumspect in favour of the better idea
about the Great Storm. If everyone were to get back from the churchyard to a
place suitable for the comfortable inspection of papers, it would need to be, on that
particular night, no more than a short walk.
This reminds me that the thrillingly unexpected sentence is
this: "In that moment, the great storm hit Sussex." But why Sussex?
No part of the North Downs is in Sussex
(and, as a matter of fact, though the storm of 15/10/87 wreaked havoc in Sussex, it was even fiercer in Kent). Did
Byatt originally envisage Hodershall as on the South Downs?
But anyway, why is McIntyre talking about downs? Surely it's a little
unusual to describe a pub's location as "on the North
Downs". Not very specific, while sitting in Mortlake, when southward
of London the North Downs extend 100 miles from Farnham to Dover. Not very idiomatic
either: people would normally say something like. “near Leatherhead” (Hodershall
is apparently near Leatherhead). Unless, that is, you are romanticizing
landscape, which evidently Byatt is, as she lurches into ever more popularized
versions of romance (she even has the essential two villlains for her graveyard scene).
But there is an underlying motif here, too. Three ranges of chalk
are encountered in the book: the Lincolnshire Wolds, the Yorkshire Wolds
(Flamborough Head), and the North Downs. Thus
chalkland oddly joins with the book's other repeated motifs, such as the six bathrooms and
the many fine meals conjoined by "and"s ("They sat over
buckwheat pancakes in Pont-Aven and drank cider from cool earthenware pitchers
and asked the dificult questions").
If I used the word "slipshod" (I did), this
reminds me of another peculiarity. The older Sir George Bailey had a passion
for exotic trees, and several of them are mentioned. They're a mixed bag, though: along
with some unexceptionable trees Byatt mentions Japanese Juniper (a procumbent shrub
that grows no taller than 50cm), Caucasian walnut (alternative name for the
common walnut, which is not at all exotic, though sometimes confused with Caucasian
wingnut), Persian Plum (non-existent, though it might refer to that commonplace
dusky ornament of small gardens, Pissard's Plum). Or take the hay-meadow where
Randolph Henry Ash meets Maia - it contains (among many other plants) yellow
snapdragons and larkspur, not things you might expect to find rioting in a
Lincolnshire meadow - or is Byatt one step ahead of me, knew of the larkspur
that was once a cornfield weed in Cambridgeshire and surmised that it might
also have occurred in Lincolnshire? Or, perhaps she's consciously mimicking the effect of botanical lists in old books where, so often, we have to infer or guess which species are meant. But the point is -- well, I don't really know
what the point is, but these thrown-together lists make a striking contrast
with the attention to detail elsewhere. (And LaMotte's memories of the North
York Moors in the extract from Melusina
seem very precise, too. To what extent are we to suppose that the mention of
Paracelsus in the Proem is specifically owed to Ash's remarks in his letter?)
A striking contrast, apparently. But our belief in unified
character perhaps slides over collages. Ellen Ash's journal style seems perfectly realized (did you too, reader, work out
that when she writes her generous remarks on Melusina, she was well aware that Miss LaMotte had been her
husband's mistress?) - "This morning Bertha was found to be slipped
away... What should best be done?..." and that memorably tight-lipped
sentence: "That matter is now I hope quite at an end and wholly cleared
up". Or Christabel's epistolary style, with its slightly breathless
intellectuality and its constant subquotations of Shakespeare et al ("I
will tell you a Tale - no, I will not neither, it does not bear thinking on -
and yet I will....").
*
How far is Possession a
supernatural tale? No more than any other romance -- say, Scott's... But there are moments when the supernatural
sneaks into view. Roland and Maud will never find out that they are repeating Randolph
and Christabel when they make their trip to the Boggle Hole. Val at one point unwittingly and
creepily quotes Blanche Glover about being a superfluous woman: at this point,
the story looks like it might not make that gear-shift towards comedy. And then
there is the surprising turn of events that reveals Maud as the direct
descendant of the two childless poets. That is all: but novels are supernatural
in a different way also. As is pointedly shown when, in contrast to all this
piecing-together of evidence and remains, the novel suddenly shows us scenes
that it's impossible anyone could know of. You might wonder, reasonably, if the
last one of those scenes, the one with Ash and Maia, is “made up” in a
different way from the others :- that is, more explicitly
made up, a fantastic embroidery.
*
I thought no more about Christabel LaMotte's story "The
Glass Coffin" until I coincidentally discovered that the homeopathic
remedy Gelsemium is known as the "glass coffin". (I imagine Peter
Redgrove must have written poetry about that!) But anyway, I then googled the expression and
realized that the common source was a fairy tale made famous by the Brothers
Grimm. LaMotte's story follows the outline but has many lovely variations like
the animals in the house in the wood, and the glass key. And it also makes a
proto-feminist move, commenting on the original tale:
'Of
course I will have you,' said the little tailor, 'for you are my promised
marvel, released with my vanished glass key, and I love you dearly already. Though
why you should have me, simply because I opened the glass case, is less clear
to me altogether, and when, and if, you are restored to your rightful place,
and your home and lands and people are again your own, I trust you will feel
free to reconsider the matter, and remain, if you will, alone and
unwed....'
This discussion continues very amusingly, but the upshot is
that the lady (or young woman - LaMotte disdains the use of "maiden")
certainly does intend to marry the tailor, so that's why I call it proto-feminist -- constrained by the
possibilities of Victorian existence -- as discussed previously.
[Written in 2009, slightly revised]
Labels: A.S. Byatt, Robert Browning
