their possessions

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).]

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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.     

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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".     

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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....").

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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.  

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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]