by A. S. Byatt
“Only the Librarian.”
“I’ll get over there. Patriotism will have to do instead of funding. Stop the drain.”
“They wouldn’t—”
“I wouldn’t trust anyone, faced with Cropper’s cheque-book, not further than I could see.”
Blackadder was struggling into his overcoat, a shabby British Warm. Roland had given up all thought, in any case not very realistic, of discussing the purloined letters with Blackadder. He did, however, ask, “Can you tell me anything about a writer called LaMotte?”
“Isidore LaMotte. Mythologies, 1832. Mythologies indigènes de la Bretagne et de la Grande Bretagne. Also Mythologies françaises. A great scholarly compendium of folklore and legends. Suffused by a kind of fashionable search for the Key to All Mythologies but also with Breton national identity and culture. Ash would almost certainly have read them, but I’ve no recollection of any precise use he made of them.…”
“There was a Miss LaMotte.…”
“Oh, the daughter. She wrote religious poems, didn’t she? A gloomy little booklet called Last Things. And children’s stories. Tales Told in November. Things that go bump in the night. And an epic which they say is unreadable.”
“I think the feminists are interested in her,” said Paola.
“They would be,” said Blackadder. “They haven’t any time for Randolph Ash. All they want is to read Ellen’s endless journal once our friend in there has actually managed to bring it to the light of day. They think Randolph Ash suppressed Ellen’s writing and fed off her imagination. They’d have a hard time proving that, I think, if they were interested in proof, which I’m not sure they are. They know what there is to find before they’ve seen it. All they’ve got to go on is that she spent a lot of time lying on the sofa, and that’s hardly unusual for a lady in her time and circumstances. Their real problem—and Beatrice’s—is that Ellen Ash is dull. No Jane Carlyle, more’s the pity. Poor old Beatrice began by wanting to show how self-denying and supportive Ellen Ash was and she messed around looking up every recipe for gooseberry jam and every jaunt to Broadstairs for twenty-five years, can you believe it, and woke up to find that no one wanted self-denial and dedication any more, they wanted proof that Ellen was raging with rebellion and pain and untapped talent. Poor Beatrice. One publication to her name, and a slim book called Helpmeets without irony doesn’t go down well with today’s feminists. One little anthology in 1950 of wise, witty and tender sayings from the female companions of the great. D. Wordsworth, J. Carlyle, E. Tennyson, Ellen Ash. But the Women’s Studies people can’t get their hands on all that stuff to publish as long as poor old Bea is still the official editor. She doesn’t know what’s hit her.”
Roland did not want to hear another long speech from Blackadder about Beatrice Nest’s long-delayed edition of Ellen Ash. There was a note that came into Blackadder’s voice when he got onto the subject of Beatrice, a jarring, snarling note, that put Roland in mind of hounds baying. (He had never heard hounds baying except on the television.) The idea of Cropper produced a furtive, conspiratorial look in the scholar.
Roland did not offer to accompany Blackadder to the London Library. He went off to look for coffee. After that he could pursue Miss LaMotte, who now had an identity of sorts, through the Catalogue, like any other dead soul.
He emerged amongst the Egyptian heavyweights and saw, between two huge stone legs, something rapid and white and golden that turned out to be Fergus Wolff, also heading for coffee. Fergus was very tall, with brassy hair cut long on top and short at the back, in the 1980s version of the 1930s, over a dazzling white heavy sweater and loose black trousers like a Japanese martial artist. He smiled at Roland, a pleased, voracious smile, with bright blue eyes and a long mouth terribly full of strong white teeth. He was older than Roland, a child of the Sixties who had temporarily dropped out, opted for freedom and Parisian revolutions, sitting at the feet of Barthes and Foucault, before coming back to dazzle Prince Albert College. He was pleasant enough in general, though most people who met him formed the vaguest of ideas that he might be dangerous in some unspecified way. Roland liked Fergus because Fergus seemed to like him.
Fergus was writing a deconstructive account of Balzac’s Chef-d’Oeuvre Inconnu. Roland had ceased to be surprised that an English Department was sponsoring the study of French books. There seemed to be nothing else nowadays, and in any case Roland did not want to be thought insular. His own French, owing to his mother’s passionate interference with his education, was good. Fergus sprawled in the cafeteria banquette and said the challenge was to deconstruct something that had apparently already deconstructed itself, since the book was about a painting that turned out to be nothing but a chaotic mass of brush-strokes. Roland listened politely and said, “Do you know anything about a Miss LaMotte who wrote children’s stories and religious poetry in the 1850s or thereabouts?”
Fergus laughed rather a long time at this, and said tersely, “I should.”
“Who was she?”
“Christabel LaMotte. Daughter of Isidore, the mythographer. Last Things. Tales Told in November. An epic called The Fairy Melusina. Very bizarre. Do you know about Melusina? She was a fairy who married a mortal to gain a soul, and made a pact that he would never spy on her on Saturdays, and for years he never did, and they had six sons, all with strange defects—odd ears, giant tusks, a catshead growing out of one cheek, three eyes, that sort of thing. One was called Geoffroy à la Grande Dent and one was called Horrible. She built castles, real ones that still exist, in Poitou. And in the end, of course, he looked through the keyhole—or made one in her steel door with his sword-point according to one version—and there she was in a great marble bath disporting herself. And from the waist down she was a fish or a serpent, Rabelais says an “andouille,” a kind of huge sausage, the symbolism is obvious, and she beat the water with her muscular tail. And he said nothing and she did nothing until Geoffroy, the tough son, took exception to his brother Fromont taking refuge in a monastery, and when he wouldn’t come out, he piled up brushwood and burned the whole thing down, monks and Fromont and all. And when this was reported, Raimondin (he was the original knight, the husband) said, “This is all your fault, I should never have married a horrible snake.” And then she reproached him and turned into a dragon, and flew away round the battlements making a terrible noise and battering the stones. Oh, before that she gave him strict injunctions to be sure to kill Horrible or he would destroy them all, which was duly done. And she comes back to the Counts of Lusignan to foretell deaths—she is a kind of Dame Blanche, or Fata Bianca.
“There are all sorts of symbolic and mythological and psychoanalytic interpretations, you can imagine. Christabel LaMotte wrote this long and very convoluted poem about Melusina’s story in the 1860s and it was published at the beginning of the 1870s. It’s an odd affair—tragedy and romance and symbolism rampant all over it, a kind of dream-world full of strange beasts and hidden meanings and a really weird sexuality or sensuality. The feminists are crazy about it. They say it expresses women’s impotent desire. It wasn’t much read until they rediscovered it—Virginia Woolf knew it, she adduced it as an image of the essential androgyny of the creative mind—but the new feminists see Melusina in her bath as a symbol of self-sufficient female sexuality needing no poor males. I like it, it’s disturbing. It keeps changing focus. From very precise description of the scaly tail to cosmic battles.”
“That’s very useful. I’ll look it up.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I came across a reference in Randolph Ash. There’s a reference to almost everything in Randolph Ash, sooner or later. Why did I make you laugh?”
“I became an involuntary expert on Christabel LaMotte. There are two people in the world who know all that is known about Christabel LaMotte. One is Professor Leonora Stern, in Tallahassee. And the other is Dr Maud Bailey in Lincoln University. I met them both at that Paris conference on sexuality and textuality I went to. If you remember
. I don’t think they like men. Nevertheless I had a brief affair with the redoubtable Maud. In Paris and then here.”
He stopped and frowned to himself. He opened his mouth to say more and then closed it again. He said after a time, “She—Maud—runs a Women’s Resource Centre in Lincoln. They’ve got quite a lot of Christabel’s unpublished papers there. If you want anything out of the way, there’s where to look.”
“I might. Thanks. What is she like? Will she eat me?”
“She thicks men’s blood with cold,” said Fergus with a lot of undecodable feeling.
4
The Thicket is Thorny
Up snakes the glassy Tower
Here is no sweet Dovecote
Nor plump Lady’s Bower
The wind whistles sourly
Through that Sharp land
At the black casement
He sees her white hand
He hears the foul Old One
Call quavering there
Rapunzel Rapunzel
Let down your Hair
Filaments Glosses
Run trembling down
Gold torrent loosened
From a gold Crown
The black claws go clutching
Hand over hand
What Pain goes shrilling
Through every strand!
Silent he watches
The humped One rise
With tears of anguish
In his own eyes
—CHRISTABEL LAMOTTE
When Roland arrived in Lincoln he was already irritated by having to take the train. It would have been cheaper to have taken the coach, if longer, but Dr Bailey had sent a curt postcard telling him it would be best for her to meet him off the noon train; the campus was some way out of town, it would be best that way. On the train, however, it was possible to try to catch up on what there was to know about Christabel LaMotte. His college library had provided two books. One was very slim and ladylike, written in 1947 and entitled White Linen after one of Christabel’s lyrics. The other was a fat collection of feminist essays, mostly American, published in 1977: Herself Herself Involve, LaMotte’s Strategies of Evasion.
Veronica Honiton provided some biographical information. Christabel’s grandparents, Jean-Baptiste and Emilie LaMotte, had fled to England in the Terror of 1793 and had settled there, choosing not to return after the fall of Bonaparte. Isidore, born in 1801, had gone to Cambridge, and toyed with writing poetry, before becoming a serious historian and mythographer
much influenced by German researchers on folk-tales and the origins of biblical narrative, but staunch in his own mystical Breton brand of Christianity. His mother, Emilie, was an older sister of the republican and anticlerical historian, also a folklore enthusiast, Raoul de Kercoz, who still maintained the family manor of Kernemet. In 1828 Isidore married Miss Arabel Gumpert, daughter of Canon Rupert Gumpert of St Paul’s, whose firm religious faith was a powerful steadying influence on Christabel’s childhood. There were two daughters of the marriage, Sophie, born in 1830, who became the wife of Sir George Bailey, of Seal Close, in the Lincolnshire Wolds, and Christabel, born in 1825, who lived with her parents until in 1853 a small independence, left her by a maiden aunt, Antoinette de Kercoz, enabled her to set up house in Richmond in Surrey, with a young woman friend whom she had met at a lecture of Ruskin’s.
Miss Blanche Glover, like Christabel, had artistic ambitions, and painted large canvases in oil, none of which have survived, as well as carving the skilful and mysterious wood engravings which illustrate Christabel’s delightful, if slightly disquieting, Tales for Innocents, and Tales Told in November, and her religious lyrics, Orisons. It is believed to be Miss Glover who first encouraged Christabel to embark on the grandiose and obscure epic poem, The Fairy Melusina, a retelling of the old tale of the magical half-woman, half-snake. The rifts of The Fairy Melusina are heavily overloaded with ore; during the Pre-Raphaelite Period it was admired by certain critics, including Swinburne, who called it, “a quiet, muscular serpent of a tale, with more vigour and venom than is at all usual in the efforts of the female pen, but without narrative thrust; rather, as was Coleridge’s Serpent who figured the Imagination, with its tail stuffed in its own mouth.” It is now deservedly forgotten. Christabel’s reputation, modest but secure, rests on the restrained and delicate lyrics, products of a fine sensibility, a somewhat sombre temperament, and a troubled but steadfast Christian faith.
Miss Glover was unfortunately drowned in the Thames in 1861. The death seems to have had a distressing effect on Christabel, who returned eventually to her family, living with her sister Sophie for the rest of her quiet and uneventful life. After Melusina she appears to have written no more poetry, and retreated further and further into voluntary silence. She died in 1890 aged sixty-five.
Veronica Honiton’s comments on Christabel’s poetry concentrated sweetly on her “domestic mysticism,” which she compared to George Herbert’s celebration of the servant who “sweeps a room as for Thy laws.”
I like things clean about me
Starched and gophered frill
What is done exactly
Cannot be done ill
The house is ready spotless
Waiting for the Guest
Who will see our white linen
At its very best
Who will take it and fold it
And lay us to rest.
Thirty years later the feminists saw Christabel LaMotte as distraught and enraged. They wrote on “Ariachne’s Broken Woof: Art as Discarded Spinning in the Poems of LaMotte.” Or “Melusina and the Daemonic Double: Good Mother, Bad Serpent.” “A Docile Rage: Christabel LaMotte’s Ambivalent Domesticity.” “White Gloves: Blanche Glover: Occluded Lesbian sexuality in LaMotte.” There was an essay by Maud Bailey herself on “Melusina, Builder of Cities: A Subversive Female Cosmogony.” Roland knew he should tackle this piece first, but was inhibited by its formidable length and density. He started “Ariachne’s Broken Woof,” which elegantly dissected one of Christabel’s insect poems, of which there were apparently many.
From so blotched and cramped a creature
Painfully teased out
With ugly fingers, filaments of wonder
Bright snares about
Lost buzzing things, an order fine and bright
Geometry threading water, catching light.
It was hard to concentrate. The Midlands went flatly past, a biscuit factory, a metal box company, fields, hedges, ditches, pleasant and unremarkable. Miss Honiton’s book contained, as a frontispiece, the first image he had seen of Christabel, a brownish, very early photograph, veiled under a crackling, protective translucent page. She was dressed in a large triangular mantle and a small bonnet, frilled inside its rim, tied with a large bow under her chin. Her clothes were more prominent than she was; she retreated into them, her head, perhaps quizzically, perhaps considering itself “birdlike,” held on one side. She had pale crimped hair over her temples, and her lips were parted to reveal large, even teeth. The picture gave no clear impression of anyone in particular; it was generic Victorian lady, specific shy poetess.
At first he did not identify Maud Bailey, and he himself was not in any way remarkable, so that they were almost the last pair at the wicket gate. She would be hard to miss, if not to recognise. She was tall, tall enough to meet Fergus Wolff’s eyes on the level, much taller than Roland. She was dressed with unusual coherence for an academic, Roland thought, rejecting several other ways of describing her green and white length, a long pine-green tunic over a pine-green skirt, a white silk shirt inside the tunic and long softly white stockings inside long shining green shoes. Through the stockings veiled flesh diffused a pink gold, almost. He could not see her hair, which was wound tightly into a turban of peacock-feathered painted silk, low on her brow. Her brows and lashes were blonde; he observed so much. She had a clean, milky skin, unpainted lips, clearcut features, largely composed. She did not smile. She acknowledged him and tried to take his bag,
which he refused to allow. She drove an immaculately glossy green Beetle.
“I was intrigued by your question,” she said, as they drove off. “I’m glad you made the effort to come. I hope it will be worth it.” Her voice was deliberately blurred patrician; a kind of flattened Sloane. She smelled of something ferny and sharp. Roland didn’t like her voice.
“It may be a wild-goose chase. It’s almost nothing really.”
“We’ll see.”
Lincoln University was white-tiled towers, variegated with violet tiles and orange tiles and from time to time acid-green tiles. In high winds, Dr Bailey said, these blew off and were a real hazard to walkers. There were often high winds. The campus was fenny-flat, laid out like a kind of chess-board, redeemed by an imaginative water-gardener who had made a maze of channels and pools, randomly flowing across and around the rectangular grid. They were now clogged with fallen leaves, amongst which Koi carp pushed blunt pearly noses. The University dated from the opulent heyday of expansion and was now slightly grubby and tatty, mortared cracks grinning between the white oblongs under their urban plaque.