by A. S. Byatt
Without this excitement they cannot have their Lyric Verse, and so they get it by any convenient means—and with absolute sincerity—but the Poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems.
You see the fork I have impaled myself on—Nevertheless I reiterate—because you will not bridle at my strictures on either manly devotion to a female ideal—or on the duplicity of Poets—but will look at it with your own Poet’s eye—askance and most wisely—I write to you as I write when I am alone, with that in me—how else to put it? you will know, I trust you know—with that which makes, which is the Maker.
I should add that my poems do not, I think, spring from the Lyric Impulse—but from something restless and myriad-minded and partial and observing and analytic and curious, my dear, which is more like the mind of the prose master Balzac, whom, being a Frenchwoman, and blessedly less hedged about with virtuous prohibitions than English female gentility, you know and understand. What makes me a Poet, and not a novelist—is to do with the singing of the Language itself. For the difference between poets and novelists is this—that the former write for the life of the language—and the latter write for the betterment of the world.
And you for the revelation to mere humans of some strange unguessed-at other world, is that not so? The City of Is, the reverse of Par-is, the towers in the water not the air, the drowned roses and flying fish and other paradoxical elementals—you see—I come to know you—I shall feel my way into your thought—as a hand into a glove—to steal your own metaphor and torture it cruelly. But if you wish—you may keep your gloves clean and scented and folded away—you may—only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.…
Roland looked up at his partner or opponent. She seemed to be getting on with an enviable certainty and speed. Fine frown-lines fanned her brow.
The stained glass worked to defamiliarise her. It divided her into cold, brightly coloured fires. One cheek moved in and out of a pool of grape-violet as she worked. Her brow flowered green and gold. Rose-red and berry-red stained her pale neck and chin and mouth. Eyelids were purple-shadowed. The green silk of her scarf glittered with turreted purple ridges. Dust danced in a shadowy halo round her shifting head, black motes in straw gold, invisible solid matter appearing like pinholes in a sheet of solid colour. He spoke and she turned through a rainbow, her pale skin threading the various lights.
“I’m sorry to interrupt—I just wondered—do you know about the City of Is? I.S. I.S?”
She shook off her concentration as a dog shakes off water.
“It’s a Breton legend. It was drowned in the sea for its wickedness. It was ruled by Queen Dahud, the sorceress, daughter of King Gradlond. The women there were transparent, according to some versions. Christabel wrote a poem.”
“May I look?”
“A quick glance. I’m using this book.”
She pushed it across the table.
Tallahassee Women Poets. Christabel LaMotte: a Selection of Narrative and Lyric Poems, ed. Leonora Stern. The Sapphic Press, Boston. The purple cover bore a white linear image of two mediaeval women, bending to embrace each other across a fountain in a square basin. They both wore veiled headdresses, heavy girdles and long plaits.
He scanned The Drowned City. This had a prefatory note by Leonora Stern.
In this poem, as in “The Standing Stones,” LaMotte drew on her native Breton mythology, which she had known from childhood. The theme was of particular interest to a woman writer, as it might be said to reflect a cultural conflict between two types of civilisation, the Indo-European patriarchy of Gradlond and the more primitive, instinctive, earthy paganism of his sorceress daughter, Dahud, who remains immersed when he has taken his liberating leap to dry land at Quimper. The women’s world of the underwater city is the obverse of the male-dominated technological industrial world of Paris or Par-is, as the Bretons have it. They say that Is will come to the surface when Paris is drowned for its sins.
LaMotte’s attitude to Dahud’s so-called crimes is interesting. Her father, Isidore LaMotte, in his Breton Myths and Legends, does not hesitate to refer to Dahud’s “perversions,” though without specifying. Nor does LaMotte specify.…
He flicked across the pages of the text.
There are none blush on earth, y-wis
As do dames of the Town of Is.
The red blood runs beneath their skin
And feels its way and flows within,
And men can see, as through a glass
Each twisty turn, each crossing pass
Of threaded vein and artery
From heart to throat, from mouth to eye.
This spun-glass skin, like spider-thread
Is silver water, woven with red.
For their excessive wickedness
In days of old, was this distress
Come on them, of transparency
And openness to every eye.
But still they’re proud, their haughty brows
Circled with gold.…
Deep in the silence of drowned Is
Beneath the wavering precipice
The church-spire in the thickened green
Points to the trembling surface sheen
From which descends a glossy cone
A mirror-spire that mocks its own.
Between these two the mackerel sails
As did the swallow in the vales
Of summer air, and he too sees
His mirrored self amongst the trees
That hang to meet themselves, for here
All things are doubled, and the clear
Thick element is doubled too
Finite and limited the view
As though the world of roofs and rocks
Were stored inside a glassy box.
And damned and drowned transparent things
Hold silent commerce.…
This drowned world lies beneath a skin
Of moving water, as within
The glassy surface of their frown
The ladies’ grieving passions drown
And can be seen to ebb and flow
In crimson as the currents go
Amongst the bladderwrack and stones
Amongst the delicate white bones.
And so they worked on, against the clock, cold and excited, until Lady Bailey came to offer them supper.
When Maud drove home that first evening, the weather was already changing for the worse. Clouds were darkly gathering; she could see through the trees a full moon, which, because of some trick of the thickening air, seemed both far away and somehow condensed, an object round and small and dull. She drove through the park, much of which had been planted by that earlier Sir George who had married Christabel’s sister Sophie, and had had a passion for trees, trees from all parts of the distant earth, Persian plum, Turkey oak, Himalayan pine, Caucasian walnut and the Judas tree. He had had his generation’s expansive sense of time—he had inherited hundred-year-old oaks and beeches and had planted spreads of woodland, rides and coppices he would never see. Huge rugged trunks came silently past the little green car in the encroaching dark, rearing themselves suddenly monstrous in the changing white beam of the headlight. There was a kind of cracking of cold in the words all round, a tightening of texture, a clamping together that Maud had experienced in her own warm limbs as she went out into the courtyard and cold ran into her constricted throat and pulled tight something she thought of poetically as the heartstrings.
Down these rides Christabel had come, wilful and perhaps spiritually driven, urging her little pony-cart on to the ritualist eucharist of the Reverend Mossman. Maud had not found Christabel an easy companion all day. She responded to threats with increasing organisation. Pin, categorise, learn. Out here it felt different. The mental pony-cart bowled along, with its veiled passenger. The trees went up, solid. A kind of elemental clanging accompanied the disappearance of each into the dark. They were old, they were grey and green and stiff. Women
, not trees, were Maud’s true pastoral concern. Her idea of these primeval creatures included her generation’s sense of their imminent withering and dying, under the drip of acid rain, or in the invisible polluted gusts of the wind. She was visited by a sudden vision of them dancing, golden-green, in a bright spring a hundred years ago, flexible saplings, tossed and resilient. This thickened forest, her own humming metal car, her prying curiosity about whatever had been Christabel’s life, seemed suddenly to be the ghostly things, feeding on, living through, the young vitality of the past. Between the trees the ground was black with the shining, sagging wet rounds of dead leaves; in front of her, the same black leaves spread like stains on the humping surface of the tarmac. A creature ran out into her path; its eyes were half-spheres filled with dull red fire, refracted, sparkling and then gone. She swerved, and nearly hit a thick oak stump. Ambiguous wet drops or flakes—which?—materialised briefly on the windscreen. Maud was inside, and the outside was alive and separate.
Her flat, with its unambiguous bright cleanliness, seemed unusually welcoming, apart from the presence of two letters, caught in the lips of the letterbox. She tugged these free, and went round, closing curtains, putting on many lights. The letters too were threatening. One was blue and one was the kind of tradesman’s brown with which all universities have replaced their milled white crested missives in the new austerity. The blue one was from Leonora Stern. The other said it was from Prince Albert College; she would have supposed it was from Roland, but he was here. She had been not very polite to him. Even bossy. The whole business had put her on edge. Why could she do nothing with ease and grace except work alone, inside these walls and curtains, her bright safe box? Christabel, defending Christabel, redefined and alarmed Maud.
Here is a Riddle, Sir, an old Riddle, an easy Riddle—hardly worth your thinking about—a fragile Riddle, in white and Gold with life in the middle of it. There is a gold, soft cushion, whose gloss you may only paradoxically imagine with your eyes closed tight—see it feelingly, let it slip through your mind’s fingers. And this gold cushion is enclosed in its own crystalline casket, a casket translucent and endless in its circularity, for there are no sharp corners to it, no protrusions, only a milky moonstone clarity that deceives. And these are wrapped in silk, fine as thistledown, tough as steel, and the silk lies inside Alabaster, which you may think of as a funerary Urn—only with no inscription, for there are as yet no Ashes—and no pediment, and no nodding poppies engraved, nor yet no lid you may lift to peep in, for all is sealed and smooth. There may come a day when you may lift the lid with impunity—or rather, when it may be lifted from within—for that way, life may come—whereas your way—you will discover—only Congealing and Mortality.
An Egg, Sir, is the answer, as you perspicuously read from the beginning, an Egg, a perfect O, a living Stone, doorless and windowless, whose life may slumber on till she be Waked—or find she has Wings to spread—which is not so here—oh no—
An Egg is my answer. What is the Riddle?
I am my own riddle. Oh, Sir, you must not kindly seek to ameliorate or steal away my solitude. It is a thing we women are taught to dread—oh the terrible tower, oh the thickets round it—no companionable Nest—but a donjon.
But they have lied to us you know, in this, as in so much else. The Donjon may frown and threaten—but it keeps us very safe—within its confines we are free in a way you, who have freedom to range the world, do not need to imagine. I do not advise imagining it—but do me the justice of believing—not imputing mendacious protestation—my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage—
Shattering an Egg is unworthy of you, no Pass time for men. Think what you would have in your hand if you put forth your Giant strength and crushed the solid stone. Something slippery and cold and unthinkably disagreeable.
Maud felt reluctant to open Leonora’s letter, which had an imperious and accusing air. So she opened instead the brown one and saw it was worse, it was from Fergus Wolff, with whom she had had no communication for over a year. Certain handwriting can turn the stomach, after one, after five, after twenty-five years. Fergus’s was, like much male writing, cramped, but with characteristic little flourishes. Maud’s stomach turned, the vision of the tormented bed rose again in her mind’s eye. She put a hand to her hair.
Dear Maud, never forgotten, as I hope I’m not either, quite. How are things in damp old Lincolnshire? Do the fens make you melancholy? How is Christabel? Would you be pleased to hear I have decided to give a paper on Christabel at the York conference on metaphor? I thought I’d lecture on
The Queen of the Castle: What is kept in the Keep?
How does that strike you? Do I have your imprimatur? Might I even hope to be able to consult your archive?
I should deal with contrasting and conflicting metaphors for the fairy Melusine’s castle-building activities. There’s a very good piece by Jacques Le Goff on “Melusine Défricheuse”; according to the new historians she’s a kind of earth spirit or local goddess of foison or minor Ceres. But then you could adopt a Lacanian model of the image of the keep—Lacan says, “the formation of the ego is symbolised in dreams by a fortress or stadium [any stadiums in Christabel?]—surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips—dividing it into two opposite fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castle whose form symbolises the id in a quite startling way.” I could complicate this with a few more real and imaginary castles—and a loving and respectful reference to your own seminal work on the limen and the liminal. What do you think? Will it wash? Will I be torn by Maenads?
I was inspired to write partly by the excitement of this project, partly because my spies tell me that you and Roland Michell (a dull but honourable contemporary of mine) have been discovering something or other together. My chief spy—a young woman who is not best pleased by the turn of events—tells me you are spending the New Year together, investigating connections. I am naturally consumed by curiosity. Perhaps I will come and consult your archive. I do wonder what you make of young Michell. Don’t eat him, dear Maud. He isn’t in your class. Academically, that is, he isn’t, as you may have discovered by now.
Whereas you and I could have had the most delectable talk about towers above and under water, serpent tails and flying fish. Did you read Lacan on flying fish and vesicle persecution? I miss you from time to time, you know. You weren’t wholly nice or fair to me. Nor I to you, you will say—but when are we ever? You are so severe with male shortcomings.
Please give me the go-ahead on my siege-paper.
Much love as always
Fergus
Dear Maud,
I find it odd that I haven’t heard from you for maybe two months now—I trust all is well with you, and that your silence indicates only that your work is going well and absorbing all your attention. I worry about you when you are silent—I know you haven’t been happy—I think of you with great love as you progress—