by A. S. Byatt
I am not become any kind of an Atheist, nor yet positivist, at least, not as to the extreme religious position of those who make a religion out of Humanity—for although I wish my fellow men well, and find them endlessly interesting, yet there are more things in Heaven and Earth than were created for their, that is our, benefit. The impulses to religion might be the need to trust—or the capacity for wonder—and my own religious feelings have always been inspired more by the latter. I find it hard to shift without the Creator—the more we see and understand, the more amazement there is in this strangely interrelated Heap of things—which is yet not disordered. But I go too fast. And I cannot, I must not, burden you with a complete confession of what are in any case a very confused, very incoherent, indeed inchoate set of ideas, perceptions, half-truths, useful fictions, struggled for and not possessed.
The truth is—my dear Miss LaMotte—that we live in an old world—a tired world—a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning—by the young Plotinus or the ecstatic John on Patmos—are now obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest, by thick horny growths over that clear vision—as moulting serpents, before they burst forth with their new flexible-brilliant skins, are blinded by the crusts of their old one—or, we might say, as the lovely lines of faith that sprung up in the aspiring towers of the ancient ministers and abbeys are both worn away by time and grime, softly shrouded by the smutty accretions of our industrial cities, our wealth, our discoveries themselves, our Progress. Now, I cannot believe, being no Manichee, that He, the Creator, if he exists, did not make us and our world that which we are. He made us curious, did he not?—he made us questioning—and the Scribe of Genesis did well to locate the source of all our misery in that greed for knowledge which has also been our greatest spur—in some sense—to good. To good and evil. We have more of both those, I must believe, than our primitive parents.
Now, my great question is, has He withdrawn Himself from our vision so that by diligence of our own matured minds we might find out His Ways—now so far away from us—or have we by sin, or by some necessary thickening of our skins before the new stages of the metamorphosis—have we reached some stage which necessitates our consciousness of our ignorance and distance—and is this necessity health or sickness?
I was in Ragnarök—where Odin, the Almighty, becomes a mere wandering Questioner in Middle-Earth—and is necessarily destroyed with all his works on the last battlefield at the end of the last terrible Winter—I was feeling towards some such question—unknowing—
And then there is the whole question of what kind of Truth may be conveyed in a wonder-tale, as you rightly named it—but I trespass terribly on your patience—which may by now be at an end with me—I may have put myself beyond the pale of your keen and discerning attention—
And I have not answered what you said of your Epic. Well—if you still care for my views—as why should you? You are a Poet and in the end must care only for your own views—why not an Epic? Why not a mythic drama in twelve books? I can see no reason in Nature why a woman might not write such a poem as well as a man—if she but set her mind to it.
Does this sound brusque? It is because it distresses me that you should even—with your gifts—suppose an apology of any kind was needed for the Project—
I am very well aware that an Apology is needed for my tone throughout this letter, which I shall not re-read, for it is out of my power to recast it again. So it comes to you rough, unhouseled, unannealed—and I shall wait—resigned but anxious—to see if you feel any response is possible—
Yours,
R. H. Ash
Dear Mr Ash,
If I held Silence—too long—forgive me. I deliberated indeed not whether but what—I might Reply—since you do me the honour—I had almost writ, the painful honour—but indeed it is not—that is not so—of trusting me with your true opinions. I am no Miss in an evangelical novel to fly into a fine frenzy of—elevated—Rebuff or Rebuttal at expressions of honest doubt—and am partially in accord with you—Doubt, doubt is endemic to our life in this world at this time. I do not Dispute your vision of our historical Situation—we are far from the Source of Light—and we know Things—that make a Simple Faith—hard to hold, hard to grasp, hard to wrestle.
You write much—of the Creator—whom you do not name Father—save in yr Norse analogy. But of the true tale of the Son you say wondrous little—and yet that lies at the Centre of our living faith—the Life and Death of God made man, our true Friend and Saviour, the model of our conduct, and our hope, in his Rising from the Dead, of a future life for all of us, without which the failing and manifest injustice of our earthly span would be an intolerable mockery. But I write—like a Sermon-Preacher—which we Women are not—it is Decreed—fitted to be—and tell you no more than you must have endlessly—in your wisdom—already cogitated.
And yet—could we have conceived that Sublime Model, that Supreme Sacrifice—if it were not so?
I could adduce against you—the Evidence of your own Lazarus-poem—whose riddling title you must some day expound to me in its mystery. Déjà-Vu or the Second Sight—indeed. How are we to take that? My friend—my companion and I have lately become interested in psychic phenomena—we have attended some local lectures on unusual States of Mind—and Spirit manifestations—we have even been bold enough to sit in at a seance conducted by a Mrs Lees—Now Mrs Lees is convinced that the phenomena of Déjà-Vu—whereby the experient is convinced that a present experience is only a Repetition of what has already, perhaps frequently, been lived through before—is Evidence of some circularity of inhuman time—of Another Adjacent World where things eternally are with no change or decay. And that the well-attested Phenomena of Second Sight—the gift of pre-Vision, or foretelling or prophecy—is another Dipping into that forever refreshed Continuum. So—in this view yr poem wd seem to be suggesting that dead Lazarus moved in and out of Eternity again—“from Time to Time” as you wrote in that poem—if I understand you—and now sees Time—from the perspective of Eternity. It is a conceit worthy of you—and now I come to know you better—his risen vision of the miraculous Nature of the Minute Particulars of Life—the Goat’s yellow barred Eye—the bread on the Platter with the scaly Fishes waiting for the oven—all these are to you the essence of living,—and it is only to your perplexed narrator that the living-dead man’s gaze appears Indifferent—for truly he sees all to have value—All—
Before I met Mrs Lees—I took your Second Sight more generally—as a Prefiguring of that Second Coming we await—little grains of sand shall be sifted and counted, as the hairs on our heads, in the eye of the dead man—
The Son of God speaks not in your poem. But the Roman Scribe who tells the tale—he the census-taker, the collector of minor facts—is he not amazed despite his own inclinations—despite his Prosaic mental habits of officialdom—by the effect of the presence of the Man on that small community of believers—who are cheerfully ready to Die for Him—and as ready to live in penury—“ ’tis all one to thee” he writes, puzzled—but we are not puzzled—for He has oped to them the Door of Eternity and they have glimpsed the light within—that illuminates the loaves and fishes—is not that so?
Or am I too Simple? Was He—so loved, so absent, so cruelly dead—merely Man?
You have most dramatically presented the Love of Him,—the Need of his Comfort—now Absent—among the women of Lazarus’ household—the ceaselessly active Martha and the visionary Mary, each in her way aware of what His Presence once meant—though Martha sees it as household decorum—and Mary sees it as Lost Light—and Lazarus sees—only what he sees—momently—
Oh what a puzzle. Now I come to the end of my clumsy apprentice adumbration of your masterly monologue—have I described the liveliness of Living Truth—or the dramatisation merely—of faith—of Need?
Will you say what you mean? Are you like the Apostle, all things to all men? Wh
ere—where have I led—myself?
Tell me—He Lives—for you
Well, my dear Miss Lamotte, I am tied to the stake and I must stay the course—though in other respects dissimilar enough from Macbeth. I was first relieved to have your letter, and to see that I was not judged excommunicado and then, on better judgment making, I weighed it for some time, turning it this way and that in case it should after all speak Brimstone and Ashes to me.
And when I came to open it, there was such generosity of spirit, such fervent faith and such subtlety of understanding of what I had written—I mean not only my dubious letter, but my poem on Lazarus. You know how it is, being yourself a poet—one writes such and such a narrative, and thinks as one goes along—here’s a good touch—this concept modifies that—will it not be too obvious to the generality?—too thick an impasto of the Obvious—one has almost a disgust at the too-apparent meaning—and then the general public gets hold of it, and pronounces it at the same time too heartily simple and too loftily incomprehensible—and it is clear only that whatever one had hoped to convey is lost in mists of impenetrability—and slowly it loses its life—in one’s own mind, as much as in its readers’.
And then you come along—with a dash of apparently effortless and casual wisdom—and resuscitate the whole thing—even to your own doubtful question at the end—did He do this—did Lazarus live—did He, the God-man, truly resurrect the dead before Himself triumphing over Death—or was it all only the product, as Feuerbach believes, of human Desire embodying itself in a Tale—?
You ask me—tell me—He Lives—for you—
Lives—yes—but How? How? Do I truly believe that this Man stept into the charnel house where Lazarus was already corrupt and bade him stand and walk?
Do I truly believe that all this is only figments of hopes and dreams and garbled folklore, embellished for the credulous by simple people?
We live in an age of scientific history—we sift our evidence—we know somewhat about eyewitness accounts and how far it is prudent to entrust ourselves to them—and of what this living-dead-man (I speak of Lazarus, not of his Saviour) saw, or reported or thought, or assured his loving family of what lay beyond the terrible bourn—not a word.
So if I construct a fictive eyewitness account—a credible plausible account—am I lending life to truth with my fiction—or verisimilitude to a colossal Lie with my feverish imagination? Do I do as they did, the evangelists, reconstructing the events of the Story in after-time? Or do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer—like Macbeth’s witches—mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book—telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban—I nowhere claim my poor bullet-headed brute of a Roman censor as other than mine, a clay mouth to whistle through.
No answer, you will say, your head on one side, considering me, like a wise bird, sharply, and judging me as a prevaricator.
Do you know—the only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination. Whatever the absolute Truth—or Untruth—of that old life-in-death—Poetry can make that man live for the length of the faith you or any other choose to give to him. I do not claim to bestow Life as He did—on Lazarus—but maybe as Elisha did—who lay on the dead body—and breathed life into it—
Or as the Poet of the Gospel did—for he was Poet, whatever else—Poet, whether scientific historian or no.
Do you touch at my meaning? When I write I know. Remember that miraculous saying of the boy Keats—I am certain of nothing, but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—
Now I am not saying—Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, or any such quibble. I am saying that without the Maker’s imagination nothing can live for us—whether alive or dead, or once alive and now dead, or waiting to be brought to life—
Oh, I have tried to tell you my truth—and have written only dreary quibbles about poetry. But you know—I do believe you know—
Tell me you know—and that it is not simple—or simply to be rejected—there is a truth of Imagination.
Dear Mr Ash,
MacBeth was a Sorcerer—had he not born of woman not put an end to him—with his sharp sword—think you not that good King James—with his pious Daemonologie—would not have desiderated his Burning?
Yet in our time you may sit quietly there and plead—oh but I am a mere poet—if I urge that we receive Truth only through the Life—or Liveliness—of Lies—there’s no harm in that—since we all take in both with our mother-milk—Indissoluble—it is the human case—
He said—I am the Truth and the Life—what of that, Sir? Was that an approximate statement? Or a Poetic adumbration? Well—was it? It rings—through eternity—I AM—
Not that I will not grant you—now I climb down from my preaching-place, my unattainable pulpit—that there are Truths of your sort. Who that judges does not know—that Lear’s agony—and the Duke of Gloucester’s pain—are true—tho’ those men never lived—or never lived so—you will tell me that they lived indeed in some sort—and that he—W.S.—sage sorcerer prophet—brought them again to huge Life—so much so that no Actor—could do his part therein, but must leave it to the studium of you and me to flesh it out.
But what a Poet might be in those days of Giants, which were also the days of the aforesaid King James and his Daemonologie—and not only of his Daemonologie—but of his commissioning of the Word of God in English—so writ then to aftertime that every word of it rings with faith and truth—and has accrued more, of faith at least—through the centuries—until our own faithlessness—
What a poet was then—seer, daemon, force of nature, the Word—is not what he is now in our time of material thickening—
It may be that your diligent—reconstitution—like the restoration of old Frescoes with new colours—is our way to the Truth—a discreet patching. Would you acknowledge my simile?
We went to hear another lecture on the recent Spiritual Manifestations, given by a most respectable Quaker—who began with a predisposition to believe in the life of the Spirit—but with no vulgar desire to be shocked or startled. Himself an Englishman, he characterised the English in a manner not wholly alien to the style of the poet Ash. We have undergone—this good man said—a double process of Induration. Trade—and Protestant abjuration of spiritual relations—have been mutually doing the work of internal petrification and ossification upon us. We are grossly materialist—and nothing will satisfy us but material proofs—as we call them—of spiritual facts—and so the spirits have deigned to speak to us in these crude ways—of rapping—and rustling—and musical hummings—such as once were not needed—when our Faith was alight and alive in us—
He said too the English are particularly indurate by reason of our denser atmosphere, less electrical and magnetic in its character than that of the Americans—who are conspicuously more nervous and excitable than we are—with more genius for social schemes—more belief in the betterment of Human Nature—whose Minds, like their Institutions—have shot up with a rapidity of growth resembling that of tropical jungles—and have in consequence greater openness and receptivity. They had the Fox Sisters and the first rapping messages—they the Revelations of Andrew Jackson Davis and his Univercoelum, they fostered the genius of D. D. Home.
Whereas our “telluric conditions” (do you savour the phrase as I do?) are less favourable to the transmission of spiritual impressions.
I know not what is your opinion of these matters—with which Society is now so universally busy—that it has stirred the quiet backwaters of our Richmond river-front—?
This letter is not a worthy answer to your inspiring remarks on Keats and poetic truth, or your self-exposition as a prophet-sorcerer. It is not written at White Heat—as others have been—but I must plead that I am not well—that we are not well—both my dear friend and I have been somewhat afflicted with a slight fever and consequent lo
wness of spirits. I have spent today in a darkened Room—and feel the benefit of that—but am still weak.
In such a situation fancies easily abuse the mind. I had half made up my mind to plead—no more such letters—leave me quiet with my simple faith—leave me aside from the Rush of your intellect and power of writing—or I am a Lost Soul—Sir—I am threatened in that Autonomy for which I have so struggled. Now I have indeed, in a Winding and Roundabout Way—made such a plea—by presenting the thing itself as a hypothetical designation of what I might say. So whether I might—or Do—so plead—I leave to your generous judgment.
Dear Miss LaMotte,
You do not forbid me to write again. Thank you. You do not even reproach me strongly with equivocation and dabbling with arcane powers. Thank you also for that. And enough—for the time being—of these harsh subjects.
I was most distressed to hear that you were ill. I cannot think that this mild Spring weather—or my letters, so full of goodwill, however else intrusive—could affect you so uncomfortably—and so am reduced to suspecting the oratory of your inspired Quaker—whose telluric conditions of magnetic inertia, whose observation of Induration—I enjoy quite as much as you could have hoped. May he invoke a force that will, indeed “strike flat the thick rotundities o’th’earth.” There is a masterly lack of logic in accusing an Age of Materialism and then invoking a wholly material spirituality—is there not?
I did not know you walked out so readily or so frequently. I had quite envisaged you barricaded behind your pretty front door—which I imagine, because I am never content without using my imagination, quite embowered in roses and clematis. What should you say if I were to evince a strong desire to hear your reasonable Quaker for myself? You may forbid me cucumber sandwiches, but not spiritual sustenance.