by A. S. Byatt
Now I must discipline myself—and address my wandering wits to your momentous questions—or we are swallowed up, both of us, in frippery imaginations, and vain speculations.
I too have seen S.T.C. I was but an infant—his pudgy Hand rested on my golden curls—his Voice remarked on their flaxen paleness—he said—or I have since by thinking created his voice saying—for I too, like you, must be imagining, I cannot let things alone—I believe he said “It is a beautiful name and will I trust not be a name of ill omen.” Now this is all the Clue I have to the end of the poem of Christabel—that its heroine was destined for tribulation—which is not hard to see—though how she might obtain Happiness thereafter is harder, if not Impossible.
Now I must change my habitual Tone wholly. Now I must write stringently and not fly about distracting you with flappings of tinsel or demoiselle-flickering. What nonsense in you to pretend to fear, or to fear truly perhaps, that I could be anything but wholly gratified by what you say of the Melusina and of my own powers of writing—of what I might do. You have read my thoughts—or made clear to me what were my predispositions—not in an intrusive way—but with true insight. She is indeed—my Melusine—just such a combination of the orderly and humane with the unnatural and the Wild—as you suggest—the hearth-foundress and the destroying Demon. (And female, which you do not remark on.)
I had not known you were a reader of such childish things as Tales Told in November. Those were my Father’s tales, above all—and told—only—in those dark months to which they belong. He used to say that those collectors or researchers who went to Brittany in the summer months—when the sea smiles sometimes, and the mist lifts from the granite so that it almost shines—might never come by what they looked for. The true tales were only told on dark nights—after Toussaint, All Saints, had passed. And the November Tales were the worst—of revenants, of demons, of portents, of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. And of the Ankou—who drove a terrible chariot,—a creaking groaning grinding sort of a conveyance anyone might hear behind him on a lonely heath on a dark night—full of dead bones, it might be, heaped and dangling. And the Driver was a Man of Bones—under his huge hat you saw only his hollow Orbits—he was not, you must know, Death, but Death’s Servitor—come with his Scythe—whose blade faced not inward for harvesting but outward—for what? (I can hear my father’s voice on a dark evening, asking—for what? And if I tell it to you somewhat flatly—why—it is because the days lengthen, and outside a thrush sings and sings in my foamy May—and all this is Out of Time.) If we are still writing letters to each other in November—as why should we? and why should we not?—I can a tale unfold—and shall—quite in my father’s manner. After November came the gentler tales of the Birth of Our Lord—you will remember it is a Breton belief that on that holy day the Beasts talk in the Stalls and Byres—but no man may hear what they say, those sage and innocent creatures—on pain of Death—
Now mark—you must write no more of your interest in my work as a possible Intrusion. You do not seem aware, Mr Ash, for all your knowledge of the great world I do not frequent, of the usual response which the productions of the Female Pen—let alone as in our case, the hypothetick productions—are greeted with. The best we may hope is—oh, it is excellently done—for a woman. And then there are Subjects we may not treat—things we may not know. I do not say but that there must be—and is—some essential difference between the Scope and Power of men and our own limited consciousness and possibly weaker apprehension. But I do maintain, as stoutly, that the delimitations are at present, all wrongly drawn—We are not mere candleholders to virtuous thoughts—mere chalices of Purity—we think and feel, aye and read—which seems not to shock you in us, in me, though I have concealed from many the extent of my—vicarious—knowledge of human vagaries. Now—if there is a reason for my persistence in this correspondence—it is this very unawareness in you—real or assumed—of what a woman must be supposed to be capable of. This is to me—like a strong Bush, well-rooted is to the grasp of one falling down a precipice—here I hold—here I am stayed—
I will tell you a Tale—no I will not neither, it does not bear thinking on—and yet I will, as an instance of trust—towards You.
I sent some of my smaller poems—a little sheaf—selected with trembling—to a great Poet—who shall be nameless, I cannot write his name—asking—Are These Poems? Have I—a Voice? He replied with courteous promptness—that they were pretty things—not quite regular—and not always well-regulated by a proper sense of decorum—but he would encourage me, moderately—they would do well enough to give me an interest in life until I had—I quote him exactly—“sweeter and weightier responsibilities.” Now how should I be brought by this judgment to desire those—Mr Ash—how? You understood my very phrase—the Life of Language. You understand—in my life Three—and Three alone have glimpsed—that the need to set down words—what I see, so—but words too, words mostly—words have been all my life, all my life—this need is like the Spider’s need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out—the silk is her life, her home, her safety—her food and drink too—and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew—you will say she is patient—so she is—she may also be Savage—it is her Nature—she Must—or die of Surfeit—do you understand me?
I can write no more at this time. My heart is too full—I have said too much—if I overlook these sheets, my courage will fail me—so they shall go all uncorrected as they are, with their imperfections on their heads—God bless you and keep you.
Christabel LaMotte
My dear Friend,
I may call myself your friend, may I not? For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else’s, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth,—even if, like the May, only a threshold-presence, by decree. I write to you now in haste—not to answer your last most generous letter—but to impart a vision, before the strangeness of it fades. An answer you shall and must have—but this I must tell you of, before I lose my courage. Are you curious? I hope so.
First I must confess my vision occurred in a ride in Richmond Park. And why must I confess this? May a poet and a gentleman not ride out with friends wherever he pleases? I was invited to take exercise with friends in the Park, and felt a vague unease as though its woody plantations and green spaces were girdled with an unspoken spell of prohibition—as your Cottage is—as Shalott was to the knights—as the woods of sleep are in the tale, with their sharp briar hedges. Now on the level of tales, you know, all prohibitions are made only to be broken, must be broken—as is indeed instanced in your own Melusina with striking ill-luck to the disobedient knight. It may be even that I might not have come to ride in the park if it had not had the definite glitter and glamour of the enclosed and barred. Though I must add, as a true nineteenth-century gentleman, I did not feel it was within my right to saunter past the clematis and roses, or the foamy May-tree, as I might so easily and casually have done—pavements are free places. I will not exchange my imagined rose-bower for reality until I am invited to step inside it—which may be never. So—I rode within the pale of the Park—and thought of those who dwelt so close to its iron gateways—and fancied that at every turn I might see a half-familiar shawl or bonnet whisk out of sight like one of yr own whiteladies—And I felt a little irritation with the good Quaker gentleman whose stolid telluric conditions have so much more confidence-inspiring virtue than the poetic morality of R. H. Ash—
Now, as all good knights in all good tales do—I was riding along, a little apart, and musing to myself. I was making my way along a grassy ride in what you might well have supposed to be an enchanted stillness. In other parts of the park, Spring had been busy—we disturbed a family of rabbits in the new bracken, which rose in strong little involuted fronds, like new-born serpents, somewhere between the feathered and the scaly—There were hosts of black ravens, very busy and
important, striding about and stabbing at the roots of things with their blue-black triangular beaks. And larks rising, and spiders throwing out their gleaming geometrical Traps and staggering butterflies and the unevenly speeding blue darts of the dragonflies. And a kestrel riding the air-currents in superlative ease with its gaze concentrated on the bright earth.
So—I went on, on my own—deeper and deeper into the silent Tunnel of the Ride—not so sure of where I was and yet not anxious either, not concerned about my companions nor even about the nearness of—certain friends. The trees were beech, and the buds, just breaking, fiercely brilliant, and the new, the renewed light on them—intermittent diamond—but the depths were dark, a silent Nave. And no birds sang, or I heard none, no woodpecker tapped, no thrush whistled or hopped. And I listened to the increasing Quiet—and my horse went softly on the beech-mast—which was wet after rain—not crackling, a little sodden, not wet enough to plash. And I had the sensation, common enough, at least to me, that I was moving out of time, that the way, narrow and dark-dappled, stretched away indifferently before and behind, and that I was who I had been and what I would become—all at once, all wound in one—and I moved onward indifferently, since it was all one, whether I came or went, or remained still. Now to me such moments are poetry. Do not misunderstand me—I do not mean missishly “poetical”—but the source of the driving force of the lines—And when I write lines I mean the lines of verse indeed, but also some lines of life which run indifferently through us—from Origin to Finish. Ah, how can I tell you? And to whom but you could I even begin to describe such indescribable—such obscurely untouchable things? Imagine an abstract sketch such as a drawing-master might make to correct your perspective for you—a fan or tunnel of lines, narrowing not to blindness, not to Nought, but to the Vanishing point, to Infinity. And then imagine these Lines embodied in the soft bright leaves and the pale light and the blue moving over it—and the tall trunks with their grey soft hide diminishing—and the very furrows in the ground—such a unique carpet of such browns and sooty blacks and peat and amber and ash—all distinct and all one—all leading on and yet stationary … I cannot say … I trust you know already …
In the distance there appeared to be a Pool. It lay across my path—a brown pool—deep in colour, uncertain in depth—reflecting the canopy in its dark unbroken surface. I looked at it and looked away, and when I looked back it contained a Creature. I must suppose this Creature to have come there by some minor magic, for it had certainly not been there before, and could hardly have walked there, for the surface remained still and unbroken.
Now the Creature was a small hound, milky-white in colour, with a finely pointed little head and black intelligent eyes. It lay—or couched would be better—it was like the sphinx, couchant—half-above and half-below the water, so that its shoulders and haunches were licked and divided by a fine hairline of surface, and its limbs, below the surface, gleamed through flowing green and amber. Its delicate forefeet were stretched before it and its fine tail curled round about. It was as still as though it was made of marble, and this not for only one or two moments but for some considerable time.
Round its neck it wore a series of spherical silver bells on a silver chain—not miniature tinkling bells, but large bells, akin to gulls’ eggs, or even bantam eggs.
My horse and I stopped and stared. And the creature, stone-still always, stared back, with comfortable confidence, and a look, somehow, of command.
I was for a period of several moments wholly undecided as to whether this manifestation were a reality, or a hallucination, or what? Had it come from another time? It lay there so improbably, half-submerged, a veritable Canis aquaticus, a water-spirit emerging, or an earth-spirit half-submerged.
I could not for the life of me press on or make it give way or move or vanish. I stared, it stared. It seemed to me a solid Poem, and you came into my mind, and your little dog and your unearthly creatures walking the earth. There also came into my mind several poems of Sir Thos Wyatt—hunting poems for the most part, but where the creatures of the Chase are denizens of the Court Chamber. Noli me tangere, the beast seemed to proclaim haughtily, and indeed I could not and did not advance upon it, but returned to time and daylight and the time-keeping of daily chatter, as best I might.
Now I write it out—it may seem no great matter to you—or to anyone who may read this account of it. And yet it was. It was a sign. I thought of Elizabeth in the days of her youth hunting in that same park with just such small hounds—a Virgin Huntress—an implacable Artemis—and I fancied I saw her fierce face in its whiteness and the deer running from her. (The full-fed ones I passed cropped the turf contentedly enough, or watched me like statues and snuffed the air of my passing.) Did you know that the Wild Hunt used sometimes, after passing through a homestead, to leave a little dog in the hearth which would be frighted with the right charm but otherwise stayed a year, eating the sustenance of the house, until the Huntsmen came again?
I shall write no more on this topic. I have made myself foolish enough and put my dignity wholly in your hands—with as much trust as you expressed towards me in your never-to-be-forgotten last letter, which, as I said in opening, shall have its answer.
Let me have your view of my apparition—
Swammerdam needs a touch or two more. He was a queer intellect and a lost soul—despised and rejected like so many great men—the circumstances of his life almost perfectly coincident with the great preoccupations—nay obsessions—of his nature. Think, my dear friend, of the variousness and the shape-shifting and the infinite extensibility of the human spirit—that can at one time inhabit a stuffy Dutch Cabinet of Curiosities—and dissect a microscopic heart—and contemplate a visionary water-hound in the brightest English air and leafiness—and tramp about Galilee considering the lilies of those fields with Renan, and pry unforgivably and in fantasy into the secrets of the unseen room where your head is bent over your paper—and you smile at your work—for by this time Melusina is embarked on and the knight comes to the encounter by the Fountain of Thirst—
My dear Friend,
If I address you So—it is for the Last Time as well as for the First. We have rushed down a Slope—I at least have Rushed—where we might have descended more circumspectly—or Not at All even. It has been borne in upon me that there are dangers in our continued conversation. I fear I lack delicacy in saying so—I see no good way out indeed—I reproach you with nothing—not myself neither—unless with an indiscreet confessional—and of what then—that I loved my father, and was set upon writing an epic?
But the world would not look well upon such letters—between a woman living in a shared solitude as I do—and a man—even if that man were a great and wise poet—
There are those who care for what the world—and his wife—may say. There are those who are hurt by his bad opinion. It is pointed out to me, quite rightly—that if I am jealous of my freedom to live as I do—and manage my own affairs—and work my work—I must be more than usually careful to remain sufficiently respectable in the eyes of the world and his wife—to evade his bad opinions—and consequent niggling restrictions on my freedom of movement.
I would not impugn your delicacy in any thing—or your judgment—or your good faith.
Do you not think it would be better—if we were to cease to correspond?
I shall be your well-wisher always
Christabel LaMotte
My dear Friend,
Your letter came as a shock to me—as you must, of course, have foreseen, from its complete contrast with its predecessor, and with the good faith and trust that had grown and subsisted (I thought) between us. I asked myself—what had I done to alarm you so—and answered myself that I had transgressed the bounds of your delineated privacy in coming to Richmond, and not only in coming, but in writing, as I did, of what I had seen. I could urge you to take that as a whimsical exaggeration of a curious phaenomenon—though it was not—if I thought truly, upon reflection, that tha
t was the cause of the matter. But it is not—or if it was, after the tone of your letter, it no longer is.
I will confess, I was at first not only shocked, but angry, that you should write so. But too much was at stake—including the delicacy and good judgment and good faith you kindly attribute to me—for me to write back in anger. So I thought long and hard about our correspondence, and about your predicament, as you choose to describe it—of a woman “jealous of her freedom to live as she does.” I have no designs on your freedom, I wanted to retort—much the opposite, indeed, I respect and honour and admire that freedom and the product of it, your work, your words, your web of language. I know to my own cost the unhappiness that lack of freedom can bring to women—the undesirability, the painfulness, the waste, of the common restrictions placed upon them. I thought of you most truly as a fine poet and my friend.
But—forgive me this necessary failure in delicacy—one thing your letter does is to define us fair and square in relation to each other as a man and a woman. Now, as long as this was not done, we might have gone on forever, simply conversing—with a hint of harmless gallantry, courtly devotion perhaps—but mostly with a surely not illicit desire to speak of the art, or craft, we both profess. I thought this freedom was one you claimed for yourself. What has caused you to retreat so behind a palisade of prickling conventions?