The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  • • •

  It was not clear for some time whether Wolfgang Stern spoke English. Joachim whispered to Charles that Anselm Stern was an important figure in Munich’s artistic life—and a sympathiser with the anarchists and the idealists. “He is not your English Punch-and-Judy—he dines with von Stuck and Lehnbach—his work is discussed in Jugend and Simplicissimus. This I know. I do not know his son.”

  Philip was the odd man out amongst the young men. He found himself frequently alone. Wolfgang Stern found him sitting on a bench, drawing, and sat down beside him.

  “I may?” he asked. Philip nodded. Wolfgang said “May I see? I speak only little English, I read better.”

  “I had a long talk in pictures with a Frenchman,” said Philip, flicking the pages back to his dialogue with Philippe; drawings, the Gien faïence, and the little grotesque figures of the majolica urns and dishes.

  “You are artist?”

  Philip made his signature gesture of hands inside clay cylinder rotating. Wolfgang laughed. Philip said “And you?”

  “I hope to be theatre artiste. Cabaret, new plays, also Puppen as my father. Munich is good for artists, also dangerous.”

  “Dangerous.”

  “We have bad—bad—laws. People are in prison. You may not say what you think. May I see your work?”

  Philip was trying to work out a new all-over pattern of latticed and entwined bodies, part-human, part-beast, part-dragon or ghost. He was making impossible combinations of the Gloucester Candlestick’s warriors and apes, the majolica satyrs and mermen, Lalique’s insect-women, and, more remotely, the naked women who sprawled and smiled and died on all the huge symbolist paintings. The drawing he was working on combined the limp puppet with the limp woman from Les Fantoches; he was paying too much attention to the female breasts, and the proportions were ugly. Wolfgang laughed, and touched a breast with a finger. Philip laughed too. He said

  “I saw your father’s puppets in England. Cinderella. And one about an automatic woman. Sandman, or something. They come to life—and don’t come to life. Uncanny.”

  “Un-canny?”

  “Like ghosts, or spirits, or gnomes. More alive than us, in some ways.”

  Wolfgang smiled. He said again “I may?”

  and took Philip’s pencil, and began to draw his own trellis of forms—little grinning black imps, and bat-winged females. “Simplicissimus,” he said, which Philip failed to understand.

  They went to the Rodin Pavilion in the Place de l’Alma. Here were gathered most of Rodin’s works in bronze, marble and plaster; the walls were hung with large numbers of his drawings. Vast forms of sculpted flesh and muscle loomed. Delicate frozen female faces emerged from rough stone, or retreated into it. Everywhere was appalling energy—writhing, striving, pursuing, fleeing, clasping, howling, staring. Philip’s first instinct was to turn and run. This was too much. It was so strong that it would destroy him—how could he make little trellis-men and modest jars, in the face of this skilled whirlwind of making? And yet the contrary impulse was there, too. This was so good, the only response to it was to want to make something. He thought with his fingers and his eyes together. He needed desperately to run his hands over haunches and lips, toes and strands of carved hair, so as to feel out how they had been done. He edged away from the Wellwoods and the Cains. He needed to be alone with this. Benedict Fludd too had edged away. Philip followed him. Fludd was considering The Crouching Woman, who squatted, clutching an ankle and a breast, her female opening displayed and lovingly sculpted. He spoke to Philip’s thought. “Shouts out to be touched,” said Fludd, and touched her, running his finger in her slit, cupping her breast in his hand. Philip did not follow his example, and looked around apprehensively for guards, or angry artist.

  The artist was in fact in the pavilion, which he treated as though it was a studio. He was talking to two men, one of them tall and very shabby, with greasy long locks, muffled in an overcoat despite the warm weather. The other too was shabby and had wild jerky movements. They were standing in front of the ghostly white plaster cast of The Gates of Hell, and Rodin, red beard jutting, blue eyes glittering, was explaining it to them, showing them the grand design with sweeping and stabbing gestures.

  “By God,” said Steyning, “that is Wilde. I’ve heard he sits in the cafés here and takes tea from Algerian boys. He hasn’t got any money, and people cut him in the street. He hides behind a newspaper so as not to embarrass his old acquaintances.”

  “We should say good morning to him,” said Humphry. “He has paid a terrible price, and it is paid.”

  Anselm Stern said that the other man was Oskar Panizza—“our own notorious writer of—obscene plays and satires—in banishment here in Paris. He is an alienist, a madman who studies the mad.”

  “An anarchist,” said Joachim Susskind, “who believes all is permitted. We should say good morning to him also.”

  Olive felt warm with admiration for Humphry as he strode forward, with August Steyning, to greet the great sinner. He was magnanimous. She loved him when he took risks. But she did not go with him.

  The overpowering sensuality of the work had had its effect on Olive, too. She had managed to crunch, or tuck, her bodily memory of Methley’s unpleasantness into a kind of compressed roundel of brownish flesh, which could be avoided when it rose to consciousness—ah, that again, look the other way—but things like The Crouching Woman reanimated it, like a frozen snake warmed. The Danaïde was lovely. She was white and gleaming, her back arched in despair, her face against the rock, and her marble hair flowing down over her head in frozen white waves. She was a denizen of the underworld, damned with her fifty sisters for stabbing her husband, damned to attempt for ever to carry water in a leaking sieve, the image of eternal futility. But she was breath-takingly lovely. Olive touched her ear timidly with a gloved finger. Tom concentrated on her beauty. He wanted nothing to do with Oscar Wilde.

  Julian would have liked to meet Wilde, though he did not like the idea of Wilde. He stood a few steps behind Steyning and Humphry Wellwood, as they shook the wanderer’s hand. They also shook Rodin’s hand, which he would have liked to do. Wilde looked appalling. His skin was covered with angry red blotches, which he had unsuccessfully tried to cover with some sort of powder or cream, or both. When he opened his fleshy mouth, he displayed a black space where his front teeth were gone, and had not been replaced by a plate. He said he was touched to be recognised by Steyning—“you have still great things to do on the stage, whereas I am rattling like dead leaves in the wind.” He introduced Panizza—“a fellow poète maudit, who is surprised by no human habit, and has studied them all—” When Rodin and Panizza turned away Wilde came close to Humphry and breathed in his ear that he would be infinitely obliged by a temporary loan—his funds were much diminished and not reaching him. “He smelled horrible,” Humphry later told Olive. “I gave him what was in my pocket, because he smelled so bad that I felt guilty of his stink. There he stood, foul, in front of the Gates of Hell. He shuffled off—receiving embarrassed him horribly—muttering about sipping mint tea. His mouth itself is a Gate of Hell.”

  They looked at The Gates of Hell. None of them saw the same thing as the others. The Gates were a ghost of what they would become. Many of the great forms of the beautiful and the damned were not yet fixed to the two white slabs, which had an almost abstract look, with mysterious swirls and rough spirals of plaster. But the rising columns of the frame and the receding space of the tympanum were full of swarming human forms attached to each other in all sorts of predatory, desiring and revolting ways. Julian knew Dante, whom he read in honour of his lost mother. He looked for the Circles of Hell which were not there, and got lost in the turmoil that was. Tom was puzzled that there were so many dead babies in Hell. Olive was grimly appalled by the figure of an old woman—a very old woman—rising or falling along the left pillar, with every detail of her fallen flesh remorselessly and lovingly recorded—flat, flaccid breasts, withered thighs, han
ging bag of a belly. A dead child trampled her head, another pressed its face into her stomach. Olive stood there, in her pale pink dress, and her hat with roses, and gripped the pommel of her pretty blush-pink parasol. She felt anger with the sculptor for having observed the descent of flesh with such indifferent glee, neither love nor hate, she thought, but a pleasure in mastery, of every kind. And so she felt mastered, but stood there, pink and charming. She, like Charles/Karl, had observed the midinettes and the street-women, and had said to herself with Northern realism, there but for the grace of God, and her own lucky face and figure, and Humphry’s magnanimity and eccentricity, went she. She caught the sculptor looking at her out of the corner of his eye. Undressing her? What did he see, this man who could model gauche passion, and shame and shamelessness and voracity in women? She turned her face modestly down in the shade of her hat-brim, swung her bottom under her skirt, and moved off to talk to Prosper Cain.

  Philip could not bear the Gates. They were more unbearable than The Crouching Woman, because they, like what filled his mind, were a pattern of interlinked human figures. He could not discern or analyse the pattern, though its presence was overpowering and annihilated him. He wanted to tear up his sketch-book, but instead he doggedly got it out, and began to draw the one rhythm he was sure he could see, a dance of repeating rounds in the tympanum, breasts and buttocks, cheeks and curls, intermingling with grinning death’s-heads and grotesques. He thinks with his fingers, close-up, Philip knew. And one form gives him the idea for another, even before he is finished with the first. Is he ever at a loss for a form? I think not, I think he fears he will never get it out and down.

  Drawing calmed him. He squatted on the edge of a plinth and devised a notation to get it down quickly. They would probably drag him off to eat French food, and he would not have seen.

  A shadow fell across the paper. He looked up. Rodin was looking down at him, peering at the drawing. Philip grasped his sketch-book to his chest.

  “Je peux? Ne vous inquiétez-pas, c’est bon,” said the sculptor. Philip’s face was red and damp. Benedict Fludd came to join them. Rodin turned the paper. “Ah bon, c’est intéressant. Un potier comme Palissy.” Philip understood “Palissy.” He looked up at Fludd, and then automatically held out his hands to the sculptor, and made the airy shape of clay on the wheel with his fingers. Fludd laughed a deep laugh, made the same gesture, and said “Benedict Fludd, potier, élève de Palissy, épouvanté par Auguste Rodin. Anglais. Philip Warren, mon apprenti. Qui travaille bien, comme vous voyez, je pense.”

  Rodin said he knew Fludd’s work. He tapped the Gien-majolica-candlestick men with his clay-ingrained finger, and said they were interesting. Wait, he said, and opened a cupboard, and brought out a large celadon-coloured greenish jar, with a twisting female figure incised in the glaze. These, he said, he made himself at the Sèvres porcelain works.

  “There is much to learn, in all forms of the clay,” he said. And to Fludd, “I know your work. You are a master.” Fludd ran his fingertips over the porcelain as he had run them over The Crouching Woman. He was in a good mood, alert and benign.

  Out on the moving pavement, he began to look at the women, and comment to Philip in an undertone on their shapes and attitudes. He asked Philip if he was enjoying himself—and do look at that lovely sulky little visage, the one with the shiny little hat—are you widening your knowledge of the world, would you say?

  “It is all a bit much. Too much too good too new, all at once.”

  “And too stimulating, I suppose, with all this flesh sailing past on the fast strip?”

  “Sailing or standing,” said Philip with a sigh, “too much.”

  “I think I should do my duty and see to your education,” said Fludd. “I’ll take you out tonight. Just you and me.”

  Benedict Fludd—that is to say, Prosper Cain on his behalf—had sold a very large midnight-blue bowl with a miasma of pale gold dragons to Siegfried, sometimes Samuel, Bing. He had French money in his pocket. He led Philip through streets alternately dark and flaring with lamplight, alternately silent and shrill with voices, to a narrow street of tall houses, where needle-strips of brightness showed on the upper floors at the edges of shutters. Fludd knocked imperiously at one of these, and the door was opened, after a time, by a trim servant in a dark dress. Fludd said, in French, that Madame Maréchale was expecting him. He said that Philip was his apprentice, a word that had only recently crept into their relationship, which Philip recognised in French.

  They climbed a narrow, carpeted staircase, and were ushered into a room with many tiny bright lights under etched glass shades, wine-red, strawberry-pink, topaz. It was inhabited by women, in various states of dress and undress. Some had elaborately knotted hair, and some wore it loose, like young girls. They wore ambiguous gowns, somewhere between morning gowns and dressing-gowns, open to display the swing of their breasts and sometimes more. There was a confusion of smells—orris root, which Philip had never met and found sickly, attar of roses, wine, cigarette smoke and an undertone of human bodily odours. He made out faces through drifts of smoke, faces weary, faces laughing, faces middle-aged and faces very young. The fully and fashionably dressed lady of the house hurried forwards to welcome Benedict Fludd. Champagne was brought, and Philip, now sitting gingerly on a sofa facing a watchful row of ladies, had his first taste of it. It steadied him. He was excited and afraid. More champagne was brought. He was studied and discussed in incomprehensible French. Benedict Fludd sat in an armchair decorated with cabbage roses, with a young woman on his knee, a girl with her hair down, meekly dressed in white cotton, barefoot, and, Philip could see, wearing nothing under the cotton. The ladies who were assessing him were older and more assertive. They smiled, professionally, but amiably enough. “Take your pick, Philip,” said Benedict Fludd. “They can teach you a thing or two. They are good girls. I know them well.”

  Philip did not think he could know them very well, since he spent his life stamping around the Marshes or tending the furnace. He was suddenly homesick for the Romney emptiness, and the marsh grass. He had had too much of too many bodies, all these last days, and he did not know if he was overexcited or surfeited. He remembered The Crouching Woman, and primitive desire stirred in him. He drank more champagne and looked at the women. One had a bony face not unlike Rodin’s squatting figure, and a big, sharp mouth. She was wearing a crêpe de Chine dressing-gown, with the kind of silvery crinkle over Japanesey flowers that reminded him of the clever crackle-glaze on the Gien pottery which he admired but did not like. He did not know how you went about “picking” a lady, so he asked her, in English, what her name was. Rose, she said, my name is Rose.

  She took him upstairs, to a little room with an ample bed, a huge mirror and more shaded lights. He was curious, and afraid. He knew about the danger of disease. He might be killing himself. It was odd that he felt compelled to go on—Fludd expected it, his manhood was in question, there were things he needed to know. She took off his clothes, and sat beside him on the bed, exhaling tobacco. The skin of her face was quite thickly painted, and did not breathe. She looked kind, he thought. She began to teach him the parts of the body, in her language, pouring him more champagne, dabbing his fingers and chin and eyes with it, naming them in French, and licking away the champagne. Chest, navel, cock and balls. His body answered her touch. His fingers, with which he thought, set about her body, feeling the difference between flesh and clay, the weight of a breast, the warmth and damp of her, underneath. Briefly he remembered cold naked Pomona, pushing under his blanket in Purchase House. Cold and white like marble, like The Danaïde. Rose had clever, coercive fingers, with which she too thought. Philip, who was growing up fast in every sense, thought that the naming of parts must be a routine she went through with all foreigners, and then thought he didn’t care, it was all perfectly sensible and efficient. Rose was generous to him. He got overexcited and came quickly, and she then revived him and showed him subtler ways of pleasure, slower rhythms, until
at last he was thinking with that part of him, as happened occasionally when he was pleasuring himself. He thought Rodin must think a lot in this way. He had an obscure vision of a church window, on the Marsh, showing the Fall of Man, the woman handing the man the round apple from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, and the fork-tongued snake staring with satisfaction. It had never made any sense to him, and he didn’t believe a word of it, but suddenly as he pushed into the compliant Rose, clutching her breast, he saw it in his body, the round apple, the tough sinuous snake, the knowledge of nakedness and good and evil.

  “Bon?” said Rose, with professional concern.

  “Bon,” said Philip, drowsily, feeling the damp of sex like the slip on the clay.

  August Steyning invited everyone to see Loïe Fuller perform in her own theatre; they went back to England the next day, so the dance was the finale of their visit. Loïe Fuller’s image was pervasive in the Exposition—her whirling figure crowned the Palais de la Danse, and stood above the entrance to her own theatre, with her floating veils solidified into plaster. Bronze figurines and statues of her were on sale there and elsewhere. Philip said to Fludd that there must be better ways of making images of floating cloth than these solid blobs which reminded him of melting butter. The theatre itself was low and white, and its front wall, modelled to resemble a skirt or shawl with a frilled hem, resembled, Philip also thought, an iced cake before it was trimmed. There was a low portal, like the entrance to a grotto or cavern. Inside were huge butterflies and flowers and a grille of Lalique’s bronze butterfly-women. “That is the way to do it,” said Fludd to Philip. “With veining and empty space.” Lalique had designed the electric light fittings also, in gilt bronze. Laughing imps were cupped round the mysterious face of an enchantress, above whose head the electric bulbs were suspended in delicate, snowdrop-shaped flowers on fine stems.