by A. S. Byatt
He related this torpor and partial blindness to the connection of the snake’s moulting with myths of renewal and rebirth. ‘Before any new life, or achievement, or insight,’ he said, ‘I have found there is a necessarily dull and stupid period.’ I hate these simple analogies; he would have made a good florid preacher and his snake an admittedly excellent exemplum – but the preaching specification destroyed the resonance of the complex image. Our life is, but not in that tone of voice, an image for something greater than its simple facts.
He watched the animal move away in silence. It is as though each coil were separately impelled from behind, and the whole body, contracting and driving, a series of interconnected, fluid, uncertainly purposeful, tentatively directed movements after the searching head. I watched him feel and fold the discarded skin. I know what he felt. We die in pieces and patches, and dry up and are renewed – for a time, for a time only. He said, ‘This wet, glistening sheen won’t last long, of course, the skin dulls and hardens.’ There is a new contusion just below his left ear, or at least, so I think: it is possible, but unlikely, that he did not present his left profile last time.
All facts, all facts, all solid facts and objects of our life are always themselves and more than themselves. And so I pursue, professionally, self-indulgently, any metaphor to the death, fantastical or truth-revealing, who knows which. I am driven to confess, the Church seems to me (to its discredit) to diminish him and his serpents, and the threads of thought I had believed securely fastened to feel along seem suddenly loose, floating wild and unattached. I connect and connect, meaninglessly, J’s ‘sense of release’, his rebirth platitude, the hostility of the objects round me, and my need for release from them. Is this a game, or an action? Is that a real question?
I live in two worlds. One is hard, inimical, brutal, threatening, the tyranny of objects where all things are objects and thus tyrannical. The other is infinite: heaven, through the pane of glass, the Looking Glass world. One dreams of a release into that world of pure vision and knows that what would be gained would be madness; a single world, and intolerable.
Simon’s embrace (if not impossible) is a function in this world of what has happened, what is misunderstood, other embraces. In that world, a release.
All I know is that at all costs the pane of glass between the worlds must not be broken. It serves, maybe, the function of the lens over the snake’s eye. It seems, ideally, that the two worlds should run into each other; but practically, one knows this would be destructive. I must remain isolated.
Enclosed by light in a glass cage, outside a glass box containing light:
An image for myself? An animal formed probably by burrowing, without ears, limbs, or eyelids, deaf, unable to gesture, with acute, unvaried vision?
Cassandra. Not Cassandra Austen, sisterly supporter of the expressive Jane. Cassandra who was Apollo’s priestess, and – since she refused intercourse with the Lord of the Muses, and was thus no artist – incapable of communication. Unrelated to the world of objects around her. (Apollo, besides being Lord of the Muses was God of Light and thus doubly rejected for some impossible chastity). Cassandra, like myself, like myself, a specialist in useless knowledge.
The Lady of Shalott, also. The web, the mirror, the knight with the sun on him, reflected in the mirror and woven into the web. I am half sick of shadows. A poem a great deal more intelligent than we commonly give it credit for. Tennyson has here both indulged, and provided a commentary on, his own mediaevalist romanticism. Cf. the Palace of Art. Solitude concerned with reflections.
Is it possible that one should recognize, and deliberately entertain, the harbingers of insanity? I have taught Swift, and maintained that he could not be described as insane since his thought-structure was so coherent. An over-simplification.
Since Julia’s visit Cassandra had made several changes in her way of life. Work on the edition of Malory had scarcely progressed. Cassandra had not been seen at meetings of the intercollegiate Augustinian Group, which, with Father Rowell, she had frequently attended. She had purchased, on separate occasions, a sou’wester, brushes, pens and inks, oil pastels, various pads of paper and several canvases. So, whilst Julia, closed in the library, wrote, Cassandra engaged battle with the objects which oppressed her.
She painted some things indoors; fireplaces, banisters, one or two sketches of pupils’ heads or legs. But she spent larger and larger stretches of time on wet benches in the botanical gardens, drawing tangles of soaked grass wound round tree roots, covering sheet after sheet of paper with patterns of broken twigs and mud and leaves. She discovered the hothouses and made a series of studies of flowers and creepers, always from very close. These drawings were both violent and contained – a profusion of natural untidiness, meticulously reproduced, held together only by the edges of the paper and an occasional hint at a pattern in the faint emphasis of a line here or there. These pictures piled up in her rooms, thickets, jungles, patterns of chair-legs. She bought a pair of corduroy trousers, finally, and a yellow-gold oilskin cape. In these clothes, carrying her painting materials in a canvas satchel, she went on longer and longer treks into the countryside. Reports arose slowly, characterised by Oxford’s indulgent and embroidering curiosity, of meetings with her in lanes or on bridges, of the red hair sprouting under the sou’wester, of the hasty arm laid over the painting, of the silent, furious, distant stare.
Chapter 13
‘WHY do you go on coming to bed with me, Ju?’
‘I suppose I must like it,’ Julia said, unable to produce any more positive affirmative. She ran a toe down his leg and turned over on her stomach. It was late May. Merle was in Birmingham, doing a television. Julia was in Ivan’s bed. It was four in the afternoon.
‘Well, you don’t seem to like it much.’
‘Don’t I?’ Julia had thought she was doing rather well at disguising this fact. Ivan kicked her.
‘What you really like is stroking me afterwards, like some sort of pet animal.’
‘Do you mind that?’
He hesitated. ‘Not particularly, no. But I wouldn’t say it was a good thing for you.’ Julia thought with a sudden access of rage that all she did enjoy was the after-calm, and now this was being shredded, too. Ivan persisted. ‘You only let me make love to you in the first place because you were scared stiff if you stopped me I wouldn’t like you any more. Didn’t you? And now you’re scared stiff I’ll stop liking you because you let me go on. Aren’t you?’ Julia felt the extreme irritation one always feels when someone proves to be more percipient than one has decided they shall be. She said, ‘Well, both of those are fairly normal male reactions.’ She thought. ‘And so is moralizing about it, before and after. You want me to be more enthusiastic about it than I am without your having to be any more enthusiastic than you are. Admit it. Well, I won’t.’
Ivan sat up. ‘I just want you to enjoy yourself a bit.’
‘Well, I do, in my own way.’ Julia dropped her face into the pillow and sighed.
‘What women like you need to learn is that men are human beings. I suppose I ought to have known from your books that you were that sort. You’re an awful stereo-typer, Ju. Not that I don’t have all those “male reactions” you spend your time cataloguing. Not that we aren’t both – not that most people aren’t – predictable stereo-types most of the time. I know what I am. Incurably promiscuous and emotionally lazy. But all the same, you know, I’m not stupid. And I do care for you. And I do feel some compunction – about using you, about possibly getting you in a mess, and so on.’
‘I’m sick of people being intelligent about sex all the time. I like you, but I’m a bit sick of sex, too. Culturally, that is, not you, sweetie. As for this compunction, I wouldn’t boast about it. It’s just another form of persecution, getting an ascendancy. Don’t you think, really?’
Ivan grimaced. ‘So according to you, it’s simply my male pride that’s hurt because you won’t let go? Why are you always so bloody polite in bed?’
Ivan moved his hand under the bed-clothes, and slapped her. ‘I think you are. The guiding light of your life is this need to be liked. You don’t want to give.’
‘Well, if I don’t, that’s convenient for you if you look at it coolly. I don’t think you’ve any right to go probing and analysing. All that does no good. Shall I stop coming to bed with you?’
‘You would, wouldn’t you? Tomorrow, with no regrets?’
‘Of course.’ Julia laughed, and rolled out of the bed in one neat movement. ‘Except that then you might stop liking me. I’d be sorry for that.’
They both laughed. Julia began to put on her clothes. ‘I do like you, darling,’ Ivan said, and they both laughed again. Julia felt relieved.
‘How’s the book?’
Julia sat down in her underclothes on a circular chair with a shaggy pelt of white fur.
‘I’ve finished it. I’ve never in my life written anything so fast. It’s a sort of inexorable interior monologue. Mixed with bits of rather crisp and completely objective exterior description. For the shock value of the contrast. I think it works. I’ve never done anything remotely like it. Only I – I tried to – tug it away – from her – and I think perhaps I’ve not tugged it far enough. The truth is so much more compelling, you know. But I think it probably ought not to be published. Perhaps it’s enough to have done it.’
‘Is it good?’
Julia gathered herself into a childish ball on the chair, and grinned at him over her naked knees with the excitement which, he reflected, she had signally failed to show during their recent love-making.
‘How do I know? Does one ever? It’s probably just mediocre-shading-into-good-in-chapters. But it feels good. It feels bloody good. Finished, you know, darling, right outside myself, something I can look at objectively. I’ve never really had that feeling before.
‘And – and the funny thing – I feel it’s detached me from her, and at the same time – I’ve made such a real effort with her – so I feel I love her. I can grow on my own now, and I do, I do really love her. We could be friends, we could meet, we could share.… Sometimes I think if she did read it she’d see it was written with love. Because it is. Real love. I know that, in myself.’
‘On your own terms,’ said Ivan. ‘You mean, “I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as a lamb.” ’
Julia blenched only momentarily. ‘Who said that?’
‘Melville. About Moby Dick. A considerable and impersonal work of literature. All the same, Ju, publish and be damned. I don’t think you can be scrupulous. A writer can’t, with his good stuff. That overrides any other consideration. Pack it off to the publisher.’
Julia bowed her head, blushing and smiling.
‘I already have.’
This stopped Ivan for a good moment, which he occupied in putting on underpants, dark grey shirt, and pale grey socks. He then turned to Julia and said, ‘Well, I’d better stop telling you what to do, hadn’t I? Since you know? So tell me what happens at the end? How did you resolve your one-sided equation? One-sided, that is, because you’ve left out the persecuting female novelist. What’s the sum of your wisdom?’
‘Well, the end’s a bit lame, I think. I just make her retreat further and further from any real human contact into this weird imaginary relationship with the TV clergyman. The unctuous epiloguer. I make her more or less deliberately destroy what contacts she’s got.’
‘I do hate this novelist’s habit of saying calmly “I make” him or her do this or that. However. What do you “make” her do then?’
‘No, love, I make him. He comes back. I make him go on one of these Missions the Church is always having, to Oxford, and they meet. And he sort of remembers her, and the pathetic thing is he likes her, he really likes her, but what the hell can she say to him with all those – those forests of imagination between them? She lets him go, she won’t put out a hand. But of course she can’t go on imagining, either. She sees him off on a train. I leave the end open. It’s a bit like Ibsen’s life-lie, you know: does his real presence free her to live in the world without him or does the loss of her illusion kill her? I leave her on the platform, watching,’ Julia said grandly, excited, ‘all her limitations and all her possibilities steaming off down the line together.’
‘Splendid stuff.’ Ivan’s voice had a note of hysteria. ‘Do you believe in the prophetic function of literature?’
‘No,’ said Julia. ‘You once accused me of thinking of myself as a prophet. But I don’t. That’s Cassandra. Cassandra. I only have hindsight.’
‘Hm,’ said Ivan. ‘There’s a lot of things I could say, but I won’t. Get your clothes on, and let me take you home. I must admit to a mild curiosity about how much of all this about “all her limitations and all her possibilities” is your sister and how much is you. Were you so polite in bed with Moffitt?’
Julia did not answer this. After a moment she said, ‘Emily in my novel is a composite portrait, like any. And of course Cassandra and me – it’s a composite creature, in a way, a sort of binary fission.’ She walked over and kissed him. ‘I wouldn’t have said I was all that polite, not really.’ She said, into his shoulder, ‘Ivan, do you really suppose she’s never, I thought nowadays there was nobody left like that.’
‘A literary convention,’ said Ivan, with his white grin.
The liner came into Southampton on a grey day, at dawn. Simon Moffitt stood on the deck and watched the wash behind it, and marbled furrow and white, curding crest, falling in on itself, crossing, diminishing, as the tugs manœuvred the heavy, helpless body this way and that. Then on the surface of the water a disturbance spread choppily, a kind of lolloping, eddying mess, no shape. Simon smiled; a momentary, mild smile.
He was leaning on his elbows on the rail. As the ship rode and turned he saw at last the long line of sheds, the dark metal. The sky was heavy and thick; there was a light, blown spray, water in the air quite unlike the continual dropping damp in the jungle. From a port-hole below him someone threw the body of a fish; stiffly arced it went up, the tail quivering slightly, and all the gulls came down raucously screaming with abrupt bursts of broken noise. One glided flat, close to the water, turned, snapped, rose with the tail hanging from its wicked beak, so bright a yellow and dabbed with scarlet, gulped, shook itself, and screamed again. Simon leaned out and observed this incident with passive attention.
After a moment he shook himself too, and turned his eyes down. He was not precisely not thinking: he was slowly reciting to himself what he could remember of In Memoriam, which was little enough, although he had been caused to learn large passages of the poem in childhood as an exercise, presumably, in religious resignation. It was not in these terms that he was thinking of it now; for the moment, simply, the vague grey sadness of it was appropriate to this homecoming. He did not like England. ‘On the bald streets breaks the blank day,’ he said in his mind. He was sorry that the solitude of this journey, outside time and place, was to come to an end, and in this chilly dampness. As the hooters blew, and the chains rattled, he went down again to supervise the unloading and packing of his snakes, his toads, his insects, his plants. He had a shuffling, meditative walk, his feet turning slightly out. He wore a whitish riding mac and an American, waterproof pork-pie hat, both of which sat uneasily on him.
On the quay a reporter took photographs of the canvas bags of snakes, the long crates and occupied cages; he also took several shots of Simon’s sad, hunched figure in his raincoat, his face lugubrious and shadowed by a widespread but not luxuriant beard. He asked several questions, which Simon answered courteously, his gaze fixed on the ground or the sky, his hands twisting. Next day, the photograph appeared in the daily column of an evening paper.
‘Yesterday Simon Moffitt, English snake-collector, familiar to thousands of viewers of TV’s Armchair Explorers series, returned at dawn to his homeland with a marvellous bag of reptiles and insects, poisonous and harmless,
savage and appealing, to enrich the zoos and his own pocket. He has been out of this country solidly for the past ten years, living in tents, often in very primitive and dangerous conditions. He believes that a continuous relationship between naturalist and the flora or fauna of any region is of inexpressible value, though he admits to having been forced to shift camp on occasion by fire or flood. I asked him if he went out there for kicks, or if he got real pleasure out of being uncomfortable. “Luckily you never realize what you’ve let yourself in for until afterwards,” he said. He does feel a hunger for places where the earth isn’t covered up by building and machinery. “I know it’s not rational to feel things are more real out there but that’s what I do feel.” Many people share this feeling, even though they only indulge it by watching Simon Moffitt’s thrilling programmes.
‘Simon Moffitt has no immediate plans for another expedition. “I must write up results, house my creatures, and think.” Tall, black-bearded, romantic Simon Moffitt is unmarried, and says that as far as he knows he will stay that way. How many of his ‘fans’ could really bring themselves to share his hermit life in the hot swamps with the crocodiles?’
Julia read this report over breakfast a day later. It was not from a paper she read, and had been cut out and sent to her in an envelope. Ivan, who had sent it, had decorated newsprint and picture with little drawings of curled snakes with bearded human heads in thickets of grass, an Adam and Eve recognizably himself and Julia with huge figleaves, and a border like those on illuminated manuscripts of rioting tropical foliage in fine red, green and black ball-point lines. Julia studied Simon’s face so closely that she could only see the newsprint dots; he might have been anyone; Ivan had looped a crimson snake round his neck and had a green one clambering up his body and two small black ones peering from the brim of his hat.
Deborah looked over her shoulder and cried, ‘Look what someone’s sent Julia.’ Thor looked up from his correspondence. Out of the kitchen Edna Baker shuffled in a hideous nightdress, followed by Trevor and Rosie. To reach the spare room, in which they ate as well as slept, they had to cross and recross the Eskelunds’ living-room. Deborah read out: ‘Tall, black-bearded romantic Simon Moffitt.…’