by A. S. Byatt
Emily Jesse imagined the young men talking together in the room they shared at night. She imagined Arthur telling Alfred, as they lay smoking on the two white couches in the attic room, about his vision of her in the Fairy Wood, and Alfred turning it into a kind of poem in his head, which he found himself suddenly enacting, faced with another Emily, in another blue dress, on Arthur’s arm. Alfred diffused everything so fast into poetry. He never had been very able to distinguish one human being from another—Jane Carlyle, one of his most intimate friends, meeting him at one of Dickens’s theatrical parties in 1844, had found herself taken by the hand and told earnestly, ‘I should like to know who you are—I know that I know you, but I cannot tell your name.’ Emily Jesse thought that Emily Sellwood’s response to the dryad-greeting had brought a hard fate on her, though in the end she had a sort of happiness. Two sons, and a devoted Laureate-husband, who drew her about his grounds in an invalid-carriage.
Women gossiping together, she knew, made love-affairs thrilling. What a man said, how he looked, what he dared, his masterfulness, his charming timidity, all this stuff of Romance was woven and knitted delightfully in quiet talk, so that a woman again alone with her professed lover after she had most thoroughly talked him over with her sisters and friends would feel a sudden shock, perhaps exciting, perhaps daunting, perhaps disappointing, at his difference from this created figure. She did not know what men made of women when they talked of them. Conventionally, it was believed that they had different, and higher topics to engage them. ‘Subtle-thoughted, myriad-minded.’ Arthur and Alfred had discussed herself and Emily Sellwood. In what terms?
If she was wholly truthful with herself, she remembered the sight of those two male backs, those two pairs of eagerly climbing legs, going up to the attic with the white beds, with the sensations of one excluded from Paradise. They talked away about love and beauty, sometimes till dawn; she caught the echoes of the indecipherable flow of words, the ruminative grumble, the quick, decisive, leaping voice. From time to time she could hear recitation. The ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. On a Grecian Urn.’ ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’—she knew the words, she could add the rest, as the rhythm hummed. Arthur had praised Alfred’s poems by comparing him with Keats and Shelley. He called him a ‘poet of sensation’, he quoted the letters of the tragically dead young poet. ‘O for a life of sensations rather than thoughts!’ he echoed, approvingly, praising Alfred for reaching the ideas of good, perfection, truth, suffused by the colouring of ‘the energetic principle of love for the beautiful’. Arthur’s God, in the ‘Theodicaea’, he had claimed, had created the Universe full of sin and sorrow, in order to experience Love, for His Son, as he redeemed the fallen world and made it beautiful.
She had once come upon those two, sitting out on the lawn, reclining in wicker chairs with their heads thrown back on battered cushions, discussing, in a male way, the Nature of Things. Alfred’s pipe-smoke curled up into the air and diffused itself. Arthur stabbed at the lawn with a kind of prong with which the gardener—obstructed and protested against by the weed-loving Tennysons—tried ineffectively to grub up daisies and clover.
‘It all comes out of the old Neoplatonic mythic belief,’ Arthur said. ‘The Mind, the higher Mind, Nous, immerses itself in inert Matter, Hyle, and creates life and beauty. The Nous is male and the Hyle female, as Ouranos, the sky, is male, and Ge, the earth, is female, as Christ, the Logos, the Word, is male, and the soul he animates is female.’
The young Emily Tennyson, carrying her basket of books, Keats and Shakespeare, Undine and Emma, passed in front of them and peered between her veils of dark hair at them. They lay back and looked up at her contentedly. Between the sagging wicker arms their two hands almost touched on the turf, one stretched towards the other, one dirty-brown, one well-tended and white.
‘Why?’ said Emily Tennyson.
‘Why what, my dearest?’ said Arthur. ‘What a picture you make, against the roses, with the wind in your hair. Don’t move, I love to see you.’
‘Why is inert Matter female and the animating Nous male, please?’
‘Because earth is the Mother, because all beautiful things spring from her, trees and flowers and creatures.’
‘And Nous, Arthur?’
‘Because Men busy their foolish heads with notions, half of which are mere chimaeras, unnatural nonentities, and lead themselves astray.’
Arthur was not good at teasing. He spoke too decisively, as though beginning a lecture.
‘That isn’t the answer,’ she persisted, flushing.
‘Because women are beautiful, my little one, and men are mere lovers of the beautiful, because women are naturally good and feel goodness in the chambers of their sweet hearts as their pure blood goes in and out, and we poor male things only apprehend truth because we are able to feel your virtues, to hold our soaring fantasies down to earth.’
‘That isn’t the answer,’ Emily persisted.
‘Women shouldn’t busy their pretty heads with all this theorising,’ he said, beginning to be fatigued. Alfred had abstracted himself; his long black lashes rested on his cheeks. There were the two fingers of their trailing, relaxed arms, touching earth, pointing quietly at each other.
VIII
The fire was sinking, and Pug had gone to sleep and was snoring and bubbling. Aaron was not asleep)—he moved sideways along the table towards her, his shoulders hunched, one black eye glittering at her. ‘Nevermore,’ Emily Jesse said to the bird, with a certain grim wit, and reached into her leather pouch for another morsel for him. He sidled round, peering, and opened his beak. The bit of flesh, roasted but red-raw at the edges, with a slippery fringe of fat, went in, came out, was rearranged, and swallowed in a gulp. Emily watched the throat muscles push. The bird shook himself and looked at her, hoping for more. ‘You have terrible fierce crooked claws,’ Emily told him, touching his head with a finger. ‘You have left your mark on every good chair in this house. There is no virtue in you. We are old and tough and shabby, you and I.’
They had been bred to be generous in spirit. Resentment was ignoble, and Emily hoped she didn’t feel it. But she could never be wholly easy about the way in which Alfred’s mourning had overtaken her own. Had not only overtaken it, she told herself in moments of bleak truthfulness, had undone and denied it. It had been she, Emily, who fainted, she, Emily, who had lived incarcerated, entombed in grief, for a year, she, Emily, who had reduced the assembled company to tears with her appearance in black, with the one white rose in her hair, as he liked to see her. Alfred had not attended the funeral, and had begun to write again, to go about his life, whilst she lay in her bed of pain and anguish. She remembered her face in the wet pillows, wet through the cotton to the damp feathers inside. She remembered swollen eyelids, uneasy sleep, and terrible wakings to the truth of loss. Her grief for poor Arthur, his bright mind, his young bones, his lecturing and his bodily need of her was confused with her terror over her own now empty future, and she was ashamed of this, she tried to push such thoughts away, so fiercely that they crowded back in moments of slack consciousness, drowsy awakenings, midnight eye-openings in ghastly moonlight.
Alfred’s dream Somersby, Arthur’s visited garden Paradise, wild wood, and family hearth, with its laughter and its singing, depended on their presence, depended, in a way, on their creation of them. It was different—it had been different before Arthur and was different again after his death—in the long Winter months—for a young girl with no chance of any journey, or occupation, or festivity, except waiting for a husband or mourning a dead lover. She had wanted to get out—and like a woman, a contradictory creature, had been terrified of coming out, so that when a family visit had finally been made by the Tennysons, it had been Alfred and Mary who had visited Wimpole Street, whilst she, the chosen one, had lurked in the depths of Somersby, in an agony of social terror over her unpresentable clothes and Lincolnshire accent, in a genuine physical agony of pains in the liver and constrictions of the blood t
hat had left her lying in a nest of sheets and coverlets, warmed with hot stones, and fed with delectable sips of brandy and water, reading Keats and the books Arthur had sent her, Undine, whom he said she resembled, and Miss Austen’s Emma, ‘Quite a woman’s book—(don’t frown, Miss Fytche, I mean it for compliment)—none but a woman and a lady could possess that tact of minute observation, and that delicacy of sarcasm.’ She had been so ill, all those young years, she had written such pathetic and pleading letters to the Old Man of the Wolds, her autocratic grandfather, disinheritor of her father and source of cash, begging to be given sufficient money to travel to Europe, or to some spa, where her symptoms might be relieved and her black despair lightened by a little cheerful company. But he had remained obdurate, and she had remained in Somersby, a beloved prison. The pains had been real enough. She had imagined herself as she lay curled about her own tender, swollen belly, like a female Prometheus, whose liver was regularly ripped at by a huge, rapacious dark bird. It drained her life. She could scarcely bring herself to walk out of doors; a kind of dizziness overtook her on the lawn, as though a cloud of wings beat about her head, clapping and humming in her ears, making the air in front of her eyes undulate and buzz. She remembered, half a century ago, standing there and swaying, and groping her way back to the safety of the bedclothes and the reduced glimmer of light from the window. Arthur had offered a way out of all that, half desired, half feared, and had remonstrated with her weakness in letter after letter, enquiring tenderly after her health, urging her to grow better, stronger, readier, more cheerful, more confident.
And therefore it is, Emily—even because my love for you is part of my religion—that no faults I may discover in you will lessen, but on the contrary will stimulate and exalt it. For your faults, which arise from an overwrought sensibility, too much concentrated by circumstances on itself, have in some degree the complexion of virtues, especially when accompanied with humility to confess, and endeavour to amend them.
His death, ironically, had accomplished what his life could not, had brought her out of her thicket and into polite society. Old Mr Hallam had entertained her with kindness, Arthur’s sister Ellen had become her friend, to whom she had written, with a delicious new ease and edge, descriptions of her unpoetic world.
Remember such icons as Wordsworth and Coleridge etc are never seen in our part of the world—scarcely ever any thing comes over our black wolds, but bleak winds, upon bleak-feeling people; sometimes indeed, a determined hunter is seen swiftly crossing the field at the bottom of the garden, but these eager, life-taking beings, you must own, are even worse than nothing.
She had even denied the Nightingale and its eternal preamble in the thicket, at least in Somersby.
Have the nightingales commenced their warblings yet?—thou art mistaken in supposing there are any in Somersby, no such birds are ever seen with us—Once on a time indeed a solitary one came to Lincoln and trilled for some time in a poor man’s garden. Of course, crowds came to see and hear it. The man, becoming quickly aware that his vegetables were getting completely trodden down (“For cabbage he sow’d, and when it grew, / He always cut it off to boil!”) had the unheard of barbarity, to shoot this adventurous songster. Dreadful, unmusical clodhopper!—what are all the cabbages in the world to one nightingale.
She had been able to laugh a little with Ellen, as she had not, for fear, for love, for humility, with Arthur. She had sparkled a little—meekly, always mindful of her great grief—at the Hallams’ dinner-table, where, one evening, she had been observed by the tall young Lieutenant Jesse. She had mourned nine years, Emily thought. She had known Arthur, alive, for four years, of which she had spent no more than a few weeks in his company. She had mourned him nine years. She had hoped that the Hallams would understand, would be kind—she could not, knowing the depth of their grief and the concentration of their lost hopes in Arthur, exactly expect them to be happy. They had—or at least old Mr Hallam had—been most correctly, most civilly gracious, had continued her money, which she had confusedly become accustomed to think of as her independence, had not severed relations, though she knew that Julia at least said unkind things of her behind her back—quite as though I was a heartless flirt or worse, a bought woman, the savage Emily asserted, when she momentarily overcame the meek one. Relations had stiffened, had even soured. She made small talk, never a Tennyson competence, where once she had made quiet jokes that were accepted. She had been trapped in, and sustained by, their grieving affection; she was trapped in, and suffocated by, their quiet, implacable disapproval.
She had spirit enough, she thought, to deal with the Hallams, if only by unmaking them now and then in her mind, as though they had not been. She had travelled since her marriage, had been in Paris during the excitement of the Commune, had roamed the Apennines and seen the Brownings in their Florence home. She had mixed with many kinds of people in London, and if she chose to be thought a little eccentric, she did it, she believed, with a kind of abrupt charm. She could make people laugh, and talked with spirits. But she had not spirit enough, she thought in the dark hours, to bear certain wounds, certain unmentionable pains, inflicted by Alfred’s masterpiece and Arthur’s monument, In Memoriam. Which she admired and idolised, the Lord knew, as much as anyone alive, for it expressed exactly the nature of her own shock and sorrow, the very structure and slow process of pain, and the transformations and transmutations of grief, like rot in the earth-mould, like roots and other blind things moving in the grave. Other things also, it expressed, the desire for the presence of the dead, the hand to clasp, the bright eye, the voice, the thoughts spoken and unspoken. It made an eternal world of the bounds of the vicarage lawn and the flat Lincolnshire horizon, over the wold or the sea. It spoke to God and expressed doubt and terror as to His purposes. It felt its way into the thick of her heart fibres and crept in her blood, ‘a mass of nerves without a mind’ as she had feared to remain.
But Alfred had lived with his grief, and worked upon it, for another eight years after her nine. She had married Richard in 1842 and closed her mourning. Alfred had grieved and written, worked and brooded, from the day of that terrible letter to the day, almost, of his own wedding, ending his solitude in 1850, and putting out In Memoriam in that year, with no poet’s name on the title page, a book for Arthur, In Memoriam A. H. H. Alfred had been faithful, as she had not. He had given her away at her wedding, so quiet, so secret, grumbling a little as he used to do, and had gone on writing those chill, terrible little lyrics, accounts of loss, of defeat, of unappeasable longing.
She believed that in that poem she stood accused. She had not read it at first, as she did later, in the way the wife, or child, or friend or enemy of a novelist riffles through the pages of the latest stories looking for traces of their own existence, anything from a particular lace collar to a secret defect of character they had believed successfully suppressed or cloaked. She had read it with love and tears, as she read all Alfred’s poetry, tears for Arthur, tears at its sheer beauty. The young women had had a secret poetry society in the Somersby days, which they had called the Husks—they ‘shucked’ the seed-corn of the poetry in passionate debates, they read Alfred’s and Arthur’s prescribed ‘sensuous’ poetry—Arthur himself claimed credit for the reintroduction of that useful word into the English language. Keats, Shelley, Alfred Tennyson. Their highest term of approbation was ‘wicked’, by which they meant ‘thrilling’, disturbing, passionate. Emily Jesse wondered sometimes, as tremulous Emily Tennyson had not, what had possessed them to choose such a dry, lifeless name for themselves, the papery container that held the ripe grain. They had read with love, and so she had read—and could still read—In Memoriam. It was, she knew and said often, the greatest poem of their time. And yet, she thought in her bursts of private savagery, it aimed a burning dart at her very heart, it strove to annihilate her, and she felt the pain of it, and could not speak of that pain to a soul.
Her small ghost appeared from time to time in the poem. She saw hers
elf early on, in the sixth lyric, the lyric of the drowned sailor, when Alfred likened his own waiting for Arthur’s return to a young girl, a ‘meek, unconscious dove’. ‘Poor child, that waitest for thy love!’ choosing a riband or a rose to please him, turning back to the mirror ‘to set a ringlet right’ whilst at that very moment her future Lord
Was drowned in passing through the ford,
Or killed in falling from his horse.
O what to her shall be the end?
And what to me remains of good?
To her, perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend.
The ringlets and the rose were hers, though Alfred had made the meek dove’s hair golden, not raven. Arthur had once compared her voice to that of the Lady in Comus, ‘stroking the raven down / Of darkness till it smiles’ and had stroked her wild ringlets as he spoke. She had not been able to manage perpetual maidenhood, whatever Alfred had supposed or desired. And in some curious way, which could be poetic tact, the poem had made Alfred into Arthur’s widow, even here.
Two partners of a married life—
I looked on these and thought of thee
In vastness and in mystery,
And of my spirit as of a wife.
And
My heart, though widowed, may not rest
Quite in the love of what is gone,
But seeks to beat in time with one
That warms another living breast.
The dust of him I shall not see
Till all my widowed race be run.
Alfred had taken Arthur and bound him to himself, blood to blood and bone to bone, leaving no room for her. It was true that late in the poem, reference was made to her love and her loss, but that too was painful, most painful. Alfred had allowed his fantasy to imagine Arthur’s future, Arthur’s children, Alfred’s nephews and nieces, mixing their blood.