by A. S. Byatt
The darkness of the world, delight,
Life, anguish, death, immortal love,
Ceasing not, mingled, unrepressed,
Apart from place, withholding time …’
She saw, in the middle of the room, a hand, a long, brown hand, no longer young, tentatively and awkwardly buttoning a nightshirt. She saw the row of buttons. They were wrongly aligned. The hand fumbled at them. It clasped the pleated front of the neck to its chest, as though it sensed, briefly, the cold of their presence.
‘ “Mingled, unrepressed,” ’ said the cold, dull voice in Sophy’s ear. ‘Good, lively words. I knew he would be as great as Keats, as Coleridge saw in Wordsworth the greatest poet since Milton. I loved him for it, you must believe me, Pistis Sophia.’
‘Oh, I do. I do.’
‘I cannot see … I cannot see … Sophia, I cannot see … can you?’
‘Not very well. A little. A hand. An old man, in a nightshirt, in a room with a candle … he is holding his hand up to his face, and—and sniffing at it … he has a beard—shaggy, partly grey—stained at the mouth—he is a handsome old man … I know who he is …’
‘I cannot see.’ The thick, cold fingers were touching her eyelashes as though to feel her vision. ‘He is old, I cannot see him. I partly think I snuff his tobacco. He walked about in a cloud of it, burning and fragrant, and the stale remnants of its old ashes, its dottle … What is he doing?’
‘He is sitting on his bed, turning his hand over and over. He looks puzzled. And very handsome. And a bit absent-minded.’
‘You would think I could hear his thoughts. But I cannot.’
X
Alfred Tennyson did feel something stir in his room. He felt that mixture of excessive atmospheric stillness and pricking in the skin which he was accustomed to refer to as ‘an angel walking on my grave’ though he knew very well he was conflating two superstitions, the angels whose silent passage overhead caused table chatter to cease at twenty minutes before or after the hour, and the prescient shiver induced by someone treading the clay which at some inexorable future moment would be grubbed up to make space for his mortal remains. He also felt attention somehow on his hand, so that he stopped trying to do up his buttons and held it up as though it was some strange, separate creature he had got hold of. Its fingers were long and brown and still sinewy. There was no puffiness or plumpness, though he had overheard Emily Jesse observing tartly that since he married he had never lifted a finger to help himself. Some of the fingers were stained mahogany by his smoking. He was afraid he perhaps carried its powerful aroma with him unnoticed. His nostrils would never again be innocent of it, as an ostler’s nostrils no doubt perceived everything through a warm haze of hair and sweat and horse-piss and horse-dung. It was a good smell when it was, so to speak, alive, and less good when it was cold. Like the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day, he thought, burning and fragrant, then stale remains, old dottle, a good word, ‘dottle’. Perhaps he stank? He lifted the ends of his fingers to his nostrils. He heard the buzzing of little flying fragments of language that hung around his head all the time in a cloud, like the veils of living and dead smoke, like the motes of dust that hung in shafts of sunlight, ‘thick-moted’ as he had so beautifully described them. ‘Let me kiss that hand,’ he heard, and answered, ‘Let me wipe it first. It smells of mortality.’ Or if not Lear, Lady Macbeth. ‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’ Or John Keats. ‘When this warm scribe my hand, is in the grave.’ Or worse, that fragment of his:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
He remembered Arthur frightening him with that in the owl-dark moon-glimmered bedroom at Somersby, with its two little white beds. ‘That makes life worth living,’ Arthur had cried in his enthusiasm, ‘that a man should write so well, with death staring him in the face, such a defiance is noble—’ He had made his own image of the dead hands, in Arthur’s poems, that he was proud of. It had the cheating life of the lifeless, his image.
And hands so often clasped in mine,
Should toss with tangle and with shells.
Hands moving, like weeds, like flotsam, the tumble of drowned flesh, he had caught the rhythm of the tumble. It was Arthur’s hands he had remembered most sharply, afterwards, of Arthur’s life. Arthur’s handclasp had faded on him like a diminishing, then guttering, candle, over forty years. He looked at the old pads on his fingertips and touched them with his other hand. A curious smoothness had glossed his knuckle-skin, the lines of life effaced, the opposite of what had happened to his mouth and brow. He had remembered the feel of Arthur’s palm warm against his own, Arthur’s eager grip. This was where Arthur met and temporarily mixed with him, in the English gentleman’s grip. Manly, alive, a renewal of touch. Meeting and parting. After the terrible letter, he had been savagely tormented by the fact that his hand still anticipated that grip. He had made fine poetry of that haunting, too, fine poetry. He had hundreds of letters. ‘I too have had exactly that sensation, I must tell you, Sir: “I should not feel it to be strange.” Your percipience is a great comfort, I thought you would wish, perhaps, to know.’
That had been early, when it had been impossible for his body and feelings to know what his poor brain had instantly accepted. He had imagined the ship touching land and the passengers descending.
And if along with these should come
The man I held as half-divine:
Should strike a sudden hand in mine,
And ask a thousand things of home;
…
And I perceived no touch of change,
No hint of death in all his frame,
But found him all in all the same,
I should not feel it to be strange.
That was accurate enough, but long ago, long gone. Arthur had died inside his own body and soul, gradually, gradually, like the slow death of a tree, an inch here, a string of cells there. When Arthur was first dead, the sudden recall of his bodily presence, an impatient motion, an alert look, had been pure torment. And then, perversely, in proportion as flesh and blood gave way to shadow, he had tried to hold his friend back, to flesh out his imaginings, to see the unseen. But Arthur had gone on dying.
I cannot see the features right,
When on the gloom I strive to paint
The face I know.
Frederick and Mary and Emily invoked lost forms and spirits, but he himself was afraid and repelled, afraid of being cheated by flecks of canker on the matter of his own brain, repelled by morbidity. ‘I shall not see thee,’ he had asserted once or twice, firmly and terribly, taking toll of his loss. Some kind of mystic union, light in light, ghost in ghost, might be possible beyond the veil, but his hands would remain empty, feeling blindly for absence.
He remembered a day when he and Arthur had talked all day long on the lawn at Somersby, of the nature of things, of creation, of love and art, of sense and soul. Arthur’s hand had been a few inches from his own, on the warm grass among the daisies. Arthur had talked of Keats’s sensuous imagination, which created beauty, and Keats said might be compared to Adam’s dream of the creation of the Woman from his own bloody ripped-out rib, ‘he awoke and found it truth’. And he, Alfred, had seen in his mind’s eye, not Milton’s Adam, but Michelangelo’s, with his limp hand livening at the power, the electric power, that arched across from the fingertip of the clouded God to his own. Arthur had said how daring that was, how shocking, and how right. ‘ “O for a life of sensation rather than thought!” ‘ Arthur had said, in the Somersby sunlight, and had gone on to read out of the wonderful letter:
‘It is “a Visi
on in the form of Youth”, a shadow of reality to come—And this consideration has further convinced me,—for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite speculation of mine,—that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone … ’
Arthur had gone on talking of Dante and Beatrice and the making sensuous of Heaven in the journeyings of the Divine Comedy—‘we must surely, in the very different cases of Keats and Dante, Alfred, take the pulsions of earthly Love as a faint figuring—a faint prescience—a faint foreshadowing—of Divine Love—do you not think?’
And he himself had lain back in his creaking chair, leaving his trailing hand where it was, imagining Paradise and loving Arthur, and feeling such happiness, such unaccustomed happiness for a blackly morbid Tennyson, in his skin and flesh and bones, that he could only smile, and hum assent, and hear the air full of singing words that were the unformed atoms of his own creation to come.
Michelangelo had been a lover of other men. He himself had told Arthur, more than once, jokingly, that he loved him as Shakespeare had loved Ben Jonson, ‘this side idolatry’, and both of them had found in Shakespeare’s sonnets line after line that could be offered to the other as a gift, or a grace, or an assurance. He knew the fruitless fire they flew round, without burning their wings, without being shrivelled, and he knew too the terrible misconstruction to which his exact exposition of the full extent of his pain and longing in Arthur’s poems had laid him open. Arthur’s father had disliked their love and had written slightingly, after Arthur’s death, and before Alfred had ventured to let Arthur’s poems see the light, of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Perhaps there is now a tendency, especially among young men of poetical tempers, to exaggerate the beauties of these remarkable productions … An attachment to some female, which seems to have touched neither his heart nor his fancy very sensibly, was overpowered, without entirely ceasing, by one to a friend; and this last is of such an enthusiastic character, and so extravagant in the phrases that the author uses, as to have thrown an unaccountable mystery over the whole work. It is true that in the poetry as well as in the fictions of early ages, we find a more ardent tone of affection in the language of friendship than has since been usual and yet no instance has been adduced of such rapturous devotedness, such an idolatry of admiring love, as the greatest being whom nature ever produced in the human form pours forth to some unknown youth in the majority of these sonnets … Notwithstanding the frequent beauties of these sonnets, the pleasure of their perusal is greatly diminished by these circumstances; and it is impossible not to wish Shakespeare had never written them.
Henry Hallam had destroyed Alfred’s letters to Arthur. He knew very well what Arthur’s father feared and suspected, though he had never once allowed Arthur’s father to see in his face, or hear in his voice, any acknowledgement of his suspicions, any disquietude. He had learned young and early to cloak everything he felt, every uncomfortable perception of his own or others, with an impenetrable mist of vagueness. For eight years he had squirted black vague ink at his dearest Emily, like a retreating squid. He had never by any the smallest twitch of irritation replied to the personal message he detected in Henry Hallam’s magisterial dismissal of the sonnets, though he had told others, repeatedly, that the sonnets were noble. He was doubly cloaked, now, in the distracted vagueness of genius and in the thick cloak of the respectability of his Age, of which he had somehow or other become an exemplary citizen. There had been bad moments when he was younger, when critics had mocked his unwary phrases, his description of his ‘darling room … with thy two couches soft and white.’ When Arthur’s poems had first appeared, anonymous as they still, in a sense, were since he had never allowed his name to appear on the title page, one critic had written that he had spent ‘much shallow art’ on ‘an Amaryllis of the Chancery Bar’. There was now almost more liveliness in the salted rawness of the wound that slick phrase had inflicted than in the remembered touch of Arthur’s hand. He had never—however great his success—got over his wincing despondency over harsh criticism. Another reviewer had thought he was a woman. “These touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow of a military man.’ It was true, it was true, he had called himself, over and over, Arthur’s widow, but that was only in the spiritual sense in which his soul, his anima, was bereaved. He believed that all great human beings encompassed both sexes, in some sense. Christ, the Son of God, the object, in Arthur’s Theodicaea Novissima,’ of the Creator’s Divine Love and Longing, was both male and female, in that he was God incarnate, he was Wisdom and Justice, which were male, and Mercy and Pity, which were female. He and Arthur both, this was his conception, had their womanly aspects, for ‘pitee renneth soone in gentil herte,’ which only increased their poetic sensibility, their manly energy. But there were things he abominated. Things Arthur abominated. Things he was sure secretly appealed to the diagnostician of the Amaryllis of the Chancery Bar. Men should be androgynous and women gynandrous, he had noted felicitously, but men should not be gynandrous nor women androgynous.
He had made an epigram ‘On One Who Affected an Effeminate Manner’:
While man and woman still are incomplete,
I prize that soul where man and woman meet,
Which types all Nature’s male and female plan,
But, friend, man-woman is not woman-man.
Pretty neat, he thought, deftly put. An epigram was a kind of bonbon, one moment it wasn’t there, the next it was popped into your mouth and turning round and round, smooth and sweet. People thought he was an innocent old creature, he was well aware. They humoured him, they protected him. But he knew more than he said, that was a politic way of going on in this straitlaced time, and he was a child of an altogether less innocent time. He and Arthur both knew of the proclivities, and more than proclivities, of the elegant Richard Monckton Milnes, their Cambridge contemporary, whose interest in beautiful boys kept bubbling to the surface of his and others’ talk. He knew, too, from Arthur, of the carnal passions that drove William Gladstone to prowl the streets at night in search of those women, and to repent in agony afterwards. A sensual man, Arthur had said of Gladstone, who had loved bright Arthur at Eton, as Alfred had loved him at Cambridge. Arthur was not a sensual man. He loved in a romantic glow. He had written in Arthur’s poems
He tasted love with half his mind
Nor ever drank the inviolate spring
and he believed that was a pretty fair assessment, he believed he should have known if Arthur had ever, so to speak, stepped over the threshold of imagination into fleshly fact.
He himself was not, he considered, a passionate man, his sensuous apprehensions were, so to speak, diffused and mingled throughout the creation, in little bursting buds and the rolling of the sea. He had found the act of love—he pushed the button in and out of its slit, and found another, still not the appropriate one, making a kind of loop of fabric—anyway it was long ago, now, Emily had long been an invalid, there was no need to think. He thought he had acquitted himself well enough, he thought he had. He had felt a suffusion of affection and companionable calm, which he suspected was less than what others felt, somehow, but not unpleasant, not inadequate. To Emily’s taste, he was sure. If he was truthful, there was more excitement in the space between his finger and Arthur’s, with all that implied of the flashing-out of one soul to another, of the symmetry and sympathy of minds, of the recognition they had both felt, that they had in some sense always known each other, they did not have to learn each other, as strangers did. But this did not make them men like Milnes. They were like David and Jonathan, whose love to each other was wonderful, passing the love of women. And yet David was the greatest lover of women in the Bible, David had despatched Uriah to his death to possess Bathsheba, David was manly beyond all heroes. Arthur’s cold completeness, his air of carved, self-contained sufficiency, attracted more agitated, more stressful souls. Alfred knew that William Gladstone still in some sense envied him
the completeness of his relations with their common object of worship. They were uneasy in each other’s company, though drawn together as much by their great loss as by the fact that they were the twin eminences of their time. Gladstone was a David-type. But Arthur had loved Alfred. He remembered Arthur showing him the draft of a letter he had despatched to Milnes, who had made a wild plea for an exclusive friendship, in Milnes’s own emotional way. It must have been 1831. Poor Arthur had less than two years of life in him at that time. He had held out his letter to Alfred and said, ‘I don’t know if it’s right to show one man’s letter to another. But I want you to see this, Ally, I want you to read what I have frankly written to Milnes. Don’t say anything, don’t comment, it would be wrong. Just read what I have written, and then it shall be sealed and sent, to have whatever effect it may. I hope you will feel my frankness is justified—’
I am not aware, my dear Milnes, that, in that lofty sense which you are accustomed to attach to the name of Friendship, we ever were, or ever could be friends. What is more to the purpose, I never fancied that we could, nor intended to make you fancy it. That exalted sentiment I do not ridicule—God forbid—nor consider as merely ideal: I have experienced it, and it thrills within me now—but not—pardon me, my dear Milnes, for speaking frankly—not for you. But the shades of sympathy are innumerable, and wretched indeed would be the condition of man, if sunshine never fell upon him save from the unclouded skies of a tropical summer.
Their eyes had met. ‘You see, Alfred,’ Arthur had said. ‘You do see?’ He saw. He had written in the poems, advisedly,
I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can
The soul of Shakespeare love thee more.
He believed that was true.
He sat down on his bed and began again to fumble at his mismatched buttons. His legs were cold and goosefleshed; he shivered inside his nightshirt. He was aware of his own body, with an appalled pity he might have felt for some dumb ox doomed to be slaughtered, or heavy, cunning-eyed porker, whose vast throat was appointed to be slit in the fullness of its grunting and chuckling. When he was younger, when Arthur was only dead as it were yesterday, he had felt the unnaturalness of that vanishing in every ending of his own live nerves. Now he was an old man, he saw that the young man he was had felt himself eternal in his noonday strength, in his grip and his stride and his inhalation and his exhalation, all of them now problems. He was approaching annihilation, however temporary he trusted it would be, step by step, and at every step, he saw his poor flesh as another creature he was responsible for. And at every step the terror of being merely snuffed out, like a mere creature, was greater. When they were young they had chanted in church that they believed in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. He imagined that there might have been a time when the whole body of the Church believed triumphantly and unquestioningly in the reconstitution of atomies of dust, the flying together of chips of bone and flakes of fallen hair at the last Trump, but that was now past, and men were afraid. As a young man he himself had once, walking in London, nearly fainted and fallen under the sudden realisation of the whole of its inhabitants lying horizontal a hundred years hence. Men now saw what he saw, the earth heaped and stacked with dead things, broken bright feathers and shrivelled moths, worms stretched and chewed and sliced and swallowed, stinking shoals of once bright fish, dried parrots and tigerskins limply and glassily snarling on hearths, mountains of human skulls mixed with monkey skulls and snake skulls and asses’ jawbones and butterfly wings, mashed into humus and dust, fed on, regurgitated, blown in the wind, soaked in the rain, absorbed. You saw one thing, nature red in tooth and claw, the dust, the dust, and you believed another, or said you believed, or tried to believe. For if you did not believe, where was the point of it all, of life or love or virtue? His dearest Emily was appalled that he should ever entertain such doubts. He had put his pretty compliment to her into Arthur’s poems.