After the death of his mother he maintained residences at Cambridge and in London. In the 1950’s he helped write the libretto to Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd, based on Melville’s 1924 novel of the same name. In 1953 he was awarded the Order of Companions of Honor and in 1969 given Queen Elizabeth’s Order of Merit. At the age of ninety, on June 7, 1970, Edward Morgan Forster died at the home in Coventry of friend and long-time companion Robert Buckingham.
Source: Wikipedia, A Room With a View, Introduction.
Finding our Present in the Past:
Possession by A.S. Byatt
“The book was thick and black and covered with dust.” It is not a coincidence that the first two words of this remarkable novel are, “the book.” Possession is a book about books, about the study and love of literature and the strange obsession with the lives of literary figures shared by academics, historians, and the randomly curious public. It tells the story of a quiet literary scholar, Roland Michell, who finds a lost letter from the great Victorian poet R.H. Ash to another famous poet of the day, Christabel LaMotte. As he is an Ash scholar, Roland takes the letter to a LaMotte scholar named Maude Bailey, and together they begin a search to uncover the relationship between the two. It is a discovery that will have repercussions in the academic world and in their own lives. If you tend to lose yourself in second-hand bookstores, are ravenously curious about the lives of the authors whose works you read, or simply love a great romantic mystery, you will love this book, which won the Booker prize, England’s highest literary award.
Synopsis
Roland Mitchell is a poor grad student pursuing a doctorate on the famous Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash. As a research assistant he spends hours in the library researching arcane facts, and one day stumbles across a letter written by Ash to another famous poet of the time, Christabel La Motte. On an impulse, he steals the letter, and goes to the leading La Motte scholar, Maude Bailey, for help. As they research old documents and piece together the relationship between the poets, they fall in love as well. Others, including jealous academic rivals and private collectors, get wind of the momentous find and the story culminates on a dark and stormy night as the body of Ash is exhumed in order to find the truth about the past.
Roland and Maud discover a cache of letters that prove that Ash and La Motte were indeed lovers, and their story is recounted in bits and pieces as the modern researchers uncover the clues. Their poetry is recreated as well, and infuses the narrative with a mythical beauty. Roland and Maude must come to grips with their mutual obsession with the past and decide if it can be the basis for a future together.
What Makes it Great?
The marvel of this novel is that Byatt creates not just two poets, but also two complete bodies of work. Calling on her extensive knowledge of Victorian literature, she intersperses the narrative with poetry, prose, tales, and even literary criticism about the works of these fictional characters. It is, to use an over-taxed phrase, a tour de force, and the poems are beautiful in their own right. Here are just a few lines from the fictional Ash:
In certain moods we eat our lives away
In fast successive greed; we must have more
Although that more depletes our little stock
Of time and peace remaining.
A.S. Byatt is herself a formidable scholar of literature who left a teaching career at London College in 1983 to write full-time. One day while in the British Museum Library, she spotted a well-known Coleridge scholar. It occurred to Byatt that much of what she knew about the Romantic poet had been filtered through the mind of that scholar. She mused about the effect that such a single-minded pursuit must have on a person. “I thought,” she said, “it’s almost like a case of demonic possession, and I wondered—has she eaten up his life or has he eaten up hers?” (A.S. Byatt, personal interview) Years later while studying Robert Browning, she became interested in the effect that his relationship with his wife (the more famous and more readable poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning) would have had on his work, and vice versa, and considered writing a novel about their lives. Soon the two ideas would combine for one great work.
Fearing the legal implications as well as the artistic restrictions of writing about real people, Byatt decided instead to create a pair of Victorian poets and link them to a pair of modern literary scholars. She remembered D.H. Lawrence’s advice: “I thought: I have to have two couples, which he says is the beginning of any novel.”
Did You Know?
Byatt once said, “I write novels because I am passionately interested in language. Novels are works of art which are made out of language, and are made in solitude by one person and read in solitude by one person . . . .” In Possession there is a marvelous passage about the act of reading that describes an emotion dear and familiar to any serious reader:
“Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark . . .” (512)
She also decided she would try to instill her novel “with the kind of warmth of a Shakespearean comedy.” Her romantic poet, Randolph Henry Ash (loosely modeled on Robert Browning) writes dramatic monologues with deep mythological and psychological underpinnings. The fair, mysterious Christabel LaMotte resembles Christina Rosetti, with her mystical, lyrical verse and her fascination with ancient folk tales and legends. I confess that my first time through this novel I went to my Norton Anthology of English Literature and looked for R.H. Ash, only to find that he did not actually exist! It amazed me that the author could switch from one style to another and write such beautiful verse in different voices. The third time through the book, I was also sensitive to the way the poetry illuminates the narrative.
Liberated Women?
For those who are involved in (and perhaps discouraged by) the academic climate of today, Possession offers a clear-eyed look at modern literary scholarship. In particular Byatt is interested in the largely negative effect of the feminist movement on literary studies. Herself the mother of four children and a successful career woman, Byatt is keenly aware of each woman’s struggle to balance the different roles in her life, and is certainly an ardent advocate for the rights of all people. She sees, however, a curious parallel between modern women and their Victorian counterparts and suggests that in the fight for their freedom, women may have “thrown the baby out with the bathwater.”
Byatt seems to suggest that, while the Victorian woman was trapped by the notion that her proper place was only to mother children and nurture and support men, the modern woman may be equally trapped by the opposite notion, that she must live free of these very natural female roles. Thus Christabel LaMotte is symbolized by the princess in the glass coffin, beautiful but unable to break free of her bonds. Yet her modern counterpart, renowned scholar and feminist Maude Bailey, is presented as a kind of “ice queen,” equally unhappy and trapped in a role that feels unnatural to her. She self-consciously hides her long, blonde hair under a scarf; her beauty is a source of shame, and her life (characterized by her surgically sterile apartment) is lonely and unfulfilling. Byatt introduces another feminist scholar, the vulgar American Leonora Stern, in a further attempt to show the kind of backwards Puritanism that exists in academia today, where morality and virtue are the new taboo, and fundamental truths have been deconstructed and dissected until nothing remains but tolerance.
The very “modern” Roland and Maude seem almost childish in their inability to form meaningful relationships, and this emotional paralysis stems from the shifting philosophies of today: “Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his ‘self’ as an illusion . . .” As Roland and Maude attempt to uncover “the truth” about the two poets, they learn important truths about themselves as well, and they break free of the modern relativism that has bo
und them.
Literary Study and the Search for Truth
The characters that swarm like scavengers around the relics of the lives of the two Victorian poets represent the desolation of our modern morality. Like Shakespeare, Byatt is showing us this empty world for a reason, however, to encourage us to recover certain truths that have been trampled in the rush for social progress. Roland Mitchell and Maude Bailey feel strangely uncomfortable in their modern setting and turn to the past for answers. As they connect to the lives of these poets through their letters, they find strength within themselves to live more meaningful lives. Byatt’s genius for metaphor connects the two couples, linking the present to the past. Notice the use of color: greens for the feminine and grays and blacks for the masculine characters. Connection is made through objects: Cropper wears Ash’s watch, Maude wears LaMotte’s brooch. Symbols of confinement and release are paired: the glass coffin and the library cubicle, the green Beetle and the serpent Melusine, the short-lived Eden of Yorkshire and Roland’s forbidden garden.
As the story builds toward its climax, the images pile up, as it were, until everything and everyone meets in one place, in one very cinematic scene, to uncover the truth. Yet, even with all the romantic drama, Byatt never loses contact with books, with the fact that it is through reading and writing that human beings connect with their finer selves.
Those who write biography or study history know that every life has a story, but also that we can never tell the story exactly as it was. There is no final truth in history, but only interpretation and recreation. We read the journals of our ancestors and wonder what was not said that would have been most enlightening, as we try to extract a vision of their reality from the clues left to us. Roland and Maude, after years of studying these poets, are torn between a desire to protect their privacy and an insatiable curiosity to find out what really happened to them. In a highly readable series of events we are pulled deeper and deeper into these interconnected lives, switching from past to present and back to the past. Finally, after all is revealed, Byatt shares one more crucial detail with the reader that is never revealed to the other characters. It is her way of letting us know at the last that the full story of any other life will always be, to some extent, a mystery.
Quotations taken from Possession. Vintage Books, New York. 1990.
Talk About It
Through her modern couple, Byatt seems to say that in our search for freedom and equality, we have lost a fundamental sense of identity. Do you think this is true, and if so, why? Was her Victorian couple equally as confused, or less so?
About the Author: A. S. Byatt
Antonia Susan Drabble Byatt was born in Yorkshire in 1936. Her Quaker parents were a judge and an English teacher. A self-described “greedy reader,” Byatt spent her often-bedridden asthmatic childhood reading fiction: Dickens, Austen, and Scott. Greedy reading made her want to write. World War II marked the end of her childhood; she was evacuated to the countryside and then to a Quaker boarding school. A solitary and slightly awkward child, she withdrew to the basement boiler room to write. Byatt was educated at Cambridge (as one of the first women admitted), Bryn Mawr College, and Oxford. At Cambridge, she found an atmosphere of “moral seriousness” that placed English literature at the center of university studies.
Byatt lectured in English and literature at the University of London, Central School of Art and Design, and University College, London. She left in 1983 to write full-time. A number of her books deal with nineteenth-century concerns, thinkers, and authors, especially themes of Romantic and Victorian literature. Her short stories merge naturalism and realism with fantasy. She married twice and is the mother of four children, one of whom was killed in a car accident at age 11. Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990, and Dame Byatt’s latest work, The Children’s Book (2009), was shortlisted for the same award.
Sources: www.asbyatt.com
www.contemporarywriters.com
www.salon.com
Wikipedia
True Romance: Take it Personally
In his famous discussion of Eros in the book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis offers a slightly different take on romantic love: “To be in love is both to intend and to promise lifelong fidelity. Love makes vows unasked; can’t be deterred from making them.” (The Four Loves, p. 158) Every person who is in a committed relationship understands the feeling of kinship, the “cord of communion” that springs to life between two people (who might otherwise be comparative strangers) and compels them to create a family, rather than just pass each other by. This sense of kinship is both spiritual and physical, and it is essential to the deepest kind of human intimacy. It is rarely discussed in fiction, but it is what we’re all either seeking, or feel lucky to have found.
In my college days when I had a new boyfriend, I’d take him home to meet the family, and invariably break up with him as a result! It was always in my home, among the minutiae of daily life, that I could see things most clearly. If the exciting new beau was out of place in my home—my real world—the romance lost its luster. Lucy Honeychurch finds the same thing to be true. We tend to think of romantic love as something outside our daily reality, something exciting and different. Yet in all three of these works lovers recognize each other as somehow already familiar—the lover feels like family—and this feeling confuses them. They have trouble realizing that the thing they are seeking is that very familiarity.
This leads to an ice-axe question for the ages: are we expecting the wrong things from romantic love? Are we expecting excitement, thrills and constant variety when in fact, our souls yearn for simplicity, familiarity and reliability? Have romance novels and movies taught us to expect the opposite of what we really want? There is an old saying that our frustrations are determined by our expectations. What do we really expect, and is it what we really want? Since love is at the center of our lives, it might be worth thinking about.
Chapter Six
Action Figures
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
Hamlet I:iii
My husband Craig is one of those guys that can’t sit still. It’s useless to take him on vacations that involve sitting around by the pool; he doesn’t last ten minutes before he’s off on an adventure. Predictably, he has little patience for most of the Victorian literature that I love. In fact he refers to my books as “tea-drinkers,” because they expend so much verbiage on elaborate descriptions of the food, clothing and furnishings that by the time something actually happens he has long since ceased to care! He would concur with Hamlet about the dangers of too much thinking and not enough doing.
This chapter is for Craig and all those like him who love to read but squirm at the mere mention of Austen or Bronte. Each of these books features unforgettable characters, stirring plots, and loads of historically accurate detail. From the impossibly dangerous (and claustrophobic) seafaring battles with Captain Jack Aubrey, to the hidden caves where the Count of Monte Cristo finds his treasure, to the muddy trenches of the First World War, men of courage and action continue to thrill and inspire. Even sedentary types like myself love to be swept along for the ride, as long as we’re home in time for tea!
Collateral Damage:
The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
History can be viewed as a series of revolutionary moments, where the existing hierarchy was upended by the sheer determination of a few brave heroes. One imagines the fierce determination on the faces of the men surrounding King John as the Magna Carta was signed. We can picture the desperate expressions of the Paris mob that stormed the dreaded Bastille Prison, or the icy resolve of George Washington as he crossed the Delaware to continue a seemingly hopeless battle against overwhelming odds. Yet none of these moments, however daring, can compare for sheer brav
ado to the day when a poor carpenter’s son climbed a hillside, sat on a rock, and calmly uttered a series of statements that turned his culture’s code of ethics inside-out and transformed the history of the world forever.
“Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also . . . Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy, But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven . . .” (Matthew 5:38-44, King James Version)
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus presented an ideal of behavior so contrary to the natural inclination of mankind that we continue to ignore it and substitute a more comfortable compromise in its stead. Who among us truly loves his enemies, turns the other cheek, and does not seek revenge against those that persecute us? Our sense of justice recoils at the idea.
As a result of our obsession with fairness, we cling to the notion that our ills are caused by someone or something that must be ferreted out and punished. If our relationships fail, we blame our spouses, or our upbringing. If we commit crimes, the fault is in our economic system. It’s the government who forces us to cheat on our taxes and our employer whose unfair practices lead us to fail at our work. In those rare cases when we truly are the innocent victims of evil we may spend a lifetime nursing the pain and increasing the damage by attempts to even the score. With the bitter Shylock, we ask, “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” (Merchant of Venice, III, i, 66) Yet, as Shylock learned, revenge has a way of backfiring, damaging us more than those we seek to punish.
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