Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  “I always said I would never teach,” says Frederica. “But it will be nice to be working with you.”

  The Head of Liberal Studies has a panelled office, with bright colour-spattered linen curtains (made by the textiles students). He offers Frederica coffee in a tomato-red cup (made by the ceramics students) and looks through her CV, which she and Thomas Poole have expertly put together. He is a large and handsome man, with what Frederica’s mother would have called a sweet face, bright blue eyes, great wings of groomed black-and-white-streaked hair, and a soft, smiling mouth. He is wearing a blue corduroy suit and a red knitted silk tie. Round the room, three deep, are paintings and prints with beautifully lettered verses and quotations underneath them, all of which Frederica sees are from Blake. An abstract of splashes: “Exuberance is Beauty.” A rather childlike face on a blue starry ground: “He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.” Trees, a huge collage: “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” An eye: “One thought fills immensity.” “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” There is also a large, Piranesi-derived etching, with the verse

  Such are Cathedron’s golden Halls in the City of Golgonooza.

  And Los’s Furnaces howl loud, living, self-moving, lamenting

  With fury and despair, and they stretch from South to North

  Thro’ all the Four Points. Lo! The Labourers at the Furnaces

  Rintrah and Palambron, Theotormon and Bromion, loud lab’ring

  With the innumerable multitudes of Golgonooza round the Anvils of Death!

  “Golgonooza” is a word that has always annoyed Frederica. It is infant-babble, not true language-forging. It is unintentionally comic. The Head of Liberal Studies murmurs “Impressive” as he reads the CV, and looks up to see her studying the varied images.

  “I make Blake the centre of my teaching here. He is the greatest English poet and the greatest English painter. He draws the mind out of itself. The students find him inspirational. Over the years I have made this collection of their tributes to his genius—as you can see, the styles are diverse, but the source is One. I like to employ creative people. Do you write yourself, Miss Potter?”

  (Frederica has decided to return to her maiden name.)

  “No, I’m afraid not. Studying English literature knocks the desire out of you. But it might be different here—where everyone is making things.”

  “There is a special atmosphere. I try to write myself. I think if one is entrusted with the minds of creative people one should at least try to create oneself, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I have been inspired by the Prophetic Books.”

  Frederica, unguarded, begins, “I could never stomach the Prophetic Books because the language is ugly—whereas the Songs of Innocence—”

  He smiles forgivingly. “I think you will find upon closer attention that the language does have a beauty all of its own, a peculiar beauty. A free beauty—free, as he said, of the monotonous Cadence—the bondage—the fetters of rhyme and blank verse. ‘Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race.’ You need an ear made new. It is visionary—the vision of Albion and the Druids as the foundation and source for the Hebrew religion—”

  “It’s an interesting myth,” says Frederica, trying to read the dedication of a rather wistful water-colour of the invisible worm in the heart of the Rose.

  “Or truth, or true myth,” he says smilingly, as she deciphers the dedication.

  “To Richmond Bly, who taught me to understand the infinite nature of Desire, with admiration and love from Marigold Topping.”

  Frederica whitens momentarily as her gleeful dissection of The Voyage of the Silver Ship rises in total recall to her mind. She swallows nervously. Richmond Bly does not notice. He is offering Frederica a year’s part-time employment, on probation, and an office in which to see students and write lectures. Alan will take her to see it.

  Up, up, up. The solid, shallow-stepped staircase hugs the wall of the Samuel Palmer School. It is wide—large objects are regularly carried up and down it. It has an elegant wrought-iron balustrade and its steps are worn in the centres, reminding Frederica of external processional staircases for monks. The staircase is dark, but at the top are the studios, roofed with glass, full of light. Alan takes Frederica through these, to the end of the building, past flashes of colour, past pools of dark and light, in the smell of oil and acrylic and turpentine and spirits. In the last airy space, in the centre, stands a strange object, surrounded by a swarm of students in black, tight clothes, and two men in jeans with what seem to be projectors of some kind. The object is a huge flask, or retort, or diving bell, with rounded sides rising to a kind of funnel into which one of the projectors appears to be pouring coloured light. As Frederica watches, this light changes from red-gold to cyan blue, and then to indigo, and then to acid yellow, and then to rose-pink. The walls of the retort or cask are painted matt black with variegated shapes and sizes of portholes out of which shimmer ribbons and flashes of changing coloured light. The light has a thick, liquid quality. The students are armed with black cardboard tubes, or periscopes, and drawing pads, and are peering in where they can, some crouched at low portholes, some perched on high stools. The operations are being directed by a burly man with not much hair, in a paint-streaked and unravelling mariner’s sweater in oiled wool. Alan introduces this person, who seems to know and like Alan, as Desmond Bull, who is a painter, in charge of the Foundation Year. “This is Frederica Reiver—Potter—” says Alan. “She’s going to teach literature.”

  “Good luck to her,” says Desmond Bull.

  “Can I look at what you are doing?”

  “Please. Go up to the top, the view’s best from there. Matthew here invented these coloured lights—he’s got all sorts of oils inside jars and frames—it’s a kind of instructive colour-happening. Come up this ladder.”

  Frederica climbs up, and peers in. The diving bell appears to be full of liquid light, but it is only air, somehow dense with colour. The background colour changes and is traversed by shoals of green spots, or golden streaks or waving lines of crimson and emerald. So delightful, so mesmerising, is the play of energy, light and colour that it takes Frederica some time to see that something is coiled below the imaginary depths, a wavering trousse of hair, or seaweed, a smooth succession of stones, or limbs, hard to fix, hard to discern, as it shifts from gold to green to sky blue.

  “Is it a sculpture?” she asks, delighted, and is answered by a voice from the depths, plangent and twanging. “No. It is a living creature. The Human Form Divine, precisely. Any movement is illusory. I am a professional.”

  “You can come out now,” says Desmond Bull. “Coffee-break time.”

  Frederica retreats from the brim of the flask. Whoever is inside gives a little jump, and clasps the edge of the tank with long greyish fingers, distinctly grey, once out of the coloured light, though whether intrinsically grey or by contrast is hard to say. A head then appears above the rim, a head long, long, with a long, fine nose, hooded eyes and a thin mouth, a head clothed and veiled in long, iron-grey hair, dead-straight, smooth, long, iron-grey hair that cloaks the shoulders and bust as they rise, so that it is impossible to see whether this is a man or a woman. A long, grey leg, sinewy and thin, is then hoist over the edge of its prison, also cloaked in the long, grey threads, and then the strange figure, all blue-grey in the daylight, is perched briefly on the edge, jumps down, and advances towards Frederica on tall, thin legs moving amongst its tent of hair. Frederica’s eyes focus on the genitals, which a swing of the hair-curtain, accidental or deliberate, reveals to be male, rather small, clouded by iron-grey pubic hair. The creature holds out a bony hand.

  “Jude,” he says.

  “Frederica,” says Frederica, registering a not very nice smell, a smell of fish, of old frying pans, of rancid oils.

  “A very ancient, fish-like smell,” says Jude, in his high-pitched, cultivated voice. Frederica f
eels a frisson of distaste, and catches him looking at her, waiting for just such a frisson. When he has noted it, he turns away, and moves towards the folding chair by the studio heater, three roses of red elements on a metal stalk. He extends his grey hands into the red light, turns a thin grey shank in the rose. The skin on his ribs, the skin on his buttocks, hangs in sculpted folds, not flapping, but folded, like the plated armour of a rhinoceros. Students bring him coffee in plastic cups and offer him biscuits, which he refuses. A whole group gather at his feet.

  Alan takes Frederica into her little office, which is a partitioned-off corner of the high studio, still under the studio lights, and with a white table and a good anglepoise, not a desk. The chair is pink moulded plastic, with hands, feet, and a microcephalic head for her own head to rest against, its long-lashed eyelids closed, its red mouth pursed to kiss.

  “Who was that?” says Frederica to Alan.

  “Jude. Jude Mason. Not his real name, I suspect. He’s a bit of a mystery man, a bit of a poseur. No one knows where he lives or where he comes from. He doesn’t say much, but occasionally he lectures the students on Nietzsche. They like him. They listen to him. He turns up for some sessions and asks for modelling work, and then he vanishes, and then he returns. Art school models are hard to come by, and he’s reliable.”

  “He looks like Gollum. Or Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar only thinner.”

  “He’s not very pro-Blake. He gets into arguments with Richmond Bly’s Blake-clique or -claque. He prefers Nietzsche.”

  “Which reminds me of something awful.” Frederica recounts the story of The Voyage of the Silver Ship. She cannot resist making it funny. It is funny, funny and sad. She says, “When I saw the mills of Golgonooza I knew. I should have listened to you telling me his name, but I obviously couldn’t bear to hear it. What can I do?”

  “Keep very quiet,” says Alan. “Tell nobody else, no matter how tempting—you always talked too much, my dear, and I’m glad to see it coming back to you, but resist, resist. Forget the Silver Ship and all who sail in her.”

  “You never talk too much,” says Frederica, turning her attention to her friend. All the way through Cambridge, she would ask herself, and occasionally him, who he loved, what he loved, and never came up with an answer. He is neat, and fair, and kindly, and she is sure of his friendship, and sure she does not know him. She likes this state of affairs.

  “What is it like,” she asks him, beglamourised by her surroundings, by the other-side-of-the-mirror world beyond the portals. “What is it like, teaching art history to artists?”

  “Horrible,” says Alan. “They think the dead are dead, and irrelevant to their own problems, or worse, threatening to their originality. Well, not all of them. Most. You’ll see. It’s quite testing. It tests your own reasons for caring about Raphael. Or Giotto, or Piero della Francesca. But they tend to vote with their feet, so you don’t always have the pleasure of arguing the toss with them. That’s one thing. Another is that places like this are run on the energies of part-timers, paid low rates for piece-work. If they don’t come, you’ve got no class, no course and no money.”

  “All the same,” says Frederica. “It’s alive, here.”

  V

  Alexander’s fears that the new Labour Government might disband the Steerforth Committee prove to be unnecessary. What happens is that two new members are added, to give it a more popular aspect. Like all committees, this one is a mixture of the relevant Great and Good from some perennial Civil Service list, and judiciously balanced professionals in its field. The original list was as follows:

  Professor Sir Philip Steerforth Chairman, holder of a personal Chair in Anthropology in Glasgow University

  Professor Gerard Wijnnobel Vice-Chancellor of the University of North Yorkshire, grammarian and polymath

  Dr. Naomi Lurie Reader in English at Oxford, author of Various Traditions of Meditational Verse (1955) and of Dissociated Sensibility, Myth or History? (1960)

  Alexander Wedderburn Playwright, Producer, BBC Educational Television

  Malcolm Friend Journalist and broadcaster

  Hans Richter Physicist, now employed by Eurobore Oil Company

  Arthur Beaver Head of Child Development, Institute of Education, Chester University

  Emily (Milly) Perfitt Children’s book writer

  Auriol Worth Headmistress, St. Clare’s School for Girls, Dorking

  Guy Croom Headmaster, Botton Grammar School, Derbyshire

  Alex Swinburn Head of English, Goldengrove Comprehensive School, Croydon

  Louis Roussel Psychologist

  Walter Priest Devonshire LEA English adviser

  Walter Bishop Acting Head, Conisborough Teacher Training College

  To these the new government had added:

  Mickey Impey Liverpool poet and performer

  Roger Magog Freelance writer and teacher, author of twenty-seven books, including The Sacramental Calling (1956), an account of the transformation of a secondary modern school English group after being encouraged to write “freely”

  There are also Civil Servants in attendance: Aubrey Wace, the Secretary of the Committee, and his assistant, Agatha Mond.

  The brief of the committee is to make recommendations for the teaching of English language in both primary and secondary schools. This brief included attention to areas where small wars are raging: the teaching of reading—sound or sight?; the usefulness or harm of teaching grammar; freedom of expression against correctness and conformity to rules. In his preliminary speech to the committee, sitting uneasy and inhibited round a board table in the Ministry of Education, Philip Steerforth said:

  “Language and children are two things we might say previous generations in our culture took for granted. We have made both problematic, and made them objects of intense study. Between us we bring to bear a formidable array of expertise and talent in both fields, that is, child development and education, and the study of the nature and behaviour of language itself. We must be philosophically rigorous, and we must also be intensely practical; otherwise we shall be sitting here in another twenty years, for both subjects are young, are in transition and flux, and our work may be helpful but cannot hope to be definitive. Let us also remember that we are, many of us, parents, and consult our hopes and fears and understandings from that source.”

  The work of the committee is divided into two kinds: the gathering of evidence and consultation with teachers, and the debates in the Ministry. There is also the evidence, which pours in by the sackful, passionately written pleas for grammar, for the abolition of grammar, for learning poetry, for learning nothing ever again “by rote,” for “look and say,” for sonics, for mixed-ability teaching, for remedial teaching, for the gifted child, for the non-native speaker. There is a brief moment when Alexander surveys this mass of passionate paper like a cool human observer, knowing that he is about to become part of it, that he is about to join the battle and the battlefield.

  He does not wholly know why he agreed to join the committee. Partly, he was flattered to be asked. Partly, he is interested in language; it is the medium of what he still thinks of as his art. Partly, his art is not going well. He wants to write differently, and does not know how. There is a new life in the theatre, and it is not one that bears any relation to the lyrical richness of his one great success, the 1953 versedrama, Astraea. The new theatre is based on Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. It believes, not in measured verse, but in “shattering language in order to shatter life.” It is a theatre of blood, of screams, of bodily extremity. It is iconoclastic in a mannered way. Glenda Jackson has appeared as Christine Keeler, stripped, bathed, and ritually clothed as a convict to the recitation of the words of the Keeler court case. She has then appeared, to the same chanted words, as Jacqueline Kennedy, preparing herself for the funeral of the President. This has been followed by The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.

  Alexander, the man
, was moved and appalled by the production, by the writhings and moanings and ritual head-bangings of the impersonators of the insane: by the concatenation of the artist-Marquis and the tormented revolutionary, by Jackson again, a wildly erotic Charlotte Corday beating de Sade with her long hair. He also feels that it is not good to release such violence as spectacle. And beyond that, secretly, he thinks “childish.” But what is “childish”? The child is wiser than the man, in the thought of this time. He is old, he is out of date, he once believed in contemplation, in singing rhythms, in thinking things out, and all this is swept away by this new bleeding, and howling. It may sound bathetic to say that he joined the committee also to observe the drama of the politics of groups, but it is so; there may be an idea there.

  The consultation process is wide-ranging. The committee is too large to crowd into any classroom or staffroom, so it divides itself into platoons, which make local forays, north, south, east and west, visiting schools in Wales and the Fens, in Cumberland and Dumfriesshire, in Devon and in Belfast. Alexander manages to attach himself to a group which is to be based for two nights in York, and will visit primary schools in Leeds and Freyasgarth, grammar schools and comprehensive schools in Calverley and Northallerton. He has chosen this group partly because it will enable him to see Bill Potter, whose grandchildren’s primary school, at Alexander’s suggestion, is one of the chosen ones. He has also chosen it because it will be organised and accompanied by Agatha Mond, the young Principal from the Ministry of Education.

  The rest of the group are Professor Wijnnobel, Hans Richter, Louis Roussel, Auriol Worth and the two new members, Mickey Impey and Roger Magog.

  Alexander manages to travel from London to York with Agatha Mond. She is a darkly beautiful woman, around thirty, he thinks. She says little, and keeps her head down, studying the papers in front of her. Her hair is long and straight and worn in a loose bun. Her eyelashes are long and black. Her hands are fine. She is perhaps a little thin, and looks perhaps a little sad and withdrawn. She is Alexander’s type; he recognises her; a woman reluctantly self-sufficient with a secret anxiety, or fear, under her cool look. All the women he has loved have been like this, quick dark women with potential passion. Except Frederica. He does not like to think about the very brief period when Frederica enforced love from him. He sits opposite Agatha Mond and watches her arrange her papers, as the London suburbs go past, and the edge of the Midlands. He fetches her a cup of coffee and observes that early rising is tiring. He asks if she has far to come.