Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  “We shall take notes,” he said, “on the variables, the optimal applications of pleasure and pain, the alternations of each, whether pleasure is involuntary in the presence of fear, as some have argued, whether in death, the female orgasm is as violent as that of a hanged man …”

  The Lady Roseace had heard and read of the great courage of heroes and heroines in the face of unbearable pain. She believed, rightly, that such courage cannot be maintained if its opponents are truly determined it shall not. She believed, rightly, that she had perhaps one more chance to speak before, in some sense, she ceased to be, although something—which she devoutly hoped would not much resemble Roseace—would in some sense live through the attentions and ministrations of the instrument. She said, “This is a most ingenious device.”

  “I think so. I have given it much thought.”

  “It must have taken ingenuity and practice.”

  “Even so. I have laboured.”

  “You must have planned the Instrument, from the earliest days of our coming here, or even from before …”

  “It has always been in my mind, yes.”

  “Tell me, Culvert, was it designed in the abstract? Or always for me—”

  “Always for you. Its proportions are constructed to fit the proportions of your interior cavities, as I have often and often measured them.”

  “So when we came, you knew it would end here?”

  “It has not ended,” said Culvert. “But you will end here, yes. Unless my machine is defective. Which I am very sure it is not.”

  “Irony is a useless weapon against Projectors,” said Colonel Grim.

  “Irony is a useless weapon when they are inserting a biting and scratching and sawing metal device into your cunt,” said Turdus Cantor.

  “Irony is the last satisfaction,” said Samson Origen. “Before death. Death will be very satisfactory to that poor lady. But her death will not, I think, be as satisfying to our Projector as he supposed it would when he projected it. And I do not know if he is clever enough to see that the satisfaction will not be greatly—if at all—increased by constant repetition of the experiment. It is time to prepare our own evasion. Would you not say? With a little more cunning and a little more aggression than those two innocents?”

  “I thought,” said Colonel Grim, “that you believed it was best not to have been born, and next best to die quickly. I can’t see why you would want to stir from this Tower, where your second-best fate impends even more insistently.”

  “I abstain from sexual bliss myself,” said Samson Origen. “And I would rather not die as part of another man’s desperate search for its vanishing lineaments in my pain or anyone else’s. I think we will find a way of gratifying our Projector and pleasing ourselves.”

  “You will act against your principles.”

  “But not against yours, mon Colonel. So you must be active in this.”

  Babbletower has a cover with a black tower on the midnight-blue sky, with a white moon riding on one of the rather Disneyish turrets, and white arched windows winking in its gloom. A trail of scantily clad people, mostly women with flowing hair and exposed breasts in Empire-line clinging dresses, winds its spiral way round the lower levels of the mass, and vanishes through a heavy doorway. The people bear some resemblance—partly owing to the way their diaphanous clothing clings to their limbs—to Samuel Palmer’s churchgoers winding their way to Evensong in a Kentish vale. Only three colours have been used in the printing: cobalt blue, black, and pink. The lettering is black and Gothick. BABBLETOWER, by Jude Mason. Inside, the title page says “Babbletower: A Tale for the Children of Our Time. By Jude Mason.” The book appears in March 1966. Frederica receives two copies, one from Rupert Parrott (“Thank you for bringing this book to my attention. I am sure it is worth publishing it. We must hope it will do well.”) and one from Jude, inscribed “For Frederica, who thought I couldn’t, and then decided that I could. In one of the most improbable interpretations of that phrase the Onlie Begetter. I babble. I salute you. Jude.”

  Frederica finds the cover passable, no more. It is striking. But simple. And has a misleading Tolkienish-science-fictionish look.

  She notices a few reviews. The Daily Telegraph (brought home from the Ministry by Agatha) has a headline A FURTHER SYMPTOM OF OUR DECADENCE, and says that the book, occasionally quite powerful, reflects the sensationalism, desire for perverse stimulation of jaded palates, determination to shock at all costs a cynical public increasingly difficult to shock or to rouse except by extreme crude measures. “We are a sick society, in which apparently anything goes, in books, in behaviour, in style of dress, in pointless posturing. In a more robust society, this book would not have been published, for the publisher would have had convictions, and the courage of those convictions. In the present climate of slimy liberalism, anything is allowed to creep out from under a stone and preen itself in the common sun.”

  The Guardian headline is THE WOUNDED SURGEON PLIES THE STEEL and its critic concludes that we live in a sick society and the only way to confront our sickness is to explore, to inhabit, to hunt out every last hiding place of our shames and our subterfuge, our divided and blunted consciousness, working our way bravely through disgust to a new understanding. We are in a state of breakdown, and only by breaking down all inhibitions will we come to see our sick selves as we really are, and embark on the difficult and dangerous project of reintegration. “We must accept that we are loathsome,” says this critic, “and Jude Mason has taken a fearless step forward on all our behalfs.”

  In Encounter there is a long article by Marie-France Smith, who is described in the Contributors’ Notes as “Carlyle Professor of Comparative Literature at Prince Albert College in London University.” Professor Smith is learned, and treats Babbletower as a learned treatise, exploring the explorations of liberty and license of those post-revolutionary French thinkers Charles Fourier and the Marquis de Sade, “who urged on the crowd that besieged the Bastille where he was imprisoned, through a speaking trumpet made out of the fall-pipe of his latrine.” “There is considerable interest amongst current French thinkers, the heirs of surrealism and anarchism, both in Fourier’s gentle belief that indulgence of every natural (i.e., every possible) human desire could be harmoniously ordered into a new paradise, a new Jerusalem, and in the darker belief, of Sade, who also believed all existing natural passions should be admitted and permitted by the state, but had a further belief in the unnatural act which could be an instrument of power over Nature and a deep insight into her ways. Sade’s philosophical interest in transgression may be related to that of Nietzsche, who remarks that the wisdom of Oedipus and the understanding of Hamlet are bought by unnatural acts …”

  • • •

  Frederica encounters Jude himself outside the male lavatories in the Samuel Palmer School. He is wearing his blue velvet Caroline coat, which looks as though clouds of greasy dust would rise from it if he were tapped with a carpet beater. His hair swings and swings, iron-grey and knotted and gleaming with its own ancient oils, ending at the hem of his coat-skirts. It has pale flecks like a small flock of clothes moths on it, minute shredded scraps of pink lavatory tissue, improbably electrified. He is preceded by his own rancid smell, and succeeded by the wafted air of the latrine. Frederica thanks him for the book, congratulates him on it, and asks if he is happy with the reviews.

  Jude’s long grey face folds lugubriously. He pulls a sheaf of reviews from his pocket and begins to read.

  “How can I be pleased,” he says, “when I am treated as a symptom of other people’s swinish malaise? I am myself, I hope, and my book is mine, and a work of art, I do believe and maintain, contrary to their insulting insinuations.”

  “At least they’re talking about it. If they think it’s a symptom, they’ll talk about it a lot. Come away from the loo, Jude, and tell me what you think about Marie-France Smith.”

  “A cold philosopher who would unravel the rainbow. Nowhere in her whole disquisition on Sade and
Fourier and les philosophes does she use an active verb of my people, my personae. Nowhere does Culvert do or Samson Origen think or Turdus Cantor speak. It is as though we were not. All of us, who peopled my poor skull and rode across its plains and savaged each other so incessantly and ingeniously, we are nothing, Frederica, but a few concepts. We are Liberty and the Id, we are the fraying backcloth of the Theatre of Cruelty.”

  “For God’s sake, Jude Mason, are you trying to say the critics should have discussed your characters as though they were real people?”

  “As though they were real characters, my sweet. A lot more real than Mr. Philip Toynbee or Mr. Cyril Connolly or Professor Marie-France Smith.”

  “You are an ungrateful sod. They’ve done you proud.”

  “Not a sod. A total abstainer. In mourning for a world.”

  Frederica understands. She says, “You miss them. You’ve lost them. Are you writing anything else?”

  She is dragging him by the elbow up the stairs out of the basement, away from the lavatories.

  “Hush. Tell no one. I’m thinking of a story of Artists. And a lot of poisonously fatal Young Things. But artists disgust me, rather. They’re too simple. Soldiers, now. I might write a tale set in a barracks. A fortified barracks under siege, no ingress nor egress.”

  “Like Babbletower.”

  “In no way. On the shore of a salt sea, with a desert behind its back, defending a space where life may not flourish. That’s promising. I’ve thought of that just talking to you, here, now. But in truth, my angel, I am flummoxed and bereft. I am a one-man wake and I am lost. I am to be interviewed by the Evening Standard tomorrow. I have no opinions to offer their young woman.”

  “You have lots.”

  “Just as bad. They want one or two simple ones. A line. I am not a line. I am a tangle.”

  Frederica asks whether Rupert Parrott is happy with the book’s reception. This evokes further plaints.

  “I had supposed that some festivity would have been forthcoming. A few glasses of champers, which of course I don’t drink but I do like to look at the bubbles going up, and some canapés. You know, when I first read about a party with canapés I was in my indigenous French phase—so imagined a Roman orgy where everyone lay around on canapés, couches, all different colours, salmon pink and sky blue and bronze—a delectable rolling-around on sofas, an ogling. I do feel I might have had a minor or minimal orgy for my debut, even if the canapés were all bite-sized, and made for teeth and gullet rather than fundament.”

  “We could all go to the pub today and drink to Babbletower,” says Frederica. “Alan and Desmond Bull and you and me and a few others. No canapés in pubs, but we could raise a glass to you.”

  “Conciliating your Eeyore with burst balloons in honey-pots,” says Jude, revealing an unusual aspect of his reading. “Very well, I will permit you to console me, we will take a jar together.”

  He does not take ajar, when the celebratory group is gathered in the local, which is a rather opulent scarlet-leather-and-gleaming-brass-and-engraved-mirrors-and-fat-frilled-glass-lampshades place called the Griffin. He takes “a Bloody Mary without the Mary, all blood, dear, with several shakes of that dark brown fluid which I believe is made like the Roman liquamen from rotted fish.” He is high on excitement; his smell is hotter and ranker than its usual cold dustbin air. The party consists of several painters and a few art historians and some students, as well as Frederica, Alan, and Desmond Bull. They all inspect the book and deprecate the cover. Gareth Larkin, who teaches graphics, says he will set Jude’s book as a project for his second-year students—“and that way you’ll have twenty or thirty alternatives to choose from. I like to give them something to bite into, in the second year, something real.”

  “Jude could pose for the torture scenes,” says one of the female students, who is wearing a purple shirt with a frilled high collar, scattered with sprigs of daisies, above a black hobble skirt and laced granny boots.

  “You’d enjoy that,” says Jude, automatically. His face is a mask, a skin stretched over something; he is going on rather, today, Frederica thinks, wondering what he is “really” thinking or feeling.

  Later, when the artists have drunk a large number of pints, and Jude has imbibed several more “simply Bloodies, thank you, dear,” there is a potential moment of ugliness when it becomes clear that there is a feeling that Jude should buy a round of drinks. It is not clear to Frederica whether Jude is aware of the muttering and growling. Someone says sotto voce that having a sold book in the hand is worth a studio of unsold canvasses when it comes to the liquid. Jude goes to the lavatory and Frederica offers to buy the round; these are the days before the women’s movement, when it is still quite difficult, though not impossible, for a woman to buy a round in a pub. Alan helps her to carry and offers to help her to pay. She refuses the offer, and becomes irrationally annoyed with Jude herself, as he re-arranges his coatskirts on the tubby red stool he is occupying. Fourteen pints and a simply Bloody makes quite a hole in her own small resources.

  The interview in the Evening Standard is conducted by an up-and-coming trendy young journalist (these are the freshly shining, newly hitched days of the word “trendy”) called Marianna Toogood.

  Jude Mason insisted on being interviewed in a Soho teashop: La Pâtisserie de Nanette, a tiny cubby-hole of a café, behind thick lace curtains, where there are three little round tables with white lace cloths flung over dark red plastic cloths, and rickety little bentwood chairs. It seemed an odd place to meet the author of “a tale for the children of our time,” which has been described as disgusting, sadistic, pornographic, intellectual, profound and “a mirror of our present disorders.”

  I did not know what to expect, and at first took my interviewee for a tramp who had wandered in by mistake, an impression I am sure he meant me to have. He wears his hair very long; it is dark grey and centrally parted; his clothes, a sort of velvet frock-coat which was once pale blue, and velvet britches, could charitably be described as well worn. There are holes in his shoes. His face is long, his bones prominent, his eyes hooded. He could do with a wash, but has a certain fancy-dress panache. He is a fairytale figure, a cross between Captain Hook, Gollum, and the Marquis de Sade, from whom he claims to have learned his craft.

  He is difficult to interview, since he answers most conventional questions with a simple “no” or a resolute silence. He prefers not to divulge where he was born, where he was educated, where he lives, or whether he has any family or friends. His voice is extremely “cultivated,” with a clipped twang which is more BBC than the BBC, a Brideshead bray. He did reveal that he had run away from school—a boarding school, one assumes, since he said “I absconded in the deep darkness”—to sit at the feet of the surrealists and anarchists, and of the playwright Jean Genet, who he says is “the Master” but not a model for his own way of life. “Genet believes that stealing is a good and easy way of encouraging the flow of goods in a community: since I have and want no possessions I neither steal nor am stolen from.”

  He earns his living, he tells me, as an employee in an art school. When asked what he does there he is surprisingly forthcoming. “I offer myself. I display my puny musculature. I let them trace the lineaments of my absence of desire.” He has an affinity for the art students, perhaps? He tells me he read his book Babbletower aloud to selected groups of them, during which he was overheard and “discovered” by “someone” who showed his manuscript to his publisher, Rupert Parrott, of Bowers and Eden.

  Parrott obviously has an eye for the risqué and unlikely success—he published Phyllis Pratt’s Daily Bread, the best-selling story of stabbings and crises de foie amongst the rural clergy.

  He has ordered several pâtisseries, which he consumes with greedy deliberation, biting into them with long yellow teeth. During the interview he devours a meringue swan, biting off its head with a decisive snap, a kind of choux pastry called a religieuse (a nun) which has a chocolate-veiled “head” on a fat, cream-fil
led body, and two feuilles de palmier. He says he does not often get the chance to eat pâtisseries. He likes eating, but does little of it—“indigence is a great staver-off of embonpoint.” He does not drink, or smoke. I wonder whether this is because, like Timothy Leary, he believes psychedelic drugs to be healthier than the normal psyche-deadeners of our society, alcohol and nicotine. This suggestion makes him indignant. He remarks oddly that he needs “neither mind-expanders nor chest-expanders nor sock-suspenders nor a trouser press.” I get the feeling that he considers me to be intellectually so far beneath him that it is not worth giving serious answers to my questions.

  Many of the reviews of Babbletower have suggested that it is likely to become cult reading among the young and turned on, the disciples of Artaud and Peter Brooke, Gormenghast and Burroughs. He is, I suggest, a proto-hippy or Flower Person. He repudiates this, quoting Peter Pan about being a little chicken sprung from the egg. “I am what I am and was, my hair is what it was and is, my book is my book and sprang from my head fully armed, sui generis.”

  But he likes the art students? I would like him to like something besides decapitated sugar swans and nuns.

  “They are revolting,” he says. He corrects himself. “They are in revolt. They are breaking their chains. They will not submit to be made to crassly imitate or even look at the drawings of Michelangelo or the techniques of Ruskin. They will all be original in their own ways, which are all new and unsullied by contact with the boring and complicated past, and which therefore all resemble each other in their freshness and innocence and simplicity.” He appears to mean what he says, but it is hard to be sure.