Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  I ask him if he thinks Babbletower will attract a large following. Yes, he says, he should think so. I ask him why, what about his book will attract them?

  “Oh,” he says, “the world is full of people doing horrible things to other people for love, and people love to read about people doing horrible things to other people because they want to learn how to do horrible things themselves to the people they love and they want to learn to write about that, naturally, it is part of it, writing it down. It keeps the world going, like Genet’s movement of goods from place to place.”

  He bites into a great pastry cabbage and smiles at me through spurts of cream.

  Rupert Parrott, when he sees this, shouts at Hugh Pink. His shouting always has a breathy quality, as though the shouter himself is trying to suppress it. He shouts that Mason must be prevented from giving any more interviews. He is making them all look ridiculous. Hugh Pink replies pacifically that the chances are that he gave a perfectly reasonable interview, but that the journalist took against him, or against the cake shop, or something. Or against his smell, says Hugh Pink, which she did have the good grace not to mention, though it can’t have gone down very well with the meringue. Hugh says he supposes the interview will be good for sales, which it is. Babbletower passes three thousand and continues to sell.

  • • •

  Frederica is stopped by Jude outside her office. He pulls out the growing sheaf of reviews from his inner pocket and peels off the interview. He is outraged. He is particularly outraged by Marianna Toogood’s reporting of “crises de foie” in the novel of Phyllis Pratt. “They are illiterate, these young things,” he says. “Crise de foi, sans e, crisis of the Faith; crise de foie, with an e, liver attack, as in foie gras, fat liver. Pig-ignorant.”

  “It could be a joke. A pun.”

  “Don’t be silly. She’s not capable of any such refinement. Pure pig-ignorance. Look what she did with my remarks about the revolting students’ revolting reluctance to learn the rudiments or study the great who have gone their way. She can’t recognise irony.”

  “Journalists never can. Most people can’t. Rule One. As she should have known, since you can’t see it’s her joke about the crise de foie or foi.”

  “She made me look a fool. She didn’t report any of the things I actually did say about my book, about my people, about my meaning. Only made animadversions on my teeth.”

  “You do ask for it, you know.”

  “Ask for what? I ask for nothing.”

  Frederica catches sight of another, newer review.

  “Is that Anthony Burgess? Can I look?”

  Burgess’s review opens with a disquisition on evil. He quotes Golding’s oracular saying “Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.” He suggests that the English have always been uneasy with evil—“They don’t go beyond right and wrong, they lean naturally towards the comedy of manners, where virtue is inextricably entangled with Class, whereas on the Catholic and Calvinist continent, writers are not afraid to acknowledge the whiff of sulphur from the Pit, the eternal confrontation between Good and Evil.” He cites Al Alvarez’s rousing introduction to his anthology of modern poetry prepared to measure up to the horrors of our history (the Holocaust, the Bomb): “Beyond the Gentility Principle.”

  Jude Mason, says Burgess, is far out beyond the Gentility Principle. In the battle between Saint Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, who believed that fallen man was naturally evil, and Pelagius, the hopeful Hibernian heretic, who believed that man could by free will and reasonable exercise of virtue achieve salvation, who, asked Burgess, is not instinctively on the side of Pelagius? And who, who ponders long and deeply, does not come to fear, to accept, that the grim Bishop was nevertheless in the right of it, that there is some quasi-mechanical system of destructiveness, betrayal, cruelty, in which we are entrapped, however we struggle?

  Jude Mason, says Burgess, is that new kind of 1960s artist, the Fabulator. His Fable enacts the battle between Augustine and Pelagius but in a society more like the post-Revolutionary France, where the sardonic Marquis de Sade promulgated his theories of freedom and terror, a renegade Augustinian, whereas the “sweetly dotty” Charles Fourier constructed a Utopian vision of Harmony where the stars would sing together because human passional and sexual freedom and bliss had heated the universe and changed the music of the spheres, had turned the oceans to a kind of agreeable lemonade, sharks to supertankers and supertigers to supertransport. Jude Mason’s people, says Burgess, are trapped in their Projector’s Fourierist utopian project, which is a mechanical conveyor-belt to Sadeian subways and dungeons.

  This book, says Burgess, portentously, mischievously, is in great danger of being prosecuted for obscenity, for a “tendency to deprave and corrupt.” Can it be acquitted on that account? True pornography, he says, is kinetic, it moves to action, it titillates, it irritates and excites flesh and spirit to seek relief. It does not follow that because a writer’s concern is deeply moral, deeply concerned with right and wrong, that what he writes will necessarily lack this kinetic quality. “The value of art is always diminished by the presence of elements that move to action: the pornographic and the didactic are, in a purely aesthetic judgement, equally to be condemned.” Jude Mason is both didactic and pornographic: it is to be supposed that he believes his own stance to be that of his creation Samson Origen, who professes a Nietzschean eschewal of the libido and all its works. But he has chosen to construct his fable, his machine, his clockwork, in parody of the drives and devices it criticises, the sado-masochistic panoply of straps and knives, the pornographic relish of human surfaces and orgiastic contortions. Does his titillation titillate? Do his switches set in motion cogs which turn on switches which set imitation in motion? The greatest works of art are not kinetic but static. Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Rainbow “discharge their emotions inside the book itself, producing the catharsis of art.” Jude Mason, though he has considerable talent and ingenuity, is working in a more dubious and dangerous mode. Freud and Mephistopheles might smile mockingly at this Projector as he smiles mockingly at his own Culvert.

  Babbletower appears in March 1966. In April Harold Wilson wins a General Election with a greatly increased effective majority of ninety-seven. Babbletower has now sold six thousand copies and aroused much discussion. Alexander Wedderburn reports to Frederica that Naomi Lurie, the Oxford don on the Steerforth Committee, has told him in confidence that the Director of Public Prosecutions has asked her to read and report on Babbletower, to give an opimon on whether a prosecution under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act would be appropriate, and whether expert opinion would be heavily in favour of the book. Dr. Lurie, says Alexander, doesn’t like the book but believes it can be argued to have literary merit, and should be in print.

  One of the new Labour MPs in the new Parliament is Dr. Hermia Cross, a physician and Methodist Lay Reader whose Liverpool constituency contains both a smart suburb and a racially pullulating series of council estates. Dr. Cross, surprisingly, asks the Attorney-General in the House whether he intends to take any steps about a dangerous and disgusting book which has received misguided praise in some quarters. The Attorney-General, Sir Mervyn Bates, replies that he believes that the peak of the book’s sales is past, that it is priced too high to be widely circulated, and that Literary Criticism, on the whole, appeared to believe the work had some merit. Dr. Cross retorts that she believes the book presents acts of cruelty in a seductive light, and that we are living through a time of horror when it is unfortunately clear that literary works can influence minds predisposed to evil to commit acts of cruelty and degradation. The trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley is being heard as she speaks, though she makes no direct reference to it. She is backed up by Sir Evelyn Maiden, a Tory MP from Suffolk, who says he has seen the book, “and it is filthy, filthy, filthy muck.” She is also backed up by other Tory backbenchers. In the Sunday papers that weekend there are articles mocking the protesting MPs, and a cartoon of Dr. Cross dressed as a
governess brandishing a whip over a crawling bare-arsed figure who is presumably Rupert Parrott, since it is clearly not Jude Mason. There is also an article entitled “Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones” by Roger Magog, which argues hotly and passionately that it is always wrong to restrict the written or the spoken word, “because precisely, words cannot hurt you, every man has the right and the freedom to make up his own mind how to react to incitements and temptations and actions of whatever kind, and what we should do for the weak and wrong-headed is educate them to judge better, not suppress other’s freedoms. We must be vigilant, but not repressive …” On the following Monday, Dr. Cross announces that if the DPP will not act as it should, she will take out a private prosecution against the publishers and author of Babbletower under Section 3 of the 1959 Act. This—and the unfortunate coincidence of the Moors Murders trial—brings about a change of heart in the DPP, which announces that it now intends to bring a prosecution against the book.

  Frederica hears this news from Rupert Parrott himself. She goes round to Elderflower Court with a heap of reports, and a basket to carry away further books. Parrott is sitting behind his desk. He says, “Now see what you have brought upon me!” and hands Frederica the official letter. “They have seized my stock,” he says. His round cheeks are pink, his eyes glittering. “We shall fight,” he says. “We shall fight, no matter what the cost, no matter what the pain. It is a matter of principle, of freedom of conscience, of the right to free speech. If people like this are allowed to win, we shall be back in a society where burning books is a step on the way to burning people.”

  He looks an unlikely martyr for free speech, with his little curls, his mustard-coloured waistcoat and his tartan tie. Frederica says, “What will you do?”

  “Elect for trial by jury when we come before the magistrates. Assemble a team of expert witnesses who will make it once and for all impossible to attack literary works. Demolish Mrs. Whitehouse and Dr. Cross and their pro-censorship movements. Start a Defence Fund with appeals to other publishers for solidarity. Bear witness.”

  “What does Jude say?”

  “To tell you the truth, I could do without Jude. He is our weak link. He will make a dreadful impression on a jury. Apart from the way he looks, he has a tendency to counter-productive frivolity. I count on you, Frederica, to keep him in order, that is, to make him see sense. We must have a good Brief. I thought of Augustine Weighall. We must talk to the solicitors. We must explore every possibility. There can be no question of losing. We cannot afford to lose.”

  He purses his mouth and looks directly at Frederica. “We need all the help we can get.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” says Frederica, not sure what that is, what role she can have.

  “But screw your courage to the sticking-place,” says Rupert Parrott, “and we’ll not fail. Who said that?”

  “Lady Macbeth, I think.”

  “Ah,” says Rupert Parrott. He laughs, a warm, rueful laugh. “Not a good choice. I must be careful. You can’t make mistakes like that, under cross-examination.”

  “She didn’t exactly fail.”

  “In the long run she did. She got damned spots on her hands and died in a nightmare. I intend to win this case and die contented in my bed.”

  Frederica in the first part of 1966 has her own problems. Her divorce is apparently no nearer being heard, and she is besieged by a long series of letters from Nigel’s solicitors about Leo’s education. “If the boy is to go to Swineburn, as is to be hoped, or to some other Public School, he should already be studying Latin and French, in order eventually to be prepared to sit the Common Entrance examination. Mr. Tiger’s client is reliably informed that no such preparation is or will be available at the William Blake Elementary School. He is perfectly prepared to pay his son’s fees at a local Preparatory School to be agreed, and would be glad to be informed as expeditiously as possible of any arrangements that could be made for his satisfaction in this regard.” Frederica snips and pastes these messages into her Laminations—“French facilities Latin elementary all confusion opportunity languages”—and sends off spirited messages to Mr. Begbie, who translates them into lawyers’ lingua franca.

  “Tell him that as far as I know he himself never passed an exam, doesn’t speak any languages and never reads a book, whereas I have distinctions in four languages at A Level and a First Class English degree from Cambridge, and share a house with a Principal in the Ministry of Education, so might be thought to have my son’s educational interests at heart. Tell him my father is a distinguished schoolmaster and no one could care more than we do about education and civilisation, neither of which are my husband’s strong points. Thank you.”

  She describes this situation with indignation to Alan Melville and Tony Watson, the chameleon and the fake of her Cambridge days. Alan, the chameleon, whose elegant manner covers a ferociously competitive struggle to break out of a Glaswegian working-class world, wonders whether Leo might not be quite happy in a boarding school in the country, “with educational standards” and civilised boys. Tony, who is the son of a rich socialist man of letters and was sent to prep school and public school, who pretends to be a working-class chap, with woollen shirts and donkey jackets, is all for leaving Leo where he is. “If they bash him in the playground, you’ll see. If he isn’t learning anything, you’ll notice. Alan doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Thirty little boys in a locker-room, all of them wanting to cry for their mummies in bed at night, is nevertheless like a crocodile pond, with jaws snapping and the fattest getting fatter. And you just don’t know what sort of pervert’s putting your son to bed at night. I do.”

  “You survived,” says Alan.

  “So did you, all your wasteland gangs and playground battles.”

  “Some don’t,” says Alan.

  “I know,” says Tony, who is reporting the Moors Murders trial, and living in a hotel in Chester. The discussion of where Leo will be least vulnerable has a new edge because of the fates of Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride, whose ordinary, gentle, childish, vanished faces appear daily in softened grey newsprint everywhere. Tony has heard the home-made tapes of the little girl crying out to be released, to go home to her mother, saying that she is frightened, being told to shut up and keep still. At the end of these tapes are children’s voices singing Christmas music. On the reverse, Tony tells Frederica and Alan, is the crazy humour of the “Goon Show.” Don’t tell me, says Alan. I don’t want to know any more. I don’t myself, says Tony. I don’t want to go back there, I don’t want to be a reporter, I don’t want to know. Frederica, her heart thumping, her gorge rising, distressed by the juxtaposition of this and Leo, by fear of losing him, by fear, by fear, finds she is weeping. Alan and Tony put their arms around her as she sobs. A car coughs in the street. Tony puts down the blind.

  Frederica has also received several visits from Paul Ottokar. John Ottokar appears less frequently, and never telephones. So that when Frederica sees the blond face with its sweep of gold hair at the basement window, or the figure standing waiting in a black PVC mackintosh when she comes home from her shopping, she learns to assume it will be Paul, who, unlike John, has no regular job to go to. Even so, it is difficult to tell. They hunch their shoulders the same way. They stand with their feet at the same angle. Their grave, tentative, charming smile is the same smile.

  “I thought I’d drop in. I hope you don’t mind. I’m at a loose end.”

  “I don’t mind, no. But I’ve got a lot of work to do. Essays to correct. Some writing. Have a cup of coffee.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  He does not keep still. He prowls around her basement room, taking books out of the bookshelves, putting them back differently. He picks up paperweights and balances them, and makes a feint of dropping them, and smiles, and restores them. He says, “Where’s your record-player? Where’s your music? Let’s put on some music.”

  “I don’t have a record-player. I’m tone-deaf. I like silence. I can’t th
ink in music.”

  “You won’t get very far in swinging London. You’ll need to know about music to know my brother. We’ve always had music. We played in a group, did he tell you? We played in the Aldermaston marches. He plays the horn and I play the clarinet. We’re good. I’m forming a new group. I want him to come and play. Neither of us is really good without the other. We anticipate. We hear each other’s thoughts. It’s got a lovely name, my new group.”

  “Has it?”

  “It’s called Zag and the Ziggy-Ziggy Zy-Goats. Clever, don’t you think?”

  He prowls.

  “You should come and hear us. When we play, we’re good together. Other times, we aren’t. I took it hard, Frederica, that my brother should have signed up for all your book classes without so much as a word to me. I took it hard, but I understood it. Both of us feel both things, you know, the need to be two, and the need to be one. We don’t always feel them simultaneously. I read all your books from your class, when I was in the—when I was in retreat. Dr. Faustus and Death in Venice, The Castle and The Idiot, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, I read all that. I made sure you’d be interested in music.”

  “No. It’s been left out of me.”

  “I’ll play to you, one day. We’ll play to you. Everyone now, all the time, understands the world through music. Books are like little scratches on the window. Inside, your soul spreads out in music. Music is wiser than pyramids of books.”

  “Sit down, you’re making me nervous.”

  “I’m nervous myself. I’m intruding. I’m being rude, I’m doing what John won’t like. Forgive me.”