Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  These, the Twenty-four in whom the Divine Family

  Appear’d; and they were One in Him. A Human Vision!

  Human Divine, Jesus the Saviour, blessed for ever and ever.

  Selsey true friend, who afterwards submitted to be devour’d

  By the waves of Despair, whose Emanation rose above

  The food, and was nam’d Chichester, lovely, mild & gentle! Lo!

  Her lambs bleat to the sea-fowls’ cry, lamenting still for Albion.

  Submitting to be call’d the son of Los, and his Emanations

  Submitting to be call’d Enitharmon’s daughters and be born

  In vegetable mould, created by the Hammer and Loom

  In Bowlahoola & Allamanda where the Dead wail night & day.

  I call them by their English names: English, the rough basement,

  Los built the stubborn structure of the Language, acting against

  Albion’s melancholy, who must else have been a Dumb despair.

  The Bard steps forward. He says:

  “Let us celebrate the mythopoeic imagination of Albion. Let us celebrate the Makers, who made systems and were not enslaved by those of other men, but broke through to the Vision of what lies beyond Language, to the eternal symbols and the unchanging Light. Let us celebrate the sevenfold vision of William Blake and the true Jerusalem; let us celebrate also J. R. R. Tolkien, who single-handed forged the Elvish languages and the myths of Middle-Earth and the lands beyond the Western Sea. What you are about to see is a Rite and an Invocation, a Calling and a Dance, and who knows what shadowy forms, or creatures of light, may not come into our ken as we weave together these two powerful nests of language, text and textures, into the warp and woof of a new Cloth of Dreams …”

  The figures on the stage begin to chant, and to pass long, shining threads from one to the other. The Elves sing of Earendil and Luvah. The Bard describes the work of the Emanations.

  The Feminine separates from the Masculine and both from Man

  Ceasing to be his Emanations, Life to themselves assuming:

  And while they circumscribe his Brain and while they circumscribe

  His Heart and while they circumscribe his Loins, a Veil and Net

  Of Veins of red Blood grows around them like a scarlet robe.

  The threads are now mixed with red threads, and one of the Bards is turning in the weaving like a bobbin.

  Covering them from the sight of Man, like the woven veil of Sleep

  Such as the Flowers of Beulah weave to be their Funeral Mantles;

  But dark, opaque, tender to touch, and painful and agonising

  To the embrace of love and the mingling of soft fibres

  Of tender affection, that no more the Masculine mingles

  With the Feminine, but the Sublime is shut out from the Pathos

  In howling torment, to build stone walls of separation, compelling

  The Pathos to weave curtains of hiding secrecy from the torment.

  The Elves sing of the terrors of Orthanc and Minas Morgul; of the web of Shelob and the Eye in Barad-dur. A soft voice sings of the hope of severing the bonds, breaking the bounds, making a bridge of rainbow light.

  Happenings are happening all over London. Frederica has come to this one with Alan Melville. The Bard is Richmond Bly, and Alan and Frederica are present out of morbid curiosity. It is hard to see what is happening as the stage is full of smoke and threads of silk and swirling garments and weaving, and it is hard to hear, as there is an accompaniment of breathy flute music, pan-pipes and tinkling bells. There is also a vague noise of disturbance from outside, from the car park which adjoins the theatre-department building where Richmond Bly’s Rite is being performed. It is a noise of motor bikes revving, and drumming, African drumming, Frederica thinks vaguely, and gongs, and tambourines, and cymbals. This noise swells. The mythopoeic celebrants of Albion dance meditatively on. A voice says, “I am the Lady Galadriel, I wear the Ring of Water.” The noise from the car park has diminished, and appears to have gone away, but then returns in a much louder burst. It is clear that the noisemakers have left the car park and entered the building through the basement. A kind of rhythmic drumming and stamping begins to mount from the depths. Alan Melville says, “I knew we ought to come, I knew it would be interesting.” Frederica says, “Interesting might be the wrong word.”

  The invaders swarm through the theatre. Many of them are naked, painted with flame-shapes in red lipstick, or corkscrew patterns in what looks like woad. They are carrying posters on sticks, most of which depict the Buddhist monk who immolated himself by fire in Vietnam, a cross-legged seated body clothed in saffron, clothed in flame, clothed in smoke, keeling over on stone. Others are carrying stout staves on which are impaled pigs’ heads, sliced in half, showing teeth and vertebrae and brains. They run up to the stage. They are many, they are male and female. The drumming intensifies. They fight with the robed figures. They seize the pipes and little bells, they play their own rhythm. A figure in black, a kind of blond demon, leaps to the front of the stage, swaying to the drumming, and takes the microphone from its place beside the Bard. “Let’s have a poem,” says the poet. It is Mickey Impey. “Let’s have a poem! Zag is coming! Let’s have a proper poem.” He begins to chant:

  The Zy-Goats dance

  To the ziggurat

  They dance and prance

  For the Cat in the Hat

  The great gold Cat

  In his shiny Hat

  In his super-sleek sanguine

  Shiny Hat.

  By the light of the skoobs

  They waggle their boobs

  Wiggle their pubes

  Snort in their tubes

  For the glittering Cat

  By the ziggurat.

  Goat and compasses

  Cat and fiddle

  Lush farrago and Tarradiddle.

  Amphisbæna

  And alley-cat

  What’s the meaning

  Of this and that?

  Scallywags

  And Pleiades

  Orthoptera

  Helicoptera

  THE BEES THE BEES THE BEES KNEES.

  Spirally spirally spirally twirl

  Widdershins widdershins widdershins whirl

  Coil recoil

  Trouble and toil

  The cosmic pot on the cosmic boil.

  Shimmy your pelvis

  Twirl your toes

  Rotate the honey pot

  Roger the rose.

  Come and dance

  Dance and prance

  To the ziggurat

  And the great gold Cat

  In his super-sleek sanguine

  Shiny Hat.

  The audience laugh and chant with him. Paul-Zag in his white satin trousers and jester’s jacket comes through the audience, unsmiling and beautiful. He steps up on to the stage. He is followed by his Group, all in white satin, carrying baby-baths, pink plastic baby-baths full of something dark and slopping. Richmond Bly, masked and robed, steps forward to confront the intruder, tripping over the microphone wire attached to Mickey Impey, recovering himself.

  “Excuse me,” says Richmond Bly, behind his sun mask. “This is a serious Rite.”

  “I know,” says Paul-Zag. “It’s a Happening, It’s all happening. You’re happening, I’m happening, we’re happening, it’s really happy. Take delight in the unforeseen. Allow me to make you an honorary member of Zag and the Szyzgy (Ziggy) Zy-Goats.”

  He waves forward his followers. The stage is crowded with grinning half-pigs’-heads on sticks, with burning monks, with singing and dancing.

  “You are a jolly goodfellow,” says Zag to Richmond Bly. “And I am a jolly goodfellow. Let us be joined.”

  A young woman wearing a dead poppy and a few feathers dips her arms into the baby-bath, which is full of pale intestines in dark blood. Zag lifts a string of them above his head and winds them round the neck of Richmond Bly, round his own neck. The red runs down their white clothes, both their wh
ite clothes.

  “No,” says Richmond Bly. “I always—faint at the sight of blood.”

  “Loss of consciousness is good for you,” says Mickey Impey. “Dissolve the one in the many.”

  “No, really,” says Richmond Bly, plucking at his fleshy necklace without being able to bring himself to touch it.

  “You are not the Wizard of Oz,” says Mickey Impey, snatching off Bly’s sun mask. Paul Ottokar stands smiling, grave and lovely, dripping blood.

  The followers are stuffing their trousers with offal, with intestines, and drawing them dripping out through their flies.

  Richmond Bly’s heavy face goes lemon-coloured, goes candlewax. He falls heavily forward, fulfilling his word. His face slides in pigs’ blood. Some of the audience laugh. The drummers drum. The drummers drum. The drumming makes it better, increases the laughter.

  “Make things happen,” cries Mickey Impey. “Happenings don’t have audiences. We are all actors. Move, you tubs of lard, get off your bums, come and dance.”

  “All the same,” says Frederica. It’s not real.”

  “The pigs’ heads are real,” says Alan. “And the monk was real.”

  “Oh hell,” says Frederica. “I’m going home. I’ve got to relieve the baby-sitter. No one in the future will think there was anyone who had to leave a Happening to relieve a baby-sitter.”

  A smell of burning begins to mix with the smells of butchery and incense. A smell of burning paint. There is the soft sound of an explosion. Someone begins to call out, “Clear the theatre. Fire! Fire!” People push and cry. The drums drum. It turns out later that someone has set fire to various small skoob towers in the corners of the studios, and that a can of acrylic paint has exploded. Frederica hurries down the stairs amongst clouds of smoke through a river of foam. She does not wait to see whether the building will burn down—the baby-sitter is waiting. She goes down into the Underground, on the long, plunging escalator down which the sculptor Stone wandered wildly to his death.

  The escalators are crowded. Frederica sometimes studies every face, looking for the differences, the similarities, the thoughts, and sometimes glides past, seeing all the white spaces as identical. Tonight she sees nothing, no faces, a white procession. A voice cries, from below, “Frederica!”

  She sees his face coming up to her from the dark. Clean-cut, well-groomed, blond over a black suit and a black plastic raincoat, John Ottokar. As they pass, she shouts, truculent, “What have you got to say for yourself?”

  “I was scared.”

  “No excuse.”

  “But true. Wait for me.”

  “No, I won’t.” She is enraged. But when she reaches the bottom she regrets this. She hesitates, turns, runs round, and gets on to the up escalator. She meets John Ottokar, again about half-way, coming down.

  He says, “I said Wait!”

  “And I said No. And then I changed my mind.”

  They pass and sail on. They are very long escalators, the longest in the Underground. She thinks she hears him call “Wait” again, and does wait, stands at the head of the escalator, looking down at the faces coming up, all different in the unearthly lights, none of them his. After a long time she makes her way down again. He is not at the foot of the escalator either. And the baby-sitter is waiting. She walks through arches, she gives a coin to a singer who is softly asking, “Where have all the flowers gone?” She waits on the platform, looking under the dark arch, smelling old, old soot, thinking of the dead Stone and the living Ottokar.

  There are plenty of seats in the train. She sits by herself, thinking that this is not her time, she did not enjoy the Happening, though it had its interest. She looks at her shadowy face in the dark window. White, staring, with dark eyes, darker than they are, smudged with exhaustion. A transparent paleface, a ghost, more elegant than the real flesh in a shining mirror. She meets her own eyes and catches the look of someone standing, farther along, someone reflected, by an angle of the light, two or three or four times, his face upon his face upon his face, like fine paper masks, but really only one, one face, John Ottokar. She smiles tentatively at him in the dark glass. His mouth lifts in an equally tentative smile. She moves her head, fractionally, the ghost-light in the red hair, and he nods. She hears the rustle of PVC, she smells, amongst the soot and cigarette smoke, faintly, the blond hair, the presence. She does not look round. She says to the glass, “I’ve learned to do without you.”

  “I never doubted that. The question is, Can you be doing with me?”

  “I might.”

  “That’s good.”

  They touch hands, and smile at each other’s shadow in the glass.

  After all the trouble, the announcement in the Press in December is curt.

  Babbletower wins appeal. Judge misdirected jury. He dropped them in at the deep end and left them to swim with no directions.

  “The appeal judges found in favour of the publishers Bowers and Eden, and of Jude Mason, author of Babbletower: A Story for the Children of Our Time. The publishers had appealed on eleven grounds. The appeal judges dismissed most of these, but agreed that the trial judge had been unnecessarily disparaging of ‘expert’ witnesses, and had not given the jury sufficient direction concerning the defence of literary merit, ‘dropping them in at the deep end and leaving them to swim as best they could’ in the words of one of the appeal judges.”

  There are photographs of Rupert Parrott, drinking champagne with his legal advisers. There are only old photographs of Jude Mason. Daniel brings these newspapers to Jude, who is still lying in Daniel’s bed. He is less skeletal and is wearing new pyjamas, provided by Ginnie Greenhill. Jude sits up and scrutinises the papers expressionlessly.

  “So that’s all right,” says Daniel. “You can get up now, and make a lot of money, and be famous.”

  “No. I want none of it. They’ve picked me clean, I want none of it.”

  “You’ve been justified.”

  “Some said one thing. Some more have said another. It is not good to be talked over, picked over.”

  “Well, however that may be, my friend, you’ve got to get up now, and go elsewhere.”

  “You should have thought of that before you brought me here.”

  “I did. I said you could stay until you were better. Now, I think you’d better go.”

  “I may not be better.”

  “That’s a risk we’ve got to take. You can get up and buy me a drink.”

  “I might,” says Jude. “I’ll think about it.”

  The three friends looked at the heap of bones, white bones, fresh bones, skulls and ribs and shins and carpals and tarsals chucked together, with a rag of cooked flesh here and there upon them.

  “The Krebs have come, and gone,” said Samson Origen.

  “We must not touch these,” said Colonel Grim. “In case they return, and learn we are still alive.”

  “Let us go away from here,” said Turdus Cantor. A beast began to howl somewhere far away in the forest, and a great bird turned and turned above them in a hot blue sky. So the three old men began to walk away across the valley, looking back from time to time at the Tower, and the grim mound at its foot, until it was so far away that its human origin could not be distinguished, and it looked like a chance heap of rocks, sprouting green here and there, with what might be shells or pebbles clustered palely at its foot. And they went on walking, and if the Krebs did not catch up with them, they are walking still.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A great many people have encouraged my curiosity about a great many things, from snails to obsolete legal forms to ethnomethodology. I am indebted to Steve Jones, Steven Rose, Arnold Feinstein, Fran Ashcroft and Lawrence Razavi for help with matters scientific, to Richard du Cann, Andrew Pugh, Steve Uglow, Arthur Davidson, Razi Mireskandari, Simon Goldberg and Marion Boyars for legal aid, to Laurie Taylor for instruction in ethnomethodology, to Carmen Callil, Martin Asher, Steve Fountain, John Forrester and Lisa Apignanesi for help with the ideas and fashions of th
e sixties, to John Sutherland for help with the history of trials for obscenity, to Claudine Vassas and Daniel Fabre for information on birdlore and the folklore of the snail, and to Claudine for the myth of the ziz, to Ignes Sôdre, Michael Worton, Jean-Louis and Anne Chevalier, my husband, Peter Duffy, Jenny Uglow and Jonathan Burnham for helpful discussions of ideas. Randolph Quirk and fellow members of the Kingman Committee provided ideas about language. Hazel Bell’s indexes to The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, though not designed as author’s aids, were very helpful for that purpose. I am also deeply indebted to all the members of my extra-mural classes in Kensington and Marylebone. Jonathan Barker made indispensable suggestions for reading. David Royle talked to me about art in the sixties and lent me books in the nineties. Helena Caletta and John Saumarez-Smith are both more research guides than booksellers. Books I have found particularly helpful are Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, Robert Hewison’s Too Much, Richard Neville’s Playpower, Bernice Martin’s A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change and James Britton’s Language and Learning. Bryan Clarke’s article “The Causes of Biological Diversity” drew my attention to the remarks of Sir Thomas Browne on faces, alphabets and diversity. Writers whose ideas changed me in the sixties and are still important to me are Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and George Steiner. I have briefly borrowed a character from one of Iris Murdoch’s sixties novels.

  I would like to thank Humphrey Stone for designing the text, and drawing the snails.

  I am particularly grateful to Elizabeth Allen for legal and archival research on obscenity, the Moors Murders and on divorce, and to Gill Marsden for work on the manuscript and for keeping things in order. I am, as always, not sure what I would do without the London Library.

  Any mistakes in this book are all my own.

  ALSO BY A. S. BYATT

  ANGELS & INSECTS

  In “Morpho Eugenia,” a shipwrecked naturalist is rescued by a family whose clandestine passions come to seem as inscrutible as the behavior of insects. And in “The Conjugal Angel,” a circle of fictional mediums finds itself haunted by a real historical personage.