Babel Tower (53 page)
Authors: A.S. Byatt
“To
Babbletower
!”
They drink.
Frederica sits in the basement in Hamelin Square. She tries to write, and cannot. The paper is blank in front of her. It is early evening. The flat still smells faintly of new paint. She is looking at the area wall through the slats of a buttercup-yellow Venetian blind, which casts a ghostly gold and violet-grey shadowed lattice, or grid, on the white expanse of the paper. She has a new writing table in pale pine-wood and a deep blue plastic chair on chrome legs.
She is surrounded by writing and cannot write. Tony Watson has shown some of her reports for Bowers and Eden to the new literary editor of
Spyglass,
a cultural weekly founded by a minor member of Bloomsbury, surviving with a precarious circulation and a disproportionate reputation for wit and influence. Frederica is now part of a rotating team of four novel columnists, and is therefore surrounded with cardboard boxes of hardback novels. She can review four or even five of these at once, giving the most important perhaps two hundred fifty words and the least a thirty-word sentence. She has learned, the hard way, what you can and can’t say in two hundred fifty words. You cannot summarise a plot in that space: you can only hint, at an atmosphere, at an analogy (Amis-territory, Murdochian moral intricacy, Sparkian wit and
bizarrerie,
Storey-north, Snow-corridors). However often they may tell you you should not use adjectives, here you have no choice; adjectives must substitute for discrimination and for narrative:
shocking, flat, murky, torpid, energetic, ferocious, intricate, gripping.
Clichés have become clichés because they are concise, useful and evocative (more adjectives) but Frederica has her standards. She eschews both
vivid
and
vibrant,
both
brilliant, hilarious, maxi
and
mini.
From feeling like an ugly sister clamping a bleeding foot into a glass slipper, she has come to enjoy picking her way precisely through the possibilities. She plays fair. Any really waspish sentence must be balanced by one purely descriptive. Every week two or three novelists write in with at least a thousand indignant words pointing out what she has
not
said. The column makes a substantial addition to her income, more through the sale of suitcases of rejected books than for the words themselves. For every book she reviews, she reads and sells
perhaps twenty. She knows a great deal about how not to write a novel.
On the other side of her desk is a heap of books for the novel class. She is constructing a lecture on love and marriage in
Howards End
and
Women in Love.
She has written:
“Margaret Schlegel’s credo is ‘only connect’ but she has to admit failure. Rupert Birkin spends most of
Women in Love
vilifying ‘connection’ and expressing intemperate suspicion of and antagonism to the word ‘love.’ But he ends in a mystical vision of oneness and connectedness, beyond language.
“Both writers, both novels, assert an antagonism between ‘the machine age’ and human passion. Both, in this sense, are pastoral, implying that love was fuller, or easier, or more natural in some primitive, Edenic past, before ‘society’ became complex, or work mechanised.
“Why?”
She thinks she might abandon her empty page for the lecture, but knows she ought not. This thing must be written. “Just write down everything you think relevant, every example of behaviour you object to, find unacceptable,” said Arnold Begbie. “And then I’ll formalise it. I’ll write it up.”
She feels nauseous. She has made three or four attempts. She has written:
He hit me.
My husband hit me.
Nigel hit me.
This last heavily crossed out.
He struck me with the side of his hand, intending to hurt.
He is trained to hurt.
He pointed this out.
She has changed the word “struck” to the word “hit.” She has a vague idea that this piece of writing should be bare, unemotive, scrupulously neutral, whatever that might mean. “Struck” carries a stronger emotional charge.
When I locked myself in the lavatory, he turned off the house electricity, to leave me in the dark.
Does this act, which was indeed frightening and humiliating, class as cruelty, or as petty comedy?
I was frightened. Afraid. Alarmed.
All crossed out.
When I tried to run away, he threw an axe after me.
He has had military training. He meant to hit me.
Is Frederica’s opinion on this evidence or not evidence? Is it even her opinion? She remembers the smell of the soil in the night, the wriggling horizon, a sound of rushing wings, which was probably only in her head. She does not remember the impact of the blow. She remembers the later seeping and oozing of the wound, the changing colours of the bruising.
Nigel’s horrified face.
He is not a monster.
The wound hurts her memory less than the refusal, both angry and bland—and how can one man be both at once?—to allow her to
work.
Than the assumption that it was a question of allowing. Though it was. She does not think either Mr. Begbie or the Divorce Court will be interested in these reflections. She writes:
He steadfastly refused to allow me to discuss my undertaking any work of any kind, though I married on the assumption that I would do so. He claimed to admire my intelligence and independence.
Claimed to? Did he? What do those words
mean
?
He shut my father’s head in a door.
He attacked my brother-in-law, who is a clergyman.
The document is nauseating because it is the skeleton of a document that could truly plead, that could make its reader weep for pity and laugh grimly at human folly.
The document is nauseating because it is a lie. It recounts true facts, for a valid purpose—to get Frederica out of a marriage that has become a trap—but it recounts these things one-sidedly, in inappropriate (inappropriate? lying? inadequate?) language.
It was really my fault, because he whole-heartedly wanted to marry me, he was
sure,
however foolish this turned out to be, and I did not, I always held back, I always knew I should not have done it.
I married because I was a woman, to get it over with, to stop thinking about whether to marry or not, or what, to know where I was. And then I didn’t like where I was, which I should have known if I had had any sense, so it is
all my fault.
I can’t write that, for every reason.
We might have worked something out, all the same, if …
He was never at home.
What sort of whingeing complaint is that?
I was locked up with his womenfolk, like Mariana in the Moated Grange, but worse.
I can’t write this
stuff.
Every ink-blob destroys a bit more of the truthful balanced memory I am trying to hang on to, of a sort of unspoken justice, of a kind of saving not-looking-but-knowing about the whole knotty mess of the experience.
She writes: “Shit.” “Fuck.” She crosses them out.
I could write it if it was a parody of this sort of document, a work of art or fiction
pretending to be
one of these.
I married him because I was beglamoured by Margaret Schlegel, because I was a reader, dear Reader.
I married him because my sister was dead and he comforted me.
This piece of paper is not about why I married him. It is about what he did, those actions of his, that offer me a way out of the decision I took.
I write things so that someone can sit in judgement on him, and I sit in judgement on myself, the one entails the other; they are both, I was going to say intolerable, but what I mean is, very nasty.
She turns to her lecture. She will work a little on that, and then take another run at the dreadful catalogue.
Howards End,
Ch. 22
Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never
joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy going.
It was hard going in the roads of Mr. Wilcox’s soul. From boyhood he had neglected them. “I am not a fellow who bothers about my own inside.” Outwardly he was cheerful, reliable and brave; but within, all had reverted to chaos, ruled, as far as it was ruled at all, by an incomplete asceticism. Whether as boy, husband or widower, he had always the sneaking belief that bodily passion is bad, a belief that is desirable only when held passionately. Religion had confirmed him. The words that were read aloud on Sunday to him and to other respectable men were the words that had once kindled the souls of St. Catherine and St. Francis into a white-hot hatred of the carnal. He could not be as the saints and love the Infinite with a seraphic ardour, but he could be a little ashamed of loving a wife. “Amabat; amare timebat.” And it was here that Margaret hoped to help him.
It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen to be at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.…
But she failed. For there was one quality in Henry for which she was never prepared, however much she reminded herself of it: his obtuseness. He simply did not notice things, and there was no more to be said.
Women in Love,
Ch. 13
“What I want is a strange conjunction with you—” he said quietly; “—not meeting and mingling;—you are quite right:—but an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings:—as the stars balance each other.”
She looked at him. He was very earnest, and earnestness was always rather ridiculous, commonplace, to her. It made her feel unfree and uncomfortable. But why drag in the stars.
Ch. 27
This marriage with her was his resurrection and his life.
All this she could not know. She wanted to be made much of, to be adored. There were infinite distances of silence between them. How could he tell her of
the immanence of her beauty, that was not form, or weight, or colour, but something like a strange golden light! How could he know himself what her beauty lay in, for him. He said “Your nose is beautiful, your chin is adorable.” But it sounded like lies, and she was disappointed, hurt. Even when he said, whispering with truth, “I love you, I love you,” it was not the real truth. It was something beyond love, such a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of having transcended the old existence. How could he say “I” when he was something new and unknown, not himself at all? This I, this old formula of the age, was a dead letter.
In the new, superfine bliss, a peace superseding knowledge, there was no I and you, there was only the third, unrealised wonder, the wonder of existing not as oneself, but in a consummation of my being and her being in a new one, a new paradisal unit regained from the duality. Nor can I say “I love you” when I have ceased to be, and you have ceased to be: we are both caught up and transcended into a new oneness where everything is silent, because there is nothing to answer, all is perfect and at one. Speech travels between the separate parts. But in the perfect One there is perfect silence of bliss.
They were married by law on the next day, and she did as he bade her, she wrote to her mother and father.
Frederica thinks hard about these passages. There are complicated connections between literature and life. She may have chosen to lecture on love and marriage in Forster and Lawrence because she is snarled in the death of marriage and the end of love: but the marriage was partly a product of the power of these books. Part of Nigel’s attraction was Forster’s incantation “Only connect.” He had Mr. Wilcox’s attraction of otherness, but was not, is not, obtuse.
Both characters, both novelists, so passionately desire
connection.
They want to experience an undifferentiated All, a Oneness, body and mind, self and world, male and female. Frederica has tried to want this. Exhortations to want it have permeated her reading. When she was very little she tried to believe in God. She looked at the stars and tried to
think
Someone intelligent, loving, caring, out there, and could not. Forcing herself hurt her head behind her eyes: she remembers the sensation precisely, and it is repeated as she remembers it, and as she tries to desire connection and Oneness. Thinking of her own infantile efforts to believe causes her to think again about something she has noticed in both pieces of writing. They are sustained by what were surely archaisms in their own time, phrases harking back, yearning, for earlier modes of expression.
“Her lord” … “the morrow” … “Happy the man who sees the glory of those outspread wings.” … “Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted.”
“This marriage was his resurrection and his life.” … “In the perfect One there is perfect silence of bliss.”
And “she did as he bade her,” Lawrence’s wife echoing the ironic “her lord” of Forster’s Margaret, archaic both.
Forster was uneasily mocking, whereas Lawrence was in deadly earnest, thinks Frederica, but both are
imbued
with religious language. Ursula’s beauty is “immanent” like a strange golden light. Forster makes love incarnate “the salvation that was latent in his own soul,” connecting beast and monk. Sexual love for Lawrence confuses and abolishes grammatical categories, no I and you, no subject and object, but “my” and “her” in a paradisal One “where everything is silent,” where language is unnecessary and defeated, thinks Frederica.
