Babel Tower (64 page)
Authors: A.S. Byatt
She reads the second legal letter, which tells her that the fixing of a date for the hearing of her divorce has been deferred, since the Respondent has asked for time to prepare his case. She opens the brown letter, which contains a very small cheque from the Crabb Robinson Institute, and the one with stickers, which is an invitation to “A Studio Debauchery” from Desmond Bull. Bull has become interested in
collage,
of which the cherubs and lilies are an outpost. He is making a large picture of layers of faces, from past and present, newspapers and paintings, with Robespierre’s eyes in Marilyn Monroe’s face above Bronzino’s Fraud’s scaly tail, or with Roosevelt’s seated figure cut into Titian’s seated Pope. This work is at a chaotic stage, and varies from the banal to the suddenly witty and shocking. Desmond Bull is cheerfully certain that any day now Frederica will join him on his studio mattress. She likes his paintings: she likes him: what follows is obvious. Frederica, because of John Ottokar, cannot claim that she is prejudicing her legal freedom by this move, and is even tempted to make love to Bull to reassure herself that she is not tied to John Ottokar. Because of John Ottokar, she has started to take the Pill, which is making her heavy and bad-tempered, unless it is life that is making her heavy and bad-tempered. She has eaten two packets of pills now, day by day, one in September and one in October, and John Ottokar has vanished for almost exactly that period of time. Desmond Bull’s blatant campaign has its attractions for that reason too: it gives the Pills some
point.
She has not told Arnold Begbie about John Ottokar. There are various reasons for this, involved and at cross-purposes. Begbie will think she was lying when she said she had not committed adultery or incontinence or whatever the law calls it. This matters because she feels judged by Begbie, which ought to be nonsense, but is not. And then, to tell Begbie about John Ottokar is to make the relations with John Ottokar more solid, more real, than either she or John Ottokar wants to think they are. They are not adultery, which is serious: they are just sex. “Just sex” does not stand the glare of legal light upon it. It is as partial a description as “incontinence” or “adultery”: it is provisional and does not bear looking at. There
are no words
with which Frederica feels able to explain her relations with John Ottokar to Arnold Begbie.
• • •
Frederica feels wild and oppressed. She takes the sharp shears and slices Guy Tiger’s letter in two, vertically, and then again horizontally, and then again, until she has a handful of rectangular segments. This will not get rid of it, she reflects gloomily. More copies can endlessly be quartered, like the heads of the hydra. She picks up the pieces and lays them out on the desk. “A happy child living in Brock’s School.” The art students are excited by William Burroughs and his cut-ups. Frederica rearranges Tiger’s letter into a kind of consequential structure. So.
A happy child living in Brock’s School where there were several relations held for him prepared to care for him and will sue for custody of his son which he was born and when Petition for Divorce reaches the rightful place as owner of Bran hopes to avoid this eventuality my client is informed return to the matrimonial home, a deprived and socially unstable environment, suggests that it will be best that you inhabit a basement, the most beneficial arrangement a near-slum; that you arrange immediately to Brock’s preparatory intermediate care for the boy, parents will be free to earn money part-time. His request is both kinds. My client does not care for the boy and he hopes that you in the interests of his son immediate and sympathetic paying you a reasonable would best be served by persist in your present way devote your full attention that if your abrupt access to the boy and would always find the matrimonial home as House or as its mistress or as a employment less fit to have the small child who was extremely concerned and distressed by their complete attention without consulting him, for his stable household, in sending the boy to the William Blake relatives and a very loving housekeeper into his family or bring him into the world into the Reiver family he will in due course have taken the child to live in Cumberland it is my client’s area of London, he is informed he himself had what could be described as his peers including several constantly changing and sins already at the schools whilst you absent yourself his son be sent forthwith employments of various seasonal proposals for the welfare of Messrs Begbie, Merle and Schloss we have ascertained that the present separation is between his urgent wish for imputations of cruelty in the matrimonial home in the Interim to forgive your own desertion to settle your supposed differences and decision to take with you Alexander Reiver with great sorrow regrets persuading you to return to Swineburn School and to women who could give care and control of so heart-felt hope and expectation may be educated among money as maintenance in the comfortable home environment for a boy born your own priorities make departure from the welfare of the child.
• • •
Lawyers are concerned to make unambiguous statements with unquestionable conclusions; Frederica’s cut-up has therefore less beauty than a cut-up of some richer text might have, but it does approximate to a satisfactory representation of her confusion, of her distress, of her sense that the apparent irrefutable clarity of Nigel’s solicitor’s arguments is a nonsense in her world. She considers it. She finds the Burroughs a student has pressed upon her—“
This
is the voice of now,
this
is where it was going, fragments shored against my ruin and all that, just try this, this is the voice of now, this is
release,
this is the ultimate.”
“Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut-ups. It is experimental in the sense of being
something to do.
Right here write now. Not something to talk and argue about.”
“All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of re-arranged cut-ups. Cutting and re-arranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his colour of vowels. And his ‘systematic derangement of the sense.’ The place of mescaline hallucination: seeing colours tasting sounds smelling forms.”
Frederica considers this. It is both attractive and repellent as a way of seeing, as a way of acting. Frederica is an intellectual, driven by curiosity, by a pleasure in coherence, by making connections. Frederica is an intellectual at large in a world where most intellectuals are proclaiming the death of coherence, the illusory nature of orders, which are perceived to be man-made, provisional and unstable. Frederica is a woman whose life appears to be flying apart into unrelated fragments: an attempt to tear free from the life of country houses and families; a person who for two months has been a female body chemically protected from the haunting fear of conception; an angular female body symbiotically tied to a rushing, small, male red-headed energy, whose absence itself is sensed as a presence and as a claim; a mind coming to grips with the fact that English literature is a structure half connected to and half cut off from a European literature which was transfigured by Nietzsche and Freud; a person in a basement with not enough money; a memory containing most of Shakespeare,
much of seventeenth-century poetry, much, too, of Forster, Lawrence, T. S. Eliot and the Romantics, a chancy baggage which once seemed a universal, reasonable necessity; a Petitioner in a Divorce Court; a wanderer in studios; a judge of the works of such as Phyllis Pratt and Richmond Bly. Frederica is a woman who sits at her desk and re-arranges unrelated scraps of languages, from apparently wholly discrete vocabularies: legal letters, letters about the Initial Teaching Alphabet from Leo’s school; Leo’s first written words, which are
BUS
and
MAN
; the literary texts and the quite other texts that dissect these texts; her reviews, her readers’ reports, which do not use the critical vocabulary she has acquired, for this is useless in three-hundred-word segments. She is a being capable of turning her attention from a recipe for an
omelette aux fines herbes
to the
Tractatus,
from Dr. Spock to the Bible to
Justine.
Language rustles around her with many voices, none of them hers, all of them hers.
Like many human beings who feel that they are exploding with grief, confusion, or anger, Frederica has thought of controlling or venting (both contradictory verbs are appropriate) her pains by writing. She has even bought an exercise book in which to record what she feels, in which, she told herself in the stationer’s shop, to reduce the lawyers’ language to plain expressive English. The exercise book is golden in colour, with a laminated plastic cover, on which is a purple design of geometric flowers, like those we learn to make in school, with overlapping swoops of the compass, shifting the centre and the circumference to make petal in petal, half-moon meeting half-moon. Inside, it Frederica has written a first sentence.
“Much of the problem appears to be one of vocabulary.” Which led to no sequel. As far as it goes, this sentence is acceptable, but there is no vocabulary to provide the next sentence. A week later, like a terrier shaking a rat, Frederica wrote:
“There is no vocabulary to provide the next sentence.”
A month later, she wrote:
“Try simplicity. Try describing a day.”
I woke up too slowly. My tongue was furry. There was a taste of—what? Metal, decay, old wine. I want to write “death” but that’s exaggerating. I got up. I went to the bathroom. I did the things you do in the bathroom, piss, shit, replace the death-taste with an alien taste of nasty (?artificial) mint. I hate mint. I have always hated mint but I go on putting it in my mouth. I know I ought in this style to
write about the pleasure and relief of pissing and shitting but I don’t want to. It is ordinary and satisfactory and writing about it would be shocking, would look as if it were meant to be shocking, which would be the opposite of what I am trying to do. Do I know what I am trying to do? I am not enjoying writing in this style. When I had come out of the bathroom I went to wake Leo. His face was buried in the pillow: it was pink and sweaty where it touched it: it was dry and warm on top. I kissed it. Leo’s smell—all his smells—are the best thing I know. I find I don’t want to go into what they are like or why they are the best thing. This style won’t do that, although it leads you in that direction, it makes you think, aha, yes, now I describe Leo’s smell. Keep going. We had breakfast. We had boiled eggs and toast. The bread was a bit old. It always is. I like fresh bread but not enough to go out and get it. If I wrote about the pleasures of fresh bread in this style for long enough I might entice myself to go out and get some, but probably not. We had the usual fight about who ties Leo’s shoes because we are late. The usual fight. Describe it. Come on. I can’t. This style fills me with a dreadful nausea. People write whole books like this. It looks so clever and it’s a cop-out. I wanted to try and think about what had gone wrong and
what I am for
and it is nothing to do with furry mouths or one-verb sentences or noticing things you notice all the time
gracefully,
but as though they hadn’t been noticed before, as though they were shocking or surprising. At this rate I could write hundreds of thousands of words and get further and further away from thinking anything out.
Tonight I am teaching
Madame Bovary.
The thing about Madame Bovary was, she didn’t teach
Madame Bovary.
That’s banal too. Writing things down makes everything
slightly worse.
Slightly worse, what a fate. Writing is compulsive. And useless. Stop writing.
Frederica considers these abortive beginnings. The desire to write something is still there, accompanied by the nausea. Once, after John Ottokar had made love to her and slept, she had tried to write what she felt about him, about lying with the blond head breathing on her breasts, about wondering whether he would come again, or stay, or settle, or vanish, about whether she herself could bear to hold herself open to him, or would close, would turn her face away, would retreat in a flurry of ink like a cuttlefish (her habitual metaphor for this manoeuvre). Do I love him, she had made herself write, a real question, but the sight of it, and the sight of the rows of sentences beginning with the first person singular had filled her with such distaste that quickly, quickly she had torn the pages out of the book, ripped them into scraps and flakes, and ground them down amongst tea-leaves and sprout-peelings in the bucket under the sink.
“I hate I,” she had written in the notebook. This was the most interesting sentence she had written yet. She added the intellectual’s question. “Why?” And an answer.
I hate “I” because when I write, “I love him,” or “I am afraid of being confined by him,” the “I” is a character I am inventing who/which in some sense drains life from me
ME
into artifice and enclosedness. The “I” or “I love him” written down is nauseating. The
real
“I” is the first I of “I hate I”—the
watcher
—though only until I write that, once I have noticed that, that I who hates “I” is a real I, it becomes in its turn an artificial I, and the one who notices that that “I” was artificial too becomes “real” (what is real) and so
ad infinitum,
like great fleas with lesser fleas upon their backs to bite ’em. Is the lesson, don’t write? It is certainly, don’t write “I.”
This page had not been torn out. Frederica finds it faintly nauseating, but interesting.
She thinks, perhaps cut-ups. She has a vision of controlling the miseries of the divorce and its dragging negotiations by cutting it all up into a kind of nonsense-diary, which produces occasional gems of scrying, like “my client does not care for the boy,” though Frederica’s innate fairness cannot find much satisfaction in that. The problem is that Mr. Tiger’s client
does
care for the boy. That is the problem. And beyond that how anyone as clever as she, Frederica Potter, once was could have got herselfinto the present mess. She gives a little laugh, rummages through her cyclostyled lecture-notes, and comes up with the quotations about wholeness from Forster and Lawrence. She cuts them away from her text, and slices them up in approved Burroughs-mode. A vertical snip, a horizontal snip, re-arrange. This method produces something interesting and loosely rhapsodic from the Lawrence:
