Babel Tower (93 page)
Authors: A.S. Byatt
Jude is silent. He is silent for some time, licking the crust round his dry lips. He says, finally,
A. I don’t know. I don’t consider readers, particular readers. I write what I have to, what I see. These are the fantasies people
have, some people live by. This is how people are, more people than you think. I don’t know
why
people need fantasies, any more than I know
why
they dream. I only know, if you stop a man dreaming, you destroy his mind. If you shut off his fantasies, I think, you make him dangerous.
Q. But Culvert
indulges
his fantasies and becomes a killer.
A. It does him no good.
Q. It does his victims no good. Did you take pleasure in the death of Roseace, Mr. Mason? In the writing of that death?
A. Pleasure?
Q. Do not stall, Mr. Mason. It is a simple question. Did you take pleasure in the slow death by sexual torture of the Lady Roseace?
A. Did Shakespeare take pleasure in Cornwall’s pleasure in the putting-out of Gloucester’s eyes? Did he mean to incite Elizabethan noblemen to go about putting out people’s eyes? They did, and enjoyed it. Now we don’t, much. He put us off the idea, I believe.
Q.
King Lear
is a great and terrible tragedy. Are you comparing
Babbletower
to that kind of work?
A. No. Oh no. I am a mere Marsyas. A minor artist, a pipe-player who was flayed by Apollo.
Q. Explain your reference.
A. He was a goat-foot, a satyr, who challenged Apollo to a musical contest. He lost, and Apollo flayed him alive. He pulled him, Dante says, out of the scabbard of his limbs, “
della vagina delle membre sue.
” He had no more song, after that. Oscar Wilde says that modern art is the cry of Marsyas, bitter and plaintive and sad. Not tragic. Tortured but not tragic. Tragedy is past.
Q. So your art is not tragic, it is a satiric piping. You wish to blow a raspberry at convention?
A. Raspberry? I don’t understand raspberry.
Q. Come, Mr. Mason. You must have heard the term. A rude noise.
A. Don’t say “Come” to me in that tone of voice. I don’t see why a rude noise is called a raspberry. For the little rosette of anal veins around a fart, perhaps?
(Some laughter, some irritable restiveness in the courtroom.)
Q. Would you accept, Mr. Mason, that it is difficult in some ways to reconcile the savagery of many of the comments in
Babbletower
with some of your own attitudes and statements during the course of your evidence?
A. I do find it difficult myself. Giving evidence is much less pleasant than writing. You are not in control, giving evidence. You are tempted into saying silly things.
Q. You have, so to speak, “presented” yourself to the Court. You pose as an unsophisticated auto-didact, a victim of the public school system. You are constructed of literary images, references—Hardy, Wilde, Marsyas. It is as though you were self-designed as a player in a drama where you were a victim, unjustly accused of writing a corrupt book—long before this trial ever took place, or this action was brought. You are a bit of a
poseur,
Mr. Mason.
A. Is that a question? (The witness is shaking so much that his answer is croaked.)
Q. I am trying to get to the bottom of the purpose and nature of the book you have written. Mr. Avram Snitkin, a witness called by the Defence, has talked about the modern desire to shock, to break taboos, to use “bad” words to create anarchy—
A. I reject all that. I am not interested in anarchy. I am an artist. A lot of nonsense is talked about those words, those words you don’t use—you can’t do
anything
with those words, it’s like studding your pages with gobs of exudations—
those two words,
“gobs” and “exudations,” are better words than “shit” and “snot,” they’re words you
react to.
If I want to upset you I can write in perfectly legitimate words a description of bliss, or hurt, or evacuation, which will leave a trace on your memory as though a knife had slid across your brain; I can leave a
trace
of these that won’t go. Poor old Lawrence tried to accommodate and tame those words, like old copper coins with the faces
rubbed off, bum pennies for bun pennies. It won’t work because they only exist to shock. And no, I don’t write to pose or to shock, Mr. Weighall,
I don’t.
Q. You don’t. You write to hurt—to slice our brains and our memories—
A. That is not illegitimate.
Q. Let me finish. You said earlier, and I quote: “I write what I have to, what I see. These are the fantasies people have …” You write the kinds of fantasies that are enacted in brothels and written down badly in dirty books in brown wrappers, Mr. Mason, but you write them in better words and make them more powerful. Do you not agree that they might hurt people just as much as these other pornographic works?
A. Hurt? Hurt? I don’t think those other things
hurt,
Mr. Weighall. I have been in those places, and I know, I have been amongst the incense and the poppies and the tawdry bits of silk and satin and tulle. I have seen grown men making fools of themselves in nappies with bottles, or loaded with heavy chains. I have seen judges pretending to be housemaids in frilly aprons and black stockings and I’ve seen postmen pretending to be judges and an eminent surgeon pretending to be a fire that could only be put out in a particularly disgusting way. If I wrote you a scientific treatise on these things, you
couldn’t touch me
—but I am an artist—meretrix, meretricious I may have been as a boy, porno-grapher I am not,
I am an artist.
Q. You protest eloquently. You have not answered my question about your readers, Mr. Mason. You have not answered it. I put it to you that when you were a boy, Dr. Grisman Gould hurt your body and depraved your mind with a mixture of literature and cruelty—and that you are intent on passing on that hurt to the world, to your readers, to the possible victims of those of your readers who resemble your own betrayer.
A. You understand nothing. I loved him. He was not a tawdry Svengali. He was—he was—he is dead, it doesn’t matter what he was, he is not on trial, though he appears to be. He is dead, and I loved him, and I have not loved since, and shan’t.
Q. You have not answered my question. Hurt was done, you were depraved and corrupted, and you
are passing that hurt on.
Jude, (to judge) Do I have to answer that? It—isn’t—a question. This is all nonsense.
Judge.
It is a question of opinion. You need not answer it.
Jude.
He need not have asked it.
Judge.
The jury will please ignore the question.
Snitkin’s tape-recorder whirs. Augustine Weighall says he has no further questions, thus leaving the deleted question, the struck question, the non-question, indelibly engraved on the jurors’ minds as the climax of his case against Jude Mason.
Frederica leaves the court during the evidence of the next witness, a schoolmaster who confirms the stories of excesses at Swineburn, and asserts that he would have no objection to his charges reading
Babbletower.
She meets Alexander Wedderburn, wandering along the corridors. Alexander thinks the case is going badly for the Defence. He says that Augustine Weighall is much cleverer than Godfrey Hefferson-Brough. “He must have known something about Jude’s history,” says Alexander. “More than his own people did.”
“Probably met him in some brothel in Piccadilly,” says Frederica tartly. “They all dress up and
port about,
as my father used to say. Jude is an idiot. Why must he
show off
?”
“He said. He’s an artist.”
“So are you. You don’t.”
“The dreadful thing is, he’s potentially a better one. And they might put him in prison. He’s got no common sense. That’s his tragedy. I have. Abundantly. That’s mine.”
“Don’t you start talking in cheap epigrams. I
hate
Oscar Wilde.”
“So does Jude.”
“With the hate that dare not tell its name, I guess. Now I’m doing it.”
“You’re worried.”
“I never thought I’d say it, but I’ve got kind of
attached
to Jude. I never thought I’d agree with Canon Holly, but he is a kind of holy fool, a real
idiot.
”
• • •
The Defence’s final witness is the novelist Phyllis Pratt, Bowers and Eden’s only bestseller. Mrs. Pratt is wearing a pink suit over a floral shirt, and an amethyst cross on a silver chain. She addresses both the Counsel for the Defence, and later Sir Augustine, in a sensible, complicit, lemon-and-honey voice, tart and warm. She states that she has much enjoyed
Babbletower
—“quite a
satisfactory
experience, like a fairy story, with the punishment of folly and a few thrills to it, but never real enough to
alarm
anyone.” She says that as a vicar’s wife she has met “many tortured souls who have harmed others, or who would have liked to harm others” and believes that reading
Babbletower
would “on the whole, merely cheer such people up. That somebody knew, and could make fairytales out of it. Fairy stories and detective stories do much less harm than real reports of what went on in concentration camps, I think you’ll find. They put a kind of pink glow round it all, that takes it out of the sordid real world.”
Would she, Hefferson-Brough asks her, give it to her children to read?
“Any mother knows that some children can take
anything
and some cry and cry over the death of a seal or a Bambi and never quite recover. I think Mr. Mason made a little mistake calling his work a tale for children. It isn’t. Children don’t like explicit sex. They like dirty noses and dirty bottoms, not genitalia doing what genitalia are made for, or can be contorted to do. No, I’d be careful who I
recommended
it to. But one must be sensible, that goes for every grown-up book.”
Sir Augustine asks her, as he has asked all the defence witnesses, whether she was sexually moved by the book.
A. Of course I was. He’s a clever writer. I was moved by the bits that appealed to my particular fantasies, as I expect you were, and I laughed at some of the others, and I skipped some of the others, as I expect you would in normal circumstances.
Q. It can’t be normal reading for you, Mrs. Pratt. Your own books are grounded in realism, in village life, in domesticity, in the Church.
A. I heard you grilling Mr. Mason about fantasies. The heroine of my first book stabbed her husband in a real
welter of gore
when
he pushed her too far. That was a fantasy, Sir Augustine, which would perhaps have become a fact, if it hadn’t got out on paper and cheered up a multitude of other vicars’ wives and other women indulging similar fantasies. What Mr. Mason said about fantasies and dreams was very wise. They save us, they save us from action.
Q. Even the warning dreams, the premonitory dreams, of murderers?
A. Come, come, Sir Augustine. You are not going to tell me that anything as accomplished and fastidious and in places downright
funny
as
Babbletower
bears any relation to the deranged vision of murderers? Or that poor Mr. Mason wants
to kill someone
? He is a good writer, and he’s half-dead with anxiety, and I think it’s a pity.
Augustine Weighall has considered other obscenity trials, and believes that previous prosecution witnesses have been ill chosen. He has decided, also, that his witnesses, coming after the long file of defence luminaries, must be succinct and convincing, carry weight. In the event, he calls five: Hermia Cross, who began the public agitation against
Babbletower,
a chief superintendent from Staffordshire, a suffragan bishop from a difficult part of Birmingham, Roger Magog and Professor Efraim Ziz, a historian of Judaism.
Hermia Cross is disturbingly sensible. She is an MP, has been a local councillor, has worked with recidivist adolescents and with the Marriage Guidance Council, is a Methodist lay preacher and a school governor. She is solid and stolid, with dark straight hair and a firm straight mouth, short but full of presence. She says that she agrees that
Babbletower
is better written than most pornography, but doesn’t believe it is literature. Literature, she says, is complex and varied.
Babbletower,
like all pornography is simple and repetitive—“like a good wank, if you’ll forgive the expression.” It repeats pain and hurt, and is offensive because it puts ideas into the heads of those who like hurting children. “A good wank is one thing, my lord. Hurting children’s another. We live in the permissive society, I’m told. We see where that leads. It leads to Brady and Hindley hurting children. Killing children. All the rest is trappings. This book is offensive and dangerous.”
Asked whether she agrees with Phyllis Pratt that fantasy might provide a beneficent release, she says she does not. “Not in my experience,
it doesn’t. I think that’s
her
fantasy, if I may say so. Airy-fairy. I think it does more good to watch and pray, if you feel temptations, than to set pen to paper and indulge your imagination. Watch and pray.” Asked by Oliphant if she believes that this goes for stabbing people with bread-knives too, she replies that that is not the issue in question. “But yes, quite probably. Watch and pray. Somebody somewhere may wield a bread-knife in earnest, as a result of reading about one.” The Court stirs: they are Phyllis Pratt fans. Samuel Oliphant pushes his advantage.
“You are not a great reader, Miss Cross? You do not have a passion for literature?”
“No. I don’t. I think a lot of time is wasted by a lot of people, reading rubbish, and talking rubbish about books. But I
do
know the difference, I think, between a book that is just nasty and a book that is positively hurtful.”
“How do you know?”
“I know quite a lot—pragmatically—about the sort of people who are vulnerable to that sort of book. It’s common sense.”
“And do you consider
yourself
depraved and corrupted by
Babbletower.
”
