Possession (22 page)

At first Roland worked with the kind of concentrated curiosity with which he read anything at all by Randolph Ash. This curiosity was a kind of predictive familiarity; he knew the workings of the other man’s mind, he had read what he had read, he was possessed of his characteristic habits of syntax and stress. His mind could leap ahead and hear the rhythm of the unread as though he were
the writer, hearing in his brain the ghost-rhythms of the as yet unwritten.

But with this reading, after a time—a very short time—the habitual pleasures of recognition and foresight gave way to a mounting sense of stress. This was primarily because the writer of the letters was himself under stress, confused by the object and recipient of his attentions. He found it difficult to fix this creature in his scheme of things. He asked for clarification and was answered, it appeared, with riddles. Roland, not in possession of the other side of the correspondence, could not even tell what riddles, and looked up increasingly at the perplexing woman on the other side of the table, who with silent industry and irritating deliberation was making minutely neat notes on her little fans of cards, pinning them together with silver hooks and pins, frowning.

Letters, Roland discovered, are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome, no closure. His time was a time of the dominance of narrative theories. Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going. If Maud had been less coldly hostile he would have pointed this out to her—as a matter of general interest—but she did not look up or meet his eye.

Letters, finally, exclude not only the reader as co-writer, or predictor, or guesser, but they exclude the reader as reader; they are written, if they are true letters, for
a
reader. Roland had another thought; none of Randolph Henry Ash’s other correspondence had this quality. All was urbane, considerate, often witty, sometimes wise—but written wholly without
urgent
interest in the recipients, whether they were his publisher, his literary allies and rivals, or even—in the notes that survived—his wife. Who had destroyed much. She had written:

The truth was, Roland thought uneasily, these letters, these busy passionate letters, had never been written for him to read—as
Ragnarök
had, as
Mummy Possest
had, as the Lazarus poem had. They had been written for Christabel LaMotte.

 … your intelligence, your marvellous quick wit—so that I may write to you as I write when I am alone, when I write my true writing, which is for everyone and no one—so
that
in me which has never addressed any private creature, feels at home with you. I say “at home”—what extraordinary folly—when you take pleasure in making me feel most
unheimlich,
as the Germans have it, least of all
at home,
but always on edge, always apprehensive of failure, always certain that I cannot appreciate your next
striking
thought or
glancing
shaft of wit. But poets don’t want homes—do they?—they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds. Now tell me—do you suppose what I just wrote is the truth or a lie? You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalized love, for this, or that, or the universe—which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, but for its universal life in every minute particular. I have always supposed it to be a cry of
unsatisfied love—
my dear—and so it may be indeed—for satisfaction may surfeit it and so it may die. I know many poets who write only when in an exalted state of mind which they compare to
being in love,
when they do not simply state, that they are in love, that they seek love—for this fresh damsel, or that lively young woman—in order to find a fresh metaphor, or a new bright vision of things in themselves. And to tell you the truth, I have always believed I cd diagnose this state of
being in love,
which they regard as
most particular,
as inspired by
item,
one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue
, item,
one graceful attitude of body or mind
, item,
one female history of some twenty-two years from, shall we say, 1821–1844
—
I have always believed this
in love
to be something of the
most abstract
masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet, who assumes and informs both. I wd have told you—no, I do tell you—friendship is rarer, more idiosyncratic, more individual and in every way more durable than this Love
.

Without this excitement they cannot have their Lyric Verse, and so they get it by any convenient means—and with absolute sincerity—but the Poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems
.

You see the fork I have impaled myself on—Nevertheless I reiterate—because you will not bridle at my strictures on either manly devotion to a
female ideal—or on the duplicity of Poets—but will look at it with your own Poet’s eye—askance and most wisely—I write to you as I write when I am alone, with
that
in me—how else to put it? you will know, I trust you know—with
that
which makes, which is the Maker
.

I should add that my poems do not, I think, spring from the Lyric Impulse—but from something restless and myriad-minded and partial and observing and analytic and
curious,
my dear, which is more like the mind of the prose master Balzac, whom, being a Frenchwoman, and blessedly less hedged about with virtuous prohibitions than English female gentility, you know and understand. What makes me a Poet, and not a novelist—is to do with the singing of the Language itself. For the difference between poets and novelists is this—that the former write for the life of the language—and the latter write for the betterment of the world
.

And you for the revelation to mere humans of some strange unguessed-at
other
world, is that not so? The City of Is, the reverse of Par-is, the towers in the water not the air, the drowned roses and flying fish and other paradoxical elementals—you see—I come to know you—I shall feel my way into your thought—as a hand into a glove—to steal your own metaphor and torture it cruelly. But if you wish—you may keep your gloves clean and scented and folded away—you may—only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.…

Roland looked up at his partner or opponent. She seemed to be getting on with an enviable certainty and speed. Fine frown-lines fanned her brow.

The stained glass worked to defamiliarise her. It divided her into cold, brightly coloured fires. One cheek moved in and out of a pool of grape-violet as she worked. Her brow flowered green and gold. Rose-red and berry-red stained her pale neck and chin and mouth. Eyelids were purple-shadowed. The green silk of her scarf glittered with turreted purple ridges. Dust danced in a shadowy halo round her shifting head, black motes in straw gold, invisible solid matter appearing like pinholes in a sheet of solid colour. He spoke and she turned through a rainbow, her pale skin threading the various lights.

“I’m sorry to interrupt—I just wondered—do you know about the City of Is? I.S. I.S?”

She shook off her concentration as a dog shakes off water.

“It’s a Breton legend. It was drowned in the sea for its wickedness. It was ruled by Queen Dahud, the sorceress, daughter of King Gradlond. The women there were transparent, according to some versions. Christabel wrote a poem.”

“May I look?”

“A quick glance. I’m using this book.”

She pushed it across the table.

Tallahassee Women Poets. Christabel LaMotte: a Selection of Narrative and Lyric Poems, ed. Leonora Stern. The Sapphic Press, Boston
. The purple cover bore a white linear image of two mediaeval women, bending to embrace each other across a fountain in a square basin. They both wore veiled headdresses, heavy girdles and long plaits.

He scanned
The Drowned City
. This had a prefatory note by Leonora Stern.

He flicked across the pages of the text.

And so they worked on, against the clock, cold and excited, until Lady Bailey came to offer them supper.

When Maud drove home that first evening, the weather was already changing for the worse. Clouds were darkly gathering; she could see through the trees a full moon, which, because of some trick of the thickening air, seemed both far away and somehow condensed, an object round and small and dull. She drove through the park, much of which had been planted by that earlier Sir George who had married Christabel’s sister Sophie, and had had a passion for trees, trees from all parts of the distant earth, Persian plum, Turkey oak, Himalayan pine, Caucasian walnut and the Judas tree. He had had his generation’s expansive sense of time—he had inherited hundred-year-old oaks and beeches and had planted spreads of woodland, rides and coppices he would never see. Huge rugged trunks came silently past the little green car in the encroaching dark, rearing themselves suddenly monstrous in the changing white beam of the headlight. There was a kind of cracking of cold in the words all round, a tightening of texture, a clamping together that Maud had experienced in her own warm limbs as she went out into the courtyard and cold ran into her constricted throat and pulled tight something she thought of poetically as the heartstrings.

Down these rides Christabel had come, wilful and perhaps spiritually driven, urging her little pony-cart on to the ritualist eucharist of the Reverend Mossman. Maud had not found Christabel an easy companion all day. She responded to threats with increasing organisation. Pin, categorise, learn. Out here it felt different. The mental pony-cart bowled along, with its veiled passenger. The trees went up, solid. A kind of elemental clanging accompanied the disappearance of each into the dark. They were old, they were grey and green and stiff. Women, not trees, were Maud’s true pastoral concern. Her idea of these primeval creatures included her generation’s sense of their imminent withering and dying, under the drip of acid rain, or in the invisible polluted gusts of the wind. She was visited by a sudden vision of them dancing, golden-green, in a bright spring a hundred years ago, flexible saplings, tossed and resilient. This thickened forest, her own humming metal car, her
prying curiosity about whatever had been Christabel’s life, seemed suddenly to be the ghostly things, feeding on, living through, the young vitality of the past. Between the trees the ground was black with the shining, sagging wet rounds of dead leaves; in front of her, the same black leaves spread like stains on the humping surface of the tarmac. A creature ran out into her path; its eyes were half-spheres filled with dull red fire, refracted, sparkling and then gone. She swerved, and nearly hit a thick oak stump. Ambiguous wet drops or flakes—which?—materialised briefly on the windscreen. Maud was inside, and the outside was alive and separate.