Possession (29 page)

I wish you might have known my father. His conversation would have delighted you. There was nothing he did not know—in his chosen field—and nothing he knew that was to him Dead Knowledge—but all
alive
and brilliant and full of import for our lives—He had always so sad a face—thin and lined and always pale. I thought he was sad for the lack of French mythology—piecing together what he said—but he was sad, I think, to be exiled—and to have no native home—he whose paramount preoccupation—was just the Lares and Penates of the home Hearth
.

My sister Sophie took no interest in these matters. She liked things women like—pretty things—she was no
reader—
it irked her, that we lived secluded—as it irked my mother—who had supposed that a
Frenchman
was always a
galant—
a Man of the World—or so I believe she supposed—for they were ill-matched. My pen runs away with me—I have had little sleep these last three nights—you will think my thoughts are all over the place—how can I be supposing you want my life-history in place of my Melusina-epic? Yet they are so
intertwined—
and I trust you—

He wore—at first simply for reading—and then always—little round steel-rimmed glasses. I think of these Cold Circles—as the most friendly, the most comfortable and comforting appearance possible—his eyes behind them were underwater Eyes—sad and large and full of veiled friendliness. I wished to become his Amanuensis—and to this end persuaded him to teach me Greek and Latin, French and Breton, also German—which he did willingly—not to that end—but because he was proud of the speed and economy with which I learned—

Enough of my Papa. I have sadly missed him lately—I think because I have been putting off my epic—and for Reasons—

Yr citation from Paracelsus was of course familiar to me. And with your usual quickness you have seen that I am interested in other visions of the fairy Mélusine—who has two aspects—an Unnatural Monster—and a most proud and loving and
handy
woman. Now there is an odd word—but no other seems to suffice—all she touched was well done—her palaces squarely
built and the stones set on rightly, her fields full of wholesome corn—according to one legend my father discovered she even brought Beans to Poitou—the true haricots—which shows she lived on into the seventeenth century—for Beans he proves, were not grown before that date. Think you not—she was not only Ghoul—but a kind of goddess of Foison—a French Ceres, it might be, or turning to your own mythology, the Lady Holda—or Freya of the Spring—or Iduna of the Golden Apples—?

Her Progeny it is true all had something of the monstrous about them. Not only Geoffroy à la Grande Dent—or Boar’s Tusk—but others who became kings in Cyprus and Armenia—had ears like jug-handles—or uneven eyes—

And the Infant Horrible, with three Eyes, whose death she urgently required at Raimondin’s hand, at the moment of her metamorphosis—what are we to make of him?

I would write, if I undertook it—a little from Melusina’s
—own—
vision. Not, as you might, in the First Person—as inhabiting her skin—but seeing her as an unfortunate Creature—of Power and Frailty—always in Fear of returning to the Ranging of the Air—the not-eternal—but finally-annihilated—Air—

I am called. I cannot write more. I must make haste to seal this—which I fear is a Plaintive Screed—a Convalescent Muttering—I am called again—I must close. Believe me yours most truly

Dear Miss LaMotte
,

I trust all is now
well
in your household, and that work—on the Merlin and Vivien—and on the increasingly fascinating
Melusina—
continues apace. As for myself—I have now nearly finished my poem on Swammerdam—I have a rough blocked-out version of the whole—I know what is
in
and what is never so regretfully eternally abandoned—and when I have tidied up a multitude of imperfections—I shall make you my first fair copy
.

I was entranced and moved by your brief portrait of your father—whose prodigious scholarship I have always admired and whose works I have read and reread most frequently. What better Father could a poet have? I was emboldened by your mention of the Ancient Mariner to wonder—was it
he
who named you and was that for Coleridge’s heroine of his unfinished poem? I have not had occasion to tell you—though I tell all I meet, with the regularity with which dear Crabb tells his tale of retrieving Wieland’s bust—I once met Coleridge, I was once taken to Highgate—when I was
very young and green—and had the chance of hearing the Angelic—(and mildly self-important) voice speak on and on—of the existence of angels and the longevity of yew-trees, and the suspension of Life in Winter (the banal and the truly profound thick and fast upon each other here) and premonitions and the Duties of Man (not Rights) and how Napoleon’s Spies had been hot on his heels in Italy on his return from Malta—and on True Dreams and Lying Dreams. And more, I think. Nothing on
Christabel.

I was so young and green, I worried inordinately that I had no chance, in all this spate of brilliant monologue, to interpose my own voice—to be heard to be able to think in that company—to be remarked. I do not know what I should have said if I could have spoken. Very likely something futile or silly—some erudite and pointless questioning of his doctrine of the Trinity, or some crude wish to be told the
end
of the poem
Christabel.
I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things—once commenced—only out of a feverish greed to be able to
swallow
the ending—sweet or sour—and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable? Do you have any privileged insight into the possible ending of the great S.T.C.’s
Tale of Christabel?—
which teases so, for it is like the very best tales, impossible to predict how it may
come out—
and yet it must—but we shall never know—its secret sleeps with its lethargic and inconsequential author—who cares not for our irritable quandary—

I partly see your meaning about
Melusina—
but hesitate to write thoughts of mine which may distort your thinking—either by causing you annoyance at my imperceptiveness—or worse by muddling the bright tracks of your own ideas
.

What is so peculiarly marvellous about the Melusina myth, you seem to be saying, is that it is
both
wild and strange and ghastly and full of the daemonic
—and
it is at the same time solid as earthly tales—the best of them—are solid—depicting the life of households and the planning of societies, the introduction of husbandry and the love of any mother for her children
.

Now—I am greatly daring, and I trust you not to fly out at me scornfully if I am wrong—I see in the gifts you show already in your writings such mastery of
both
these contradictory elements—that the Story may appear to be made for you, to await indeed—You—to tell it
.

Both in your wonder-tales and in your fine lyrics—you have a most precise eye and ear for the matter of fact and the detailed—for household linen
for instance, for the fine manipulations of delicate sewing—for actions like Milking—which make a mere man see the world of little domestic acts as a paradisal revelation—

But you are never content to leave it there … your world is haunted by voiceless shapes … and wandering Passions … and little fluttering Fears … more sinister than any conventional Bat or Broomstick-witch
.

As if to say—you have the power to render the secure keep of Lusignan—as it might be in the lives of the lords, ladies and peasants in the brilliant colours of a Book of Hours—and yet you can render also—the Voices of the Air—the Wailing—the Siren Song—the Inhuman Grief that cries down the avenues of the years—

What will you be thinking of me now? I told you—I cannot think of anything without
imagining
it, without giving it shape in my mind’s eye and ear. So, as I said, I have the clearest mental vision of yr unseen Porch, overarched with Clematis—one of those delightful deep-blue violet ones—and little clambering roses. I have also the clearest vision of your parlour—with its two peaceful Human inhabitants employed—I will not say at netting, but perhaps at reading—aloud, some work of Shakespeare or Sir Thomas Malory—and Monsignor Dorato all lemony plumes in a filigree dome—and your little dog—now of what kind is he? if I were to hazard a guess I would say perhaps a King Charles Spaniel—yes, I see him now, unfortunately clearly, with one chocolate ear and one white and a feathery tail—and yet he is maybe no such thing—but a small hound—a milk-white fine creature such as Sir Thos Wyatt’s ladies kept in their mysterious chamber. I have no vision of
Jane
at all—but that may come. I do have the clearest olfactory ghost of yr tisanes—though they hesitate between verveine and lime and raspberry-leaves, which my own dear mother found most efficacious in case of headache and lassitude
.

But I have no right, however I may extend my imagining gaze on harmless chairs and wallcoverings—I have no right to extend my unfortunate curiosity to your work, your writing. You will accuse me of trying to write your Melusina, but it is not so—it is only my unfortunate propensity to try to make concrete in my brain how you would do it—and the truly exciting possibilities open up before me—like vistas of long rides in sun-dappled shade in the mysterious forest of Brocéliande—I think—so, she will do it—so, she would enter the project. And yet I know your work is nothing if not truly original—my speculations are an impertinence. What can I say? I have never before been tempted to discuss the
intricacies
of my own writing—or
his own—with any other poet—I have always gone on in a solitary and self-sufficient way—but with
you
I felt from the first that it must be the true things or nothing—there was no middle way. So I speak to you—or not speak
, write
to you, write written speech—a strange mixture of kinds—I speak to you as I might speak to all those who most possess my thoughts—to Shakespeare, to Thomas Browne, to John Donne, to John Keats—and find myself unpardonably lending
you,
who are alive, my voice, as I habitually lend it to those dead men—Which is much as to say—here is an author of Monologues—trying clumsily to construct a Dialogue—and encroaching on both halves of it. Forgive me
.

Now if this were a true dialogue—but
that
is entirely as you may wish it to be
.

Dear Mr Ash
,

Have you truly Weighed—what you ask of me? Not the Gracile Accommodation of my Muse to your promptings—for
that
wd be resisted to the Death of the Immortal—which cannot Be—only Dissipation in Air. But you Overwhelm my small diligence—with Pelion piled on Ossa of Thought and fancy—and if indeed I sit down to answer all as it
should
be answered—there is the morning quite
gone—
and what has become either of the setting of the junket or of the Fairy Melusina?

Yet do not on that account cease to write to me—if I skimp a little on the Fairy-cakes—and write you a truncated and scanty answer
—and
procrastinate—not unfruitfully—one more day for the Melusina—all may be botched together
somehow.

You say you cannot imagine Jane. Well—I will tell you, this much—she has a Sweet Tooth—a very sweet tooth. It is beyond her powers to let be a set of little milk-jellies—or delicious macaroons—or brandy-snaps—in the Larder—without abstracting one insignificant exemplar here—or indenting a Spoon there and leaving traces of her gourmandise. So it is with my sad Self and the inditing of letters. I will not do it I say, until
this
is quite done—or
that
embarked on—but in my mind runs an answer to this that or the other—and I say to myself—if
this
argument were disposed of (if just
that
sweetmeat were tasted and slid down) my mind would be my own again, without agitation—

No, but how ungracious to quibble. I was just asserting—I am no Creature of your thought, nor in danger of becoming so—we are both safe in that regard. As for the Chairs and wall-coverings—imagine away—think
what you will—and I shall from time to time write a small Clue—so that you may be the more thoroughly confounded. I will say nothing as to clematis and roses—but we have a very fine Hawthorn—just now tressed and heavy with pink and creamy blooms and alive with that almond smell—so sweet—too sweet—that the sense aches at it. I will not say
where
this Tree is—nor how young or old, large or small—so you will be imagining it not as it is
indeed—
Paradisal and Dangerous—you know the May must never be brought into the house
.

Now I must discipline myself—and address my wandering wits to your momentous questions—or we are swallowed up, both of us, in frippery imaginations, and vain speculations
.

I too have seen S.T.C. I was but an infant—his pudgy Hand rested on my golden curls—his Voice remarked on their flaxen paleness—he said—or I have since by thinking created his voice saying—for I too, like you, must be imagining, I cannot let things alone—I believe he said “It is a beautiful name and will I trust not be a name of ill omen.” Now this is all the Clue I have to the end of the poem of
Christabel—
that its heroine was destined for tribulation—which is not hard to see—though how she might obtain Happiness thereafter is harder, if not Impossible
.

Now I must change my habitual Tone wholly. Now I must write stringently and not fly about distracting you with flappings of tinsel or demoiselle-flickering. What nonsense in you to pretend to fear, or to fear truly perhaps, that I could be anything but wholly gratified by what you say of the
Melusina
and of my own powers of writing—of what I might do. You have read my thoughts—or made clear to me what were my predispositions—not in an
intrusive
way—but with true insight. She is indeed—my Melusine—just such a combination of the orderly and humane with the unnatural and the Wild—as you suggest—the hearth-foundress and the destroying Demon. (And
female,
which you do not remark on.)