Possession (62 page)

It is clear enough what all this is about. But the vision changes my sense of the shape of events. When I ask myself, now, what became
of the child, I see the black obsidian pool, and the lively white shirt going down.

MAY
10
TH

A letter came today for my father from M. Michelet, and enclosed in it one for Christabel. She took it composedly enough, as though she had been expecting it, and then when she saw it properly, caught her breath and put it aside, unopened. My Father says M. Michelet writes that it is sent by a friend, upon a hope rather than a certainty that Miss LaMotte might be with us. He asks us to return it to him, if she is not here, and it goes undelivered. All day she did not open it. I do not know when or if she did.

Note to Maud Bailey from Ariane Le Minier.

Dear Professor Bailey
,

Here the journal ends, and the notebook almost ends. It is possible that Sabine de K. took it up in another book; if so, it has not yet been found
.

I made up my mind not to tell you much of its content, as I wished you, perhaps a little childishly, to have the narrative shock and pleasure that I had from discovering it. When I return from the Cévennes we must compare notes, you and I and Professor Stern
.

I was certainly under the impression that students of LaMotte believe her to have lived a secluded life, in a happy lesbian relationship with Blanche Glover. Do you know of any lover or possible lover who might have been the father of this child? The question imposes itself—was the suicide of Blanche connected to the history related in this text? Perhaps you can enlighten me?

I should also tell you that I have made efforts of my own to discover whether the child survived. The convent of St Anne was the obvious place to look, and I have been there and have convinced myself that there is no trace of LaMotte in their somewhat scanty records. (Much was cleared out under a zealous Mother Superior in the 1920s who believed dusty papers were an unnecessary waste of space and nothing to do with the timeless mission of the sisterhood.)

I still suspect the Curé, if only because there is no one else, and I cannot quite believe the child was born and murdered in a barn. I imagine it may well not have survived, however
.

I enclose a few English poems and parts of poems I found among Sabine’s things. I have no access to any specimen of LaMotte’s handwriting, but I think they may be hers, and confirm the view that all was not well?

Sabine’s story after these events is part happy, part sad. She published the three novels I wrote of, of which
La Deuxième Dahud
is much the most interesting, and depicts a heroine of powerful will and passions, an imperious mesmeric presence, and a scorn of the conventional female virtues. She is drowned in a boating accident, after having destroyed the peace of two households, and whilst pregnant with a child whose father may be her meek husband or her Byronic lover, who drowns with her. The strength of the novel is its use of Breton mythology to deepen its themes and construct its imaginary order
.

She married in 1863, after a prolonged battle with her father to be allowed to meet possible
partis.
The M. de Kergarouet she married was a dull and melancholic person, considerably older than she was, who became obsessively devoted to her, and died of grief, it was said, a year after she died in her third child-bed. She bore two daughters, neither of whom survived into adolescence
.

I hope all this has been of interest to you, and that we may compare our findings at leisure at some later date
.

May I say finally, as I hoped to be able to say during our brief meeting, how much I admire your work on liminality. I think from that point of view too, you will find poor Sabine’s journal interesting. La Bretagne is full of the mythology of crossing-places and thresholds, as she says
.

Mes amitiés
Ariane Le Minier

A page of scraps of poems. Sent by Ariane Le Minier to Maud Bailey.

O
rdinarily, Mortimer Cropper would not have minded how long it took to wear down Sir George. In the end he would have been there, sitting inside the dilapidated mock-castle, listening to the little woes of the invalid wife (whom he had not met but imagined vividly; he had a vivid imagination; it was well regulated of course, his major asset in his craft). And at night he would have turned over the delectable letters, one by one, searching out their hints and secrets, passing them across the bright recording eye of his black box.

But now, because of James Blackadder, there was no time for patience and finesse. He must have those papers. He felt real pangs, a kind of famishing.

He gave his lecture, “The Art of a Biographer,” in a fashionable City church whose Vicar liked people to come, and eclectically made sure they did, with guitars, faith-healing, anti-racist rallies, vigils for peace and passionate debates on the camel and the eye of the needle, and sexuality in the shadow of AIDS. He had persuaded the Vicar, whom he had met at an episcopal tea party, that biography was just as much a spiritual hunger of modern man as sex or political activity. Look at the sales, he had urged, look at the column space in the Sundays, people need to know how other people lived, it helps them to live, it’s human. A form of religion, said the Vicar. A form of ancestor worship, said Cropper. Or more. What are the Gospels but a series of varying attempts at the art of biography?

He saw that the lecture, already scheduled, could be used. He wrote discreet letters to various academies, friendly and inimical. He
rang up the Press and said that a major discovery was to be unveiled. He interested the directors of some of the new American banks and financial institutions that were expanding in the City. He invited Sir George, who did not reply, and the solicitor, Toby Byng, who said it would be very interesting. He invited Beatrice Nest, and saved her a front-row seat. He invited Blackadder, not because he thought he would come, but because he liked to imagine Blackadder’s annoyance at receiving the invitation at all. He invited the US Ambassador. He invited the radio and the television.

Cropper loved lecturing. He was not of the old school, who fix the audience with a mesmeric eye and a melodious voice. He was a hi-tech lecturer, a magician of white screens and light-beams, sound-effects and magnifications. He filled the church with projectors and transparent cages of promptings which helped him, like President Reagan, to orchestrate with impromptu naturalness a highly complicated presentation.

The lecture, in the dark of the church, was accompanied by a series of brilliant images on the double screens. Huge oil-portraits, jewel-bright magnified miniatures, early photographs of bearded sages among broken arches of Gothic cathedrals, were juxtaposed with visions of the light and space of Robert Dale Owen University, of the sparkling sheen of the glass pyramid that housed the Stant Collection, of the brilliant little boxes that preserved the tresses of Randolph’s and Ellen’s woven hair, Ellen’s cushion embroidered with lemon-trees, the jet brooch of York roses on its cushion of green velvet. From time to time, as if by accident, the animated shadow of Cropper’s aquiline head would be thrown, as if in silhouette, across these luminous objects. On one of these occasions he would laugh, apologise, and say half-seriously, carefully scripted,
there
you see the biographer, a component of the picture, a moving shadow, not to be forgotten among the things he works with. It was in Ash’s time that the intuition of historians became a respectable, even an essential, object of intellectual attention. The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the
poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject’s life.…

At this point in the lecture Cropper had himself lit again, briefly. He spoke with careful simplicity.

“Of course, what we all hope for and at the same time fear, is some major discovery that will confirm, or disprove, or change at the least, a lifetime’s work. A lost Shakespeare play. The vanished works of Aeschylus. Such a discovery was made recently when a collection of letters from Wordsworth to his wife were found in a trunk in an attic. Scholars had said that Wordsworth’s only passion was his sister. They had confidently called his wife dull, and unimportant. Yet here, after all those years of marriage, were these letters, full of sexual passion on both parts. History has had to be rewritten. Scholars have taken humble pleasure in rewriting it.

“I have to make known to you that an event of similar magnitude has just taken place in the field in which I have the honour to work, the field of Randolph Henry Ash. Letters have been discovered between him and the woman poet Christabel LaMotte, that are going to electrify—to
upheave
—the relevant associated fields. I cannot quote these letters—I have seen only a small few at this time. I can only express the hope that they may be freely made available to all scholars of all nations, for it is in the interest of international communication, free movement of ideas and intellectual property that they be most widely accessible.”

The finale of Cropper’s lecture was a product of his passion. The truth was, he had come to love the bright transparencies of the things he had acquired, almost as much as the things themselves. When he thought of Ash’s snuff-box, he thought not of the weight of it in his hand, the cold metal warming in his own dry palm, but also now of the enamelled cover magnified on the screen. Ash had never seen such gilded birds of Paradise, such blooming grapes, such deep red roses, though all their colours had been fresher in his time. He had never seen the sheen on the pearly rim as the light touched it through Cropper’s projector. At the end of the lecture, Cropper would present this object in hologram, floating in the church like a miraculously levitated object.

“Look,” he would say, “at the museum of the future. The Russians are already stocking their museums not with sculptures or ceramics, nor with copies in fibreglass or plaster, but with these constructions of light. Everything can be everywhere, our culture can be, is, worldwide. The original objects must be preserved where the air is best, where breath cannot harm them, as the cave-paintings at Lascaux have been damaged by those who came to marvel at them. With modern technology, mere possession of the relics of the past is of little importance. All that
is
of importance is that those entrusted with the care of these fragile and fading things should have the requisite skills—and resources—to prolong their life indefinitely, and to send their representations, fresh, vivid, even, as you have seen,
more
vivid than in the flesh, so to speak, journeying round the world.”