Possession (75 page)
Authors: A.S. Byatt
She remembered from the days of the Close, seeing herself once, naked, in a cheval glass. She must have been barely eighteen. Little high breasts, with warm brown circles. A skin like live ivory and long hair like silk. A princess.
Dearest Ellen
,
I cannot get out of my mind—as indeed, how should I wish to, whose most ardent desire is to be
possessed entirely
by the pure thought of you—I cannot get out of my mind the entire picture of you, sitting in your white dress among the rosy teacups, with all the garden flowers, the hollyhocks, the delphiniums, the larkspur, burning crimson and blue and royal purple behind you, and only emphasising your lovely whiteness. And you smiled at me so kindly today, under your white hat with its palest pink ribbons. I remember every bunch of little bows, I remember every gentle ruffle, indeed it is a shame I am not a painter, but only an aspiring poet, or you should see how I treasure every smallest detail
.
As I shall treasure—until death, theirs alas, and not mine, not for centuries yet, for I need a very long lifetime to love and cherish you, and must spend another such lifetime, alas
proleptically,
waiting for the right to do so—I shall treasure, I say, those flowers you gave me, which are before me as I write, in a very fine blue glass vase. I love the white roses most—they are not open yet—I have decades of
their
time, days at least of my own longer and most impatient duration in which to enjoy them. They are not a simple colour, you know, although they look it. They contain snow, and cream, and ivory, all quite distinct. Also at their heart they are still
green—
with newness, with hope, with that fine cool vegetable blood which will flush a little, when they open. (Did you know that the old painters gave an ivory glow to a rich skin by painting on a
green
base—it is a paradox of optics, strange and delightful.)
I lift them to my face and admire them. They are mildly fragrant, with a promise of richness. I push my enquiring nose in amongst them—not to hurt or derange their beautiful scrolling—I can be patient—each day they will unfold a little—one day I will bury my face in their white warmth—Did you ever play that childhood game with the huge opium poppy buds—we did—we would fold back the calyx and the tightly packed silk skirts, one by one—all crumpled—and so the poor flaunting scarlet thing would droop and die—such prying is best left to Nature and her hot sun, which opens them soon enough
.
I have composed over 70 lines today, mindful of your injunctions to be busy, and avoid distraction. I am writing about the pyre of Balder—and his wife, Nanna’s grief for him—and Hermodur’s brave and fruitless journey to the Underworld to have him released by the goddess Hel—it is all
most
violently interesting, dear Ellen, an account of the human mind imagining and inventing a human story to account for the great and beautiful and terrible
limiting facts of—
existence—the rising and vanishing of the golden Sun, the coming of blossom (Nanna) in the Spring—her shrivelling in the Winter—the recalcitrance of dark (the goddess Thöck who refused to mourn for Balder, who was no use to her, she said, living or dead). And is not this the subject for great modern poetry as much as for the mythy speculations of our forefathers?
But I would rather be sitting in a certain garden—in a certain Close—among green and white roses—with a certain—decidedly a
certain—
young lady in white with a grave brow and a sudden sunny smile—
Ellen read no more. They could go with him. And wait for her.
She thought of putting the jet brooch he had sent from Whitby into the box, but decided against it. She would wear it at her throat, when they drove out to Hodershall.
She put more coal and more pieces of wood on the fire, and made a brave little blaze, by the side of which she sat down to manufacture the carefully edited, the carefully
strained
(the metaphor was one of jelly-making) truth of her journal. She would decide later what to do with
that
. It was both a defence against, and a bait for, the gathering of ghouls and vultures.
And why were the letters so carefully put up then, in their sealed enclosure? Could she read them, where she was going, could he? This last house was no house, why not leave them open to the things that tunnelled in the clay, the mites and blind worms, things that chewed with invisible mouths, and cleansed and annihilated?
I want them to have a
sort of duration
, she said to herself. A demi-eternity.
And if the ghouls dig them up again?
Then justice will perhaps be done to
her
when I am not here to see it.
She thought, one day, not now, not yet, I will put pen to paper and write to
her
, and tell her, tell her, what?
Tell her he died peacefully.
Tell her?
And the crystalline forms, the granite, the hornblende-schist, shone darkly with the idea that she would not write, that the Protean letter would form and re-form, in her head, that it might become too late, too late for decency, absolutely too late. The other woman might die, she herself might die, they were both old and progressing towards it.
In the morning she would pull on her black gloves, and pick up the black box, and a spray of those white scentless hothouse roses that were all over the house, and set out on his last blind journey.
I am in your hands
.
22
Recorded by Swinburne in a letter to Theodore Watts-Dunton. A. C. Swinburne,
Collected Letters
, Vol. V, p. 280. Swinburne’s poem, “The Old Ygdrasil and the Churchyard Yew,” is supposed to have been inspired by his emotions on the passing of R. H. Ash.
23
Reported in
The Times
, November 30th 1889. The reporter remarked “several comely young maidens, in floods of unembarrassed tears and a large gathering of respectful working men, beside the Literary Lions.”
24
Ellen Ash, in a letter to Edith Wharton, December 20th 1889, reprinted in
The Letters of R. H. Ash
ed. Cropper, vol. 8, p. 384. A similar expression of her intention occurs in an unpublished passage of her Journal, written two nights after the poet’s death. The Journal is shortly (1967) to appear, edited by Dr Beatrice Nest, of Prince Albert College, London University.
25
I have spent long hours walking in this countryside, and have observed the way the earth characteristically lies in layers, and throws up the dark flints embedded in the white chalk, which shine in the ploughed fields like snow.
26
This Shakespeare, and those violets, repose now in the Stant Collection in Robert Dale Owen University, where they are preserved.
27
See, for instance, the letter to Tennyson, in the Stant Collection (August 24th 1859), which is wholly bordered by a series of such formalised trees, the roots and branches intermingling, not unlike a William Morris repeating pattern. Stant MS no 146093a.
28
The Latin is
Ille hic est Raphael timuit quo sospite vinci rerum magna parens et moriente mori
.
29
John Donne, “Death Be Not Proud,”
Divine Poems
, ed. Helen Gardner, p. 9.
30
An irritable comment of F. R. Leavis in
Scrutiny
, vol. XIII, pp. 130–31: “That the Victorians took Randolph Ash seriously as a poet is sufficiently evinced by the seriousness of their obituary panegyrics, which claimed, like his bathetic tombstone, supplied by his wife, that he was the equal of Shakespeare, Milton, Rembrandt, Raphael and Racine.”
31
Recorded by Patience Meredith in a letter to her sister Faith, now in the possession of Marianne Wormald, great-granddaughter of Edmund Meredith.
32
See above, note 24, and in the unpublished Journal, November 25th 1889.
33
Sigmund Freud,
Totem and Taboo, Works
(Standard edn 1955), vol. 13, pp. 65–6.
Since riddles are the order of our day
Come here, my love, and I will tell thee one.
There is a place to which all Poets come
Some having sought it long, some unawares,
Some having battled monsters, some asleep
Who chance upon the path in thickest dream,
Some lost in mythy mazes, some direct
From fear of death, or lust of life or thought
And some who lost themselves in Arcady …
These things are there. The garden and the tree
The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold
The woman in the shadow of the boughs
The running water and the grassy space.
They are and were there. At the old world’s rim
In the Hesperidean grove, the fruit
Glowed golden on eternal boughs, and there
The dragon Ladon crisped his jewelled crest
Scraped a gold claw and showed a silver tooth
And dozed and waited through eternity
Until the tricksy hero, Herakles,
Came to his dispossession and the theft.
Far otherwise, among the northern ice
In a high frozen fastness, in the waste
Of jagged ice-teeth and tall glassy spikes
Hidden from demons of the frost and mist
Freya’s walled garden, with its orchard green
With summery frothing leaves and bright with fruit
Lay where the Ases came to eat the warm
Apples of everlasting youth and strength.
Close by, the World Ash rose from out the dark,
Thrusting his roots into the cavern where
Nidhogg the dark coiled with his forking tongue
And gnawed the roots of life that still renewed.
And there too were the water and the lawns,
The front of Urd, where past and future mixed
All colours and no colour, glassy still
Or ominously turbulent and twined.
And are these places shadows of one Place?
Those trees of one Tree? And the mythic beast
A creature from the caverns of men’s minds,
Or from a time when lizards walked the earth
On heavy legs as large as trees, or sprang
From bank to bank in swampy primal creeks
Where no man’s foot had trod?
Was he a dark Lord whom we dispossessed?
Or did our minds frame him to name ourselves
Our fierceness and our guile, our jealous grasp
At the bright stem of life, our wounded pride?
The first men named this place and named the world.
They made the words for it: garden and tree
Dragon or snake and woman, grass and gold
And apples. They made names and poetry.
The things
were
what they named and made them. Next
They mixed the names and made a metaphor
Or truth, or visible truth, apples of gold.
The golden apples brought a rush of words
The silvery water and the horrent scales
Upon the serpentining beast, the leaves
All green and shining on the curving boughs
(The serpentining boughs) that called to mind
The lovely gestures of the woman’s arms
Her curving arms, her serpentining arms,
The forest wove a fence of its dark boughs
For the green grass and made a sacred place
Where the gold globes of fruit, like minor suns
Shone in their shadowy caverns made of leaves
So all was more and more distinct, and all
Was intertwined and serpentining, and
Parts of one whole, they saw, the later men
Who saw connections between shining things
And next saw movements (snatch and steal and stab)
And consequential stories where the Tree
Once stood in solitude and steady shone.
We see it and we make it, oh my dear.
People the place with creatures of our mind,
With lamias and dryads, mélusines
And firedrakes, sparking, sliding, wreathing on,
We make commotion there and mystery
Hunger and grief and joy and tragedy.
We add and take away, we complicate
And multiply the foliage and the birds—
Place birds of paradise upon the boughs,
Make the stream run with blood and then run clear,
O’er grit of precious stones, diamonds and pearls
And emerald green and sapphires and anon
Wash these away and leave the pleasant sand
Holding the traces of the water’s flow
As it has done since time began, we say.
I see the Tree all rugged-thick with bulk
Of corky bark about its knotted base.
You see it like a silver pillar, straight
With breathing skin for bark, and graceful arms.
The place is at the centre of a maze
Where men have died in thorny culs-de-sac.
The place is in a desert where men die
From thirst in sight of it, nor know they see
The true place, who have stumbled through a glare
Of mirage upon mirage, vanishing
Like melting ice, in the hot sun, or foam
Breaking at tide’s edge, on the sifting beach.
All these are true and none. The place is there
Is what we name it, and is not. It
is
.
—R
ANDOLPH
H
ENRY
A
SH
from
The Garden of Proserpina
