The Books: “Possession: A Romance” (A.S. Byatt)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Possession – by A.S. Byatt. I know I’ve written here before what that book meant to me (and continues to mean to me – I just re-read it … again!!). I read it in December of 92 – which means nothing to anyone but me, but I was in a specific place in my life when this book became necessary. Not just a good book … but a helpful guide – a lantern in the darkness. It didn’t solve any problems but it sure as hell put into words – and beautiful words – so many of my own wordless struggles, my too-frightening-to-talk-about fears … my heartache, which I had a lot at that time. And every single time I have read the book since then – in different stages of my life – I’ve seen different things, gotten different things … As a matter of fact, just recently – I had a bit of a crack-up, and was out o’ commission for maybe 3 days – not a huge crack-up, but definitely a teeny one – and I immediately turned to Possession again. I knew the passage I needed. It helped. In a weird way, it really did. It’s one of those miraculous books that seems to grow with you, the devoted reader. I continue to be amazed by the breadth and depth of AS Byatt’s skill. I linked to a piece once where Byatt talked about the writing of this book – Here it is – and there’s a fantastic discussion in the comments about the book itself (I have awesome readers. Yay!) I guess the fact that I would place Possession on such a list as this one says it all. I write in that post:

As my life changes, as I grow older … the book appears to take on deeper meanings – I fluctuate between sympathy for Roland, for Christabel, for Val, for poor Ellen Ash, for Maud … depending on my mood, or where I am at in my life. Also, and this is a deeper comment: This is a book about intellectuals having love affairs. The cerebral mixed with the primal. This is something that strikes a very intense chord in me … a problem that has come up in my life repeatedly, because of who I am, and because of my emotional makeup – a fiery mix of brains and passion. Tough for anybody to handle. How will it work? How will I find my way, find peace? My intellectual side is rigid, hard-working, and can be very inflexible. I will not “tone it down” to make others feel comfortable around me. I’ve been asked (outright, and also subliminally) to “tone it down” and the price (for me) is too great. It’s too much of a betrayal. And yet I do not lack feelings, I am not cold … Maud’s struggle in the book with “letting her hair down”, her resistance to love, her fear of having her boundaries melded with somebody else’s, is my eternal struggle. I have never ever read a better prolonged study of the issues a woman like myself has when she falls in love. It’s very specific. There isn’t anything generic about a love affair – and yet most books do not tackle it from Byatt’s angle. Not only did I love the story, but I felt validated and vindicated by it. It’s something I go to again and again, sometimes searchingly, sometimes just with the knowledge that I will be able to lose myself in it … and sometimes with trepidation. The truths revealed in this book are only live-able to me when I am in a good head-space, and dealing with myself openly. If I’m trying to “hide” (in the same way that Maud hides) – then the book rebukes me. I can’t think of too many other books that maintain such a vibrant presence in my life.

I always get kind of nervous when, during this daily book excerpt thing I do, I approach a book which has been truly meaningful to me – like the Emily books – many others.

Byatt is at the top of her game here. She’s at the top of anyone’s game, frankly. She has written extensively about how she wanted to create almost a Victorian melodrama – the scene at the grave at the very end has all of the “props” – thrashing trees, driving rain, flickering lanterns, dirt – and yet we also have the gleam and bustle of modern-day London, and the postmodern world of academia – (her labeling the book “A Romance” is indicative of what she is trying to do … it’s a bit of a distancing technique). Two modern-day literature scholars – one a feminist, a women’s studies professor – and one, a kind of aimless and yet passionate graduate student – end up tripping over a cache of letters between two Victorian poets – Randolph Ash and Christabel laMotte – love letters – and it was never before known that these two even knew each other. As a matter of fact, there is a bit of hostility in the LaMotte camp towards Randolph Ash – he’s seen as a “soft-core misogynist” – LaMotte was a lesbian, apparently – she lived with a woman for many years – and all of the LaMotte scholarship since then has slowly and yet inevitably been erected around the sexual politics of the situation. Her work MEANS something to lesbians … it validates THEIR life in the modern-day world. And now … to discover … that she actually had a tormented love affair with … Randolph Ash?? Randolph Ash is apparently a sort of Tennyson-esque poet – he is part of the edifice of British culture. He was celebrated in his day (the same way Tennyson was) – and he lived an exemplary life, married, never unfaithful (as far as scholarship knows) – he was also a man of his time – inquiring, curious, controversial in some of his beliefs (about religion, for example) … LaMotte is seen as a minor poet, and the Ash folks kind of pooh-pooh her. She didn’t publish as much – a book of fairy tales, a limited edition of an epic about a fairy … she didn’t make her mark in the same way that Ash did. Byatt’s depiction of modern-day scholarship is spot ON. She includes “excerpts” from scholarly papers and books which show the absolute opacity of lit-crit writing … and makes the point that life will always be between the lines. There are things a biographer can NEVER know (the whole section about Ellen Ash at her husband’s death bed is a perfect example) … and Roland and Maud (the two modern-day scholars) have to go through quite a lot to, first of all, understand each other … and second of all, to understand Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte. Both of them are so-called EXPERTS in their field. There is nothing about Christabel that Maud doesn’t know.

And so the discovery of this huge correspondence rocks their world. They know they are sitting on a gold-mine. This will change the face of scholarship. Other forces become involved. Ash scholars, LaMotte scholars … all of them start closing in … everyone wants a piece of this new discovery.

Imagine if it was discovered that Tennyson and Emily Dickinson actually had a passionate and unrequited love affair. THAT’S the kind of bombshell we’re talking about here. It would change everything.

Byatt’s a genius. She acts as a sort of medium here. We get to read Randolph Ash’s poetry. And also LaMotte’s. And as the book goes on … we start to see how they influenced one another. It was a meeting of the minds, man.

The book has everything. It’s a detective story. At the end, it basically becomes a melodrama. It’s a whodunit. It’s a romance. The romance, for me, is startlingly effective. I burst into tears at the last sentence of the book. BURST into tears. Noooooooooooo!!!! was my main response.

It works.

Here’s an excerpt. Now … let me just say something about Byatt’s writing. There is something here (and you’ll see it in the excerpt) where she pulls back her lens a bit … to comment on the action. It’s not like we, the reader, are completely IN Maud and Roland’s world … no. She pulls back from THEM as well. (This goes back to her title of the book: Possession: A Romance) Even though we are peering back through time at the correspondence between Ash and LaMotte – trying to figure out what happened … we are not QUITE in the present-moment completely either. Byatt is really making the whole point of the book in this section. In the movie (which I liked – I’ll write about that at some other time – I was nervous about it, because of my feelings for the book – but I was very pleased with the result. Not 100% pleased, but almost so). Anyway, in the movie – they added a scene – which is kind of a compilation of many different scenes (including, sort of, the excerpt below). Maud and Roland lie in bed, they are in Yorkshire, trying to track down the Victorian poets … and they have a prickly professional relationship. Yet they’re warming up to each other. No romance yet. They lie in bed (they were given one room) … and it’s not awkward, they’re just lying there, with books around them … talking about their search, and about Ash and LaMotte. It starts to get personal. Roland asks Maud why she always wears her hair back (this is also in the book). They start to talk about it. And it segues into a talk about love and relationships. Is Roland seeing someone? How about Maud? They talk. At one point, Roland says something about his desire to stay free and independent, or whatever … and Gwyneth glances at him, grins, and says, “Aren’t we so modern.” She’s not saying it in a bitchy way. It’s perfect, the way she says it. (And it’s not in the book. But the FEELING of that moment is in the book – and in this excerpt today. But the movie puts it into language. Wonderful adaptation). The point here is that … Ash and LaMotte conducted their romance in what may be seen as a simpler time. They didn’t have to contend with gender politics, sexual politics, labeling – at least not the way we do in our “modern” era – the “isms” of modern day life. The hyphenated classifications of every human being. When Ash and LaMotte say the word “love” they actually mean something different than a modern person. Roland and Maud are discovering that. Are they falling “in love”? But … what does that mean now? What have we lost, in being so modern? Gwyneth’s little kind grin in that scene where she teases, “Aren’t we so modern” says it all.

The funny thing is, and this is Byatt’s kind of trickiness in this book (a trickiness that works): below, Roland starts to think about plots, and … what if THEIR plot, in the modern-day was mirroring the plot of the Victorian poets. But then … what WAS the plot? How could they know the plot if they don’t know the ending? Byatt goes on to talk about the mistrust of “love” in the modern generation – and so … beautifully … by calling the book Possession: A Romance … and by having Roland worry about what plot he is in … and by explaining that he and Maud do not trust romantic love … the title of the book answers Roland’s question. He may not like that answer, he may be afraid of it … but it’s right there, plain as the nose on his face.

Here’s the excerpt.

Excerpt from Possession: A Romance – by A.S. Byatt. I

They had been in Brittany three weeks. They had supposed, when they made their precipitate flight, that they would spend such timem as they stole, decorously in the university library at Nantes. Instead, they found themselves, owing to the closure of the library and the absence of Ariane Le Minier, on holiday, on holiday together, and for the second time that summer. They had separate rooms – with the requisite white beds – but there was no doubt that there was a marital or honeymooning aspect to their lingering. Both of them were profoundly confused and very ambivalent about this. Someone like Fergus Wolff would have known how to take advantage of this state of affairs, and would have assumed that it was natural for, indeed incumbent upon, him to take advantage. But Maud would not again willingly have gone anywhere with Fergus. And she had more than willingly set out with Roland. They had run away together, and were sharply aware of the usual connotations of this act. They spoke peacefully, and with a kind of parody of ancient married agreement of “we” or “us”. “Shall we go to Pont-Aven?” one would placidly ask, and the other would answer, “We might try to see the crucifix that was the original of Gauguin’s Christ Jaune.” They did now, however, discuss this use of the pronoun, although both thought about it.

Somewhere in the locked-away letters, Ash had referred to the plot of fate that seemed to hold or drive the dead lovers. Roland thought, partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot of fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others. He tried to extend this apercu. Might there not, he professionally asked himself, be an element of superstitious dread in any self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist mirror-game or plot-coil that recognises that it has got out of hand? That recognises that connections proliferate apparently at random, apparently in response to some ferocious ordering principle, which would, of course, being a good postmodernist principle, require the aleatory or the multivalent or the “free”, but structuring, but controlling, but driving, to some – to what? – end. Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. “Falling in love”, characteristically, combs the appearances of the world, and of the particular lover’s history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot. Roland was troubled by the idea that the opposite might be true. Finding themselves in a plot, they ight suppose it approrpriate to behave as though it was that sort of plot. And that would be to compromise some kind of integrity they had set out with.

So they continued to discuss, almost exclusively, the problems of those dead. They sat over buckwheat pancakes in Pont-Aven, and drank cider from cool earthenware pitchers and asked the difficult questions.

What became of the child?

How or why, in what state of ignorance or knowledge, had Blanche been abandoned? How had Ash and LaMotte parted? Did he know of the possible child?

The letter returning the letters to Christabel was undated. When had that been sent? Had there been more contact? A long affair, an immediate rupture?

Maud was muted and saddened by the poems Ariane had enclosed. She interpreted the second to mean that the child had been born dead, and the “spilt milk” poem to be an evidence of a terrible guilt, on Christabel’s part, at the fate, whatever it was, of the infant.

“Milk hurts,” Maud said. “A woman with milk who can’t feed a child, is in pain.”

In terms of Christabel, she too discussed the parodying of plots.

“She wrote a lot about Goethe’s Faust round about then. It’s a regular motif, the innocent infanticide, in European literature at that time. Gretchen, Hetty Sorrel, Wordsworth’s Martha in ‘The Thorn.’ Despairing women with dead babies.”

“We don’t know it was dead.”

“I can’t help thinking, if it was not destined to die, why did she run away? She had gone there for sanctuary. Why didn’t she stay where she was safe?”

“She meant no one to know what happened.”

“There’s an ancient taboo on seeing childbirth. Early versions of the Melusina myth have childbirth instead of the bath.”

“Repeating patterns. Again.”

They discussed also the future of the project, that is, of the research, without knowing where to go next. Back to Nantes was an obvious step, and they condoned their lingering, on this ground. Maud said Christabel had stayed with friends in London in the early 1860s – she was unaware of the connection with the Vestal Lights. Roland remembered a glancing reference to the Pointe du Raz in Ash — “tristis usque ad mortem,” Ash had said it was – but that was no guarantee he had come there.

Beyond the future of the project, Roland was worried about his own future. He would have been in a panic if he had allowed himself to think, but the dreamy days, the pearly light alternating with the hot blue, and something else, made it possible to leave thinking in abeyance. Things did not look good. He had simply walked out on Blackadder. He had done the same to Val, who was, he considered, unforgiving and dependent in equal proportion – he would have to go back to be berated, and then how could he leave, where would he go, how should he live?

Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture that mistrusted love, “in love”, romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about pollymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared.

They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed.

One night they fell asleep, side by side, on Maud’s bed, where they had been sharing a glass of Calvados. He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.

They did not speak of this, but silently negotiated another such night. It was important to both of them that the touching should not proceed to any kind of fierceness or deliberate embrace. They felt that in some way this stately peacefulness of unacknowledged contact gave back their sense of their separate lives inside their separate skins Speech, the kind of speech they knew, would have undone it. On days when the sea-mist closed them in a sudden milk-white cocoon with no perspectives they lay lazily together all day behind heavy white lace curtains on the white bed, not stirring, not speaking.

Neither was sure how much, or what, all this meant to the other.

Neither dared ask.