The Sheila Variations

The Books: "The Virgin in the Garden" (A.S. Byatt)

Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:

The Virgin in the Garden - by A.S. Byatt.

This is Byatt's third novel - and actually, she has gone on to write three more books about this particular family, so there was obviously something here that gripped her. You can tell in the writing, too. The book takes place in 1952, in England - the time of Elizabeth's coronation - seen as "the new Elizabethan age". This is AS Byatt's explicit topic. A young playwright/academic has written a new play, in honor of the occasion of the coronation - and if I recall correctly it's in verse, and it's about Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. Drawing parallels between that age and the "new" age. The play is to be put on at a private school - and the headmaster and his family (3 kids) are the main characters of Byatt's book. The chapters alternate points of view. We follow Bill (the father), and Stephanie, Frederica and Marcus (the children) through their lives - but all the time, they are grappling with big questions and issues. What is it to be English? What is culture? Is it something to be inherited? Is how we speak directly influenced by, say, Chaucer? Shakespeare? Byatt revisits these themes again and again in her books (Possession is all about that). Virgin in the Garden is really ABOUT England. England at a particular time. There is a cynicism in the era - a kind of dichotomy between the brou-haha of the upcoming coronation (and all its sincerity - you know, there's no ironic distance in a coronation, no wink-wink at the audience), and all of the shining expectations of what this new age will bring for the British Empire - and the snarkiness going on below in the populace. Another one of Byatt's main themes (this, I believe, is the thing I found most piercingly wonderful in Possession, the thing that spoke to me the most) is the split between the cerebral and the earthy. Body and mind. In a funny way, nobody writes about sex like AS Byatt. At least, to my taste and sensibilities. She writes about cerebral people, intellectuals, to some extent cut off from their own bodies - this is her topic. Sex is not always easy, or grasp-able to certain types - although the desire is usually present in every human. So there's Frederica and Stephanie - the two daughters in this book - both kind of cerebral in their own way. Frederica is sharp-minded, no-nonsense, not always likeable, unlike other girls - not gushy or mushy at all - and then there's Stephanie, a charcter I find truly fascinating. A quiet placid girl, a teacher ... I don't know, she's a mystery to me. With all her quiet placid-ness, I never knew what she was going to do next. Anyway, the lushness of Elizabethan drama, juxtaposed with the dry academic setting in 1950s England - the national hysteria over the coronation - juxtaposed with Stephanies' lectures to her students - on Keats, Ovid, Chaucer ... The book is kind of patchwork, no real plot - (unlike Possession, which is all plot) - but what you are left with is ... the image of a nation on the brink of some big changes. 1950s England. What is it to be English? What is it to be an artist? How does one feel about Shakespeare, if one is English? How does he inform the present? What is culture? A construct? Or something more organic? Byatt knows what's coming - because this book was published in 1976, I believe. Byatt knows that England, like many other countries, is headed for some decades of self-doubt, cynicism, and rebellion against old forms. The prologue of Virgin in the Garden takes place in 1968 - so in some sense, by doing that, Byatt is placing the book in its decade, purposefully. There is some retrospect. What do the 1950s look like, from the end of the 1960s? It's almost like it was a different world entirely.

I love this book. I should go back and read it again.

Here's an excerpt. I didn't know what to pick - the book is so rich, and there are so many parts I love - the family watching the coronation on television, and having all kinds of differing responses to it - the discussions of the new play, rehearsals - but I like this one. I wanted to pick an excerpt having to do with quiet deep Stephanie. Here she is, in the classroom where she teaches. She's gotta be about 20? Can't remember. She, unlike her sister Frederica, isn't a difficult character to like. But she is difficult to understand. There seems to be some melancholy there, and also - perhaps she represents a kind of old order. Meaning: look at the poem she is teaching to her students. A 'revolution' in the culture is coming. In the 60s and 70s, lit crit and multicultural concerns are going to re-make "English" classes into something entirely different. How would Stephanie have fared in that new landscape? It's not that she's a purist. No, not exactly. But her reading - and the way Byatt talks about her reading - is personal. I can't imagine that politicized readings of the classics would appeal to her at all.

Byatt doesn't really get into all of that in this book (she saves that for later books in this same series, and takes it as her main subject for Possession) - but it is there, nonetheless.

Excerpt from The Virgin in the Garden - by A.S. Byatt.

Stephanie sat in a chill brown classroom, whitened over with chalk dust, and taught the Ode on a Grecian Urn to those girls who had not gone to Blesford Ride. Good teaching is a mystery and takes many forms Stephanie's idea of good teaching was simple and limited: it was the induced, shared, contemplation of a work, an object, an artefact. It was not the encouragement of self-expression, self-analysis, or what were to be called interpersonal relations. Indeed, she saw a good reading of the Ode on a Grecian Urn as a welcome chance to avoid these activities.

She had never had trouble with discipline, although she never raised her voice. She exacted quietness, biologically and morally. Girls came in from outside, buzzing, crashing, laughing. Barbara, Gillian, Zelda, Valerie, Susan, Juliet, Grace. Valerie had a disfiguring boil and Barbara an acute curse pain. Zelda's father was dying, this month or next, and Juliet had been shocked by a strange boy who had thrust his fist up her skirt and crooked an elbow around her throat in a Blesford ginnel. Gillian was very clever and required a key, mnemonics and an analytic blueprint of the Grecian Urn for exam purposes. Susan was in love with Stephanie whom she tried to please by straining her attention. Grace wanted only to have a florist's shop, was held at school in a vice of parental ambition, biding her time.

Stephanie's mind was clear of all this information, and she required that their minds should become so. She made them keep still, by keeping unnaturally still herself, as tamers of wild birds and animals keep still, she had read in childhood, so that the creatures become either mesmerized or fearless or both, she was not sure which.

She required also that her mind at least should be clear of the curious clutter of mnemonics that represented the poem at ordinary times, when the attention was not concentrated upon it. In her case: a partial visual memory of its shape on the page, composed, in fact, of several super-imposed patterns from different editions, the gestalt clear, but shifting in size: a sense of the movement of the rhythm of the langauge which was biological, not verbal or visual, and not to be retrieved without calling whole strings of words to the mind's eye and ear again: some words, the very abstract ones, form, thought, eternity, beauty, truth, the very concrete words, unheard, sweeter, green, marble, warm, cold, desolate. A run of grammatical and punctuational pointers: the lift of frozen unasnwered questions in the first stanza, the apparently undisciplined rush of repeated epithets in the third. Visual images, neither seen, in the mind's eye, nor unseen. White forms of arrested movement under dark formal boughs. Trouble with how to "see" the trodden weed. John Keats on his death-bed, requesting the removal of books, even of Shakespeare. Herself at Cambridge, looking out through glass library walls into green boughs, committing to memory, what? Asking what, why?

She read the poem out quietly, as expressionless as possible, a ditty with no tone. And then again. The ideal was to come to it with a mind momentarily open and empty, as though for the first time. They must all hear the words equally, not pounce, or tear, or manipulate. She asked them chilly, "Well?" prolonging the difficult moment when they must just stare, finding speech difficult and judgment unavoidable.

She sat there, looking into inner emptiness, waiting for the thing to rise into form and saw nothing, nothing and then involuntarily flying specks and airy clumps of froth or foam on a strongly running grey sea. Foam not pure white, brown and gold-stained herre and there, blowing together, centripetal, a form cocooned in crusts and swathes of adhesive matter. Not relevant, her judgment said, the other poem, damn it, the foam of perilous seas. The thing had a remembered look, not pleasant, and she grimaced, as she saw it. Venus de Milo, Venus Anadyomene. The foam-born, foam from the castrated genitals of Kronos. Not a bad image, if you wanted one, of the coming to form from shapelessness, but not what she had meant to call up.

"Well," she said to the girls, "well, what do you see?"

They began to talk about when Keats required his reader to see an urn and when a landscape, what colours he called up and what he left to chocie, and moved from there to the nature of the difficulty of seeing what is formed to be
"seen" by language alone, marble men and maidents, the heifer and altar, a burning forehead and a parching tongue, cold pastoral.

Herad melodies are sweet but those unheard
Are sweeter,

said Stephanie. Clever Gillian commented that the word desolate was the centre of the poem, almost allowing one to be taken out of it, like the word forlorn in the Nightingale. They talked about beauty is truth, truth beauty. They talked, as Stephanie had meant them to, about a verbal thing, made of words so sensual and words not sensual at all, like beauty and truth. She talked about what it could mean, that the turn should "tease us out of thought As doth eternity". It is a funeral urn, said Zelda. That is not enough to say, said Susan, staring at Stephanie.

Things moved in the classroom, amongst eight closed minds, one urn, eight urns, nine urns, half realised, unreal, white figures whose faces and limbs could be sensed but not precisely described, bright white, the dark, the words, moving, in ones, in groups, in clusters, in and out of whatever cells held their separate and communal visual, aural or intellectual memories. Stephanie talked them out of the vocabulary she was supposed to be teaching them and left them with none, darlkling. Gillian, who was enjoying the process, reflected that words could be quickly enough snatched back, when the occasion required it. Stephanie reflected that this poem was the poem she most cared for, saying ambivalently that you could not do, and need not attempt, what it required you to do, see the unseen, realise the unreal, speak what was not, and that yet it did it so that unheard melodies seemed infinitely preferable to any one might ever hope to hear. Human beings, she had thought, even as a very small child faced with The Lady of Shalott, might so easily never have hit on the accidental idea of making unreal verbal forms, they might have just lived, and dreamed, and tried to tell the truth. She had kept asking Bill, why did he write it, and the answers had been so many and so voluble and so irrelevant to the central problem, that she closed her mind to them, even whilst effortlessly committing them to memory for future use, as Gillian now must and would.

The bell rang. They came out blinking, like owls into the bright daylight. Stephanie, gathering her books, allowed herself to wonder whether the irrelevant flying foam she had seen had come from the Nightingale, or from her own intellect, making Freudian associations all too tidily between marble maidens, the Venus and the subconscious knowledge she had of the nature of that foam. It was not very nice foam.

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