The Books: “Sugar and Other Stories” – ‘Sugar’ (A.S. Byatt)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

bosugar.jpegThis excerpt is from “Sugar”, the final short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories – by A.S. Byatt.

This one feels autobiographical to me – and not just because it’s (rare for Byatt) a first-person narrative. I actually don’t know all that much about Byatt – bare bones stuff – but I feel like I know many of her intellectual interests. Those all show up here. It’s the story of a woman whose father is dying – he’s in a hospital bed in Amsterdam where he collapsed – and she has gone to him. One of the themes of the whole story is that her mother – mainly a good woman, an upstanding woman – was also a liar. A fabricator. She told stories about the past – weaving fiction into truth – choosing words carefully, omitting certain things – and also flat out making things up. And by doing so – it’s almost like she has hijacked the past. Our narrator doesn’t know if some of her memories are real – or … implanted there by her mother’s telling and re-telling and embroidering of the stories. She begins to recognize signs of fictionalization, certain phrases her mother uses – like: Oh, I bet she made that part of it up … While her father lies dying in Amsterdam, he talks about this trait of his wife … in a way that makes you feel that she did the same thing to him. She took over his stories. And sometimes she told them wrong. Or sometimes she made shit up – like being at the death-bed of his father and being there at the moment he passed away. This is a sacrilege – to make up something like that. Why does her mother do this? The story doesn’t really set out to answer that question … but the story does set out (in first-person voice) to try to put down what you remember. It’s all “I remember this …” “I remember that” – as though the act of writing will make it concrete, or will make it hers. She wants to know her father. It is hard to know her father without getting thru the mists set up by her mother … and it is also hard because he’s not a gushy talk-y kind of guy. The following excerpt – is also a reminder of what was to come in Possession (this collection of short stories pre-dates Possession) as well as Still Life (excerpt here) – with its intercut scenes of the Potter family narrative and the letters of Vincent Van Gogh. Randolph Henry Ash, in Possession, wrote an epic poem about Ragnarok – and had a great fascination in the chilly northern gods and their myths. It’s interesting, here, to hear this narrator (who is or is not Byatt) discuss what it was that drew her to those two specific things.


Excerpt from “Sugar”, the final short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories – by A.S. Byatt.

He had often said before, though he didn’t repeat it, at least to me, during those weeks, that a man’s children are his true and only immortality. As a girl I had been made uncomfortable by that idea. I craved separation. “Each man is an island” was my version of a delightful if melancholy truth. I was like Auden’s version of Prospero’s rejecting brother, Antonio, “By choice myself alone”. But during those extreme weeks in Amsterdam I thought about origins. I thought about my grandfather. I thought also about certain myths of origin which I had pieced together in childhood, to explain things that were important, my sense of northernness, my fear of art, the promised end. By a series of elaborate coincidences two of these had become inextricablly involved in what was happening. The first was the Norse Ragnorak, and the second was Vincent Van Gogh.

We went to see the Gotterdammerung, in Covent Garden, on the last night of my father’s doomed Rhine-journey. I had a bad cough, which embarrassed me. Now whenever I could I see Gunter and Gutrune like proto-Nazis in their heavy palace beside the broad and glittering artificial water, and think as I thought then, as I always think, when I think of the 1930s, of my father in those first years of my life knowing and fearing what was coming, appalled by appeasement, volunteering for the RAF. When I was clearing his things I found a copy of the “Speech Delivered in the Reichstag, April 28th 1939, by Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer and Chancellor”. It was stored in a box of family photographs, the only thing in there that was not a photograph, as though it was an intimate part of our family history. At the time, because I was thinking about islands, I remember very clearly thinking about the similarities and dissimilarities between Prospero and Wotan. I thought, in the red dark, that the nineteenth-century Allfather, compared to the Renaissance rough magician, was enclosed in Victorian family claustrophobia, was essentially, by extension, a social being, though both had broken rods. When Fricka berated Wotan, I thought with pleasure of my father, proceeding slowly and freely along the great river.

My favourite book, the book which set my imagination working, as a small child in Pontefract in the early years of the war, was Asgard and the Gods. Tales and Traditions of our Northern Ancestors. 1880. It was illustrated with steel engravings, of Wodan’s Wild Hunt, of Odin tied between two fires, his face threatening and beautiful, of Ragnarok, the Last Battle, with Surtur with his flaming head, come out of Muspelheim, the gaping Fenris Wolf about to destroy Odin himself, Thor thrusting his shield-arm into the maw of the risen sea-serpent Jormungander. I remember the shock of reading about the Last Battle in which all the heroes, all the gods, were destroyed forever. It had not until then occurred to me that a story could end like that. Though I had suspected that real life might, my expectations were gloomy. I found it exciting. I knew Asgard backwards before my mother told me about Sylvia, that is certain. I remember sitting in church, listening to the story of Joseph and his coat of many colours and thinking that this story was no different from the stories in Asgard and less moving than they were. I remember going on to think that Ragnarok seemed “truer” than the Resurrection. After Ragnarok, a very tentative, new, vegetable world began a new cycle, washed clean of blood and fire and gold. I may, I see now, rereading the book as I still do, have been influenced in these childish steps in literary theory and the Higher Criticism by the tone of the authors of Asgard, who rationalize Balder and Hodur into summer and winter, who turn giants into mountain ranges and Odin’s wrath to wild weather, and who talk about the superior truths illustrated by the beautiful Christian stories. They are not Frazer, equating all gods gleefully with trees, but they set you on course for him. I identified Our Northern Ancestors in my mind with my father’s family, wild, extravagant, stony, large and frightening. They were something of which I was part. They were serious gods, as the Greeks, with their love-affairs and capriciousness, were not. The book was, however, not my father’s, but my mother’s, bought as a crib for the Ancient Icelandic and Old Norse which formed an obligatory part of her degree course. I can’t remember if she gave it to me to read, or if I found it. I do remember that she fed the hunger for reading, there was always a book and another book and another. She never underestimated what we could take. She was not kind to her children as social beings, she screamed at invited friends, she felt and communicated extremes of nervous terror. But to readers she was generous and resourceful. I knew she had been the kind of child I was, speechless and a reader. I knew.

It was with my mother, on the other hand, that the Van Gogh myth originated. Her family name had a Dutch shape and sound to it. Her family came, in part, from the Potteries, from the Five Towers, and a myth had grown up with no foundation in evidence, that they were descended from Dutch Huguenots, who came here in the time of William the Silent, practical, warm, Protestant, hardworking craftsmen, with a buried and secret artistic strain. This Dutch quality was a kind of Gemutlichkeit, the quality with which my mother had hoped to warm and mitigate the wuthering and chill of my father’s upbringing. In Sheffield, after the war, we had various reproductions of paintings by Vincent Va Gogh around our sitting room wall. There was one of the bridges at Arles, one of the sunnier ones, where the water is aquamarine and women are peacefully spreading washing. There were the boats on the beach at Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer, which I recognized with shock when I went there eight years later. There was a young man in a hat and yellow jacket whom I now know to have been the son of Roulin, the postman, and there was a Zouave in full oriental trousers and red fez, sitting on a bench on a floor whose perspective rose dizzily and improperly towards him There were also two Japanese prints and what I think now must have been a print of Vermeer’s Little Street in the Rijksmuseum, a housefront of great peace and steadiness, with a bending woman in a passageway on the left. I always, from the very earliest, associated these working women in Dutch streets with my mother. I associated the secret inwardness of the houses, de Hooch’s houses even more than Vermeer’s, with my mother’s domestic myth, necessary tasks carried out in clear light, in their own confined but meaningful spaces. In my memory, I have superimposed a de Hooch on the Vermeer, for a remember in the picture a small blonde Dutch child, with a cap and serious expression, close to the woman’s skirts, who is my small blonde self, gravely paying attention, as my mother would have liked. The Sheffield house, in whose sitting-room these images were deployed, was one of a pair of semi-detached houses purchased as a wedding present for my father by his father, who could never, clearly, do things by halves, who thought, rightly, it would be an investment. We left one of these houses for Pontefract, during the war, for fear of bombs, and came back to the other. At the period when I most clearly remember the Van Goghs and the Vermeer/de Hooch the second house was in a state of renovation and redecoration. My grandfather had died, various large and dignified pieces of furniture had come to be fitted in, and there was money to spend on wallpaper and curtains. I remember one very domestic one, a kind of blush pink with regular cream dots on it, a sugar-sweet paper that my parents repeatedly expressed themselves surprised to like, and about which I was never sure. In my memory, the Van Goghs hang tamed on this delicately suburban ground, but in fact they cannot have done so. I am almost sure that paper was in the dining-room, where my Aunt Gladys was flustered by my enraged and aproned mother. In any case my earliest acquaintance with the paintings was as pleasantly light decoration round a three-piece suite. This was part of what he meant his work to be, sensuous pleasure for everyone. When did I discover differently? Certainly before I myself went to Arles, before Cambridge, in the 1950s, and saw that tortured and aspiring cypresses were exact truths, of their kind. When my father collapsed at Schiphol I was writing a novel in which the idea of Van Gogh stalked in and out of a text about puritanical northern domesticity. There was nowhere I would rather have found myself than the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. I was reading and rereading his letters. He wrote about the Dutch painters and their capacity to paint darkness, to paint the brightness of black. He wrote about the hunger for light, and about how his “northern brains” in that clear, heavy, sulphur yellow southern light were oppressed by its power. He was not cautious, he lived dangerously. He felt his brains were electric and his vision too much for his body. Yet he remained steadily intelligent and analytic, mixing his colours, thinking about the nature of light, of one man’s energy, of one man’s death. He painted the oppression of his fellow-inmates in the hospital in St. Remy. He was a decorous and melancholic northerner turned absolute and wild. He observed and reobserved his own grim red-headed skull and muscles without gentleness, without self-love, without evasion. He was truthful and mad. In the mornings I went and looked at his paintings, and in the afternoons I took the tram out to my father’s echoing hospital, carrying little parcels of delicacies, smoked fish, fruits, chocolates. In the afternoons and evenings he talked. He talked, among other things, about the Van Gogh prints, which were obviously his own, his choice, nothing to do with my “Dutch” mother. He talked particularly about the portrait of the Zouave. That was on one of his good days. I had brought him some freesias and some dahlias. I had not realized, in all those years, that he was one of the rare people who cannot smell freesias. He claimed that on this occasion he could. “Just a ghost of a smell, just a hint, I think I can smell it …” he said. He helped me to mend one of the dahlias with sellotape, where I had bent its stem. “You can keep them alive,” he said, “if you keep the water-channels open. I’ve often kept things alive successfully for surprisingly long periods, that way.” He talked about Van Gogh’s Zouave, the one of the family prints I had liked least, as a child, because the floor made me giddy and because the man was alien, both his clothes and his face. It was, said my father precisely, “a very powerful image of pure male sexuality. Absolutely straightforward and simple. It was always my favourite.”

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8 Responses to The Books: “Sugar and Other Stories” – ‘Sugar’ (A.S. Byatt)

  1. Ted says:

    Did you read the Science Times piece about narrative a few weeks back? How we construct narratives as frames for our experiences, whether we construct that narrative in the first or third person, and what changing that point of view does to our experience. What is it about stories that compels us so much? The illusion of unbroken flow? The sense we make of what is otherwise disjointed and contradictory? And when someone constructs a narrative for us that is not our’s – what a violation! I want to read this story.

  2. red says:

    Ted – I didn’t read the piece – but it’s interesting, I just had a conversation with David recently about this very thing. I didn’t call it “narrative”, though – I called it “mythology” – that we each have a mythology, we construct it to organize our memories, our experiences … and perhaps this is an artistic trait, not sure – but it’s also like that line in Postcards from the Edge, when Meryl Streep says, “I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.”

    I think one of the appeals of stories to me (espeically the ones I construct about my own life) is that they give me the possibility of sense. Of things making sense. So much seems to be random, so much in life occurs to me as absolutely un-fucking-fair … and somehow – the narratives, the mythology – helps counter-act that.

    That’s what I’ve been writing about and concentrating on these days, anyway.

  3. red says:

    There’s more to this whole mythology thing – I’ve been thinking a lot about it … Of course you want to be open to other people’s input, their “interpretations” of your own narrative … but on some deep level, it seems to me that friendship – and true friendship – needs to be based on an acceptance of the other person’s mythology.

    If someone was constantly trying to tell me that the way I saw certain things (certain things that I find sacred – like the 74 Facts relationship) was wrong- or that my “mythology” that I erected around it was a fallacy … I would have a very hard time being intimate with that person as a friend.

    Whether or not there are different ways to look at the 74 Facts situation is irrelevant. Of course there are. But the narrative I have constructed – feels the most true – and it’s the best kind of truth. It’s a truth that keeps on giving, a truth that really matters to me.

    But did it really happen that way? And exactly?

    And does that even matter??

    I know that sometimes all of this needs to be adjusted … this was one of the things David and I were talking about … because sometimes the stories we choose to tell ourselves are the WRONG stories. Or – not wrong, but completely self-destructive. (You know, whatever happens to you becomes the story of: “Why I am Stupid and Why I don’t Deserve Love” or whatever … ) Everything that happens becomes another cog in that thematic wheel … and you just keep destroying yourself, through your own interpretation of events … know what I mean? We all do that. We all have those moments.

    But there are some things in my “mythology” that are not up for discussion or debate. And why is that? Why am I so fiercely protective of my own stories? Well, I know the reason … but it is interesting to contemplate all the whys and wherefores.

  4. John says:

    That’s funny. My entire life has been a fight against mythology. A fight to embrace the Chaos. To see what is. See first, theorize later, and always be ready to abandon the construct when it disagrees with reality.

    It can be taken too far, of course. We had a prof (the one who used to send emails to his students at 3:30 AM) in grad school who forbade fiction books for his children. They turned out a little … odd.

    I’m not that bad yet – I enjoy a good instructive yarn as well as the next person. I haven’t read Byatt, but based on your excerpts, I think I’m going to pick up Possession.

  5. red says:

    Well, you have misunderstood my point about mythology – or you just went to one surface level of it, John. If you read my posts about my romances, my life, my pain, my growth as a person, my struggles, my experiences as a woman – how I make sense of that – how I grieve, or celebrate – you might know what I was talking about.

    I am talking about aftermaths and how I handle aftermaths. To me, that has to do with mythology.

  6. John says:

    Oh, I wasn’t talking about personal mythology, I was talking about the constructs that authors and politicians use to make sense out of society. Byatt seems to do a pretty good job of cutting that out and trying to get at what people in the past actually felt, rather than layer on our preconceptions about their world view and our reactions to what they felt. I’ve heard her called a post-modern novelist, and it seems to me from your excerpts that she is pretty much the antithesis of that crew, although she perhaps harbors some sympathy for their central theme of social construction.

    I guess one reason I react poorly to socially contructed (as opposed to personally constructed) mythology is because of the time I spent observing the mythology of the USSR first hand. The older I get, the more I see the stain of Romanticism in the great evils of our age.

  7. red says:

    Well, we’re talking about personal mythology here. That is obvious from my conversation with my friend Ted. Do you have anything to add to that, or no? I never get sick of talking about the USSR and totalitarianism, obviously – but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Nor is it what Byatt is discussing. I get sick of this type of comment in posts where that is not the topic or the focus.

    Byatt is, like most of us, a hodgepodge of feelings, thoughts, ideas – don’t decide anything about her from your own limited viewpoint, and also not having read any of her stuff. That would be very bad form.

    I actually do look forward to hearing your response to her stuff – but she is probably not black and white enough for you. She’s not a CRITIC. She’s an observer. She’s a storyteller. Her observations about literary criticism, and responses to literature – and how they impact our lives – and what modernism is, etc – are genius.

    But I am also (again, ad nauseum) uninterested in having a black and white tone on my blog – especially when I’m discussing something that is inherently grey, meaning subjective experiences. It’s inappropriate.

    I am talking about art and life here. I know there are larger issues, and these concern me as well – and I have bookshelves full of books about these things and cults and brainwashing and fascistic structures – but like I’ve said I’m not talking about that here.

  8. red says:

    Back again to Byatt:

    Possession is, among other things, a look at modern-day literary theory and its weirdness – its distancing – its rigidity – and then being confronted with something living from the past … how can we imagine ourselves into the past … how can we know what it was really like for, say,Robert Browning … what was it really like to be Chaucer …

    It is difficult to even remember a time wihtout email now … I would say if Byatt did have a theme – it would be that.

    It comes up again and again in her work.

    Not to mention the fact that she’s an awesome writer – and is able to, like nobody else, describe what it is like, what it is actually like – to be a cerebral woman in a romance.

    It’s so specific – but that’s my milieu, it’s how I live … and I’ve never EVER heard it described so perfectly as she does. In Possession but also in all of her books – Babel Tower, etc.

    Intellect. Passion.

    It’s a struggle, it’s not easy. For some. For some it’s not a struggle. But for others, it is a torment.

    It is a torment for me.

    And that’s what Byatt writes about.

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