Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
Next book on the shelf is another short story collection – this one called Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice – by A.S. Byatt. This is an excerpt from the second story in the collection “A Lamia in the Cévennes”. A painter named Bernard Lycett-Kean (I believe he has had some success in his career, the way Byatt writes about him you can tell he’s serious about his work, etc.) can’t take England under Margaret Thatcher, and so he takes his savings – and buys a house in The Cévennes. It’s a little stone house in a hillside – and he has a swimming pool built into the side of a hill. He lives in total solitude. He becomes obsessed with the blue in the swimming pool – and how to paint it … (this will be the excerpt today). It is a problem in color and paint that keeps him up at nights. He asks- what is my problem? Why am I tormented by this blue?? But still – he just keeps working the problem. Then one day … the pool starts to seem cloudy, murky – There’s something wrong with it. Bernard kind of freaks out. It must be fixed! Where did the blue go? He has workmen come out – drain the pool – re-fill it with water from an underground spring … and this completely screws up Bernard’s rhythm, in terms of his work … but he grits it out. When the pool is re-filled … it’s just not the same. The blue is not the same. The depths are cloudy. He swims in the pool and can’t see his legs because of the murk. Toads swim in the pool, too. Something is shifting, changing. He doesn’t know what it is. Sometimes he thinks he gets a glimpse of a massive (meaning: scary massive) snake, coiled up at the bottom of the pool. In double figure eights. He is not scared of the snake … or monster … he tries to paint it. The snake – eventually – …. hmm, this is where Byatt goes into fairy-tale mode, which is one of her voices, or genres. She has an entire book of fairy tales out – she loves that magical stuff … So basically this snake – is kind of a Little Mermaid type creature … looking to Bernard to “save” her, and make her be human. She is a disgusting creature – but there’s something in her that Bernard likes. And also – he becomes obsessed with his painting of the snake in the pool. He can’t follow her instructions that would make her be a human until he has finished his painting.
Anyway – it’s a fascinating scary little story.
Here is Bernard, becoming obsessed with the blue.
Oh, and I mentioned yesterday in my first post about Elementals that each story in the collection uses as its jumping-off point an image of some work of art – an artifact, an object, a painting. The one for this is a sketch of a mermaid by Matisse.
The last line of this excerpt kills me. God, it’s good. YES.
Excerpt from Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice – by A.S. Byatt. – “A Lamia in the Cévennes”
He swam more and more, trying to understand the blue, which was different when it was under the nose, ahead of the eyes, over and around the sweeping hands and the flickering toes and the groin and the armpits and the hairs of his chest, which held bubbles of air for a time. His shadow in the blue moved over a pale eggshell mosaic, a darker blue, with huge paddle-shaped hands. The light changed, and with it, everything. The best days were under racing cloud, when the aquamarine took on a cool grey tone, which was then chased back, or rolled away, by the flickering gold-in-blue of yellow light in liquid. In front of his prow or chin in the brightest lights moved a mesh of hexagonal threads, flashing rainbow colours, flashing liquid silver-gilt, with a hint of molten glass; on such days liquid fire, rosy and yellow and clear, ran across the dolphin, who lent it a thread of intense blue. But the surface could be a reflective plane, with the trees hanging in it, with two white diagonals where the aluminium steps entered. The shadows of the sides were a deeper blue but not a deep blue, a blue not reflective and yet lying flatly under reflections. The pool was deep, for the Émeraude young men envisaged much diving. The wind changed the surface, frilled and furred it, flecked it with diamond drops, shirred it and made a witless patchwork of its plane. His own motion changed the surface – the longer he swam, the faster he swam, the more the glassy hills and valleys chopped and changed and ran back on each other.
Swimming was volupté – he used the French word, because of Matisse. Luxe, calme et volupté. Swimming was a strenuous battle with immense problems, of geometry, of chemistry, of apprehension, of style, of other colours. He put pots of petunias and geraniums near the pool. The bright hot pinks and purples were dangerous. They did something to that blue.
The stone was easy. Almost too blandly easy. He could paint chalky white and creamy sand and cool grey and paradoxical hot grey; he could understand the shadows in the high rough wall of monstrous cobblestones that bounded his land.
The problem was the sky. Swimming in one direction, he was headed towards a great rounded-green mountain, thick with the bright yellow-green of dense chestnut trees, making a slightly innocent, simple arc against the sky. Whereas the other way, he swam towards crags, towards a bowl of bald crags, with a few pines and lines of dark shale. And against the green hump the blue sky was one blue, and against the bald stone another, even when for a brief few hours it was uniformly blue overhead, that rich blue, that cobalt, deep-washed blue of the South, which fought all the blues of the pool, all the green-tinged, duck-egg-tinged blues of the shifting water. But the sky had also its greenish days, and its powdery-hazed days, and its theatrical louring days, and none of these blues and whites and golds and ultramarines and faded washes harmonised in any way with the pool blues, though they all went through their changes and splendours in the same world, in which he and his shadow swam, in which he and his shadow stood in the sun and struggled to record them.
He muttered to himself. Why bother. Why does this matter so much. What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again. I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera-camp in Colombia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint or air on a bit of board? I could just stop.
He could not.
He tried oil paint and acrylic, watercolour and gouache, large designs and small plain planes and complicated juxtaposed planes. He tried trapping light on thick impasto and tried also glazing his surfaces flat and glossy, like seventeenth-century Dutch or Spanish paintings of silk. One of these almost pleased him, done at night, with the lights under the water and the dark round the stone, on an oval bit of board. But then he thought it was sentimental. He tried veils of watery blues on white in watercolour, he tried Matisse-like patches of blue and petunia – pool blue, sky blue, petunia – he tried Bonnard’s mixtures of pastel and gouache.
His brain hurt, and his eyes stared, and he felt whipped by winds and dried by suns.
He was happy, in one of the ways human beings have found in which to be happy.