I didn’t mark the passing of A.S. Byatt last year when it happened. I was overwhelmed with work at the time. But I did take a moment … a very still and silent moment … to reflect on her, on what her work has meant to me, what it has given me, the years and years I was lucky enough to experience, years where she was an active and prolific writer, putting out a book every year or so. A new AS Byatt was something to look forward to. I read it all, even her more obscure books, about Coleridge and Wordsworth, about literary history, her published “talks” on storytelling, fairy tales, myths … all of which she incorporated gorgeously in her fiction.
She is a rigorous read, and I love a rigorous read.
It’s her birthday today.
More, much more, after the jump.
Possession was my way in, as I assume it was for a lot of people. I would recommend the book to other people – good friends, good readers – who couldn’t get into it. But for me it so reflected my sensibility, my concerns and questions, my interests … I almost couldn’t believe it existed. There was a seriousness at play, obvioiusly, but it also is a HOOT, which I didn’t really perceive on my first read. It starts off as this serious exploration of so-called niche things like postmodernist literature and academia … not exactly mainstream … and then basically switches up to a mystery-caper, complete with grave-robbing and different bands of writer-detectives descending on the same spot at the same time, grasping for immortality. It’s very funny!
But she also created memorable characters, and she was a great writer of love, romance, yearning – but of a very specific kind, the kind where intellect matters. It’s not just feeling. It’s sense AND sensibility, mixed together in a potent brew. For me, discovering her was like discovering a kindred spirit. If you are living a life of the mind – which I primarily am – then you understand the passion and “possession” of the written word, and how VIBRANT the intellect is, how exciting. I read Possession in my wild-child 20s, when I was cavorting through the city streets having bacchanalian adventures – so I was not at all ensconced in academia, and I don’t understand academic language, it is not at all my world and it never WAS my world. But I understood it. I understood Maud’s pain/yearning, her desire for something more, her fear of something more. The “breaking down” of Maud’s edifice was one of the most moving things I could read at that time. My edifice was not like Maud’s: hers was openly feminist, severe, a serious academic. My edifice was wild red-headed playmate, lol. But we are not our surfaces. At the same time, our surfaces are real. Byatt examined, in work after work, the reality of surfaces. I think her passionate interest in painting (many of her short stories are extended riffs on well-known paintings) came from her interest in surfaces, and the stories they tell.
In Possession, the 19th century Tennyson-esque poet Randolph Henry Ash considers fellow poet Christabel LaMotte, in the early days of knowing her:
As a young man he had been much struck by the story of Wordsworth and his solitary Highland girl; the poet had heard the enchanted singing, taken in exactly as much as he had needed for his own immortal verse, and had refused to hear more. He himself, he had discovered, was different. He was a poet greedy for information, for facts, for details. Nothing was too trivial to interest him; nothing was inconsiderable; he would, if he could, have mapped every ripple on a mudflat and its evidence of the invisible workings of wind and tide. So now his love for this woman, known intimately and not at all, was voracious for information. He learned her. He studied the pale loops of hair on her temples. Their sleek silver-gold seemed to him to have in it a tinge, a hint of greenness, not the copper-green of decay, but a pale sap-green of vegetable life, streaked into the hair like the silvery bark of young trees, or green shadows in green tresses of young hay. And her eyes were green, glass-green, malachite green, the cloudy green of seawater perturbed and carrying a weight of sand. The lashes over them silver, but thick enough to be visibly present. The face not kind. There was no kindness in the face. It was cut clean but not fine – strong-boned rather, so that temples and slanting cheeks were pronounced and solid-shadowed, the shadows bluish, which in imagination he always touched with green too, but it was not so.
If he loved the face, which was not kind, it was because it was clear and quick and sharp.
He saw, or thought he saw, how those qualities had been disguised or overlaid by more conventional casts of expression – an assumed modesty, an expedient patience, a disdain masking itself as calm. At her worst – oh, he saw her clearly, despite her possession of him – at her worst she would look down and sideways and smile demurely, and this smile would come near a mechanical simper, for it was an untruth, it was a convention, it was her brief constricted acknowledgement of the world’s expectations. He had seen immediately, it seemed to him, what in essence she was, sitting at Crabb Robinson’s breakfast table, listening to men disputing, thinking herself an unobserved observer. Most men, he judged, if they had seen the harshness and fierceness and absolutism, yes, absolutism, of that visage, would have stood back from her. She would have been destined to be loved only by timid weaklings, who would have secretly hoped she would punish or command them, or by simpletons, who supposed her chill look of delicate withdrawal to indicate a kind of female purity, which all desired, in those days, at least ostensibly. But he had known immediately that she was for him, she was to do with him, as she really was or could be, or in freedom might have been.
“She was to do with him.” God, I love that. It stuck with me.
Byatt wrote a lot about her own process. It was always interesting, since she was so well-read, and so conscious of what she was going for. In one essay (sadly, the link is dead, but I saved the quote), she wrote about writing Possession and her various concerns with writing this dual literary tale, taking place in the 19th century AND the 20th century:
There was a huge problem. I knew that modern forms were parodic- not only Eco, but the intelligent criticism of Malcolm Bradbury had been pointing that out – parodic, not in a sneering or mocking way, but as “rewriting” or “representing” the past. The structural necessity of my new form was that the poems of my two poets, the most important thing about them in my own view, should be in this no-longer ghostly text. And I am not a poet, and novelists who write poems usually come to grief. Robertson Davies, the Canadian novelist, had written a novel with a parodic libretto in fact made up of the poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. I said to the poet D.J.Enright at a party, that I was contemplating using the early poems of Pound that look as though they could be by Browning. “Nonsense,” he said. “Write your own.”
So I tried. My mind has been full since childhood of the rhythms of Tennyson and Browning, Rossetti and Keats. I read and reread Emily Dickinson, whose harsher and more sceptical voice I found more exciting than Christina Rossetti’s meek resignation. I wanted a fierce female voice. And I found I was possessed – it was actually quite frightening – the nineteenth-century poems that were not nineteenth-century poems wrote themselves, hardly blotted, fitting into the metaphorical structure of my novel, but not mine, as my prose is mine.
She had already explored many of these issues in The Virgin in the Garden, the start of what would be a quartet, about – a lot of the time – her own life, her formative experience as a child in WWII, her literary interests, the rise of postmodernism, the struggle with literature, a literature she took personally, it transported her. In Virgin in the Garden, Stephanie (the older sister of Byatt stand-in Frederica) teaches Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to a high school class:
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.
Her books explore things OTHER than personal emotions: literary trends, scientific trends, things like entymology and anthropology, she was interested in the insect world, and in the plant world. These things come into play over and over again in her work. She wrote her own fairy tales. All of this is put together in her magnum opus Possession but it’s present everywhere.
George Eliot was a guiding star for her and I can’t remember where I read the following comment, but it was in some review of her work and I absolutely love it; “Byatt writes as though James Joyce never existed.” Yes! Her sensibility was 19th century, but her backround was postmodern. She used all of this in her writing.
Quotes from her essay “George Eliot: A Celebration”:
So I came to George Eliot late, in the days when I was teaching the modern English novel in evening classes and trying to find out how to write a good novel myself. Meeting any great writer is like being made aware of freedoms and capabilities one had no idea were possible. Reading Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda I learned several primitive yet crucial lessons about writing novels – and these lessons were also moral lessons about life. It is possible, I learned, to invent a world peopled by a large number of inter-related people, almost all of whose processes of thought, developments of consciousness, biological anxieties, sense of their past and future can most scrupulously be made available to readers, can work with and against each other, can lead to failure, or partial failure, or triumphant growth.
On Eliot’s “God’s eye” POV, the way Eliot leaps from micro to macro, as though she’s God perched on a cloud, looking down, seeing all:
One of the technical things I had discovered during the early teaching of Middlemarch was George Eliot’s authorial intervention, which were then very unfashionable, thought to be pompous Victorian moralizing and nasty lumps in the flow of “the story.” I worked out that on the contrary, the authorial “voice” added all sorts of freedom a good writer could do with. Sometimes it could work with firm irony to undercut the sympathetic “inner” portrayal of a character…There is so much in there, in the style. The magisterial authority of a Greek Chorus, or God, who knows Dorothea’s fate before her drama has really begun. Sympathy, in the author, towards the character’s ambitions, and a certain wry sense that, unfocused as they are, they are doomed. And then, in that last sentence, which is biting social comedy, the choice of the crucial adjective – “merely canine affection” – to disparage the kind of “love” thought adequate by most planners of marriages, not only in the nineteenth century.
If you click on the ‘Byatt’ tab at the bottom of the post, you can see the vast archive I’ve written on this woman, dating back to the early days of my blog 22 freakin’ years ago. A lifelong relationship with a living writer. I treasure it.
Patricia Lockwood’s essay on Byatt is a must-read.
Some sections I love/have collected:
From her short story “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary”:
“You must learn now, that the important lesson – as long as you have your health – is that the divide is not between the servants and the served, between the leisured and the workers, but between those who are interested in the world and its multiplicity of forms and forces, and those who merely subsist, worrying and yawning.”
On Middlemarch:
When I was younger it was fashionable to criticise Eliot for writing from a god’s eye view, as though she were omniscient. Her authorial commenting voice appeared old-fashioned. It was felt she should have chosen a limited viewpoint, or written from inside her characters only. I came to see that this is nonsense. If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work – as a novelist.
From her short story “The Pink Ribbon” (her eroticism apparent: plain-spoken yet romantic, and in a larger cultural context):
They were students and virgins; he had half-feared and half-hoped that she might not be, for he wanted to be the first and he wanted it not to be a fiasco, or a worse kind of failure. He hadn’t asked her about it until they were undressing together in the hotel room he had taken. She turned to laugh at him through the black hair she was unpinning, catching exactly both his anxieties.
“No, there’s no one else, and yes, you will have to work it all out from scratch, but since human beings always have worked it out, we’ll probably manage. We’ve done pretty well up to now,” she said, glancing under her lashes, recalling increasingly complicated and tantalising fumbles in cars, in college rooms, in the river near the roots of willows.
She had always demonstrated a sturdy, even shocking, absence of the normal feminine reticences, or modesty, or even anxiety. She loved her own body, and he worshipped it.
From her short story “The Stone Woman”, which describes just that: a woman slowly turns to stone:
She was surprised at the fatalism with which she resigned herself to taking horrified glances at her transformtion. It was as though, much of the time, hr thoughts and feelings had slowed to stone-speed, nerveless and stolid. There were, increasingly, days when a new curiosity jostled the horror. One day, one of the blue veins on her inner thigh erupted into a line of rubious spinels, and she thought of jewels before she thought of pustules. They glittered as she moved. She saw that her stony casing was not static – points of rock salt and milky quartz thrust through glassy sheets of basalt, bubbles of sinter formed like tears between layers of hornblende. She learned the names of some of the stones when curiosity got the better of passive fear. The flat, a dictionary-maker’s flat, was furnished with encyclopedias of all sorts. She sat in the evening lamplight and read the lovely words: pyrolusite, ignimbrite, omphacite, uvarovite, glaucophane, schist, shale, gneiss, tuff.
From her fairy-tale/autobiographical story “The Thing in the Forest”, about two children evacuated from london during the Blitz:
The window-panes were both grimy and misted up. The train stopped frequently, and when it stopped, they used their gloves to wipe rounds, through which they peered out at flooded fields, furrowed hillsides and tiny stations whose names were carefully blacked out, whose platforms were empty of life.
The children did not know that the namelessness was meant to baffle or delude an invading army. They felt – they did not think it out, but somewhere inside them the idea sprouted – that the erasure was because of them, because they were not meant to know where they were going or, like Hansel and Gretel, to find the way back. They did not speak to each other of this anxiety, but began the kind of coversation children have about things they really disliked, things that upset, or disgusted, or frightened them. Semolina pudding with its grainy texture, mushy peas, fat on roast meat. Listening to the stairs and the window-sashes creaking in the dark or the wind. Having your head held roughly back over the basin to have your hair washed, with cold water running down inside your liberty bodice. Gangs in playgrounds. They felt the pressure of all the other alien children in all the other carriages as a potential gang. They shared another square of chocolate, and licked their fingers, and looked out at a great white goose flapping its wings beside an inky pond.
From another one of her fairy tales, “The Eldest Princess”:
She began to think. She was by nature a reading, not a travelling princess. This meant both that she enjoyed her new striding solitude in the fresh air, and that she had read a great many stories in her spare time, including several stories about princes and princesses who set out on Quests. What they all had in common, she thought to herself, was a pattern in which the two elder sisters, or brothers, set out very confidently, failed in one way or another, and were turned to stone, or imprisoned in vaults, or cast into magic sleep, until rescued by the third royal person, who did everything well, restored the first and the second, and fulfilled the Quest.
She thought she would not like to waste seven years of her brief life as a statue or prisoner if it could be avoided.
She thought that of course she could be vigilant, and very courteous to all passers-by – most elder princesses’ failings were failings of courtesy or over-confidence.
There was nobody on the Road to whom she could be courteous, except the old woman, or women, bundling aong from time to time a long way ahead.
She thought, I am in a pattern I know, and I suspect I have no power to break it, and I am going to meet a test and fail it, and spend seven years as a stone.
This distressed her so much that she sat down on a convenient large stone at the side of the road and began to weep.
From another princess-centered fairy tale, about a princess who doesn’t just love the cold, but needs it. The tale is called “Cold”:
You couldn’t name it and I couldn’t recognize it. I thought it was just a Puritanical ice that glittered like flame. But now I believe it was flame, mistaken for ice. I still don’t understand it, but I know it was there, just as I know that your eyes and your voice are the two most beautiful things I’ve ever known — and also the warmest, although they don’t seem to be in your body at all …
Flame, mistaken for ice. One of Byatt’s interests.
And finally, from Possession, when Roland and Maud – two very different scholars from two different traditions – find themselves growing close. You’ll notice Byatt’s use of the Eliot-God’s-Eye POV. It’s almost like there’s a camera on the ceiling.
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.
I miss her. But I am so grateful for all the work she made while she was here. It has enriched my life beyond compare. She actually helped me explain my life to myself: what I wanted, how I thought, maybe what traps I was in, maybe even the escape routes available. “Thank you” doesn’t even come close to what I feel.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
