The Newton Letter, by John Banville

Sir –
Being of opinion that you endeavoured to embroil me with woemen & by other means I was so much affected with it as that when one told me you were sickly and would not live I answered twere better you were dead. I desire you to forgive me this uncharitableness. For I am now satisfied that what you have done is just & I beg your pardon for my having hard thoughts of you for it & for representing that you struck at ye root of morality in a principle you laid down in your book of Ideas & designed to pursue in another book & that I took you for a Hobbist. I beg your pardon also for saying or thinking that there was a designe to sell me an office, or to embroile me. I am

your most humble & most
unfortunate Servant
Is. Newton

Isaac Newton, suffering some sort of mental breakdown, mysterious to this day, wrote that letter to John Locke, on September 16, 1693. Rumors about Newton were rife at that time. It was said that a fire had destroyed his papers and he went mad. He became obsessed with sex, and had sexual dreams that he found troubling. In the past, he had sent Locke long letters before, they were great debaters, but nothing that comes close to the strangeness of this particular letter. The intimacy of it, the pain, the torment … Newton wrote some other odd letters around this terrible time in his life, but it’s the Locke one everyone remembers.

It is this letter to Locke, and a fictional second letter to Locke from Newton, that is the driving force of John Banville’s slim 1982 novel The Newton Letter. Slim as in 77 pages long. The book is written as a long letter from a writer to his mentor, reflecting the epistolary nature of so many of Newton’s relationships, and this writer has been working for seven years on a book about Isaac Newton and has found himself completely stuck. He has stopped work entirely. He becomes obsessed with the two letters to Locke, and has become convinced that therein lies the entire secret to the mystery of Newton’s personality.

Remember that mad letter Newton wrote to John Locke in September of 1693, accusing the philosopher out of the blue of being immoral, and a Hobbist, and of having tried to embroil him with women? I picture old Locke pacing the great garden at Oates, eyebrows leaping higher and higher as he goggles at these wild charges. I wonder if he felt the special pang which I feel reading the subscription: I am your most humble and unfortunate servant, Is. Newton. It seems to me to express better than anything that has gone before it Newton’s pain and anguished bafflement. I compare it to the way a few weeks later he signed, with just the stark surname, another, and altogether different, letter. What happened in the interval, what knowledge dawned on him?

We have speculated a great deal, you and I, on his nervous collapse in that summer of ’93. He was fifty, his greatest work was behind him, the Principia and the gravity laws, the discoveries in optics. He was giving himself up more and more to interpretative study of the Bible, and to that darker work in alchemy which so embarrasses his biographers (cf. Popov et al.) He was a great man now, his fame was assured, all Europe honoured him. But his life as a scientist was over. The process of lapidescence had begun: the world was turning him into a monument to himself. He was cold, arrogant, lonely. He was still obsessively jealous – his hatred of Hooke was to endure, indeed to intensify, even beyond the death of his old adversary. He was —

Look at me, writing history; old habits die hard.

This is early in the book, when the themes and obsessions are expressed. The mentor’s name is Clio. Clio, as I recall from Humanities class in high school, was one of the seven muses. Clio was the muse of history. Perhaps not Banville’s subtlest hour. Newton hovers over our narrator. The narrator has moved to a house in the country to finish his book. He strolls around the orchard, staring at the apples, trying to imagine his way into Newton’s train of thought. Life intervenes, though, as it always does, as it did for Newton too. He is staying at a small cottage on a large property owned by the Lawless family, who all live in the main house. Their relationships are indistinct, there is a child, there are two women and a man, and it takes the narrator some time to put it all together, who is related to who. But by that time, it is too late. He has started an intense sexual affair with Ottilie, one of the women, while at the same time he has fallen deeply in love with the other woman, Charlotte. Edward is the man. He is married to Charlotte, and he lumbers about the property in a state of disrepair and perpetual hangover. It is a bleak house.

The Newtonian aspect fades pretty quickly (a disappointment to me, the opening of the book was rich), and the love affairs take center stage. He doesn’t understand the Lawless family. He makes judgments about them, and he is wrong on all counts. There is a startling moment late in the book when Ottilie mentions she is going to “Mass”, and therefore, with that one magic word, he realizes that they are Catholics, and that doesn’t fit into his conception of them at all. He must reevaluate the entire thing. The family treats him as a lodger, not one of them at all, and so it takes him some time to gain access to the inner circle. His sexual affair with Ottilie is intense, but disturbing, and he loses interest almost immediately. His mind is elsewhere. Everywhere, it seems, except on his book that he must finish.

This is the writer’s dilemma, and also a fact of life that every writer knows. When it comes time to get down to real work, often you find anything, even something silly, to distract you. There is nothing wrong with procrastination in this context: it is, simply, part of the process, and any good writer (and by that, I mean, a writer who actually writes, not just someone who says, “I know I could write something good if I had the time”) recognizes it as such. “Oh, here I go organizing my desk again when I should be getting to work. Here I go falling in love inappropriately because I want some drama. Here I go gorging on movies and comic books instead of doing what I should be doing.” A good writer knows to wait it out. Procrastination is sometimes the calm before the storm. Downtime is important. Mike Nichols has said that the most productive day in any week of rehearsals is the day off. People return from one day off and the problems they had been focusing on all week have suddenly vanished.

Writers writing about writers is nothing new, and often young writers start out this way. It is a “way in”. It’s hard to write convincingly about writing. James Joyce, in his own way, wrote about nothing else. His first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was about his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, finding his way to having a VOICE. Self-indulgent? Sure. Most great art is. An artist has to strip away those niggling social concerns of what people will think, what if people say, “Oh, listen to him whining”, or say, “Why don’t you try some REAL work?” A writer is the most isolated of artists, and “playing well with others” is not high on the list of what makes a good writer. Here, in The Newton Letter, Banville is inadvertently writing about that. Perhaps too inadvertently for my taste: I wanted more of an open wrestling match with Newton, and instead I got angsty country Irish sex, which I’m not knocking, but it seemed a distraction, rather than a pathway to deeper illumination.

His obsession with Newton’s history, in particular the breakdown in the summer of 1693, is replaced by an obsession with the Lawless family history. He presses his face against the glass. But nobody’s talking.

I saw the whole thing now, of course: he was a waster, Charlotte kept the place going, everything had been a mistake, even the child. It all fitted, the rueful look and the glazed eye, the skulking, the silences, the tension, that sense I had been aware of from the beginning of being among people facing away from me, intent on something I couldn’t see.

The affair with Ottilie is initiated by her, in a surprising moment. She doesn’t seem the type. John Banville is a pretty sexy writer, and I think he “does” sex quite well. He gets the strain of melancholy that so often is present, the loneliness afterwards, the sense of isolation and also wanting to re-set boundaries. But he also is able, in my mind, to express the act itself in a way that is not embarrassing to read. Not embarrassing because I’m a prude, but embarrassing because there’s nothing more … ikky … than terribly written or over-written sex scenes. An entire literary award is devoted to such purple passages. But John Banville is a good sex writer. He’s sophisticated, but human. He doesn’t leave the emotion out of it. He’s extremely male, which I suppose isn’t a surprise, since, well, he is a man, but often male writers fall apart, even good ones, when they come to their sex scenes. They are horrid! Either you can feel their own insecurities about what kind of lovers they themselves are, and therefore they make their male characters the best lovers in the world, an obvious smokescreen, or they go all Penthouse Letters on you in the middle of a fine book, and objectify the crap out of people we had come to either like, or at least be interested in. I’m not letting women writers off the hook, there’s plenty of bad sex writing to go around, but I find male writers to be the worst offenders. I should think more about why that is, it seems interesting to me. One of the sexiest writers on the planet, and you probably wouldn’t even know it, because of her serious heavy-hitting literary reputation, is A.S. Byatt. Now HER sex scenes are always superb. You almost don’t realize they are happening until they are over. She segues seamlessly. They are poetic and beautiful and human, but she gets the rawness of it, too. The “liaison” section of Possession is one of the most beautiful bits of writing she has ever done. She also gets the “montage effect” of a lot of sex, the way it often goes: It’s not so much Point A to Point B as a collage of impressions and actions and memories. I mentioned this in my essay about Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, and how Michael Mann filmed their sex scene, and how effective I think it is: he didn’t abandon the characters when they started having sex, as so often happens in movies, when suddenly people take off their clothes and become Olympic gymnasts, and not human beings, with feelings about being naked, feelings other than, “Don’t I have an awesome body? I have a great trainer and I’ve been working so hard on my body because I knew I had a sex scene coming up.” Michael Mann filmed that sex scene as a montage, glimpses, fragments, and it seems to me that that is often how sex, when you look back on it, is. You rarely remember it as a literal progression of who did what to whom. Hard to do as artists, to capture that, but definitely worth the effort, because when it works, it helps reveal the characters.

I like Banville when he gets sexy. It seems a good milieu for him. The Benjamin Black books are very sexy too, with that overlay of neuroticism and pain that is so essentially Irish. But the primal forces beneath … Banville rides that wave like a master. I am never embarrassed when I read his sex scenes. I always know he’s up to something good. And everyone “does it” differently. We’re not robots. We’re not Girls Gone Wild. We’re human beings. Banville gets that, too.

Despite the fact that I kept wishing he would “get back to Newton”, the sexual aspect of the book is powerful, and complex.

It’s strange to be offered, without conditions, a body you don’t really want. You feel the most unexpected things, tenderness of course, but impatience too, curiosity, a little contempt, and something else the only name for which I can find is sadness. When she took off her clothes it was as if she were not merely undressing, but performing a far more complex operation, turning herself inside out maybe, to display not breast and bum and blonde lap, but her very innards, the fragile lungs, mauve nest of intestines, the gleaming ivory of bone, and her heart, passionately labouring. I took her in my arms and felt the soft shock of being suddenly, utterly inhabited.

I was not prepared for her gentleness. At first it seemed almost a rebuff. We were so quiet I could hear the rain’s whispered exclamations at the window. In the city of the flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.

We lay, damp and chill as stranded fish, until her fingers at the back of my neck gave three brisk taps and she sat up. I turned on my side and gazed in a kind of fond stupor at the two folds of flesh above her hip bone. She put on her trousers and her lumpy sweater and padded into the kitchen to make tea. Our stain on the sheet was the shape of a turtle. Grey gloom settled on my heart. I was dressed when she came back. We sat on the bed, in our own faintly ammoniac smell, and drank the strong tea from cracked mugs. The day darkened, the rain was settling in.

“I suppose you think I’m a right whore,” she said.

The narrator becomes “embroiled”, as Newton became “embroiled” with these phantom women, with the Lawless family, their secrets and pain, their withheld stories. It is not as harrowing as, perhaps, it should be. The big reveal is a bit of a letdown. However, the narrator has fallen in love with a woman he cannot have. His ruminations on Newton have subsided, perhaps he needed to let that obsession go, since he was so stuck, but there were times when suddenly he would start to talk about Newton again, and I would feel a jolt, as in: “Oh, that’s right. This whole book is about Newton. I forgot.”

That fault could lie in me, not Banville. I went into The Newton Letter with no expectations. Okay, one. That it would contain beautiful writing. Because it’s Banville. And it does.

The double-helix narrative is one of my favorite current devices (used so beautifully in Possession and The Goldbug Variations, two of my favorite books in the last twenty years), and here, in this tiny book, the double-helix is set up at the outset, but the connecting threads were lost for me. I did not feel what Newton had to do with the love triangle. I could surmise, and I did. Gravity, the pull of opposing forces, and also, the harrowing feeling that maybe you “don’t have it anymore”, that the best is behind you, that your work has added up to nothing, and what is life then? How will you go on? But the Lawless family’s troubles did not create as big a rupture as would seem warranted by the elegiac tone taken by the narrator from the outset. This is, perhaps, an example of John Banville, a formidable writer from the start, not quite at the height of his powers yet in terms of structure. The writing is hypnotic, the characters subtly drawn in quick sketches (he’s so good at that), but Newton was mostly missing.

What happened to Newton that made him write that letter?

I am still wondering.