The Books: “Angels and Insects” – ‘Conjugal Angel’ (A.S. Byatt)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Angels & Insects: Two Novellas – by A.S. Byatt.

This is the second novella in the collection Angels and Insects. It also takes place in the 1800s – late 1800s I believe. It has, as its plot-line and theme, another one of AS Byatt’s pet interests – the whole seance phenomenon, the table-rapping, mesmerism, etc. – that was such a fad then. This also is featured heavily in Possession – Christabel gets very into it after the breakup with Ash … and Ash, memorably, infiltratees himself into a seance so that he can confront Christabel. The two novellas – “Morpho Eugenia” and “Conjugal Angel” stand back to back – two sides of the same 19th century coin. The mania for insects, and the mania for seances and spirit-world visitations. There is so much IN these novellas – seriously, Byatt is just a master. I LOVE her.

“Conjugal Angel” takes place at one particular seance. We get to know all the participants – and what they are looking for, the dead person they are hoping to communicate with … Byatt has a lot to say about what was REALLY going on with this ‘fad’ … what people were really looking for. Mrs. Papagay is the “medium” who runs the thing. She was married to a sea captain – who was apparently lost at sea 10 or so years back – his ship never returned. It was through a medium that she “contacted” her dead husband … and since then has found that she has a talent for this stuff herself.

The ending of this novella was surprisingly moving to me. Something happens on the very last page which takes the breath away – I did not see it coming. At all. And the event is one that completely upends the entire seance proceedings … and yet also deepens my understanding of it. Byatt isn’t interested in judging the silliness of this fad (and the charlatans involved) … she is more interested in what it indicates, philosophically. What it shows us about ourselves.

Here’s an excerpt.

Excerpt from Angels & Insects: Two Novellas – by A.S. Byatt.

Mr. Hawke arranged them. He sat between Sophy Sheekhy and Lilias Papagay, with a copy of the Bible, and a copy of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell in front of him. Mrs. Jesse was next to Mrs. Papagay and on her other side was Mrs. Hearnshaw. Captain Jesse sat between Mrs. Hearnshaw and Sophy Sheekhy, in a kind of parody of dinner-party placement when there were insufficient men. It was Mr. Hawke’s custome to begin the proceedings with a reading from Swedenborg and a reading from the Bible. Emily Jesse was not quite sure how he had made himself so central a figure, since he had exhibited no mediumistic powers up to that point. She had been glad at first, when she told him of their promising, if alarming results from their early cautious spiritual experiments, that he had asked to be included. Like her eldest brother, Frederick, and her sister, Mary, she was a dedicated member of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church, and also a convinced spiritualist. Whilst the spiritualists claimed Swedenborg, who had made such momentous journeys into the interior of the spirit world, as a founder of the faith, many of the more orthodox Swedenborgians looked askance at what they saw as the loose and dangerous power-play of the spiritualists. Mr. Hawke was not an ordaining minister in the New Church, but a wandering preacher, ordained to speak but with no society to govern, a grade, as he never tired of explaining, referred to by Swedenborg as sacerdos, canonicus, or flamen. He sat with his back to the fire and read out:

‘The Church on earth before the Lord is One Man. It is also distinguished into societies, and each society again is a Man, and all who are within that Man are also in Heaven. Every member of the Church also is an angel of heaven, for he becomes an angel after death. Moreover, the Church on earth, together with the angels, not only constitutes the inward parts of that Grand Man, but also its outward parts, which are called cartilaginous and osseous. The Church brings this about because men on earth are furnished with a body in which the spiritual ultimate is clothed with a natural. This makes the conjunction of Heaven with the Church, of the Church with Heaven.

‘Today’s reading from the Word,’ he went on, ‘is taken from the Book of Revelation, the twentieth chapter, verses 11 to 15.

‘And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.
And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the book swere opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.’

The passage from Revelation sent a frisson of accustomed delight through the frame of Mrs. Papagay, who loved its sonorous booming and its lurid colours, scarlet, gold, white and the black of the Pit. She loved too, and had loved since childhood, all its strange visions and images, the angels rolling up the scroll of the heavens and tidying them away forever, the stars falling out of the sky into the sea like a rain of golden fiery globes, the dragons and swords, the blood and the honey, the swarms of locusts and the hosts of angels, those creatures at once pure white and fiery-eyed, casting down their golden crowns around a glassy sea. She had asked herself often and often why everyone loved the ferocious Saint John and his terrible vision so, and had answered herself variously, like a good psychologist, that human beings liked to be terrified – look how they enjoyed the nastier Tales of Mr. Poe, pits, pendulums, buried alive. Not only that, they liked to be judged, she considered, they could not go on if their lives were not of importance, of absolute importance, in some higher Eye which watched and made real. For if there were not death and judgement, if there were not heaven and hell, men were no better than creepy-crawlies, no better than butterflies and blowflies. And if this was all, sitting and supping tea, and waiting for bed-time, why were we given such a range of things guessed at, hoped for and feared beyond our fat bosoms confined in stays, and troubles wiht stoves? Why the white airy creatures towering, the woman clothed with the sun and the Angel standing in it?

Mrs. Papagay was not good at giving up thinking. Their practice was to sit in silence, composing the circle, holding hands lightly, to join them into one, waiting, passive mind mind for the spirits to use, to enter, to speak through. At first they had used a system of raps and answers, one for yes, two for no, and every now and then they were still startled by great peals of banging from beneath the table, or shakings of the surface below their fingers. But mostly now they waited until the spirits gave signs of their presence, and then proceeded to automatic writing – all might hold pencil over paper, all, except Captain Jese, had produced scripts, long or short, which they had studied and interrogated. And then, if it was a good day, the visitors would speak through Sophy, or more rarely, through herself. And once or twice, Sophy could see them, she could describe what she saw to others. She had seen Mrs. Jesse’s dead nephew and nieces, the three children of her sister Cecilia – Edmund, Emily, and ucy, dead at thirteen, nineteen and only last year at twenty-one. So slow, so sad, Mrs. Papagay thought, though the spirits said how happy and busy they were in a land of Summer amongst flowers and orchards of wonderful light. It was the marriage of this sister, Cecilia, which had been celebrated at the end of In Memoriam as the triumph of Love over Death, with the bride’s little slippered feet, Mrs. Papagay could just see them, tripping on the tablets of the dead in the old church. But we live in a Vale of Tears, Mrs. Papagay had to conclude, we need to know that there is Summerland. The unborn child who was the future hope of the Laureate’s poem had come and gone, like A.H.H. himself. With whom, for some reason, they were none of them not even Sophy Sheekhy, able to esstablish communication.

The firelight made shadows on walls and ceilings. Captain Jesse’s mane of white hair stood out like a crown, his beard was god-like, and Aaron’s smooth black head appeared in a smoky and wavering silhouette. Their hands were fitfully lit. Mrs. Jesse’s were long and brown, gipsy hands with glinting red rings. Mrs. Hearnshaw’s were softly white, covered with mourning rings containing the hair of the lost in littler caskets. Mr. Hawke’s were muddy, with a few gingery hairs on them. He took good care of his nails, and wore a little signet ring with a bloodstone. He was given to making little pats and squeezes of encouragement and reassurance to his neighbours. Mrs. Papagay could also feel his knees, which occasionally rubbed her own, and, she was sure, Sophy Sheekhy’s. She knew, without having to think about it, that Mr. Hawke was an excitable man in that way, that he liked female flesh, and thought much and very frequently about it. She knew, or thought she knew, that he liked the idea of the cool pale limbs of Sophy Sheekhy, that he imagined undoing that smooth unornamented bodice, or running his hands up those pale legs under the dove-coloured dress. She knew, with slightly less assurance, that Sophy Sheekhy did not respond to this interest. She saw Sophy’s pale hands, creamy-pale even under the nails, motionless and at rest in his grip, with no answering sweat, Mrs. Papagay was sure. Sophy seemed to have no interest in that kind of thing. Part of her spiritual success might be due to this intact quality of hers. She was a pure vessel, cool, waiting dreamily.

Mrs. Papagay also knew that Mr. Hawke had considered her own possibilities as a source of creature comfort. She had caught his eye on her breast and waist, involuntarily speculative, she had felt his warm fingers massage her palm, at moments of excitement. She had met his eye, once or twice, as he weighed up her full mouth and her still-youthful coils of hair. She had never offered him any voluntary encouragement, but she had not, as she could have done, repelled him once and for all when he looked too long or brushed against her. She was trying to weigh it all up. She believed any woman who put her mind to it could have Mr. Hawke for the asking, if only that woman were reasonably buxom and inclined to him. Did she want to be Mrs. Hawke? The truth was she wanted Arturo, she wanted what Swedenborg would call the ‘conjugal delights’ of her married life. She wanted to sleep with male arms round her in the scent of marriage-sheets. Arturo had taught her much and she had been an apt pupil. He had gained courage to tell his wide-eyed wife of what he had seen in various ports, of women who had entertained him – he went so far, and further, as he saw that his surprising wife did not take umbrage, but evinced detailed curiosity. She could teach Mr. Hawke, or some other man, a thing or two, could Lilias Papagay, that would surprise him. If she could bring herself to it, after Arturo. She had a terrible nightmare once, about embracing Arturo and finding herself engorged with a great sea-eel, dragon or sea-serpent, which had somehow half-absorbed or half-extruded parts of him. Though the occasional dream in which he returned, as it were, ‘to the life’ hurt almost more, on waking. ‘ “Ah, dear, but come thou back to me,” ‘ said Mrs. Papagay to herself, to her dead man. Her outside thumb found itself measured, and rubbed, by Mr. Hawke’s stiff outside thumb. She tried to compose her mind to the purpose of the meeting. She reproached her own backsliding by looking at the expectant strain on Mrs. Hearnshaw’s large soft face.