The Books: “Sugar and Other Stories” – ‘On the Day That E.M. Forster Died’ (A.S. Byatt)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

This excerpt is from “On the Day That E.M. Forster Died”, another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories – by A.S. Byatt.

This is my favorite story in the whole collection. It’s also the most revealing. Meaning – I felt named by it. Especially when I re-read it recently. It got me all worked up when I finished it. I felt nervous. Irritable. Worried. It was a free-floating sensation, the kind of which I used to suffer from all the time. Something was wrong … but what??? Well, recently I could locate the source of my anxiety pretty quickly – it was because I had re-read this story.

I don’t want to say too much about it. I will say that it starts with the words: “This is a story about writing.” The main character is named Mrs. Smith. We get to know her quite well … but never her first name. We get to know what goes on in her mind. She is a middle-aged housewife and mother – who goes to the London Library after the kids go to school – and sits there, in that environment, trying to write. She does write. She does write. All kinds of disparate strands of stories take up space in her head … and on one fateful day, the day that EM Forster died, she decides to put them all together and write a big long complex book – where ALL of her stories are part of it. Take this strand about the Hungarian refugee – and somehow weave it in with the Tolkien-esque story – the whole world opens up for her (inside her head) – Byatt describes the revelatory moment like nobody else. That feeling, that itchy feeling, that knowing …. that you are onto something. That you are not just able to THINK of an idea, but you WILL be able to execute it. You are ready to execute it. It’s hard to write about writing. But obviously – with Possession – Byatt has shown she’s a master at it.

I won’t say too much more about this story. It makes me want to cry. It makes me want to mourn the lost years, the lost time …. and it also makes me nervous, voracious, ready, but paralyzed – because, like Zooey says to Franny: ” You’d better get busy though, buddy. The goddamn sands run out on you every time you turn around.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Excerpt from “On the Day That E.M. Forster Died”, another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories – by A.S. Byatt.

She went up and down Jermyn Street, through the dark doorway, the windowed umber quiet of St James’s Piccadilly, out into the bright churchyard with its lettered stones smoothed and erased by the passage of feet. Along Piccadilly, past Fortnum and Mason’s, more windows full of decorous conspicious consumption, down an arcade bright with windowed riches like Aladdin’s cave, out into Jermyn Street again. Everything was transformed. Everything was hers, by which phrase she meant, thinking fast in orderly language, that at that time she felt no doubt about being able to translate everything she saw into words, her own words, English words, English words in 1970, with their limited and meaningful and endlessly rich histories, theirs as hers was hers. This was not the same as Adam in Eden naming things, making nouns. It was not that she said nakedly, as though for the first time, tree, stone, grass, sky, nor even, more particularly, omnibus, gas-lamp, culottes. It was mostly adjectives, Elephantine bark, eau-de-nil paint on Fortnum’s walls, Nile-water green, a colour fashionable from Nelson’s victories at the time when this street was formed, a colour for old drawing-rooms or, she noted in the chemist’s window, for a new eyeshadow, Jeepers Peepers, Occidental Jade, what nonsense, what vitality, how lovely to know. Naming with nouns, she thought absurdly, is the language of poetry, There is a Tree, of many One. The Rainbow comes and goes. And Lovely is the Rose. Adjectives go with the particularity of long novels. They limit nouns. And at the same time give them energy. Dickens is full of them. And Balzac. And Proust.

Nothing now, she knew, whatever in the moral abstract she thought about the relative importance of writing and life, would matter to her more than writing. This illumination was a function of middle age. Novels – as opposed to lyrics, or mathematics – are essentially a middle-aged form. The long novel she meant to write acknowledged both the length and shortness of her time. It would not be History, nor even a history, nor certainly, perish the thought, her history. Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction. But it would be written in the knowledge that she had lived through and noticed a certain amount of history. A war, a welfare state, the rise (and fall) of the meritocracy, European unity, little England, equality of opportunity, comprehensive schooling, women’s liberation, the death of the individual, the poverty of liberalism. How lovely to trace the particular human events that might chart the glories and inadequacies, the terrors and absurdities, the hopes and fears of those words. And biological history too. She had lived now through birth, puberty, illness, sex, love, marriage, other births, other kinds of love, family and kinship and local manifestations of their universals, Drs Spock, Bowlby, Winnicott, Flower Power, gentrification, the transformation of the adjective gay into a politicized noun. How extraordinary and interesting it all was, how adequate language turned out to be, if you thought in t terms of long flows of writing, looping tightly and lolsey round things, joining and knitting and dividing, or, to change the metaphor, a Pandora’s box, an Aladdin’s cave, a bottomless dark bag into which everything could be put and drawn out again, the same and not the same. She quoted to herself, in another language, “Nel mzzo del cammin di nostra vita.” Another beginning in a middle. Mrs. Smith momentarily Dante, in the middle of Jermyn Street.