The Books: “Little Black Book of Stories” – ‘Body Art’ (A.S. Byatt)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

The next book on the shelf is the last short story collection by AS Byatt, and this one is called Little Black Book of StoriesLittle Black Book of Stories – I’m excerpting from the second story, called “Body Art”. Damian Becket is a gynocologist. One day, after his rounds, he sees a kind of grubby sullen young woman, sitting in one of the wards, making decorations to put up. He doesn’t know who she is. Turns out, she is from a local art school – the hospital had asked for volunteers to put up Christmas decorations, and she was the only one who applied. Damian Becket is an art-lover and art-collector – and the hospital itself is decorated with various modern paintings, donated by the artists and by galleries. It gives the hospital a very un-hospital-like feeling. Damian was married – to an actress – but the marriage didn’t work out. He had been Catholic – but his faith has now completely lapsed. He sort of befriends Daisy, the art student – but he is an awkward man, and she is sullen, and also vaguely homeless. Turns out, she has been camping out in the hospital basement, undetected. He discovers her there and offers her a room in his apartment, at least until she can get something more permanent. She stays a week – and every night, she comes into his room and they make love. Without speaking about it, or “dating”, or anything like that. It is very uncharacteristic for Damian to have casual sex – although there isn’t anything casual about sex with Daisy. Maybe I should just say sex outside of a relationship – because you can have pretty intense connected sex with a stranger, all the myths notwithstanding. Daisy is not a sympathetic character, not really – she scorns modern art, which is Damian’s great passion, and she has a lot of anger and apathy towards things he holds sacred. But ‘sacred’ – maybe that’s not the right word – especially in lieu of the expert below.

Excerpt from Little Black Book of Stories

He did not lose faith as a consequence of her death. Nor as a consequence of its effect on Eleanor, who now wriggled away from his body as though he was going to damage or contaminate her. Nor out of any moral outrage – though he felt some – at the Church’s interference in processes he wanted to believe were human and natural. (That included contraception. Human beings were not animals. They cared for children for perhaps a third of the normal human life. They needed to havev the number of children they could decently and responsibly care for. Their sexual desires were unfortunately not periodic in the way of cows and bitches. Women were perpetually on heat unless, as in the case of his wife, the heat had been turned off. It followed that contraception was natural.) He lost his faith as a result of a vision.

The vision was conventional enough, in one sense. It was a vision of Christ on the Corss – not a heavely appearance, but the result of an unnaturally close inspection of the carving that hung in his local church, a painted wooden carving, neither good nor bad, a mediocre run-of-the-mill carving of a human body, unpleasantly suspended from nails hammered through the palms of hands neither writhing in pain nor distorted by stress, but spread wide in blessing. He thought, The anatomy is bad, the weight would rip through muscle and sinew long before the man was dead. Some crucifixes did support the feet. This one did not. They were crossed, and improbably nailed through both ankles. Some care had been taken to depict the agony of the muscles of the torso, the arms and the thighs. The gash under the heart had realistic slipperiness where it opened; unreal immobilised paint-blood spilled from it, in runnels someone had taken pleasure in varying. There were no bloodstains on the loincloth, which carefully obscured the sex. The face was stylised. Long, unlied, with downcase eyelids, closed as in sleep, and a mouth slightly opened, showing no teeth. More artistic blood had been dribbled from the clutches of the crown of thorns in the abundant shaggy hair. The dead or dying flesh – the carving was simplly not good enough for him to be sure which – was creamy in colour, with pink highlights. He thought, I belong to a religion which worships the form of a dead or dying man. He realised that he did not believe and never had believed, either that the man’s bodily death had been reversed, or that he ascended into heaven, for there was no heaven, and all human descriptions of heaven made it pathetically clear that we can’t imagine it well enough to make it at all attractive as a prospect. He would not meet poor Rosalie in any such place, and he did not think he would even want to. He did not believe that this one unpleasant death had in any way cancelled out the sins of the earth: Rosalie’s wildness, the Church’s obstructiveness and bloodymindedness, his grandfather’s deaths in bomb blasts in wartime ( paternal) and peacetime (maternal). He never had believed any of it. He felt for the shape of the time – his whole life – when he would have said he believed, and was aghast to sense it like a great humming ice-box behind him, in which what he had been had kept its form, neither dead nor alive, suspended. He was a human bowed down under the weight of a man-sized icebox.

He went on looking at the figure hanging by his hands, with outrage and then with pity. There was a man, who had been dying, and then dead. And there was an idea of who he was, which was a dream, which was a poem, which was a moral cage, which was a film over a clear vision of things. A man is his body, his body is a man.

From which it followed that Damian Becket, having straightened his back, and shaken the ice-box from his sholuders to melt he hoped, at the feet of the lifeless carving, had to concern himself with bodies. His vision had not taught him that everything was without meaning, that chaos reigned. There was order, but order was in time and space and the body. If a man – who had seen the ice-box – wanted to make sense of his life and live well, he must concern himself with the body. There were multifarious reasons why in his case it was the female body. His decision to become a medical student, at the age when he should have been about to earn his living, offended his mother and made his wife extremely angry. He was not quite sure why she was so very angry, and could not find out. Communication is much harder in intimate fear and anger than between casual companions. Silence spread into their lives. He went to London and she did not. She went to church, and he did not.