A.S. Byatt’s New Book

She’s got a new giant novel coming out: The Children’s Book. it’s been a while for her – recently it’s been mainly short stories – and I am beyond excited. Now that I hear what it’s about, I am even more excited.

There are only a couple of writers out there where I wait, with baited breath, to see what they will do next.

J.D. Salinger is one. Dude, I’m still waiting.

But the others are John Banville, Annie Proulx, Nancy Lemann, Michael Chabon, Jeanette Winterson – and, above all else, A.S. Byatt. Her books aren’t just good – they thrill me. They create worlds in my head, and not only that but – unlike most other writers today (although Annie Proulx comes close) – they tell me that love, with all its disappointments and griefs, is worth it. Not only is it worth it, but it is the only thing on this planet that actually lasts. That has any value. Love for anything. Writing, family, a mate … Her books sometimes have an intellectual overlay (sometimes??) that may make that message not as palpable – at least not to certain types of people. For me, a cerebral intellectual person (I say it with pride) – her vision of love is tremendously validating. I have felt (and I still feel, although, to quote Joan Armatrading, “I am open to persuasion ….”) that my cerebral bent will make this love thing too arduous for me, too difficult. It’s not “for me”. And, hell, there’s been a lot of evidence for that. But Byatt doesn’t write about people who live in their subjective experience of life. She writes about academics and writers and research assistants – whose “love” for life is expressed through their driving obsession for whatever topic – people who spend their whole lives researching one minor female Victorian poet … and any real love that comes into the life of a person like that will either have to take a back seat, OR somehow inform and deepen that other obsession. This is something I understand in my bone marrow. I was just talking with a friend about that last night. Many people fall in love with a person qua person. (“Nekulturny hordes”?) They love his face, his kindness, his brain, his sense of family, his stand-up-guy-ness, whatever. They fall in love with the actual person. But many of us (ahem) fall in love, primarily, with the WORK someone does. The work comes first. This may sound like a fine-line distinction but it really isn’t. Work, for many, is what you do to make a living, support your family, and there is obviously nothing wrong with that, and it is quite noble, in and of itself. But for many of us work is a passion, an activity fraught with financial despair and the dreams of childhood … and nobody, not even the great love of your life, could compete with it – and that is good and right. I grew up with a father who had, along with his love for my mother, an overriding passion for something else. Not a hobby, not a sport, not a “free time activity” – but a passion, an ongoing intellectual study of something. He never was not that way. And we all had to somehow fit into that, that pre-existing passion, and of course we all did. He was not a monk in a cloister with his passions – they were shared with us. So I understand that dynamic and not only do I understand it, but I live it. The men I have loved have always had a lot of shit going on, and all of them, to a man, have been artists – people who have a passion and drive for something that pre-dates me, that I could never supplant, nor would I want to. I’m the same way. Whoever steps into my world as my mate, will have to fit himself into what is already there – not just in terms of life experience, but my passions and obsessions, which I am not just doing to kill time until my mate shows up (often these things are looked at in this way, and sometimes married people, not realizing they are being insulting, will say to me, “God, I wish I had the time to read so much …” or whatever it may be. Look, if you want to do something, you make the time. And that’s final. I know married pregnant women who still read voraciously. Obviously it is a priority for them.) Life itself, and our intellectual pursuits, do not STOP just because love shows up. Although often movies, and sometimes books, treats it that way. Sometimes people in movies seem to have no lives outside of the main driving force of the plot, which is the romance. They don’t read books or read the newspaper. They have no outside interests. Maybe they cook sometimes, and drink a glass of wine, but they’re always thinking about love, love, love, love. I love movies that show people who have other things going on, and love shows up – and instead of being welcome – it kind of messes up the entire thing. I am thinking of Broadcast News. Or, the most obvious one: Moonstruck, with Nicolas Cage’s great monologue on this very topic. Only Angels Have Wings is another one. Bonnie’s entire journey throughout that film is learning how to live with the passion of the man she loves. Not for her, but for flying. If she tries to tone him down, or make him stop, she will lose him altogether. Now. Not everyone in this world is obsessed with something like that. But for those of us who are (I call us “obsessives”), it is hugely comforting to see our experiences reflected from time to time.

To me, A.S. Byatt writes in this realm like no one’s business. She is the heir of George Eliot (someone she openly emulates). Life is BIG, and important – and it is not just our personal lives that give it resonance – but our passions, obsessions, intellectual pursuits and the wider culture and how it informs how we live. That makes her sound didactic or top-heavy. She is neither of those things. She is passionate.

Her work is vibrant, alive, and it strikes a deep chord in me.

Not only that, but she, the woman – the writer hidden behind her work (you rarely see pictures of her, she’s not a publicity-hound – she doesn’t need to be – similar to Annie Proulx, whose work totally speaks for itself) – moves me. Her thought process, her process of work … her interest in ventriloquism (which you can see at work in almost all of her novels, writing AS other people -she loves that epistolary style) … where she creates worlds within worlds, until you the reader get a bit disoriented and forget which way is the way out. Alice and the fawn, anyone? There is no way out. We are all, for our whole lives, in the wood where things have no name. The feeling that we are in control of events is an illusion. Byatt writes about love that comes as a supreme disorientation of the senses … which is often how we cerebral types experience anything that has to do with the flesh. How do I interpret this, how do I explain it, how do I put this ineffable experience into words? We worry about such things. We can be a bit much for people who aren’t like that. “Just chill out. What’s the big deal?” Can’t answer that. I just know that it is.

Here’s a fascinating profile of A.S. Byatt which made me even more excited for her new novel.

The older I get, the more I think human beings have a deep need for something to go right.

Ain’t it the truth. That’s the other thing I love about her books. They are not without their tragedy (the last scene of Possession! Ouch!), but sometimes … sometimes … things do “go right”. And often, if you have been in the wilderness for a long time, things “going right” is not always a blessing. It can be awful. This seems ridiculous and ungrateful, but again: it is the truth, and Byatt knows of what she speaks. Life, the longer you live it, is a thing of deep compromise and buried old dreams. We do what we need to survive. It’s not an easy thing. Life is made up of loss, little losses and big ones. So things “going right” (when you are older, anyway) sometimes has a tremulous and fragile feeling to it. You don’t want to believe. You have been so chastened by life itself, so disheartened.

F. Scott Fitzgerald writes about this a bit in his essay on “early success” and what it is like to “hit it huge” on your first try. It is a blessing and a curse. One of the things I was fascinated by in the essay is his thought that when you become successful early – you feel (quite naturally) that you have been in charge of it, that your star is somehow a lucky one, that providence will continue to provide for you in the same manner. You yourself have had something to do with your own good fortune. But a person who becomes successful in their forties has a very different outlook. They have a greater understanding of the concept of WILL, and how much your WILL has to do with your success. It is a long hard road. Nothing is given, nothing comes easy. The young man who is an “early success” has to learn the hard lessons later in life … as he tries to either re-create his early success, or capitalize on what he has already done, or – worse – struggle to keep growing and changing, even if the audience doesn’t want that from him.

A.S. Byatt was not an early success. Her success (a phenomenal one) came later. In her early 50s. To say that I find this comforting is a total understatement. Unbelievable – and rare. George Eliot was the same way.

These women had percolated through decades, following their passions and obsessions, living life, still working, but not “hitting it” yet. Through those early years, it is the WILL that helps you keep going. Belief in luck is for kids. I have had a bit of a brou-haha with a friend of mine recently, who said to me – about everything that’s been happening lately – “God, you’re so lucky.” I am so insulted by that. The years of struggle and hardship and heartbreak and fucking nightmarish lack of belief in myself … and now I get some good fortune, and suddenly I’m “lucky”? How dare you. This is similar to the “If I only had time, I’d read more” comment, or – even more insulting, “I know I have a novel in me, if I just had the time.” Oh. Is it TIME that is the issue? Dickens wrote all those books because he had the time? Not because he had the WILL to create? My acting mentor said to me once, “Those who are the most successful are not the most talented. They are the ones who are the most fanatical about success.” The older I get, the more I see the truth in that.

To know that A.S. Byatt didn’t really hit upon “her” story until her early 50s is amazing to me – she had written quite a few books before Possession (and they’re all quite good, of course they are) … but she wrote Possession when she was ready to write it. It is not the book of a young woman, or a woman in her 30s.

She’s in her 70s now. Still going. Still capable of being delighted and surprised by things (I love the anecdote about Paul Muldoon in that article) – and yes, her books (and stories) have always given me hope. That a person like me can find happiness. It will be a strange happiness, and it will be my own version of it … but spinsterhood is not a done deal, even though it seems that way at times. Her people could be spinsters. Some are. But there is a blessing in spending your life devoted to a passion OTHER than personal happiness. Or: work brings happiness, of course it does, but anyone who is an artist knows that that is not really why you do it. It’s part of it … but who can explain the journey of a Christabel Lamotte, in Possession, who – in almost total obscurity – continues to write her poems and fairy tales in a world that doesn’t want any of it from her? That’s what I’m talking about. Byatt understands that. I understand her characters and to me they stand alone in literature, in who they are, and how they are portrayed.

I have never felt more “named” by a book than I felt by Possession. Okay, maybe Mating, by Norman Rush – another book about strong-willed passionate people who have grand interests in life – not just for a happy personal life, but for other things: theoretical, abstract, intellectual. What’s love like for THOSE people?

I can’t wait to read Byatt’s latest. Hopefully by the time I get it, I’ll be back in reading-mode.