The Books: Passions of the Mind, ‘George Eliot: A Celebration,’ by A.S. Byatt

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Passions of the Mind, a collection of essays by A.S. Byatt.

A.S. Byatt is one of my favorite writers writing today. This collection of essays, in topics ranging from George Eliot to Toni Morrison, came out in the early 90s, in the wake of the Possession brouhaha. At least that’s how I remember it. Possession was such a huge deal, that suddenly her earlier novels were re-issued with similar covers to Possession, and other non-fiction works re-appeared as well. I bought them all. The cover of Passions of the Mind is Henri Matisse’s Jupiter and Leda. (Byatt is so obsessed with Matisse that she came out with an entire short story collection called The Matisse Stories. Love those stories.)

I read these essays back when the collection first came out, and found many of them tough-going. I hadn’t read a lot of the people she writes about, and she’s extremely into Freud and quotes him at length and I found that pretty arduous. But, like I said, favorite author … so I sweated it out. She is one of those people who makes me realize and really feel the gaps in my education. You know, I’m reasonably well-read, but then I read this and think: “I am basically illiterate.” Byatt taught and came up in a serious academic environment (much of which she lampoons – or at least presents – in Possession). All of the post-modern structuralist French stuff really matters to her – because she experienced it all first-hand. (Whereas to me, an outsider, I think: “These people write turgid prose, dry and prissy, more like sociologists than anything else, I cannot understand what the hell they are talking about. Therefore, I will not pay attention to them at all.” I could afford to do so, since I wasn’t buried in an academic English program. Byatt was on the front-lines of all of it.)

While Byatt and Camille Paglia don’t, on the face of it, have too much in common, there is a rigorous appreciation of the despised “canon” in both of them, and much of Paglia’s work is an act of redress against academia that chooses to celebrate second-rate work merely because it was written by a member of an oppressed group. Byatt’s interests are wide-ranging. She goes where her beloved authors lead her. Iris Murdoch (she has written a couple of books on Murdoch), Robert Browning, George Eliot … these are Byatt’s gods. (I wish I could find the quote – but in some review of A.S. Byatt’s fiction, the reviewer said, “Byatt writes as though James Joyce had never existed,” and I absolutely LOVE that!! She really is a 19th-century type of writer, and you can see the influence of George Eliot – which we’ll get to in this essay and the next one – as well as the influence of her post-modern academic career – it gives an interesting blend. In Possession, at least, we get two modern-day English scholars, working away in their overly-compartmentalized fields, divorced from the flow of continuity in the dreaded “canon” … suddenly becoming allies, when they realize that the 19th century poets they have devoted their lives to studying had had a secret love affair. It’s a brilliant book. Despite the rigors of the academic life, what it eventually shows is that literature – good personal literature – belongs to all of us, and we are in danger of cutting ourselves off from the wellspring of life when we compartmentalize literature out, when we cut it up so severely that we can’t even see it anymore. Byatt struggles to see it all as one big messy glorious WHOLE.

I still find some of these essays pretty tough-going. The references to works I have not only never read but never even heard of (to quote my father: we’d say, “Hey, have you read …???” and he’d say flatly, “Nevah heard of it.”) makes me feel stupid. There are long passages in French, for example. Translations to follow. But Byatt is a scholar, not just a writer, and her learning is vast and voracious. Even with its academic rigor, you can feel her passion. One of her struggles as a novelist was to find her own way into the field of fiction, and she is frank over how she found it daunting. She had spent her childhood and young adulthood surrounded by the greats of the past. It takes courage to plant your flag in that landscape, to lay claim to the title “writer”, when you have spent the majority of your life studying George Eliot or all the rest.

Here, she discusses George Eliot. One of the things that is so unique about Eliot, that is still striking today, is how much of her books are about the process of thought itself. Dickens isn’t like that. The two writers are often compared, but it’s apples/oranges. Eliot is interested in how people think, and how people’s thought processes actually operate. It’s a nice coincidence that I would come to this book in my ongoing book-excerpt project right now, because I am currently re-reading Silas Marner, a book I adore. It makes me cry.

Byatt discusses her discovery of George Eliot. She had read some of Eliot’s books as a child and really really disliked them. She hated the ending of Mill on the Floss. She was angry about it. Then later, in college, she re-read Eliot, and discovered Eliot’s essays (Byatt eventually wrote the introduction to a collection of those essays), and had a total change of heart.

Excerpt from Passions of the Mind: ‘George Eliot: A Celebration’, by A.S. Byatt

So I came to George Eliot late, in the days when I was teaching the modern English novel in evening classes and trying to find out how to write a good novel myself. Meeting any great writer is like being made aware of freedoms and capabilities one had no idea were possible. Reading Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda I learned several primitive yet crucial lessons about writing novels – and these lessons were also moral lessons about life. It is possible, I learned, to invent a world peopled by a large number of inter-related people, almost all of whose processes of thought, developments of consciousness, biological anxieties, sense of their past and future can most scrupulously be made available to readers, can work with and against each other, can lead to failure, or partial failure, or triumphant growth.

I suppose I was in my late twenties when I began teaching Middlemarch, and I taught it with passion because I perceived it was about the growth, use and inevitable failure and frustration of all human energy – a lesson one is not interested in at eleven or eighteen, but at twenty-six, with two small children, it seems crucial. George Eliot’s people were appallingly ambitious and greedy – not always for political or even, exclusively, sexual power, as in most of the other English novels I read. They were ambitious to use their minds to the full, to discover something, to live on a scale where their life felt valuable from moment to moment. In Middlemarch Dorothea, the untutored woman who wishes to contribute to science, even Casaubon, the failed scholar, had hopes which meant something to me, as Madame Bovary’s cramped, Romantic, confused sexual lunges towards more life did not. In Daniel Deronda the hero has humane and intellectual ambitions: Gwendolyn Harleth is a sympathetic portrait on the grand scale of a deficient being whose conceptions of the use of energy never extended beyond power (sexual and social) and money (not for its own sake, but for social pride). Perhaps the most vital discovery I made about George Eliot at that time was that her people think: they worry an idea, they are, within their limits, responsive to politics and art and philosophy and history.

The next discovery was that the author thought. One of the technical things I had discovered during the early teaching of Middlemarch was George Eliot’s authorial intervention, which were then very unfashionable, thought to be pompous Victorian moralizing and nasty lumps in the flow of “the story.” I worked out that on the contrary, the authorial “voice” added all sorts of freedom a good writer could do with. Sometimes it could work with firm irony to undercut the sympathetic “inner” portrayal of a character. Consider this early description of Dorothea:

Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own role of conduct there; she was enamored of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection.

There is so much in there, in the style. The magisterial authority of a Greek Chorus, or God, who knows Dorothea’s fate before her drama has really begun. Sympathy, in the author, towards the character’s ambitions, and a certain wry sense that, unfocused as they are, they are doomed. And then, in that last sentence, which is biting social comedy, the choice of the crucial adjective – “merely canine affection” – to disparage the kind of “love” thought adequate by most planners of marriages, not only in the nineteenth century.