Possession. A Romance

Chapter 26

Since riddles are the order of our day

Come here, my love, and I will tell thee one.

There is a place to which all Poets come

Some having sought it long, some unawares,

Some having battled monsters, some asleep

Who chance upon the path in thickest dream,

Some lost in mythy mazes, some direct

From fear of death, or lust of life or thought

And some who lost themselves in Arcady . . .

These things are there. The garden and the tree

The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold

The woman in the shadow of the boughs

The running water and the grassy space.

They are and were there. At the old world's rim

In the Hesperidean grove, the fruit

Glowed golden on eternal boughs, and there

The dragon Ladon crisped his jewelled crest

Scraped a gold claw and showed a silver tooth

And dozed and waited through eternity

Until the tricksy hero, Herakles

Came to his dispossession and the theft.

Far otherwise, among the northern ice

In a high frozen fastness, in the waste

Of jagged ice-teeth and tall glassy spikes

Hidden from demons of the frost and mist

Freya's walled garden, with its orchard green

With summery frothing leaves and bright with fruit

Lay where the Ases came to eat the warm

Apples of everlasting youth and strength.

Close by, the World Ash rose from out the dark,

Thrusting his roots into the cavern where

Nidhogg the dark coiled with his forking tongue

And gnawed the roots of life that still renewed.

And there too were the water and the lawns,

The front of Urd, where past and future mixed

All colours and no colour, glassy still

Or ominously turbulent and twined.

And are these places shadows of one Place?

Those trees of one Tree? And the mythic beast

A creature from the caverns of men's minds,

Or from a time when lizards walked the earth

On heavy legs as large as trees, or sprang

From bank to bank in swampy primal creeks

Where no man's foot had trod?

Was he a dark Lord whom we dispossessed?

Or did our minds frame him to name ourselves

Our fierceness and our guile, our jealous grasp

At the bright stem of life, our wounded pride?

The first men named this place and named the world.

They made the words for it: garden and tree

Dragon or snake and woman, grass and gold

And apples. They made names and poetry.

The things were what they named and made them. Next

They mixed the names and made a metaphor

Or truth, or visible truth, apples of gold.

The golden apples brought a rush of words

The silvery water and the horrent scales

Upon the serpentining beast, the leaves

All green and shining on the curving boughs

(The serpentining boughs) that called to mind

The lovely gestures of the woman's arms

Her curving arms, her serpentining arms,

The forest wove a fence of its dark boughs

For the green grass and made a sacred place

Where the gold globes of fruit, like minor suns

Shone in their shadowy caverns made of leaves

So all was more and more distinct, and all

Was intertwined and serpentining, and

Parts of one whole, they saw, the later men

Who saw connections between shining things

And next saw movements (snatch and steal and stab)

And consequential stories where the Tree

Once stood in solitude and steady shone.

We see it and we make it, oh my dear.

People the place with creatures of our mind,

With lamias and dryads, mélusines

And firedrakes, sparking, sliding, wreathing on,

We make commotion there and mystery

Hunger and grief and joy and tragedy.

We add and take away, we complicate

And multiply the foliage and the birds-

Place birds of paradise upon the boughs,

Make the stream run with blood and then run clear,

O'er grit of precious stones, diamonds and pearls

And emerald green and sapphires and anon

Wash these away and leave the pleasant sand

Holding the traces of the water's flow

As it has done since time began, we say.

I see the Tree all rugged-thick with bulk

Of corky bark about its knotted base.

You see it like a silver pillar, straight

With breathing skin for bark, and graceful arms.

The place is at the centre of a maze

Where men have died in thorny culs-de-sac.

The place is in a desert where men die

From thirst in sight of it, nor know they see

The true place, who have stumbled through a glare

Of mirage upon mirage, vanishing

Like melting ice, in the hot sun, or foam

Breaking at tide's edge, on the sifting beach.

All these are true and none. The place is there

Is what we name it, and is not. It is.

-RANDOLPH HENRY ASH

from The Garden of Proserpina

As Roland was going down the area steps, a large woman in an apron leaned over the railings.

"There isn't nobody there any more, luv."

"I live here."

"Oh yes? And where was you when they took her off, after two days lying in pain under the letter-box too faint to squeak? It was me as noticed the milk-bottles and informed the Social Services. They took 'er off to Queen Mary's."

"I was staying with friends in Lincoln. You mean Mrs Irving?”

“Yah. 'Ad a stroke and broke 'er 'ip. I 'ope they 'aven't cut off the electric. They do sometimes."

"I'm only back-" Roland began, before Londoner's caution overtook him, and the thought of loitering burglars. "I'm only back until I can find another flat," he said carefully.

"Watch out for cats."

"Cats?"

"When they come to take 'er off, they all come spitting and hissing out and ran off into the street. They make a nuisance of themselves, messing in the area, thieving in the bins. I telephoned the RSPCA to come and put them down. They say they'll look into it. I don't think there's any shut in the house. They come out like bugs shaken out of a blanket. A dozen or more."

"Oh dear."

"You can smell them."

He could. It was the old smell of failure and sourness, with a fresh intensity to it.

Inside, it was, as always, dark. He turned on the hall light, which did work, and discovered he was standing on a heap of unopened letters, addressed to him, mostly limp and damp. He gathered them up, and moved through the flat, putting on lights. It was early evening; the area windows were dark periwinkle blue. Outside a cat mewed and another, further away, uttered a brief howl.

He said aloud, "Listen to the silence." The silence gathered thickly round his voice, so that he wondered, after all, if he had really spoken.

In the hall, in the light, the Manet portrait sprang out at him. The solid-shadowed head, the sharply thoughtful face, looking out, past him, with its expression eternally curious and composed. The light in Roland's hall caught the photographed painted light in the shiny thickness of the crystal ball. It illuminated the hints and traces of reflected light on the glass-contained jungle-ferns and watery sea-depth behind the head. Manet must have come close and peered at the light which made the life of those long-dead eyes.

Opposite, the print of the G. F. Watts's Ash rose silver-haired from its blackly shadowed trunk, the folded emptiness of the hinted frock-coat, and stared, prophetic perhaps, beautiful certainly, fiercely alert, like an ancient hawk at the solid and sensuous being opposite.

They were recognisably the same man and yet utterly different, years apart, visions apart. Yet recognisably the same.

Roland had once seen them as parts of himself. How much they had been that, to him, he only now understood, when he saw them as wholly distant and separate, not an angle, not a bone, not a white speck of illumination comprehensible by him or to do with him.

He put the stove on in the hall, and the gas-fire in the living-room, and sat down on the bed to read his letters. One was from Blackadder, which he put immediately at the bottom of the heap. Some were bills and some were postcards from holidaying friends. There were also what appeared to be answers to his last routine set of job-applications. They had foreign stamps. Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Barcelona.

Dear Dr Michell,

I am happy to tell you that the Board ofStudies in English has recommended that we offer you apost as lecturer in English in the University of Hong Kong. The post is tenable initiallyfor a period of two years after which a review will take place…

The salary is…

I hope very much that you will feel able to accept this offer. May I say how very much I admired your paper, "Line by Line, "on R. H. Ash, which you sent with your application. I hope to have the chance of discussing it withyou.

We should be glad ofan early reply, as there was very strong competition for thepost. We have tried to telephone, but there hasbeen no answer.

Dear Dr Michell,

We are happy to tell you thatyour applicationfor an assistant lectureship a t theFree University ofAmsterdamhasbeen successful. The appointment i s tobegin in OctoberIQ88: it is understood that you will learn Dutch within t wo years of taking up your post, though themajority of your teaching will b e in English.

A prompt reply would be appreciated. Professor de Groot hasasked me t o tell you that he thinks very highly of your paper, "Line byLine, " on R. H. Ash's vocabulary…

Dear Mr Michell,

It is with great pleasure that I write to inform you thatyour application for the post ofLecturer in the Autonomous University ofBarcelona has been successful,and that you are offered the position with effectfrom January IQ88. We areparticularly keen to strengthen ourteachingin the nineteenth century, and your paper on R. H. Ash was very much admired…

Roland was so used to the pervasive sense of failure that he was unprepared for the blood-rush of success. He breathed differently. The dingy little room humped around in his vision briefly and settled at a different distance, an object of interest, not of choking confinement. He reread his letters. The world opened. He imagined aeroplanes and a cabin on the ferry from Harwich to the Hook, the sleeper from the Gare d'Austerlitz to Madrid. He imagined canals and Rembrandt, Mediterranean oranges, Gaudi and Picasso, junks and skyscrapers, a glimpse of hidden China and the sun on the Pacific. He thought of "Line by Line" with a great rush of the first excitement with which he had first mapped it out. The gloomy self-disparagement inspired in him by Maud's theoretic certainties and sharpnesses vanished like smoke. Three professors had particularly admired it. How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence. Nothing in what he had written had changed and everything had changed. Quickly, before his courage went, he opened Blackadder's letter.

Dear Roland,

I a m somewhat concerned to have heard nothing from you for some considerable time. I hope you will feel able to tell me about the Ash-LaMotte correspondence in due course. You may even care to know what steps have been taken to preserve it for "the Nation. " You may not; your proceedings in this matter are hard for me tounderstand.

I am writing now, however, not onaccount ofthis, norbecause of your unexplained absencefrom the British Library, but becauseI have had urgent telephone callsfrom Professor de Groot in Amsterdam, Professor Liu inHong Kong and Professor Valverde in Barcelona, all of whom are anxious to appoint you. I would not wish you to lose these chances. I have assured them that you will reply assoon as you return, andthat you areavailable. But I need instruction as to your plans in order to know how to protect your interests.

I hope you are not ill.

Yours

James Blackadder

After a moment's needled irritation, in which he heard the whole of this message in Blackadder's most sarcastic Scots, Roland realised that this was quite possibly a very generous letter-certainly kinder than he deserved. Unless it contained a hidden Machiavellian plan to re-establish contact and then savage him? This seemed unlikely; the threatening and repressive demon in the BM basement seemed in this new light partly a figment of his own subjected imagination. Blackadder had held his face in his hands and had seemed not to care to help. Now Roland could be free of him-and he was actively helping, not hindering, that freedom. Roland thought over the whole thing. Why had he run away? Partly because of Maud-the discovery had been half hers, neither of them could have shared with anyone else without betraying the other. He decided not to think about Maud. Not yet, not here, not in this context.

He began restlessly to walk about the flat. He thought of telephoning Maud to tell her about his letters and then decided against it. He needed to be alone and to think.

He became aware of a strange sound in the flat-a kind of sawing and scraping, as though someone was trying to force his way in. It stopped and then started again. Roland listened. The scraping was accompanied by a strange intermittent moaning cry. After a moment's fear, he worked out that the cats were scratching at the matting outside his front door. In the garden, a full-throated feline howl rose and was answered from the area. He wondered idly how many they were and what would become of them.

He thought about Randolph Henry Ash. The pursuit of the letters had distanced him from Ash as they had come closer to Ash's life. In the days of his innocence Roland had been not a hunter but a reader, and had felt superior to Mortimer Cropper, and in some sense equal to Ash, or anyway related to Ash, who had written for him to read intelligently, as best he could. Ash had not written the letters for Roland or for anyone else but Christabel LaMotte. Roland's find had turned out to be a sort of loss. He took the draft letters out of their safe place, inside a file on his desk marked Notes on Aeneid VI, and read them again.

Since our extraordinary conversation I have thought of nothing else.

Since our pleasant and unexpected conversation I have thought of little else.

He remembered the day those dark leaves had flown out of R. H. Ash's Vico. He remembered looking up Vico's Proserpine. He remembered he had been reading Ash's Golden Apples and had been looking for a connection between Vico's Proserpina and Ash's version of her in that poem. He took down his Ash from the shelf, sat at his desk, and read.

It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, amise-enabîme even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of good burgundy. And yet, natures such as Roland's are at their most alert and heady when reading is violently yet steadily alive. (What an amazing word "heady" is, enpassant, suggesting both acute sensuous alertness and its opposite, the pleasure of the brain as opposed to the viscera-though each is implicated in the other, as we know very well, with both, when they are working.)

Think of this, as Roland thought of it, rereading The Garden of Proserpina for perhaps the twelfth, or maybe even the twentieth, time, a poem he "knew" in the sense that he had already experienced all its words, in their order, and also out of order, in memory, in selective quotation or misquotation-in the sense also, that he could predict, at times even recite, those words that were next to come, or more remotely approaching, the place where his mind rested, like clawed bird feet on twig. Think of this-that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser's golden apples in the Faerie Queene, Proserpina's garden, glistening bright among the place's ashes and cinders, may have seen in his mind's eye, apple of his eye, the golden fruit of the Primavera, may have seen Paradise Lost, in the garden where Eve recalled Pomona and Proserpina. He was alone when he wrote and he was not alone then, all these voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places, an Irish castle, an unseen cottage, elastic-walled and grey round blind eyes.

There are readings-of the same text-that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are-believe it-impersonal readings-where the mind's eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind's ear hears them sing and sing.

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark-readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it wasalways there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.

Roland read, or reread, The Golden Apples, as though the words were living creatures or stones of fire. He saw the tree, the fruit, the fountain, the woman, the grass, the serpent, single and multifarious in form. He heard Ash's voice, certainly his voice, his own unmistakable voice, and he heard the language moving around, weaving its own patterns, beyond the reach of any single human, writer or reader. He heard Vico saying that the first men were poets and the first words were names that were also things, and he heard his own strange, necessary meaningless lists, made in Lincoln, and saw what they were. He saw too that Christabel wTas the Muse and Proserpina and that she was not, and this seemed to be so interesting and apt, once he had understood it, that he laughed aloud. Ash had started him on this quest and he had found the clue he had started with, and all was cast off, the letter, the letters, Vico, the apples, his list.

"In the garden they howled, they lifted their voices and howled with hunger and desolation."

Over his desk the little print of the photograph of Randolph Ash's death mask was ambiguous. You could read it either way; as though you were looking into a hollow mould, as though the planes of the cheeks and forehead, the blank eyes and the broad brow were sculpted and looking out. You were inside-behind those closed eyes like an actor, masked: you were outside, looking at closure, if not finality. The frontispiece of his book was a photograph of Ash on his death-bed, the abundant white hair, the look of fatigue caught at a transient moment between the semblance of life and the set of death. These dead men, and Manet's wary, intelligent sensualist and Watts's prophet were all one-though also they were Manet and Watts -and the words too were one, the tree, the woman, the water, the grass, the snake and the golden apples. He had always seen these aspects as part of himself, of Roland Mitchell, he had lived with them. He remembered talking to Maud about modern theories of the incoherent self, which was made up of conflicting systems of beliefs, desires, languages and molecules. All and none of these were Ash and yet he knew, if he did not encompass, Ash. He touched the letters, which Ash had touched, over which Ash's hand had moved, urgent and tentative, reforming and rejecting his own words. He looked at the still fiery traces of the poem.

What Ash said-not to him specifically, there was no privileged communication, though it was he who happened to be there, at that time, to understand it-was that the lists were the important thing, the words that named things, the language of poetry.

He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself.

He thought about the death mask. He could and could not say that the mask and the man were dead. What had happened to him was that the ways in which it could be said had become more interesting than the idea that it could not.

He felt hugely hungry. On the way to fetch himself a tin of sweetcorn he heard the cats again, crying, scraping at his door. He found a heap of tins of pilchards and sardines-he and Val had lived frugally, these were a staple. He opened one of these and put it into a saucer, put it down inside the entrance to the flat and opened the door. Faces looked up at him, triangular sleek black faces, golden-eyed, owlish whiskered faces, tiger-striped, a smoke-grey kitten and a heavy orange Tom. He put down his saucer and called, as he had heard the old woman call. For a moment they hesitated there, heads on one side, and he watched their nostrils spread and snuff the oil on the air. Then they came past him in a rush, on their bellies, and the food was gone, two heads, snatching and gulping, a battle of legs and sinuous bodies, a long cry of the disappointed. He opened more tins, and put down a row of saucers. Soft feet hurried down the area steps, white needle teeth tore at the fish flesh, satisfied fur coiled and purred around his ankles, setting off little electric sparks. He watched them. Fifteen cats. They looked up at him, clear green glass eyes, tawny eyes, yellow and amber eyes, their pupils narrowing to slits in the light of his hall.

He thought there was no reason why he should not go out into the garden. He went back through the basement, pursued by several padding beasts, and pulled open the forbidden bolts, against the grittiness of the rust. He had to move heaps of papers away from the door. (Val had said they were a fire hazard.) The central lock was a Yale, which he turned, propping the door open. The night air came in, cold and damp and earthy, and the cats came out with him, running ahead. He went up the stone steps, and round the wall, beyond the extent of his confined view, and stood in the narrow garden, under the trees.

It had been a wet October; the lawn was covered with damp leaves, although some of the trees were still green. They held up their complicated arms, black against the pink haze of street lighting which lay over, rather than mixing with, the black of the space beyond. In his imagination, when he could not get into the garden, it had seemed a large space of breathing leaves and real earth. Now he was out, it seemed smaller, but still mysterious, because of the earth, in which things were growing. He could see the espaliered peaches on the red bricks of the serpentining wall, which had once bounded General Fairfax's Putney estate. He walked over and touched the wall, the baked bricks put up sturdily then, and still solid now. Andrew Marvell had been Fairfax 's secretary and had written poems in Fairfax 's gardens.

Roland was not sure why he felt so happy. Was it the letters, was it Ash's poem, was it the opening of his future, was it simply being alone, which was something he needed ferociously from time to time and lately had missed?

He walked along the path, inside the wall, to the end of the garden, where a couple of fruit trees obscured the view of the garden beyond. He looked back at the gaunt house, across the lawn. The cats were coming after him. Their snaking bodies wove in and out of the shadows of the trees on the grass, now glossy in the light, now velvet black in the dark. Their eyes shone fitfully and intermittently, hollow reddish balls, with a bluish spark at the centre, green-streaked curves on the dark that glittered and were gone. He was so pleased to see them, he stood with a silly smile on his face. He thought of the years of their dank smell, the dripping cave he had lived in, and felt, now he was going-for that was certain, he was going away-simply friendly towards them. Tomorrow he would have to think how to arrange for their survival. Tonight, he began to think of words, words came from some well in him, lists of words that arranged themselves into poems, "The Death Mask,”

“The Fairfax Wall,”

“A Number of Cats." He could hear, or feel, or even almost see, the patterns made by a voice he didn't yet know, but which was his own. The poems were not careful observations, nor yet incantations, nor yet reflections on life and death, though they had elements of all these. He added another, "Cats' Cradle," as he saw he had things to say which he could say about the way shapes came and made themselves. Tomorrow he would buy a new notebook and write them down. Tonight he would write down enough, the mnemonics.

He had time to feel the strangeness of before and after; an hour ago there had been no poems, and now they came like rain and were real.