Possession

  Dear Miss LaMotte,

  I trust all is now well in your household, and that work—on the Merlin and Vivien—and on the increasingly fascinating Melusina—continues apace. As for myself—I have now nearly finished my poem on Swammerdam—I have a rough blocked-out version of the whole—I know what is in and what is never so regretfully eternally abandoned—and when I have tidied up a multitude of imperfections—I shall make you my first fair copy.

  I was entranced and moved by your brief portrait of your father—whose prodigious scholarship I have always admired and whose works I have read and reread most frequently. What better Father could a poet have? I was emboldened by your mention of the Ancient Mariner to wonder—was it he who named you and was that for Coleridge’s heroine of his unfinished poem? I have not had occasion to tell you—though I tell all I meet, with the regularity with which dear Crabb tells his tale of retrieving Wieland’s bust—I once met Coleridge, I was once taken to Highgate—when I was very young and green—and had the chance of hearing the Angelic—(and mildly self-important) voice speak on and on—of the existence of angels and the longevity of yew-trees, and the suspension of Life in Winter (the banal and the truly profound thick and fast upon each other here) and premonitions and the Duties of Man (not Rights) and how Napoleon’s Spies had been hot on his heels in Italy on his return from Malta—and on True Dreams and Lying Dreams. And more, I think. Nothing on Christabel.

  I was so young and green, I worried inordinately that I had no chance, in all this spate of brilliant monologue, to interpose my own voice—to be heard to be able to think in that company—to be remarked. I do not know what I should have said if I could have spoken. Very likely something futile or silly—some erudite and pointless questioning of his doctrine of the Trinity, or some crude wish to be told the end of the poem Christabel. I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things—once commenced—only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending—sweet or sour—and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable? Do you have any privileged insight into the possible ending of the great S.T.C.’s Tale of Christabel?—which teases so, for it is like the very best tales, impossible to predict how it may come out—and yet it must—but we shall never know—its secret sleeps with its lethargic and inconsequential author—who cares not for our irritable quandary—

  I partly see your meaning about Melusina—but hesitate to write thoughts of mine which may distort your thinking—either by causing you annoyance at my imperceptiveness—or worse by muddling the bright tracks of your own ideas.

  What is so peculiarly marvellous about the Melusina myth, you seem to be saying, is that it is both wild and strange and ghastly and full of the daemonic—and it is at the same time solid as earthly tales—the best of them—are solid—depicting the life of households and the planning of societies, the introduction of husbandry and the love of any mother for her children.

  Now—I am greatly daring, and I trust you not to fly out at me scornfully if I am wrong—I see in the gifts you show already in your writings such mastery of both these contradictory elements—that the Story may appear to be made for you, to await indeed—You—to tell it.

  Both in your wonder-tales and in your fine lyrics—you have a most precise eye and ear for the matter of fact and the detailed—for household linen for instance, for the fine manipulations of delicate sewing—for actions like Milking—which make a mere man see the world of little domestic acts as a paradisal revelation—

  But you are never content to leave it there … your world is haunted by voiceless shapes … and wandering Passions … and little fluttering Fears … more sinister than any conventional Bat or Broomstick-witch.

  As if to say—you have the power to render the secure keep of Lusignan—as it might be in the lives of the lords, ladies and peasants in the brilliant colours of a Book of Hours—and yet you can render also—the Voices of the Air—the Wailing—the Siren Song—the Inhuman Grief that cries down the avenues of the years—

  What will you be thinking of me now? I told you—I cannot think of anything without imagining it, without giving it shape in my mind’s eye and ear. So, as I said, I have the clearest mental vision of yr unseen Porch, overarched with Clematis—one of those delightful deep-blue violet ones—and little clambering roses. I have also the clearest vision of your parlour—with its two peaceful Human inhabitants employed—I will not say at netting, but perhaps at reading—aloud, some work of Shakespeare or Sir Thomas Malory—and Monsignor Dorato all lemony plumes in a filigree dome—and your little dog—now of what kind is he? if I were to hazard a guess I would say perhaps a King Charles Spaniel—yes, I see him now, unfortunately clearly, with one chocolate ear and one white and a feathery tail—and yet he is maybe no such thing—but a small hound—a milk-white fine creature such as Sir Thos Wyatt’s ladies kept in their mysterious chamber. I have no vision of Jane at all—but that may come. I do have the clearest olfactory ghost of yr tisanes—though they hesitate between verveine and lime and raspberry-leaves, which my own dear mother found most efficacious in case of headache and lassitude.

  But I have no right, however I may extend my imagining gaze on harmless chairs and wallcoverings—I have no right to extend my unfortunate curiosity to your work, your writing. You will accuse me of trying to write your Melusina, but it is not so—it is only my unfortunate propensity to try to make concrete in my brain how you would do it—and the truly exciting possibilities open up before me—like vistas of long rides in sun-dappled shade in the mysterious forest of Brocéliande—I think—so, she will do it—so, she would enter the project. And yet I know your work is nothing if not truly original—my speculations are an impertinence. What can I say? I have never before been tempted to discuss the intricacies of my own writing—or his own—with any other poet—I have always gone on in a solitary and self-sufficient way—but with you I felt from the first that it must be the true things or nothing—there was no middle way. So I speak to you—or not speak, write to you, write written speech—a strange mixture of kinds—I speak to you as I might speak to all those who most possess my thoughts—to Shakespeare, to Thomas Browne, to John Donne, to John Keats—and find myself unpardonably lending you, who are alive, my voice, as I habitually lend it to those dead men—Which is much as to say—here is an author of Monologues—trying clumsily to construct a Dialogue—and encroaching on both halves of it. Forgive me.

  Now if this were a true dialogue—but that is entirely as you may wish it to be.

  Dear Mr Ash,

  Have you truly Weighed—what you ask of me? Not the Gracile Accommodation of my Muse to your promptings—for that wd be resisted to the Death of the Immortal—which cannot Be—only Dissipation in Air. But you Overwhelm my small diligence—with Pelion piled on Ossa of Thought and fancy—and if indeed I sit down to answer all as it should be answered—there is the morning quite gone—and what has become either of the setting of the junket or of the Fairy Melusina?

  Yet do not on that account cease to write to me—if I skimp a little on the Fairy-cakes—and write you a truncated and scanty answer—and procrastinate—not unfruitfully—one more day for the Melusina—all may be botched together somehow.

  You say you cannot imagine Jane. Well—I will tell you, this much—she has a Sweet Tooth—a very sweet tooth. It is beyond her powers to let be a set of little milk-jellies—or delicious macaroons—or brandy-snaps—in the Larder—without abstracting one insignificant exemplar here—or indenting a Spoon there and leaving traces of her gourmandise. So it is with my sad Self and the inditing of letters. I will not do it I say, until this is quite done—or that embarked on—but in my mind runs an answer to this that or the other—and I say to myself—if this argument were disposed of (if just that sweetmeat were tasted and slid down) my mind would be my own again, without agitation—

  No, but how ungracious to qui
bble. I was just asserting—I am no Creature of your thought, nor in danger of becoming so—we are both safe in that regard. As for the Chairs and wall-coverings—imagine away—think what you will—and I shall from time to time write a small Clue—so that you may be the more thoroughly confounded. I will say nothing as to clematis and roses—but we have a very fine Hawthorn—just now tressed and heavy with pink and creamy blooms and alive with that almond smell—so sweet—too sweet—that the sense aches at it. I will not say where this Tree is—nor how young or old, large or small—so you will be imagining it not as it is indeed—Paradisal and Dangerous—you know the May must never be brought into the house.

  Now I must discipline myself—and address my wandering wits to your momentous questions—or we are swallowed up, both of us, in frippery imaginations, and vain speculations.

  I too have seen S.T.C. I was but an infant—his pudgy Hand rested on my golden curls—his Voice remarked on their flaxen paleness—he said—or I have since by thinking created his voice saying—for I too, like you, must be imagining, I cannot let things alone—I believe he said “It is a beautiful name and will I trust not be a name of ill omen.” Now this is all the Clue I have to the end of the poem of Christabel—that its heroine was destined for tribulation—which is not hard to see—though how she might obtain Happiness thereafter is harder, if not Impossible.

  Now I must change my habitual Tone wholly. Now I must write stringently and not fly about distracting you with flappings of tinsel or demoiselle-flickering. What nonsense in you to pretend to fear, or to fear truly perhaps, that I could be anything but wholly gratified by what you say of the Melusina and of my own powers of writing—of what I might do. You have read my thoughts—or made clear to me what were my predispositions—not in an intrusive way—but with true insight. She is indeed—my Melusine—just such a combination of the orderly and humane with the unnatural and the Wild—as you suggest—the hearth-foundress and the destroying Demon. (And female, which you do not remark on.)

  I had not known you were a reader of such childish things as Tales Told in November. Those were my Father’s tales, above all—and told—only—in those dark months to which they belong. He used to say that those collectors or researchers who went to Brittany in the summer months—when the sea smiles sometimes, and the mist lifts from the granite so that it almost shines—might never come by what they looked for. The true tales were only told on dark nights—after Toussaint, All Saints, had passed. And the November Tales were the worst—of revenants, of demons, of portents, of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. And of the Ankou—who drove a terrible chariot,—a creaking groaning grinding sort of a conveyance anyone might hear behind him on a lonely heath on a dark night—full of dead bones, it might be, heaped and dangling. And the Driver was a Man of Bones—under his huge hat you saw only his hollow Orbits—he was not, you must know, Death, but Death’s Servitor—come with his Scythe—whose blade faced not inward for harvesting but outward—for what? (I can hear my father’s voice on a dark evening, asking—for what? And if I tell it to you somewhat flatly—why—it is because the days lengthen, and outside a thrush sings and sings in my foamy May—and all this is Out of Time.) If we are still writing letters to each other in November—as why should we? and why should we not?—I can a tale unfold—and shall—quite in my father’s manner. After November came the gentler tales of the Birth of Our Lord—you will remember it is a Breton belief that on that holy day the Beasts talk in the Stalls and Byres—but no man may hear what they say, those sage and innocent creatures—on pain of Death—

  Now mark—you must write no more of your interest in my work as a possible Intrusion. You do not seem aware, Mr Ash, for all your knowledge of the great world I do not frequent, of the usual response which the productions of the Female Pen—let alone as in our case, the hypothetick productions—are greeted with. The best we may hope is—oh, it is excellently done—for a woman. And then there are Subjects we may not treat—things we may not know. I do not say but that there must be—and is—some essential difference between the Scope and Power of men and our own limited consciousness and possibly weaker apprehension. But I do maintain, as stoutly, that the delimitations are at present, all wrongly drawn—We are not mere candleholders to virtuous thoughts—mere chalices of Purity—we think and feel, aye and read—which seems not to shock you in us, in me, though I have concealed from many the extent of my—vicarious—knowledge of human vagaries. Now—if there is a reason for my persistence in this correspondence—it is this very unawareness in you—real or assumed—of what a woman must be supposed to be capable of. This is to me—like a strong Bush, well-rooted is to the grasp of one falling down a precipice—here I hold—here I am stayed—

  I will tell you a Tale—no I will not neither, it does not bear thinking on—and yet I will, as an instance of trust—towards You.

  I sent some of my smaller poems—a little sheaf—selected with trembling—to a great Poet—who shall be nameless, I cannot write his name—asking—Are These Poems? Have I—a Voice? He replied with courteous promptness—that they were pretty things—not quite regular—and not always well-regulated by a proper sense of decorum—but he would encourage me, moderately—they would do well enough to give me an interest in life until I had—I quote him exactly—“sweeter and weightier responsibilities.” Now how should I be brought by this judgment to desire those—Mr Ash—how? You understood my very phrase—the Life of Language. You understand—in my life Three—and Three alone have glimpsed—that the need to set down words—what I see, so—but words too, words mostly—words have been all my life, all my life—this need is like the Spider’s need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out—the silk is her life, her home, her safety—her food and drink too—and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew—you will say she is patient—so she is—she may also be Savage—it is her Nature—she Must—or die of Surfeit—do you understand me?

  I can write no more at this time. My heart is too full—I have said too much—if I overlook these sheets, my courage will fail me—so they shall go all uncorrected as they are, with their imperfections on their heads—God bless you and keep you.

  Christabel LaMotte

  My dear Friend,

  I may call myself your friend, may I not? For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else’s, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth,—even if, like the May, only a threshold-presence, by decree. I write to you now in haste—not to answer your last most generous letter—but to impart a vision, before the strangeness of it fades. An answer you shall and must have—but this I must tell you of, before I lose my courage. Are you curious? I hope so.

  First I must confess my vision occurred in a ride in Richmond Park. And why must I confess this? May a poet and a gentleman not ride out with friends wherever he pleases? I was invited to take exercise with friends in the Park, and felt a vague unease as though its woody plantations and green spaces were girdled with an unspoken spell of prohibition—as your Cottage is—as Shalott was to the knights—as the woods of sleep are in the tale, with their sharp briar hedges. Now on the level of tales, you know, all prohibitions are made only to be broken, must be broken—as is indeed instanced in your own Melusina with striking ill-luck to the disobedient knight. It may be even that I might not have come to ride in the park if it had not had the definite glitter and glamour of the enclosed and barred. Though I must add, as a true nineteenth-century gentleman, I did not feel it was within my right to saunter past the clematis and roses, or the foamy May-tree, as I might so easily and casually have done—pavements are free places. I will not exchange my imagined rose-bower for reality until I am invited to step inside it—which may be never. So—I rode within the pale of the Park—and thought of those who dwelt so close to its iron gateways—and fancied that at every turn I might see a half-familiar shawl or bonnet whi
sk out of sight like one of yr own whiteladies—And I felt a little irritation with the good Quaker gentleman whose stolid telluric conditions have so much more confidence-inspiring virtue than the poetic morality of R. H. Ash—

  Now, as all good knights in all good tales do—I was riding along, a little apart, and musing to myself. I was making my way along a grassy ride in what you might well have supposed to be an enchanted stillness. In other parts of the park, Spring had been busy—we disturbed a family of rabbits in the new bracken, which rose in strong little involuted fronds, like new-born serpents, somewhere between the feathered and the scaly—There were hosts of black ravens, very busy and important, striding about and stabbing at the roots of things with their blue-black triangular beaks. And larks rising, and spiders throwing out their gleaming geometrical Traps and staggering butterflies and the unevenly speeding blue darts of the dragonflies. And a kestrel riding the air-currents in superlative ease with its gaze concentrated on the bright earth.

  So—I went on, on my own—deeper and deeper into the silent Tunnel of the Ride—not so sure of where I was and yet not anxious either, not concerned about my companions nor even about the nearness of—certain friends. The trees were beech, and the buds, just breaking, fiercely brilliant, and the new, the renewed light on them—intermittent diamond—but the depths were dark, a silent Nave. And no birds sang, or I heard none, no woodpecker tapped, no thrush whistled or hopped. And I listened to the increasing Quiet—and my horse went softly on the beech-mast—which was wet after rain—not crackling, a little sodden, not wet enough to plash. And I had the sensation, common enough, at least to me, that I was moving out of time, that the way, narrow and dark-dappled, stretched away indifferently before and behind, and that I was who I had been and what I would become—all at once, all wound in one—and I moved onward indifferently, since it was all one, whether I came or went, or remained still. Now to me such moments are poetry. Do not misunderstand me—I do not mean missishly “poetical”—but the source of the driving force of the lines—And when I write lines I mean the lines of verse indeed, but also some lines of life which run indifferently through us—from Origin to Finish. Ah, how can I tell you? And to whom but you could I even begin to describe such indescribable—such obscurely untouchable things? Imagine an abstract sketch such as a drawing-master might make to correct your perspective for you—a fan or tunnel of lines, narrowing not to blindness, not to Nought, but to the Vanishing point, to Infinity. And then imagine these Lines embodied in the soft bright leaves and the pale light and the blue moving over it—and the tall trunks with their grey soft hide diminishing—and the very furrows in the ground—such a unique carpet of such browns and sooty blacks and peat and amber and ash—all distinct and all one—all leading on and yet stationary … I cannot say … I trust you know already …