No—I am out—I am out of my Tower and my Wits. I have my cottage to myself for a few brief hours—Tuesday afternoon—ca 1.00 p.m.—should you care to reconnoitre the humdrum truth of your imagined Bower—of—? Will you take Tea?
Oh, I regret much. Much. And there are things that must be said—soon now—and will find their moment.
I am sad, sir, today—low and sad—sad that we went walking, yet sad too, that we are not walking still. And that is all I can write, for the Muse has forsaken me—as she may mockingly forsake all Women, who dally with Her—and then—Love—
Your Christabel
My Dear
So now I may think of you in truth—in your little Parlour—presiding over the flowering little cups—with Monsignor Dorato prinking and trilling, not, as I had hypothesised, in a Florentine palazzo but in a very Taj Mahal of burning brass wires. And over the mantel, Christabel before Sir Leoline—yourself caught like a statue with coloured light striking garishly across you and an equally frigid Dog Tray. Who ranged, busily seeking, with his hackles like porpentine quills and his soft grey lip wrinkled in a snarl—truly, as you say, he at least does not love me, and once or twice threatened my composed attention to the excellent seed cake, and rattled cup and saucer. And no porch with tumbling flowers—all vanishing froth and fantasy—but stiff tall Roses like a thicket of sentinels.
I think your house did not love me, and I should not have come.
And it is true, as you said, across the whole hearth, that I too have a house, which we have not described or even spoken of. And that I have a wife. You asked me to speak of her and I was speechless. I know not how you construed that—I grant it was your absolute right to ask—and yet I could not answer. (Though I knew you must ask.)
I have a wife, and I love her. Not as I love you. Now, I have sat for half-an-hour, having written those bleak little sentences, and quite unable to go on. There are good reasons—I cannot discuss them, but they are good, if not absolutely adequately good—why my love for you need not hurt her. I know this must sound bald and lame. It must, most probably, be what many men, philandering men, have said before me—I do not know—I am inexperienced in these matters and never thought to find myself writing such a letter. I find I can say no more, only aver that I believe what I have said to be true and hope that I shall not lose you by this necessary uncouthness. To discuss this any further would be the most certain way to betray her. I should feel the same if the question were ever to arise of discussing you—with anyone at all. Even the implicit analogy is distressing—you must feel it. What you are is yours—what we have—if anything—is ours.
Please destroy this letter—whatever you do or have done with the rest—because in itself it constitutes such a betrayal.
I hope the Muse has not indeed forsaken you—even briefly, even for so long as a Teatime. I am writing a lyric poem—most intransigent—about Firedrakes and Chinese Lung dragons—a conjuration, it might rightly be called. It is to do with you—as everything I do these days, or think, or breathe, or see is to do with you—but it is not addressed to you—those poems are to come.
If any answer comes to this plain letter—I shall know both that you are generous indeed, and that our small space is ours—for our short time—until the moment of impossibility makes itself known—
Your R.H.A.
My dear Sir,
Yr plainness and yr reticence can do you nothing but Honour—if that might be thought to be pertinent in this—Pandora’s Box—we have opened—or wet Outdoors we have ventured into. I find I can write no more—indeed and indeed my Head Hurts—and matters in this House—of which I shall not speak, from something the same motives of I hope honour—enfin, they do not go well. Can you be in the park on Thursday. I have matters to impart that I would rather speak.
Ever, C.
My dear
My Phoenix is temporarily a woebegone and even bedraggled bird—speaking uncharacteristically small and meek—and even from moment to moment deferential. This will not do—this may not be—I will renounce all, all my heart’s happiness, I say—to see you brighten and flare as you were wont. I would do all in my power that you might sparkle in your sphere as ever before—even renounce my so-much-insisted-upon claim on you. So tell me—not that you are sad, but why you are so, and truthfully, and I will take it upon me to mend what’s ill, if it lies in my power. Now write back to me as you may, and come again on Tuesday.
Always, R.H.A.
Dearest Sir,
In faith I know not why I am so sad. No—I know—it is that you take me out of myself and give me back—diminished—I am wet eyes—and touched hands—and lips am I too—a very present—famished—fragment of a woman—who has not her desire in truth—and yet has desire superabundantly—ah—this is painful—
And you say—so kind you are—“I love you. I love you.”—and I believe—but who is she—who is “you”? Is she—fine fair hair and—whatever yearns so—I was once something else—something alone and better—I was sufficient unto my self—and now I range—busily seeking with continual change. I might be less discontented if my daily Life were happy, but it is become a brittle tissue of silence and needle-sharp reproach punctuating. I stare proudly—and seem most ignorant where I am most sharply knowing—and known—but this costs—it is not easy—it is not good.
I read yr John Donne.
But we, by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
This is a fine phrase—“inter-assured of the mind.” Do you believe it is possible to find such—safe mooring—in the howling gale?
And I have now a new word in my vocabulary, much hated, to which I am enslaved—it goes “And if—” “And if—” And if we had time and space to be together—as we have allowed ourselves to wish to be—then we would be free together—whereas now—caged?
My dear,
The true exercise of freedom is—cannily and wisely and with grace—to move inside what space confines—and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted. But we are human—and to be human is to desire to know what may be known by any means. And it is easier to miss lips hands and eyes when they are grown a little familiar and are not at all to be explored, the unknown calling. “And if” we had a week—or two—what would we not make of it? And maybe we shall. We are resourceful and intelligent persons.
I would not for the whole world diminish you. I know it is usual in these circumstances to protest—“I love you for yourself alone”—“I love you essentially”—and as you imply, my dearest, to mean by “you essentially”—lips hands and eyes. But you must know—we do know—that it is not so—dearest, I love your soul and with that your poetry—the grammar and stopping and hurrying syntax of your quick thought—quite as much essentially you as Cleopatra’s hopping was essentially hers to delight Antony—more essentially, in that while all lips hands and eyes resemble each other somewhat (though yours are enchanting and also magnetic)—your thought clothed with your words is uniquely you, came with you, would vanish if you vanished—
The journey I spoke of is not finally decided on. Tugwell finds himself greatly involved in his work at home—and though the project was long ago decided upon for when the weather should be clement—to be civilised these days requires an intelligent interest in the minuter forms of life and the monstrous permanent forms of the planet—it now hangs fire. And I who was all enthusiasm—now hang fire—hang upon fire—for how should I willingly go so far from Richmond?
Until Tuesday then
P.S. Swammerdam is almost ready once more.
Dearest Sir,
My dubious Muse is back. I send you (unperfected) what She has dictated.
The grassy knoll
Shivers in His embrace
His muscles—roll
About—about—His Face
Smiles hot and gold
/> Over the small hill’s brow
And every fold
Contracts and stiffens—now
He gathers strength
His glistering length
Grips, grips: the stones
Cry out like bones
Constricted—earth—in pain
Cries out—again—
He grips and smiles—
My very dear,
I write in haste—I fear your answer—I know not whether to depart or no—I will stay, for you—unless this small chance you spoke of prove a true possibility. Yet how may that be? How could you satisfactorily explain such a step? How can I not nevertheless hope?
I do not wish to do irreparable damage to your life. I have so much rational understanding left to me, as to beg you—against my own desires, my own hope, my own true love—to think before and after. If by any kind of ingenuity it may be done satisfactorily so that you may afterwards live as you wish—well then—if it may—this is not matter for writing. I shall be in the Church at noon tomorrow.
I send my love now and always.
Dear Sir,
It is done. BY FIAT. I spoke Thunder—and said—so it shall be—and there will be no questions now—or ever—and to this absolute Proposition I have—like all Tyrants—meek acquiescence.
No more Harm can be done by this than has already been done—not by your will—though a little by mine—for I was (and am) angry.
11
SWAMMERDAM
Bend nearer, Brother, if you please. I fear
I trouble you. It will not be for long.
I thank you now, before my voice, or eyes,
Or weak wit fail, that you have sat with me
Here in this bare white cell, with the domed roof
As chalky-plain as any egg’s inside.
I shall be hatched tonight. Into what clear
And empty space of quiet, she best knows,
The holy anchoress of Germany
Who charged you with my care, and speaks to God
For my poor soul, my small soul, briefly housed
In this shrunk shelly membrane that He sees,
Who holds, like any smiling Boy, this shell
In his bright palm, and with His instrument
Of Grace, pricks in his path, for infinite Light
To enter through his pinhole, and seek out
What must be sucked to him, an inchoate slop
Or embryonic Angel’s fledgling wings.
I have not much to leave. Once I had much,
Or thought it much, but men thought otherwise.
Well-nigh three thousand winged or creeping things
Lively in death, injected by my Art,
Lovingly entered, opened and displayed—
The types of Nature’s Bible, ranged in ranks
To show the secrets of her cunning hand.
No matter now. Write—if you please—I leave
My manuscripts and pens to my sole friend,
The Frenchman, the incomparable Thévenot,
Who values, like a true philosopher
The findings of a once courageous mind.
He should have had my microscopes and screws—
The copper helper with his rigid arms
We called Homunculus, who gripped the lens
Steadier than human hands, and offered up
Fragments of gauze, or drops of ichor, to
The piercing eyes of Men, who dared to probe
Secrets beyond their frame’s unaided scope.
But these are gone, to buy the bread and milk
This curdled stomach can no more ingest.
I must die in his debt. He is my friend
And will forgive me. Write that hope. Then write
For her, for Antoinette de Bourignon
(Who spoke to me, when I despaired, of God’s
Timeless and spaceless point of Infinite Love)
That, trusting her and Him, I turn my face
To the bare wall, and leave this world of things
For the No-thing she shewed me, when I came
Halting to Germany, to seek her out.
Now sign it, Swammerdam, and write the date,
March, 1680, and then write my age
His forty-third year. His small time’s end. His time—
Who saw Infinity through countless cracks
In the blank skin of things, and died of it.
Think you, a man’s life grows a certain shape
As out of ant’s egg antworm must proceed
And out of antworm wrapped in bands must come
The monstrous female or the winged drone
Or hurrying worker, each in its degree?
I am a small man, closed in a small space,
Expert in smallness, in the smallest things,
The inconsiderable and overlooked,
The curious and the ephemeral.
I like your small cell, Brother. Poverty,
Whiteness, a window, water, and your hand
Steadying the beaker at my cracking lips.
Thank you. It is enough.
Where I was born
Was a small space too, not like this, not bare,
A brilliant dusty hutch of mysteries,
A cabinet of curiosities.
What did my eyes first light on? There was scarce
Space for a crib between the treasure-chests,
The subtle-stoppered jars and hanging silks,
Feathers and bones and stones and empty gourds
Heaped pêle-mêle o’er the tables and the chairs.
A tray of moonstones spilled into a bowl
Of squat stone scarabs and small painted eyes
Of alien godlings winked from dusty shelves.
A mermaid swam in a hermetic jar
With bony fingers scraping her glass walls
And stiff hair streaming from her shrunken head.
Her dry brown breasts were like mahogany,
Her nether parts, coiled and confined, were dull,
Like ancient varnish, but her teeth were white.
And there was too a cockatrice’s egg,
An ivory-coloured sphere, or almost sphere,
That balanced on a Roman drinking-cup
Jostling a mummy-cat, still wrapped around
With pitch-dark bandages from head to foot,
Sand-dried, but not unlike the swaddling-bands
My infant limbs were held in, I assume.
And your hands, will they? presently will fold
This husk here in its shroud and close my eyes,
Weakened by so much straining over motes
And specks of living matter, eyes that oped
In innocent lustre on that teasing heap
Of prizes reaped round the terrestrial globe
By resolute captains of the proud Dutch ships
That slip their anchors here in Amsterdam,
Sail out of mist and squalls, ride with the wind
To burning lands beneath a copper sun
Or never-melted mountains of green ice
Or hot dark secret places in the steam
Of equatorial forests, where the sun
Strikes far above the canopy, where men
And other creatures never see her light
Save as a casual winking lance that runs
A silver shaft between green dark and dark.
I had a project, as a tiny boy
To make a catalogue of all this pelf,
Range it, create an order, render it,
You might say, human-sized, by typing it
According to the use we made of it
Or meanings we saw in it. I would part
Medicine from myth, for instance, amulets
(Pure superstition) from the minerals—
Rose-quartz, quicksilver, we could grind to heal
Agues or tropic fever. Living things
Should have their own affined taxonomy,
Insect with insect,
dusty bird with bird,
And all the eggs, from monstrous ostrich-globe
To chains of soft-shelled snakes’ eggs, catalogued,
Measured with calipers and well set out
Gainst taffeta curtains, in curved wooden cups.
My father had a pothecary’s shop
And seemed well-pleased at first to have a son
With such precocious yearnings of the mind.
He was ambitious for me. In his thoughts
He saw me doing human good, admired
By men, humble in God’s eyes, eloquent
For truth and justice. When he saw that I
Was not the lawyer-son his hopes embraced
He fixed on a physician. “Who can mend
Man’s ailing frame, succours his soul too,” said
My father, a devout and worldly man,
“And keeps himself in bread and meat and wine.
Since fallen man must ail, the doctor’s care
Is ever-wanted, this side of the grave.”
But I had other leanings. Did they come
From scrupulous intellect, or glamorous spell
Cast by my infant nursery’s denizens?
It seemed to me that true anatomy
Began not in the human heart and hands
But in the simpler tissues, primal forms,
Of tiny things that crept or coiled or flew.
The clue to life lay in the blind white worm
That eats away the complex flesh of men,
Is eaten by the farmyard bird who makes
A succulent dinner for another man
And so completes the circle. Life is One
I thought, and rational anatomy
Begins at the foot o’ the ladder, on the rung
Nearest the fertile heat of Mother Earth.
Was it for that, or was it that my Soul
Had been possessed, in that dark Cabinet
By the black spider, big as a man’s fist,
Tangible demon, in her sooty hair,
Or by the coal-black Moths of Barbary
Pierced through their frail dark wings, and crucified
With pins, for our amusement?