Dear Roland,
I am 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 to understand.
I am writing now, however, not on account of this, nor because of your unexplained absence from the British Library, but because I have had urgent telephone calls from Professor de Groot in Amsterdam, Professor Liu in Hong 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 as soon as you return, and that you are available. 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, a mise-en-abîme 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, en passant, 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 was always 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 was 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 Michell, 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.
27
In certain moods we eat our lives away
In fast successive greed; we must have more
Although that more depletes our little stock
Of time and peace remaining. We are driven
By endings as by hunger. We must know
How it comes out, the shape o’ the whole, the thread
Whose links are weak or solid, intricate
Or boldly welded in great clumsy loops
Of primitive workmanship. We feel our way
Along the links and we cannot let go
Of this bright chain of curiosity
Which is become our fetter. So it drags
Us through our time—“And then, and then, and then,”
Towards our figured consummation.
And we must have the knife, the dart, the noose,
The last embrace, the golden wedding ring
The trump of battle or the deathbed rasp
Although we know and must know, they’re all one,
Finis, The End, the one consummate shock
That ends all shocks and us. Do we desire
We prancing, cogitating, nervous lives
Movement’s cessation or a maw crammed full
Of sweetest certainty, though with that bliss
We cease as in his thrilling bridal dance
The male wasp finds the bliss and swift surcease
Of his small time i’ the air.
—RANDOLPH HENRY ASH
The Mortlake conference was held in an unlikely atmosphere of gaiety and conspiracy. It was held in Beatrice Nest’s house, at her invitation. (Mortlake was agreed, conspiratorially, to be beyond the beam of Mortimer Cropper’s attention.) Beatrice made onion and cream tart, green salad and chocolate mousse, as she had once done for her graduate students. The tarts and mousse looked delicious, and Beatrice was happy. Concentrating on the matter in hand, the threat from Mortimer Cropper, she ignored the currents of tension between her guests, the things not being said, the things substituted for what was not being said.
Maud arrived first, looking severe and preoccupied, her green silk scarf again wound round her head and pinned with the jet m
ermaid. She stood in one corner, considering the silver-framed photograph of Randolph Henry Ash that stood, where those of father or lover might have stood, on Beatrice’s little secretaire. It was not a photograph of the late silvered sage, but an early one, with a mass of dark hair and an almost piratical look. Maud automatically began to analyse it semiotically; the solid silver arabesques of the frame, the choice of image, the fact that the sitter apparently met the onlooker’s eye, the still nineteenth-century pre-snapshot stare. The fact that the photograph was of the poet, not of his wife.
Maud was followed by Val and Euan MacIntyre. Beatrice did not quite understand this grouping. She had met Val from time to time, sullenly staring from the edge of the working group in the Ash Factory. She noted Val’s new, slightly defiant radiance, but with scholarly single-mindedness did not attempt to account for it. Euan complimented her on her presence of mind in overhearing and reporting Mortimer Cropper’s intentions, and pronounced the whole business to be very exciting, which, combined with the success of the tart and mousse, further changed Beatrice’s mood, which had initially been alarm and a sense of oppression.
Val and Euan were followed by Roland, who said nothing to Maud and began a long conversation with Val about the arrangements for feeding a horde of savage cats and the making of telephone calls to the Animal Welfare. Beatrice did not hear the silence between Roland and Maud, and was of course not aware that Roland was not telling anyone at all about Hong Kong, Barcelona and Amsterdam.
Beatrice herself had telephoned Blackadder, saying in a matter-of-fact way that she had made contact with Dr Bailey and Roland Michell and that they wanted to meet to discuss the Ash–LaMotte correspondence and something she had overheard Professor Cropper saying. When she opened the door to this final member of the group, he presented her, with a look of mingled embarrassment and amusement, to Professor Leonora Stern. Leonora was resplendent in a purple hooded woollen cape, fringed with black silk braid, which covered a kind of scarlet Russian tunic, in heavy silk, over wide black Chinese trousers. Leonora said to Beatrice, “I hope you don’t mind me coming. I promise not to harass anyone, but I have my own scholarly interest in all this.” Beatrice could feel her own round face failing to achieve a welcoming smile. Leonora said, “Oh, please. I’ll keep as quiet as a mouse. I can swear in advance I’m not out to snatch any manuscript, covertly or openly. I only want to read the damn things.”