Babel Tower

  “It is a trick,” said Narcisse. “They wish to make us open the door.”

  “We wish to exchange this thing for things you have. For wine and flour and sugar to make a feast. It is our feast day.”

  “Show us your thing,” cried Culvert.

  “You must come down and see,” said the Krebs.

  “It is a trap,” said Narcisse.

  “I think not,” said Colonel Grim. “It is true that periodically they have great feasts, and like to season their sour beer and their rootcakes with our more refined provisions. Let us go down, Culvert, and see their thing. Fabian will stand over the bridge with a musket, and Narcisse with another, to cover our sally, and we will see this thing.”

  “We have enough flour and wine for ourselves, and none to spare,” said the Lady Paeony.

  “And how much shall we have if the Krebs take a dislike to us and camp there to starve us out?”

  So Culvert and Colonel Grim went to the mouth of the bridge, and told the Krebs to show their thing to be exchanged.

  And they brought a great leather sack, tied with leather ropes.

  “Open it up,” said Colonel Grim. “So we may barter.”

  And the Krebs opened the mouth of the sack, and kicked the sack several times, two of them, with their small, sharp, booted feet.

  And out crawled a man. He came out with difficulty, his long grey hair matted with blood, his face a mask of blood, his arms bound, and his ankles, so that he could only slide like a snake out of the mouth of the bag. He was gagged too, with a leather strap between his teeth.

  “He is a friend of yours,” said the Krebs. “Or so he said when we took him.”

  When they turned their faces up to speak they could be seen to be covered with dark hair, fat faces with mouths lost in the hair, and small glittering black eyes.

  “We cannot see him for blood,” said Culvert. “Let us see him.”

  “He is a friend of yours, he says,” repeated the Krebs. “If you will not acknowledge him, we will kill him for spying. As you please. Also we will take his ransom as your food parties arrive, for we know where they are and when they will come. But our feast is now, and we would like wine now.”

  “Stand him up, and untie him,” said Culvert.

  So the Krebs undid the leathery knots, and helped the man roughly to his feet, jostling him, and leaving his hands tied.

  He was a tall man, in a long black cloak. His eyes shone dark in his bloody face.

  “Can you see me, Culvert?” he said. “Through all this muck and mire? I am not a gift you would have chosen, but I would be grateful if you would accept me, for the alternatives are not pleasant.”

  His voice, though racked by pain, was dry and precise.

  And Culvert laughed.

  “You are right,” he said. “You are a gift I would never have chosen, for you and I shall never agree to the world’s end. But I can do no other but accept you, old enemy, for I will not have your death on my head.”

  And no one had any knowledge of the stranger, save Culvert. But they found out food enough, and drink enough, to satisfy the Krebs, and the stranger walked painfully but proudly across the bridge into the Tower. And Culvert said to the assembled people:

  “Let me make known to you my old childhood playmate and student companion, Samson Origen. Let me say also, in front of him, as he stands there covered in blood and dust, that he comes as the serpent into our Paradise, for he is the world’s great nay-sayer, and there is nothing in the world on which he and I agree. There is no human being worse fitted for our project, or more opposed to our aims, and so we must welcome him with tender loving care and overwhelm him with sweet reason, and seduce him with reasonable pleasures, or he will have us all shivering and chastising ourselves in monastic cells, not because that is our secret delight, but because we must have no delight under the moon. Is it not so, old enemy? Do I misrepresent you?”

  “I will keep quiet,” said Samson Origen, “for the present, I promise you.”

  And then he fainted away on the cobbles where he stood, and further philosophical dispute had to be postponed.

  Frederica stands on a small platform at one end of a large studio, lit from above. She is dressed in a short black woollen dress and a knitted jacket in black, as long as the dress. Her hair is loose and long: her sharp face looks out from between its curtains. The students sit in chairs with swinging notepad arms, the men in dark jeans, the women in shirts and smocks mostly in dark, fruity colours, slightly acid. They have pale lips and eyes made up like sinister dolls, with long lashes and a bruised look. They are professional waifs. Some are taking notes and some are doodling. Frederica is speaking passionately about paper lanterns on a dark lake, primroses and ruddy sea with crabs, white storks and turquoise sky, and the great sinister cuttlefish “that stared straight from the heart of the light.” Everything for Lawrence, she says, is loaded with meaning. She describes the shattered circle of the reflected moon. She talks of the white flowers of evil, the fleurs du mal, floating on the sea of death. She is teaching a ten-week course on “The Modern Novel.” Art students read with difficulty; choose some short books, said Richmond Bly. She has chosen Death in Venice, La Nausée, The Castle, all of which are still to come. She has begun with Lawrence and Forster because that was where, in Cambridge, she ended. “The novel is the one bright book of life,” said Lawrence, and Lawrence was the point of perfection towards which the novel had been heading, it appeared then. Men asked her if she was “a Lawrentian woman.” The sixties are slowly gathering speed, and the sixties do not find Lawrence daring: he has been admitted to the Establishment with the Lady Chatterley trial in 1961. Daring is Naked Lunch, is Allen Ginsberg, is Artaud. Frederica by a pure trick of time feels involved in Women in Love, which is a book about which she feels a fierce ambivalence (it is powerful, it is ridiculous, it is profound, it is wilfully fantastic). Its existence is part of the way she sees the world. It matters to her that these students should see it.

  She does not yet know them very well. Later, she will distinguish; potters notice different things from textile designers, painters use language more flamboyantly and more loosely than graphic designers, sculptors are either silent or voluble, industrial designers dislike the culture of the book, jewellers are fey, theatre designers read as though books were blueprints for structures of images. At this early stage, she is a little afraid of them. She is there presenting herself as a literary critic, and these students are artists. Instinctively, she does not offer them critical categories or moral judgements. She tries to seduce them into seeing that books are complicated formal structures. For they do not like books for the most part. For them, brightness and meaning are elsewhere, are in the studio, in the pub, in bed.

  A novel, Women in Love, for instance, she says, is made of a long thread of language, like knitting, thicker and thinner in patches. It is made in the head and has to be remade in the head by whoever reads it, who will always remake it differently. It is made of people whose fates are more interesting to its maker than those of his friends or lovers—but who are also an attempt to understand his friends and lovers probably. The people are made of language, but this is not all they are. A novel is also made of ideas that connect all the people like another layer of interwoven knitting—Women in Love is a novel about decadence, about love of death, about thanatos as opposed to eros. The ideas are made out of language but that is not all they are. This novel is made of visual images—the lanterns, the moon, the white flowers—which you might think were like painted images, but they are not, for they have to be unseen visible images to be powerful. They are made out of language but that is not all they are. We must all imagine the broken moon, and she takes her power from all our imaginings and their sameness and their difference. She is trying to make the painters and sculptors see how a novel is a work of art and is not a painting. She is trying to understand something herself. A young woman smiles at her: a young man in glasses writes furiously. They are listeni
ng. The group is listening. She has them: the knitting is a fishnet.

  At the other end of the studio, on another platform, another group of students is arranged, less formally, lying on the ground, squatting on the floor, round the model, Jude Mason, who has been reading to them from what appears to be a blood-red ledger. He is partly dressed: below his spare haunches he is naked: he sits on the edge of the platform, his knees drawn up amongst his long grey veil of hair, his balls poised on the dust between his dirty feet. He wears a dirty velvet jacket in a faded speedwell blue, a skirted jacket, from the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in style, with filthy lace cuffs and a kind of jabot or cravat. Under this jacket, and beneath the cravat, he is unclothed, his body lean like dark metal. He calls out now, in a sawing voice, “You should teach them Nietzsche. Man in a little skiff on the raging sea of Maya, of illusion, supported by the principium individuationis.”

  Frederica is angry. The thread of the class attention is broken. Anything she can say will sound school-mistressy or piqued. So will silence. She says, “I am talking about Lawrence.”

  “I know. I can hear. Bits of it are not uninteresting. The knitting idea is not at all bad, writing does resemble that despised art. Continue. We may yet join your circle.”

  Frederica stares angrily at him. All imagined retorts sound petulant. He smiles, a self-satisfied, smart smile on his drawn, sinewy face.

  “Because it is knitting, I should be glad if you wouldn’t break the thread of my argument.”

  “Argument, is it? Happy those who earn their daily bread by arguing, as opposed to displaying their flesh and blood for study. I will hear your argument.”

  This too is a nice provocation: it requires Frederica either to invite him into her class, or to speak up to be heard and interrupted, or to speak low, conspiratorial, so that he cannot hear. The best would be to invite him. But she does not want him. She does not like him. She does not like his look, his smell, or his sawing voice. He is disruption in person. She decides to continue. She opposes herself to him. She wills the attention of her group, the fringes of which turn their heads to see what Jude will do.

  “At the centre of Women in Love,” says Frederica, “is a mystery, an emptiness. The two women are wonderful both as real women making decisions about love, about sex, about the future, and as myths, as mythic beings willing life or death. But what are we to make of Birkin, who in many ways is Lawrence, in many ways is the central consciousness of the whole tale? We are told, and mostly forget, that he is an Inspector of Schools. Indeed, at one moment, we actually see him inspecting a school, when he discusses with Ursula the sexuality of the hazel catkins. But mostly we do not believe in him as an Inspector of Schools. He has the entrée both to the upper-class society of Nottinghamshire and to the Bohemian artistic world in London. There is no reason why this should be so. It feels wrong.”

  “Matthew Arnold,” says the sawing voice, “was an Inspector of Schools.”

  “Also the author of innumerable books and poems,” says Frederica, this time managing to contain and include Jude’s contribution. “And part of a cultural dynasty. I was going to go on to say, we experience Birkin, if not as Lawrence’s alter ego (though he is best when most absurdly insisting on his maleness, for which Lawrence intelligently and complicitly mocks him)—if Birkin is not Lawrence’s alter ego, he is the presence of the author of the book. And Women in Love is not, is trying very hard not to be, A Portrait of the Artist. Lawrence may have said, “The novel is the highest form of human expression yet attained”—which you are in a better position to question than most people are—but I think he felt a kind of sickliness in writing novels about writing novels about writing novels.”

  “Tout existe pour aboutir à un livre,” speaks the Chorus. Frederica gives him a theatrical nod of complicity, covering rage, and goes on again.

  “He was in the tradition of realism in which George Eliot wrote of the travails of Lydgate and the moral defeat of Dorothea. He wasn’t an aesthete, he didn’t want to be. But he was pushed towards it. Because Women in Love is a novel about experiencing the world as art—good art or bad art. It came at the time of the First World War and the trenches, but it does not look directly at those, it is about the forms of vision and the forms of thought.”

  “And sex.”

  “And sex. Seen as part of art. But Birkin is not an artist, because Lawrence felt a distaste for writing with his nose in his navel. He wanted to write about death and Europe. And there is an emptiness, a lack of solidity, because Birkin is not writing a book when in fact we experience him as though he is. As there would have been an emptiness—a disappointment—if all he was doing was writing a book—when Lawrence wants to talk about everything, all life, not books.”

  She stares at the students fiercely. They stare back. They are all listening. She does not know if she has put it properly this time. It is a question that obsesses her: the unreality of Birkin, Inspector of Schools, who sees the world as a book he isn’t writing.

  Jude says, “You know what Nietzsche said. He said, ‘Only as an aesthetic product can the world be justified to all eternity.’ He says we are all art works of ‘the veritable creator,’ ‘although our consciousness of our own significance does scarcely exceed the consciousness a painted soldier might have of the battle in which he takes part.’ ”

  “That’s a red herring. I don’t believe in your ‘veritable creator.’ ”

  “No. But maybe your David Herbert does or did, maybe his Birkin does or did or will. I’m afraid you’re snarled up in your own narrow little utilitarian roots.”

  Frederica is about to reply angrily when there is a disturbance at the other end of the studio, and two people come in. The first is Desmond Bull, who says, “Here she is. The class must be finished or almost finished. All these kids must move on.”

  Behind Desmond Bull is Daniel Orton. His face is an interesting mess, his eyes lost in black bruised pits, his lips split, his nose crimson and florid.

  “I’ve come to tell you,” says Daniel, “that your husband is looking for you.”

  Frederica scrambles off the platform, and embraces him. The students begin to pack up.

  “He found me,” says Daniel, mildly enjoying the drama of his own appearance. “I hope he can’t find you.”

  Desmond Bull fetches a chair. Daniel and Frederica sit down. Things rush through their minds. Stephanie, William, Mary, Leo.

  “He went to see your father, too.”

  Frederica laughs. “I hope he didn’t turn him black and blue.”

  Daniel says, “Don’t laugh. He did. He slammed a door on his head. Your father took it calmer than I would. He let him go off with your dress.”

  “My dress?”

  “Your dancing dress, your dad said.”

  Frederica does not like the idea of Bill hurt. Of Bill vulnerable.

  “Help me, Daniel,” she says, putting out a hand to touch his sleeve. Behind her she senses a whiff of rancid grease, of sour sweat, of fish.

  “A Daniel come to judgement,” says Jude. “I do believe I have found you at last, my own, my sweet, my only friend, and in the flesh, in the splendidly substantial and generously abundant flesh which I hadn’t envisaged in all its perfection. Will you acknowledge this thing of darkness, my invisible Master?”

  “Oh sod,” says Daniel, alarmed out of his manners. “Steelwire.” He repeats, “Oh sod.”

  “Steelwire?” says Jude. “An expletive I do not know.”

  “What we write in the book at work when we hear your nasty voice,” says Daniel. “Descriptive, sort of.”

  “Is it flattering? Am I flattered? On the whole, yes. It is not bad. A little fame, a pseudonym. Steelwire. It isn’t good, either. My name is Jude Mason. It was not, and now is. I am my own progenitor. In my own way. Will everything else be an anti-climax?”

  “Probably,” says Daniel. “You should start ringing someone else. I’ve got to talk to Frederica, now. Seriously.”

/>   “We shall meet again. I am glad to have seen you. You have an unexpected beauty, parson-person, you do not glitter or gleam but you have a sort of light in you. I hope my own appearance was not too disappointing.”

  Daniel stares gloomily from his chair. His eyes meet Jude’s encrusted navel and travel down, across his limp grey member, towards his thin knees.

  “You smell like an alley-cat,” he says.

  “I know several. Resourceful beasts, my friends. Do you know, I was present in the aether when meat was made of our friend’s cheeks and ears?” he says to Frederica.

  “Go away,” says Frederica. “Please. I’ve got to think. You can talk to Daniel after.”

  “No he can’t. I’m going. You and I can go somewhere and talk and then I’m going.”

  • • •

  Frederica and Daniel talk in a coffee bar. It is a good coffee bar for talking in; it has booths, around Formica tables. Muzak plays. Frederica, who has been avoiding Daniel, who has not attempted to see him or answer his letter, is almost overwhelmed by her happiness in seeing him, by his reality and solidity. Tears rise in her eyes and run over: she puts out a hand amongst the coffee stains and Daniel grips it.

  “It’s not that your letter wasn’t right. It was that I couldn’t cope. I have been such a fool and now I’m scared. I wouldn’t be so scared if it wasn’t for Leo. I can’t do right, for him.”

  “Tell me.”

  She tells him. The whole sorry story, the attraction of strangeness, the trap of the country house, the horror of being “a married woman” (“I thought I would still be myself, Daniel, and wasn’t”), the mistake and the wonder of Leo, the guilt, the guilt, the Conservative canvassers, the friends, the anger, the blood, the axe. She does not tell him about the Bluebeard cupboard or about her visits to the Middlesex Clinic for sexually transmitted diseases.

  Daniel listens well. It is his job, and he knows Frederica. She tells him hysterically that he is real, tears dripping down her sharp nose.