The Children’s Book by AS Byatt

The Children’s Book, by AS Byatt, is a big, sprawling historical novel that begins in the mid 1890’s and ends with the end of World War I. It is no secret that I am a big fan of Byatt’s, although that doesn’t mean that I’ve liked all of her novels equally. I liked this one even though it wasn’t perfect. All of my favorite parts of a Byatt novel are in here: characters who think too much, social commentary, much emphasis on the role of women in society. Some of the things I regularly don’t like in Byatt novels are here too, fairy tale style stories embedded within the narrative being the biggest offender in my eyes.

Byatt almost bit off more than she could chew in this novel. Edwardian times and World War I have been written about so much that it doesn’t seem that there would be much need for exposition in a novel about that time. And yet, most people probably aren’t aware of the interconnectedness of many of the progressive leaders of the day and while everyone knows that World War I began with the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, most people may not know that there were multiple assassinations of leaders in the years ahead of the war. At times Byatt gets a bit bogged down in the social history, much more than she did in Possession. But Possession was an intimate story and this is a sprawling tale. Also, half of Possession took place in modern times with characters trying to discover things about the Victorian characters. They could provide the necessary exposition. This novel takes place completely in the past.

I don’t intend to do anything like a formal ‘review’ of this novel. Truthfully I find writing those kinds of things somewhat boring because of the need not to give away anything important. Instead I want to just talk about the novel because I found it thought provoking. And I’ll probably talk about it over a series of posts. So if you don’t want spoilers, stop now.

Re-Reading A Whistling Woman

"And that," said Agatha to the assembled listeners, "is the end of the story."
There was an appalled silence.
Leo said, "The end?"
"The end," said Agatha.

AS Byatt's novel, A Whistling Woman, picks up where her novel Babel Tower left off. Frederica Potter, now in legal possession of her son Leo after a bitter divorce trial, is still renting a garden flat from government bureaucrat and single mother Agatha. As the novel opens Agatha is still (still!) spinning the fantasy tale begun in Babel Tower for Leo and her daughter Saskia . But the audience for her weekly story session has expanded to include the two children from across the street as well as Frederica, Frederica's new lover John Ottokar, John's twin brother and Frederica's brother-in-law.

The opening chapter of A Whistling Woman is the final chapter of Agatha's fantasy tale and the adults are as appalled as the children at the way the story abruptly ends. As Byatt says: All these people were both shocked and affronted by Agatha's brutal exercise of narrative power." But Agatha is adamant that it is the end of the story. "That is where I always meant it to end, " she said.

This is, perhaps, a foreshadowing of the end of A Whistling Woman, the fourth and, apparently, the last in the quartet of "Frederica" novels written by Byatt. And just as Leo complains to Agatha, "That isn't an end. We don't know everything," we the Byatt readers don't know everything at the end of A Whistling Woman. But maybe that's ok because, as Frederica remarks, "What's a real end? ... The end is always the most unreal bit ..."

Springtime, TV and Reading

In the comments to yesterday's post andif commented that Truman might like me to read him the last book in AS Byatt's Fredericka Potter series.  A Whistling Woman has been sitting on my shelf looking at me for a few months but I was determined to finish Anna Karenina before I started another long book. 

Late yesterday I also read an article about Byatt published in The Guardian and learned she has a new novel coming out called The Children's Book.  I consider this another nudge by the universe to get back to A Whistling Woman.   

But it's spring, all my windows are open and I'm in the midst of spring cleaning.  I need to get out into my yard and do some yard cleanup and I have two major home improvement projects that are supposed to start in a couple of weeks.  It just isn't the time of year for reading long books.  At least not for me.

Or really for watching TV.  The last two Friday nights have been beautiful.  It is the time of year to leave work and sit outside at one of the nice patio bars that open this time of year and listen to music until after dark.  Maybe that's why, when I got home last night, I really wasn't all that into watching the Dollhouse episode.

I think some interesting things were revealed about character - especially Adele (Addie?) but also Ballard.  I really disliked Ballard last night.   And his little moment of self-realization in the shower didn't mitigate it.    And I disliked Topher for creating a fake friend.   But I loved Victor as the horse dude.   And I actually enjoyed Eliza Dushku playing an older woman in a younger woman's body.  And, oddly, I liked the "Dynasty" aspect to the story in the clothing and the country house etc. 

Make a Movie of ...

Booking Through Thursday asks this question:

What book do you think should be made into a movie? And do you have any suggestions for the producers? Or, What book do you think should NEVER be made into a movie?

I'm always interested in people's thoughts on this because I love books and I love movies. But so seldom do good books become good movies.

 

Here's my answer. Are you sitting down?  Really. You should sit down.  Here it is ... The Biographer's Tale, by AS Byatt. 

 

Stop laughing.  I have my reasons.

 

If you want to know why, click "More".  If not, just leave your own ideas in the comments.

 

Anyone who reads this blog will know that I'm a huge fan of AS Byatt.  But The Biographer's Tale is my least favorite Byatt novel and I found it almost unreadable in certain respects.  So it might strike some of you as funny that I think it could be made into a film.  But I do. I've thought so ever since about a week after the first (and only) time I read the novel and was caught up in thinking about how the novel just didn't work.  When suddenly I thought, but it would work as a movie.  I just never thought I'd get the chance to tell anyone this idea.

For those of you who haven't read it, I can't recommend that you do.  But I'll give you a brief synopsis.   Phineas G. Nanson is a graduate student who tires of academic life and is uninterested in completing his dissertation.  He is tired of post-structural literary studies and wants "facts".  His advisor recommends that he instead write a biography of an obscure writer who only wrote biographies: Scholes Destry-Scholes.  Nanson attempts to research Scholes'  life but, in the end, discovers very little about Scholes, certainly not enough to write a biography.   To support himself as he conducts his tedious research he becomes employed at a travel agency that helps people plan special fantasy trips.  In the course of the story he also becomes lovers with two women, a Scandinavian bee taxonimist and a radiologist.  In the end he is not able to finish the biography but he does become a fiction writer.

Not the most exciting plot in the world.  Those immersed in academia might find parts of it amusing; others might be bored. But the plot is not necessarily the reason that it didn't work as a novel.  The problem with this novel was that Byatt forces the reader to go through every bit of tiresome, pointless research that Nanson goes through. 

When Nanson finds that Scholes had begun work on three biographies, we are forced to read the excerpts of these biographies that he has found.  All right, perhaps this was not pointless from the point of view of the reader because the fictional biographies are of real life persons (Carl Linneaus, Francis Galton and Henrik Ibsen) and we the reader figure out that Scholes inserted a bit of ... fantasy into his biographies.   But although not pointless, they take up a great deal of the book and interrupt the narrative (and while Byatt is making statements in this novel about narrative it is still annoying).  Each of these three real life people were involved in the science (or art?) of classification.  And classification plays a big role in this novel.

Nanson also discovers a huge collection of notecards on which Scholes kept notes. As Nanson slowly works through them he tries to classify them and fails.    As a reader we try to impose a narrative on them and fail - there is no rhyme or reason to the order of the cards and the quotes on them are not identified so it is impossible to tell what was a quote versus what was an original thought of Scholes'.  This notecard examination goes on for quite some time and is the main reason that I found the novel almost unreadable. 

So why on earth would I think this would make a good film?  Because if you cut out those sections of the novel in which the reader must read what Nanson reads (not the idea behind these sections but the actual fact of having to read them), the story of Phineas Nanson is actually ... a tale.  A fairy tale, even.  And one that lends itself to a visual medium.

Byatt loves to create tales and she often inserts them into her novels.  She did it in Possession and in Babel Tower.  She also wrote a small book of tales.   And I'm usually bored by them.  But this entire novel is a fairy tale and it works if the reader can get past all the research she is forcing us to do. 

Here are the details that I left out of my synopsis.  Phineas G. Nanson is a "little person".  Not really a dwarf.  "Small but perfectly formed."  Maybe like a hobbit but without the furry feet.   He is given advice by Professor Goode - a Merlin or Gandalf like person.  The two women with whom he becomes involved are like opposite twins of myth - one a bee taxonimist, all outdoors and golden.  The other a radiologist, all indoors and silver.  There is a mysterious stranger who lurks at the Travel Agency and is threatening in some vague way (his name is Bossey) all of which leads up to an "encounter".   The Travel Agency itself is one of those magical places that inhabit British children's literature - Phineas "just notices" it on the street one day.  He realizes that he needs a job and it just sort of appears.  A plain building with a magical interior . 

The particular reason I think this would work in film is because as the story moves forward his life become more colorful - literally.  (In the novel his writing becomes more interesting too). And it would work so much better if you could actually see the color and the other visuals.  The story opens in shades of brown and gray (London, the interior of a classroom) and ends in a field of bright flowers.    In between he moves between a gray existence (reading all those damn notecards) to color (the Travel Agency).   I can picture an Amelie like colorization technique as different objects become colorized until by the end his whole world is color.  And all the parts that were boring to read?  We could see what he sees as he reads them - as they become more fantastical.  A sort of movie of the mind showing us that what were supposed to be solid documentaries about great men became works of fiction.

I think it could work.  

The most amazing thing to me is that the whole fairy tale thing was not even noticeable to me through most of the novel.  Thank god.  If it had been blatant I would have given up early on.  I don't like fairy tales.  But it was done so subtly that I didn't even realize it until late in the novel when Phineas gets into an argument with the very likeable but slightly naughty gay owners of the Travel Agency and the word "fairies" is flung around.  Gasp.   Of course I assumed it was just a slur thrown against two gay men.  Until a few pages later when it dawned on me that they were not only gay they were exactly like fairies.  Real fairies (well, you know what I mean).   Think Tinkerbell.  She is essentially good but unreliable.  She grants wishes but they might not turn out as you expect.  She has a temper and gets jealous.  She can be mischievous.  And that's what the Travel Agency owners are like. They have made Phineas' life better by employing him but they are also ... difficult.  And it was at that moment that I put the whole thing together and realized that Phineas was living in a fairy story although he thought he was living another genre of narrative altogether.  And once he released himself into fiction his life became happier.

Now can't you just see a filmmaker wrapping his arms around that concept? 

Oh, and by the way, I never thought I would ever blog about The Biographer's Tale. 

 

Re-Reading Babel Tower

I hesitated before I moved on to A.S. Byatt's Babel Tower.  I disliked this novel the first time I read it and I wasn't eager to get into it again.  But I truly enjoyed re-reading The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life and, while I could have stopped after Still Life, I had always wanted to re-read A Whistling Woman at some point and to do that I needed to re-read Babel Tower.  There seemed no time like the present, so I plunged in.

I still didn't like it, although not with the same intensity that I disliked it the first time.  At over 600 pages, it is a very long novel.  I paused at about the 200 page mark to ask myself what Byatt was trying to accomplish with this novel.  It wasn't a novel about the the characters'  thought processes; it wasn't about the creative process.  And yet there was creation and thinking in it.  It is much more driven by narrative than the first two novels in the quartet.

The story takes place in the early 1960's, six years after the end of Still Life. There are multiple stories, all intertwining. One narrative is the story of Frederica Potter who has made a bad marriage and is going through a bitter divorce and custody battle. The other stories involve a novel called BabbleTower written by an eccentric named Jude Mason: large parts of the actual narrative of that fictional novel are excerpted but there is also the story of the struggle to get the novel published and then an ensuing court case over whether it is obscene.  There is also a side story in which the writer Alexander Wedderburn becomes involved in an education commission that studies and makes recommendations on how children are or should be taught.  And there is a small side story about Agatha, a single mother and Frederica's landlady, who among other things is spinning a long serial fantasy story for the children. And there is the story of Frederica's brother-in-law whose narrative has stopped as he has walked away from his old life and isn't clear what he will do with his new life.

I found Frederica's narrative compelling. Byatt was at her best when writing about the relationship of Frederica with her child, Leo. And also the struggle Frederica had with the expectations of society (or at least a certain type of society) and her own expectations of herself.  I found the back story story of the publication of the BabbleTower novel mildy interesting.  I found I was just as bored with the actual narrative of the BabbleTower novel this time as I was the last time and, just like last time, I had a hard time believing that it would find a publisher.   I was also again bored by the children's story that Agatha was weaving. I found both trials only mildly interesting.

I knew from my prior reading that part of the point of this novel was about the force of narrative, both in fiction and in real life. I knew that by the end of the novel Frederica would see her life reduced to a narrative in legal documents, the content of which was partly untrue and, in any case, incomplete.  In the end, the judge would believe the false narrative and not the truth.  At the same time, the narrative of the Babbletower novel would be rejected as obscene by a jury who could not get past their disgust at the content to see the larger truths that the novel espoused.   This novel was Byatt's first novel published after Possession and part of the story of Possession is that the modern characters feel they are trapped in a traditional narrative and wonder if they are doing things because they want to do them or because they think they should do them.  It seemed to me, when I first read Babel Tower, that Byatt was further exploring that theme of the power of narrative.

But it doesn't take 600 pages to show the power of narrative.  So I always felt that I must have missed something else in this novel the first time around, something else that Byatt was trying to get me to think about. There was simply too much going on in the novel to make it only about the truth of certain human relationships, such as the relationship between a mother and son.

At the 300 page mark I finally gave myself permission to skim or simply skip major parts of Jude Mason's dystopian novel and reading became easier. I also decided to allow myself to skim over Agatha's fantasy story. I have a low tolerance for fantasy novels, although I can tolerate them better when they are meant for children, and I knew the the pages and pages of direct text from those stories were one reason I had disliked this novel the first time.  I remember that each time I would come to one of them I would find it difficult to go on.  Some people say the same thing about all the poetry in Possession. By giving myself permission to skip them or just skim them I kept myself engrossed in the rest of the novel.

I found myself, this time, focusing more on Alexander Wedderburn's story and Frederica's path toward becoming a teacher.  And it finally dawned on me, that was what else this novel was about for me - the importance of learning critical thinking; the effect of learning how to think critically but not being able to use critical thinking because you are stuck at home with children (this was somewhat explored in Still Life); the effect of not learning critical thinking and reading stories only for their face value; the actual process of learning critical thinking and the questions that educators ask themselves about the best way to teach critical thinking.

This theme is mostly seen through the study of literature.  Again, as in the other novels, the study of literature is key to Byatt's characters and is represented by the storytelling for young children and Frederica's frustration at not being able to go back to school and the adult education classes held after long hours of work in church halls.  It culminates in the jury's bewilderment at being asked to look beyond the literal story of BabbleTower to what message the novel might have for society and why it was important that authors be able to create works that might, on their face, be judged obscene.  Byatt seems to be saying that critical thinking is important when you are looking for the truth --whether you are judging obscenity or judging a divorce/custody fight.

If critical thinking is a doorway to truth then learning how to think critically is the key to opening that door.  And this novel ends up being a novel about learning or, more specifically, a novel about education.  This novel asks all the questions that were being asked about education in the 60's.  Can we educate ourselves or do we need to be led by a teacher?  Do we need basic skills to understand (and write) literature?  Grammar, for instance.  Does grammar come naturally or does it need to be taught? (It blows my mind that this was ever a real question.) What is the best physical environment for children to learn in?   Do you teach children by rote memorization or by freeing them to learn what they want and what do they lose when you take one of those methods away?

One of my favorite moments is a disagreement on Alexander's committee about the importance of rules.  The committee had visited a school in which the children learned nothing by rote, not even the alphabet.  One of the committee members asks how they navigate the dictionaries that they carry and the teacher says she just shows them, until they eventually know it.  Later, one of the committee members says he:

is not in favor of new educational methods which attempt to promote discovery at the expense of learning a few facts.  He thinks children are being cheated by being made to discover all sorts of things they could actually simply learn about and then go on to discover more interesting things. Rules facilitate. Rules create order, and without order is no creativity.  The poor little children who didn't know the alphabet are wasting hours looking through their dictionaries at random. 

He concludes that the need for rules is a deep human need.  In response, one of the other more "modern" committee members retorts "That's what the Fascists said."   The whole conversation brought back to me my life as a child in a 1960's elementary school and the wasted year of 5th grade as the teacher took away all structure and just let us learn.  Or not.

But this novel also reminded me of the best of my teachers.  Here is Frederica teaching D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love:

"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 hazel catkins.  But mostly we do not believe in him as an Inspector of Schools. He has the entree 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."

Frederica is discussing this with her students because it is a problem that she has been trying to work out in her own mind.  Why there is an emptiness - because, she thinks, Lawrence has written Birken as an Inspector of Schools who sees the world as if he were a novelist writing a book.  But he isn't a novelist.  Writing a novel is not part of of the narrative of Birken and that's why certain things feel wrong.

Frederica, who has never wished to teach, discovers that she is a good teacher. And that is important - for the students and for Frederica.  As one of the members of the Committee on Education comments after some school visits, there were two schools they found that were exemplary but those schools were, perhaps, exemplary because of the individual skills of the particular teachers.  Good teaching depended on the skills of the teachers.  And I said aloud, "duh."

But of course the best teacher still works within the confines of an educational system.

The theme of the novel is very much, among other things, education and differing ideas about the best way to educate children.  In Frederica's divorce trial, she ends up with custody of her son in part because she emphatically disagrees with her husband that their seven year old son should be sent off to boarding school.  Unexpectedly, the judge agrees with her.  He was sent away at the age of seven. 

And in the obscenity trial of BabbleTower the author's upbringing in a boy's boarding school is an issue.  There is a question as to whether or not he was abused. As we read novels like Harry Potter we shouldn't forget that not all boarding school experiences were good ones.

So, in the end, although I still didn't like the novel I am glad that I re-read it.  It sets me up to re-read A Whistling Woman which I remember enjoying tremendously and it gave me many things to think about. 

Re-Reading Still Life

After I finished reading The Virgin in the Garden I did move on to Still Life, the sequel. I had forgotten that Virgin ends so abruptly, with all the characters left hanging:

That is not an end, but since it went on for a considerable time, is as good a place to stop as any.

I had also forgotten how strong an author's voice there was in these books. Or maybe that's not the right phrase. At certain points the narrator of the story (who may very well not be intended to be the author) talks to the reader, as above. This is even more pronounced in Still Life.

Many people I know don't really like Byatt, or don't really like any Byatt except Possession. They think her other works are too "wordy" and they want more narrative. I'm always reminded of the film Amadeus in which the Emperor tells Mozart that there are too many notes and he should just cut a few. It isn't that Mozart isn't melodic, but melody isn't the key to Mozart. Mozart is about notes. Mozart is about how notes create and envelop melody - so sometimes the melody is very strong and sometimes it is enveloped in ... lots of notes. For people who like music from a structural sense, Mozart is heaven. All those notes to listen to and marvel at how they relate to each other while still carrying the work forward. For those that like a brief simple melody, Mozart is boring.

Likewise, it isn't that Byatt doesn't have narrative, but that the narrative is enveloped in lots of words. Byatt is about words. Words, literally, are the key to Byatt; not only what the words represent but the mere fact that words are representational. She has said: I write novels because I am passionately interested in language.

In Still Life, she juxtaposes the representational nature of words with representational art, specifically the art of Vincent van Gogh of whom the character Alexander Wedderburn is writing a new play. Alexander becomes obsessed with how to use words to describe color.

How would one find the exact word for the color of the plum-skins? (There was a further question of why one might want to do so, why it was not enough to look at, or to eat and savor the plum, but Alexander did not wish to address himself to that, not just now. It was a fact that the lemons and the plums, together, made a pattern that he recognized with pleasure, and the pleasure was so fundamentally human it asked to be noted and understood.) There was a problem of accurate notation, which was partly a problem of sufficiency of adjectives. Do we have enough words, synonyms, near synonyms for purple? What is the greyish, or maybe white, or whitish, or silvery, or dusty mist or haze or smokiness over the purple shine? How do you describe the dark cleft from stalk pit to oval end, its inky shadow? Partly with adjectives; it is interesting that adjectives in a prose or verse style are felt to be signs of looseness or vagueness when in fact they are the opposite, at their best, an instrument for precision.

A writer aiming for unadorned immediacy might say a plum, a pear, an apple, and by naming these things evoke in every reader's mind a different plum, a dull tomato-and-green specked Victoria, a yellow-buff globular plum, a tight, black-purple damson. If he wishes to share a vision of a specific plum he must exclude and evoke: a matte, oval, purple-black plum, with a pronounced cleft.

You may use the word "bloom" for the haze on this plum, and it will call up in the mind of any competent reader the idea that the plum is glistening, overlaid with a matte softness. You may talk about the firm texture of the flesh, and these words will not be metaphors, bloom and flesh, as the earlier "cleft" was certainly not a metaphor but a description of a grown declivity. But you cannot exclude from the busy, automatically collecting mind possible metaphors, human flesh for fruit flesh, flower bloom, skin bloom, bloom of ripe youth for this powdery haze, human clefts, declivities, cleavages for that plain noun. The nearest color Alexander could find, in his search for accurate words for the purple of the plum, was in fact the dark center of some new and vigorously burgeoning human bruise. But the plum was neither bruised, nor a bruise nor human. So he eschewed, or tried to eschew, human words for it.

In the end, Alexander is

... troubled by the sense that it was possible for, say, Vincent van Gogh to get nearer to the life of the plums than he ever could. Both metaphor and naming in paint were different from these things in language.

In order to write a passage about Alexander's thought process over describing Vincent Van Gogh's plum in words, Byatt had to ... use words.

In many of her books Byatt is writing about people who do most of their living in their own minds - thinking. This fits in with her theory of novels. She says:

' Novels are works of art which are made out of language, and are made in solitude by one person and read in solitude by one person - by many different, single people, it is to be hoped. So I am also interested in what goes on in the minds of readers, and writers, and characters and narrators in books. I like to write about people who think, to whom thinking is as important and exciting (and painful) as sex or eating. This doesn't mean I want my books to be cerebral or simply battles of ideas.

In Still Life much of the "action" takes place in the minds of the characters as they think, and yet there is still a narrative. Byatt's principle characters in this Novel are people who naturally think about and create words - not necessarily as an exercise in creative writing, as Alexander's play is, but simply as a natural part of their being. Because they are people living daily lives their lives are not wholly in their minds, there is a narrative. But the life of the mind defines their character. This is a novel that is, in part, about people thinking in words about words.

One of the strongest images I retained from my previous reading of this novel, years ago, is of the pregnant Stephanie Potter at her ObGyn appointment, reading. She is reading, or trying to read, and think about William Wordsworth's words and meaning through all the indignities of the public health system, even including propping the book against her distended "baby bump" to read while she waits for the doctors. This image was so sharp in my mind that I was surprised to find, on re-reading, that it takes up only a few pages in this novel.

I had been struck in Virgin with how Byatt described the first phase of the Gift of creativity and even the offering of the Gift to the public. In Still Life she examines the second phase of the Gift - in which the will is worked upon the original gift, in order to create what may be eventually offered.

And Byatt makes clear that will, alone, is not enough. Frederica Potter, who has tremendous talent in thinking about and analyzing words, cannot write a novel. Frederica spends winter as an au pair in Provence. As she explores the French countryside, she decides, as many a traveler before her, to become a writer.

Frederica was also enough a child of her time to suppose that what she should write should be fiction. "The novel is the one bright book of life," Lawrence had didactically exclaimed and Bill Potter didactically reiterated. "The novel is the highest form of human expression yet attained." If anyone had challenged Frederica directly as to whether she believed that, she would have argued the toss. But -- however Wordsworthian the roots -- in the 1950's the recording compulsion took Lawrentian forms. And she had no plot. Or did not recognize those plots she had. And was not, primarily, in those days concerned with invention.

Frederica eventually gives up. "She was a good critic, despite her egocentricity, and decided briskly and miserably that writing was not her metier." Frederica has not received the first Gift and so she has nothing to work her will on.

Alexander is a contrast to this. He is staying in the south of France in order to write another big "historical" play set in World War I, perhaps using the poems of Rupert Brooke. But the work is going nowhere. It is a work that he feels he should write, not one that he necessarily wants to write. His host has also asked him to write a fun little piece about a local medieval troubadour named Cabestan, or Cabestainh, that could be performed by those staying at the villa. But Alexander has found himself obsessed with the letters of Vincent Van Gogh and keeps coming back to the idea of writing a play about him.

A writer is a man haunted by voices. Alexander, walking to and from the water tank in Crowe's kitchen garden, where balloon-like tadpoles, the size of half crowns, dived and plashed their lips, unable to emerge and metamorphose into frogs, was amused sometimes by the counterpoint that wailed in his mind: Cabestan's heart, Vincent's ear, gassed soldier's throats, Brooke's poppies, the troubadour's lady like rose and gillyflower, Vincent's irises, jealousy rage and fear, fear jealousy and rage, fear and indignation and pity. Sometimes, before he drank the fourth or fifth glass of Cote-du-Rhone that would incapacitate him, he thought with guilt of the Flanders fields, with impotence of the forests where wolves ranged, with the sense of temptation, secret delight, and energy welling up from unknown sources of Gauguin's cold bluster, of Vincent's two choices.

The choice is made after Alexander has a long conversation about it with Frederica who says that he of course must write about van Gogh. And Byatt writes: Paradoxically the release of tension enabled him, in the next week, to run up, turn out, patch together, a romantic melodrama about Cabestainh with which the house guests had some civilized fun.

So, in the end, although the narrative of this novel follows the chronological lives of the Potter siblings and their friends, the ideas of this novel follow thought processes. Alexander's creative process - the will he works to find the words to bring forth the creation. Stephanie's process of trying to find time in her life, despite husband and children, to think about words. Frederica's process through Cambridge and her ability to analyze and understand the words and creative process of others.

What I remember most from my first reading of this novel was the story of Stephanie. I remember the end of this novel, which is very much of the real world and not the world of the mind. (I originally wrote "grounded in the real world" but that seemed a horrible but unintentional pun, as those who know the ending would recognize.) As with Possession, and perhaps all of Byatt's novels, the title of this novel is the theme for all parts of the novel. Stephanie is a person who keeps still and calms everyone around her. Her mental life which has always been vibrant is now stilling. She is pregnant and there is always the fear of a still birth. The narrative of this novel is concerned with births and death. Death is, of course, the ultimate stillness. But after a death others still have life. I was aware of all those narrative themes the first time I read the novel.

It is nice, this time, to focus on the non-narrative parts of the novel. It's nice to focus on the ideas as ideas, not as an interruption in the narrative but as means of shaping character.

Re-Reading The Virgin in the Garden

For Christmas I was given the new PD James mystery novel and also Billy Collins' latest book of poetry and also a number of book store gift cards that I've already exchanged for books. But what am I reading? I'm re-reading A.S.Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden. Why? I'm not sure. I just want to.

I saw a quote from it on a book blog and suddenly thought "I want to re-read that."? So I am. I'm not sure if that means I'm going to end up reading the three other books in the quartet. Maybe. I was thinking about it the other day when Jen blogged (indirectly) about Fibonacci sequences and that made me think of this series. The Fibonacci sequence comes up in the 3d book and runs throughout the 4th book, A Whistling Woman.

I read this book so long ago that I've forgotten all but the basic plot outline. That makes rediscovering the detail more enjoyable. It has also been interesting reading this novel after reading Lewis Hyde's The Gift. One of the things I have consistently liked about Byatt is how she describes the creative process - whether it is literary creativity or scientific creativity. Roland, in Possession, making lists of words, comes to mind. Also, the study of the ants in Angels & Insects.

According to Hyde, there are three gifts of the artist:

First the initial gift - what is bestowed upon the artist by "perception, experience, intuition, imagination, a dream, a vision, or another work of art." The artists tries to transmit this initial gift but rarely can he do it without laboring. The ability to do the labor is the second gift. I would say this is the gift of talent but it is also a gift of perseverance (which perhaps comes from the gratitude for the initial gift). The artist refines the initial gift and as it passes through the artist it increases. The finished work that is offered to the world is the third gift.

In Virgin, I particularly like the way Byatt describes how two of the main characters conceptualize the things that are important to them and it struck me that she was, in a sense, describing the process of that first gift.

Marcus Potter is a mathematical whiz who is, at this point in the novel, suffering from the mathematical equivalent of writer's block. He is trying to explain how he at one time was able to come up with mathematical solutions by visualizing geometry:

"Well -- I used to see -- to imagine -- a place. A kind of garden. And the forms, the mathematical forms, were about in the landscape and you would let the problem loose in the landscape and it would wander amongst the forms -- leaving luminous trails. And then I saw the answer."

But when questioned more closely about the landscape, he cannot answer with any precision and, in fact, when he tried to be more precise he lost the gift.

"You see -- it was important to see only obliquely -- out of the edge of the eye -- in the head -- the kind of thing it was, the area it was in, but never to look directly, to look away on purpose, and wait for it to rise to form. When you'd waited, and it was there in its idea, you could draw the figures or even say words to go with it. But it mustn't be fixed, or held down, or it . . . it was important to wait and they, the people asking, were pressing on me, how could I be patient, how could I, so I tried to fix, to fix, to fix ... and it was no good."

Marcus' idea that you could never look too closely at the garden reminded me of Hyde's admonition to suspend the will in order to let the imagination flow. He wrote:

There are at least two phases in the completion of a work of art, one in which the will is suspended and another in which it is active. The suspension is primary. It is when the will is slack that we feel moved or we are struck by an event, intuition or image. The materia must begin to flow before it can be worked, and not only is the will powerless to initiate that flow, but it actually seems to interfere, for artists have traditionally used devices -- drugs, fasting, trances, sleep deprivation, dancing -- to suspend the will so that something "other" will come forward.

Byatt directly talks about suspending the will in this next passage. Marcus' sister, Stephanie Potter, a former Cambridge star pupil, is now a teacher and in this passage is preparing to teach Ode on a Grecian Urn to a group of students. This passage describes how Stephanie would clear her mind of her conception of the poem in order to focus on the poem.

She required also that her mind at least should be clear of the curious clutter of mnemonics that represented the poem at ordinary times, when the attention was not concentrated upon it. In her case: a partial visual memory of its shape on the page, composed, in fact, from several superimposed patterns from different editions, the gestalt clear, but shifting in size: a sense of the movement of the rhythm of the language which was biological, not verbal or visual, and not to be retrieved without recalling whole strings of words to the mind's eye and ear again: some words, the very abstract ones, form, thought, eternity, beauty, truth, the very concrete ones, unheard, sweeter, green, marble, warm, cold, desolate. A run of grammatical and punctuational pointers: the lift of frozen unanswered questions in the first stanza, the apparently undisciplined rush of repeated epithets in the third. Visual images, neither seen, in the mind's eye, nor unseen. White forms of arrested movement under dark formal boughs. Trouble with how to "see" the trodden weed. John Keats on his death-bed, requesting the removal of books, even of Shakespeare. Herself at Cambridge, looking out through glass library walls, into green boughs, committing to memory, what? Asking what, why?

For Stephanie, the ideal was to come to [the poem] with a mind momentarily open and empty, as though for the first time.

But sometimes what she would "see" was unexpected.

She sat there, looking into inner emptiness, waiting for the thing to rise into form and saw nothing, nothing and then involuntarily flying specks and airy clumps of froth or foam on a strongly running grey sea. Foam not pure white, brown and gold-stained here and there, blowing together, centripetal, a form cocooned in crusts and swathes of adhesive matter. Not relevant, her judgment said, the other poem, damn it, the foam of perilous seas. The thing had a remembered look, not pleasant, and she grimaced, as she saw it. Venus de Milo. Venus Anadyomene. The foam born, foam from the castrated genitals of Kronos. Not a bad image, if you wanted one, of the coming to form from shapelessness, but not what she had meant to call up.

In the case of both Marcus and Stephanie, the sorrow is that neither is able to do anything with their gift. Marcus suffers some kind of breakdown caused (or exacerbated) by his relationship with a mad schoolteacher. Stephanie marries a curate and gets pregnant and her busy life precludes time for thought.

The situations that Marcus and Stephanie find themselves in are, to a certain extent, results of their own attempts to escape their father, Bill Potter, who is pushing each of them to "achieve." Ironically it will be the third sibling, Frederica who is the natural achiever in the family; the quartet is, in fact, about her. It isn't that Bill doesn't push Frederica, he just pushes her less and she has a constitution that doesn't respond negatively to the pushing. He pushes her enough so that she has a first rate education but she is, essentially, lost in the attention paid to Stephanie and Marcus by both parents. And perhaps this is the lesson; that no one can force another's gift to fruition.

There is another character in Virgin who I have found more interesting this second time around. He is in the third stage of the gift - offering the finished work to the public. Alexander Wedderburn has written his second play, a production of the life of Elizabeth I written in modern verse. It is to be performed as part of a local festival celebrating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

Here, he is thinking about the rehearsal process:

He had forgotten -- it was strange how one could forget -- how he had worked on Elizabeth's metaphors, winding into her verse the iconography of her cult, the phoenix, the rose, the ermine, justice and foison. Alone in this room he had worked and worked, and since he had finished the work, no one had remarked on these things. Crowe and Lodge talked about the dramatic pointing, contemporary relevance, cutting to speed it up overall pace, character. No one mentioned those images he had so lovingly, with such an indescribable mixture of voluntary elaboration and involuntary vision, constructed.

And here we have all three stages of the gift: involuntary vision (the first gift in which the will is suspended), voluntary elaboration (the second gift in which the will works on the first gift) and the letting go of the work into the world, a world that might or might not notice what you wanted them to, or at least thought they would, notice.

Another thing I like about Byatt is how she subtly and sometimes not so subtly makes fun of academia. She seems to understand that sometimes the study of literature can destroy the enjoyment of that same literature. So, while an author may lament that, upon first reading, the public does not notice certain things. the author should not necessarily wish for the opposite. She writes, almost immediately after that last passage:

In the fifties they wrote critical articles on "Blood and Stone Images in Wedderburn's Astraea."

In the early sixties, helpful lists of these images were published in Educational Aids to help weak A-level candidates.

In the seventies, the whole thing was dismissed as a petrified final paroxysm of a decadent individualist modernism, full of irrelevant and damaging cultural nostalgia, cluttered, blown. A cul de sac, the verse drama revival, as should have been seen in the beginning.

I've always found it fascinating that Byatt, on the one hand is committed to the study of literature - she has taught the subject and her novels abound with analysis of the process of creating literature. On the other hand she seems so ambivalent about the processes by which literature is taught. Or perhaps she isn't, and I am projecting my own ambivalence on to her writing.

Although I am a person who likes to analyze and discuss the language and structure of novels, I never had any desire to do it as an organized course of study that I paid for. I'm wondering if what I instinctively felt was that an analysis that arises naturally out of love of a novel is an acceptance and appreciation of the gift; whereas analysis without the love but simply as a requirement is a rejection of the gift.

In any event, I am enjoying this second read. It is a novel dense with ideas and since I already know the plot I can focus almost exclusively on the ideas. Which is always how I love to read.