Still Life - A.S. Byatt

Still Life - A.S. Byatt


George Eliot, Stephanie thought, was a good hater. She looked long and intelligently at what she hated, with curiousity to see exactly what it was, and the necessary detachment to imagine it from within and without, these two breeding a kind of knowledge that was love. George Eliot had loved the bonnets and sprigged china—because she knew them, or because writing them down gave her power over them, made her gentle and generous to their meaning? She tried to relate this sudden vision of the things of the pieties of the Dodson sisters to Daniel’s mum’s instructions about how to cook Christmas pudding, and largely failed.

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He had seen her look at Frederica’s books and had understood what he had half sensed on the occasion of Frederica’s telegrams, her sense of loss. He had his own sense of loss—the grim singleness of himself and his job alone in an anonymous bed sitter.

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“Can’t you just be in a place, Frederica?”
“No. I think. I have to think. So do you.”
“No, I don’t. To my shame, in many ways, I don’t.”
But he did. He was very tempted to tell her about The Yellow Chair. The whole problem, the way the plays had got wound into each other, would interest her; she would see it was a problem. He turned on his back and swam away, jerky and splashing.

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… what was known as the “limited revolt” of the intellectuals against the benign and humdrum welfare state. She was able to compare this “limited revolt” with reactions to a family structure known as the Power House, in which the principles and even practice of the parents are so liberal, so rational, so acceptable, that any necessary rebellion against their authority must take the form of absurd gestures, petulant or violent.

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She believed unquestioningly, with part of herself, for instance, that a woman was unfulfilled without marriage, that marriage was the end of every good story. She was looking for a husband, partly because she was afraid no one might want her, partly because she couldn’t decide what to do with herself until that problem was solved, partly because everyone else was looking for a husband. (It is curious, but true, that the offers she received in no way changed her fixed feeling that the sort of woman she was was essentially not wanted as a wife.)

She believed, with a mixture of “realism” and resignation, that women were much more preoccupied with love than men were, more vulnerable, more in pain. There were imposing tags in her mind. “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/ ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.” “He for God only, she for God in him.” “I claim only this privilege for my sex—you need not covet it…this distinction of loving longest when life, when hope is gone.” She was conditioned to desire to be abject.

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Daniel was ill at ease with the “personal.” What Mr. Ellenby had seen as Daniel’s interference in the private lives of his parishioners Daniel saw as a practical ordering of resources of help. He did not require affection, let alone love, from those he helped; he did put a great deal of imagination and consistent effort into helping them sensibly. Gideon was a man, Daniel saw, whose religious needs sprang from an overpowering desire to exact and bestow affection, contact, warmth. He did not know whether it was a failing or a virtue in himself that he feared and mistrusted this.

….In the days of Mr. Ellenby, to whom transcendent truth, order, and authority were living beings, Daniel had been able to afford the luxury of being the rebel, of questioning, in his secret mind, the sources of his religion, of human morals. In the new dispensation, where an almost anthropological vision of the source of morals in the life of the family seemed to inform Gideon’s thinking, Daniel found himself regretting the commandments, authority itself. He loved his wife terribly, and his son with protective fear, his mother with a sense of shared blood and tribal responsibility. These loves in themselves would not have led him to universal “love” if there was such a creature. His sense that the old must be comforted, the sick relieved, the useless made useful, came from a need for order so profound that he had needed the authority of Holy Orders, a form that sanctioned his dogged use of his life to restore a little order to the muddle and limpness and fear we make of things. Mr. Ellenby had believed for him, for Daniel. He had often sat in this church and thought: in another society I would as easily have been a Buddhist priest, a Hindu, a Moslem. What he believed and said he believed every day in the creed was what, in Sheffield in the mid-twentieth century, had been the available and thus the right form to believe. Now, under Gideon, this compromising doubt seemed dangerous as it had not. The church seemed vacant, the altar merely a table, the words…less authoritative, more dubious.

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Alexander was more than usually given to finding the act of sex ludicrous, popping buttocks, squeaking sounds of flesh slithering or air groaning inappositely outward, but with this silent woman it was simply a question of a peaceful repeated bending and rocking until she closed like a vice, shivered again, and again, and again, still silent and smiling, sweating along the hairline, hardly to be called discomposed. Alexander saw and felt everything bathed in gold, and gave, finally, one cry that broke the silence and heard the woman sobbing. He thought both: this is what I am for, and more distantly, this is not what I really want.

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“But our human experience,” said Juliana Belper, “is chaotic.” She was not interested in numbers. “We don’t know our own nature—Freud showed us we don’t know our own unconscious lives. We receive random impressions…” Her big eyes brimmed under a haze of soft hair escaped from a loose chignon.

“Sigmund Freud,” said Wijnnobel, “like Johannes Kepler, was a scientist and believed in truth. Kepler observed that the apparently irregular variations in the motions of the planets were a function of the form of the lens of the eye. This does not mean that we cannot study the planets, only that we must also study the eye. Freud believed that there were laws of human behavior that could be truly observed and understood. His results are harder to verify but his intentions were exact and honorable. Your hazy concept of chaos and vagueness depends on ignorance and feebleness of intellect. Good art cannot come from it.”

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There was a God, he suddenly knew, a God of overflowing order and intricacy, ovals and ants. He saw two Gods side by side, Gideon’s God, who was like Gideon, a golden man opening his arms to comfort, and a God of fine bristles in dark corridors, of segments and interlocking threads and forms, of force taking shape, innumerable shapes. Lucas had been mad to think that any channel of communication existed with this God. He was in and about Marcus and the world. That was dangerous. But it had been his function. He thought of Jacqueline’s curiosity and the beauty of Ruth’s plait. Adrenaline, his own, not the half-moon pill’s, began to run.

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Part of the joy of falling in love—for the intelligent, the watchers, the judicious—is the delicious license to set something above thinking clearly, the pleasure of being driven, taken over, overwhelmed. Frederica, despite her clumsy rushes of tactless fervor, was doomed to be intelligent, a watcher, judicious, and as she recognized this doom she desired proportionately to be let off, to feel incontrovertibly. There are moments of biological terror between two people when they realize that they cannot keep their hands from each other, that they cannot, temporarily at least, touch, smell, taste, hear, except in terms of the other, which are also love, and also immediate, and also incontrovertible.

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He had lent her books—that was a beginning, lending of books was a universal sign of the beginning of something. To borrow implied to return. As soon as he was not there, love flooded her again like an easing of pain. She named what she loved: sadness, exact thought, remembered fear, a furious inner life. She remembered meeting his eyes when she explained that she was not Jewish. They were strangers. She loved a stranger. The world was larger than it had been.

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He walked, and in his way prayed to the God who drove him, for patience in inactivity, for a reordering, for quiet sleep, by which he meant, and knew he meant, some response from his wife. Praying was not asking; praying was loosing these knots of care into some dark running stream of energy between It and himself so that things were delivered from him, to It, to deal with. He walked on. He breathed better.

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He registered happiness, which was in its way as dangerous as the physical well-being; both presented themselves as empty patches of bright light on the inner eye, ringed by a prismatic flaring of color and danger. He tried to keep still. He considered the tree.

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“[The negative article] was only really nasty if I’d conducted my life furtively, which I haven’t. But it was a bit horrible. I felt like an object, made into an object.”
“Sometimes you behave as though you were the only subject.”
“All of us do that.”
“You do it so obviously.”
“Oh, Alan. I want to be part of things. You get shut out, as a woman.”
“You’re at the center. In a way most men can’t be.”
“Yes, but they’re together and I’m alone.”
“Newnham’s full of women.”
“Women don’t live in groups happily.”

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There were two hypothetical future Fredericas—one closed in the University Library writing something elegant and subtle on the use of metaphor in seventeenth-century religious narrative, and one in London, more nebulous, writing quite different things, witty critical journalism, maybe even a new urban novel like those of Iris Murdoch. The trouble was, she sometimes thought, that the two Fredericas were really indissolubly one. The Ph.D. writer would have died of aimlessness and spiritual vertigo without the drive of the worldly one; the worldly one would have felt like a creaking, varnished carapace without an abundant inner life. In the world of the fictive and hypothetical future, they could coexist, and Frederica took steps to promote the careers of both.

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“I’ve been thinking. I suffer from having to use a limited vocabulary. All the time. How big do you suppose the average used vocabulary is? A thousand words? Two thousand? Will can’t know that many, and Mary even fewer. And the people I see—in the shops—”
“And my poor old mum—”
“And your poor old mum,” she said steadily, “and most of the people in this parish, wouldn’t understand most of the words I really care about if I were suddenly to say them, right out, out of the blue. So the words become ghosts. They haunt me.”
“Mebbe I wouldn’t understand them either,” said Daniel disagreeably. “My own vocabulary has deteriorated since college days. Or since we were courting.”
“Exactly. Have some more beans.” Food improved the temper. “We learn to think and can’t use our thinking words--”
“Like what?”
“Oh,” she said, frivolously, desperately. “Discourse. Discourse of reason. Sophistical. Ideal—in a Platonic sense. Catalyst. Anacoluthon. Mendacious. Realism. The worst things are the words that do have meaning in the tiny vocabulary I do use, like real and ideal, words that lose half their associations… Don’t you understand, Daniel?”
“I do,” he said. He pushed way his plate. “I shouldn’t have made you marry me. I thought that was real. God help me.”
“It was.” Quickly.
“Aye. And your great unopened volumes of vocabulary, they’re real, too.”
“Daniel—I can teach it to Will and Mary.” She was afraid of what she had done. She had meant to say something loving, from her to him. Who was he? What did he care about? He was a good, a practical man. She loved him. Did she not?
“I don’t understand. It wasn’t what I meant. This.” He gestured at the comfortable little room, where Will’s things, including the red engine, were heaped in a clothes basket, where Mary’s nappies hung on a clothes line by the fire. He laughed. “I can’t find a word. It’s all got—muffled.”
“Muffled is a good word.”
“Don’t be nice to me, Steph. Don’t patronize. That I can’t bear.”
“Daniel, I love you.”
“I think you do. It was daft of you. I mean that.”
“You can’t choose, about love.”
“Can’t you? Mebbe you should. I never thought it that important, until…I hate talking these days. Gideon’s a great talker; he gets talking things done, discussion groups and that, but not… It wasn’t what I was meant—“
“You knew so clearly what you were meant for. Before you married me…You’ve lost something, too. As heavy as my vocabulary.”
“Aye.” He stared at the table. The best, she thought, for her solitary self would have been to go on talking, to make him talk to her, but she was too afraid of failure and too unused to words herself now, to dare that. So she did what she knew was second best and dropped to her knees beside his chair and put a hand on his, her bright head on his knee.
“I do love you. Now we are alone.”
He stroked her hair, and put out blind arms, and they clung together. In silence they stood and climbed the stairs and tumbled into the new space of their bedroom. In bed they were happy, they knew each other, they loved each other. And the words wandered loose and unused. Peripeteia. Anguish. Morphology. Infinite in faculty. In apprehension how like a god. Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love, nor yet for constriction of vocabulary. She slept under the weight of his arm.

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For two or three weeks after The Yellow Chair she was in love with Alexander in the old way. She survived this as though it was a curse pain, or an attack of motion sickness, a visitation beyond her control.

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Daniel spoke almost savagely, “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

The words were a thin defense between him and the pit. They were an action, customary and saving, not because he any longer believed any of the more comfortable ones, but because the terrible ones spoke some of the truth of things. “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday; seeing that is past as a watch in the night. As soon as thou scatterest them, they are even as a sleep: and fade away suddenly like the grass.”

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So quickly, so quickly, the English stop speaking of grief, he thought, ungraciously, knowing that he had resented the inadequate words they had spoken, and sometimes worse than inadequate. Maybe Stephanie had been taken, a deaconess said, so young and so happy, because our Lord wanted Daniel to know the way of life without such love. Cordelia was killed, Christian critics argue, to effect the reconciliation of Lear with the heavens, to redeem him. Daniel thought for a terrible moment of Stephanie cycling off to the prenatal unit with her Wordsworth heavy in her bicycle basket. She had had her life. Who could believe in a God who killed that life to teach Daniel Orton a lesson about suffering? Shakespeare killed Cordelia to show that there are worse things than guilt and atonement for guilt, that Lear’s wisdom, painfully acquired and not very great, was of very little moment beside that cry.. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat…And even that, Daniel thought, after he had abruptly terminated the deaconess’s remonstrances, was self-referring. There were times when he was amazed that anything was alive, a greenfly, or an early daffodil someone brought him, when he feared for its green silky weightless life as much as he feared for his children.

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“I’ve been walking,” said Daniel. “I walked most of the way. Sometimes I got buses. Slept out—sometimes—sometimes in transport digs and such. Won’t bore you with all that. Don’t think I knew where I was going, rightly—the idea was to finish myself off, tire myself out, like—go to nothing.”

How could he say? He had fought his flesh, punished it, and spoken to no one for week after week, treading heavily from surface to surface, tarmac, grass, sand, heather, indifferently, realizing what “tramp” meant. He remembered his feet moving, and the regularity of the movement taking the life from his mind, from himself, from what had happened.

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