Possession - A.S. Byatt (1) in Curbed (by the damn library) Annotations

Mostly, I'm listing quotes that I'm too polite to underline in a book that isn't mine.

"It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air Acts" (6).

Part of the invented poet's letter to an unnamed woman:

"Did you not find it as strange as I did, that we should so immediately understand each other uncommonly well, did we not? Or is this perhaps a product of the over-excited brain of a middle-aged and somewhat disparaged poet, when he finds that his ignored, his arcane, his deviously perspicuous meanings, which he thought not meanings, since no one appeared able to understand them, had after all one clear-eyed and amused reader and judge?" - (9)

"He could not identify the Fairy Topic, either, and this gave him a not uncommon sensation of his own huge ignorance, a grey mist, in which floated or could be discerned odd glimpses of solid objects, odd bits of glitter of domes or shadows of roofs in the gloom" (11). I can empathize.

“A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love, indifference and dislike; also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forebears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the slow utterance of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorable law, of all this and something else too, a single flame in which every way obeys the laws that pertain to Fire itself, and yet is lit and put out from one moment to the next, and can never be relumed in the whole waste of time to come” (13).

“Blackadder was discouraged and liked to discourage others. (He was also a stringent scholar.)” (13).

“He thought of himself as a latecomer. He had arrived too late for things that were still in the air but vanished, the whole ferment and brightness and journeyings and youth of the 1960s, the blissful dawn of what he and his contemporaries saw as a pretty blank day” (14).

“He had liked the look of her, he remembered, a soft, brown uncertain look” (15).

“In the early days she had had lots of quiet opinions, he remembered, which she had offered him, shyly slyly, couched as a kind of invitation or bait” (15). I remember being like Val, opinions in deep, blocked inner reserves, forced to keep indoors because looked like rain. I'm wondering if I got to the point where I had fewer opinions. I do remember feeling like I had nothing to say, but moping and fixating make us blind to parts of ourselves that can't mope and fixate properly. I think.

"Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis's comments on them, and burned them" (30).

Excellent passage on feminists:

"'I think the feminists are interested in her,' said Paola. 'They would be,' said Blackadder. 'They haven't any time for Randolph Ash. All they want is to read Ellen's endless journal once our friend in there has actually managed to bring it to the light of day. They think Randolph Ash suppressed Ellen's writing and fed off her imagination. They'd have a hard time proving that, I think, if they were interested in proof, which I'm not sure they are. They know what there is to find before they've seen it'" (34).

Interesting ambiguity in this sentence: "After that he could pursue Miss LaMotte, who now had an identity of sorts, through the Catalogue, like any other dead soul" (34). Since Christabel LaMotte is dead, initially she seems like the dead soul in question. But Roland is the initial subject of the sentence. Depending on the way the clauses relate, he could be the dead soul who, like any other, could pursue Miss LaMotte. I'd like to cultivate this kind of ambiguity.

Anti-journaling sentiments (which always make me curious): “’If you can order your Thoughts and shape them into Art, good: if you can live in the obligations and affections of Daily Life, good. But do not get into the habit of morbid Self-examination. Nothing so unfits a woman for producing good work, or for living usefully’” (44).

On LaMotte’s poetry: “’It’s a very sad poem.’ ‘Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong’” (57).

On what scholars decide to devote their lives to: "'They were what stayed alive, when I'd been taught and examined everything else.' Maud smiled then. 'Exactly. That's it. What could survive our education'" (58).

"She made him up a bed on the high white divan in her living room - not a heap of sleeping-bags and blankets but a real bed, with laundered sheets and pillows in emerald green cotton cases. And a white down quilt, tumbled out of a concealed drawer beneath" (58). I love the idea of having something like this in my household, when I have an established, more-than-a-year-stay place of my own. I like how Maud's living room is first described. I'll go back to it. "Maud's living room was not what might have been expected of a Victorian scholar. it was bright white, paint, lamps and dining-table; the carpet was a Berber off-white. The things in this room were brilliantly coloured in every colour, peacock, crimson, sunflower, deep rose, nothing pale or pastel. Alcoves beside the fireplace held a collection of spotlit glass, bottles, flasks, paperweights" (54). It sounds breathtaking. It makes Roland feel "wakeful." It didn't take too many words to make the room vivid, enviable, and indicative of its dweller. I love it. Ditto with her bathroom: "He moved gingerly inside the bathroom, which was not a place to sit and read or to lie and soak, but a chill green glassy place, glittering with cleanness, huge dark green stoppered jars on water-green thick glass shelves, a floor tiled in glass tiles into whose brief and illusory depths one might peer, a shimmering shower curtain like a glass waterfall, a blind to match, over the window, full of watery lights. Maud's great green-trellised towels were systematically folded on a towel-heater. Not a speck of talcum powder, not a smear of soap, on any surface. He thought of his home bathroom, full of old underwear, open pots of eyepaint, dangling shirts and stockings, sticky bottles of hair conditioner and tubes of shaving foam" (59).

Lots from this page. The images we align with people: "Later, Maud stood in there, turning her long body under the hot hiss of the shower. Her mind was full of an image of a huge, unmade, stained and rumpled bed, its sheets pulled into standing peaks here and there, like the surface of whipped egg-white. Whenever she thought of Fergus Wolff, this empty battlefield was what she saw. Beyond it lay, if she had chosen to conjecture them up, unwashed coffee cups, trousers lying where they had been stepped out of, heaped dusty papers ring-stained with wine glasses, a carpet full of dust and ashes, the smell of socks and other smells. Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance" (59). That she is in the shower is what makes this thought more tumultuous. Out of context, sentence two through four alone would be too static for weight. That's what one ought to remember when writing a diary: abstractions are useful and beautiful, but context gives them resonance. Which is what we want, I think, for when we read them over a couple years down the line.

"A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows 'This is I.' An ugly woman knows, with equal certainty, 'This is not I.' Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing" (60).

I like Byatt's invented Victorian fairytale of LaMotte's: a tailor is presented with the choice of three gifts after he prepares a beautiful meal for a forest man: a little purse of soft leather, a cooking pot, and a little glass key. "He desired the little glass key, because he was a craftsman, and could see that it had taken masterly skill to blow all these delicate wards and barrel, and because he did not have any idea about what it was or might do, and curiosity is a great power in men's lives. So he said to the little man, 'I will take the pretty glass key.' And the little man answered, 'You have chosen not with prudence, but with daring. The key is the key to an adventure, if you will go in search of it.' 'Why not?' replied the tailor. 'Since there is no use for my craft in this wild place, and since I have not chosen prudently'" (63). The tailor "'must go out of this house,' said the little grey man, 'and call to the West Wind, and show her your key, when she comes, and let her carry you where she will, without struggle or alarm. If you fight or question she will toss you on the thorns'" (63). Beautiful: "He moved on to the dome, which you must imagine like the magic covers you have seen in your drawing-room under which dwell all sorts of brilliant little birds, or flights of mysterious moths and butterflies. Or maybe you have seen a crystal ball containing a tiny house which you can shake to produce a brilliant snowstorm? This dome contained a whole castle, set in a beautiful park, with trees and terraces and gardens, fishpools and climbing roses, and bright banners hanging limp in its many turrets. It was a brave and beautiful place, with innumerable windows and twisting staircases and a lawn and a swing in a tree and everything you could desire in a spacious and desirable residence, only that it was all still and tiny enough to need a magnifying glass to see the intricacies of its carvings and appurtenances. The little tailor, as I have told you, was first and foremost a craftsman, and he stared in wonder at this beautiful model and could not begin to imagine what fine tools or instruments had carved and wrought it" (66). Of course, it is a castle enchanted to that size.

I like that different things involve their attention: "Roland, who was urban, noted colours: dark ploughed earth, with white chalk in the furrows; a pewter sky, with chalk-white clouds. Maud noticed good rides and unmended gates, and badly crunched hedgerows, gnashed by machine-teeth" (73).

Very Larkin: "'Leonora would be very shocked at the state of this graveyard,' said Maud. 'She would not find it romantic. I think it's all right. A slow return to nature and oblivion'" (75).

I'll finish reading for now and dredge up some Larkin in honor of Maud.

Philip Larkin - Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats, and stone,

And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut

For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;

And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,

Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off

My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.

From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -

Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.

Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few

Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce

'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.

The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door

I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,

Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,

And always end much at a loss like this,

Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,

When churches will fall completely out of use

What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep

A few cathedrals chronically on show,

Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,

And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.

Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come

To make their children touch a particular stone;

Pick simples for a cancer; or on some

Advised night see walking a dead one?

Power of some sort will go on

In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;

But superstition, like belief, must die,

And what remains when disbelief has gone?

Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,

A purpose more obscure. I wonder who

Will be the last, the very last, to seek

This place for what it was; one of the crew

That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?

Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,

Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff

Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?

Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt

Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground

Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt

So long and equably what since is found

Only in separation - marriage, and birth,

And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built

This special shell? For, though I've no idea

What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

That poem always makes me cry. A serious house on serious earth it is. And what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky. An upward lift, and then he ends with gravitating, with the dead underground. That much never can be obsolete.

...

Edit: I had to put a space between each line of the poem, otherwise the lines weren't breaking properly. I hate that, because I want the stanzas to clump properly. Oh well. Here it is, unmutilated:

http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar5.htm