Possession - A.S. Byatt (2) in Curbed (by the damn library) Annotations

"Roland felt briefly guilty of the oppressions of mankind" (75). Just a sad, nicely put, common feeling.

Adorable:

"Roland turned his eyes back to the shadowy desk. He did not feel the presence of the dead poet in the room, but he did have a vague excited sense that any of these containers - the desk, the trunks, the hat-boxes, might contain some treasure like the faded letters in his own breast-pocket. Some clue, some scribbled note, some words of response. Only that was nonsense, they would not be here, they would be wherever Randolph Henry Ash had put them, if they had ever been written.

'Do you know,' Roland said, turning to Sir George, 'whether there were papers? Is there anything left in that desk? Anything of hers?'

'That was cleared, I suppose, after death,' said Sir George.

'May we at least look?' said Roland, imagining perhaps a hidden drawer, and at the same time uncomfortably aware of the laundry lists in Northanger Abbey (85).

Reminds me of Aaron:"Here are your letters, as you request. They are all accounted for. Two I have burned and there may be - indeed there are - others which should immediately meet the same fate. But, as long as they are in my hands, I cannot bring myself to destroy any more, or anything written by you. These letters are the letters of a wonderful poet and that truth shines steady through the very shifting and alternating feelings with which I look at them in so far as they concern me, that is in so far as they are mine. Which within half an hour they will not be, for I have them packaged and ready to be delivered into your hands to do with as you shall see fit. You should burn them, I think, and yet, if Abelard had destroyed Eloisa's marvellous constant words, if the Portuguese Nun had kept silent, how much poorer should we not be, how much less wise? I think you will destroy them; you are a ruthless woman; how ruthless I am yet to know and am just beginning to discern" (92).

And: "I shall forget nothing of what has passed. I have not a forgetting nature. (Forgiving is no longer the question, between us, is it?) You may rest assured I shall retain every least word, written or spoken, and all other things too, in the hard wax of my stubborn memory. Every little thing, do you mark, everything. If you burn these, they shall have an afterlife in my memory, as long as I shall live, like the after-trace of a spent rocket on the gazing retina. I cannot believe that you will burn them. I cannot believe that you will not" (92).

Really, honestly tragic. The wife of the poet having an affair with the lady poet writes after finishing her husband's mistress's epic poem:

"My recent reading has caused me for some reason to remember myself as I was when a young girl, reading high Romances and seeing myself simultaneously as the object of all knights' devotion - an unspotted Guenevere - and as the author of the Tale. I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem, and now am neither, but the mistress of a very small household, consisting of an elderly poet (set in his ways, which are amiable and gentle and give no cause for anxiety), myself, and the servants who are not unmanageable" (126-7). And then: "I hit on something I believe when I wrote that I meant to be a Poet and a Poem. It may be that this is the desire of all reading women, as opposed to reading men, who wish to be poets and heroes, but might see the inditing of poetry in our peaceful age, as a sufficiently heroic act. No one wishes a man to be a Poem" (127).

"Letters, Roland discovered, are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome, no closure. His time was a time of the dominance of narrative theories. Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going....Letters, finally, exclude not only the reader as co-writer, or predictor, or guesser, but they exclude the reader as reader, they are written, if they are true letters, for a reader" (135).

"you take pleasure in making me feel most unheimlich, as the Germans have it, least of all at home, but always on edge, always apprehensive of failure, always certain that I cannot appreciate your next striking thought or glancing shaft of wit. But poets don't want homes, - do they? - they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds. Now tell me - do you suppose what I just wrote is the truth or a lie? You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalised love, for this, or that, or the universe - which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, but for its universal life in every minute particular. I have always supposed it to be a cry of unsatisfied love - my dear - and so it may be indeed - for satisfaction may surfeit it and so it may die. I know many poets who write only when in an exalted state of mind which they compare to being in love, when they do not simply state, that they are in love, that they seek love - for this fresh damsel, or that lively young woman - in order to find a fresh metaphor, or a new bright vision of things in themselves" (136).

"I have always believed this in love to be something of the most abstract masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet, who assumes and informs both. I wd have told you - no, I do tell you - friendship is rarer, more idiosyncratic, more individual and in every way more durable than this Love. Without this excitement they cannot have their Lyric Verse, and so they get it by any convenient means - and with absolute sincerity - but the Poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems" (137).

Maud: "The stained glass worked to defamiliarise her. It divided her into cold, brightly coloured fires. One cheek moved in and out of a pool of grape-violet as she worked. Her brow flowered green and gold. Rose-red and berry-red stained her pale neck and chin and mouth. Eyelids were purple-shadowed. The green silk of her scarf glittered with turreted purple ridges. Dust danced in a shadowy halo round her shifting head, black motes in straw gold, invisible solid matter appearing like pinholes in a sheet of solid colour. He spoke and she turned through a rainbow, her pale skin threading the various lights" (138).

On 140, Byatt has "transparent things" in the invented poet LaMotte's The Drowned City. I'm wondering which was written first: Possession or Nabokov's Transparent Things. I believe TT was. In that case, Byatt is either being funny or being ignorant.

"Maud was inside, and the outside was alive and separate" (141). I feel this way when I drive more than fifteen minutes. Missing out.

Boo, I want to keep reading and I don't want to go to class. What is Mary Eleanor Wilkins to Dame Antonia?