Medusa's Ankles Page 2
He muttered to himself. Why bother. Why does this matter so much. What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again. I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera camp in Colombia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint on a bit of board. I could just stop.
He could not.
Art is a mercurial lover. One artist you’ll meet in these pages pays a truly shocking final price for his devotion to his art. Yet art is also what saves Bernard from the titular lamia. For Velázquez, art is the key that unlocks life. Whatever chord the stories end on, the artists can no more ignore their art than a character can change the story they appear in, or a Greek hero outwit the Fates.
* * *
—
Metafiction, my dictionary tells me, is “fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions and traditional narrative techniques.” Quite a mouthful, and not an overly appetising one. Metafiction as practised during 1980s “peak-postmodernism” led up some sterile cul-de-sacs. How can a reader care about a character who discusses his own fictionality? Metafiction in A. S. Byatt’s stories is subtler, however, often wrapped up with voice, and is an urbane pleasure of her work. First-person narratives are the “home viewpoint” for many a fine writer, but they require an extra act of complicity from the reader, who must “believe” not only the story but also in the reality of its fictional narrator. Byatt’s stories are all third-person, told by a narrator who balances the needs of the story—keep that disbelief suspended, keep the reader caring—with the “insider information” that only a sentient narrator can impart. On occasion, the narrator is chatty, pondering aloud at the start of “Racine and the Tablecloth,” “When was it clear that Martha Crichton-Walker was the antagonist?” Since we, the readers of said story, can’t be expected to know the answer, the narrator elaborates: “Emily found this word for her much later, when she was a grown woman.” Sometimes the narrator alludes to the reader’s role in fiction by inviting us to fill in an onerous blank, as in the story of Gillian Perholt’s dumping, by fax, by her husband. “It was long and self-exculpatory, but there is no need for me to recount it to you, you can very well imagine it for yourself.” From time to time the narrator will philosophise, noting that if the newly-wed Fiammarosa (from “Cold”) was sometimes lonely in her glass palace, “this was not unusual, for no one has everything they can desire.” Such remarks bridge Fiammarosa’s fantastical reality with our own less fantastical one, and make the point that the workings of the heart—and marriage—are pretty much the same, whether they reside in an enchanted palace or a house with a postcode. Elsewhere, the narrator offers cinematic “fore-flashes”: in one of the frame narratives in “Precipice-Encurled,” a woman is waiting for the poet Robert Browning. “She ... will do this for many years,” prophesies the authorial voice, thereby elongating this character’s sad arc, and shading her in tones of Miss Havisham and The Aspern Papers. The effect reminds me of watching a film with a taciturn director’s commentary; or, more precisely, a film whose script includes a few remarks spoken by the director from behind the camera. Narrators clued up on the act of narration are, of course, nothing new. Chaucer was at it in the 1300s—but there’s a self-knowing quality to Byatt’s narrator’s self-knowledge that renders the mechanisms of these stories sporadically visible. At these moments I even sense Byatt observing the reader through her narrator, like Dutch painters painting their own reflections in mirrors.
As “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” is metafictional by way of being a Narratologist’s Tale, so the story “Raw Material” is fiction about fiction. Jack Smollett (the names of Byatt’s characters hum with allusion) is a one-hit-wonder, ex–Angry Young Man novelist who, in the 1960s, “left for London and fame, and returned quietly, ten years later.” Jack lives off a circle of students who are unencumbered by a surfeit of talent. One week, the octogenarian Cicely Fox appears in his class with a brief essay, “How We Used to Black-Lead Stoves.” The essay itself is included in “Raw Material,” as are a couple of follow-ups. Jack sees the merit and authenticity in Cicely’s work as “the real thing.” Artistically, the semi-washed-up youngish writer is smitten and reignited by the senior. The essays, the narrator tells us, “made Jack want to write. They made him see the world as something to be written.” If the “painter” stories allow Byatt to depict a painter painting, “Raw Material” enables Byatt to write a writer discussing writing. Byatt ricochets ideas between these metafictional levels. “He had given up telling them that Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy. In ways both sublime and ridiculous it clearly was, precisely, that.” Tonally, “sublime and ridiculous” would be a fair description of the whole story. It is about the clarity offered by poetry and prose; about why writers write what writers write about. It is dark, shocking, and exhibits Byatt’s ticklish sense of the ridiculous. It is a counterpoint to death, which arrives with all the warning an owl gives a vole. The narrative eye of “Sea Story” has the godlike precision of a GPS satellite, tracking the voyage of a message in a bottle from Filey to its (un-Romantic) destination in the Great Caribbean Trash Vortex. Meditatively, brilliantly, the story gives form to Byatt’s recurring theme of epistemology: What are the limits of knowledge? What do we know is true, and what do we merely believe is true? Is truth a constant, or a lover’s words on a page of paper rolled up in a plastic Perrier bottle doomed to split open, disintegrate, and end up inside a mollyhawk’s chicks?
* * *
—
About 170 pages from this one you’ll meet Orhan Rifat, a cosmopolitan Turkish academic, waiting for Gillian Perholt at Ankara airport. Orhan will refer to a statue’s breasts, explaining: “They are metaphors. They are many things at once, as the sphinxes and winged bulls are many things at once.” These remarkable stories, too, are many things at once. Chains of cause and effect. Puzzle boxes. Meditations. Learned discourses. Statements of regret and offerings of solace. X-rays of the heart. Showcases of beauty for beauty’s own sake. Views of a world where, to be sure, bad things can happen to good people; but also where happy-ish endings, qualified by realism, are not beyond hope. Step inside. Take your time. Savour your discoveries. “They sat in silence and were amazed, briefly and forever.”
—David Mitchell
May 2021
THE JULY GHOST
“I think I must move out of where I’m living,” he said. “I have this problem with my landlady.”
He picked a long, bright hair off the back of her dress, so deftly that the act seemed simply considerate. He had been skilful at balancing glass, plate, and cutlery, too. He had a look of dignified misery, like a dejected hawk. She was interested.
“What sort of problem? Amatory, financial, or domestic?”
“None of those, really. Well, not financial.”
He turned the hair on his finger, examining it intently, not meeting her eye.
“Not financial. Can you tell me? I might know somewhere you could stay. I know a lot of people.”
“You would.” He smiled shyly. “It’s not an easy problem to describe. There’s just the two of us. I occupy the attics. Mostly.”
He came to a stop. He was obviously reserved and secretive. But he was telling her something. This is usually attractive.
“Mostly?” Encouraging him.
“Oh, it’s not like that. Well, not ... Shall we sit down?”
* * *
—
They moved across the party, which was a big party, on a hot day. He stopped and found a bottle and filled her glass. He had not needed to ask what she was drinking. They sat side by side on a sofa: he admired the brilliant poppies bold on her emerald dress, and her pretty sandals. She had come to London for the summer to work in the British Museum. She could really have managed with microfilm in Tucson for what little manuscript research was needed, but there was a dragging love affair to end. There is an age at which, however desperately happy one is in stolen moments, days, or weekends with one’s married professor, one either prises him loose or cuts and runs. She had had a stab at both, and now considered she had successfully cut and run. So it was nice to be immediately appreciated. Problems are capable of solution. She said as much to him, turning her soft face to his ravaged one, swinging the long bright hair. It had begun a year ago, he told her in a rush, at another party actually; he had met this woman, the landlady in question, and had made, not immediately, a kind of faux pas, he now saw, and she had been very decent, all things considered, and so ...
He had said, “I think I must move out of where I’m living.” He had been quite wild, had nearly not come to the party, but could not go on drinking alone. The woman had considered him coolly and asked, “Why?” One could not, he said, go on in a place where one had once been blissfully happy, and was now miserable, however convenient the place. Convenient, that was, for work, and friends, and things that seemed, as he mentioned them, ashy and insubstantial compared to the memory and the hope of opening the door and finding Anne outside it, laughing and breathless, waiting to be told what he had read, or thought, or eaten, or felt that day. Someone I loved left, he told the woman. Reticent on that occasion too, he bit back the flurry of sentences about the total unexpectedness of it, the arriving back and finding only an envelope on a clean table, and spaces in the bookshelves, the record stack, the kitchen cupboard. It must have been planned for weeks, she must have been thinking it out while he rolled on her, while she poured wine for him, while ... No, no. Vituperation is undignified and in this case what he felt was lower and worse than rage: just pure, childli
ke loss. “One ought not to mind places,” he said to the woman. “But one does,” she had said. “I know.”
She had suggested to him that he could come and be her lodger, then; she had, she said, a lot of spare space going to waste, and her husband wasn’t there much. “We’ve not had a lot to say to each other, lately.” He could be quite self-contained, there was a kitchen and a bathroom in the attics; she wouldn’t bother him. There was a large garden. It was possibly this that decided him: it was very hot, central London, the time of year when a man feels he would give anything to live in a room opening onto grass and trees, not a high flat in a dusty street. And if Anne came back, the door would be locked and mortice-locked. He could stop thinking about Anne coming back. That was a decisive move: Anne thought he wasn’t decisive. He would live without Anne.
* * *
—
For some weeks after he moved in he had seen very little of the woman. They met on the stairs, and once she came up, on a hot Sunday, to tell him he must feel free to use the garden. He had offered to do some weeding and mowing and she had accepted. That was the weekend her husband came back, driving furiously up to the front door, running in, and calling in the empty hall, “Imogen, Imogen!” To which she had replied, uncharacteristically, by screaming hysterically. There was nothing in her husband, Noel’s, appearance to warrant this reaction; their lodger, peering over the banister at the sound, had seen their upturned faces in the stairwell and watched hers settle into its usual prim and placid expression as he did so. Seeing Noel, a balding, fluffy-templed, stooping thirty-five or so, shabby corduroy suit, cotton polo neck, he realised he was now able to guess her age, as he had not been. She was a very neat woman, faded blond, her hair in a knot on the back of her head, her legs long and slender, her eyes downcast. Mild was not quite the right word for her, though. She explained then that she had screamed because Noel had come home unexpectedly and startled her: she was sorry. It seemed a reasonable explanation. The extraordinary vehemence of the screaming was probably an echo in the stairwell. Noel seemed wholly downcast by it, all the same.
* * *
—
He had kept out of the way, that weekend, taking the stairs two at a time and lightly, feeling a little aggrieved, looking out of his kitchen window into the lovely, overgrown garden, that they were lurking indoors, wasting all the summer sun. At Sunday lunchtime he had heard the husband, Noel, shouting on the stairs.
“I can’t go on, if you go on like that. I’ve done my best, I’ve tried to get through. Nothing will shift you, will it, you won’t try, will you, you just go on and on. Well, I have my life to live, you can’t throw a life away ... can you?”
He had crept out again onto the dark upper landing and seen her standing, halfway down the stairs, quite still, watching Noel wave his arms and roar, or almost roar, with a look of impassive patience, as though this nuisance must pass off. Noel swallowed and gasped; he turned his face up to her and said plaintively,
“You do see I can’t stand it? I’ll be in touch, shall I? You must want ... you must need ... you must ...”
She didn’t speak.
“If you need anything, you know where to get me.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, well ...” said Noel, and went to the door. She watched him, from the stairs, until it was shut, and then came up again, step by step, as though it was an effort, a little, and went on coming, past her bedroom, to his landing, to come in and ask him, entirely naturally, please to use the garden if he wanted to, and please not to mind marital rows. She was sure he understood ... things were difficult ... Noel wouldn’t be back for some time. He was a journalist: his work took him away a lot. Just as well. She committed herself to that “just as well.” She was a very economical speaker.
* * *
—
So he took to sitting in the garden. It was a lovely place: a huge, hidden, walled south London garden, with old fruit trees at the end, a wildly waving disorderly buddleia, curving beds full of old roses, and a lawn of overgrown, dense ryegrass. Over the wall at the foot was the Common, with a footpath running behind all the gardens. She came out to the shed and helped him to assemble and oil the lawn mower, standing on the little path under the apple branches while he cut an experimental serpentine across her hay. Over the wall came the high sound of children’s voices, and the thunk and thud of a football. He asked her how to raise the blades: he was not mechanically minded.
“The children get quite noisy,” she said. “And dogs. I hope they don’t bother you. There aren’t many safe places for children, round here.”
He replied truthfully that he never heard sounds that didn’t concern him, when he was concentrating. When he’d got the lawn into shape, he was going to sit on it and do a lot of reading, try to get his mind in trim again, to write a paper on Hardy’s poems, on their curiously archaic vocabulary.
“It isn’t very far to the road on the other side, really,” she said. “It just seems to be. The Common is an illusion of space, really. Just a spur of brambles and gorse bushes and bits of football pitch between two fast four-laned main roads. I hate London commons.”
“There’s a lovely smell, though, from the gorse and the wet grass. It’s a pleasant illusion.”
“No illusions are pleasant,” she said, decisively, and went in. He wondered what she did with her time: apart from little shopping expeditions she seemed to be always in the house. He was sure that when he’d met her she’d been introduced as having some profession: vaguely literary, vaguely academic, like everyone he knew. Perhaps she wrote poetry in her north-facing living room. He had no idea what it would be like. Women generally wrote emotional poetry, much nicer than men, as Kingsley Amis has stated, but she seemed, despite her placid stillness, too spare and too fierce—grim?—for that. He remembered the screaming. Perhaps she wrote Plath-like chants of violence. He didn’t think that quite fitted the bill, either. Perhaps she was a freelance radio journalist. He didn’t bother to ask anyone who might be a common acquaintance. During the whole year, he explained to the American at the party, he hadn’t actually discussed her with anyone. Of course he wouldn’t, she agreed vaguely and warmly. She knew he wouldn’t. He didn’t see why he shouldn’t, in fact, but went on, for the time, with his narrative.
* * *
—
They had got to know each other a little better over the next few weeks, at least on the level of borrowing tea, or even sharing pots of it. The weather had got hotter. He had found an old-fashioned deck chair, with faded striped canvas, in the shed, and had brushed it over and brought it out on to his mown lawn, where he sat writing a little, reading a little, getting up and pulling up a tuft of couch grass. He had been wrong about the children not bothering him: there was a succession of incursions by all sizes of children looking for all sizes of balls, which bounced to his feet, or crashed in the shrubs, or vanished in the herbaceous border, black and white footballs, beach balls with concentric circles of primary colours, acid-yellow tennis balls. The children came over the wall: black faces, brown faces, floppy long hair, shaven heads, respectable dotted sun hats and camouflaged cotton army hats from Milletts. They came over easily, as though they were used to it, sandals, training shoes, a few bare toes, grubby sunburned legs, cotton skirts, jeans, football shorts. Sometimes, perched on the top, they saw him and gestured at the balls; one or two asked permission. Sometimes he threw a ball back, but was apt to knock down a few knobby little unripe apples or pears. There was a gate in the wall, under the fringing trees, which he once tried to open, spending time on rusty bolts only to discover that the lock was new and secure, and the key not in it.