A. S. Byatt's Possession Observed
Robert B. Heilman
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Possession: A Romance has a distinguishing singularity: it derives its basic characters and situation from an unlikely source of fiction--historical scholarship in the field of English literature. A flock of twentieth-century researchers are digging into the lives of two Victorian poets. The results of their labors will be new editions, new biographies, and a flock of historical and critical articles in academic journals.
Such materials will not at first seem like the raw materials of "romance." To many observers, academic romance will seem rather to consist mainly of amorous free-lancing, often with a sense of having distinguished one's individuality from the dull norm. (Odd how the most universal of human activities often seems to the activists to be a remarkable individual achievement.) Free-swinging bed-biz may be for promotion, protest, parity, or passion (the "4 P's" of modern moralities played on the stage of higher education). Of course I do know the case of a sturdy assistant professor, seemingly well-wived, who made off with the department beauty (also a Ph.D.), and underwent a long life of unromantic recovery from the initial burst of flame. In a story about campus life William Corrington has described an act of fellatio, apparently public, by a female student said to have learned that this treatment was the professor's way of distinguishing A-students from the common run. (One wonders how this strain of romance would be influenced by the arrival of a New Age, now said to be upon us, in which all students expect to get A's.) Then there was the frequently husbanded assistant professor of whom an observer said, analytically, "She's a very moral person. She doesn't sleep around. She just marries around." This, of course, was before marriage itself was taken for an inartistic hand-me-down not much worn by the bold and free.
"Romance," which has been called "the world of malleable circumstance," is threefold in Byatt's practice. First is the romance of the research itself, its ordinarily pedestrian nature (endless routines of manuscript-crawling, text-gazing, marginalia-hunting, and close reinspection of printed materials) rendered tense and often challenging by rumors of striking new materia biographica, revealed directly in letters and indirectly in texts once thought plain enough. The second order of romance lies in the rivalries among the researchers, with both personal and national interests (English and American) at stake. Fame is the spur, and the professional competition is complicated by sexual excitements. The third matter of romance lies in what all the researchers are focused on: the life and works of Randolph Henry Ash (which, in some of his verse and in the breadth of his intellectual interests, such as science--he is both a collector of specimens and an experimenter--is reminiscent of Browning, but in his revered status among British lares and penates, Tennyson), an Ash now apparently given a new dimension by the accidental discovery of evidence that he may have had an affair, as we are to find that indeed he did (with the poetess Christabel LaMotte, a less conspicuous literary figure), an affair likely to change the dominant twentieth-century perception of him. (The reader may well think of Dickens and Ellen Ternan, but there is no parallel: unlike Ash's, Dickens's affair was well known at the time, but by common consent was buried in oblivion after his death--for more than half a century indeed.)
There is considerable variety among the researchers. The English camp is headed by Professor James Blackadder, who runs the "Ash Factory," as it is playfully called, in the British Museum and has been editing Ash's "Complete Works" since 1951 (it is now 1986), obviously an insiders' jest. A worker in the factory is Roland Michell, a recent Ph.D. with only thin professional prospects. Roland's live-in is the matter-of-fact Val, who keeps sarcastically referring to her breadwinner's role as menial; in time, rather improbably, she is happily married to a bright young lawyer whose knowledge of copyright laws and the rules governing manuscript ownership becomes important in the control of Ash research. A professional rival of Roland's is Fergus Wolf, a clever-tongued success-boy and a master of up-to-date in-talk in literary criticism and theory, whose style manages to suggest that Roland is a pretty stodgy fellow. Fergus seems sharp and crafty, but it is Roland who happens upon, and makes off with, a manuscript which leads to new directions in the study of the poet Ash (i.e., the affair with LaMotte). Dr. Beatrice Nest, a big, earnest, dull student of Mrs. Ash, is officed near the Ash Factory; later she does some useful overhearing. The English camp includes, finally, three Baileys, all in one way or another descendants of Christabel LaMotte: Maud Bailey, a scholar who runs a women's studies operation at Lincoln University; and her squire cousin, Sir George Bailey (and his invalid wife), who turn out to be the unknowing possessors of a set of LaMotte letters and, being needy, get greedy about them. The letters come to seem a goldmine, not only of biographical information, but of pounds or dollars, to whoever can get control of them.