Possession
Chapter 1
These things are there. The garden and the
tree
The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold
The woman in the shadow of the boughs
The running water and the grassy space.
They are and were there. At the old world's
rim,
In the Hesperidean grove, the fruit
Glowed golden on eternal boughs, and there
The dragon Ladon crisped his jewelled crest
Scraped a gold claw and sharped a silver
tooth
And dozed and waited through eternity
Until the tricksy hero, Herakles,
Came to his dispossession and the theft.
--RANDOLPH HENRY
ASH
from The
Garden of Proserpina, 1861
The book was thick and black and covered with
dust. Its boards were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own
time. Its spine was missing, or, rather, protruded from amongst the leaves like
a bulky marker. It was bandaged about and about with dirty white tape, tied in a
neat bow. The librarian handed it to Roland Michell, who was sitting waiting for
it in the Reading Room of the London Library. It had been exhumed from Locked
Safe no. 5, where it usually stood between Pranks of Priapus and The Grecian Way of Love. It was ten in
the morning, one day in September 1986. Roland had the small single table he
liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the fireplace
nevertheless in full view. To his right was a high sunny window, through which
you could see the high green leaves of St James's Square.
The London Library was Roland's favourite place.
It was shabby but civilised, alive with history but inhabited also by living
poets and thinkers who could be found squatting on the slotted metal floors of
the stacks, or arguing pleasantly at the turning of the stair. Here Carlyle had
come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland saw her
black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of
the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets. Here
Randolph Henry Ash had come, cramming his elastic mind and memory with
unconsidered trifles from History and Topography, from the felicitous
alphabetical conjunctions of Science and Miscellaneous--Dancing, Deaf and Dumb,
Death, Dentistry, Devil and Demonology, Distribution, Dogs, Domestic Servants,
Dreams. In his day, works on Evolution had been catalogued under Pre-Adamite
Man. Roland had only recently discovered that the London Library possessed Ash's
own copy of Vico's Princtpi di una
Scienza Nuova. Ash's books were most regrettably scattered across Europe and
America. By far the largest single gathering was of course in the Stant
Collection at Robert Dale Owen University in New Mexico, where Mortimer Cropper
worked on his monumental edition of the Complete Correspondence of Randolph Henry
Ash. That was no problem nowadays, books travelled the aether like light and
sound. But it was just possible that Ash's own Vico had marginalia missed even
by the indefatigable Cropper. And Roland was looking for sources for Ash's Garden of Proserpina. And there was a
pleasure to be had from reading the sentences Ash had read, touched with his
fingers, scanned with his eyes.
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. Roland undid the bindings. The book sprang apart, like a box, disgorging leaf after leaf of faded paper, blue, cream, grey, covered with rusty writing, the brown scratches of a steel nib. Roland recognised the handwriting with a shock of excitement. They appeared to be notes on Vico, written on the backs of book-bills and letters. The librarian observed that it didn't look as though they had been touched before. Their edges, beyond the pages, were dyed soot-black, giving the impression of the borders of mourning cards. They coincided precisely with their present positions, edge of page and edge of stain.
<!--pagebreak--> Roland asked if it was in order for him to study these jottings. He gave his credentials; he was part-time research assistant to Professor Blackadder, who had been editing Ash's Complete Works since 1951. The librarian tiptoed away to telephone: whilst he was gone, the dead leaves continued a kind of rustling and shifting, enlivened by their release, Ash had put them there. The librarian came back and said yes, it was quite in order, as long as Roland was very careful not to disturb the sequence of the interleaved fragments until they had been listed and described. The librarian would be glad to know of any important discoveries Mr Michell might make.
All this was over by ten-thirty. For the next
half-hour Roland worked haphazardly, moving backwards and forwards in the Vico,
half looking for Proserpina, half reading Ash's notes, which was not easy, since
they were written in various languages, in Ash's annotating hand, which was
reduced to a minute near-printing, not immediately identifiable as the same as
his more generous poetic or letter-writing hand.
At eleven he found what he thought was the
relevant passage in Vico. Vico had looked for historical fact in the poetic
metaphors of myth and legend; this piecing together was his "new science." His
Proserpine was the corn, the origin of commerce and community. Randolph Henry
Ash's Proserpine had been seen as a Victorian reflection of religious doubt, a
meditation on the myths of resurrection. Lord Leighton had painted her,
distraught and floating, a golden figure in a tunnel of darkness. Blackadder had
a belief that she represented, for Randolph Ash, a personification of history
itself in its early mythical days. (Ash had also written a poem about Gibbon and
one about the Venerable Bede, historians of greatly differing kinds. Blackadder
had written an article on R. H. Ash and relative historiography.)
Roland compared Ash's text with the translation, and copied parts onto an
index card. He had two boxes of these, tomato-red and an intense grassy green,
with springy plastic hinges that popped in the library silence.
Ears of
grain were called apples of gold, which must have been the first gold in the
world while metallic gold was unknown...So the golden apple which Hercules first
brought back or gathered from Hesperia must have been grain; and the Gallic
Hercules with links of this gold, that issue from his mouth, chains men by the
ears: something which will later be discovered as a myth concerning the fields.
Hence Hercules remained the Deity to propitiate in order to find treasures,
whose god was Dis (identical with Pluto) who carries off Proserpine (another
name for Ceres or grain) to the underworld described by the poets, according to
whom its first name was Styx, its second the land of the dead, its third the
depth of furrows.?It was of this golden apple that Virgil, most learned in
heroic antiquities, made the golden bough Aeneas carries into the Inferno or
Underworld.
Since our extraordinary conversation I have
thought of nothing else. It has not often been given to me as a poet, it is
perhaps not often given to human beings, to find such ready sympathy, such wit
and judgment together. I write with a strong sense of the necessity of
continuing our talk, and without premeditation, under the impression that you were
indeed as much struck as I was by our quite extraordinary to ask if
it would be possible for me to call on you, perhaps one day next week. I feel, I
know with a certainty that cannot be the result of folly or misapprehension,
that you and I must speak again. I know you go out in company very little, and
was the more fortunate that dear Crabb managed to entice you to his breakfast
table. To think that amongst the babble of undergraduate humour and through all
Crabb抯 well-wrought anecdotes, even including the Bust, we were able to say so
much, that was significant, simply to each other. I cannot surely be alone in
feeling
The second one ran:
Dear Madam,
Since our pleasant and unexpected conversation I
have thought of little else. Is there any way in which it can be resumed, more
privately and at more leisure? I know you go out in company very little, and was
the more fortunate that dear Crabb managed to entice you to his breakfast table.
How much I owe to his continuing good health, that he should feel able and
eager, at eighty-two years of age, to entertain poets and undergraduates and
mathematical professors and political thinkers so early in the day, and to tell
the anecdote of the Bust with his habitual fervour without too much delaying the
advent of buttered toast.
Did you not find it as strange as I did, that we should
so immediately understand each other so well? For we did 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? What you said of Alexander Selkirk's monologue, the
good sense you made of the ramblings of my John Bunyan, your understanding of the
passion of Inez de Castro... gruesomely resurrecta... but that is enough of my egoistical mutter
and of those of my personae, who are
not, as you so rightly remarked, my masks. I would not have you think that I do not
recognise the superiority of your own fine ear and finer taste. I am convinced
that you must undertake that grand Fairy Topic--you will make something highly
strange and original of it. In connection with that, I wonder if you have
thought of Vico's history of the primitive races--of his idea that the ancient
gods and later heroes are personifications of the fates and aspirations of the
people rising in figures from the common mind? Something here might be made of
your Fairy's legendary rootedness in veritable castles and genuine agricultural
reform--one of the queerest aspects of her story, to a modern mind. But I run on
again; assuredly you have determined on your own best ways of presenting the
topic, you who are so wise and learned in your retirement.
I cannot but feel, though it may be an illusion induced
by the delectable drug of understanding, that you must in some way share my
eagerness that further conversation could be mutually profitable that we must
meet. I cannot do not think I amcan be mistaken in my belief that our meeting
was also important
interesting to you, and that however much you may value your seclusion
I know that you came only to honour dear Crabb, at a
small informal party, because he had been of assistance to your illustrious
Father, and valued his work at a time when it meant a great deal to him. But you
did come out, so I may
hope that you can be induced to vary your quiet days with
I am sure you understand
<!--pagebreak-->Roland was first profoundly shocked by these writings, and then, in his scholarly capacity, thrilled. His mind busied itself automatically with dating and placing this unachieved dialogue with an unidentified woman. There was no year on the letters, but they must necessarily come after the publication of Ash's dramatic poems, Gods, Men and Heroes, which had appeared in 1856 and had not, contrary to Ash's hopes and perhaps expectations, found favour with the reviewers, who had declared his verses obscure, his tastes perverse and his people extravagant and improbable. "The Solitary Thoughts of Alexander Selkirk" was one of those poems, the musings of the castaway sailor on his island. So was "The Tinker's Grace," purporting to be Bunyan's prison musings on Divine Grace, and so was Pedro of Portugal's rapt and bizarre declaration of love, in 1356, for the embalmed corpse of his murdered wife, Inez de Castro, who swayed beside him on his travels, leather-brown and skeletal, crowned with lace and gold circlet, hung about with chains of diamonds and pearls, her bone-fingers fantastically ringed. Ash liked his characters at or over the edge of madness, constructing systems of belief and survival from the fragments of experience available to them. It would be possible, Roland thought, to identify the breakfast party, which must have been one of Crabb Robinson's later efforts to provide stimulating conversation for the students of the new London University.
Crabb Robinson's papers were kept in Dr Williams's
Library in Gordon Square, originally designed as University Hall, supported by
Robinson as a place in which lay students could experience collegiate university
life. It would, it must, be easy to check in Robinson's diary an occasion on
which Ash had breakfasted at 30 Russell Square with a professor of mathematics,
a political thinker (Bagehot?) and a reclusive lady who knew about, who wrote,
or proposed to write, poetry.
He had no idea who she might be. Christina
Rossetti? He thought not. He was not sure that Miss Rossetti would have approved
of Ash's theology, or of his sexual psychology. 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.
Had the correspondence continued? If it had, where
was it, what jewels of information about Ash's 'ignored, arcane, deviously
perspicuous meanings' might not be revealed by it? Scholarship might have to
reassess all sorts of certainties. On the other hand, had the correspondence
ever in fact started? Or had Ash finally floundered in his inability to express
his sense of urgency? It was this urgency above all that moved and shocked
Roland. He thought he knew Ash fairly well, as well as anyone might know a man
whose life seemed to be all in his mind, who lived a quiet and exemplary married
life for forty years, whose correspondence was voluminous indeed, but guarded,
courteous and not of the most lively. Roland liked that in Randolph Henry Ash.
He was excited by the ferocious vitality and darting breadth of reference of the
work, and secretly, personally, he was rather pleased that all this had been
achieved out of so peaceable, so unruffled a private existence.
He read the letters again. Had a final draft been
posted? Or had the impulse died or been rebuffed? Roland was seized by a strange
and uncharacteristic impulse of his own. It was suddenly quite impossible to put
these living words back into page 300 of Vico and return them to Safe 5. He
looked about him: no one was looking: he slipped the letters between the leaves
of his own copy of the Oxford Selected Ash, which he was never without. Then he
returned to the Vico annotations, transferring the most interesting
methodically to his card index, until the clanging bell descended the stairwell,
signifying the end of study. He had forgotten about his lunch.
