Finding our Present in the Past: Possession by A.S. Byatt
by Marilyn Green Faulkner

If you tend to lose yourself in second-hand bookstores, are ravenously curious about the lives of the authors whose works you read, or simply love a great romantic mystery, you will love this book

“The book was thick and black and covered with dust.” It is not a coincidence that the first two words of this remarkable novel are, “the book.” Possession is a book about books, about the study and love of literature and the intricate obsession with the lives of literary figures shared by academics, historians, and the randomly curious public. It tells the story of a quiet literary scholar, Roland Michell, who finds a lost letter from the great Victorian poet R.H. Ash to another famous poet of the day, Christabel LaMotte. As he is an Ash scholar, Roland takes the letter to a LaMotte scholar named Maude Bailey, and together they begin a search to uncover the relationship between the two. It is a discovery that will have repercussions in the academic world and in their own lives. If you tend to lose yourself in second-hand bookstores, are ravenously curious about the lives of the authors whose works you read, or simply love a great romantic mystery, you will love this book, which won the Booker prize, England’s highest literary award.

A.S. Byatt is herself a formidable scholar of literature who left a teaching career at London College in 1983 to write full-time. One day while in the British Museum Library, she spotted a well-known Coleridge scholar. It occurred to Byatt that much of what she knew about the Romantic poet had been filtered through the mind of that scholar. She mused about the effect that such a single-minded pursuit must have on a person. “I thought,” she said, “it’s almost like a case of demonic possession, and I wondered-has she eaten up his life or has he eaten up hers?” Years later while studying Robert Browning, she became interested in the effect that his relationship with his wife (the more famous and more readable poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning) would have had on his work, and vice versa, and considered writing a novel about their lives. Soon the two ideas would combine for one great novel.

A Two-Part Invention
Fearing the legal implications and the artistic restrictions of writing about real people, Byatt decided instead to create a pair of Victorian poets and link them to a pair of modern literary scholars. She remembered D.H. Lawrence’s advice: “I thought: I have to have two couples, which he says is the beginning of any novel.” She also decided she would try to instill her novel “with the kind of warmth of a Shakespearean comedy.” Her romantic poet, Randolph Henry Ash, loosely modeled on Robert Browning, writes dramatic monologues with deep mythological and psychological underpinnings. The fair, mysterious Christabel LaMotte resembles Christina Rosetti, with her mystical, lyrical verse and her fascination with ancient folk tales and legends. The marvel of the novel is that Byatt creates not just the poets, but also their poetry. Calling on her extensive knowledge of Victorian literature, she intersperses the narrative with poetry, prose, tales, and even literary criticism about the works of these fictional characters. It is, to use an over-taxed phrase, a tour de force. The poems are beautiful in their own right. Here are just a few lines from the fictional Ash:

In certain moods we eat our lives away

In fast successive greed; we must have more

Although that more depletes our little stock

Of time and peace remaining.

I confess that my first time through this novel I went to my Norton Anthology of English Literature and looked for R.H. Ash. It amazed me that the author could switch from style to style and write such beautiful verse in different voices. This third time through the book, I was also sensitive to the way the poetry illuminates the narrative.

Liberated Women?
For those who are involved in, and perhaps discouraged by, the academic climate of today, Possession offers a clear-eyed look at modern literary scholarship. In particular Byatt is interested in the largely negative effect of the feminist movement in literary studies. Herself the mother of four children and a successful career woman, Byatt is keenly aware of each woman’s struggle to balance the roles of her life, and is certainly an ardent advocate for the rights of all people. She sees, however, a curious parallel between modern women and their Victorian counterparts and suggests that in the fight for their freedom, women may have “thrown the baby out with the bathwater.” Through Christabel LaMotte and Maude Bailey Byatt suggests that, while the Victorian woman was trapped by the notion that her proper place was only to mother children and nurture and support men, the modern woman may be equally trapped by the opposite notion, that she must live free of these very natural female roles. Thus Christabel LaMotte is symbolized by the princess in the glass coffin, beautiful but unable to break free of her bonds. Yet her modern counterpart, renowned scholar and feminist Maude Bailey, is equally unhappy and trapped in a role that feels unnatural to her. She self-consciously hides her long, blonde hair under a scarf; her beauty is a source of shame; and her life, characterized by her surgically sterile, clean apartment, is lonely and unfulfilling. Byatt introduces another feminist scholar, the vulgar American Leonora Stern, in a further attempt to show the kind of backwards Puritanism that exists in academia today, where morality and virtue are taboo and fundamental truths have been deconstructed and dissected until nothing remains but tolerance. The very modern Roland and Maude seem almost childish in their inability to form meaningful relationships, and this emotional paralysis stems from the shifting philosophies of today: “Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his ‘self’ as an illusion… ” As Roland and Maude attempt to uncover “the truth” about the two poets, they learn important truths about themselves as well, and they break free of the modern relativism that has bound them.

Literary Study and the Search for Truth
The characters that swarm around the relics of the lives of the two Victorian poets represent the desolation of our modern morality, and I would warn sensitive readers that their values do not reflect our own. Like Shakespeare, Byatt is showing us this empty world for a reason, however, to encourage us to recover certain truths that have been trampled in the rush for social progress. Roland Michell and Maude Bailey feel strangely uncomfortable in their modern setting and turn to the past for answers. As they connect to the lives of these poets through their letters, they find strength within themselves to live more meaningful lives. Byatt’s genius for metaphor connects the two couples, linking the present to the past. Notice the use of color: greens for the feminine and grays and blacks for the masculine characters. Connection is made through objects: Cropper wears Ash’s watch, Maude wears LaMotte’s brooch. Symbols of confinement and release are paired: the glass coffin and the library cubicle, the green Beetle and the serpent Melusine, the short-lived Eden of Yorkshire and Roland’s forbidden garden. As the story builds toward its climax, the images pile up, as it were, until everything and everyone meets in one place, in one very cinematic scene, to uncover the truth. Yet, even with all the romantic drama, Byatt never loses contact with books, with the fact that it is through reading and writing that human beings make contact with their finer selves. There is a marvelous passage about reading that describes that moment when a text we are studying finally becomes clear for us. It is one of the only passages in literature I know that describes an emotion dear and familiar to any serious reader:

“Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark… ” (512)

Those who write biography or study history know that every life has a story, but also that we can never tell the story exactly as it was. There is no final truth in history, but only interpretation and recreation. We read the journals of our ancestors and wonder what was not said that would have been most enlightening, as we try to extract a vision of their reality from the clues left to us. Roland and Maude, after years of studying these poets, are torn between a desire to protect their privacy and an insatiable curiosity to find out what really happened to them. In a highly readable series of events we are pulled deeper and deeper into these interconnected lives, switching from past to present and back to the past. Finally, after all is revealed, Byatt shares one more crucial detail with the reader that is never revealed to the other characters. It is her way of letting us know at the last that the full story of any other life will always be, to some extent, a mystery.

Possession is the February selection for the Best Books Club. Share your comments about this or any other book that interests you by writing to [email protected], or join the conversation on our website at www.jadefalconpress.com.