Possession (26 page)

T
HE
C
ORRESPONDENCE

Dear Miss LaMotte
,

I do not know whether to be more encouraged or cast down by your letter. The essential point in it is “if you care to write again,” for by that permission you encourage me more than by your wish not to be seen—which I must respect—you cast me down. And you send a poem, and observe wisely that poems are worth all the cucumber-sandwiches in the world. So they are indeed—and yours most particularly—but you may imagine the perversity of the poetic imagination and its desire to feed on
imagined
cucumber-sandwiches, which, since they are positively not to be had, it pictures to itself as a form of English
manna—
oh the perfect green circles—oh the delicate hint of salt—oh the fresh pale butter—oh, above all, the soft white crumbs and golden crust of the new bread—and thus, as in all aspects of life, the indefatigable fancy idealises what could be snapped up and swallowed in a moment’s restrained greed, in sober fact
.

But you must know that I am happy to forgo the sandwiches, dreamed or soberly chewed, for your delightful poem—which, as you say, has a note of savagery proper to the habits of true spiders as they have lately been observed. Do you wish to extend your metaphor of entrapment or enticement to Art? I have read other of your poems of Insect Life, and marvelled at the way they combined the brilliance and fragility of those winged things—or
creeping—with something too of the biting and snapping and devouring that may be seen under a microscope. It would be a brave poet indeed who would undertake a true description of the Queen Bee—or Wasp—or Ant—as we now know them to be—having for centuries supposed these centres of communal worship and activity to be Male Rulers—I somehow imagine you do not share your Sex’s revulsion at such life-forms—or what I imagine to be a common revulsion—

I have in my head a kind of project of a long poem on insect life of my own. Not lyric, like yours, but a dramatised monologue such as those I have already written on Mesmer or Alexander Selkirk or Neighbour Pliable—I do not know if you know these poems and shall be glad to send them to you if you do not. I find I am at ease with other imagined minds—bringing to life
, restoring
in some sense to vitality, the whole vanished men of other times, hair, teeth, fingernails, porringer, bench, wineskin, church, temple, synagogue and the incessant weaving labour of the marvellous brain inside the skull—making its patterns, its most particular sense of what it sees and learns and believes. It seems important that these
other lives
of mine should span many centuries and as many places as my limited imagination can touch. For all I am is a nineteenth-century gentleman plumb in the midst of smoky London—and what is peculiar to
him
is to know just how much stretches away from his vanishing
pin-point
of observation—before and around and after—whilst all the time he is what he is, with his whiskered visage and his shelves full of Plato and Feuerbach, St Augustine and John Stuart Mill
.

I run on, and have not communicated to you the subject of my insect-poem, which is to be the short and miraculous—and on the whole tragic—life of Swammerdam, who discovered in Holland the optic glass which revealed to us the endless reaches and ceaseless turmoil of the
infinitely small
just as the great Galileo turned his optic tube on the majestic motions of the planets and beyond them the silent spheres of the
infinitely great.
Are you acquainted with his story? May I send you my version when I have worked it out? If it comes to good? (As I know it will, for it is so full of tiny particular facts and objects in the observation of which the animation of the human mind inheres—and you will ask—my mind or his?—and I do not know, to tell the truth. He invented marvellous tiny instruments for peering and prying into the essence of insect life, and all made of fine ivory, as less destructive and harmful than harsh metal—Lilliputian needles he made, before Lilliput was thought of—faery needles. And I have merely words—and the dead
husks of other men’s words—but I shall bring it off—you need not believe me yet, but you shall see.)

Now—you say I may have an essay on the Everlasting Nay—or on Schleiermacher’s Veil of Illusion or the Milk of Paradise—or what I will. What prodigality—how am I to chuse? I think I will not have the Everlasting Nay, but remain still in hope of eventual cool green circles—to go with the Milk of Paradise and a modicum of Bohea—and I want from you not illusion but truth. So perhaps you will tell me more about your Fairy Project—if it may be spoken of without hurting your thinking—There are times when to speak—or to write—is helpful, and times when it is most nugatory—if you would rather
not
pursue our conversation I shall understand. But I hope for a letter in answer to all my rambling nonsense—which I hope has given no offence to one I hope to know better
.

Yours very truly
R. H. Ash

Dear Mr Ash
,

I am ashamed to think that what you may reasonably have taken for coyness—or even churlishness—in myself should have produced such a generous and
sparkling
mixture of wit and information from you. Thank you. If all persons to whom I
refused
mere vegetable aliment were so to regale me with intellectual nourishment I should remain obdurate in the matter of sandwiches till all eternity—but most petitioners are content with one denial—And that is truly for the best, for we live so very quietly, we two solitary ladies, and run our little household—we have our sweet daily rhythms which are not disturbed, and our circumscribed little independence—on account of being wholly
unremarkable—
your delicacy will see how it is—I speak soberly for once—we neither call nor receive callers—we met, you and I, because Crabb Robinson was a friend of my dear father—as whose friend was he not? I did not feel it in my power to refuse a request
in that name—
and yet I was sorry—for I do not go out into society—the lady protests too much, you will say—but she was moved by your green circular visions of contentment, and did wish, briefly, that it was in her power to give a more satisfactory answer. But it would have been regretted, it would—not only by me, but also by yourself
.

I was greatly flattered by your good opinion of my little poem. I am uncertain as to how to answer your question on entrapment or enticement as
qualities of Art—of Ariachne’s art they may be—and by extension of merely fragile or glistening female productions—but not surely of your own great works. I was quite shocked that you might suppose I did not know the Poem on Mesmer—or that on Selkirk on his terrible island, face to face with an unrelenting Sun and an apparently unresponsive Creator—or that too on Neighboour Pliable, and his religious
versatility
or tergiversations. I should have told a small Fib—and said I knew them not—for the grace of receiving them at their Author’s hands—but one must keep truth—in small things as in great—and this was no small thing. You are to know that we have
all
your volumes, ranged forbiddingly side by side—and that they are often opened and often discussed in this little house as in the great world
.

You are to know too—or maybe you are not—how should I say this, to you with whom my acquaintance is so recent—and yet if not to you, to
whom—
and I have just written, one must keep truth, and this is so central a truth—you are to know then, after all, for I must take my courage in my hands—that your great poem
Ragnarök
was the occasion of quite the worst crisis in the life of my simple religious faith, that I have ever experienced, or hope to experience. It was not that anywhere in that poem you attacked the Christian religion—which indeed was not made mention of with complete Poetic Propriety—and moreover you speak never, in your poetry, with your own voice, or from your own heart
directly.
(That you
question
is clear—the creator of Pliable, of Lazarus, of the heretic Pelagius is as wise as the serpent about all the most subtle and searching questionings and probings of the Grounds of our Belief that in our time have been most persistently and unremittingly explored. You know the “ambages and sinuosities” of the Critical Philosophy, as your Augustine says of your Pelage—for whom I have a weakness, for was he not a Breton, as I in part am, and did he not wish sinful men and women to be nobler and freer than they were?…) I digress wildly from
Ragnarök
and its pagan Day of Judgment and its pagan interpretation of the mystery of the Resurrection, and the New Heaven and the New Earth. It seemed to me you were saying “Such Tales men tell and have told—they do not differ, save in emphasis, here and there.” Or even “Men tell what they Desire shall be or might be, not what it is divinely, transcendently decreed Must Be and Is.” It seemed to me you made Holy Scripture no more than another Wonder Tale—by dint of such writing, such force of imagining. I confuse myself, I shall not go on, I ask your pardon if what I have said appears incomprehensible to you. I doubted and I admitted Doubts I have had to live with since. Enough of that
.

I did not mean to write all this. Can you doubt that I shall be delighted to receive your
Swammerdam—
if, as you come to the end of it, you should still have an inclination to make a copy and send it here.—I cannot promise intelligent
criticism—
but you cannot be in need of that—a receptive and a Thoughtful
reading
you are assured of. I was most interested in what you tell me of his discovery of the microscope—and his ivory needles for examining the minuter Forms of Life. We in this house have done a little work with microscopes and glasses—but We have a very womanly reluctance to take life—you will find no pinned and chloroformed
collection
Here—only a few upturned Jars housing temporary guests—a large House-spider—and a Moth in chrysalis form—a voracious Worm with many legs which we have been wholly unable to identify and which is Possessed of a Restless Demon—or hatred of Jar-panopticons
.

I send two more Poems. They form part of a series on Psyche—in modern form—that poor doubting Girl—who took Heavenly Love for a Serpent
.

I have not answered yr question about my Fairy Poem. I am deeply flattered—and no less deeply alarmed—that you remember it so—for I spoke—or affected to speak—idly on the matter, as about something which might be pleasant to Toy with—or pretty to investigate—one of these unoccupied days—

Whereas in verity—I have it in my head to write an epic—or if not an epic, still a Saga or Lay or great mythical Poem—and how can a poor breathless woman with no
staying-power
and only a Lunar Learning confess such an ambition to the author of the
Ragnarök?
But I have the most curious certainty that you are to be trusted in this matter—that you will not mock—nor deluge the fairy of the fountain with Cold Water
.

Enough. The Poems are enclosed. I have many more on the subject of metamorphosis—one of the problems of our time—and all Times, rightly known. Dear Sir—forgive my excited prolixity—and send, when you may, if you will, your
Swammerdam
to edify

Your sincere well-wisher
C. LaMotte

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M
ETAMORPHOSIS

P
SYCHE