Possession (27 page)

Dear Miss LaMotte
,

How generous of you, after all, to write so promptly and so fully. I hope my answer is not too precipitate—I would not for the world harass you importunately—but there was so much of interest in what you said that I should like to set my thoughts down whilst they are fresh and clear. Your poems are delightful and original—if we were face to face I should hazard a guess or two at the deeper reaches of riddling allegory in the
Psyche—
which I have not the courage or effrontery to set down in black and white. You begin so meekly, with your cast-down princess and useful creatures—and end quite the opposite, with a moral dispensation—from what? is the difficulty—from monarchy—or the Love of Man—or Eros as opposed to Agape—or the malignity of Venus? Is the
social affection
of the anthill truly a better thing than the love of men and women? Well, you are to be the judge—the poem is yours and a fine one—and there is enough evidence in human history of topless towers set on fire for a passionate whim—or poor souls enslaved by loveless unions imposed by parental will and the dictates of lineage—or friends slaying each other—Eros is a bad and fickle little godhead—and I have quite talked myself round to your way of thinking, Miss LaMotte, without still wholly knowing what that is
.

Now I have given your poems the priority which is their
due,
I must tell you that I have been in some distress to think that my poem had occasioned doubt in you. A secure faith—a true prayerfulness—is a beautiful and a
true
thing—however we must nowadays construe it—and not to be disturbed by the meanderings and queryings of the finite brain of R. H. Ash or any other puzzled student of our Century
. Ragnarök
was written in all honesty in the days when I did not myself question Biblical certainties—or the faith handed down by my fathers and theirs before them. It was read differently
by some—
the lady who was to become my wife was included in these readers—and I was at the time startled and surprised that my Poem should have been construed as any kind of infidelity—for I meant it rather as a reassertion of the Universal Truth of the living presence of Allfather (under whatever Name) and of the hope of Resurrection from whatever whelming disaster in whatever form. When Odin, disguised as the Wanderer, Gangrader, in my Poem, asks the Giant Wafthrudnir what was the word whispered by the Father of the gods in the ear of his dead son, Baldur, on his funeral pyre—the young man I was—most devoutly—meant the word to be
—Resurrection.
And he, that young poet, who is and is not myself, saw no difficulty in supposing that the dead Norse God of Light might
prefigure—or figure—the dead Son of the God Who is the Father of Christendom. But, as you perceived, this is a two-handed engine, a slicing weapon that cuts both ways, this of figuration—to say that the Truth of the Tale is in the meaning, that the Tale but symbolises an eternal verity, is one step on the road to the parity of all tales.… And the existence of the same Truths in all Religions is a great argument both for and against the paramount Truthfulness of One
.

Now—I must make confession. I have written and destroyed an earlier answer to your letter in which
—not
disingenuously—I urged you to hold fast by your faith—not to involve yourself in the “ambages and sinuosities” of the Critical Philosophy—and wrote, what may not be nonsense, that women’s minds, more intuitive and purer and less beset with torsions and stresses than those of mere males—may hold on to truths securely that we men may lose by much questioning, much of
that
mechanical futility; “A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender it”—this was the wise saying of Sir Thomas Browne—and I would not be instrumental in demanding the keys of
that
city from you in pursuit of a false claim
.

But I thought—and I was right in thinking, was I not?—that you would not be best pleased to be exempted from argument by an appeal to your superior Intuition and an abandoning of the field by me?

I do not know why—or how—but I do know wholeheartedly that it is so—so I cannot prevaricate with you, and worse, cannot leave decently undiscussed matters of such import. So you will have remarked—you so sharply intelligent—that I have nowhere in this letter claimed that I now hold the simple or innocent views of the young Poet of
Ragnarök.
And if I tell you what views I do hold—what will you think of me? Will you continue to communicate your thoughts to me? I do not know—I only know that I am under some compulsion of truthfulness
.

I am not become any kind of an Atheist, nor yet positivist, at least, not as to the extreme religious position of those who make a religion out of Humanity—for although I wish my fellow men well, and find them endlessly interesting, yet there are more things in Heaven and Earth than were created for their, that is our, benefit. The impulses to religion might be the need to trust—or the capacity for wonder—and my own religious feelings have always been inspired more by the latter. I find it hard to shift without the Creator—the more we see and understand, the more amazement there is in this strangely interrelated
Heap
of things—which is yet not disordered. But
I go too fast. And I cannot, I must not, burden you with a complete confession of what are in any case a very confused, very incoherent, indeed inchoate set of ideas, perceptions, half-truths, useful fictions, struggled for and not possessed
.

The truth is—my dear Miss LaMotte—that we live in an
old
world—a tired world—a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning—by the young Plotinus or the ecstatic John on Patmos—are now obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest, by thick horny growths over that clear vision—as moulting serpents, before they burst forth with their new flexible-brilliant skins, are blinded by the crusts of their old one—or, we might say, as the lovely lines of
faith
that sprung up in the aspiring towers of the ancient ministers and abbeys are both worn away by time and grime, softly shrouded by the smutty accretions of our industrial cities, our wealth, our discoveries themselves, our Progress. Now, I cannot believe, being no Manichee, that He, the Creator, if he exists, did not make us and our world
that
which we are. He made us
curious,
did he not?—he made us questioning—and the Scribe of Genesis did well to locate the source of all our misery in that greed for knowledge which has also been our greatest spur—in some sense—to good. To good
and
evil. We have more of both those, I must believe, than our primitive parents
.

Now, my great question is, has He
withdrawn Himself
from our vision so that by diligence of our own matured minds we might find out His Ways—now so far away from us—or have we by sin, or by some necessary thickening of our skins before the new stages of the metamorphosis—have we reached some stage which
necessitates
our consciousness of our ignorance and distance—and is this
necessity
health or sickness?

I was in
Ragnarök—
where Odin, the Almighty, becomes a mere wandering Questioner in Middle-Earth—and is necessarily destroyed with all his works on the last battlefield at the end of the last terrible Winter—I was feeling towards some such question—unknowing—

And then there is the whole question of what kind of Truth may be conveyed in a wonder-tale, as you rightly named it—but I trespass terribly on your patience—which may by now be at an end with me—I may have put myself beyond the pale of your keen and discerning attention—

And I have not answered what you said of your Epic. Well—if you still care for my views—as why should you? You are a Poet and in the end must care only for your own views—why not an Epic? Why not a mythic drama
in twelve books? I can see no reason in Nature why a woman might not write such a poem as well as a man—if she but set her mind to it
.

Does this sound brusque? It is because it distresses me that you should even—with your gifts—suppose an apology of any kind was needed for the Project—

I am very well aware that an Apology is needed for my tone throughout this letter, which I shall not re-read, for it is out of my power to recast it again. So it comes to you rough, unhouseled, unannealed—and I shall wait—resigned but anxious—to see if you feel any response is possible—

Yours,
R. H. Ash

Dear Mr Ash
,

If I held Silence—too long—forgive me. I deliberated indeed not
whether
but
what—
I might Reply—since you do me the honour—I had almost writ, the
painful
honour—but indeed it is not—that is
not
so—of trusting me with your true opinions. I am no Miss in an evangelical novel to fly into a fine frenzy of
—elevated—
Rebuff or Rebuttal at expressions of honest doubt—and am partially in accord with you—Doubt, doubt is endemic to our life in this world at this time. I do not Dispute your vision of our historical Situation—we are far from the Source of Light—and we know Things—that make a Simple Faith—hard to hold, hard to grasp, hard to wrestle
.

You write much—of the Creator—whom you do not name Father—save in yr Norse analogy. But of the true tale of the Son you say wondrous little—and yet
that
lies at the Centre of our living faith—the Life and Death of God made man, our true Friend and Saviour, the model of our conduct, and our hope, in his Rising from the Dead, of a future life for all of us, without which the failing and manifest injustice of our earthly span would be an intolerable mockery. But I write—like a Sermon-Preacher—which we Women are not—it is Decreed—fitted to be—and tell you no more than you must have endlessly—in your wisdom—already cogitated
.

And yet—could we have conceived that Sublime Model, that Supreme Sacrifice—if it were not so?

I could adduce against you—the Evidence of your own Lazarus-poem—whose riddling title you must some day expound to me in its mystery
. Déjà-Vu or the Second Sight—
indeed. How are we to take that? My
friend—my companion and I have lately become interested in psychic phenomena—we have attended some local lectures on unusual States of Mind—and Spirit manifestations—we have even been bold enough to sit in at a seance conducted by a Mrs Lees—Now Mrs Lees is convinced that the phenomena of
Déjà-Vu—
whereby the experient is convinced that a present experience is only a Repetition of what has already, perhaps frequently, been lived through before—is Evidence of some circularity of inhuman time—of Another Adjacent World where things eternally
are
with no change or decay. And that the well-attested Phenomena of Second Sight—the gift of pre-Vision, or foretelling or prophecy—is another Dipping into that forever refreshed Continuum. So—in this view yr poem wd seem to be suggesting that dead Lazarus moved in and out of Eternity again—“from Time to Time” as you wrote in that poem—if I understand you—and now sees Time—from the perspective of Eternity. It is a conceit worthy of you—and now I come to know you better—his risen vision of the miraculous Nature of the Minute Particulars of Life—the Goat’s yellow barred Eye—the bread on the Platter with the scaly Fishes waiting for the oven—all these are to you the
essence of living,—
and it is only to your perplexed narrator that the living-dead man’s gaze appears Indifferent—for truly he sees all to have value
—All—

Before I met Mrs Lees—I took your Second Sight more generally—as a Prefiguring of that Second Coming we await—little grains of sand shall be sifted and counted, as the hairs on our heads, in the eye of the dead man—

The Son of God speaks not in your poem. But the Roman Scribe who tells the tale—he the census-taker, the collector of minor facts—is he not amazed despite his own inclinations—despite his Prosaic mental habits of officialdom—by the effect of the presence of the Man on that small community of believers—who are cheerfully ready to Die for Him—and as ready to live in penury—“ ’tis all one to thee” he writes, puzzled—but we are not puzzled—for
He
has oped to them the Door of Eternity and they have glimpsed the light within—that illuminates the loaves and fishes—is not that so?

Or am I too Simple? Was He—so loved, so absent, so cruelly dead—merely Man?

You have most dramatically presented the Love of Him,—the Need of his Comfort—now Absent—among the women of Lazarus’ household—the ceaselessly active Martha and the visionary Mary, each in her way aware
of what His Presence once meant—though Martha sees it as household decorum—and Mary sees it as Lost Light—and Lazarus sees—only
what
he sees—momently—

Oh what a puzzle. Now I come to the end of my clumsy apprentice adumbration of your masterly monologue—have I described the liveliness of Living Truth—or the dramatisation merely—of faith—of
Need?

Will you say what you mean? Are you like the Apostle, all things to all men? Where—where have I led—myself?

Tell me—He Lives—for you

Well, my dear Miss Lamotte, I am tied to the stake and I must stay the course—though in other respects dissimilar enough from Macbeth. I was first relieved to have your letter, and to see that I was not judged excommunicado and then, on better judgment making, I weighed it for some time, turning it this way and that in case it should after all speak Brimstone and Ashes to me
.

And when I came to open it, there was such generosity of spirit, such fervent faith and such subtlety of understanding of what I had written—I mean not only my dubious letter, but my poem on Lazarus. You know how it is, being yourself a poet—one writes such and such a narrative, and thinks as one goes along—here’s a good touch—this concept modifies that—will it not be too obvious to the generality?—too thick an impasto of the Obvious—one has almost a disgust at the too-apparent meaning—and then the general public gets hold of it, and pronounces it at the same time too heartily simple and too loftily incomprehensible—and it is clear only that whatever one had hoped to convey is lost in mists of impenetrability—and slowly it
loses its life—
in one’s own mind, as much as in its readers’
.