Authors: A.S. Byatt
Babel Tower (2 page)
The Profumo scandal and the Moors Murders were important public events which helped to define the moral atmosphere of “swinging London” and the “permissive society” in England in the 1960s. Other important events were the prosecution and acquittal of the publishers of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
in 1960 and the prosecution and conviction of the publishers of
Last Exit to Brooklyn
in 1967. The
Last Exit
decision was reversed on appeal. I have taken some legal details from that trial, particularly the unusual decision by the judge to hear the defence witnesses before those for the prosecution, and also the fact that it was tape-recorded in full on behalf of the publishers, who later used their transcript to prepare the appeal.
John Profumo was Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillan’s government. In 1963 there were rumours that he had slept with a prostitute, Christine Keeler, who had also slept with a Soviet naval attaché, Eugene Ivanov. National security was thought to be threatened by this. Profumo made a personal statement to the House of Commons in March, denying the allegations, but resigned in June, confessing that his statement had been a lie. Also in June Christine Keeler and another young woman, Marilyn (Mandy) Rice-Davis, were involved in the trial of Dr. Stephen Ward, osteopath and artist, who was convicted in August of living on their immoral earnings, but killed himself on the day of the verdict. The trial made public figures of the two composed and attractive young women, and aroused a swarm of rumours of sleaze and corruption in high places, which contributed to the fall of the Conservative government. Lord Denning, an eminent judge, wrote a report on the “Profumo Affair” dealing solemnly with, among other things, rumours that a government minister had attended sadistic orgies at Stephen Ward’s house in “a black leather mask which laces up at the back,” and that there were parties where “the man who serves dinner is nearly naked except for a small square lace apron round his waist such as a waitress might wear.”
Ian Brady was found guilty in 1966 of the murders of Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey, and John Kilbride. Myra Hindley was found guilty of murdering Evans and Downey, not guilty of murdering Kilbride, but guilty of abetting Brady in that murder. The murders were particularly horrific because they seemed to have been committed for the pleasure of murdering. Brady did have the works of de Sade, amongst others, in his library. The victims were buried on the Moors, and Hindley later confessed that further victims were still hidden there. Both Brady and Hindley are still in prison.
Her Telepathic-Station transmits thought-waves
the second-rate, the bored, the disappointed,
and any of us when tired or uneasy
are tuned to receive.
So, though unlisted in atlas or phone-book,
Her Garden is easy to find. In no time
one reaches the gate over which is written
large:
MAKE LOVE NOT WAR
• • •
She does not brutalise Her victims (beasts could
bite or bolt), She simplifies them to flowers,
sessile fatalists who don’t mind and only
can talk to themselves.
All but a privileged Few, the elite She
guides to Her secret citadel, the Tower
where a laugh is forbidden and
DO HARM AS
THOU WILT
is the Law
.
Dear little not-so-innocents, beware of
Old Grandmother Spider; rump Her endearments.
She’s not quite as nice as She looks, nor you quite
as tough as you think.
W. H. Auden, “Circe”
La Nature n’a qu’une voix, dîtes-vous, qui parle à tous les hommes.
Pourquoi donc que ces hommes pensent différemment? Tout, d’après cela, devait être unanime et d’accord, et cet accord ne sera jamais pour l’anthropophagie
.
Mme. de Sade, Letter to her husband
I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.
Nietzsche
It might begin:
The thrush has his anvil or altar on one fallen stone in a heap, gold and grey, roughly squared and shaped, hot in the sun and mossy in the shade. The massive rubble is in a clearing on a high hill. Below is the canopy of the forest. There is a spring, of course, and a little river flowing from it.
The thrush appears to be listening to the earth. In fact he is looking, with his sideways stare, for his secret prey in the grass, in the fallen leaves. He stabs, he pierces, he carries the shell with its soft centre to his stone. He lifts the shell, he cracks it down. He repeats. He repeats. He extracts the bruised flesh, he sips, he juggles, he swallows. His throat ripples. He sings. His song is liquid syllables, short cries, serial trills. His feathers gleam, creamy and brown-spotted. He repeats. He repeats.
Characters are carved on the stones. Maybe runes, maybe cuneiform, maybe ideograms of a bird’s eye or a creature walking, or pricking spears and hatchets. Here are broken alphabets, α and ∞, C and T, A and G. Round the stones are the broken shells, helical whorls like empty ears in which no hammer beats on no anvil. They nestle. Their sound is brittle. Their lips are pure white (
Helix hortensis
) and shining black (
Helix nemoralis
). They are striped and coiled, gold, rose, chalk, umber; they rattle together as the quick bird steps among them. In the stones are the coiled remains of their congeners, millions of years old.
The thrush sings his limited lovely notes. He stands on the stone, which we call his anvil or altar, and repeats his song. Why does his song give us such pleasure?
Or it might begin with Hugh Pink, walking in Laidley Woods in Herefordshire in the autumn of 1964. The woods are mostly virgin woodland, crowded between mountainsides, but Hugh Pink is walking along an avenue of ancient yews, stretched darkly over hills and across valleys.
His thoughts buzz round him like a cloud of insects, of varying colours, sizes and liveliness. He thinks about the poem he is writing, a rich red honeycomb of a poem about a pomegranate, and he thinks about how to make a living. He does not like teaching in schools, but that is how he has recently made some sort of living, and he reconstructs the smells of chalk and ink and boys, the noise of corridors and tumult, amongst the dark trees. The wood floor smells pungent and rotting. He thinks of Rupert Parrott, the publisher, who might pay him to read manuscripts. He does not think he will pay much, but it might be enough. He thinks of the blooded pink jelly of pomegranates, of the word “pomegranate,” round and spicy. He thinks of Persephone and is moved by the automatic power of the myth and then repelled by caution. The myth is too big, too easy, too much for his pomegranate. He must be oblique. Why is there this necessity, now, to be oblique? He thinks of Persephone as he used to imagine her when he was a boy, a young white girl in a dark cavern, before a black table, with a gold plate containing a heap of seeds. He had supposed the six seeds she ate were dry seeds, when he was a boy and had never seen a pomegranate. Her head is bowed, her hair is pale gold. She knows she should not eat, and eats. Why? It is not a question you can ask. The story compels her to eat. As he thinks, his eyes take in the woods, brambles and saplings, flaming spindle-berries and gleaming holly leaves. He thinks that he will remember Persephone and holly, and suddenly sees that the soft
quadruple rosy seed of the spindle is not unlike the packed seeds of the pomegranate. He thinks about spindles, touches on Sleeping Beauty and her pricked finger, goes back to Persephone, dreaming girls who have eaten forbidden bloody seeds. Not the poem he is writing. His poem is about fruit flesh. His feet make a regular rhythm on fallen needles and the blanket of soft decay. He will remember the trees for the images in his mind’s eye, and the images for the trees. The brain does all sorts of work, Hugh Pink thinks. Why does it do this sort so well, so luxuriously?
At the end of the ride, when he comes to it, is a stile. Beyond the stile are rough fields and hedges. On the other side of the stile are a woman and a child, standing quietly. The woman is wearing country clothes, jodhpurs, boots, a hacking jacket. She has a green headsquare knotted under her chin, in the style of the Queen and her royal sister. She leans on the fence, without putting her weight on it, looking into the wood. The child, partly obscured by the steps of the stile, appears to be clinging to the leg of the woman, both of whose arms are on the top bar of the fence.