Possession: A Romance

For Isobel Armstrong


When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that
he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which
he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be
writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very
minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary
course of man's experience. The former—while as a work of art, it must
rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may
swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present
that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing
or creation. . . . The point of view in which this tale comes under the
Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the
very present that is flitting away from us.
—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Preface to The House of the Seven Gables


And if at whiles the bubble, blown too thin,
Seem nigh on bursting,—if you nearly see
The real world through the false,—what do you see?
Is the old so ruined? You find you're in a flock
O' the youthful, earnest, passionate—genius, beauty,
Rank and wealth also, if you care for these:
And all depose their natural rights, hail you,
(That's me, sir) as their mate and yoke-fellow,
Participate in Sludgehood—nay, grow mine,
I veritably possess them—. . .

And all this might be, may be, and with good help
Of a little lying shall be: so Sludge lies!
Why, he's at worst your poet who sings how Greeks
That never were, in Troy which never was,
Did this or the other impossible great thing! . . .
But why do I mount to poets? Take plain prose—
Dealers in common sense, set these at work,
What can they do without their helpful lies?
Each states the law and fact and face o' the thing
Just as he'd have them, finds what he thinks fit,
Is blind to what missuits him, just records
What makes his case out, quite ignores the rest.
It's a History of the World, the Lizard Age,
The Early Indians, the Old Country War,
Jerome Napoleon, whatsoever you please.
All as the author wants it. Such a scribe
You pay and praise for putting life in stones,
Fire into fog, making the past your world.
There's plenty of 'How did you contrive to grasp
The thread which led you through this labyrinth?
How build such solid fabric out of air?
How on so slight foundation found this tale,
Biography, narrative?' or, in other words,
'How many lies did it require to make
The portly truth you here present us with?'
—Robert Browning
from "Mr Sludge, 'the Medium' "



CHAPTER 1

page 3
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 Mitchell, who was sitting waiting
for it in the Reading Room of the London Library. It had been

4
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 possessedAsh's own copy of Vico's Principi 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

5
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.
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

6
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.

Randolph Henry Ash's Proserpina, "gold-skinned in the gloom,"
was also "grain-golden." Also "bound with golden links" which
might have been jewellery or chains. Roland wrote neat crossreferences
under the headings of grain, apples, chain, treasure.
Folded into the page of Vico on which the passage appeared was
a bill for candles on the back of which Ash had written: "The
individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought,
modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of
his ephemeral existence." Roland copied this out and made another
card, on which he interrogated himself: "Query? Is this a quotation

7
or is it Ash himself? Is Proserpina the Species? A very C19 idea. Or
is she the individual? When did he put these papers in here? Are
they pre- or post-The Origin of Species? Not conclusive anyway—
he cd have been interested in Development generally. . . ."
That was eleven-fifteen. The clock ticked, motes of dust danced
in sunlight, Roland meditated on the tiresome and bewitching
endlessness of the quest for knowledge. Here he sat, recuperating a
dead man's reading, timing his exploration by the library clock and
the faint constriction of his belly. (Coffee is not to be had in the
London Library.) He would have to show all this new treasuretrove
to Blackadder, who would be both elated and grumpy, who
would anyway be pleased that it was locked away in Safe 5 and not
spirited away to Robert Dale Owen University in Harmony City,
with so much else. He was reluctant to tell Blackadder. He enjoyed
possessing his knowledge on his own. Proserpina was between pages
288 and 289. Under page 300 lay two folded complete sheets of
writing paper. Roland opened these delicately. They were both
letters in Ash's flowing hand, both headed with his Great Russell
Street address and dated, June 21st. No year. Both began "Dear
Madam," and both were unsigned. One was considerably shorter
than the other.

Dear Madam,
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's wellwrought
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

8
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 hefnds 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. / 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

9
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


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 keptin 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

10
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.

11
When he left, with his green and tomato boxes heaped on his
Selected Ash, they nodded affably from behind the issue desk. They
were used to him. There were notices about mutilation of volumes,
about theft, with which he quite failed to associate himself. He left
the building as usual, his battered and bulging briefcase under his
arm. He climbed on a 14 bus in Piccadilly, and went upstairs,
clutching his booty. Between Piccadilly and Putney, where he lived
in the basement of a decaying Victorian house, he progressed
through his usual states of somnolence, sick juddering wakefulness,
and increasing worry about Val.


CHAPTER 2

___________________

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