The Tortured Poets Department
Possession: A Romance by AS Byatt and one more Ken Russell film
Pretty quickly into AS Byatt’s Possession: A Romance, I could see why someone might not like it, though all of those imagined annoyances were reasons I was having a great time. The reputation of the Booker Prize Winner from 1990 based on contemporaneous reviews seems to be “hit among critics, slog about readers.” All I can say on that matter is that it is the first book I’ve ever been compelled to start over from the beginning while I was in the middle of reading it.
Possession is a dual timeline romance/mystery. The modern timeline in the late 1980s focuses on Roland Michell, a postdoc academic worker in a thankless position at the “Ash Factory,” a cohort of academics studying Randolph Henry Ash. Ash is a fictional Victorian poet, with a cultural impact as big as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and the spirit and style of Robert Browning. While performing an uninspiring archival search of a book owned by Ash, hoping to find any illuminating marginalia, Roland finds a drafted letter by Ash. The intended recipient is not clear, but through context clues and more archival research, Roland is able to identify that the letter was drafted to another Victorian poet, Christabel LaMotte.
LaMotte also has academic followers, but as a minor female poet, research into her work is primarily relegated to gender studies departments. One such academic is haughty and patrician Maud Bailey, a distant relative of LaMotte. Roland meets with her and they use their shared expertise to uncover correspondence between Ash and LaMotte. When they discover a set of letters hidden by LaMotte in her former home, still occupied by her heirs, Roland and Maud conclude that Ash and LaMotte did have an intimate attachment, despite no one knowing that they even knew each other previously. The academics also circle around their own sexual tension and mistrust of each other.
Byatt’s sometimes overwrought prose might rub some readers the wrong way, both in the sections of the modern academics and in the Victorian reproductions. There is a sense that this is Important because it is about Time and Poetry and Love, and you, reader, must know that those things are important, don’t you? One Goodreads review writes that the book is “too clever, and too complicated, by half.” I do tend to like self-gratifying cleverness, both in literary works and in myself, when grappling with something complicated, be it a mystery novel or thinking about the scale of time in a human life. The best way to explain this is that I like when movies and books feel the same way as watching a really good close-up magic trick. Plus it clearly doesn’t take a lot for me to approach things like romance and Victorians with a grave self-seriousness.
The book primarily tells the story of the Victorians through the written ephemera of life. To unlock the timeline of Ash and LaMotte’s relationship, the reader must sift through documents, just as Roland and Maud do with their research. These fictional documents, all created by Byatt, include their letters and their poems, academic papers analyzing their work, diaries from those close to them. The primary source chapters are long and often the reader doesn’t understand the importance of the clues given to them until the perspective switches back to the present-day academics, who are experts in the biographies and works of the Victorians. Maud will contextualize LaMotte’s words to Roland, and he will do the same for her with Ash. Through this process, the reader is clued into the importance of what they just read.
As a romance reader though, the distance between reading and the love story created an uncanny feeling. What I craved throughout the book was a flip to an omniscient narrator in the 19th century. I wanted to see Ash and LaMotte interact and speak and occupy space together as their personal and intimate selves. But for the modern academics in the book and the reader, the times when the Victorian lovers were physically together are the least documented moments—you don’t write letters to someone you are sharing a bed with. The intimacy creates a vacuum of first-hand knowledge for third parties!
I had the same experience when I was reading Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts during the scene where Napoleon and Josephine decide to divorce. Roberts writes about the week-long discussions that took place when Napoleon told Josephine that he would be arranging an annulment. Bausseta, a Napoleonic prefect, reports “violent cries from the Empress Josephine issue from the Emperor’s chamber.” What exact words were spoken between Napoleon and Josephine during this denouement of their relationship are lost. Obviously. It is not a revelation that history demands documentation in order to be reported, but voyeuristically, I craved the conversation nonetheless.
Possession puts into focus that selfishness of desire for knowledge. Roland begins his journey with Ash and LaMotte by pocketing the drafted letter from the library and telling only Maud about the details in the letter, as to keep his boss and academic rivals from getting the scoop on a major Ash revelation. Roland is in dire financial straits and his discovery of this letter would and does help him rise out of post-doc doldrums, but a major theme of the book is that Roland’s interest is not mercenary, even if it is selfish.1 He is attempting, in part, to keep the secret to ensure the safety of the yet-to-be-discovered documents that make up the correspondence, but also there’s this romance of being the person to know something of another. He and Maud understand the intimacy of that and work to keep it theirs for as long as they can.
My immediate parallel while reading for this romance of knowledge was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konisburg, my favorite chapter book from when I was a kid. Claudia and Jamie are a sister and brother who famously run around to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While there, they initially plan to learn one thing about everything in the museum, but then abandon that plan when Claudia becomes fixated on a marble statue of an angel in a new exhibition. The angel might be the work of Michelangelo, but art historians are not sure. After trying to find out all they can at the museum, Claudia and Jamie use the last of their pocket money to go visit Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the donor of the statue, an act they know will end their adventure at the Met. The old philanthropist has an interesting and nonstandard filing system and gives them one hour to peruse her files to discover any clues they want about the origin of the statue.
When they discover documentation of the answer, Jamie, the accountant of the pair, has to be bribed to keep the secret. But Mrs. Frankweiler sees something in Claudia and knows that knowledge of the secret is bribe enough for the girl, explaining to Jamie, “Claudia doesn’t want adventure. She likes baths and feeling comfortable too much for that kind of thing. Secrets are the kind of adventure she needs. Secrets are safe, and they do much to make you different. On the inside where it counts.”
Byatt does flip to that omniscient POV that I craved, revealing the verbal and emotional secrets, a select number of times. The first time and the most jarring is halfway into the book. After Roland and Maud trace Ash’s famed journey through Yorkshire, which they believe LaMotte took with him, despite no direct evidence. They become confident in the assertion on their simulacrum journey, recognizing parallels between the two’s poetry, particularly in relationship to the geography and landscape of the region. A new chapter starts and the reader gets to see Ash and LaMotte together on the coastal journey, confirming some of Roland and Maud’s suspicions, and also revealing intimacies that the researchers have no way of knowing, or ever knowing.
There are two more flips to the omniscient Victorian narrator. I won’t spoil the details revealed in these passages, but they are importantly slightly removed and distinct from the conclusions drawn by Roland and Maud, who fill in the gaps as best they can, but fail to reconstitute an entire truth.
How we deal with depictions of the historic past that we might only know through filters really is a structural question when it comes to art. How do you build something out of nothing and have it still ring true? Byatt has the freedom to do this however she wishes because her Victorian geniuses are fictional as well. But I’ve also been watching all these Ken Russell biopics, none of the ones I have seen are structured exactly the same. For Elgar, the first BBC production Russell made, the visuals are reenactments and the audio is a voiceover, describing Elgar’s life and work. In a sense, this is a staid, proper BBC documentary, except that Russell’s visuals and politics could never be boring and he juxtaposes Elgar’s Victorian marches with historical context that undercuts visions of imperial greatness.
The Debussy Film shows a film crew making a movie about Debussy, so there is all this slippage between the relationships of the cast and crew and the characters they are playing. Salome’s Last Dance is not really a biopic of Oscar Wilde, but he is a character in the film watching a production of his notorious play. The Music Lovers (biopic of Tchaikovsky) and Mahler both have extended, surreal sequences set to the works of their subjects and push the depictions of the lowest moments of each of the composers’ lives to extreme metaphorical violence.
Dante’s Inferno is Russell's biopic most directly connected to Possession through subject matter. The film’s subject is Dante Gabriel Rossetti, primarily his relationship with model and muse Elizabeth Siddal. The Pre-Raphaelites sort of dance around Ash and LaMotte in Possession. The older fictional poet, Ash, is aligned with two poets (Tennyson and Browning) a generation older than the PRB, though the PRB clearly admired Tennyson, given their frequent artistic rendering of his medieval heroines. LaMotte’s life and poetry borrow in part from Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel’s sister, though Emily Dickinson is also an influence, particularly related to LaMotte’s seclusion outside her affair with Ash and her style of writing. In the novel, the members of the PRB are documented admirers of LaMotte’s poetry as well. In the film, a coterie of Pre-Raphaelites drift in and out of their lives, in all stupendous casting, to the point where I could almost always tell who was who before anyone said their names.
The structure of this film splits the difference between Elgar’s silent characters and chatty, documentary-style narrator and The Debussy Film’s meta collapsing of documentary and depiction. The narrator’s voiceover of Dante’s Inferno recedes and reappears intermittently throughout the film, so that sometimes the sensation is “I’m watching Oliver Reed and Judith Paris do a reenactment of Rossetti and Siddal” and sometimes it is “I’m watching Rossetti and Siddal.” Russell plays with this distance in intervals as Rossetti and Siddal fall into their relationship that is marred by her health problems, including an eating disorder and addiction, and his cruelty and own addictive personality. Sometimes even the voiceover is taken over by Reed as Rossetti and the voiceover will transform mid-scene suddenly to diegetic speech.
The most stirring images in Russell’s film are the recurring dream visions related to Rossetti burying his poetry with Siddal and then deciding to exhume her to retrieve the volume of unpublished poetry. Byatt borrows and references this macabre anecdote for the climax of Possession. A rival (uncouth, American) academic illegally breaks into Ash’s tomb to retrieve documents his wife buried with him, which will prove some of the details of the affair with LaMotte. The noble academics that we’ve been following intercept him, post-exhumation. The debate over whether the exhuming is moral or not becomes moot because it has already happened and the academics and their allies read the letters. These are documents that Roland and Maud think will lock everything into place, though Byatt has one last look omniscient look into the past before the book is over that complicates the narrative.
In Rossetti’s case, he published his poems, though their sensual and erotic nature caused controversy and Rossetti’s health and personal relationships rapidly declined in the last decade of his life. In Russell’s film, this decline is connected to a haunting by Siddal, both for her exhumation and Rossetti’s behavior toward her during their relationship. His life and artistic life continue after Lizzie, and any look at the timeline of his paintings would suggest he was more productive with other muses. But his life and work are easy to read through the lens of loss and pain, even with the projected story contradicted by history.
In my newsletter about The Debussy Film (linked above), I talked about my favorite scene that is really an extended reference to Rossetti. The Director takes the Actor to the Tate and draws parallels between Rossetti’s relationship with Siddal and Debussy’s relationship with Gabrielle Dupont in front of a painting by Rossetti based on one of his poems, The Blessed Damozel. The Director’s story is simple: Upper-crust Rossetti betrayed working-class Lizzie and mourned her death and his actions. He writes the poem about her and paints her as the heavenly figure in the poem, looking down at her lover, yearning for a future reunion.
The Director’s story may be neat, but the story is contradicted in multiple places by the historical record. The creation of the poem (written before the couple’s meeting) and painting (the model is a composite of two other well-known Rossetti muses) just do not align with Siddal as the primary muse. But also—what did a mourning, but unfaithful, husband think as he revised and republished a poem about a dead lover in the years after Siddal’s death and as he painted a woman in heaven waiting patiently, even if he used different models? We can connect the intuitive and romantic dots, but they also might lead to false conclusions. At the very least, the story is not tidy, the life is not a narrative. There are no guarantees of cosmic coincidences that can be controlled and destined like they are in Possession.
Byatt gives her novel the subtitle “A Romance” and the first epigraph of the book is from the preface to The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne:
“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 by-gone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.”
Byatt and Russell both reproduce and generate the art beneath the biographies they create, Byatt with her earnest pastiche of the two fictional poets' work and Russell with his celluloid reconstructions of Rossetti’s process of looking at his muses. It’s truth through lying and it’s truth through poetry. The dialogue must be counterfeit to tell the story, but because they’re successful romances, at least for this reader/watcher, the sentiment and art beneath could never be false.
housekeeping, upcoming, and some recommendations
I’m not saying I’m done with Ken Russell, but Ken Russell Winter is over; it is springtime and our warm weather directors await. Tony Scott, Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg, Sofia Coppola, Billy Wilder, things of that nature. If you have any ideas of what I’m going to fixate on this summer, clue me in!
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib: Abdurraqib has been one of my favorite writers for ages. I think the most ringing endorsement I can give is that he is my most gifted author, in that I’m always handing my copies of his books to other people. I’ve bought every one of his books and currently own only this one. The only other author I feel the compulsion to do that with is Frank O’Hara. Next Restorative Romance will be about this book and ostensibly sports romance (but really more sports as romance).
Chels on Whitney, My Love: I finally read a book that Chels has been talking about for ages now. I love their writing and I love Whitney, even if I’m still not sure how I feel about Whitney, My Love. The book, at the very least, is unlike anything I have ever read.
The Talented Mr. Ripley has become my annual “it’s getting a little warm out” movie. It’s easily one of the most Me movies of all time, not unlike the way that I feel Possession is a Me book. Fran on Gwyneth Paltrow’s performance at BW/DR is outstanding and captures so much of why I can’t ever look away from the movie. I’m also Gwyneth as Actress apologist and an Anthony Minghella enthusiast. Gwyneth is on my cover of Possession because she stars in the film adaptation that I have not yet seen.2 Cosmic coincidences!
Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants: When I said I love things that feel like magic tricks, I was not being spurious. I do love close-up magic. Ricky Jay is in my top three all-time great entertainers list (along with Sammy Davis, Jr. and Rita Hayworth). My “if I had oodles of money” home media release project would be a Blu-Ray of this HBO special. In the meantime, it is on YouTube!
I also watched Twister while reading Possession and immediately aligned the antagonist Victorian poetry scholars with Cary Elwes and the Noble Victorian Scholars with Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton. In every industry, even tornado chasing and Victorian poetry, there is corruption and greed, apparently.
The threat of Aaron Eckhart as a Victorian poetry scholar, is daunting, to say the least.
omg I love that Ricky Jay special so much