I am writing now, however, not onaccount ofthis, norbecause of your unexplained absencefrom the British Library, but becauseI have had urgent telephone callsfrom Professor de Groot in Amsterdam, Professor Liu inHong Kong and Professor Valverde in Barcelona, all of whom are anxious to appoint you. I would not wish you to lose these chances. I have assured them that you will reply assoon as you return, andthat you areavailable. But I need instruction as to your plans in order to know how to protect your interests.
I hope you are not ill.
Yours
James Blackadder
After a moment's needled irritation, in which he heard the whole of this message in Blackadder's most sarcastic Scots, Roland realised that this was quite possibly a very generous letter-certainly kinder than he deserved. Unless it contained a hidden Machiavellian plan to re-establish contact and then savage him? This seemed unlikely; the threatening and repressive demon in the BM basement seemed in this new light partly a figment of his own subjected imagination. Blackadder had held his face in his hands and had seemed not to care to help. Now Roland could be free of him-and he was actively helping, not hindering, that freedom. Roland thought over the whole thing. Why had he run away? Partly because of Maud-the discovery had been half hers, neither of them could have shared with anyone else without betraying the other. He decided not to think about Maud. Not yet, not here, not in this context.
He began restlessly to walk about the flat. He thought of telephoning Maud to tell her about his letters and then decided against it. He needed to be alone and to think.
He became aware of a strange sound in the flat-a kind of sawing and scraping, as though someone was trying to force his way in. It stopped and then started again. Roland listened. The scraping was accompanied by a strange intermittent moaning cry. After a moment's fear, he worked out that the cats were scratching at the matting outside his front door. In the garden, a full-throated feline howl rose and was answered from the area. He wondered idly how many they were and what would become of them.
He thought about Randolph Henry Ash. The pursuit of the letters had distanced him from Ash as they had come closer to Ash's life. In the days of his innocence Roland had been not a hunter but a reader, and had felt superior to Mortimer Cropper, and in some sense equal to Ash, or anyway related to Ash, who had written for him to read intelligently, as best he could. Ash had not written the letters for Roland or for anyone else but Christabel LaMotte. Roland's find had turned out to be a sort of loss. He took the draft letters out of their safe place, inside a file on his desk marked Notes on Aeneid VI, and read them again.
Since our extraordinary conversation I have thought of nothing else.
Since our pleasant and unexpected conversation I have thought of little else.
He remembered the day those dark leaves had flown out of R. H. Ash's Vico. He remembered looking up Vico's Proserpine. He remembered he had been reading Ash's Golden Apples and had been looking for a connection between Vico's Proserpina and Ash's version of her in that poem. He took down his Ash from the shelf, sat at his desk, and read.
It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, amise-enabîme even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of good burgundy. And yet, natures such as Roland's are at their most alert and heady when reading is violently yet steadily alive. (What an amazing word "heady" is, enpassant, suggesting both acute sensuous alertness and its opposite, the pleasure of the brain as opposed to the viscera-though each is implicated in the other, as we know very well, with both, when they are working.)
Think of this, as Roland thought of it, rereading The Garden of Proserpina for perhaps the twelfth, or maybe even the twentieth, time, a poem he "knew" in the sense that he had already experienced all its words, in their order, and also out of order, in memory, in selective quotation or misquotation-in the sense also, that he could predict, at times even recite, those words that were next to come, or more remotely approaching, the place where his mind rested, like clawed bird feet on twig. Think of this-that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser's golden apples in the Faerie Queene, Proserpina's garden, glistening bright among the place's ashes and cinders, may have seen in his mind's eye, apple of his eye, the golden fruit of the Primavera, may have seen Paradise Lost, in the garden where Eve recalled Pomona and Proserpina. He was alone when he wrote and he was not alone then, all these voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places, an Irish castle, an unseen cottage, elastic-walled and grey round blind eyes.
There are readings-of the same text-that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are-believe it-impersonal readings-where the mind's eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind's ear hears them sing and sing.
Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark-readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it wasalways there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.
Roland read, or reread, The Golden Apples, as though the words were living creatures or stones of fire. He saw the tree, the fruit, the fountain, the woman, the grass, the serpent, single and multifarious in form. He heard Ash's voice, certainly his voice, his own unmistakable voice, and he heard the language moving around, weaving its own patterns, beyond the reach of any single human, writer or reader. He heard Vico saying that the first men were poets and the first words were names that were also things, and he heard his own strange, necessary meaningless lists, made in Lincoln, and saw what they were. He saw too that Christabel wTas the Muse and Proserpina and that she was not, and this seemed to be so interesting and apt, once he had understood it, that he laughed aloud. Ash had started him on this quest and he had found the clue he had started with, and all was cast off, the letter, the letters, Vico, the apples, his list.