Who can endure to think of greedy hands furrowing through Dickens's desk for his private papers, for these records of personal sentiment that were his and his only-not meant for public consumption-though now those who will not reread his mar vellous books with true care will sup up his so-called Life in his Letters.
The truth was, Roland thought uneasily, these letters, these busypassionate letters, had never been written for him to read-as Ragnarôk had, as Mummy Possest had, as the Lazarus poem had. Theyhad been written for Christabel LaMotte.
… your intelligence, your marvellous quick wit - so that I may write to you as I write when I am alone, when I write my true writing, which is for everyone and no one - so that in me which has never addressed any private creature, feels at home with you. I say "at home" - what extraordinaryfolly - when you take pleasure in making me feel most unheimlich, as the Germans have it, least of all at home, but always on edge, always apprehensive of failure, always certain that I cannot appreciateyour next striking thought or glancing shaft of wit. But poets don't want homes - do they? - they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds. Now tell me - do you supposewhatI just wrote is the truth or a lie? You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalized love, for this, or that, or the universe - which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, butfor its universal life in every minute particular. I have always supposed it to be a cry of unsatisfied love- my dear - and so it may be indeed-for satisfaction may surfeit it and so it may die. I know many poets who write only when in an exalted state of mind which they compare to being in love, when they do not simply state,that they are in love, that they seek love - -forthis fresh damsel, or that lively young woman - in order to find afresh metaphor, or a new bright vision of things in themselves. And to tell you the truth, I have always believed I cd diagnosethis state of being in love, which they regard as most particular, as inspired by item, one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, item, one graceful attitude of body or mind, item, one female history of some twenty-two yearsfrom, shall we say, 1821-1844 - I have always believed this in love to be something of the most abstract masking itself underthe particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet, who assumes and informs both. I wd have told you - no, I do tell you - -friendship is rarer, more idiosyncratic, more individual and in every way more durable than this Love.
Without this excitement they cannot have their Lyric Verse, and so they get it by any convenient means - and with absolute sincerity - but the Poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems. You see the fork I have impaled myself on - Nevertheless I reiterate - because you will not bridle at my strictures on either manly devotion to a female ideal - or on the duplicity of Poets - but will look at it with your own Poet's eye - askance and most wisely -I write to you as I write when I am alone, with that in me - how else to put it? you will know, I trustyou know - with that which makes, which is the Maker.
I should add that my poems do not, I think, spring from the Lyric Impulse - but from something restless and myriad-minded and partial and observing and analytic and curious, my dear, which is more like themind of the prose master Balzac, whom, being a Frenchwoman, and blessedly less hedged about with virtuous prohibitions than English female gentility, you know and understand. What makes me a Poet, and not a novelist - is to do with the singing ofthe Language itself. For the difference between poets and novelists is this - that the former write for the life ofthe language - and the latter write for the betterment of the world.
And youfor the revelation to mere humans ofsome strange unguessed-at other world, is that not so? TheCity ofIs, thereverse ofPar-is, the towers in the water not the air, the drowned roses and flying fish andother paradoxical elementals - you see -I come to know you - I shall feel myway into your thought - as a hand into a glove - to steal your own metaphor and torture it cruelly. But if you wish - you may keep your gloves clean and scented and folded away - you may - only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hopand skip and sudden starts of your ink…
Roland looked up at his partner or opponent. She seemed to be getting on with an enviable certainty and speed. Fine frown-lines fanned her brow.
The stained glass worked to defamiliarise her. It divided her into cold, brightly coloured fires. One cheek moved in and out of a pool of grape-violet as she worked. Her brow flowered green and gold. Rose-red and berry-red stained her pale neck and chin and mouth. Eyelids were purple-shadowed. The green silk of her scarf glittered with turreted purple ridges. Dust danced in a shadowy halo round her shifting head, black motes in straw gold, invisible solid matter appearing like pinholes in a sheet of solid colour. He spoke and she turned through a rainbow, her pale skin threading the various lights.
"I'm sorry to interrupt-I just wondered-do you know about the city of Is? I.S. I.S?"
She shook off her concentration as a dog shakes off water.
"It's a Breton legend. It was drowned in the sea for its wickedness. It was ruled by Queen Dahud, the sorceress, daughter of King Gradlond. The women there were transparent, according to some versions. Christabel wrote a poem."
"May I look?"A quick glance. I'm using this book."She pushed it across the table.
Tallahassee Women Poets. Christabel LaMotte: a Selection of Narrative and Lyric Poems, ed.Leonora Stern. The Sapphic Press, Boston. The purple cover bore a white linear image of two mediaeval women, bending to embrace each other across a fountain in a square basin. They both wore veiled headdresses, heavy girdles and long plaits.
He scanned The Drowned City. This had a prefatory note by Leonora Stern.
In this poem, as in "The Standing Stones," LaMotte drew on her native Breton mythology, which she had known from childhood. The theme was of particular interest to a woman writer, as it might be said to reflect a cultural conflict between two types of civilisation, the Indo-European patriarchy of Gradlond and the more primitive, instinctive, earthy paganism of his sorceress daughter, Dahud, who remains immersed when he has taken his liberating leap to dry land at Quimper. The women's world of the underwater city is the obverse of the male-dominated technological industrial world of Paris or Par-is, as the Bretons have it. They say that Is will come to the surface when Paris is drowned for its sins.
LaMotte's attitude to Dahud's so-called crimes is interesting. Her father, Isidore LaMotte, in his Breton Myths andLegends, does not hesitate to refer to Dahud's "perversions," though without specifying. Nor does LaMotte specify…
He flicked across the pages of the text.
There are none blush on earth, y-wis
As do dames of the Town of Is.
The red blood runs beneath their skin
And feels its way and flows within,
And men can see, as through a glass