Possession

by A.S. Byatt

All men shrink From dire Medusa and her writhing locks. Who weeps for Scylla in her cave of bones, Thrashing her tail and howling for her fate With yelping hound-mouths, though she once was fair, Loved by the sea-god for her mystery Daughter of Hecate, beautiful as Night? Who weeps the fall of Hydra’s many heads?

“Oddly,” said Maud, “if we were obsessed with each other, no one would think we were mad.” “Val thinks we are obsessed with each other. She even said it was healthier than being obsessed with Randolph Ash.”

The blank space of these white pages fills me with fear and desire. I could write anything I wished here, so how shall I decide where to begin?

(That is not badly put. And having written it, I am now full of a kind of aesthetic love of my countrymen and of our wind. I would go on, if I were a poet, to write the poem of its keening. Or if I were a novelist I could go on to say that in sober truth its monotonous singing can drive you half mad for silence, in the long winter days, like a man thirsting in a desert. The psalms sing with praise of the cool shelter of rocks in the hot sun. We here are athirst for a drop or two of dry, bright silence.)

“If I were a Good Fairy,” said Christabel, “I would wish her a pretty face—which she has—and a capacity to take pleasure in the quotidian.” “You wish me to be Martha, not Mary,” I cried, with some little fire. “I did not say that,” she said. “The opposition is false. Body and soul are not separable.”

I have never met anyone who so gave the impression that normal acts of friendliness are a deadly intrusion.

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

“The copyright in unpublished letters is the property of the writer of the letters. The physical letters themselves are the property of the recipient. Unless returned, as these were.”

He hated the new vulgarity of contemporary biography, the ransacking of Dickens’s desk for his most trivial memoranda, Forster’s unspeakable intrusions into the private pains and concealments of the Carlyles. He said often to me, burn what is alive for us with the life of our memory, and let no one else make idle curios or lies of it.

I live in a Turret like an old Witch, and make verses nobody wants. If in the goodness of your heart, you would tell me what becomes of him—I shall praise God for you. I am in your hands.

Everyone looked at Roland again. He brought out his wallet and unfolded the letters from their safe place inside it.

What

“She leads you on and baffles you,” said Beatrice. “She wants you to know and not to know. She took care to write down that the box was there. And she buried it.”

The honeymoon couple had their heads together over their table. The man, smoothly handsome, in what Cropper recognised as a Christian Dior wool and cashmere jacket in dark peacock, took their joined hands to his mouth and kissed the inside of the girl’s wrists. She wore an ivory silk shirt, displaying an amethyst necklace on a smooth throat, above a purple skirt. She caressed her partner’s hair, evidently in that obsessive and compulsive state that excludes, for brief periods of human lives, all consciousness of other observers.