PEARL K . BELL
479
what was there, that it only spoke itself'), with a few quivers hurled at
American collectors of literary memorabilia. Byatt, a former don at the
University of London who has published studies of Wordsworth, Co–
leridge, and Iris Murdoch, as welJ as four earlier, and one must say duller,
novels, is passionately in love with language and Victorian poetry, and
she has drawn from her overflowing well of erudition with indefatigable
glee.
Roland Mitchell, a wimpy young scholar with dismal prospects,
stumbles on the draft of a letter that the revered Victorian poet Ran–
dolph Ash (modeled on Browning) wrote to the poet Christabel
LaMotte (part Emily Dickinson, part Christina Rossetti, with a dollop of
Browning's wife). Long forgotten, LaMotte has been rediscovered and
apotheosized in our time by an American feminist, Professor Leonora
Stern of Tallahassee University, and the British academic Maud Bailey,
beautiful, repressed, and incurably cerebral, much given to such donnish
reflections as "Do you ever have the sense that our metaphors
eat up
our
world?"
When Roland and Maud discover a cache of letters LaMotte had
hidden in a doll's bed, they embark on a feverish quest to uncover what
realJy happened between the long-dead poets. Soon they are hotly pur–
sued in the race for the secret truth by the implacable Professor Stern,
who feels that LaMotte is her property and the others should get out of
the way. Faced with this formidable American competitor, Maud be–
comes practical: "We'd better start looking for the facts as welJ as im–
ages," she tells Roland.
In
the end, of course, the facts are not realJy sur–
prising - Byatt has been slyly hinting and whispering and alluding all
along - but it is poetic images, Everests of images - that fill much of the
space in this very long novel. Since Byatt can leave nothing unexamined
or merely suggested , a writer who must spell out her intentions with
fiercely pointed elaborateness, toward the end of the story she unhappily
becomes the didactic lecturer. Gripping the lectern, she speaks directly to
the reader: " It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least for a
reader, the primary pleasures of eating, drinking, or looking on, or sex..
. . They do not habitually elaborate on the equalJy intense pleasure of
reading.. . . There are readings - of the same text - that are dutiful,
readings that map and dissect. .. ."
Dutiful.
The word is sharply relevant to the often exhausting expe–
rience of reading
Possession.
Other novelists might be wilJing to make do
with an illustrative excerpt from the work of an invented poet, and lazily
leave it at that. Not Byatt, the great impersonator, who brilliantly simu–
lates the voice, tone, mood, metaphor - everything but the genius - of
her eminent Victorians with uncanny skill and has the inexhaustible
energy of a Victorian as well. ( Were there more hours in the Victorian
