Postscript: A. S. Byatt 1936 - 2023

A. S. Byatt (Photo by Ozier Muhammad)

I see in the Times that A. S. Byatt has died (“A.S. Byatt, Scholar Who Found Fame With Fiction, Dies at 87,” November 17, 2023). The Times writer, Rebecca Chace, emphasizes Byatt’s achievements as a fiction writer, particularly her Booker prize-winning novel Possession. A friend gave me that book many years ago and urged me to read it. I tried, but never made it very far. Romance in the Victorian Age is not my thing. Maybe someday I’ll give it another shot. But there is a piece by Byatt that I treasure – her brilliant “Van Gogh, Death and Summer,” included in her 1991 essay collection A Passion of the Mind. 

“Van Gogh, Death and Passion” starts out as a review of Tsukasa Kodera’s Vincent van Gogh: Christianity versus Nature (1990). But it soon morphs into something vaster and more profound: an appreciation of Van Gogh’s letters; a consideration of his “sense of the real”; an exploration of his ideas about color. She quotes liberally from his letters. She quotes Bataille, Artaud, Rilke, Freud, Stevens, De Quincey. She praises De Quincey’s concept of the involute – “the way in which the human mind thinks and feels in ‘perplexed combinations of concrete objects’ or ‘compound objects, incapable of being disentangled.’ ” She writes, “De Quincey’s Romantic involute, Stevens’s abstract and sensuous meditation on the relations between sun, earth, mortality, myth and metaphor, have become, with Van Gogh’s letters and paintings, part of a new involute for me.”

It's an extraordinary essay, a ravishing involute of her own making, drenched in Van Gogh’s colors, ending in a meditation on death, and one last quotation from Van Gogh:

Work is going pretty well – I am struggling with a canvas begun some days before my indisposition, a “Reaper”; the study is all yellow, terribly thick painted, but the subject was fine and simple. For I see in this reaper – a vague figure fighting like the devil in the midst of heat to get to the end of his task – I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping. So it is – if you like – the opposite of that sower I tried to do before. But there’s nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold.