Patricia Lockwood's Brilliant "Isn't that ... female?"

Patricia Lockwood (Photo by Thomas Slack)

The best book review of the year (so far) is Patricia Lockwood’s “Isn’t that ... female?” (London Review of Books, June 20, 2024). It’s an appraisal of A. S. Byatt’s recently reissued Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories. Actually, it’s an appraisal of Byatt’s entire oeuvre. Lockwood loves Byatt. She writes,

I have read it all, beginning with Babel Tower (1996), back when I was the age of Frederica Potter graduating from school at Blesford Ride, sinking her uniform into the canal as her older sister, Stephanie, looks on. I have gone to the bookstore on publication day in my pyjamas and asked them to unbox the new one; it’s back there, I know it. I have twice fumbled through The Biographer’s Tale (2000), a book which seems to take place entirely in a filing cabinet (don’t worry, there are also sadistic pictures). If you told me she had a lost novel about paperweights, I would believe you. And I would read that too. 

What I savor are Lockwood’s ingenious descriptions – surreal montages of incredibly vivid, concentrated imagery inspired by Byatt’s works. For example:

The cover of the original edition of Medusa’s Ankles – hell, the title, let’s be honest – illustrates the aesthetic problem. An ivory ribbon, a speckled lobster, blown poppies, a lascivious oyster. A hand mirror reflecting a whitish lake, a heavy key. These are seen to be her concerns, lacquerish, decorative, romantic. But the hand mirror fills with blood, the cabinet of wonders displays a skull. On the other side of the pomegranate, maggots like instinct pearls.

And:

My affinity is perhaps unexpected. I know the books so well that looking at them on the shelf is like reading them. What she created for me, in the Frederica quartet, was a kind of internal geography. Over on the left, in the darkness, is the wood where the smooth-between-the-legs Alexander is not quite managing to make it happen with the frustrated housewife Jenny, released into the ache of the unattainable by her part in the play being put on at Long Royston. Up in the tower is the evasive poet Raphael Faber, ever withdrawing his tapered fingertips, dry as his own spice cakes. Out on the moors is Jacqueline, with thick sandwiches, observing her population of Cepea nemoralis. Carrying dishes to the communal kitchen is ill-fated Ruth, with her plait down her back. In the car the mystic madman Lucas Simmonds is eternally interfering with Marcus. And Stephanie, suffering from “an excess of exact imagination,” exerting her whole will to bring her family together, is wrestling with the slithering Christmas turkey in its dish.

And this extraordinary summary of Margaret Drabble:

The white satin and little gold pins of Stephanie in The Virgin in the Garden (1978), frightened, unhappy, knowing she is leaving the life of the mind behind, yet compelled by the dense matter of Daniel’s body; the chilling image of the bride in A Summer Bird-Cage, devouring, immoral, greedy as golden syrup, drunk on the morning of her wedding, in a wild silk dress and a dirty bra, telling her sister she would love her forever if she made her some Nescafé.

No other critic writes like this. James Wood creates wonderful collages of exquisite quotation. This one, for example, from his great “Red Planet” (The New Yorker, July 25, 2005), a review of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men:

He is also a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature. His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), has this picture of lightning: “Far back beyond the mountain a thin wire of lightning glowed briefly.” The protagonist of “Child of God” (1973), a psychotic necrophiliac named Lester Ballard, lights a fire in an old grate, and as it races up the disused chimney sees a spider that “descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth.” How strange and original that “clutching itself” is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shrivelling. “Blood Meridian” is a vast and complex sensorium, at times magnificent and at times melodramatic, but nature is almost always precisely caught and weighed: in the desert, the stars “fall all night in bitter arcs,” and the wolves trot “neat of foot” alongside the horsemen, and the lizards, “their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks,” fend off the world “with thin smiles and eyes like cracked stone plates,” and the grains of sand creep past all night “like armies of lice on the move,” and “the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake.” McCarthy liked this last phrase so much that he repeated it, seven years later, in “All the Pretty Horses” (1992): “Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.”

But this is different from Lockwood’s fever dreams of condensed imagery. Here’s one more from her Byatt piece:

Contemporary reviewers pointed out that The Children’s Book contained a mathematically impossible number of glazes. But colour was one of Byatt’s strongest points, such that you can feel different schemes in every book. The greens of Possession – vegetable, mineral and moss when we are in Brittany – and the burnishing panther of the fairy tales, gold-purple-black, stalking through. The buttery sunlight and gouache of Still Life. Reading her at seventeen I had an idea that perhaps the English had a better sense of colour because they spent so much time looking at teacups; I must be highly disadvantaged in this regard. Coffee cups have Garfield on them – or, if you’re unlucky, Odie. They do not fill your mind with the soft dreaming tints that made up Byatt’s encyclopedia. She has to mention it every time; it is more than an attribute, it is an achievement, a soul. The eggs of things are being lifted up out of their Easter dye, and don’t you exclaim every time? What a surprise! Look at that one!

Those last three sentences are inspired. The whole piece is inspired – criticism as passionate creation. 

The Art of Quotation (Part V)

A. S. Byatt (Photo by Ozier Muhammad)

A. S. Byatt, in the Introduction to her essay collection On Histories and Stories (2000), wrote,

I should finally like to say something about the style of these essays. I quote extensively and at length. I tell the stories of books, I describe plots. When I first studied English, extensive quotation was a necessary part of the work of the critic. I. A. Richards showed his students that they were not really reading the words as they were written. He diagnosed and exposed stock responses. And whatever Leavis’s faults of dogmatic dismissal, irascibility prescriptiveness, he was a quoter of genius, and I increasingly look on my early readings of – and reading around, and following up of – those quotations as the guarantee, the proof, that we were all indeed engaged in the common pursuit of true judgment. 

She went on to say, “My quotations are like the slides in an art historical lecture – they are the Thing Itself.” 

Byatt was an extraordinary quoter: see, for example, her great “Van Gogh, Death and Summer” (included in her 1991 essay collection Passions of the Mind), in which she quotes passage after glorious passage from Van Gogh’s letters, celebrating his passionate love of color. 

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.