To possess the truth
I recently reread A. S. Byatt’s absolutely wonderful book, Possession. It’s a book that’s basically catnip for me, a story of writers and academics, myths and poetry, romance and heartbreak. I loved it again, this read. Just as much, or maybe even more than I loved it the first time I read it. But I was struck, deeply, by how differently I read it this time.
A key plot point involves newly discovered letters between two poets, letters that change what was known of their biographies, and – for the academics involved – change how their poetry is read. The first time I read this book, I was an academic, an academic with no plans to be a writer of fiction. An academic who, when she heard about things like writers burning their papers or having them destroyed after their deaths felt horrified. The loss to scholarship! And so, of course, on first reading, my sympathy was completely for the academics (well, not all of them – at least one is a truly horrid human being – but certainly for the pair at the center of the story). They were, after all, only trying to discover the truth.
As a writer, my sympathies are entirely different.
Of course I loved reading the correspondence between the poets. I was deeply emotionally involved in their relationship. And of course I read their poems with that background detail – the revelations of their letters – in mind. Byatt does what she does brilliantly, and for someone with my background, this hunt, this puzzling out, has very real pleasures. What can I see? What can I know? Can I make my interpretation better? The revelation of the hidden is a huge part of this book. It is impossible to read it without uncovering secrets.
But what I enjoy in fiction is not necessarily what I want in life. As a person who deeply values her privacy, and yet is in an industry that would prefer that I present a public face to the world, I am very much aware that I curate what I share. That there are secrets I would prefer to keep. I understand, viscerally, in a way I didn’t before, the writers who choose to burn their papers. It is what I choose. I don’t owe anyone – even future scholars, who are only looking for truth – the pieces of my life.
Also, I found it interesting what Byatt’s book seems to say about that pursuit of truth. A key myth in Possession is that of the Fairy Mélusine, who forbids her husband from looking at her in the bath so that he does not see her true form. Her husband is unable to keep his vow, and conceals himself so that he can look upon her. His broken promise ends their relationship. What her husband learns is only the truth, but it is a truth that was not his to know.
And then there is the epilogue, a scene between two people. Another revelation, that changes, yet again, what the academics think they know about the two poets. But this time, beyond the people in the scene, the only ones who learn the truth of it are the readers. Even the person who should have been given the knowledge of what passed, who might have been eased by it, never learned what happened.
Truths are fragmentary and complex. Given, not owed. No matter what the relationship. Death doesn’t change that. I ache, reading this book, for the unshared secrets, for the people whose lives might have been eased by their telling (though, certainly, that is not the only possibility from their sharing.) But I no longer think of what was not said, or what was burned, or not discovered, as a loss to scholarship, or to history. I think of those lost bits as pieces of lives, that belonged to those who lived them.
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