Correspondence

Correspondence To the Editor: Readers of this journal concerned witii die pervasive influence of Henry James wiU find his presence in the recently pubtished novel Possession, by A. S. Byatt (New York: Random House, 1990), interesting and even amusing . In Possession, we are presented widi die search for the biographical facts about Randolph Henry Ash, an invented Victorian poet, probably based on Robert Browning. A contemporary young research feUow, Roland MitcheU, finds two letters from Ash to the equaUy celebrated invented woman poet, Christabel La Motte (reminiscent of Christina Rossetti), in a volume of Vico in a London library . Witii the help of a young professor, Maud BaUey, he unearths evidence for a romance between the two poets and assists in die discovery of the existence of a child born of their love affair. In an authorized biography of Ash caUed The Great Ventriloquist, Ash is presented as having die abüity to place his voice into the poetry of others. At least this is how I understand one of the many poems (and diere are many) in the novel caUed "The Great Collector," for it is composed of words and phrases from Henry James's The Golden Bowl. The poem by Ash is as foUows, and I have italicized the words taken from James's passage: His taste, that was his passion, brought him men To bourgeois parlours, grey and grim back rooms, All redolent of Patriarchal teas, Pacing behind a lustrous, smiling Jew, AU decorous, 'twixt brute mahogany, Meuble or chest, and solid table, clotiied Smug in its Sabbath calm, in indigo, Faded maroon and bistre cotton stripes— He'd see, perhaps, extracted one by one, From three times locked, but plumply vulgar drawers From satchels soft of oriental silk, To spread in ordered and in matched array, So tenderly unmuffled and revealed The immemorial amethystine blue Of twenty ancient Damascene glazed tiles As bright as heaven's courts, as subtle-hued As living sheen upon the peacock's neck. And then his soul was satisfied, and men He tasted honey, dien in diose dead lights Alive again, he knew his life, and gave His gold, to gaze and gaze. . . . (103) Here is the relevant passage in The Golden Bowl, and I have italicized tiie words by James used in Ash's poem. Adam Verver, the great coUector, is at Brighton 182 The Henry James Review with Charlotte Stant, and together they visit the house of Mr. Gutermann-Seuss to look at some Damascene tiles: Such places were not strange to him when they took die form of bourgeois back parlours, a trifle ominously grey and grim from tiieir north light, at watering-places prevailingly homes of humbug, or even when they wore some aspect still less, if not perhaps still more, insidious. He had been everywhere .. . going ... so far as to risk ... life, healui and die very bloom of honour; but where while precious things, extracted one by one from thrice-locked yet often vulgar drawers and soft satchels of old oriental silk, were impressively ranged before him, had he, til now, let himself, in consciousness, wander like one of the vague? . . . [Mr. Gutermann-Seuss had a] repeated act of passage between a featureless mahogany meuble and a table so virtuously disinterested as to look fairly smug under a cotton cloth of faded maroon and indigo, all redolent of patriarchal teas. The Damascene tiles successively, and oh so tenderly, unmuffled and revealed, lay mere at last in tiieir full harmony and their venerable splendour. . . . The infinitely ancient, the immemorial amethystine blue of the glaze, scarcely more meant to be breatiied upon, it would seem, man the cheek of royalty—this property of the ordered and matched array had inevitably all its determination for him. (Penguin, Chapter 12, 171-72) From the journal of EUen, Ash's wife, we leam that Ash died on November 25, 1889, at 2:00 a.m. (480). We know that The Golden Bowl was pubtished in 1904. Therefore, does Byatt wish us to believe diat Ash, "the Great Ventriloquist ," wrote a poem anticipating James's beautiful passage on his encounter with Gutermann-Seuss and die "ametiiystine" tiles in Brighton, and that the...