Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Tuesday
Yesterday I wrote about how Kate Atkinson, a writer I’ve just discovered and have fallen in love with, scatters literary allusions throughout her works. In A God in Ruins, her use of past literature gives her a powerful way to explore the mystery of dying, a daunting subject to say the least. Perhaps Leo Tolstoy handles the subject best in The Death of Ivan Ilych, but Atkinson does a pretty good job herself.
In my post I said that her handling of literary fragments reminds me of how T.S. Eliot relies on such fragments in The Waste Land. In that confusing and complicated poem, Eliot draws on Dante, Andrew Marvell, William Shakespeare, James Joyce, William Blake, Thomas Kyd, and many others in an attempt to counteract what he sees as the disintegration of culture following the horrors of World War I and the chaos of modernity. He reveals his project towards the end of the poem when he writes, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
Perhaps Atkinson had this passage in mind when she came up with the title A God in Ruins. Its predecessor, Life after Life, begins in Victorian England and the two novels proceed to describe the horrors of both world wars and their impact on English life. The “God” in the title is in part a deity that people have a trouble believing in following the carnage, in part a faltering belief in the old English ways that have been disrupted. In other words, Atkinson—who sets much of her action in Eliot’s time period—is responding as he does to the same state of affairs.
God in Ruins reaches a kind of crescendo at the end with the death of Teddy, who represents the old-fashioned decency and civility that seems to be disappearing. In his final hours, his granddaughter doesn’t turn to God but to literature. After reading Trollope to him (see yesterday’s post), she turns to passages from various poets. Or as she puts it, “scraps from her ragbag because words were all that were left now.”
First she thinks of Edmund Spenser’s “The Ministry of Angels.” Although she herself is not religious, she is momentarily hopeful at the poet’s assurance that God sends angels to care for us:
How oft do they their silver bowers leave,
To come to succour us that succour want!
How oft do they with golden pinions cleave
The flitting skyes, like flying pursuivant,
Against fowle feendes to ayd us militant!
They for us fight, they watch, and dewly ward,
And their bright squadrons round about us plant;
And all for love, and nothing for reward…
Bertie wonders,
Were Spenser’s bright squadrons of angels waiting to welcome him? Were all the mysteries about to be revealed? They were questions that no one had ever answered and no one ever would.
The Spenser allusion is followed up with the “scraps” that Bertie shares with her grandfather, imagining them as coins that he could pay Charon to cross over the River Styx. The phrases, while they may seem to be randomly chosen, work together to form a kind of narrative. Or as Hippolyta in Midsummer Night’s Dream would describe it, “a great constancy.” Here’s the list:
Perhaps he could use them to pay the ferryman. Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Full fathom five thy father lies. Little lamb, who made thee? Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie. On that best portion of a good man’s life, his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love. Farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
The first passage is from John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and the second from Gerard Manley’s Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur.” These two capture the richness of the world, which Teddy has loved. Then there’s a shift to Ariel’s song in The Tempest, informing Ferdinand that his father has drowned. (Eliot also draws on the passage in the Waste Land.)
The passage from Tempest is followed by Blake’s assurance that God created the marvelous little lamb, which captures some of the same wonder at creation found in Keats and Hopkins:
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Delight, however, is followed by grief as we get a second Hopkins poem (“Spring and Fall”), this one asking a young girl why she is grieving. The answer is that she has just realized that death will one day come for us all:
Márgarét, áre you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
But though Teddy will die, while alive he has carried out many quiet acts “of kindness and of love,” which make up “that best portion of a good man’s life” (Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”). The list concludes with the mystical final lines of Edmund Thomas’s “Adlestrop,” where the speaker looks out at an empty train station in the middle of nowhere—the train stops for only a minute–and finds himself entranced and captivated by the surrounding countryside:
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
This has been Teddy’s life, which was like a momentary stop in a countryside that he loved and wrote about in a nature column. I love how the poem, through the mist, opens out to full-heartedly embrace all creation. The poet is well-chosen for this novel because he himself was killed in the Battle of Arras (1917), meaning that his own stop in life was short.
Atkinson is not finished with her poetic scraps. As the novel shifts from Bertie’s to Teddy’s perspective, we get again a line from Hopkin’s “God’s Grandeur,” with its amazing vision of the Holy Ghost hovering over God’s creation:
The air rippled and shimmered. Time narrowed to a pinpoint. It was about to happen. Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Although Teddy too is not a believer—the war has ruined God for him as well as for others—the power of Hopkins’s image suggests that the universe may not be an empty void after all.
Teddy’s thought processes continue:
Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment. Life was a fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, fleeting as the bluebells in the wood. It didn’t matter, he realized, he didn’t mind, he was going where millions had gone before and where millions would follow after. He shared his fate with the many.
Then there is an allusion to the old folk carol “The Holly and the Ivy”:
And now. This moment. This moment was infinite. He was part of the infinite. The tree and the rock and the water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer. Now.
In the carol, the holly reenacts the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, blending nature’s life cycle and the Christ narrative into a single story. The words that Teddy recalls occur in the chorus:
The rising of the sun
And the running of the deer,
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in the choir.
Then Atkinson shifts to Prospero’s famous speech in The Tempest, regarded by many as Shakespeare’s own farewell speech to the theater. I’ll start with the speech so that you can see how Atkinson uses it to describe Teddy’s final seconds:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Now Atkinson:
The trumpets sound the end of the revels. The baseless fabric begins to disintegrate. The stuff that dreams are made of starts to rend and tear and the walls of a cloud-capped tower tremble. Little showers of dusty begin to fall. Birds rise in the air and fly away.
In this final moment, Teddy is imagining himself back inside the plane that was shot down over Berlin—except that, in his imagining, he didn’t jump but was plunged with the plane into the North Sea:
Teddy sank to the silent sea-bed and joined all the tarnished treasure that lay there unseen, forty fathoms deep.
In an alternative ending where this in fact happens—Atkinson regularly imagines different narratives for her characters, thereby calling attention to their fictionality—Teddy’s mourning sister Ursula finds some comfort in quoting the follow-up line to the Ariel passage: “Those are pearls that were his eyes.” Here’s the passage in full, which turns death into a mystical transfiguration:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
[Distant bell rings]
Hark, now I hear them: ding dong bell.
Teddy having died, Atkinson then informs us that her own novel will suffer the same fate:
And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into the thin air and disappear. Pouf!
Prospero’s “great globe itself” could be our world or it could be the Globe Theater. In the end, it’s impossible to tell the difference between life and literature given that we ourselves are such stuff as dreams are made on. Where does the physical Self end and the imagined Self begin? Where is the dividing line between body and soul? As Bertie notes, these are questions “that no one had ever answered and no one ever would.”
But we can use literature, which goes as far as language can go, to ask the questions. That’s a start.
