I would write, if I undertookit - a little from Melusina's -own- vision. Not, as you might, in the First Person - as inhabiting her skin - but seeing her as an unfortunate Creature - of Power and Frailty - always in Fear of returning to the Ranging of the Air - the not-eternal - but finally-annihilated - Air -•
I am called. I cannot write more. I must make haste to sealthis - which I fear is a Plaintive Screed - a Convalescent Muttering -I am called again -I must close. Believe me yours most truly
Dear Miss LaMotte,
I trust all is now well in your household,and that work - on the Merlin and Vivien - and on the increasingly fascinating Melusina- continues apace. As for myself- -I have now nearly finished my poem on Swammerdam -I have a rough blocked-out version of the whole -I know what is in and what is never so regretfully eternally abandoned - and when I have tidied up a multitude of imperfections -I shall make you my first fair copy.
I was entranced and moved by your brief portrait of your father - whose prodigious scholarship I have always admired and whose works I have read and reread most frequently. What better Father could a poet have? I was emboldened by your mention of the Ancient Mariner to wonder - was it he who named you and was that for Coleridge's heroine of his unfinished poem? have not had occasion to tell you - though I tell all I meet, with the regularity with which dear Crabb tells his tale of retrieving Wieland's bust -I once met Coleridge, I was once taken to Highgate - when I was very young and green - and had the chance of hearing the Angelic - (and mildly self-important) voice speak on and on - of the existence ofangels and the longevity of yew-trees, and the suspension ofLife in Winter (the banal and the truly profound thick and fast upon each other here) and premonitions and the Duties of Man (not Rights) and how Napoleon's Spies had been hot on his heels in Italy on his return from Malta - and on True Dreamsand Lying Dreams. And more, I think. Nothing on Christabel.
I was so young and green, I worried inordinately that I had no chance, in all this spate of brilliant monologue, to interpose my own voice - to be heard to beable to think in that company - to be remarked. I do notknow what I should have said if I could have spoken. Very likely something futile or silly - some erudite and pointless questioningof his doctrineof the Trinity, or some crude wish to betold the end ofthe poem Christabel. I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things - once commenced - only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending - sweet or sour - and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay asidetheunprofitable? Do you have any privileged insight into the possible ending of the great S.T.C.'s Tale of Christabel?- which teases so, for it is like the very best tales, impossible to predict how it may come out- and yet it must - but we shall never know - its secret sleeps with itslethargic and inconsequentialauthor - who cares not for ourirritable quandary -
I partly see your meaning about Melusina- but hesitate to write thoughts of mine which may distort your thinking - either by causing you annoyance at my imperceptiveness - or worse by muddling the bright tracks of your own ideas.
What is so peculiarly marvellous about the Melusina myth, youseemto be saying, is that it is both wild and strange and ghastly and full ofthe daemonic -and it is at the same time solid as earthly tales - the best of them - are solid - depicting the life of households and the planning of societies, the introduction of husbandry and the love of any mother for her children.
Now -I am greatly daring, and I trust you not to fly out at me scornfully if I am wrong -I see in the gifts you show already in your writings such mastery of both these contradictoryelements - that the Story mayappear to be made for you, to await indeed - You - to tell it.
Both in your wonder-tales and in your fine lyrics - you have a most precise eye and earfor the matter of fact and the detailed-for household linen for instance, for the fine manipulations of delicate sewing - -for actions like Milking - which make a mere man see the world of little domestic acts as a paradisal revelation -
But you are never content to leave it there… your world is haunted by voiceless shapes… and wandering Passions… and little fluttering Fears… more sinister than any conventional Bat or Broomstick-witch.
As if to say - you have the power to render the secure keep ofLusignan - as it might be in the lives of the lords, ladies and peasants in the brilliant colours of a Book of Hours - and yet you can render also - the Voices of the Air - the Wailing - the Siren Song - the Inhuman Grief thatcries down the avenues of the years -
What will you be thinking of me now? I told you -I cannot think of anything without imagining it, without giving it shape in my mind'seye and ear. So, as I said, I have the clearest mental vision of yr unseen Porch, overarched with Clematis - one of those delightful deep-blue violet ones - and little clamberingroses. I have also the clearest vision of your parlour - with its two peaceful Human inhabitants employed -I will not say at netting, but perhaps at reading - aloud, some work of Shakespeare or Sir Thomas Malory - and Monsignor Dorato all lemony plumes in a filigree dome - and your little dog - now of what kind is he? if I were to hazard a guess I would say perhaps a King Charles Spaniel - yes, I see him now, unfortunately clearly, with one chocolate ear and one white and a feathery tail - and yet he is maybe no such thing - but a small hound - a milk-white fine creature such as Sir Thos Wyatt's ladies kept in their mysterious chamber. I have no vision of Jane at all - but that may come. I do have the clearestolfactory ghost of yr tisanes - though they hesitate between verveine and lime and raspberry-leaves, which my own dear mother found most efficacious in case of headache and lassitude.
But I have no right, however I may extend my imagining gaze on harmless chairs and wallcoverings - I have no right to extend my unfortunate curiosity to your work, your writing. You will accuse me of trying to write your Melusina, but it is not so - it is only my unfortunate propensity to try to make concrete in my brain how you would do it - and the truly exciting possibilities open up before me - like vistasof long rides in sun-dappled shade in the mysteriousforest of Brocéliande -I think - so, she will do it - so, she would enter the project. And yet I know your work is nothing if not truly original - my speculations are an impertinence. What can I say? I have never before been tempted to discuss the intricacies of my own writing - or his own - with any other poet -I have alwaysgone on in a solitary and self-sufficient way - but with you I felt from the first that it must be the true things or nothing - there was no middle way. So I speak to you - or not speak, write to you, write written speech - a strange mixture of kinds -I speak to you as I might speak to all those who mostpossess my thoughts - to Shakespeare, to Thomas Browne, to John Donne, to John Keats - and find myself unpardonably lending you, who are alive, my voice, as Ihabitually lend it to those dead men - Which is much as to say - here is an author of Monologues - trying clumsily to constructa Dialogue - and encroachingon both halves of it. Forgive me.
Now if this were a true dialogue - but that is entirely as you may wish it to be.
Dear Mr Ash,
Have you truly Weighed - what you ask of me? Not the Gracile Accommodation of my Muse to your promptings - -for that wd be resisted to the Death of the Immortal - which cannot Be - only Dissipation in Air. But you Overwhelm my small diligence - with Pelion piled on Ossa of Thought andfancy - and if indeed I sit down to answer all as it should be answered - there is the morning quite gone- and what has become either of thesetting of the junket or of the Fairy Melusina?