Wyndham Lewis' Taxi-Cab-Driver Test: 2. "Possession" by A.S. Byatt

I explained the principle of the Test in the introduction to No. 1 of this series (see below). So, without further ado, let us have the first page of Possession by A.S. Byatt:

These things are there. The garden and the tree
The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold
The woman in the shadow of the boughs
The running water and the grassy space.
They are and were there. At the old world's rim,
In the Hesperidean grove, the fruit
Glowed golden on eternal boughs, and there
The dragon Ladon crisped his jewelled crest
Scraped a gold claw and sharped a silver tooth
And dozed and waited through eternity
Until the tricksy hero Herakles
Came to his dispossession and the theft.
--Randolph Henry Ash, from The Garden of Proserpina, 1861


The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time. Its spine was missing, or rather protruded from amongst the leaves like a bulky marker. It was bandaged about and about with dirty white tape, tied in a neat bow. The librarian handed it to Roland Michell, who was sitting waiting for it in the Reading Room of the London Library. It had been exhumed from Locked Safe no. 5 where it usually stood between Pranks of Priapus and The Grecian Way of Love. It was ten in the morning, one day in September 1986. Roland had the small single table he liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the fireplace nevertheless in full view. To his right was a high sunny window, through which you could see the high green leaves of St. James's Square.
The London Library was Roland's favourite place. It was shabby but civilised, alive with history but inhabited also by living poets and thinkers who could be found squatting on the slotted metal floors of the stacks, or arguing pleasantly at the turning of the stair. Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland saw her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets. Here Randolph Henry Ash had come, cramming his elastic mind and memory with unconsidered trifles from History and Topography, from the felicitous alphabetical conjunctions of Science
and Miscellaneous--Dancing, Deaf and Dumb, Death, Dentistry, Devil and Demonology, Distribution, Dogs, Domestic Servants, Dreams. In his day, works on Evolution had been catalogued under Pre-Adamite Man. Roland had only recently discovered that the London Library possessed Ash's own copy of Vico's Principj di Scienza Nuova. Ash's books were most regrettably scattered across Europe and America. By far the largest single gathering was of course in the Stant Collection at Robert Dale Owen University in New Mexico, where Mortimer Cropper worked on his monumental edition of the Complete Correspondence of Randolph Henry Ash. That was no problem nowadays, books travelled the aether like light and sound. But it was just possible that Ash's own Vico had marginalia missed even by the indefatigable Cropper. And Roland was looking for sources for Ash's Garden of Proserpina. And there was a pleasure to be had from reading the sentences Ash had read, touched with his fingers, scanned with his eyes.

The epigraph with which the novel opens is offered as an extract from the work of Randolph Henry Ash, a mid-victorian poetaster of Swinburnian tendencies. Only, it is doubtful whether Byatt intends Ash to be thought of in that light (someone whose only attraction is his obscurity), or whether she intends him to be a good poet but lacks the ability to write a convincing pastiche of Swinburne. Certainly, Ash's blank verse, eked out with line-filling phrases such as "These things are there" and "They are and were there", and depleted by weak imagery ("grassy space"), shares with Swinburne only its mythological stage-properties - though even in this department it confuses the Garden of Proserpina with the Garden of the Hesperides, the one that has the golden apples and the guardian serpent.
   Quantities of verse in novels (such as the cantos of John Shade's autobiography that precede Nabokov's Pale Fire), can usually be skipped; the prose narrative cannot. When we turn to the first chapter proper, we are introduced to the scholar Roland Michell, who has gone to the London Library in order to consult a book once owned by Ash. The book arrives, and Michell examines it. It's obvious at once that not only is Byatt's prose as pedestrian as Ash's verse, but that it lacks the editorial input (Byatt is rumoured to resist creative editing) that would have red-pencilled the repetition of "high sunny windows" and "high green leaves", hackneyed phrases such as "alive with history" and "unconsidered trifles", and the polysyllabic humour of "felicitous alphabetical constructions". A good editor would also have pointed out to the author that a book stored in a locked safe would not be covered in dust. But to sharpen up the slack sentences that follow one another in no particular order would go far beyond an editor's normal role. The book would have to be rewritten. In fact, it would have to be written by somebody else.
   The cynical calculation might have been made that the target readership of the novel would not notice such things. The first page tells us at least something about what they would be looking for. One of the components of the High Ladylike Style (which is the arrow that is being aimed at this particular target) is an undue reverence towards its subject-matter that some might also call sentimentality. Thus, the Library, the world inhabited by Roland Michell, is described not as learned, secluded, or monastic, but as 'civilised', and the author shows no awareness of the comic possibilities of its inhabitants as she describes them, squatting on its iron walkways like Barbary apes. On the contrary, the reader is expected to admire them, as well as, of course, the stumbling poetaster Ash himself, with his 'elastic mind and memory'. The general tone of the writing is one of confidence that the novel's readership will reward this reverence with corresponding reverence for the author. This confidence proved to be well-founded. Possession was awarded the Booker Prize for 1990. It was listed by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the Twentieth Century. "The Times" named Byatt as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.