John Banville: The Newton Letter

Being a man with a secret was a full-time role. Sometimes I almost lost sight of the beloved herself in the luxuriant abundance of my mission. When Ottilie was in my arms I was careful not to speak, for fear of crying out the wrong name — but there were moments too when I was not sure which was the right one, moments even when the two became fused. At first I had conjured Charlotte’s presence to be only a witness to the gymnastics in my narrow bed, to lean over us, Ottilie and me, with the puzzled attention of a pure spirit of the night, immune herself to the itch of the flesh yet full of tenderness for these sad mortals struggling among the sheets, but as time went on this ceased to be enough, the sprite had to fold her delicate wings, throw off her silken wisps, and, with a sigh of amused resignation, join us. Then in the moonlight my human girl’s blonde hair would turn black, her fingers pale, and she would become something new, neither herself nor the other, but a third — Charlottilie!

There was a fourth, too, which was that other version of myself which stood apart, watching the phenomenon of this love and my attendant antics with a wry smile, puzzled, and at times embarrassed. He it was who continued to, I won’t say love, but to value Ottilie, her gaiety and generosity, her patience, the mournful passion that she lavished on me. Was there, then, another Ottilie as well, an autochthonous companion for that other I? Were all at Ferns dividing thus and multiplying, like amoebas? In this spawning of multiple selves I seemed to see the awesome force of my love, which in turn served to convince me anew of its authenticity.

Perhaps this sense of displacement will account for the oddest phenomenon of all, and the hardest to express. It was the notion of a time out of time, of this summer as a self-contained unit separate from the time of the ordinary world. The events I read of in the newspapers were, not unreal, but only real out there , and irredeemably ordinary; Ferns, on the other hand, its daily minutiae, was strange beyond expressing, unreal, and yet hypnotically vivid in its unreality. There was no sense of life messily making itself from moment to moment. It had all been lived already, and we were merely tracing the set patterns, as if not living really, but remembering. As with Ottilie I had foreseen myself on my deathbed, now I saw this summer as already a part of the past, immutable, crystalline and perfect. The future had ceased to exist. I drifted, lolling like a Dead Sea swimmer, lapped round by a warm blue soup of timelessness.

I even went back to the book, in a way. I needed something on which to concentrate, an anchor in this world adrift. And what better prop for the part of hopeless lover than a big fat book? Sitting at my table before the window and the sunlit lilacs I thought of Canon Koppernigk at Frauenburg, of Nietzsche in the Engadine, of Newton himself, all those high cold heroes who renounced the world and human happiness to pursue the big game of the intellect. A pretty picture — but hardly a true one. I did little real work. I struck out a sentence or two, rearranged a paragraph, corrected a few solecisms, and, inevitably, returned again to the second, and longer, of those two strange letters to Locke, the one in which N. speaks of having sought a means of explaining the nature of the ailment, if ailment it be, which has afflicted me this summer past . The letter seemed to me now to lie at the centre of my work, perhaps of Newton’s too, reflecting and containing all the rest, as the image of Charlotte contained, as in a convex mirror, the entire world of Ferns. It is the only instance in all his correspondence of an effort to understand and express his innermost self. And something is expressed, understood, forgiven even, if not in the lines themselves then in the spaces between, where an extraordinary and pitiful tension throbs. He wanted so much to know what it was that had happened to him, and to say it, as if the mere saying itself would be redemption. He mentions, with unwonted calm, Locke’s challenge of the absolutes of space and time and motion on which the picture of the mechanistic universe in the Principia is founded, and trots out again, but without quite the old conviction, the defence that such absolutes exist in God, which is all that is asked of them. But then suddenly he is talking about the excursions he makes nowadays along the banks of the Cam, and of his encounters, not with the great men of the college, but with tradesmen, the sellers and the makers of things. They would seem to have something to tell me; not of their trades, nor even of how they conduct their lives; nothing, I believe, in words. They are, if you will understand it, themselves the things they might tell. They are all a form of saying —and there it breaks off, the rest of that page illegible (because of a scorch mark, perhaps?). All that remains is the brief close: My dear Doctor, expect no more philosophy from my pen. The language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, but a language none of whose words is known to me; a language in which commonplace things speak to me; and wherein I may one day have to justify myself before an unknown judge . Then comes that cold, that brave, that almost carven signature: Newton . What did he mean, what was it those commonplace things said to him, what secret did they impart? And so I sat in the shadow of lilacs, nursing an unrequitable love and reading a dead man’s testament, trying to understand it.

WHATEVER I had felt Ottilie in the beginning, there was not much left now save lust, and irritation, and a kind of grudging compassion. She sensed the change, of course, and began to probe it. She came to the lodge more often, as if to test my endurance. She said she wanted to stay all night, she didn’t care what they thought at the house. Then she would look at me, not listening to my excuses, only watching my eyes and saying nothing. I began cautiously to try to disengage myself. I talked a lot about freedom. Why tie ourselves down? This summer would end. She was too young to throw away the best moments of her life on a dry old scholar. Her eyes narrowed. I too wondered what I was getting at — but no, that’s not true, I knew damn well. It was devious, and heartless, and horribly pleasurable. Who knows the sweet stink of power like the disenchanted lover renouncing all claim to loyalty? I pictured her known flesh soiled by some faceless other, yet gloried in the knowledge that I need only give the reins the faintest twitch and she would come running back to me, awash in her lap.

I look back on myself in those days, and I do not like what I see.

We spent hours in bed, entire afternoons seeped away into the sheets. We invented new positions, absurd variations that left us gasping, our sinews aquiver. She had me bind her hands and tie her to chairs, to the legs of the bed. We made love on the floor, against the walls. If Michael had not been liable to pop up from the undergrowth she would have dragged me naked out into the grass to do it. When she bled we devised a whole manual of compromises. No witch could have worked at her dark art more diligently than she.

Sometimes this frenzied sorcery of the senses frightened me. Squatting before her with my face in her lap, staring in silent fascination at the brownish frills and violet-tinted folds of her sex, I would suddenly feel something blundering away from me, an almost-creature of our making, damaged and in pain, dragging a blackened limb along the floor and screaming softly. It was an image of guilt, of my shame and her desperation, the simple fear that she would get pregnant, and of things too more deeply buried. Its counterpart, light to that dark, was the pale presence of a third always with us, who was my private conjuring trick. “Look at me!” Ottilie would say, “Look at me when we’re doing it, I want you to see me!” I looked at her, that was easy. But after these bouts of ghostly troilism I hardly had the nerve to face Charlotte.