John Banville: The Newton Letter

She’s pregnant. Yes, the most banal ending of all, and yet the one I least expected. Wait, that’s not true. I have a confession to make. That last night in bed with her, when she sobbed in my arms: I told you she went immediately to sleep, but I lied. I could not resist her tear-drenched nakedness, the passionate convulsions of her sobbing. God forgive me. I believe that was when she conceived; she thinks so too. More sentimentality, more self-delusion? Probably. But at least this delusion has a basis in fact. The child is there. The notion of this strange life, secret in its warm sea, provokes in me the desire to live — to live forever, I mean, if necessary. The future now has the same resonance that the past once had, for me. I am pregnant myself, in a way. Super-numerous existence wells up in my heart.

I set out to explain to you, Clio, and to myself, why I had drown’d my book. Have you understood? So much is unsayable: all the important things. I spent a summer in the country, I slept with one woman and thought I was in love with another; I dreamed up a horrid drama, and failed to see the commonplace tragedy that was playing itself out in real life. You’ll ask, where is the connection between all that, and the abandoning of a book? I don’t know, or at least I can’t say, in so many words. I was like a man living underground who, coming up for air, is dazzled by the light and cannot find the way back into his bolt-hole. I trudge back and forth over the familiar ground, muttering. I am lost.

Edward survived the winter. He’s very low, bedridden: you wouldn’t know him , she says. As if I ever did. I remember one day he tried to tell me about dying. Oh not directly, of course. I can’t recall what he said, what words he used. The subject was the countryside, farming, something banal. But what he was talking about, I suppose, was his sense of oneness now with all poor dumb things, a horse, a tree, a house, that suffer their lives in silence and resigned bafflement, and die unremarked. I wish I could have erected a better monument to him than I have done, in these too many pages; but I had to show you how I thought of him then , how I behaved, so that you would see the cruelty of it, the wilful blindness.

Of Charlotte she makes no mention. That was only to be expected. I brood on certain words, these emblems. Succubus , for instance.

What shall I do? Find that fissure in the rocks, clamber down again into that roomy and commodious grave? I hope not. Begin afresh, then, learn how to live up here, in the light? Something is moving under the ice. Oh, I'm not in despair, far from it. I feel the spring around me, the banality of it, the heedless power. Emotions flourish in these frozen wastes. I stop sometimes, staring at a white hill with the tender porcelain of the sky behind it, and I feel such a sense of. . of something, I don't know. All kinds of things appear on that white screen: a house, a chestnut tree, a dark window with a face reflected in it. Oh and other things, too many to mention. These private showings seem an invitation. Go back to Ferns, move in, set up house, fulfil some grand design, with Ottilie, poor Charlotte, the two boys — for I feel it will be a boy, it must be — become a nurseryman and wear tweeds, talk about the weather, stand around chewing a straw? Impossible. All the same, I shall go back. And in the end, it’s come to me just this moment, in the end of course I shall take up the book and finish it: such a renunciation is not of this world. Yet I'm wary. Shall I have to go off again, leaving my research, my book and everything else unfinished? Shall I awake in a few months, in a few years, broken and deceived, in the midst of new ruins?

Dublin — Iowa — Dublin

Summer 79–Spring 81

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. His first book, Long Lankin , was published in 1970. His other books are Nightspawn, Birchwood, Doctor Copernicus (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1976), Kepler (which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1981), Mefisto, The Book of Evidence (which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize and won the 1989 Guinness Peat Aviation Award), Ghosts, Athena and The Untouchable . John Banville is the literary editor of the Irish Times and lives in Dublin with his wife and two sons.

I have since learned that this contention is mistaken; cf Polkolski, F. X., Interface Tribal Situations in Southeast Ireland: a structuralist study (M. I. T. 1980).