J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

Hugo von Hofmannsthal 'Letter of Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon' (1902)

Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon

Dear and esteemed Sir,

You will have received from my husband Philip a letter dated this 22nd August. Ask me not how, but a copy of that letter has come under my sight, and now I add my voice to his. I fear you may think my husband wrote in a fit of madness, a fit that by now may have passed. I write to say: It is not so. All that you read in his letter is true, save for one circumstance: no husband can succeed in concealing from a loving wife distress of mind so extreme. These many months have I known of my Philip's affliction, and suffered with him.

How did our sorrows come to be? There was a time, I remember, before this time of affliction, when he would gaze like one bewitched at paintings of sirens and dryads, craving to enter their naked, glistening bodies. But where in Wiltshire will we find a siren or a dryad for him to try? Perforce I became his dryad: it was I whom he entered when he sought to enter her, I who felt his tears on my shoulder when again he could not find her in me. But a little time and I will learn to be your dryad, speak your dryad speech, I whispered in the dark; but he was not consoled.

A time of affliction I call the present time; yet in the company of my Philip I too have moments when soul and body are one, when I am ready to burst out in the tongues of angels. My raptures I call these spells. They come to me -I write without blushing, this is no time for blushing – in my husband's arms. He alone is guide to me; with no other man would I know them. Soul and body he speaks to me, in a speaking without speech; into me, soul and body, he presses what are no longer words but flaming swords.

We are not meant to live thus, Sir. Flaming swords I say my Philip presses into me, swords that are not words; but they are neither flaming swords nor are they words. It is like a contagion, saying one thing always for another (like a contagion, I say: barely did I hold myself back from saying, a plague of rats, for rats are everywhere about us these days). Like a wayfarer (hold the figure in mind, I pray you), like a wayfarer I step into a mill, dark and disused, and feel of a sudden the floorboards, rotten with the wetness, give way beneath my feet and plunge me into the racing mill-waters; yet as I am that (a wayfarer in a mill) I am also not that; nor is it a contagion that comes continually upon me or a plague of rats or flaming swords, but something else. Always it is not what I say but something else. Hence the words I write above: We are not meant to live thus. Only for extreme souls may it have been intended to live thus, where words give way beneath your feet like rotting boards (like rotting boards I say again, I cannot help myself, not if I am to bring home to you my distress and my husband's, bring home I say, where is home, where is home?).

We cannot live thus, neither he nor I nor you, honoured Sir (for who is to say that through the agency of his letter or if not of his letter then of mine you may not be touched by a contagion that is not that, a contagion, but is something else, always something else?). There may come a time when such extreme souls as I write of may be able to bear their afflictions, but that time is not now. It will be a time, if ever it comes, when giants or perhaps angels stride the earth (I cease to hold myself back, I am tired now, I yield myself to the figures, do you see, Sir, how I am taken over?, the rush I call it when I do not call it my rapture, the rush and the rapture are not the same, but in ways that I despair of explaining though they are clear to my eye, my eye I call it, my inner eye, as if I had an eye inside that looked at the words one by one as they passed, like soldiers on parade, like soldiers on parade I say).

All is allegory, says my Philip. Each creature is key to all other creatures. A dog sitting in a patch of sun licking itself, says he, is at one moment a dog and at the next a vessel of revelation. And perhaps he speaks the truth, perhaps in the mind of our Creator {our Creator, I say) where we whirl about as if in a millrace we interpenetrate and are interpenetrated by fellow creatures by the thousand. But how I ask you can I five with rats and dogs and beetles crawling through me day and night, drowning and gasping, scratching at me, tugging me, urging me deeper and deeper into revelation – how? We are not made for revelation, I want to cry out, nor I nor you, my Philip, revelation that sears the eye like staring into the sun.

Save me, dear Sir, save my husband! Write! Tell him the time is not yet come, the time of the giants, the time of the angels. Tell him we are still in the time of fleas. Words no longer reach him, they shiver and shatter, it is as if (as if, I say), it is as if he is guarded by a shield of crystal. But fleas he will understand, the fleas and the beetles still creep past his shield, and the rats; and sometimes I his wife, yes, my Lord, sometimes I too creep through. Presences of the Infinite he calls us, and says we make him shudder; and indeed I have felt those shudders, in the throes of my raptures I have felt them, so much that whether they were his or were mine I could no longer say.

Not Latin, says my Philip – I copied the words – not Latin nor English nor Spanish nor Italian will bear the words of my reve lation. And indeed it is so, even I who am his shadow know it when I am in my raptures. Yet he writes to you, as I write to you, who are known above all men to select your words and set them in place and build your judgements as a mason builds a wall with bricks. Drowning, we write out of our separate fates. Save us.

Your obedient servant

Elizabeth C.

This II September, AD 1603

An earlier version of Lesson 1i appeared under the tide 'What is Realism?' in Salmagundi nos. 114-15 (1997).

An earlier version of Lesson 2 appeared as 'The Novel in Africa', Occasional Paper no. 17 of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California at Berkeley, 1999. Cheikh Hamidou Kane is quoted from Phanuel Akubueze Egejuru, Towards African Literary Independence (Greenwood Press, Westport, 1980), by permission of the author. Paul Zumthor is quoted from Introduction à la poésie orale, by permission of Editions du Seuil.

Lessons 3 and 4 were published, with responses by Peter Singer, Marjorie Garber, Wendy Doniger and Barbara Smuts, as The Lives of Animals (Princeton University Press, 1999).

An earlier version of Lesson 5 appeared as 'Die Menschenwissenschaften in Afrika' / 'The Humanities in Africa' (Siemens Stiftung, Munich, 2001).

An earlier version of Lesson 6 appeared in Salmagundi nos. 137-38 (2003).

'Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos' was published by Intermezzo Press, Austin, Texas, in 2002.