‘Why? Because today I am before you not as a writer but as an old woman who was once a child, telling you what I remember of the Dulgannon mudflats of my childhood and of the frogs who live there, some as small as the tip of my little finger, creatures so insignificant and so remote from your loftier concerns that you would not hear of them otherwise. In my account, for whose many failings I beg your pardon, the life cycle of the frog may sound allegorical, but to the frogs themselves it is no allegory, it is the thing itself, the only thing.
‘What do I believe? I believe in those little frogs. Where I find myself today, in my old age and perhaps my older age, I am not sure. There are moments when it feels like Italy, but I could easily be mistaken, it could be a quite different place. Towns in Italy do not, as far as I know, have portals (I will not use the humble word gate in your presence) through which it is forbidden to pass. But the Australian continent, where I was born into the world, kicking and squalling, is real (if far away), the Dulgannon and its mudflats are real, the frogs are real. They exist whether or not I tell you about them, whether or not I believe in them.
‘It is because of the indifference of those little frogs to my belief (all they want from life is a chance to gobble down mosquitoes and sing; and the males among them, the ones who do most of the singing, sing not to fill the night air with melody but as a form of courtship, for which they hope to be rewarded with orgasm, the frog variety of orgasm, again and again and again) – it is because of their indifference to me that I believe in them. And that is why, this afternoon, in this lamentably rushed and lamentably literary presentation for which I again apologize, but I thought I would offer myself to you without forethought, toute nue so to speak, and almost, as you can see for yourselves, without notes – that is why I speak to you of frogs. Of frogs and of my belief or beliefs and of the relation between the former and the latter. Because they exist.’
She comes to a stop. From behind her, the sound of gentle handclapping, from a single pair of hands, the cleaning woman’s. The clapping dwindles, ceases. It was she, the cleaning woman, who put her up to it – this flood of words, this gabble, this confusion, this passion. Well, let us see what kind of response passion gets.
One of the judges, the man on the extreme right, leans forward. ‘Dulgannon,’ he says. ‘That is a river?’
‘Yes, a river. It exists. It is not negligible. You will find it on most maps.’
‘And you spent your childhood there, on the Dulgannon?’
She is silent.
‘Because it says nothing here, in your docket, about a childhood on the Dulgannon.’
She is silent.
‘Is childhood on the Dulgannon another of your stories, Mrs Costello? Along with the frogs and the rain from heaven?’
‘The river exists. The frogs exist. I exist. What more do you want?’
The woman among them, slim, with neat silver hair and silver-rimmed glasses, speaks. ‘You believe in life?’
‘I believe in what does not bother to believe in me.’
The judge makes a little gesture of impatience. ‘A stone does not believe in you. A bush. But you choose to tell us not about stones or bushes but about frogs, to which you attribute a life story that is, as you concede, highly allegorical. These Australian frogs of yours embody the spirit of life, which is what you as a storyteller believe in.’
It is not a question, it is, in effect, a judgement. Should she accept it? She believed in life: will she take that as the last word on her, her epitaph? Her whole inclination is to protest: Vapid! she wants to cry. I am worth better than that! But she reins herself in. She is not here to win an argument, she is here to win a pass, a passage. Once she has passed, once she has said goodbye to this place, what she leaves behind of herself, even if it is to be an epitaph, will be of the utmost inconsequence.
‘If you like,’ she says guardedly.
The judge, her judge, looks away, purses her lips. A long silence falls. She listens for the buzzing of the fly that one is supposed to hear on such occasions, but there does not appear to be a fly in the courtroom.
Does she believe in life? But for this absurd tribunal and its demands, would she even believe in frogs? How does one know what one believes in?
She tries a test that seems to work when she is writing: to send out a word into the darkness and listen for what kind of sound comes back. Like a foundryman tapping a bell: is it cracked or healthy? The frogs: what tone do the frogs give off?
The answer: no tone at all. But she is too canny, knows the business too well, to be disappointed just yet. The mud frogs of the Dulgannon are a new departure for her. Give them time: they might yet be made to ring true. For there is something about them that obscurely engages her, something about their mud tombs and the fingers of their hands, fingers that end in little balls, soft, wet, mucous.
She thinks of the frog beneath the earth, spread out as if flying, as if parachuting through the darkness. She thinks of the mud eating away at the tips of those fingers, trying to absorb them, to dissolve the soft tissue till no one can tell any longer (certainly not the frog itself, lost as it is in its cold sleep of hibernation) what is earth, what is flesh. Yes, that she can believe in: the dissolution, the return to the elements; and the converse moment she can believe in too, when the first quiver of returning life runs through the body and the limbs contract, the hands flex. She can believe in that, if she concentrates closely enough, word by word.
‘Psst.’
It is the bailiff. He gestures towards the bench, where the judge-in-chief is regarding her impatiently. Has she been in a trance, or even asleep? Has she been dozing in the faces of her judges? She should be more careful.
‘I refer you to your first appearance before this court, when you gave as your occupation “secretary to the invisible” and made the following statement: “A good secretary should not have beliefs. It is inappropriate to the function”; and, a little later, “I have beliefs but I do not believe in them.”
‘At that hearing you appeared to disparage belief, calling it an impediment to your calling. At today’s hearing, however, you testify to a belief in frogs, or more accurately in the allegorical meaning of a frog’s life, if I understand your drift. My question is: Have you changed the basis of your plea from the first hearing to the present one? Are you giving up the secretary story and presenting a new one, based on the firmness of your belief in the creation?’
Has she changed her story? It is a weighty question, no doubt about that, yet she has to struggle to fix her attention on it. The courtroom is hot, she feels drugged, she is not sure how much more of this hearing she can take. What she would like most is to lay her head on a pillow and have a snooze, even if it has to be the filthy pillow in the bunkhouse.
‘It depends,’ she says, playing for time, trying to think (Come on, come on! she tells herself: Your life depends on this!). ‘You ask if I have changed my plea. But who am I, who is this I, this you? We change from day to day, and we also stay the same. No I, no you is more fundamental than any other. You might as well ask which is the true Elizabeth Costello: the one who made the first statement or the one who made the second. My answer is, both are true. Both. And neither. I am an other. Pardon me for resorting to words that are not my own, but I cannot improve on them. You have the wrong person before you. If you think you have the right person you have the wrong person. The wrong Elizabeth Costello.’
Is this true? It may not be true but it is certainly not false. She has never felt more like the wrong person in her life.
Her interrogator waves impatiently. ‘I am not asking to see your passport. Passports have no force here, as I am sure you are aware. The question I ask is: you, by whom I mean this person before our eyes, this person petitioning for passage, this person here and nowhere else – do you speak for yourself?’
‘Yes. No, emphatically no. Yes and no. Both.’
r /> Her judge glances left and right at his colleagues. Is she imagining it, or does the flicker of a smile pass among them, and a whispered word? What is the word? Confused?
He turns back to her. ‘Thank you. That is all. You will hear from us in due course.’
‘That is all?’
‘That is all, for today.’
‘I am not confused.’
‘Yes, you are not confused. But who is it who is not confused?’
They cannot contain themselves, her panel of judges, her board. First they titter like children, then abandon all dignity and howl with laughter.
She wanders across the square. It is, she would guess, early afternoon. There is less bustle than usual. The locals must be at their siesta. The young in one another’s arms. If I had my life again, she tells herself, not without bitterness, I would spend it otherwise. Have more fun. What good has it done me, this life of writing, now that it comes to the final proving?
The sun is fierce. She ought to be wearing a hat. But her hat is in the bunkhouse, and the thought of re-entering that airless space repels her.
The courthouse scene has not left her, the ignominy of it, the shame. Yet beneath it all she remains, strangely, under the spell of the frogs. Today, it would appear, she is disposed to believe in frogs. What will it be tomorrow? Midges? Grasshoppers? The objects of her belief appear to be quite random. They come up without warning, surprising and even, despite her dark mood, delighting her.
She gives the frogs a tap with her fingernail. The tone that comes back is clear, clear as a bell.
She gives the word belief a tap. How does belief measure up? Will her test work with abstractions too?
The sound that belief returns is not as clear, but clear enough nevertheless. Today, at this time, in this place, she is evidently not without belief. In fact, now that she thinks of it, she lives, in a certain sense, by belief. Her mind, when she is truly herself, appears to pass from one belief to the next, pausing, balancing, then moving on. A picture comes to her of a girl crossing a stream; it comes together with a line from Keats: Keeping steady her laden head across a brook. She lives by belief, she works by belief, she is a creature of belief. What a relief! Should she run back and tell them, her judges, before they disrobe (and before she changes her mind)?
Astonishing that a court which sets itself up as an interrogatory of belief should refuse to pass her. They must have heard other writers before, other disbelieving believers or believing disbelievers. Writers are not lawyers, surely they must allow for that, allow for eccentricities of presentation. But of course this is not a court of law. Not even a court of logic. Her first impression was right: a court out of Kafka or Alice in Wonderland, a court of paradox. The first shall be last and the last first. Or contrariwise. If it were guaranteed in advance that one could breeze through one’s hearing with anecdotes from one’s childhood, skipping with laden head from one belief to another, from frogs to stones to flying machines, as often as a woman changes her hat (now where does that line come from?), then every petitioner would take up autobiography, and the court stenographer would be washed away in streams of free association.
She is before the gate again, before what is evidently her gate and hers alone, though it must be visible to anyone who cares to give it a glance. It is, as ever, closed, but the door to the lodge is open, and inside she can see the gatekeeper, the custodian, busy as usual with his papers, which ripple lightly in the air from the fan.
‘Another hot day,’ she remarks.
‘Mm,’ he mumbles, not interrupting his work.
‘Every time I pass by I see you writing,’ she continues, trying not to be deterred. ‘You are a writer too, in a sense. What are you writing?’
‘Records. Keeping the records up to date.’
‘I’ve just had my second hearing.’
‘That’s good.’
‘I sang for my judges. I was today’s singing-bird. Do you use that expression: singing-bird?’
He shakes his head abstractedly: no.
‘It did not go well, I’m afraid, my song.’
‘Mm.’
‘I know you are not a judge,’ she says. ‘Nevertheless, in your judgement, do I stand any chance of passing through? And if I do not pass through, if I am deemed not good enough to pass, will I stop here for ever, in this place?’
He shrugs. ‘We all stand a chance.’ He has not looked up, not once. Does that mean something? Does it mean that he has not the courage to look her in the eye?
‘But as a writer,’ she persists – ‘what chance do I stand as a writer, with the special problems of a writer, the special fidelities?’
Fidelities. Now that she has brought it out, she recognizes it as the word on which all hinges.
He shrugs again. ‘Who can say,’ he says. ‘It is a matter for the boards.’
‘But you keep the records – who passes through, who does not. You must, in a sense, know.’
He does not answer.
‘Do you see many people like me, people in my situation?’ she continues urgently, out of control now, hearing herself out of control, disliking herself for it. In my situation: what does that mean? What is her situation? The situation of someone who does not know her own mind?
She has a vision of the gate, the far side of the gate, the side she is denied. At the foot of the gate, blocking the way, lies stretched out a dog, an old dog, his lion-coloured hide scarred from innumerable manglings. His eyes are closed, he is resting, snoozing. Beyond him is nothing but a desert of sand and stone, to infinity. It is her first vision in a long while, and she does not trust it, does not trust in particular the anagram GOD-DOG. Too literary, she thinks again. A curse on literature!
The man behind the desk has evidently had enough of questions. He lays down his pen, folds his hands, regards her levelly. ‘All the time,’ he says. ‘We see people like you all the time.’
At such moments even a negligible creature, a dog, a rat, a beetle, a stunted apple tree, a cart track winding over a hill, a mossy stone, counts more for me than a night of bliss with the most beautiful, most devoted mistress. These dumb and in some cases inanimate creatures press toward me with such fullness, such presence of love, that there is nothing in range of my rapturous eye that does not have life. It is as if everything, everything that exists, everything I can recall, everything my confused thinking touches on, means something.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
‘Letter of Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon’ (1902)
Postscript
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).