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 revelation. 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 (Elizabeth Costello)

'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. (Elizabeth Costello)

'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, corne 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.' (Elizabeth Costello)

She steps forward. 'What I believe,' she reads in a firm voice, like a child doing a recitation.'I was born in the city of Melbourne, but spent part of my childhood in rural Victoria, in a region of climatic extremes: of scorching droughts followed by torrential rains that swelled the rivers with the carcases of drowned animals. That, anyhow, is how I remember it. 

 'When the waters subsided--I am speaking of the waters of one river in particular now, the Dulgannon--acres of mud were left behind. At night you would hear the belling of tens of thousands of little frogs rejoicing in the largesse of the heavens. The air would be as dense with their calls as it was at noon with the rasping of cicadas. 

 'Where do they suddenly arrive from, these thousands of frogs? The answer is, they are always there. In the dry season they go underground, burrowing further and further from the heat of the sun until each has created a little tomb for itself. And in those tombs they die, so to speak. Their heartbeat slows, their breathing stops, they turn the colour of mud. Once again the nights are silent. 

 'Silent until the next rains come, rapping, as it were, on thousands of tiny coffin lids. In those coffins hearts begin to beat, limbs begin to twitch that for months have been lifeless. The dead awake. As the caked mud softens, the frogs begin to dig their way out, and soon their voices resound again in joyous exultation beneath the vault of the heavens. 

'Excuse my language. I am or have been a professional writer. Usually I take care to conceal the extravagances of the imagination. But today, for this occasion, I thought I would conceal nothing, bare all. The vivifying flood, the chorus of joyous belling, followed by the subsiding of the waters and the retreat to the grave, then drought seemingly without end, then fresh rains and the resurrection of the dead--it is a story I present transparently without disguise. 

'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. (Elizabeth Costello)

'I am a writer. You may think I should say instead, I was a writer. But I am or was a writer because of who I am or was. I have not ceased to be what I am. As yet. Or so it feels to me.

'I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given me. I merely write down the words and then test them, test their soundness, to make sure I have heard right.

'Secretary of the invisible: not my own phrase, I hasten to say. I borrow it from a secretary of a higher order, Czeslaw Milosz, a poet, perhaps known to you, to whom it was dictated years ago.'

She pauses. This is where she expects them to interrupt. Dictated by whom? she expects them to ask. And she has her answer ready: By powers beyond us. But there is no interruption, no question. Instead their spokesman wags his pencil at her. 'Go on.'

'Before I can pass on I am required to state my beliefs,' she reads. 'I reply: a good secretary should have no beliefs. It is inappropriate to the function. A secretary should merely be in readiness, waiting for the call.'

Again she expects an interruption: Whose call? But there are going to be no questions, it would seem.

'In my work a belief is a resistance, an obstacle. I try to empty myself of resistances.'

'Without beliefs we are not human.' The voice comes from the leftmost of them, the one she has privately labelled Grimalkin, a wizened little fellow so short that his chin barely clears the bench. In fact, about each of them there is some troublingly comic feature. Excessively literary, she thinks. A caricaturist's idea of a bench of judges.

'Without beliefs we are not human,' he repeats. 'What do you say to that, Elizabeth Costello?'

She sighs.'Of course, gentlemen, I do not claim to be bereft of all belief. I have what I think of as opinions and prejudices, no different in kind from what are commonly called beliefs. When I claim to be a secretary clean of belief I refer to my ideal self, a self capable of holding opinions and prejudices at bay while the word which it is her function to conduct passes through her.'

'Negative capability,' says the little man. 'Is negative capability what you have in mind, what you claim to possess?'

'Yes, if you like. To put it in another way, I have beliefs but I do not believe in them. They are not important enough to believe in. My heart is not in them. My heart and my sense of duty.'

The little man purses his lips. His neighbour turns and gives him a glance (she can swear she hears the rustle of feathers). 'And what effect do you think it has, this lack of belief, on your humanity?' the little man asks.

'On my own humanity? Is that of consequence? What I offer to those who read me, what I contribute to their humanity, outweighs, I would hope, my own emptiness in that respect.'

'Your own cynicism, you mean to say.'

Cynicism. Not a word she likes, but on this occasion she is prepared to entertain it. With luck it will be the last occasion. With luck she will not have to subject herself again to self-defence and the pomposities that go with it.

'About myself, yes, I may well be cynical, in a technical sense. I cannot afford to take myself too seriously, or my motives. But as regards other people, as regards humankind or humanity, no, I do not believe I am cynical at all.'

'You are not an unbeliever then,' says the man in the middle.

'No. Unbelief is a belief. A disbeliever, if you will accept the distinction, though sometimes I feel disbelief becomes a credo too.'

There is a silence. 'Go on,' says the man. 'Proceed with your statement.'

'That is the end of it. There is nothing that has not been covered. I rest my case.'

'Your case is that you are a secretary. Of the invisible.'

'And that I cannot afford to believe.'

'For professional reasons.'

'For professional reasons.'

'And what if the invisible does not regard you as its secretary? What if your appointment was long ago discontinued, and the letter did not reach you? What if you were never even appointed? Have you considered that possibility.'

'I consider it every day. I am forced to consider it. If I am not what I say I am, then I am a sham. If that is your considered verdict, that I am a sham secretary, then I can only bow my head and accept it. I presume you have taken into account my record, a lifetime's record. In fairness to me you cannot ignore that record.'

[...]

'Do you believe the voices come from God? Do you believe in God?'

Does she believe in God? A question she prefers to keep a wary distance from. Why, even assuming that God exists--whatever exists means--should His massive, monarchical slumber be disturbed from below by a clamour of believes and don't believes, like a plebiscite?

'That is too intimate,' she says. 'I have nothing to say.'

'There are only ourselves here. You are free to speak your heart.'

You misunderstand. I mean, I suspect that God would not look kindly on such presumption--presumption to intimacy. I prefer to let God be. As I hope He will let me be.' (Elizabeth Costello)