The Postscript

A few thoughts on fatherhood and A.S. Byatt's "Possession"

The most nebulous and insistent platitude of parenthood is that it changes you, whether you want it to or not. Your sense of what matters shifts overnight (rightward, apparently) along with your sense of scale. Fathers set aside old inanities and start worrying about big stuff like purpose and posterity. Mothers undergo something even weirder, akin to acquiring superpowers. Once their radioactive offspring latch, they are said to gain bat-like hearing and a telepathic instinct for when something is wrong.

I came quite late to fatherhood. My daughter was born a few months before I turned 45, by which time I felt pretty fully formed. And for the best part of two years I would have rejected the idea that anything in me changed. Mostly, I still do. Like a lot of writers, I acquired my job/vocation/punishment through a love of reading. But until I met my wife, I never really gave much thought to what kind of reader I am. I assumed—speed aside—that most people read in the same way. By which I mean that genre fans expect to be scared, excited or aroused, while readers of serious fiction (a term I have no intention of defining here) mostly want to be engaged intellectually.

But where did such a rigid belief come from? I plowed through books as a child (we did not own a VCR), studied literature in college, and read on the tube every day on my way to and from the tech job I managed to keep hold of through most of my twenties. And in all that time, all those many hundreds of novels, I don’t think I felt moved even once. When I met my future wife, her disbelief that I didn’t cry or yearn or feel while reading was one of the first things we talked about. Luckily, she was sympathetic.

I’m happy to report that this is no longer true, the change occurring upon finishing A.S. Byatt’s Possession. The novel is subtitled A Romance, but it wasn’t this aspect of the book that got to me. For the most part I found it impressive but empty, all the high Victoriana and low academic skullduggery resembling Iris Murdoch, challenged to write about something other than dinner. But then I got to the postscript, and was quietly devastated.

As the book ends, both the present-day scholars and the nineteenth century women whose letters they have been fighting over draw the same conclusion: that the poet Randolph Henry Ash died without knowing his brief affair with Cristabel LaMotte resulted in the birth of a child. But then Byatt intervenes. In a moment of unusual grace, she allows the reader to see something that no amount of academic research could have revealed: Ash meeting his daughter, just once, on a beautifully rendered day in the English countryside. The scene is brief, but it only took a single sentence to get me. He remarks that the girl has a look of her mother, and then after a pause, of her father too.

Everyone tells me that my daughter looks just like me.