Read Online A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt - Free Book Online

her friends Tony Watson, who had his own column now in the
New Statesman,
and Alan Melville. Tony said he would talk to the editor. Alan said he was entirely with her in her decision but couldn’t help. She talked to Hugh Pink, the poet, who worked part-time for Bowers & Eden. Hugh said there were almost no women in publishing, though there were women
authors,
he had always supposed she would eventually be a writer. Frederica said that the writer in the house was Agatha Mond, and she wanted Hugh to get Agatha to send the fairy story to Rupert Parrott. “Now it’s come to an end,” said Frederica. “Then she’ll have to write a sequel. Saskia and Leo are languishing. I can’t write a fairy story for them. I appear not to be a writer.”
    â€œYou do write,” said Hugh. “I saw.”
    â€œThat’s not writing, that’s a game,” said Frederica. She was defensive.
    Hugh was the only person to whom Frederica had shown her book of jottings, cut-ups, commonplaces and scraps of writing, which she called
Laminations
. She had only shown him certain bits, as illustrations of jokes or literary points.
    â€œIt’s a contemporary game,” said Hugh. “Like Burroughs and Jeff Nuttall, only quite different, of course, because it’s you.”
    â€œIt’s got intimate bits in, bits of me. Only a few lines long.” She didn’t show him those bits.
    She had had the word,
Laminations,
before the object. It referred to her attempts to live her life in separated strata, which did not run into each other. Sex, literature, the kitchen, teaching, the newspaper,
objets
trouvés
. She did not put Leo into
Laminations,
not because he was not part of her fragmentary life, but because he was not fragmented. Lately, however, she had begun to put in odd passages from the books with which she was trying to teach him, too late, to read. How do you interest a boy with the vocabulary of a sophisticated adolescent in Daddy cleaning the car and Mummy making cakes?
    She took the exercise books out of her desk and showed them to Hugh. Her last entry was a collection of graffiti from the Samuel Palmer School.
    Turn on, tune in, drop out.
    Art is Orgasm which blasts away Civic Walls and Bourgeois Frames
and BURSTS OPEN the locks and chains of Capital.
    Student-networks for relevance to the total environment.
    Teaching is oppression.
    We Demand you make Literature more relevant to Jewellery Design.
    Shut up and listen for a change.
    Use pricks and cunts not brains. Use tongues for Human Delight not
syllabubbles.
    Prescribe mushrooms not Shakespeare Texts. Learn folly to be wise.
    Paint all the walls every day with everything that comes to hand.
    Hugh flicked back through the pages. Frederica hovered nervously. He laughed. He smiled. He noted the cut-ups of Lawrence and Forster. “And those are the cut-up letters from my ex-husband’s solicitor.”
    â€œIt’s like a private I Ching,” said Hugh. “Well, not private. A particular, an individual I Ching. Can I show it to Rupert?”
    â€œIt isn’t finished.”
    â€œThat’s its nature.”

Frederica gave in. Hugh was part of her laminated system. He was a friend, in many ways
the
friend, as far as writing and reading went. It was important that he should never be confused with possible lovers. He had not always quite seen it that way himself. Frederica thought, thinking about not thinking about sex, about John Ottokar. Who had accepted the Yorkshire job, starting in the autumn term.

The person who produced real work, real cheques, for Frederica, turned out to be Edmund Wilkie.
    Wilkie, who was still professionally interested in the activities of the brain, and the nature of perception, had somehow also managed to become part of the then small, curiously open and anarchic world of BBC Television. People had good ideas (and bad ideas) and put them into practice, without too much bureaucratic