A Conspiracy Theory About the Love Lives of Two Famous Authors

About Us: Non Grata is a print and online magazine focused on books and culture. For those of you in New York, we have an upcoming event at Mezzrow, the legendary jazz bar, on November 22nd (R.S.V.P. here). The following piece is a part of our online publication.

Order print

The novelist A.S. Byatt is widely beloved in highbrow literary circles. Her work has won many literary prizes, including the Booker Prize, the Shakespeare Prize, the Erasmus Prize, the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, and she was reportedly a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

She is also responsible for the rise of the novelist David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, who writes things like this:

“Shit, meet Fan. Fan, this is Shit.”

Mitchell, for his part, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, but aside from that, his writing has little in common with Byatt’s. So it may come as a surprise to learn that Byatt was one of Mitchell’s biggest champions, particularly for his debut novel, Ghostwritten, which she praised before its publication, calling it “one of the best first novels I’ve read for a long time.”

But first: Who is A.S. Byatt?

Byatt’s writing is rigorous and highly intellectual, and spans many topics, from mythology to feminism to Victorian-era science. She’s known for her postmodernist, metafictional novels and stories, which often incorporate fictional letters, memoirs, original poetry and folktales along with extant mythology. Science, too: she’s studied snail science and brain science and color theory alongside English literature. At the same time, her fiction is largely plot-driven and quick-moving. In short: her work is not only a joy to read, it’s intellectually enlarging, making the reader a little smarter by the end.

Her most famous work is the Booker-winning novel Possession: A Romance. The book features two scholars who are passionate about two Victorian-era poets who apparently never crossed paths. But when one scholar stumbles upon a previously unknown letter between the two poets, they unravel a conspiracy about a secret relationship, following clues hidden in their poems and stories to uncover a chain of evidence linking them together. The affair, if proven true, would shake their scholarly worlds. One of the poets, Randolph Ash, is a famously devoted husband to a loving, if boring, wife. The other, Christabel LaMotte, is a fierce, independent feminist and, it was thought, a lesbian. Neither would ever engage in an affair. Unless . . . ?

Meanwhile, David Mitchell:

David Mitchell’s novels are fun and funny. They move quickly and often feature characters saying witty things as they get up to elaborate hijinks. There are reincarnated immortals, noncorporeal spirits, wizards, haunted houses, robots, cultists, and terrorists. The books span continents and eras, from the far past to the distant future. They feature characters who are sassy and strong and full of wit.

But Mitchell gives the air of someone who doesn’t take anything too seriously. He experiments, he explores, and if the stories don’t come together (which they largely don’t), it’s okay, it was a fun ride. He constantly undermines himself. Many of his books feature a David Mitchell stand-in who winks at the camera and tells the audience that it’s all a lark and he’s in on the joke.

“Hershey is so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistle-blower,” he writes in The Bone Clocks. “What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?”

The problem is when all this undermining kills the book. Many have criticized his lack of proper endings. At times his refusal to take things seriously means he doesn’t take his own premise seriously. This is most true in The Bone Clocks, which I’ll get into more later.

As The New York Times wrote of his work: “Self-mockery as self-protection is a very old gambit, certainly.”

Yet A.S. Byatt Has Always Adored Him

A.S. Byatt was there for David Mitchell from the beginning of his career. She wrote a blurb for the book jacket of Ghostwritten, David Mitchell’s first novel, praising it highly even though he was an unknown author. Before the book was published, she also sat next to him at a literary festival as he did a reading from the book, a “royal command performance” moment, according to The Guardian.

She continued to praise him throughout his career, giving a celebratory review of Cloud Atlas in 2004, calling him “newer than new” in 2006 and lauding his ability to “imagine these extraordinary large structures” in 2010. She even helped him with the writing of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which came out in 2010, giving him critical advice on writing in third-person.

Mitchell, for his part, wrote the introduction for Byatt’s final published book, a story anthology called Medusa’s Ankles. In this introduction, he wrote: “During a conversation with Gaiman I told him how much A.S. Byatt enjoyed his fantasy novel Coraline,” which means he had access to that non-public information.

It seems an unlikely duo, yet clearly a strong one. Get your head out of the gutter. They were both married to different people. This was a relationship of professional admiration, nothing more.

Unless . . . ?

An Investigation

Both authors share a love for intertextuality. David Mitchell often states that his books all take place in the same universe. He wants his readers to search for and connect the recurring characters, invented movies, and ideas. Like Crispin Hershey, who wrote a novel in number9dream that comes back to bite him in The Bone Clocks, and is also featured in Slade House and Utopia Avenue. It’s a long game and one that is exciting and fun.

Byatt, meanwhile, is devoted to esotericism, secret messages behind stories. She includes myths and fables, invented and real, inviting her readers to notice how the stories sometimes reveal the central plot.

It’s in their honor that I took a deep dive into their fictional writings for textual clues of a possible relationship beyond what’s on the surface. What drew Byatt to Mitchell, and vice versa? How did they know each other? When did their relationship develop, and how did it develop, and why? Let’s explore.

Ghostwritten

Mitchell’s first novel, Ghostwritten, begins with a doomsday-cultist-terrorist gas attack on the Tokyo subway. The narration moves through characters and space from the East to the West, who deal with ghost children, heists, quantum A.I. superintelligence, “noncorporal” parasites and more. The book starts in Japan and moves through China, Mongolia, Russia, and to London, Ireland, ending in New York City before briefly returning to Tokyo.

This journey roughly follows a trip Mitchell himself took while he was writing the book. He was living in Japan then took a six-month solo tour through China, Mongolia, Russia, and Ireland, including travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway. He wrote the first chapters in backpacker hostels, not taking them seriously, just playing around with different stories. “After the Chinese section the idea came to me that they could be merged and strung into an odd-looking sort of novel,” he said to the Paris Review. This structure of loosely interconnected novellas sets the stage for the format he will take on for the rest of his career.

But I’m most interested in the London chapter in particular. It features a ghostwriter named Marco, who’s super cool and sleeps with a bunch of women yet is also, despite his financial hardships and general fuckboy attitude, an amazing person deep down, saving one person’s life, and overwhelming his girlfriend with desire. It’s hard not to picture this as an author surrogate, or wish-fulfillment of the same.

His main girl is a woman named Poppy who lives in Putney, London. The chapter revolves around his relationship with her. She gets pregnant, and when this happens, she wants him to get serious and commit, but he’s uncertain. Can he say goodbye to his other shags? “I map the city by trigonometrical shag points. Highbury is already Katy Forbes. Putney is Poppy . . .”

Where did Byatt live for most of her adult life? Putney, London.

As a reminder, Ghostwritten is Mitchell’s first novel. Byatt somehow got her hands on it and read it and blurbed it before publication, outside of her professional duties as book reviewer. This gives it special weight as insight into their possible relationship.

The July Ghost

While Byatt wrote about Mitchell’s first book, Mitchell wrote the introduction for Byatt’s last. Medusa’s Ankles was an anthology of curated stories from throughout her career. The first story in the collection, and the one most visibly connected to Byatt’s biography, is called “The July Ghost.”

In real life, Byatt’s only son, whom she had with her first husband, was killed by a drunk driver at 11 years old. The July Ghost features a grieving woman whose own ten-year-old son died in a car accident—the autobiographical parallels are obvious. The woman in the story is facing marriage troubles, an absent husband. She is matronly but not too old, nice-looking without being audacious, and keeps largely to herself (all personality traits that can be attributed to Byatt). She takes in a young male lodger, an academic studying poetry at a nearby university. She tells the lodger he should spend time in their beautiful garden out back, so he does, as he focuses on his reading and writing. Then one day there is a boy sitting out there. The boy won’t speak, even when spoken to. He’s sitting in a tree and looks perfectly comfortable. It unnerves the lodger so he tells the landlady about what he saw, describing the boy’s hair and clothes. She informs him that this is her dead son.

The ghost of her son comes back often, and the lodger sees him, but his mother never does. They investigate this together; she tells him she’s unable to see the ghost because she’s “too sensible” and he’s more attuned to these things. His investigations provide her some solace, but it only makes her want more. The lodger decides that the only way to hash this out is to have sex with her. It doesn’t go well and they both agree he should move out.

The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye

Mitchell lived in Japan for a long time. Byatt mentions Japan in her novella “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.” This story is a love affair at a literary conference in Istanbul between a female scholar of narratology. She’s divorced, her children have grown up and moved away, and she’s facing life as a single, aging woman, and although she is independent and pleased with her career, there is a post-motherhood emptiness in her life, an unbearable fear of death. When she buys a paperweight at the market, it turns out to be an ancient Turkish glass orb holding an immortal djinn. She strokes it and the djinn appears in her hotel room, beautiful and sexy and full of virility. He grants her three wishes, of course. She wishes 1) for her body to be restored to a younger vision, 2) for the djinn to love her (and he does, many times), and 3) for the djinn to have his freedom. Neither want to be bound to the other. Their affair ends when they separate, but her faith in life is restored, her eroticism is awakened, and she understands that love can exist without ownership.

Does David Mitchell Have a Type?

The second and tenth chapters of Cloud Atlas, Mitchell’s most famous novel, feature sexy but broke English musician Robert Frobisher, who stays at the home of a much more famous composer and his wife. Frobisher composes a groundbreaking musical work called the Cloud Atlas Sextet, whose structure mimics that of the Cloud Atlas novel itself, with movements that are interrupted and resumed in mirror-symmetry, making Frobisher a clear author stand-in. This section features a tumultuous affair with his benefactor’s wife as he continues to work on his creatively brilliant music.

In fact, many of his works include an author stand-in character who is charming but unruly and attracted to women who are self-possessed and mature. The woman as form, embodying the stability and continuity missing from his own, rootless life.

By Now My Theory Must Be Clear

But so far I’ve only discussed their literary works. What about their real lives?

In the year 1992, Mitchell would have been twenty-three, Byatt fifty-six. Byatt was still highly prominent from her Booker win and continuing literary successes, giving lectures all the time, writing constantly, in a period of high productivity. She was a lovely woman, put-together and thoughtful.

In this year, Mitchell had just returned to England after finishing his master’s degree in comparative literature and spending a year teaching English in Sicily. He moved to London, where he stayed for two years, unsure what to do with his life. He vaguely wanted to write since he was a child and told his mother at thirteen that he was writing a book, but didn’t take it seriously — or anything else. He got degrees in literature but picked up jobs teaching English at whatever school would have him.

Concurrently, Byatt’s relationship with her second husband, Peter Duffy, was described as “independent.” And potentially rocky. Duffy “gets his own supper at night,” the New York Times reported in 1991. Byatt said in a later interview, “I don’t think I felt at home with him at first. I felt I loved him and I wanted to be in a house where he was, and wanted to talk to him about books and ideas.” But her husband was not an artist. He was an investment banker.

Meanwhile in her creative work, Byatt was drawn to relationships between artists. In Possession, the poet Randolph Henry Ash is married to a woman he loves, but their relationship lacks the intense passion he shares with Christabel LaMotte. Ash and LaMotte, both artists and poets, are able to inspire each other intellectually and creatively, and this mutual admiration gradually develops into an affair.

Let’s return to the character Marco, the Mitchellian character in his first novel, Ghostwritten. Marco is a ghostwriter in London who fucks. He’s super cool, also a drummer by the way, and even though he’s kind of a shit show — a financial mess, in debt, battling against constant deadlines — he’s happy to live a life of independence. “Independence and insecurity hobble along together in my three-legged race,” he writes. By the way, he’s also really secretly wonderful. He saves a woman’s life by pushing her out of traffic. And Poppy, the situationship he waffles about, is overly smitten with him by the end. “Marco,” she says. “I’m taken aback that you can still take me aback.”

Marco’s journey in this chapter barely impacts the overarching plot; the only real change (other than the fact that he saved a woman’s life on a whim, and this woman turns out to be the narrator of the next chapter), is that he becomes a better person. He starts out by believing everything in the world is up to chance, so why should his actions affect anything? He’s an asshole and treats women terribly. The very first time he meets Poppy (the potential Byatt stand-in), this exchange takes place:

“Do you ever think of the effect you have on your conquests?”“I don’t see where you’re coming from, Poppy.”“I’m not coming from anywhere. But I suddenly noticed that you love talking about cause. You never talk about effect.”

But by the end of his section, Marco is finally convinced that actions matter, even in a world of chance. “Tying my future to Poppy’s and India’s — if they would have me — would be the greatest, never-ending, Richter-busting plunge I could ever take.” He grows up!

So let’s go back to 1992. Let’s say Mitchell and Byatt knew each other, as both traveled in London’s literary circles. She was well-known and serious, he was charming and interested. Perhaps they knew each other. Perhaps they knew each other very, very well. But then he left. In 1994 he chased a Japanese woman to Hiroshima. A few years later, in 1997, he took his cross-continental trip from Japan back to London. He wrote his chapter about Marco as a result of this trip. He might have seen Byatt once more. And then he completed his book. It was a huge success. He moved back to Japan and met a woman named Keiko, who would become his wife. They got married and had two kids and are still together. Mitchell grew up!

And what about Byatt?

In “The July Ghost,” the woman wracked with grief is opened up by her younger lodger. The male lodger narrates: “She was strong: too strong for her own good. It would take years to wear away that stony, closed, simply surviving insensibility. It was not his job.” But he does his best to try. And he does help. And then he leaves.

An Alternative Theory

It’s time to clear up the timelines. “The July Ghost” is a beautiful story. And it is almost certainly not about Mitchell. It was first published in 1982 when Mitchell would have been thirteen and Byatt forty-six.

But what if they found each other later, and in him, she discovered the character she had dreamed up? What if he struck something in her that she had been writing about for years? What if it felt like fate?

Or . . . what if David Mitchell is immortal?

All of his books are part of the same Mitchell universe. In this universe, immortality is real. It comes in two forms. There are the Horologists who age and die and wake up in someone else’s body. And the Anchorites who consume other people’s souls once in a while. Mitchell is celebrated for his ability to embody voices of all ages and eras.

What if he has inside knowledge?

Vague spoiler for The Bone Clocks, which dives into the war between immortals most fully: In the end, we learn that despite driving the plot of the story, the immortals are actually impotent and can do nothing to change the downward trajectory of society. The final chapter, when I first read it, made me throw my book across the room. I thought it undermined the whole book. But what if it was not a matter of poor plotting, but instead an admission? That he is immortal and can’t do anything with this power, except perhaps have a bunch of sex and wander the world and give sad women a new lease on life.

After all, Mitchell once admitted: “[I]t’s not vulgar to hanker after immortality — we’re genetically driven toward survival, and we only reach the middle stages of our lifespans because of this drive.”

A reconsideration of their work, through each other’s eyes

Byatt didn’t speak to anyone voluntarily until she was sixteen, and Mitchell didn’t speak until he was five, and then was tormented by a bad stammer. Both of their childhoods were spent with heads in books, in a world of fairy tales and fantasy. This is just one reason that meeting each other might have felt like fate. Both adored myths, magic, folktales, and a good story. They pushed back against their religious upbringings. They each had sons whose fates were wrapped in tragedy: Byatt’s only son died and Mitchell’s has non-verbal autism, severe to the point of self-harm.

At the very least, one can argue that these two authors inspired each other professionally. They found something in each other and each had something to provide the other. Byatt was overly sensible, super serious and mired in grief long after the death of her son. Meet Mitchell, a breath of fresh air, constantly joking, in love with life. Mitchell, meanwhile, was a white-hot flame of talent and excitement, exploring the world, unwilling to settle. Meet Byatt, who could show him how to take things more seriously.

Byatt passed away in 2023, so we’ll never know her private thoughts (that is, unless someone stumbles upon a bundle of letters in her grave à la Possession, but that would be too on the nose, even for her. Maybe Mitchell would do it.) I hope her works don’t fall into obsolescence. I hope Mitchell can continue to lift her up in the same way she did for him. Byatt’s stories deserve to live on. Stories, after all, are the only true path to immortality.