Mark Fuller Dillon's Blog, page 20

Every time I read Marjorie Bowen's "The Sign-Painter And ...

Every time I read Marjorie Bowen's "The Sign-Painter And The Crystal Fishes," I begin with doubts, but end with praise.

The doubts are justified. Bowen writes with an intensely visual style, but her descriptions are often static:

The house was built beside a river. In the evening the sun would lie reflected in the dark water, a stain of red in between the thick shadows cast by the buildings. It was twilight now, and there was the long ripple of dull crimson, shifting as the water rippled sullenly between the high houses.

Beneath this house was an old stake, hung at the bottom with stagnant green, white and dry at the top. A rotting boat that fluttered the tattered remains of faded crimson cushions was affixed to the stake by a fraying rope. Sometimes the boat was thrown against the post by the strong evil ripples, and there was a dismal creaking noise.

While undeniably vivid, these images are better suited to the script of a stage play than to a narrative meant to involve the reader.

When the characters appear, they, too, are described as if they were actors on a stage:

There was no glass in the window, and the shutters swung loose on broken hinges. Now and again they creaked against the flat brick front of the house, and then Lucius Cranfield winced.

He held a round, clear mirror in his hand, and sometimes he looked away from the solitary tree to glance into it. When he did so he beheld a pallid face surrounded with straight brown hair, lips that had once been beautiful, and blurred eyes veined with red like some curious stone.

As the red sunlight began to grow fainter in the water a step sounded on the rotting stairway, the useless splitting door was pushed open, and Lord James Fontaine entered.

Slowly, and with a mincing step, he came across the dusty floor. He wore a dress of bright violet watered silk, his hair was rolled fantastically, and powdered such a pure white that his face looked sallow by contrast. To remedy this he had painted his cheeks and his lips, and powdered his forehead and chin. But the impression made was not of a pink and fresh complexion, but of a yellow countenance rouged. There were long pearls in his ears and under his left eye an enormous patch. His eyes slanted towards his nose, his nostrils curved upwards, and his thin lips were smiling.

Bowen has a good eye, but not always a good ear. She often falls back on adverbs to compensate for weak verbs:

"You have a very splendid painting swinging outside your own door," said Lord James suavely. "Never did I see fairer drawing nor brighter hues. It is your work?" he questioned.

"Mine, yes," assented the sign-painter drearily.

As the story develops, the few lapses in her style fade into the background, while the visual sense remains up front:

The bright dark eyes of the visitor flickered from right to left. He moved a little nearer the window, where, despite the thickening twilight, his violet silk coat gleamed like the light on a sheet of water....

She cast off her long earrings, her bracelets, her rings, the necklace Lord James had given her. This slipped, like a glitter of purple water, through her fingers, and shone in a little heap of stars on the gleaming waxed floor.

From beginning to end, Bowen maintains a tone of detached omniscience. This makes it impossible to read the story as a particpant, only as a spectator, but the compensations of visual detail make the spectacle worth seeing.

I also think she was right to keep the readers at a distance. The surprises of the plot depend on a detached perspective; allowing us into the heads of her characters would have undermined her best moments.

To say anything else would ruin the impact of a story that not only surprises, but develops a mood of quiet eeriness that creeped under my skin years ago when I first read it, and one that comes back to me with each new reading.

Dans la confusion de cet étrange bouleversement....

As I have pointed out, C. L. Moore wrote in a pulp style that offered the vividness of primary colours, but without nuance and often without grace. In contrast, Clark Ashton Smith wrote in a style so closely related to French decadence, that it could be compared without exaggeration to the work of Jean Lorrain, Charles Nodier, or, at its most severe, Marcel Schwob.

Here is a passage from Nodier's "Smarra ou les Démons de la nuit":

...Le monstre jaillit de sa main brûlante comme le palet arrondi du discobole, il tourne dans l'air avec la rapidité de ces feux artificiels qu'on lance sur les navires, étend des ailes bizarrement festonnées, monte, descend, grandit, se rapetisse, et, nain difforme et joyeux dont les mains sont armées d'ongles d'un métal plus fin que l’acier, qui pénètrent la chair sans la déchirer, et boivent le sang à la manière de la pompe insidieuse des sangsues, il s'attache sur mon cœur, se développe, soulève sa tête énorme et rit. En vain mon œil, fixe d'effroi, cherche dans l'espace qu'il peut embrasser un objet qui le rassure; les mille démons de la nuit escortent l'affreux démon de la turquoise: des femmes rabougries au regard ivre; des serpents rouges et violets dont la bouche jette du feu; des lézards qui élèvent au-dessus d'un lac de boue et de sang un visage pareil à celui de l'homme; des têtes nouvellement détachées du tronc par la hache du soldat, mais qui me regardent avec des yeux vivants, et s'enfuient en sautillant sur des pieds de reptiles.

From Jean Lorrain's "L'un d'eux":

Son costume, que j'examinais, révélait maintenant des préciosités voulues: une énorme grenouille de soie verte s'étalait brodée à la place du coeur et, autour de son capuchon de velours glauque, une couronne, que je n'avais pas d'abord remarquée, se tressait, composée de grenouilles et de lézards. Le burnous arabe l'enveloppait comme un suaire, et sa cagoule de drap d'argent évoquait des idées de lèpre et de peste, de maladies maudites comme en connut le Moyen Age. Un damné devait grimacer sous ce masque; il était à la fois oriental, monastique et démoniaque; il sentait le lazaret, le marécage et le cimetière; il était aphrodisiaque aussi dans sa souple et ferme nudité soulignée par le maillot noir. Homme ou femme, moine ou sorcière?

From Marcel Schwob's "La Cité dormante":

Et la somnolence de cette cité dormante mit dans nos membres une profonde lassitude. L'horreur du silence nous enveloppa. Nous qui cherchions dans la vie active l'oubli de nos crimes, nous qui buvions l'eau du Léthé, teinte par les poisons narcotiques et le sang, nous qui poussions de vague en vague sur la mer déferlante une existence toujours nouvelle, nous fûmes assujettis en quelques instants par des liens invincibles.

Or, le silence qui s'emparait de nous rendit les Compagnons de la Mer délirants. Et parmi les peuples aux quatre couleurs qui nous regardaient fixement, immobiles, ils choisirent dans leur fuite effrayée chacun le souvenir de sa patrie lointaine; ceux d'Asie étreignirent les hommes jaunes, et eurent leur couleur safranée de cire impure; et ceux d'Afrique saisirent les hommes noirs, et devinrent sombres comme l'ébène; et ceux du pays situé par delà l'Atlantide embrassèrent les hommes rouges et furent des statues d'acajou; et ceux de la terre d'Europe jetèrent leurs bras autour des hommes blancs et leur visage devint couleur de cire vierge.

And finally, a passage from a story that I read again last night, "The Ice Demon." Notice how Smith falls back on the use of the French term, bouleversement. He had good reason to use it.

Quanga felt that creation itself had gone mad, and had left him at the mercy of demoniacal forces from the godless outer gulfs. Keeping a perilous foothold, weaving and staggering laboriously upward, as on some acclivitous treadmill of glabrous glass, he feared momently that he would slip and fall and slide back forever into Arctic depths unfathomable. And yet, when he dared to pause at last, and turned shudderingly to peer down at the supposed descent, he saw behind him an acclivity similar in all respects to the one he was climbing: a mad, oblique wall of ice, that rose interminably to a second remote sun.

In the confusion of that strange bouleversement, he seemed to lose the last remnant of equilibrium; and the glacier reeled and pitched about him like an overturning world as he strove to recover the sense of direction that had never before deserted him. Everywhere, it appeared, there were small and wan parhelia that mocked him above unending glacial scarps. He resumed his hopeless climb through a topsy-turvy world of illusion: whether north, south, east or west, he could not tell.

The Right Word For The Right Mandible

What can we learn from a genius, if we ourselves are not geniuses?

George Sterling had a gift for adjectives that, in my opinion, matched the brilliance of Shakespeare and Keats, and has made me scornfully aware that too many writers give little thought to precision or to fire.

A writer who saw Sterling's brilliance was Ambrose Bierce. *

One of a poet's most authenticating credentials may be found in his epithets. In them is the supreme ordeal to which he must come and from which is no appeal. The epithets of the versifier, the mere metrician, are either contained in their substantives or add nothing that is worth while to the meaning; those of the true poet are instinct with novel and felicitous significances. They personify, ennoble, exalt, spiritualize, endow with thought and feeling, touch to action like the spear of Ithuriel. The prosaic mind can no more evolve such than ditch-water in a champagne-glass can sparkle and effervesce, or cold iron give off coruscations when hammered. Have the patience to consider a few of Mr. Sterling's epithets, besides those in the lines already quoted:

'Purpled' realm; 'striving' billows; 'wattled' monsters; 'timid' sapphires of the snow; 'lit' wastes; a 'stainèd' twilight of the South; 'tiny' twilight in the jacinth, and 'wintry' orb of the moonstone; 'winy' agate and 'banded' onyx; 'lustrous' rivers; 'glowering' pyres of the burning-ghaut, and so forth.

Up to this point, I agree with Bierce, but then he adds:

Do such words come by taking thought? Do they come ever to the made poet? -- to the 'poet of the day' -- poet by resolution of a 'committee on literary exercises'? Fancy the poor pretender, conscious of his pretense and sternly determined to conceal it, laboring with a brave confusion of legs and a copious excretion of honest sweat to evolve felicities like these!

If Bierce is right, if such an ability depends on genius, and cannot be learned through study or applied through hard work, then what remains for the rest of us to do?

Everything.

Writers need not be geniuses to write, at the very least, well, or, again at the very least, interestingly. We might not show the flair of Sterling (or of Keats, or of Shakespeare), but we can still reject the first word that comes to the keyboard; we can think about what we need to convey; we can hold an image in our mind, turn it around to see all of its curves and planes as if it were a skull, and struggle to find the right word for the right mandible.

None of this effort would turn us into poets, but it would help to turn us into writers worth reading.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
* Ambrose Bierce, 'A Poet And His Poem.' From THE COLLECTED WORKS OF AMBROSE BIERCE, VOLUME 10. The Neale Publishing Company, 1911.

The Death of Halpin Frayser

One dark night in midsummer a man waking from a dreamless sleep in a forest lifted his head from the earth, and staring a few moments into the blackness, said: 'Catharine Larue.' He said nothing more; no reason was known to him why he should have said so much.

Over the decades, I have read "The Death of Halpin Frayser" many times, always with interest, always with nagging doubts. Having read the story again today, I feel that it never quite works.

Believe me, I wish I could say otherwise. I agree with H. E. Bates, who, in THE MODERN SHORT STORY: A CRITICAL SURVEY (1941), praised Ambrose Bierce as one of the founders of modernism in short fiction. As Bates wrote, "Bierce began to shorten the short story; he began to bring to it a sharper, more compressed method: the touch of impressionism."

This radical compression often led to stories with complicated plots being crammed into a few pages. For me, one of the best examples would be "The Moonlit Road," which works because it relies on a series of narratives told in the first person by people who cannot perceive the full scope of what has happened. The story offers bits and pieces of testimony, yet leaves one of the central enigmas unexplained. (Who ran out of the house, that night?) In other hands, this type of story might frustrate, but in the hands of Bierce, it frightens.

In "The Death of Halpin Frayser," the story is told in the third person by an implied author who knows what the characters are thinking and knows what has happened. This makes the delayed resolution of the mystery seem contrived. In "The Moonlit Road," nobody understood what was going on, and this gave the story its power; in contrast, "Halpin Frayser" seems like a failed experiment in withheld information.

Another factor that cripples the story is a narrative method that tells us what to think, instead of prompting us with details that would allow us to form our own opinions. This limitation might be caused by the story's extreme compression, but something more fundamental is at work, here.

In his essay, "Visions of the Night," Bierce recounts a dream that is apparently the basis for "The Death of Halpin Frayser." As in the story, the essay describes a forest that drips with blood, a forest that conceals a terrible secret. In the story, this terrible secret is conveyed only by assurances that it does, in fact, exist:

All this he observed with a terror which seemed not incompatible with the fulfilment of a natural expectation. It seemed to him that it was all in expiation of some crime which, though conscious of his guilt, he could not rightly remember. To the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings the consciousness was an added horror. Vainly he sought, by tracing life backward in memory, to reproduce the moment of his sin; scenes and incidents came crowding tumultuously into his mind, one picture effacing another, or commingling with it in confusion and obscurity, but nowhere could he catch a glimpse of what he sought. The failure augmented his terror; he felt as one who has murdered in the dark, not knowing whom nor why. So frightful was the situation -- the mysterious light burned with so silent and awful a menace; the noxious plants, the trees that by common consent are invested with a melancholy or baleful character, so openly in his sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all about came so audible and startling whispers and the sighs of creatures so obviously not of earth -- that he could endure it no longer, and with a great effort to break some malign spell that bound his faculties to silence and inaction, he shouted with the full strength of his lungs! His voice, broken, it seemed, into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, went babbling and stammering away into the distant reaches of the forest, died into silence, and all was as before.

A pile of adjectives offers nothing tangible that might create a mood, but consider, instead, this image from the original dream:

Mechanically and without hope, I moved under the arms of the giant trees along a narrow trail penetrating the haunted solitudes of the forest. I came at length to a brook that flowed darkly and sluggishly across my path, and saw that it was blood. Turning to the right, I followed it up a considerable distance, and soon came to a small circular opening in the forest, filled with a dim, unreal light, by which I saw in the center of the opening a deep tank of white marble. It was filled with blood, and the stream that I had followed up was its outlet. All around the tank, between it and the enclosing forest -- a space of perhaps ten feet in breadth, paved with immense slabs of marble -- were dead bodies of men -- a score; though I did not count them I knew that the number had some significant and portentous relation to my crime. Possibly they marked the time, in centuries, since I had committed it. I only recognized the fitness of the number, and knew it without counting. The bodies were naked and arranged symmetrically around the central tank, radiating from it like spokes of a wheel. The feet were outward, the heads hanging over the edge of the tank. Each lay upon its back, its throat cut, blood slowly dripping from the wound. I looked on all this unmoved. It was a natural and necessary result of my offense, and did not affect me....

To repeat myself: I would like to call "The Death of Halpin Frayser" a great story in the same rank as "The Moonlit Road," but the limitations of its narrative techniques, and its failure to match a powerful mood that Bierce crafted with similar elements in "Visions of the Night," make it for me a fascinating experiement, but a failed one.

A Reminder To See And To Hear

There comes a point when the analysis of poetry falls apart. Certain details and techniques can be studied, but further mysteries are beyond solution. Why do poems haunt us? For many reasons, but only a few of the reasons can be taken apart and discussed.

With all of this in mind, some people have argued that the sounds and methods of poetry should never be analyzed, but I disagree. I say, Study whatever you can, as far as you can, but know that study is nothing more than a reminder to see and to hear as you read, a reminder to pay attention with everything you are.

Attention is the first and final thing we can give to certain poems that move beyond analysis, beyond the possibility of paraphrase. Consider this example: I believe I know -- up to a point -- what is going on, here (and the title certainly helps), but beyond that point I can only stare and listen.

THE SONG OF THE MAD PRINCE
by Walter de la Mare.

Who said, 'Peacock Pie'?
The old King to the sparrow:
Who said, 'Crops are ripe'?
Rust to the harrow:
Who said, 'Where sleeps she now?
Where rests she now her head,
Bathed in eve's loveliness'? --
That's what I said.

Who said, 'Ay, mum's the word';
Sexton to willow:
Who said, 'Green dusk for dreams,
Moss for a pillow'?
Who said, 'All Time's delight
Hath she for narrow bed;
Life's troubled bubble broken'? --
That's what I said.


[From PEACOCK PIE, by Walter de la Mare. Constable and Company Ltd. London, 1920 -- Sixth Impression; originally published in 1913.]

And consider these: utterly simple, utterly clear, yet somehow, they move beyond clarity into something more.

IN THE LION'S YELLOW EYES
by Mervyn Peake.

In the lion's yellow eyes
Floats the grief of dynasties
Floats the pain of Emperors
Dying under tragic stars.
In the lion's eyes I see
The yellow lake of prophecy;
While the fickle gods of war
Tell me what I'm needed for,
In the lion's eyes I read
Of what it is I am and need.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

AND I THOUGHT YOU BESIDE ME

 by Mervyn Peake.

And I thought you beside me
How rare and how desperate
And your eyes were wet
And your face as still
As the body of a leveret
On a tranced hill
But my thought belied me
And you were not there
But only the trees that shook,
Only a storm that broke
Through the dark air.


[From COLLECTED POEMS, by Mervyn Peake. FyfieldBooks Carcanet, Great Britain, 2008, ebook 2012.]

I Don't Need Anyone Now, I've Got Teeth

Tove Jansson, MOOMINVALLEY IN NOVEMBER.

If Ingmar Bergman had written a story for children, it would feel very much like this.

In the last of the Moomin books, the Moomins never show up. Instead, six people burdened (yes, burdened) by happy memories of time spent with the Moomins arrive in Moominvalley to find the family absent without explanation, without any hint of where the family might have gone.

Each of the six people carries the weight of a psychological problem to work out in secret; a few them come to terms with who they are, the rest might -- might -- be on the way to some sort of private redemption. They hate each other; they need each other; over time they begin to understand each other and (perhaps, maybe) to understand themselves.

Then they leave, one by one; the light fades, the valley sinks into the dusk of winter. For the smallest and strangest of the characters, the story ends with a glimpse of hope. Or does it...?





I should write about Toft, the most disturbed and disturbing character I've encountered in fiction for some time, but to do so, I will need to describe the ending of this book. Before I reach that point, I will post a warning about spoilers. Please, if you have not read MOOMINVALLEY IN NOVEMBER, do not continue beyond that warning.

Toft seems to be (seems to be) a child, by implication, an orphan, and also by implication, severely mentally ill.

He lives inside his own head:

In the evening, when everyone had gone home and the bay was silent, Toft would tell himself a story of his own. It was all about the Happy Family. He told it until he went to sleep, and the following evening he would go on from where he had left off, or start it all over again from the beginning.

Toft generally began by describing the happy Moominvalley....

By describing this (apparent?) memory in detail, Toft is able to re-experience a (genuine?) memory of happier days that he spent with the Moomin family. Soon the memory fades; the details become unclear.

When he woke up in the dark he knew what he would do. He would... make his way to Moominvalley and walk on to the veranda, open the door and tell them who he was.

When Toft had made up his mind, he went to sleep again and slept all night without dreaming.

Toft arrives in Moominvalley to find the family gone without a trace. When other lost people arrive, driven by similar memories of happy days in the Moomin house, Toft again retreats within himself. He stares into the ornamental glass ball in the garden, which, he believes, has the power to magically reveal the true location of the Moomins:

He looked right into it, it was as deep as the sea and was flooded with a tremendous swell. Toft looked deeper and deeper and waited patiently. At last, deep down inside the ball, he could see a faint point of light. It shone and then disappeared, shone and disappeared at regular intervals, like a lighthouse.

What a long way away they are, Toft thought. He felt the cold creeping up his legs but he stayed where he was staring at the light which came and went, so faint that one could only just see it. He felt as though they had deceived him somehow.

At night, he spends most of his time reading a biology textbook that he mistakes for a storybook. He feels pity for what he assumes is the protagonist:

Toft had never known before that deep down at the bottom of the sea lived Radiolaria and the very last Nummulites. One of the Nummulites wasn't like his relatives... and little by little he was like nothing except himself. He was evidently very tiny and became even tinier when he was frightened.

When he imagines himself as a defender of the last Nummulite, the creature begins to grow within his mind. In the story that he tells himself, the Nummulite develops teeth:

One evening in the yellow light of sunset the Creature leant over the water and saw its own white teeth for the first time. It opened its mouth and yawned, then snapped its mouth shut and gnashed its teeth a bit, and thought: I don't need anyone now, I've got teeth.

It also develops "aggressivity." One of the other characters explains to him what this means:

'It's what one shows when one is angry.'

Like his fictional creature, Toft also becomes angry:

Toft suddenly exclaimed: 'That's what you think! What do you know about what Moominpappa likes?'

They all stopped eating and stared at him....

'Well, what do you know!' said Mymble in astonishment. 'Toft's baring his teeth!'

Toft has no idea what this anger means:

He wanted to be alone to try and work out why he had been so terribly angry at that Sunday dinner. It frightened him to realize that there was a completely different Toft in him, a Toft he didn't know and who might come back and disgrace him in front of all the others.

People disturb him:

'I don't want friends who are kind without really liking me and I don't want anybody who is kind just so as not to be unpleasant. And I don't want anybody who is scared. I want somebody who is never scared and who really likes me. I want a mamma!'

Alienated from his own emotions, Toft projects all of his anger and frustration onto the Nummulite creature. In his mind, it grows:

While the guests were honouring the Moomin family in silence, a faint thumping sound could be heard outside somewhere near the kitchen steps. It sounded as though something was groping its way up the wall... Toft raised his head, the Creature was outside now, a great heavy body rubbing along the wall by the kitchen door.

It has become too big, Toft thought. It's so big that it can't move properly.

In the garden, he confronts the Nummulite (within his imagination?), and tries to reason with it:

'It's no good... We can't hit back. Neither of us will ever learn to hit back. You must believe me.... Make yourself tiny and hide yourself! You'll never get through this!'

For Toft, the only solution to his problems must come from the Moomins. Without them, he is helpless:

Suddenly the crystal ball became overshadowed. A dizzy vortex opened in the heavy blue swell and then closed itself again, the Creature of the Protozoa group had made itself tiny and returned to its proper element. Moominpappa's crystal ball, which gathered everything and took care of everything, had opened up for the bewildered Nummulite.

Snufkin, a songwriter, senses intuitively the story-telling forces at work within the boy's mind, and tries to offer advice:

'You want to be careful not to let things get too big.'

This advice is lost on Toft because, for him, the stories that he tells himself are not imaginary reflections of his own psychological despair, but actual events that take place in the outside world.

SPOILER WARNING

SPOILER WARNING

SPOILER WARNING

His failure to distinguish between events within his mind and events in the real world give the final pages of the book a troubling ambiguity, even, perhaps, a cruelty.

At the end of the book, Toft is (quite horribly) left on his own when the other characters, one by one, leave the Moomin house:

That night the sky was completely clear. The thin ice crunched beneath Toft's paws as he walked through the garden. The valley was full of the silence of the cold and the snow shone on the hill slopes. The crystal ball was empty. It was nothing more than a pretty crystal ball. But the black sky was full of stars, millions of sparkling glittering diamonds, winter stars shimmering with the cold.

But then he catches another glimpse from the garden ornament:

That evening a tiny but steady light was shining in the crystal ball. The family had hung the storm-lantern at the top of the mast and they were on their way home to hibernate for the winter.

Things fall apart for him:

His dream about meeting the family again had become so enormous that it made him feel tired. Every time he thought about Moominmamma he got a headache. She had grown so perfect and gentle and consoling that it was unbearable, she was a big, round smooth balloon without a face. The whole of Moominvalley had somehow become unreal, the house, the garden and the river were nothing but a play of shadows on the screen and Toft no longer knew what was real and what was only his imagination.

He feels compelled to wander towards the sea:

Toft walked on through the forest, stooping under the branches, creeping and crawling, thinking of nothing at all and became as empty as the crystal ball....

Toft looked behind him and the valley was just an insignificant shadow below him. Then he looked at the sea.

The whole sea lay spread out in front of him, grey and streaked with even white waves right out to the horizon. Toft turned his face into the wind and sat down to wait.

Now, at last, he could wait.

The family had the wind with them and they were making straight for the shore. They were coming from some island where Toft had never been and which he couldn't see. Perhaps they felt like staying there, he thought. Perhaps they will make up a story about that island and tell it to themselves before they go to sleep.

Toft sat high up on the mountain for several hours looking at the sea.

Just before the sun went down it threw a shaft of light through the clouds, cold and wintry-yellow, making the whole world look very desolate.

And then Toft saw the storm-lantern Moominpappa had hung up at the top of the mast. It threw a gentle, warm light and burnt steadily. The boat was a very long way away. Toft had plenty of time to go down through the forest and along the beach to the jetty, and be just in time to catch the line and tie up the boat."

This might seem, at first glance, a happy ending, but the question remains: is all of this real? Or is it only taking place in the crystal ball of his imagination?

At the start of the book, Toft was abandoned, isolated, and living only in his mind. At the end of the book, there seems to be a hint that nothing has changed for Toft, that nothing will ever change for Toft.

M. P. Shiel versus L. P. Hartley

A writer can assert with an adjective, or describe with nouns, images, and sensations. One method lectures at the readers; the other invites the readers to participate: to feel, for themselves, the strangeness of a moment.

Here is the first method, in all of its weakness, from "Huegenin's Wife," by M. P. Shiel:

And now, from out the vault, there burst -- above the roaring of the fire, and the whistle of the tempest, and the thousandfold rattle of the earthquake -- a shrill and raucous shriek, which turned my blood to ice; and I saw proceeding from the darkness a creature whose native loathsomeness human language has no vocabulary to describe. For if I say that it was a cheetah -- of very large size -- its eyes a yellow liquid conflagration -- its fat and boneless body swathed in a thick panoply of dark grey feathers, vermilion-tipped -- with a similitude of miniature wings on its back -- with a wide, vast, downward-sweeping tail like the tail of a bird of paradise, -- how by such words can I image forth all the retching nausea, all the bottomless hate and fear, with which I looked?

While a fat and boneless body might seem troubling, what is terrible about feathers? What is loathsome about miniature wings, or the tail of a bird of paradise? No, they don't belong on a cheetah, but neither does a ruby collar, neither does a trilby. Shiel grabs our hands, asserts that these details will provoke retching nausea, but we only have his word for this. I myself have not yet vomited, not even a spoonful.

In contrast, here is a passage from L. P. Hartley's "A Visitor From Down Under." The bizarre details of the bus passenger are not asserted, but dramatized. Things happen on the page, and they happen to us.

Breasting the ascent, he saw a passenger sitting on the right-hand front seat; and the passenger, in spite of his hat turned down, his collar turned up, and the creased white muffler that showed between the two, must have heard him coming; for though the man was looking straight ahead, in his outstretched left hand, wedged between the first and second fingers, he held a coin.

‘Jolly evening, don’t you think?’ asked the conductor, who wanted to say something. The passenger made no reply, but the penny, for such it was, slipped the fraction of an inch lower in the groove between the pale freckled fingers.

‘I said it was a damn wet night,’ the conductor persisted irritably, annoyed by the man’s reserve.

Still no reply.

‘Where you for?’ asked the conductor, in a tone suggesting that wherever it was, it must be a discreditable destination.

‘Carrick Street.’

‘Where?’ the conductor demanded. He had heard all right, but a slight peculiarity in the passenger’s pronunciation made it appear reasonable to him, and possibly humiliating to the passenger, that he should not have heard.

‘Carrick Street.’

‘Then why don’t you say Carrick Street?’ the conductor grumbled as he punched the ticket.

There was a moment’s pause, then:

‘Carrick Street,’ the passenger repeated.

‘Yes, I know, I know, you needn’t go on telling me,’ fumed the conductor, fumbling with the passenger’s penny. He couldn’t get hold of it from above; it had slipped too far, so he passed his hand underneath the other’s and drew the coin from between his fingers.

It was cold, even where it had been held. ‘Know?’ said the stranger suddenly. ‘What do you know?’

The conductor was trying to draw his fare’s attention to the ticket, but could not make him look round.

‘I suppose I know you are a clever chap,’ he remarked. ‘Look here, now. Where do you want this ticket? In your button-hole?’

‘Put it here,’ said the passenger.

‘Where?’ asked the conductor. ‘You aren’t a blooming letter-rack.’

‘Where the penny was,’ replied the passenger. ‘Between my fingers.’

The conductor felt reluctant, he did not know why, to oblige the passenger in this. The rigidity of the hand disconcerted him: it was stiff, he supposed, or perhaps paralysed. And since he had been standing on the top his own hands were none too warm. The ticket doubled up and grew limp under his repeated efforts to push it in. He bent lower, for he was a good-hearted fellow, and using both hands, one above and one below, he slid the ticket into its bony slot.

‘Right you are, Kaiser Bill.’

Perhaps the passenger resented this jocular allusion to his physical infirmity; perhaps he merely wanted to be quiet. All he said was:

‘Don’t speak to me again.’

‘Speak to you!’ shouted the conductor, losing all self-control. ‘Catch me speaking to a stuffed dummy!’

Muttering to himself he withdrew into the bowels of the bus.

A:B:O

"A:B:O," by Walter de la Mare.

It would be hard to find two writers more dissimilar than M. P. Shiel and Walter de la Mare -- Shiel, who in the 1890s wrote some of the most deranged and wild-eyed horror stories of all time, and de la Mare, one of the most subtle and elusive people to make an impact on our field. But that was when de la Mare was older. "A:B:O" is the work of a younger man, and very much a product of the flaming fin-de-siecle mood that set fire to Shiel.

If you know "Xelucha," or "Vaila," or "Tulsah" by Shiel, and consider them crazy tales, you might find yourself at home with "A:B:O," not only for the overheated emotions, the melodramatics, the staccato dialogue that hints vaguely at private histories between the characters, but also for the topic. "A:B:O" is that one-of-a-kind achievement, a Walter de la Mare monster story.

'Dear Friend Pell. I am writing, in a fever. Come at once -- Antiquities! -- the lumber -- a mere scrawl -- Come at once, or I begin without you.'

And so Pelluther comes at once to help his antiquarian pal dig up something nasty in the garden.

When he again set to work upon the chest he prised open the lid at the first effort. The scrap of broken steel rang upon the metal of the chest. A faint and unpleasant odour became perceptible. Dugdale remained in the position the sudden lift of the lid had given his body, his head bent slightly forward, over the open chest. I put one hand upon the side of the chest. My fingers touched a little cake of hard stuff. I looked into the chest. I took a step forward and looked in. Yellow cotton wool lined the leaden sides and was thrust into the interstices of the limbs of the creature which sat within. I will speak without emotion.

He then becomes emotional, indeed. And the monster goes to work.

As vivid as the story can be (and it really does come to life on the page), it's also just a bit ridiculous. With a monster lurking in the house, the narrator goes off on a desperate quest for company, for anyone to share his fear:

'You silly fellow! May a sick man not pace his mansion. I will give you a five pound note to come and sit with me,' said I. 'Be neighbourly, my good fellow. I fear that a fit will overtake me. I am weak -- the heat -- epileptical too. Rats in the walls, I often hear their tumult. Come, sup with me.'

The cad shook his villainous head sagely.

'A five pound note -- two,' said I.

But even a mute beggar on the street can see that something is not quite right with our narrator:

'Come in, come in,' I screamed. 'You shall eat a meal, poor man. How dire is civilization in rags -- Evil fortune! Socialism! Millionaires! I'll be bound. Come in, come in.'

I was weeping with delight.

And so I have to wonder: was Walter de la Mare kidding? Was he writing a parody? (And to be fair, I often wonder the same thing about Shiel.)

Whether you take "A:B:O" as a joke, or as an undeniably vivid monster story, I doubt that you'll regret the time you spend with it, but you might find yourself scratching your head.

Pastiche Can Cripple

Ballantine Books, 1961. Cover by Richard Powers.
"Sardonicus," by Ray Russell.

Russell was a literate, gifted writer whose work showed the benefits of careful research and the strengths of careful craftsmanship, but also the limitations of pastiche.

Pastiche can cripple: it can block writers from exploring their own fears and from asserting their own personalities. This danger becomes worse if the writer is good at pastiche, if he is able to bury his own voice in tones and textures of the past so thoroughly, so convincingly, that he disappears like a ventriloquist who gives all of his wit and charm to a dummy made of dead wood.

During the 1960s, Russell created stories that might have come from the 1860s:

In the late summer of the year 18--, a gratifying series of professional successes had brought me to a state of such fatigue that I had begun seriously to contemplate a long rest on the Continent. I had not enjoyed a proper holiday in nearly three years, for in addition to my regular practise, I had been deeply involved in a program of research, and so rewarding had been my progress in this special work (it concerned the ligaments and muscles, and could, it was my hope, be beneficially applied to certain varieties of paralysis) that I was loath to leave the city for more than a week at a time. Being unmarried, I lacked a solicitous wife who might have expressed concern over my health; thus it was that I had overworked myself to a point that a holiday had become absolutely essential to my well-being; hence, the letter which was put in my hand one morning near the end of that summer was most welcome.

He had the voice, the tones, the knowledge to pull off these pastiches well, but the results were not like anything written by Le Fanu or Collins: the stories lacked any personal touch, any sense of a human being alive behind the words with obsessions and nightmares of his own.

When viewed from a certain perspective, "Sardonicus" looks like a fine story, told with clarity, pace, energy, and surprise. As a work of professional writing, it has everything it needs except for one fundamental component: any hint of what Ray Russell might fear.

From Walt Kelly to Joanna Russ, and Then Back

THE POGO SUNDAY PARADE, by Walt Kelly. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1958. Click for a larger view.

From THE FEMALE MAN, by Joanna Russ:

As the bear swore in Pogo after having endured a pot shoved on her head, being turned upside down while still in the pot, a discussion about her edibility, the lawnmowering of her behind, and a fistful of ground pepper in the snoot, she then swore a mighty oath on the ashes of her mothers (i.e. her forebears) grimly but quietly while the apples from the shaken apple tree above her dropped bang thud on her head:

"OH, SOMEBODY ASIDES ME IS GONNA RUE THIS HERE PARTICULAR DAY."

And yet the bear, Barnstable, is not a woman, not a female man, but a plain ordinary man. I've never understood why Russ considered him female.