Mark Fuller Dillon's Blog, page 8

Combined and Reduced Characters in "The Cat Jumps"

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Those of you who read my complaint about an August Derleth story crowded by too many characters most likely thought for a moment, and then said to yourselves, "Wait a minute, Dillon, what the hell are you talking about? What about Elizabeth Bowen? What about 'The Cat Jumps'?"

I agree with you! What about "The Cat Jumps?" Eight pages long, with at least thirteen characters (a few merely mentioned, but most of them active on the page), it somehow lets me process all of its people, and it keeps their story-functions clear.

Why does Bowen succeed where August Derleth fails?

In the opening pages, Bowen sets up two couples (the Bentleys, the Wrights), and establishes them immediately as two groups in opposition; in effect, she reduces four people into a clearly-divided pair, and makes their difference a central point of the story.

On page three, the Wrights welcome several guests. Here also, Bowen sets up two groups in opposition: Muriel (nervous, imaginative, and by the standards of everyone else, morbid), and the rest, who form a single unit of rational intellectuals not at all prey to the fears of Muriel.

(You could take this further, and say that we have only three groups to keep in mind: Muriel, the Bentleys, and everyone else who is unafraid and unconcerned.)

What we have, then, are thirteen people, but reduced into clear groups with clear differences between them, so that the reader has no need to stop and think about who is related to whom, or how so-and-so must not be confused with someone else. At the same time, the opposition of these groups, and their differing mental energies, turn the wheels of the plot.

The lesson, here, is that a crowded mess in one story can become a driving force in a second.

This, too: Almost any potential downfall in a story can be avoided or even justified by a writer's intentions and a writer's craft. Never underestimate the healing magic of skill.

Lessons From Garbage: Combine and Reduce the Characters

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Henry? Which one was Henry, again?

Things I have learned by reading garbage in WEIRD TALES, Lesson One.

Every character mentioned in a story forces the reader to make a mental checklist of who is who, of who is related to whom, of who is doing what. This mental dogwork tugs the reader's attention away from details that might be more essential to the story; it also turns reading into a school assignment.

Combine. Condense. In a story five pages long, five characters could become three, or two. Even a longer story can gain by having its characters reduced only to those needed for conflict.

Any reader willing to pick up a story deserves consideration. Be courteous and welcoming. Do not be August Derleth.

Roy Fuller, THE SECOND CURTAIN

Roy Fuller, THE SECOND CURTAIN, 1953, soon to be reprinted by Valancourt Books.

A few stray thoughts....

Every now and then, with reluctance, I begin to read certain novels if they are well under 200 pages long. Most I never finish, but Roy Fuller's Graham-Greenesque thriller kept me going to the end. How?

Fuller has never been one of my favourite poets. His war-time poems hold my interest by dealing with his own feelings and impressions; those written after the war seem less personal, and more preoccupied with other poets, other books.

THE SECOND CURTAIN is very much a book about a bookish life, but one that takes a hard look at its novelist hero as it dismantles him. The effect is both cruel and honest: this man, who fancies himself smarter and more insightful than most people, finds himself swamped and over his head in a crime that expands in both complexity and threat, and what is more, a crime that he has no competence to solve. Fuller shows the price paid for a life of emotional detachment and full devotion to books, art, and music at the expense of personal growth: a price too severe, a life too shallow.

The book moves rapidly, with a genuine, "pull the carpet from beneath your feet" surprise three-quarters through, an impressively-described pursuit through a crowded football stadium, a looming sense of risk. As a thriller, it functions through pacing and plot, and as a literary novel, dissects its protagonist and his delusions without mercy.

Still, from start to finish, what kept me reading was the solid British competence of the prose. Having squirmed and scowled through too many badly-written blobs, pulp and modern, I was held by Fuller's confident refusal to be "poetic" or convoluted, to sacrifice economy and clarity to market demands for bloated illiteracy. A modern writer, Stephen King or even worse, would have pumped this book into a 972-page mound of toxic waste, and made it dull, dull, dull. Fuller, to his credit and to my relief, wrote as much as the book needed, but nothing more.

As for the book's ending, I feel conflicted. The final pages are honest, which makes them perhaps grimmer than most readers would prefer. Yet as I lay in bed afterwards and thought about this ending, I realized that, from a certain perspective, it might actually seem hopeful. For the protagonist of THE SECOND CURTAIN, as for that man in a song by the Rolling Stones --

"You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find
You get what you need."

This, too, can bring a hint of necessary change.

Protonicus Moronicus

From the diary: Tuesday, August 2, 2019.

Last night, exhausted after a five-hour bike ride in this midnight heat, I took a shower, went to bed, and dreamt immediately that I was reading a play attributed to Shakespeare, called (and I kid you not):

PROTONICUS MORONICUS.

And now, three years later, for no good reason --

THE SPASTICALLY TRAGICAL HISTORY OF PROTONICUS MORONICUS.

PRINCE AVOCADO:
How fragrant are the roses of our state,
How dignified the columns and the laws;
Yet much, I fear, is undermined by day
And toppled in the dusk.

GRISTLE:
Beware, my prince!
These nagging undercurrents are the work
Of but one man, a blot upon the realm.

PRINCE AVOCADO:
Moronicus! Indeed, a warning cry:
For as the light of intellect will scatter
The scuttling roaches of the cellar crowd,
So too the pratings of an errant fool,
The bantam dance of squat, priapic bastards,
The twirlings of acephalic imposters,
Shall gad the wary mob to celebration.

GRISTLE:
Indeed, my prince. The blatherings of one
Incite the emulations of the many.

PRINCE AVOCADO:
Contagious are the dull, and dullest dire
Is he, Protonicus Moronicus!
Bring here this armpit of the nation state!

GRISTLE:
Bring forth Protonicus!

PROTONICUS MORONICUS:
Doy doy, doy doy!

PRINCE AVOCADO:
And thus I hear a simpletonic twang,
A string untuned upon a pea-brain's lute,
A siren call that turns our noble crowd
Into a hive of pixilated thick-ohs.

GRISTLE:
See how the common people prance and drool!

PRINCE AVOCADO:
Backbones of our grandeur! Citizens!
What would you have as pilots to your barque:
The pensive iambs of a bardic wit,
The dithyrambs cathartic of the great?
Or would you rather shuffle to a thud
Pounded by a pustule-minded clod?

CITIZENS:
Protonicus Moronicus! We want him!

PRINCE AVOCADO:
Oh fuck it all, this era falls apart!
The pratings of a dope are now anthemic,
High bugle tones for sheep and sheepish lice.

GRISTLE:
Hasten, Prince, an exit!

PROTONICUS MORONICUS:
Doy doy doy!

Howard Wandrei, "The Other"

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Howard Wandrei, "The Other."
ASTOUNDING STORIES, December 1934.

Although I've never had respect for Howard Wandrei (neither as artist nor as writer), I keep returning to this one short story.

The style is overblown, the story overlong, the characters not so much human as pulpoid:

"He jabbed the bell. He gave the knocker a boost for good measure and was pretty cocky about it. Then he yawned and blinked his eyes dopily, for it was morning, and Basil Sash's nights generally reeled....

[...]

"Then the door banged in again just as quickly as it had shut. A hand shot out, grasped him fiercely by the throat, yanked him inside.

"He swung his feet helplessly in the air. He plucked at an enormous hand which he found collaring his throat more and more tightly. Ingvaldssen had him off the floor and pinned to the door like one of his damned trophies. Sash's eyes bulged and darkened with blood.

"All at once the elephantine Ingvaldssen changed his mind. He gave the reporter a violent shake that came near to disarticulating the vertebrae and dropped him.

"'For a minute,' Sash choked out, 'I thought you were going to throttle me. Now, was that nice?'"

By this point, "The Other" has lurched beyond bad. I could forgive any reader for tossing the story aside and for moving on to something more believable.

Yet for all of its flaws, "The Other" develops into something interesting. Unlike so many pulp stories from the period that shared a Lovecraftian cosiness and offered a last minute reprieve to the human species, "The Other" leaps over the cliff. With a few well-chosen details, it implies that something terrible is free at last and will never be stopped.

I could never recommend so flawed a story to readers, but to writers, I would -- if only to give them a chance to see, for their own purposes and by their own standards, what does not work, and what does.

Abortion Rights

I believe that women have an inherent right to control their own bodies, and, in consequence, their own reproduction. I support their unrestricted access to contraception in all forms, and this includes abortion.

But something else comes into play, here:

As a heterosexual man, I support the readiness and reliability of contraception, which also helps to maintain my control over my own life. Even if I felt, somehow, perhaps in some hellish parallel universe, that women had no right to secure their own freedom, I would certainly want to ensure mine.

For this reason, I can't understand why any man would want to limit the reproductive freedoms of a woman. Does every man want to be a father, every time? Pardon my skepticism.

Yes, abortion is a woman's right, but the right to control reproduction belongs to all of us. People who restrict abortion are the enemies not only of women, but of men.

Is It Procrastination, Or Merely Good Sense?

Sometimes, what might seem at first like procrastination in setting to work on a story is actually a recognized fault in the planning stage: you skipped over a dead spot in the outline, your plot has a hole, your character assumptions are missing the emotional conflicts that can bring people to life, your story structure is less a firm skeleton than a seeping blob.

At times like this, it can be too easy to plow ahead and hope for the story to work despite its deformities, but I've learned to trust my hunches. If the outline stinks like a semi-liquescent groundhog, how likely is the finished work to smell as good as pecan pie?

Horror: A Choice Between Masks and Monsters

"Not many people are comfortable with horror -- I'm certainly not. But it does allow me to play with metaphors and imagery that would otherwise be too disturbing or too bleak for me to confront. It's like the difference between a monster and a monster mask: I can at least recognize a mask when I see one, but monsters can be hard to know."

-- From an email that I sent on Tuesday, May 12, 2015 to my sister, who does not read horror.

The Rocking Horse Winner (1949)

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Three superb horror films of the 1940s have experienced separate fates. DEAD OF NIGHT (1945) seems to have been recognized immediately as a great achievement. THE QUEEN OF SPADES (1949) developed its reputation over decades; it is now highly-regarded by many viewers and critics, but still not as well-known as it deserves to be. THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER (1949) remains obscure, rarely seen, rarely praised.

The reasons for this obscurity are themselves obscure. I would call THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER as frightening and as beautifully crafted as DEAD OF NIGHT or THE QUEEN OF SPADES. From the cinematography of Desmond Dickinson to the music of William Alwyn, from the hideous eyes of the horse itself to a production design that turns an ordinary middle-class home into a labyrinth of disconnected stairways and narrow corridors, from the often painfully intense performances to the well-paced and escalating direction, THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER provides everything a horror film should. It even anticipates a later film, REPULSION, in its use of expanding sets to imply a mental breakdown. Why, then, despite its obvious merits, has it never been popular?

The trouble, I think, has nothing to do with the film, but might perhaps be caused by the expectations of horror film viewers.

Many people see horror as a genre, and they bring to it the expectations of genre. Yet horror is actually a mood, and can be conjured up with an endless variety of plots, characters, metaphors, images, and settings, too many to be limited by the constraints of any genre. At the same time, many viewers prefer horror as escapism, as a way to substitute imaginary troubles for the complications of everyday life.

One expectation that people often bring to horror is a touch of the supernatural. Both DEAD OF NIGHT and THE QUEEN OF SPADES offer hints of the supernatural right from their opening sequences, and maintain these touches from beginning to end. In contrast, the supernatural elements of THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER gleam out later in the film, as a reflection of everyday troubles in an ordinary family, and these elements remain muted until the climax. The film offers tensions beautifully developed and sustained, but these are the tensions of life as we know it, not of life as we fear it might be just beyond human perception. The supernatural elements are integrated fully into the plot, and they bring a nightmarish power to the climax, but the tragedy at work, here, is a human tragedy, caused by human desires and human misperceptions.

This emphasis on tragedy and grief takes THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER far from any hint of escapism. At the end of the film, there is no hope for any return to normalcy, no suggestion that the story's evils can be repaired. What is done is done, and it hurts. This puts the film in a category similar to the bleak psychological dramas of Bergman, dramas that I consider the most harrowing horror films ever made, but films unlikely to win the praise of many horror viewers.

It saddens me. A superb horror film deserves a wide audience, yet sometimes, the viewers most likely to embrace a film of that type stay away. All I can do is to encourage as many people as possible to see THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER and to reach their own conclusions.

Every Day, I Remind Myself

Every day, I remind myself that the world is full of honest, compassionate, thoughtful, and courageous people who are completely ignored and have no authority whatsoever.