Mark Fuller Dillon's Blog, page 9

Robert E. Howard, "Red Nails"

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Because writers have intentions of their own, a reader should respond to any story as it reveals itself on the page, and not as it could have developed in the reader's imagination.

With all of this in mind, I consider my response to Robert E. Howard's Conan story, "Red Nails," unfair. Still, the conviction of my response forces me to accept it with obvious reservations.

To the adventure modes of Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Howard brought a distinctive touch of supernatural horror. This made his work stand out, but in various degrees of intensity. Stories like "The Shadow Kingdom" and "Worms of the Earth" emphasize their moods of dread and strangeness, while other stories focus more on physical action. For the most part, Howard's Conan stories fit the second pattern.

In that sense, I feel that "Red Nails" became a lost opportunity. The story develops into a tale of action and physical conflict like many other Conan stories, but it begins as a tale of potential horror.

The primary source of this mood comes from the setting, an apparently-deserted city that is in fact one vast building with cavernous hallways and balustrades in perpetual twilight, where dying factions who have never set foot outside ambush and torture each other in the darkness.

As a writer, Howard lacked the visual precision of Clark Ashton Smith, but like Smith, he understood the value of setting as a narrative engine. His vast building offers little in the way of any physical presence, but it does provide expressionistic hints of jade green, blood red, and cat's-eye gleams from supernatural gems. As Conan wanders through each dim hallway, he drags the reader along to find what he finds; this propels the story with a sense of immersion despite the absence of detail.

For me, this immersion works best early in "Red Nails," when Conan has no idea of where he is and of what exactly he is witnessing. He uncovers hints of a twilit war fought by crazed people, and the result is a mood of morbid strangeness that I wish Howard had maintained right to the end. Instead, Howard explains everything from top to bottom: who these people are, why they fight, how they ended up in this Gothic trap. To his credit, Howard's exposition never slows the narrative drive, but it does reduce an eerie sense of mystery into yet another typical Conan tale.

Many readers consider this a good Conan adventure, and as a tale of pulp swordplay and treachery, it does the job. Yet I wish that Howard had pursued his initial hints of that twilit building and its incomprehensible inhabitants. He had a setting of eerie potential that he turned into something ordinary, and I suspect that he felt the loss, because while the story goes on, he pulled more and more supernatural elements out of his hat in a patchwork effort to top himself. None of these escalations were necessary. What he had needed was right there, on the page, right from the start.

Writers have their own goals; as a reader, I should accept these, but every now and then, I feel as if other directions would have led to more striking outcomes. Like the feuding clans of "Red Nails," Howard the writer of horror clashed with Howard the writer of Conan, and in this battle, Conan won.

Robert E. Howard, "The Shadow Kingdom"

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From 1929, "The Shadow Kingdom" displays Robert E. Howard at his worst and best. The worst is clear on the page; the best remains harder to pin down.

As a writer for WEIRD TALES, Howard lacked the verbal precision and sensory immersion of Clark Ashton Smith, the grotesquely metaphysical imagination of C. L. Moore. What he did offer was a narrative drive that moved rapidly from one scene to the next, and the intensity of a specific emotional tone: the conviction of a world endlessly dangerous, yet one that could be fought. Howard wrote for an adolescent sensibility, which limited the range of his techniques and the scope of his feelings, but within these limitations, he was king.

As often happens with kings, Howard's charm tends to thrive in recollection, but it crumbles while the king scowls back at us. Once the pages have been closed, the stories become dreams recalled in a reader's mind, but the process of absorbing Howard's prose can drive attentive readers out of their minds.

Howard understood the demands of adventure, he understood the thrill of a rapid pace, but did he understand the needs of a human ear? Perhaps he never heard his prose above the clacking of the typewriter.

He let assonance bloat beyond control:

"The color and the gayety of the day had given away to the eery stillness of night."

- - - - -

"And so in a brooding mood Kull came to the palace, where his bodyguard, men of the Red Slayers, came to take the rein of the great stallion and escort Kull to his rest."

- - - - -

"'Strike at the skull if at all,' said Brule. 'Eighteen wait without the door and perhaps a score more in the corridors."

He cluttered his prose with end rhymes:

"They eyed each other silently, their mutual tribal enmity seething beneath their cloak of formality."

- - - - -

"'Tush. Be seated. Look about you. The gardens are deserted, the seats empty, save for ourselves. You fear not me?'

"Kull sank back, gazing about him warily."

- - - - -

"The windows opened upon the great inner gardens of the royal palace, and the breezes of the night, bearing the scents of spice trees, blew the filmy curtains about. The king looked out."

- - - - -

"'Did not Ka-nu bid you follow me in all things?' asked the Pict irritably, his eyes flashing momentarily."

- - - - -

"'Aye. Night and day you are watched, king, by many eyes.'"

- - - - -

"'Aye!' came Brule's scarcely audible reply; there was a strange expression in the Pict's scintillant eyes."

Bloated assonance and end-rhymes are the sickness of an early draft; most writers hear these flaws in revision and cut them out. Howard, I suspect, either failed to hear or failed to revise.

These are the limitations of Howard, but many people clench their noses, turn off their hearing, pretend to be blind, and read on. What keeps them reading?

The rapid pace is an obvious clue, but Howard's most reliable secret is a knack for making scenes vivid not to eyes, nor to ears, but to a specific emotional receptor that tingles at the touch of uneasiness and defiance:

"Valusia -- land of dreams and nightmares -- a kingdom of the shadows, ruled by phantoms who glided back and forth behind the painted curtains, mocking the futile king who sat upon the throne -- himself a shadow. [...]

"He was king of Valusia -- a fading, degenerate Valusia, a Valusia living mostly in dreams of bygone glory, but still a mighty land and the greatest of the Seven Empires. Valusia -- Land of Dreams, the tribesmen named it, and sometimes it seemed to Kull that he moved in a dream. Strange to him were the intrigues of court and palace, army and people. All was like a masquerade, where men and women hid their real thoughts with a smooth mask [...] And now a strange feeling of dim unrest, of unreality, stole over him as of late it had been doing. Who was he, a straightforward man of the seas and the mountain, to rule a race strangely and terribly wise with the mysticisms of antiquity? An ancient race --

"'I am Kull!' said he, flinging back his head as a lion flings back his mane. 'I am Kull!'

"His falcon gaze swept the ancient hall. His self-confidence flowed back…. And in a dim nook of the hall a tapestry moved -- slightly."

Even as the combination of anxiety and defiance can limit the emotional range of a narrative, it can supercharge with pulp intensity the tone that remains:

"'The night can hear,' answered Ka-nu obliquely. 'There are worlds within worlds. But you may trust me and you may trust Brule, the Spear-slayer. Look!' He drew from his robes a bracelet of gold representing a winged dragon coiled thrice, with three horns of ruby on the head.

"'Examine it closely. Brule will wear it on his arm when he comes to you tomorrow night so that you may know him. Trust Brule as you trust yourself, and do what he tells you to. And in proof of trust, look ye!'

"And with the speed of a striking hawk, the ancient snatched something from his robes, something that flung a weird green light over them, and which he replaced in an instant.

"'The stolen gem!' exclaimed Kull recoiling. 'The green jewel from the Temple of the Serpent! Valka! You! And why do you show it to me?'

"'To save your life. To prove my trust. If I betray your trust, deal with me likewise. You hold my life in your hand. Now I could not be false to you if I would, for a word from you would be my doom.'"

A story like "The Shadow Kingdom" represents an acquired taste, and like many such things, must work a spell on young readers or never take hold at all. I was caught before my 'teen years; I can understand the power of a narrow scope, I can even respect it, but as an adult reader, I clutch my ears at the scraping of this gawdawful prose.

Ambrose Bierce on Critics With Narrow Minds

Have you noticed that in many current reviews, anything at all close to horror is linked with King, Lovecraft, or Ligotti, no matter how little the work in question resembles theirs? Have you noticed that reviewers never compare new writers to Bernard Capes, or to L. A. Lewis, or to Ralph Adams Cram, not even when such a comparison would actually make sense? All too often, people who write about stories have a limited grasp of how wide the field has been, and so they pull out the first names -- the only names? -- that come to their minds.

This is nothing new; Ambrose Bierce had quite a bit to say about the failure of certain critics and reviewers to understand the width and depth of any field:

"Until Gabriel, with one foot upon the sea and the other upon the neck of the last living critic, shall swear that the time for doing this thing is up, every writer of stories a little out of the common must suffer the same sickening indignity. To the ordinary microcephalous bibliopomps -- the book-butchers of the newspapers -- criticism is merely a process of marking upon the supposed stature of an old writer the supposed stature of a new, without ever having taken the trouble to measure that of the old; they accept hearsay evidence for that. Does one write 'gruesome stories'? -- they invoke Poe; essays? -- they out with their Addison; satirical verse? -- they have at him with Pope -- and so on, through the entire category of literary forms. Each has its dominant great name, learned usually in the district school, easily carried in memory and obedient to the call of need. And because these strabismic ataxiates, who fondly fancy themselves shepherding auctorial flocks upon the slopes of Parnassus, are unable to write of one writer without thinking of another, they naturally assume that the writer of whom they write is affected with the same disability and has always in mind as a model the standard name dominating his chosen field -- the impeccant hegemon of the province."

-- Ambrose Bierce, "On Literary Criticism."
From THE COLLECTED WORKS OF AMBROSE BIERCE, VOLUME 10.
The Neale Publishing Company, 1911.

William Wordsworth: No Motion Has She Now, No Force

Wordsworth? Words words. Too many words, at too great a length.

Sometimes, though, he could hit the target with one shot.

A SLUMBER DID MY SPIRIT SEAL,
by William Wordsworth.

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

From
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, SELECTED POETRY.
The Modern Library, New York, 1950.

Emily Dickinson: That Long Shadow

Because I am not religious, I feel nothing when I read the many poems by Emily Dickinson that convey pious thoughts in conventional terms. What force me to sit up and take notice are the poems that evoke, in her own way, the unsettling mental states that precede religion....

[764]
by Emily Dickinson.

Presentiment -- is that long Shadow -- on the Lawn --
Indicative that Suns go down --
The Notice to the startled Grass
That Darkness -- is about to pass --

c. 1863

From
THE COMPLETE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, edited by Thomas H. Johnson.
Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1960.

Things Neglected, Never Seen

Symphonies that turn to acid yellow in crumbling boxes, paintings that fade in attic piles, sculptures that bulge and lose their shapes under centuries of lichen -- all of these hidden things are triumphs against the indifference of human perception and the blindness of universal entropy. Despite the odds, they were created; despite the silence, they sang; despite the utter lack of response, they spoke... if only to the needs and hopes of one solitary mind.

Isaac Babel On Revision

We were sitting on the parapet on the cliff. [Isaac] Babel was absent-mindedly throwing pebbles into the sea; they cracked like pistol shots as they hit the rocks.

'It's all right for you other writers,' said Babel, although I was not yet a writer. 'You can wrap things up in the dew of your imagination, as you put it! What an awful expression, by the way! But what would you do if you had no imagination? Like me.'

'Rubbish!' I said angrily.

He seemed not to have heard me.

'Not one drop,' he repeated after a long pause and several pebbles. 'I'm quite serious. I can't make anything up. I have to know everything, down to the last wrinkle, or I can't even begin to write. "Authenticity", that's the motto, and I'm stuck with it! That's why I write so little and so slowly. Because it's terribly hard. So much for Mozart, the joy of creativity, the free flight of imagination! I wrote somewhere, I'm getting old from asthma, a mysterious disease I've had from birth and inherited together with my weak constitution. But that's a lie. What puts years on me is every single short-story I write. I work like a black, like a navvy, as if I had to dig up Everest with my own hands. When I start, I never believe I'll have the strength to finish. Sometimes I could weep, I'm so tired. It stops my circulation. If I get stuck over a sentence, it gives me spasms. And I'm always stuck over a sentence!'

'But your writing is so fluent.' I said. 'How do you do it?'

'That's style.' He gave a senile giggle in imitation of Moskvin. 'Style! It's style that does it, young man, he-he-he! I'll write about the weekly washing if you like, and the prose might sound like Julius Caesar! That I seem to manage. But, you understand, that's not the essence of art, it's the bricks, or the marble or the bronze. Come, I'll show you how I do it. I'm a miser, a skinflint, but just for you!...'

By now, it was dark inside the house. Beyond the garden the sea rumbled more and more quietly with the approach of night. Fresh air poured in from the sea and drove out the sultry wormwood smell of the steppe. Babel lit a small lamp. The light fell on his glasses; behind them his eyes looked inflamed; he was always having trouble with his eyes.

He got a thick wad of typescript out of his desk; there were at least a hundred pages.

'Know what that is?'

I had no idea. Was it possible that Babel had at last written a full length novella and kept it a secret from all of us? I could not believe it. Babel, whose short stories were almost like telegrams! Who packed everything into the smallest possible space. For whom a story of ten pages was much too long and surely padded!

A hundred pages of his concentrated prose? No, it couldn't be!

I looked at the cover page, and saw the title 'Lyubka the Cossack'. This was still more puzzling.

'Didn't I hear that "Lyubka the Cossack" is a very short short-story that hasn't yet been published? Do you really mean you've expanded it into a novella?'

He covered the typescript with his hand and laughed, his eyes crinkling.

'It's "Lyubka" all right,' he said, blushing. 'And it's fifteen pages long. But these are the twenty-two versions -- two hundred pages of it.'

'Twenty-two versions!'

'What's so terrible about that?' he bridled at once. 'Look here, a work of art is not a pot-boiler. You write several versions of the same story -- so what? I'm not even sure the twenty-second is fit to publish. It looks as if it could still be tightened up. It's all this elimination that makes for power of language and style. Of language and style,' he repeated. 'You take anything -- an anecdote, a bit of gossip -- and you turn it into a story you yourself can't bear to put down. It glows like a jewel. It's round like a pebble. It hangs together by the cohesion of its parts. And its cohesion is so powerful that even lightning can't split it up. People will read it. And remember it. And they'll laugh over it, not because it's cheerful but because you always feel like laughing when somebody has brought something off. I have the nerve to talk about bringing it off only because we are alone. And you won't tell anyone about this conversation so long as I live. You must give me your word. It's no credit to me, of course. Goodness knows how someone like me, the son of a small broker, gets possessed by the demon or the angel of art. But whichever it is, I have to obey him like a slave, like a pack-mule. I've sold him my soul, and I have to write as well as I know how. It's my happiness, or my cross. More of a cross, I suppose. But take it away, and every drop of my blood will go with it and I won't be worth a chewed up fag-end. That's the work that makes a human being out of me and not just an Odessa street-corner philosopher.'

He paused, then went on more bitterly.

'I've got no imagination. All I've got is the longing for it. You remember Blok -- "I see the enchanted shore, the enchanted distance." He got there all right, but I won't. I see that shore unbearably far off. I'm too sober. But I thank my lucky stars that at least I long for it. I work till I drop, I do all I can because I want to be at the feast of the gods and I'm afraid they'll throw me out.'

He took off his glasses, and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his patched jacket.

'I didn't choose to be born a Jew,' he said suddenly. 'I think I can understand everything. Only not the reason for that black villainy they call anti-semitism.

'I came safely through a Jewish pogrom as a child, only they tore my pigeon's head off. Why?... I don't want Evgenia to come in,' he said softly. Put the door on the hook, will you? This kind of talk frightens her. She's liable to cry all night. She thinks I'm very lonely. Perhaps I am?'

What could I answer?

'So there it is,' said Babel, stooping short-sightedly over his manuscript. 'I work like a pack mule, but it's my own choice. I'm like a galley-slave who's chained for life to his oar but who loves the oar. Everything about it. Every grain of wood he's polished with his hands. If you use enough elbow grease, even the coarsest wood gets to look like ivory. That's what we have to do with words, and with our Russian language. Warm it and polish it with your hand, and it glows like a jewel.

'But I meant to tell you all I do, in the right order. The first version of a story is terrible. All in bits and pieces tied together with boring "link passages" as dry as old rope. You have the first version of "Lyubka" there -- you can see for yourself. It yaps at you, it's clumsy, helpless, toothless.

'That's where the real work begins. I go over each sentence, time and again. I start by cutting all the words it can do without. You have to keep your eye on the job because words are very sly, the rubbishy ones go into hiding and you have to dig them out -- repetitions, synonyms, things that simply don't mean anything.

'After that, I type the story and I let it lie for two or three days. If I can hold out. Then I check it again, sentence by sentence and word by word. And again I find a lot of rubbish I missed the first time. So I make another copy, and another -- as many as I have to, until I've cleaned it all up and there's not a speck of dirt left.

'But that's not all! When I've done the cleaning up, I go over every image, metaphor, comparison, to see if they are fresh and accurate. If you can't find the right adjective for a noun, leave it alone. Let the noun stand by itself.

'A comparison must be as accurate as a slide rule, and as natural as the smell of fennel. Oh, I forgot -- before I take out the rubbish, I break up the text into shorter sentences. The more full stops the better. I'd like to have that passed as a law. Not more than one idea and one image to one sentence. Never be afraid of full stops. Actually, my own sentences are too short -- that's because of my asthma. I can't talk for long. The longer the sentence the more I get short of breath.

'I take out all the participles and adverbs I can. Participles are heavy, angular, they destroy the rhythm. They grate like tanks going over rubble. Three participles to one sentence, and you kill the language. All that "presenting", "obtaining", "concentrating" and so on.... Adverbs are lighter. They can even lend you wings in a way. But too many of them make the language spineless, it starts mioaling [SIC].... A noun needs only one adjective, the choicest. Only a genius can afford two adjectives to one noun.

'The breaking up into paragraphs and the punctuation have to be done properly but only for the effect on the reader. A set of dead rules is no good. A new paragraph is a wonderful thing. It lets you quietly change the rhythm, and it can be like a flash of lightning that shows the same landscape from a different aspect. There are writers, even good ones, who scatter paragraphs and punctuation marks all over the place. They can write good prose, but it has an air of muddle and carelessness because of this. Even Kuprin used to do that.

'Line is as important in prose as in an engraving. It has to be clear and hard.

'My twenty-two versions of "Lyubka" gave you a shock. They are all part of the weeding, sifting, pulling the story out into a single thread. There can be as much difference between the first and last version of a book as between a greasy bit of packing paper and Boticelli's "Spring".'

'It really is slave labour,' I said. 'A man should think twenty times before he decides to become a writer.'

'But the most important thing of all,' said Babel, 'is not to kill the story by working on it. Or else all your labour has been in vain. It's like walking a tight-rope. Well, there it is.... We ought all to take an oath not to mess up our job.'

From Chapter 16, in
STORY OF A LIFE: YEARS OF HOPE, by Konstantin Paustovsky.

Translated by Manya Harari and Andrew Thomson.

Harvill Press, London, 1968.

The Red Laugh: A Psychotic Universe

"The Red Laugh," by Leonidas Andreief (Leonid Andreyev), 1904.
Translated by Alexandra Linden.
T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1905.

Click for a better jpeg.

Since the 1970s, I have always gone back to Leonid Andreyev with similar feelings: admiration for his concepts, frequent bafflement at the directions these took, and a constant frustration as I peered at his work indirectly through the smog of translators. In plays and short stories, Andreyev had something to say, but how he said it, and why, often left me in the dark.

On the other hand, a novella that fascinates and frightens me despite clumsy translation is "The Red Laugh." To call it (as many have) a story about the horrors of warfare, or even (as a few have) an allegory of post-traumatic stress disorder, is to miss the point. One might as well call PSYCHO the story of a woman who runs away with stolen money: a description accurate but too limited.

No; "The Red Laugh" is about something even more unsettling than battlefields and crippling wounds.

'I am afraid of crowds -- of men, when many of them gather together. When of an evening I hear a noise in the street -- a loud shout, for instance -- I start and believe that... a massacre has begun. When several men stand together, and I cannot hear what they are talking about, it seems to me that they will suddenly cry out, fall upon each other, and blood will flow. And you know' -- he bent mysteriously towards my ear -- 'the papers are full of murders -- strange murders. It is all nonsense that there are as many brains as there are men; mankind has only one intellect, and it is beginning to get muddled.'

In "The Red Laugh," war is only the beginning. Wounded, exhausted soldiers have become infected on the battlefield by a shared psychosis. When they finally return home, this mental illness grows and spreads to poison their families, their cities, and eventually, it seems, reality itself.

At first, dreams and daylight perceptions become strange:

Those children, those innocent little children. I saw them in the street playing at war and chasing each other, and one of them was already crying in a high-pitched, childish voice -- and something shrank within me from horror and disgust. And I went home; night came on -- and in fiery dreams, resembling midnight conflagrations, those innocent little children changed into a band of child-murderers.

Something was ominously burning in a broad red glare, and in the smoke there swarmed monstrous, misshapen children, with heads of grown-up murderers. They were jumping lightly and nimbly, like young goats at play, and were breathing with difficulty, like sick people. Their mouths, resembling the jaws of toads or frogs, opened widely and convulsively; behind the transparent skin of their naked bodies the red blood was coursing angrily -- and they were killing each other at play. They were the most terrible of all that I had seen, for they were little and could penetrate everywhere.

I was looking out of the window and one of the little ones noticed me, smiled, and with his eyes asked me to let him in.

'I want to go to you,' he said.

'You want to kill me.'

'I want to go to you,' he said, growing suddenly pale, and began scrambling up the white wall like a rat -- just like a hungry rat. He kept losing his footing, and squealed and darted about the wall with such rapidity that I could not follow his impetuous, sudden movements.

Violent impulses become uncontrollable:

...In the eleventh row of stalls. Somebody's arms were pressing closely against me on my right- and left-hand side, while far around me in the semi-darkness stuck out motionless heads, tinged with red from the lights upon the stages. And gradually the mass of people, confined in that narrow space, filled me with horror. Everybody was silent, listening to what was being said on the stage or, perhaps, thinking out his own thoughts, but as they were many they were more audible, for all their silence, than the loud voices of the actors. They were coughing, blowing their noses, making a noise with their feet and clothes, and I could distinctly hear their deep, uneven breathing, that was heating the air. They were terrible, for each of them could become a corpse, and they all had senseless brains. In the calmness of those well-brushed heads, resting upon white, stiff collars, I felt a hurricane of madness ready to burst every second.

My hands grew cold as I thought how many and how terrible they were, and how far away I was from the entrance. They were calm, but what if I were to cry out 'Fire!'... And full of terror, I experienced a painfully passionate desire, of which I cannot think without my hands growing cold and moist. Who could hinder me from crying out -- yes, standing up, turning round and crying out: 'Fire! Save yourselves -- fire!'

A convulsive wave of madness would overwhelm their still limbs. They would jump up, yelling and howling like animals; they would forget that they had wives, sisters, mothers, and would begin casting themselves about like men stricken with sudden blindness, in their madness throttling each other with their white fingers fragrant with scent. The light would be turned on, and somebody with an ashen face would appear upon the stage, shouting that all was in order and that there was no fire, and the music, trembling and halting, would begin playing something wildly merry -- but they would be deaf to everything -- they would be throttling, trampling, and beating the heads of the women, demolishing their ingenious, cunning headdresses. They would tear at each other's ears, bite off each other's noses, and tear the very clothes off each other's bodies, feeling no shame, for they would be mad. Their sensitive, delicate, beautiful, adorable women would scream and writhe helplessly at their feet, clasping their knees, still believing in their generosity -- while they would beat them viciously upon their beautiful upturned faces, trying to force their way towards the entrance. For men are always murderers, and their calmness and generosity is the calmness of a well-fed animal, that knows itself out of danger.

Cities far away from the battlefields become war zones, and then finally, zones of chaos where illusions crush the real in a shockwave of universal psychosis: the Red Laugh.

The crowd, like a living, roaring wave, lifted me up, carried me along several steps and threw me violently against a fence, then carried me back and away somewhere, and at last pressed me against a high pile of wood, that inclined forwards, threatening to fall down upon somebody's head. Something crackled and rattled against the beams in rapid dry succession; an instant's stillness -- and again a roar burst forth, enormous, open-mouthed, terrible in its overwhelming power. And then the dry rapid crackling was heard again and somebody fell down near me with the blood flowing out of a red hole where his eye had been.

In its focus on shared mental breakdown as a growing pandemic, as a type of non-traditional haunting, "The Red Laugh" reminds me of three other stories, but with significant differences.

In THE CROQUET PLAYER, by H. G. Wells (1936), people in a small district are "haunted" by violent impulses from humanity's biological history, with implications that this infection might have spread out into the greater world:

'So long as I was actively employed I kept going, but as soon as I got home I found myself slumping. I could eat nothing. I drank a lot of whisky and instead of going to bed I fell asleep in an arm-chair by the fire. I awoke in terror and found the fire nearly out. I went to bed and when at last I got to sleep the dreams closed in on me and I sat up again starkly awake. I got up and put on an old dressing-gown and went downstairs and made up the fire, determined to keep awake at any cost. But I dozed there and then went back to bed. And so between the bed and the fireside I dragged through the night. My dreams were all a mix-up of the poor scared old lady, the almost as pitiful old man, the ideas the museum custodian had put in my head and, brooding over it all, that infernal palaeolithic skull.

'More and more did the threat of that primordial Adamite dominate me. I could not banish that eyeless stare and that triumphant grin from my mind, sleeping or waking. Waking I saw it as it was in the museum, as if it was a living presence that had set us a riddle and was amused to hear our inadequate attempts at a solution. Sleeping I saw it released from all rational proportions. It became gigantic. It became as vast as a cliff, a mountainous skull in which the orbits and hollows of the jaw were huge caves. He had an effect -- it is hard to convey these dream effects -- as if he was continually rising and yet he was always towering there. In the foreground I saw his innumerable descendants, swarming like ants, swarms of human beings hurrying to and fro, making helpless gestures of submission or deference, resisting an overpowering impulse to throw themselves under his all-devouring shadow. Presently these swarms began to fall into lines and columns, were clad in uniforms, formed up and began marching and trotting towards the black shadows under those worn and rust-stained teeth. From which darkness there presently oozed something -- something winding and trickling, and something that manifestly tasted very agreeably to him. Blood.'

And then Finchatton said a queer thing. 'Little children killed by air-raids in the street.'

In QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, the television play by Nigel Kneale (1959), something terrible and toxic lurks at the heart of human sentience, waiting to be freed. When finally released, it turns London into an alien-directed slaughterhouse. Here, as in THE CROQUET PLAYER, the damage is real but limited; ways are found to deal with infection, or at least to avoid it.

More devastating is the mass hysteria that destroys "The Republic of the Southern Cross," in the story by Valery Brussov / Bryusov (1907). While "Southern Cross" maintains a tone of journalistic detachment, so that its implications become disturbing in contemplation, "The Red Laugh" is visceral, disturbing on the page. "Southern Cross" turns its horrors into a history lesson; "The Red Laugh" turns them into experience.

This visceral focus on blood, broken bodies, and the struggles of nightmare is what survives translation in Andreyev. If read "through" the words instead of "by" the words, "The Red Laugh," in English, becomes a great horror story. If it seems less frequently-encountered nowadays than it was in the past, then it might also become, for many new readers, a striking discovery.

David Lynch: A Dark And Troubling DUNE

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In 1984, when I had not yet seen ERASERHEAD or the short films of David Lynch, I called his adaptation of DUNE a disaster. Here in 2021, I think of Lynch as my favourite living film artist, and would call DUNE at least halfway brilliant. As an interpretation of Herbert's book, it fails, but as an individualistic vision that works better than ever on Blu Ray, it could almost have been ERASERHEAD 2: A DREAM OF DARK AND TROUBLING SPACE.

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Time and experience change perspective. Back then, I failed to recognize that many flaws in DUNE the movie were caused, perhaps inevitably, by the complications of DUNE the book, which is not so much an original work as a melange of previously-tested ideas in a newly-jumbled combination. Once the readers have accepted this mixture of Charles Harness, Cordwainer Smith, Middle Eastern history and Islamic culture, they often take pleasure not only in Herbert's blend, but in his trust that people will understand what he has in mind as the story unfolds.

Herbert does what he can to keep exposition to a minimum: he dumps most of his background information into his appendices, but he also relies on italicized thoughts from many different characters, along with points of view that leap from skull to skull within a scene. The result is a set of narrative techniques less than elegant on the page, and pretty much impossible to film. Lynch retains the spoken thoughts, drags exposition into full view, and ends up with moments that tell more than show -- not the best approach for a cinematic story.

Lynch is also forced to leave out chunks of the book, not only from the story itself (which often happens when books are adapted to the screen), but also, fatally, from Herbert's perspective on the rise and fall of Paul Muad'Dib. Herbert takes a dim view of political and religious heroes, a skepticism that Lynch never considers. By turning Paul into an actual messiah, Lynch not only distorts the book, he misses the point completely.

This failure back then remains a botch today: DUNE the film is not DUNE the book. It is, however, in its images, moods, and sounds, very much the creation of David Lynch. That a director-for-hire could have imposed this personal touch on a film so expensive and so theoretically impersonal would perhaps have been unexpected for anyone less confidently and stubbornly himself.

What we have, then, is a film by Lynch, but is it a good film? I would argue that it works well up until its halfway point; after Paul and his mother meet the desert Fremen, the pacing and focus fall apart as Lynch crams too much narrative within too small a running time. The lingering moods, the stately movements disappear; all that remain are scattered moments of nightmare imagery.

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Yet still, for all of its abandoned promise (and despite its ridiculous rainfall ending), DUNE the film has gained clarity over time: the clarity of context within the later work of its director. Readers of the book will find much to lament; viewers of David Lynch will find much to love.

The American Senate Recesses Without Having Passed Legislation To Protect Voting Rights

Trivia quiz: Name the American president between Trump 1 and Trump 2.

"Wait a minute. Was there a president between Trump 1 and 2?"

Yes. Who was it?

"Can you give me a hint?"

Joe....

"Manchin!"

That is CORRECT.