What he loves is not at all frightening, and what should be frightening seems to bore him.

Cover by Douglas Walters, for the Ash-Tree Press edition, 2012.

"Negotium Perambulans..." features some of E. F. Benson's best writing, a well-described locale, and a slavering monster, yet the story has never worked for me. Why not?

1) SETTING SHOULD BE ATMOSPHERE.

Whether an actual place or a creation of Benson's idle moments, the fishing village of Polearn inspires him to write with his full attention. He describes it so thoroughly that "Negotium Perambulans..." could almost be a passage from a traveller's diary:

"The casual tourist in West Cornwall may just possibly have noticed, as he bowled along over the bare high plateau between Penzance and the Land’s End, a dilapidated signpost pointing down a steep lane and bearing on its battered finger the faded inscription 'Polearn 2 miles', but probably very few have had the curiosity to traverse those two miles in order to see a place to which their guide-books award so cursory a notice."

Benson clearly loves the place as if he had lived there, as if he wanted to return there for the rest of his life, to spend his days in peace. The trouble, here, is that his love makes the setting desirable and soothing, but not at all eerie. Any mood of dread that he would like to build up in the story is undermined by the calm and sunlit beauty of sea cliffs and shore.

2) REPETITION BREEDS TEDIUM.

A terrible supernatural event has left its mark on the past. Then it happens again. When it happens for a third time, the reader has every right to wonder if such repetition might not make this event more common than unusual.

Another day, another brutal death. Ho hum. At least the weather is fine and the fishing is good.

3) DRINKING BY YOURSELF IS WICKED, AND SO IS PAINTING.

"A church far more ancient than that in which my uncle terrified us every Sunday had once stood not three hundred yards away, on the shelf of level ground below the quarry from which its stones were hewn. The owner of the land had pulled this down, and erected for himself a house on the same site out of these materials, keeping, in a very ecstasy of wickedness, the altar, and on this he dined and played dice afterwards."

A non-religious reader might feel compelled to ask if the supernatural punishment meted out in the story (three times!) was actually deserved. By the date the story was published, in 1922, the world had already seen several thousand years of wickedness more terrible than the crime on display, here. That one "sinner" also drinks alone, and the other paints eerie pictures, hardly seems to merit an earthly retribution, let alone a supernatural fate.

4) THIS HAPPENED TO SOMEONE ELSE, BUT I'M JUST FINE, THANKS.

In my favourite Benson stories ("The Face," "Caterpillars," "The Room in the Tower," "The Horror Horn"), the narrator, or the third-person viewpoint character, is confronted by horror directly, is personally involved; this allows the reader to feel the same dreads and uncertainties. Even in a story like "The Sanctuary," in which the narrator pops up unexpectedly halfway through -- Hi, I'm the narrator! I'll bet you didn't know that I existed, huh? -- this character still takes part in the story and witnesses events on his own.

In contrast, "Negotium Perambulans..." takes a distant view. Terrible things happen to other people, but not to the narrator. He tells us that other people are consumed by fear, but he is not; these events have little to do with him. As a result, there is no build-up of tension, and for that reason, when the narrator does encounter a monster on the final page, this encounter comes and quickly goes without effect.

All of these points undermine a story that could have been one of his better ones. I rarely find, in his work, writing that can match the quiet assurance of this prose:

"Before getting into bed I drew my curtains wide and opened all the windows to the warm tide of the sea air that flowed softly in. Looking out into the garden I could see in the moonlight the roof of the shelter, in which for three years I had lived, gleaming with dew. That, as much as anything, brought back the old days to which I had now returned, and they seemed of one piece with the present, as if no gap of more than twenty years sundered them. The two flowed into one like globules of mercury uniting into a softly shining globe, of mysterious lights and reflections."

This combination of specific, physical detail and abstract implication represents, for me, Benson at his best.

I find a later passage less effective:

"He was justified in his own estimate of his skill: he could paint (and apparently he could paint anything), but never have I seen pictures so inexplicably hellish. There were exquisite studies of trees, and you knew that something lurked in the flickering shadows. There was a drawing of his cat sunning itself in the window, even as I had just now seen it, and yet it was no cat but some beast of awful malignity. There was a boy stretched naked on the sands, not human, but some evil thing which had come out of the sea. Above all there were pictures of his garden overgrown and jungle-like, and you knew that in the bushes were presences ready to spring out on you...."

Here, the adjectives are banal, and do not convey, but assert. With a better choice of words, with more justification by physical detail, the passage could have been interesting, but Benson seems not to have given it much concern.

This is the trouble with "Negotium Perambulans...": in the story, Benson focuses best on what he loves, but what he loves is not at all frightening, and what should be frightening seems to bore him.

A Gasp That Blocks Your Throat

Click on this image for a larger view.

One of the many things I love about metrical substitution is that it can guide you to read a poem in a certain way, and when used with harsh, clashing combinations of sound, it can force a poem's impact right down to your bones.

In this example, here and there an iamb has been replaced by a spondee, a foot with two-equally stressed syllables, to produce a hammering that forces the reader to pause:

wrought // not

scarred // acre

old // woe

hot // pain

Each time, the result is like a gasp that blocks your throat.

"We own the right to be fed up with anything we damn please...."

So. 49TH PARALLEL. A propaganda film created for the sole purpose of convincing the American people to rise up against Hitler. Unsubtle, with a shameless, crowd-pleasing finale, it should have been a disaster.

Instead, it was filmed by Powell and Pressburger, and it's magnificent. Flawed, but still magnificent.

That the film was also scored by Vaughan Williams, that it was photographed by Freddie Young and edited by David Lean, are dabs of frosting on a tasty cake.


Parts of the film do seem contrived: a sequence with Leslie Howard as a decadent, art-loving anthropologist who can't be bothered to fear an armed Nazi; Laurence Olivier as the world's least convincing French Canadian (a shame, because his character has a few of the best lines).

Other parts of the film are as good as anything by Powell and Pressburger: a thoughtful sequence in a German Hutterite community, led by Anton Walbrook, where Nazi arguments for German unity are not accepted; Niall MacGinnis as a reluctant soldier (an understated, humane performance); and best of all, a tense and frightening plane crash that is a brilliant showcase for sound effects, editing, acting, photography, and direction: a great sequence.

So yes, 49TH PARALLEL is a propaganda film, but the work and thought applied to it have made it much more lasting than propaganda, much more fun.

It Won't Kill You

Someone posted a manuscript online and asked for opinions. I told him that his first paragraphs included a misplaced modifier, inaccurate nouns, ambiguous pronouns, non-standard usage, a sentence that would have gained from parallel construction, and a misuse of the subjunctive mood. Then I told him that he should study grammar, and offered a link to a useful book.

He deleted the manuscript.

Several weeks later, he posted the manuscript again, without revision. I pointed out the same flaws, and once again offered a link.

He deleted the manuscript.

I have to wonder what he expected. Did he think the bad writing would heal by itself? "Oh look, it got better!"

Listen: when I tell you that you need to study grammar, I'm not insulting you, I'm not calling you an idiot, I'm not hinting that you're a lousy human being; I'm telling you that you need to study grammar.

"Their Use is Not to Inquire for Good Books, But New Books"

The Archers

Watching CONTRABAND last night made me wonder why Powell and Pressburger films are not more popular. There is no lack of incentive to try them -- after all, countless hordes of critics, along with directors like Scorsese, Romero, and Coppola, have raved about these films for decades. Nor, thanks to home video, is there any lack of access.

CONTRABAND is not what I would call a great film, but in writing and direction, it shows more creativity, more energy and passion, than all too many acclaimed films I've seen from the past few decades. These "big" films come and go, are deservedly forgotten: who talks about THE ARTIST nowadays, or THE KING'S SPEECH, or (to look further into the dead past) CHARIOTS OF FIRE?


I would argue, too, that in terms of cleverness and drive, CONTRABAND is a better film than most of the stuff I've regretted watching from Marvel or Disney -- and CONTRABAND can't even begin to compare with BLACK NARCISSUS, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP, THE RED SHOES, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, or I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING.

Then again, I could raise the same points about films by Carné and Prévert, by Renoir, Keaton, Lloyd, Lubitsch, von Sternberg, Lean, Sturges, Aldrich, or even (to my astonishment) by Sirk; I could talk about any number of demotic, accessible, delightful, and thrilling movies that repay a viewer's time with qualities impossible to calculate, films readily available and ready to be watched.

In his preface to THE WHITE DEVIL, John Webster compared the theatre-goers of his time to those readers who, "visiting stationer's shops, their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books."

I could ask the same question of movie watchers. With so much gold from the past recovered and readily available, why do people allow themselves to settle for the latest corporate products with a shelf-life of months? Why not look around for films that can last a lifetime?

Unfaded Pleasure

Cover by Bruce Pennington, 1974.

Elsewhere on the vast filthy Web, someone asked for opinions about THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, by William Hope Hodgson. I replied:

It was one of the many books that impressed me during my 'teen years, but which I now find clumsy to the point of pain. Was I wrong to admire it, way back when? No. Was I right to move on? Yes. Depending on who we are, on what we need to learn and to do, certain books are best for certain stages of our lives. Any work of prose or verse that can carry us through many stages is one to be loved, but works that only speak to us during one stage are not necessarily bad; they are stepping stones that we use and then pass by.

I will not deny the stories I loved when I was eleven years old; for me, at the time, they were great. That I find them unreadable now says more about me than it does about them.

Yet even after so many decades, I can still read, with unfaded pleasure, stories by H. G. Wells, Ambrose Bierce, and Clark Ashton Smith -- not because I read them now with an eleven-year-old's eyes and heart, not because of any nostalgia, but because the stories have grown as I have grown, in the same directions, and together.

Technicians and Magicians

Can we learn a useful point by contrasting those filmmakers discussed all the time on Youtube with filmmakers rarely mentioned? I think we can.

Certain film creators are candidly technicians: their methods can be separated from their films and analyzed. We need technicians because they can show us how things are done; they can teach us the craft of movies, and inspire, in turn, a new generation of creators. When I think of technicians, I think of directors like Hitchcock, Lean, Welles: directors who allow the scaffolding to remain on their constructions, who leave their works open to be studied.

On the other hand, certain filmmakers are magicians: they rely on technique as thoroughly as technicians, but they conceal their methods behind layers of complexity or implication that cannot easily be separated from their films. The magicians I have in mind are directors like Powell and Pressburger, Renoir, Bergman.

Magicians could be studied. Someone on Youtube with time and ambition could sit down and take apart the methods used in a film like LA RÈGLE DU JEU, and compare them with CITIZEN KANE's. Nobody seems compelled to do this, yet I believe that technically-minded students could learn as much from Renoir as they could from Welles. They could learn as much about technique from BLACK NARCISSUS and PERSONA as they could from LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and PSYCHO, but the work needed to uncover the hidden methods of magicians is more complicated, more time-consuming, than the work needed to study technicians.

There is no value judgement, here: I love films by technicians and by magicians. Yet I can recognize the greater ease and clarity in taking apart the films of technicians than in staring at the chasms and whirlpools of magicians, even as magicians compel me to stare.