Details Accumulate

Ash-Tree Press, 2013.

A favourite of mine since I first read it in the 1970s, Edward Lucas White's "The Snout" is a good story burdened by a frame.

Frames can be effective when they bracket a story that the narrator has failed to understand, or when they add further implications to a story that might seem small at first glance. My favourite example of the latter case would be "A Wedding," by William Sansom, which could not work as a story without its frame, and which becomes all the more haunting with it.

In contrast, the frame of "The Snout" offers nothing that is not conveyed by the story itself. It also withholds information from the readers in a way that feels like cheating:

'Do you see anything in that cage?' he demanded in reply.

'Certainly,' I told him.

'Then for God's sake,' he pleaded. 'What do you see?'

I told him briefly.

'Good Lord,' he ejaculated. 'Are we both crazy?'

Ejaculations aside, the story, once it begins, is told with swift economy:

As if it had been broad day Thwaite drove the car at a terrific pace for nearly an hour. Then he stopped it while Rivvin put out every lamp. We had not met or overtaken anything, but when we started again through the moist, starless blackness it was too much for my nerves.

No time is wasted as a group of thieves break into the house of a mysterious hermit wealthy beyond imagination:

'Here's the place,' he said at the wall, and guided my hand to feel the ring-bolt in the grass at its foot. Rivvin made a back for him and I scrambled up on the two. Tip-toe on Thwaite's shoulders I could just finger the coping.

'Stand on my head, you fool!' he whispered.

I clutched the coping. Once astraddle of it I let down one end of the silk ladder.

'Fast!' breathed Thwaite from below.

I drew it taut and went down. The first sweep of my fingers in the grass found the other ring-bolt. I made the ladder fast and gave it the signal twitches. Rivvin came over first, then Thwaite. Through the park he led evenly. When he halted he caught me by the elbow and asked:

'Can you see any lights?'

The rapid pace and the tension continue, even while much of the story is devoted to wanderings through a mansion that, as the details accumulate, begins to seem less like a home and more like the prison of a being that might not be human.

The methods of "The Snout" can be hard to analyze, because nothing stands out in terms of technique beyond its rapid pace. Yet as the details of this house accumulate, the effect becomes dreamlike: nothing on its own might seem unusual, but as the pages go by, the odd little touches here and there begin to add up:

Close to me when the lights blazed out was a sea picture, blurred grayish foggy weather and a heavy ground-swell; a strange other-world open boat with fish heaped in the bottom of it and standing among them four human figures in shining boots like rubber boots and wet, shiny, loose coats like oilskins, only the boots and skins were red as claret, and the four figures had hyenas' heads. One was steering and the others were hauling at a net. Caught in the net was a sort of merman, but different from the pictures of mermaids. His shape was all human except the head and hands and feet; every bit of him was covered with fish-scales all rainbowy. He had flat broad fins in place of hands and feet and his head was the head of a fat hog. He was thrashing about in the net in an agony of impotent effort. Queer as the picture was it had a compelling impression of reality, as if the scene were actually happening before our eyes....

Then next to that was a fight of two compound creatures shaped like centaurs, only they had bulls' bodies, with human torsos growing out of them, where the necks ought to be, the arms scaly snakes with open-mouthed, biting heads in place of hands; and instead of human heads roosters' heads, bills open and pecking. Under the creatures in place of bulls' hoofs were yellow roosters' legs, stouter than chickens' legs and with short thick toes, and long sharp spurs like game roosters'. Yet these fantastic chimeras appeared altogether alive and their movements looked natural, yes that's the word, natural....

'Mr Hengist Eversleigh is a lunatic, that's certain,' Thwaite commented, 'but he unquestionably knows how to paint.'

A story, then, worth reading and revisiting. Too bad about the frame.