E. F. Benson, "The Face"

Although he wrote too many stories too quickly, E. F. Benson showed undeniable skill in four strong works of horror: "The Horror Horn," "The Room in the Tower," "Caterpillars," and "The Face."

Having read Jim Rockhill's book on Sheridan Le Fanu, and having begun to re-read Le Fanu's novellas and stories, I now recognize that Benson's "The Face" is, in effect, his version of a Le Fanu theme.

In Number 5356 of THE SPECTATOR (Saturday, February 21, 1931), Benson wrote:

"There is one author, far too little known by those in search of creepy lore, who seldom fails in his high mission: his name is Sheridan Le Fanu. He produces, page for page, a far higher percentage of terror than the more widely read Edgar Allan Poe, and whether he deals in ghosts direct or in more material horrors, his success in making his readers very uneasy is amazing. Though we may already know the story we select to give us some insupportable moments on a lonely evening, there is a quality about most of his tales which seldom fails to alarm: familiarity with them does not breed comfort. Many ghost stories are efficacious for a first reading, but few, when we already know the worst that the author has to tell us, preserve untainted the atmosphere of horror as do the tales in IN A GLASS DARKLY. The best of these... are instinct with an awfulness which custom cannot stale, and this quality is due... to Le Fanu’s admirably artistic methods in setting and narration....

"As a story-teller, his best work is of the first rank, while as a flesh-creeper he is unrivalled. No one else has so sure a touch in mixing the mysterious atmosphere in which horror darkly breeds."

One motif that appears in Le Fanu is the innocent, faultless woman who suddenly falls prey to a dead man. In "Ultor de Lacey," the innocent woman is victimized as part of an old curse against her family, but in "Schalken the Painter," no reason is given for the innocent woman's fate. She was chosen by a corpse, and he will take her.

In "The Face," Benson develops his own version of this idea. Again, the woman is innocent. Again, no explanation, no connection, no reason is offered for this catastrophe. Again, the story can be read and re-read with no loss of its power.

Benson was rarely a stylist. In passages like this one, he could be tone-deaf. Notice the end-rhymes:

"Her heart hammered in her throat, and then seemed to stand still altogether. A qualm, as of some mental sickness of the soul overcame her, for there in front of her was he who would soon come for her. There was the reddish hair, the projecting ears, the greedy eyes set close together...."

Where Benson excelled was in capturing a sense of place:

"The warning dream, the curtain that was drawn up on the succeeding night, and disclosed the vision she dreaded, was simple and harmless enough in itself. She seemed to be walking on a high sandy cliff covered with short down-grass; twenty yards to the left came the edge of this cliff, which sloped steeply down to the sea that lay at its foot. The path she followed led through fields bounded by low hedges, and mounted gradually upwards. She went through some half-dozen of these, climbing over the wooden stiles that gave communication; sheep grazed there, but she never saw another human being, and always it was dusk, as if evening was falling, and she had to hurry on, because someone (she knew not whom) was waiting for her, and had been waiting not a few minutes only, but for many years. Presently, as she mounted this slope, she saw in front of her a copse of stunted trees, growing crookedly under the continual pressure of the wind that blew from the sea, and when she saw those she knew her journey was nearly done, and that the nameless one, who had been waiting for her so long was somewhere close at hand. The path she followed was cut through this wood, and the slanting boughs of the trees on the sea-ward side almost roofed it in; it was like walking through a tunnel. Soon the trees in front began to grow thin, and she saw through them the grey tower of a lonely church. It stood in a graveyard, apparently long disused, and the body of the church, which lay between the tower and the edge of the cliff, was in ruins, roofless, and with gaping windows, round which ivy grew thickly."

Often with Benson, scenery drives the plot. In "The Face," it fuels anxiety, a sense of dread, of something waiting to strike. Each repetition of that walk up the sandy cliff becomes a step into a trap.

When this trap closes, "The Face" reveals the true skills of E. F. Benson.

The Non-Productive Toilet Of AI

Why flush billions of dollars down the non-productive toilet of AI, when that money could be invested productively: in public schools that create readers and thinkers instead of screen junkies; in free community colleges that train engineers and scientists instead of corporate drones; in universities that study and learn from great minds and great achievements of the past, instead of working hard to erase them from the nation's memory; in a thriving middle class instead of an increasingly-impoverished crowd of digital slaves?

Wait -- you say that Americans once developed a strong and educated middle class, and that this class gave the country unprecedented intellectual achievements and technological innovations? But also that this middle class was perceived by America's plantation-owners as a political and financial threat to their own dreams of oligarchy? And so they destroyed it, to make themselves richer?

Oh, well. Countries go from periods of greatness to declines and falls, and America seems no different. Its collapse will be studied by Iranian, Russian, and Chinese historians of tomorrow. I hope they learn from it. Good luck to them!

Read to Keep the Past Alive

This is how the life of yesterday endures.

You read a book that mentions other, older books. You read those books, too, and they also mention other, older books. And so your steps take you back, to Montaigne, to Francis Bacon, to Thomas Browne, to the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, to Seneca, and then back even further to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.

This is a normal process that keeps the past alive, but it requires you to pick up that first book and to damned well read it.

It also requires you to follow your own interests, and not the recommendations of book clubs or online book-fetish commodity sites. The steps you take into the past will be your own steps. They will certainly take you to different books than the books I found. You might walk past Virginia Woolf to the Bronte sisters, and then to Sappho. Your neighbour might step from George Orwell to Thomas Carlyle, and then to Thomas Hobbes, and then to Cicero. There are no incorrect pathways.

All of these recoveries and survivals depend on the willingness of people to take their initial steps, on the willingness of people to read. When people stop reading, everything known by the past, everything treasured by the past, will die.

If you want to see the septic wounds of its dying, just look around.

William Sansom: THE PASSIONATE NORTH - "A Wedding"

The horror stories of William Sansom are hidden away in his collections, which makes them all the more surprising when discovered. Any given story might seem, at first, an everyday slice of life, until the facade falls apart and something goes wrong. Even the gentler stories are often told with an intensity of vision that suggests paranoia, a sense that the universe itself is out to destroy someone. A few imply the supernatural, while still more describe physical dangers ferocious enough to seem demonic. (One of these, "The Vertical Ladder," made the palms of my hands too sweaty to hold the book.)

Of the more uncanny tales, my favourite is "A Wedding," from THE PASSIONATE NORTH (The Hogarth Press, London, 1950). It not only conveys a vivid setting and sinister mood, it also reveals how a frame can be used to broaden our perspective on what might seem, at first glance, a small, isolated event, and to allow for a narrator who tells the tale without understanding what the story means.

Sansom loads the weight of his frame onto the final sentence, but not on a twist ending. A twist can be useful in the middle of a story, when space remains to explore the implications of the twist; it can be fatal at the story's end, where it often seems more of a gimmick than a thoughtful resolution. Sansom avoids any twist, but offers, instead, one final, unexpected detail, the meaning of which the narrator has never grasped. Like the one piece of a puzzle that suddenly resolves a patch of blue into definite sky or definite sea, the final statement offers a hint of what kind of story this had been from the start.

In his usual style, Sansom builds up visual impressions to make his writing live. The story has no room for any detailed exploration of character (and none is needed, in this context), but the setting, and the actions within, are vividly conveyed:

"At last the door swung open, two men swathed in greatcoats came out carrying torches high. There followed the others: and last of all came the new husband and his bride.

"She seemed to lean on his arm. Perhaps as though she had almost fainted ? It was difficult in that light, the light of moon and torches, for the janitor to be sure of what he saw. Or perhaps that strange young man held her imprisoned by his own strong arm? So many dark figures moving there in the snow! So much whispering, such stamping, such a muffling of bunched furs! And now they had all moved over to a part of open ground away from the church, a place where tombstones lurched in the snow. There they stood and pointed to the ground -- they seemed to be discussing the place for a grave. Only the bride’s face was averted, she stood a frailer figure than the others, turning herself away from what they were most plainly trying to show her....

"In a few minutes all were gone. The silence of the snows again descended. The bell had ceased tolling, the lights in the church had been extinguished. Nothing stirred. Only the dark blue moonlight fell widely everywhere, sparkling a tinsel from iced birch-branches, bringing a great stillness to the black fir-clumps grouped like figures conferring against the white."

Still and cryptic, the winter landscape is a perfect setting for terrible events. William Sansom was a master of terror; in a "Wedding," he also became a master of the final sentence that lingers in the mind.

======

Because "A Wedding" is long out of print and hard to find (and not even listed on ISFDB), I can offer a PDF to those who want to read it. You can download the file without having to sign in.

The Pleasures of Literacy

Many discussions about literacy focus on its practical benefits: on the power to develop critical thinking, to pursue knowledge, to seize and to refine those random, scattered notions that flit across awareness and then vanish. All of these points matter, but one detail often missed remains, for me, central: that reading is a source of pleasure.

I often come across a complaint from students: Why bother to read a full text, when a summary in bullet form (often supplied by Artificial Idiot) can provide all of the "information" of a text without the "distractions" of skill and form and art? This takes utilitarianism to absurd lows, but the point is worth considering. Why bother to read?

My answer is that reading, in itself, can be a joy.

Let me offer a few passages from a lifetime's library of pleasure. Please read them aloud; please hear them.

"In vain do individuals hope for Immortality, or any patent from oblivion, in preservations below the Moon: Men have been deceived even in their flatteries above the Sun, and studied conceits to perpetuate their names in heaven. The various Cosmography of that part hath already varied the names of contrived constellations; Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osyris in the Dogge-starre. While we look for incorruption in the heavens, we finde they are but like the Earth; Durable in their main bodies, alterable in their parts: whereof beside Comets and new Stars, perspectives begin to tell tales. And the spots that wander about the Sun, with Phaeton's favour, would make clear conviction.

"...Man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equall lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature.

"Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us. A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres, and to burn like Sardanapalus, but the wisedom of funerall Laws found the folly of prodigall blazes, and reduced undoing fires, unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an Urne."

-- From HYDRIOTAPHIA, by Thomas Browne, 1658.

Sound and sense in combination can provide an intensely aesthetic pleasure, but even I, agnostic and anti-spiritual, can feel Browne's belief through the intensity of his language.

Another example from Thomas Browne, this one more "down to Earth." Again, please read this aloud.

"Whether lampries have nine eyes, as is received, we durst refer it unto Polyphemus, who had but one, to judge it. An error concerning eyes, occasioned by the error of eyes; deduced from the appearance of diverse cavities or holes on either side, which some call eyes that carelessly behold them; and is not only refutable by experience, but also repugnant unto reason. For, beside the monstrosity they fasten unto nature, in contriving many eyes, who hath made but two unto any animal, that is, one of each side, according to the division of the brain; it were a superfluous inartificial act to place and settle so many in one plane; for the two extremes would sufficiently perform the office of sight without the help of the intermediate eyes, and behold as much as all seven joined together. For the visible base of the object would be defined by these two; and the middle eyes, although they behold the same thing, yet could they not behold so much thereof as these; so were it no advantage unto man to have a third eye between those two he hath already; and the fiction of Argus seems more reasonable than this; for though he had many eyes, yet were they placed in circumference and positions of advantage, and so are they placed in several lines in spiders."

-- From PSEUDODOXIA EPIDEMICA (Third Book), by Thomas Browne, 1646-1672.

This is natural history, close observation, skeptical inquiry, fuelled by a wit that no reduction to point form could preserve.

Another example. By all means, read this one aloud!

"But the third sister, who is also the youngest --! Hush, whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybèle, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes rising so high might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with tiger's leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum -- Our Lady of Darkness."

-- From SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS, by Thomas de Quincey, 1845.

De Quincey moves beyond the natural history and anthropology of Browne into the worlds of imagination, dreams, and dreads, but he relies no less on striking images and organ chords.

A final example.

"A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides --
You may have met Him -- Did you not
His notice sudden is --

"The Grass divides as with a Comb,
A spotted shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on --

"He likes a Boggy Acre --
A Floor too cool for Corn --
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot --
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone --

"Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me --
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality --

"But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone --"

-- Emily Dickinson, ca 1865.

The power, the beauty of great prose and great poetry is that it cannot be paraphrased; it must be read as it is, in full, because its impact relies as much on sound and metaphor, imagery and rhythm, as on what it "says."

Any student of today who prefers bullet form summaries to the joys of reading might be dissuaded by examples like these. It is the task of literate people, who love to read, to show what can be gained by reading for pleasure.

Revenge of the Reading Comprehension Test

And now, a reading comprehension test! Do you consider yourself literate? LET'S FIND OUT FOR CERTAIN.

Read, if you can, this brief passage:

"Meethinkes their ghoasts come gaping for revenge
Whom I have slain in reaching for a crowne.
Clarence complains and crieth for revenge,
My Nephues bloods, 'Revenge, revenge' doth crie.
The headlesse Peers come pressing for revenge,
And everyone cries, 'let the tyrant die.'
The Sunne by day shines hotely for revenge,
The Stars are turned to Comets for revenge,
The Planets change their courses for revenge,
The birds sing not, but sorrow for revenge,
The silly lambe sits bleating for revenge,
The screeking Raven sits croking for revenge,
Whole heads of beasts come bellowing for revenge,
And all, yea all the world I think
Cries for revenge and nothing but revenge."

-- From THE TRUE TRAGEDIE OF RICHARD III (ca 1591).

Question: What are all of these comets and ghosts and birds and silly lambs bellowing, screeking, shining hotly and pressing for?

A) Renege.

B) Pretence.

C) Replunge.

D) All of the above, but not necessarily in that order.

BONUS QUESTION!

Are you illiterate? (If you can't write the answer, then shake your head, or put an X on paper, or cry out, "No! My parents loved each other!")

'Will' and 'Shall' Best Fitteth Tamburlaine

Click for a better jpeg.

TAMBURLAINE, PART ONE, by Christopher Marlowe (ca 1588): a difficult play to assess, but I do have thoughts about it.

Tamburlaine knows, thoroughly, utterly knows, that he will conquer the world, so he begins. When the ends of his power are served by persuasive oratory and generosity to those who follow him, he shows mercy and clemency. When the ends are served by the slaughter of innocents and the brutal humiliation of his opponents, he mows down entire populations without a second thought, and treats human beings as furniture, as caged amusements. The man seems more a drive to conquest than a human being, and this makes the play disturbing.

For this reason, the play is less about plot than about iron pageantry: a tapestry of murders, victories, humiliations dished out by a symbol of power with few human characteristics. Yet the play does does offer moments of unexpected sympathy for those caught up in Tamburlaine's path: in the fate of Bajazeth and Zabina, emperor and empress of the Turks, brutally mistreated like caged animals until they show surprising depths of love for each other; in the final words of Arabia's king, whose intended bride, Zenocrate, was captured for marriage by Tamburlaine, and who, at the moment of his death, reveals himself to have been a good man sincerely devoted to the woman who should have been his; and in the second thoughts, the hesitations, of Zenocrate herself, the one person close to Tamburlaine who argues for mercy and against mass murder. These brief glimpses of humanity stand out all the more as a contrast to the single-minded will of Tamburlaine.

The result is a troubling, repetitive play that lacks the layered characters of Shakespeare, Webster, Ford. What it offers, instead, from beginning to end, is brilliant language: the first great poetry of Elizabethan drama. Quote one passage, and you might be tempted to quote them all.

THERIDAMAS:
Before the moon renew her borrowed light,
Doubt not, my lord and gracious sovereign,
But Tamburlaine and that Tartarian rout
Shall either perish by our warlike hands
Or plead for mercy at your highness’ feet.

======

TAMBURLAINE: Whom seek’st thou Persian? I am Tamburlaine.

THERIDAMAS:
[Aside] Tamburlaine?
A Scythian shepherd, so embellished
With nature’s pride and richest furniture?
His looks do menace heaven and dare the gods,
His fiery eyes are fixed upon the earth
As if he now devised some stratagem,
Or meant to pierce Avernus’ darksome vaults
And pull the triple-headed dog from hell.

======

TAMBURLAINE:
Theridamas my friend, take here my hand,
Which is as much as if I swore by heaven
And called the gods to witness of my vow --
Thus shall my heart be still combined with thine
Until our bodies turn to elements
And both our souls aspire celestial thrones.

======

MENAPHON:
Your majesty shall shortly have your wish
And ride in triumph through Persepolis.

TAMBURLAINE:
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?
Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles?
Usumcasane and Theridamas,
Is it not passing brave to be a king
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

======

TAMBURLAINE:
The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown,
That caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops
To thrust his doting father from his chair
And place himself in the empyreal heaven,
Moved me to manage arms against thy state.
What better precedent than mighty Jove?
Nature that framed us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wand’ring planet’s course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

For all of its great poetry and stark moments of humane feeling, TAMBURLAINE, PART ONE is hardly a great play, but its place in the history of world theatre and its nagging persistence in the mind after its pages have been closed make it worth celebration.

Why We Need That Foreign Country, The Past

When we turn to the past, do we seek a mirror to reflect our own faces back at us, to reinforce our current attitudes and behaviours? Or do we look for a window that could show us other faces, other ways of thinking and living?

By the same token, when we deal with plays and poems, art and stories of the past, should we "reinterpret," "reimagine" them for "today's audience," to align them with current ideologies, or should we allow them confront us, to challenge us, on their own terms?

In 163 BC, the Roman playwright Terence translated a Greek play by Menander; this became HEAUTON TIMORUMENOS ("The Self-Tormentor"), remembered today for one brief riposte. "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto."

"I am human: nothing human is alien to me."

When we look into the past, we find attitudes and activities that we share now, and yet, often in subtle, disconcerting ways, we also find differences. These differences have become all the more striking in our current crises.

The West is collapsing. Human values and human relations have been supplanted by values and relations of the market. This is neoliberalism, the defining ideology of our times. In September 1987, while interviewed in WOMAN'S OWN, one of the pushers of neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, said, "Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families."

Yet if we go back to the 5th century BC, we find that Aeschylus took a different view. At the conclusion of his dramatic trilogy, THE ORESTEIA, he shows how the legal system of a democratic state can end the seemingly unstoppable cycle of murders for the sake of revenge. For too long, the House of Atreus has been trapped in this brutal cycle, but now, the citizens of Athens hold a trial and reach a verdict that finally puts the killings to a stop. Left on their own, individual men and women and families can tear themselves apart, but a democratic society can bring justice and civic peace.

In today's dying West, democracy crumbles into rule of the rich and powerful. Human rights retreat into smaller and tighter coffins of identity, and thus become self-limited, unthreatening, no challenge to the power of corporations and oligarchs. We need reminders of another time, when democracy held the promise of liberation, when societies and human beings mattered. For this, Aeschylus represents a good starting point, but only a starting point.

"Nothing human is alien to me." This is true, yet it also remains true that the people of yesterday did not quite resemble us. We do not read Montaigne or Thomas Browne to find ourselves; we read them to encounter minds better than ours. We read the Greek dramatists, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, for their poetry, for their piercing insights into human character and human failings. We read Shakespeare's CORIOLANUS, or the OEDIPUS REX of Sophocles, because the nobility of these heroes perplexes and challenges us in ways that the idiotic Trumps and Macrons, Bidens and Zelenskis, Modis and Netanyahus never could.

As L. P. Hartley wrote in THE GO-BETWEEN (1953), "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." This is why we need the past. This is why we should allow the past to speak to us on its own terms, with all of its difference, because we have lost many ways of being human, and we must rediscover all that we can, to survive.

John Ford, 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE (1633)

By critical consensus, the plays of John Ford represent either a last echo of popular Jacobean theatre, or early examples of a Caroline theatre designed not for the crowds, but for private viewings in palaces or in houses of the wealthy. Whatever the label, most critics agree that by this time, the vitality, the broad appeal of Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedy was dead, that Ford was one of the few interesting writers of this period who retained something of Jacobean vigour, and that his most interesting, most lively play, 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE, remains one of the best from its period.

I would call it a hand grenade, to be handled carefully at the risk of losing several fingers or an eye.

One reason for caution: the play's topic.

GIOVANNI:
Must I not praise
That beauty which, if framed anew, the gods
Would make a god of if they had it there,
And kneel to it, as I do kneel to them?

FRIAR:
Why, foolish madman!

GIOVANNI:
Shall a peevish sound,
A customary form, from man to man,
Of brother and of sister, be a bar
'Twixt my perpetual happiness and me?
Say that we had one father, say one womb
(Curse to my joys!) gave both us life and birth:
Are we not therefore each to other bound
So much the more by nature, by the links
Of blood, of reason (nay, if you will have't,
Even of religion), to be ever one,
One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all?

[Act I, Scene i]

Like many teenagers before and since, Giovanni knows that he knows everything, and that his will, his desires, transcend social norms and accepted customs.

GIOVANNI:
What I have done I'll prove both fit and good.
It is a principle, which you have taught
When I was yet your scholar, that the frame
And composition of the mind doth follow
The frame and composition of the body;
So where the body's furniture is beauty,
The mind's must needs be virtue; which allowed,
Virtue itself is Reason but refined,
And Love the quintessence of that. This proves
My sister's beauty, being rarely fair,
Is rarely virtuous; chiefly in her love,
And chiefly in that love, her love to me.
If hers to me, then so is mine to her,
Since in like causes are effects alike.

[Act II, Scene v]

What Giovanni ignores is the weight of the world's countering opinion.

FRIAR:
O ignorance in knowledge! Long ago
How often have I warned thee this before!
Indeed, if we were sure there were no deity,
Nor heaven nor hell, then to be led alone
By nature's light -- as were philosophers
Of elder times -- might instance some defence;
But 'tis not so. Then, madman, thou wilt find
That nature is in heaven's positions blind.

[Act II, Scene v]

Luckily (or unluckily) for Giovanni, his beloved sister is more than willing to love him back. For Annabella, the long line of suitors eager to win her hand might as well not exist; her one true love is her brother.

ANNABELLA :
This noble creature was in every part
So angel-like, so glorious, that a woman
Who had not been but human as was I,
Would have kneeled to him, and have begged for love.
You -- why you are not worthy once to name
His name without true worship, or indeed,
Unless you kneeled, to hear another name him.

[Act IV, Scene iii]

The first unsettling aspect of this play is the implication that these lovers are indeed sincere. Despite the hardships that eat away at their secret union, they remain devoted and loyal to each other.

The second unsettling detail is the brutal ferocity of the other characters towards Annabella. Like the enemies of the Duchess in John Webster's THE DUCHESS OF MALFI, these men seem to resent her mainly because she openly, honestly, and courteously follows her own path. Circumstances are complicated (perhaps over-complicated) by plotters in disguise, by daily betrayals, by feuds between the suitors, but in all of this, Annabella, despite her incest, comes across as the better human being.

Yet as we know, history is written by the victors. The final judgement of the victors in this play is that Annabella was a despicable whore, which ignores her actions and her personality. Whether this harsh assessment of her character was also John Ford's remains impossible to tell, but much of the lingering bitterness of this play comes from the unfairness, the cruelty of the men.

If Annabella seems more innocent, more pure than the men around her, Giovanni carries the weight of a more complex mind. At the play's end, he becomes a full revenger against those who persecute his sister, yet his own "solution" to the challenge of his love is just as brutal as theirs. The play foreshadows this end in many lines, but it remains horrific. For some readers, this might seem over the top, but in the traditions of Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedy, the spectacle of gore fits right in.

While John Ford shares with Webster and Shakespeare this passion for bloodshed, he lacks their genius for metaphors and imagery. Instead, he offers a smoothly elegant dramatic language that brings pleasures of its own.

ANNABELLA:
Methinks you weep.

GIOVANNI:
I do indeed: these are the funeral tears
Shed on your grave; these furrowed up my cheeks
When first I loved and knew not how to woo.
Fair Annabella, should I here repeat
The story of my life, we might lose time.
Be record all the spirits of the air,
And all things else that are, that day and night,
Early and late, the tribute which my heart
Hath paid to Annabella’s sacred love
Hath been these tears, which are her mourners now.
Never till now did Nature do her best
To show a matchless beauty to the world,
Which in an instant, ere it scarce was seen,
The jealous Destinies required again.
Pray, Annabella, pray. Since we must part,
Go thou white in thy soul to fill a throne
Of innocence and sanctity in heaven.
Pray, pray, my sister.

ANNABELLA:
Then I see your drift.
Ye blessed angels, guard me!

GIOVANNI:
So say I.
Kiss me. [They kiss] If ever after-times should hear
Of our fast-knit affections, though perhaps
The laws of conscience and of civil use
May justly blame us, yet when they but know
Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour
Which would in other incests be abhorred.
Give me your hand. How sweetly life doth run
In these well-coloured veins! How constantly
These palms do promise health! But I could chide
With Nature for this cunning flattery.
Kiss me again. Forgive me.

ANNABELLA:
With my heart. [They kiss]

[Act V, Scene v]

What we have, then, is a play of elegant poetry, undeniable power, and an overwhelming bitterness. Readers will respond as they will; for my part, I admire the play even as I wince at the sting of its venom.

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

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In the 1977 theatrical version of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, a moment of human honesty caught me off guard: as protagonist Roy Neary sculpts a mound of mashed potatoes into the blob-image that haunts him, his elder son watches with silence and tears. It offers a glimpse of the pain that Neary has brought to his family, but writer-director Steven Spielberg will soon reassure us that a family's pain counts for nothing. The one thing that matters is Dad's rapture into heaven as a Chosen One.

When I saw this film in 1977, I hated it. Watching it now, I respect its technical merits. It looks great (with five expert cinematographers, it should), and the visual effects by everyone from model-maker Greg Jein to the legendary Douglas Trumbull ensure that visually, at least, the film will grab its audience. At the same time, Spielberg shows genuine skill with direction. He knows how to set up elaborate crowd sequences without losing focus on the placement and movements of the central characters, how to block action with clarity, and where to place the camera for maximal impact. These once-common skills can be hard to find in the Age of Marvel, and I appreciate them here.

What troubles me now is what troubled me in 1977: the failure (the refusal?) of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS to explore the implications of its evangelical message, along with the failure of any character in the film to suggest that religious adoration of alien beings might be short-sighted.

Any first contact would leave impact craters on human science, politics, philosophy, art, on all aspects of human existence. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS turns away from this, and instead, looks at one man's religious conversion. Not a bad concept, and much could be done with it, but Spielberg has no concern for the implications of ideas; he wants a rock concert light-show, and thanks to his team of technical geniuses, he can provide it. But story-telling films live or die by drama, and what this film lacks is a doubter to pose the obvious questions: Should we assume that superior technology means a superior culture? Why, against all biological odds, do these alien beings look so human, so childlike? If they can fly starships, why should they not be able to master human languages? Can we really trust these alien kidnappers?

Writers are not obliged to answer all questions (indeed, unanswered questions can make a story haunting), but I do expect writers to understand that questions will arise. I would have been less uneasy with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS if someone in the film had put up a hand, and said, "Excuse me. Excuse me! Have we really thought about the implications of our choices? Aren't we assuming more than we actually know?"

These questions would have turned CLOSE ENCOUNTERS into science fiction, but like THE TEN COMMANDMENTS playing on TV in the Neary house, Spielberg's film remains, at heart, religious. Other viewers have embraced its blank-eyed innocence, but I see a failure of imagination, a lack of dramatic development, a refusal to confront the implications of running away from your wife and children to join a cosmic cult. The result is akin to Neary's mound of mashed potatoes: it might have meant something in Spielberg's head, but here, on the plate, it looks more like an unfinished blob.

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"You are a fucking idiot."

With terse precision, a Mr D on Facebook assessed my comments on CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. He continued:

"It's a movie. An action=adventure piece of crowd-pleasing entertainment. About ufo's and aliens. It's nothing more than that."

This is where he and I disagree. Films that tell any kind of story are necessarily statements of meaning. This meaning can sometimes be hard to specify; it can be plural and contradictory; it can be dramatized, so that we know how certain characters think and feel, without necessarily finding ways to transpose their personal meaning into an overall meaning for the film. But in certain cases, the meaning is presented with simple clarity, and this is often true of "crowd-pleasing entertainment" films.

Mr D implies that we should never look for meaning in popular entertainment, but as I see it, films that reach a wide audience often tell us about the unspoken assumptions, hopes, or dreads of that audience. For this reason, I think a close look at certain films can bring widely-held public attitudes to light, and sometimes, these attitudes can be disturbing. They can suggest unaddressed issues, hidden resentments, or troubling limitations of thought and feeling.

Mr D concluded, in summary:

"Get a life."

Perhaps he rejects the examined life as not worth living, but I would say that looking under public stones and peering through dusty public windows can be worthwhile, if only to see what cobwebs writhe in the shadowed spaces of our times.

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Mr D encouraged me to share his comment:

"Please do. It would be a pleasant surprise for everyone if you posted something intelligent."

I suspect I might have disappointed him again.

John Webster's THE WHITE DEVIL Revisited

As a Jacobean-mad teenager forty-five years ago, I read John Webster's THE WHITE DEVIL for the first time. I applauded its brilliance, but I also wanted to take a hot, soapy shower to wash away the grease of all that evil.

FRANCISCO:
Brachiano, I am now fit for thy encounter.
Like the wild Irish I'll ne'er think thee dead
Till I can play at football with thy head.

= = = = = = = =

[A man with a set of pistols threatens two women, and he means it]

FLAMINEO:
Look, these are better far at a dead lift
Than all your jewel house.

VITTORIA:
And yet methinks
These stones have no fair lustre, they are ill set.

FLAMINEO:
I'll turn the right side towards you: you shall see
How they will sparkle.

Above all, in the world of THE WHITE DEVIL, power counts for everything, people count for nothing.

FLAMINEO:
He was a kind of statesman, that would sooner have reckon'd how many cannon-bullets he had discharged against a town, to count his expense that way, than how many of his valiant and deserving subjects he lost before it.

= = = = = = = =

[A child, a mere child of murdered parents, has claimed the throne]

GIOVANNI:
Away with them to prison and to torture.

A world of power is a world of horrors.

BRACHIANO:
Look you; six gray rats that have lost their tails,
Crawl up the pillow....

= = = = = = = =

BRACHIANO:
O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin
To sweetest slumber: no rough-bearded comet
Stares on thy mild departure: the dull owl
Beats not against thy casement: the hoarse wolf
Scents not thy carrion. Pity winds thy corse,
Whilst horror waits on princes.

VITTORIA:
I am lost for ever.

BRACHIANO:
How miserable a thing it is to die
'Mongst women howling!

Yet reading this play again -- for what, the fourth time? The fifth? -- I caught a hint of grey light in its darkness. There is goodness in this world, even if much of it endures in resigned sadness.

FLAMINEO:
I would I were from hence.

CORNELIA:
Do you hear, sir?
I'll give you a saying which my grandmother
Was wont, when she heard the bell toll, to sing o'er
Unto her lute--

FLAMINEO:
Do, and you will, do.

CORNELIA:
'Call for the robin red breast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flow'rs do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm
And (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm,
But keep the wolf far thence that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.'

They would not bury him 'cause he died in a quarrel
But I have an answer for them.
'Let holy church receive him duly
Since he paid the church tithes truly.'
His wealth is summed, and this is all his store:
This poor men get; and great men get no more.
Now the wares are gone, we may shut up shop.
Bless you all good people.

FLAMINEO:
I have a strange thing in me, to the which
I cannot give a name, without it be
Compassion. I pray leave me.

This night I'll know the utmost of my fate:
I'll be resolved what my rich sister means
T'assign me for my service. I have liv'd
Riotously ill, like some that live in court;
And sometimes, when my face was full of smiles
Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast.
Oft gay and honour'd robes those tortures try:
'We think cag'd birds sing, when indeed they cry'.

Yet along with resignation comes defiance, in particular, the courageous defiance of women. This hits a peak during Act 3, Scene 2, with an arraignment of the heroine, Vittoria, whose only crime is that men want her. She will not be cowed by accusations: instead, she argues back, brilliantly, and gains approval from the court's witnesses.

VITTORIA:
Find me but guilty, sever head from body:
We'll part good friends: I scorn to hold my life
At yours or any man's entreaty, sir.

ENGLISH AMBASSADOR:
She hath a brave spirit.

Her defiance, and the defiance of certain women around her, never fades, not even at the end.

VITTORIA:
'Twas a manly blow.
The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant
And then thou wilt be famous.

In THE WHITE DEVIL, defiance often snarls with bared fangs, but it remains courage, and as a light against the darkness, admirable.

Darkness obscured the critical consensus on Webster for decades. Even after Shakespeare had been revisited and rehabilitated from his long neglect by British and German Romantics, Webster was hobbled with the reputation of Horror Sensationalist until the end of the 19th Century, when critics like Swinburne and John Addington Symonds came forward to defend him. His rehabilitation continued in the 20th Century, thanks to critics like Rupert Brooke and F. L. Lucas. They pointed out what should have been obvious right from the start: John Webster was not only a great poet, but a great dramatist.

A great poet, a great dramatist. Marlowe was a great poet, but not exactly a good dramatist. Chapman could write beautifully, but dramatically, his plays, especially BUSSY D'AMBOIS, were unconvincing, inconsistent messes. Ford was often fine as a dramatist, and as a poet, often very fine. Above all, however, as dramatist and poet, stood William Shakespeare, and along with him, John Webster.

Webster's poetry differed from Shakespeare's in its precision. Shakespeare seems to have thought in metaphors, and he rarely used one or two when he could use twelve or fifteen; Webster showed more constraint, which enhanced the power of those metaphors he carefully chose. Webster's drama differed from Shakespeare's in its range of people and emotions. While Shakespeare understood all kinds of people, and covered a vast emotional range, Webster focused on angry, bitter people, ignored, passed by, denied promotion and money despite their qualities. It would not be exaggeration to call Webster a Poet Of Resentment.

Yet as THE WHITE DEVIL makes clear, he was also a Poet Of Defiance.

LODOVICO:
Dost laugh?

FLAMINEO:
Wouldst have me die, as I was born, in whining?

GASPARO:
Recommend yourself to heaven.

FLAMINEO:
No, I will carry mine own commendations thither.

For John Webster, defiance represents courage: a daylight strength against a world of brutal midnight power.

The Past Glides On. We Lurk Within Its Currents.

450 million years ago, I studied classical guitar. (I failed at this, but my teacher, an Ottawa University student named Terry Gomes, quickly became my closest friend.)

At this time, I read a book by a famous rock session player. I can't recall his name, but I've lived by his advice. He wrote that the best way to learn was not to study your favourites, but to study the favourites of your favourites. For each of his "guitar gods," he traced back lines of influence to their "gods," and this taught him far more about guitar playing, and about music, than he would have gained by focusing on current players only.

Tracing back a lineage can be not only educational, but transformational. E. T. A. Hoffmann is rarely mentioned these days, but his impact on European and Russian fantasy was a nova-level event. When I studied German (again, 450 million years ago), I was able to read Hoffmann in his own language, and the impact shook me. Any readers of today who go back to "Der goldne Topf," or "Meister Floh," will be astonished by how "modern," how creative, how thrilling these old stories remain. In many cases, the work of originators has not only been passed down over the centuries, but watered down by would-be imitators, and this is obvious with Hoffmann.

Hoffmann is hardly alone. Thomas Browne left impact craters not only on English prose, but on English vocabulary; his books remain glorious. Dramatists, poets, and writers of intensely-felt fiction have looked back at Elizabethan-Jacobean geniuses like Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Ford, and Tourneur (or whoever it was who wrote THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY, and no, I do not believe it was Middleton). I have no classical Greek, but not even French or English translations can hide the power of Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Euripides (whose THE BACCHAE remains a sinister, full-blown horror story 2,400 years later).

The past glides on. We lurk within its currents, and our efforts to drift along with it, to swim against it, to swallow it, or to spit it out, become a dialogue with dead people and thriving methods. To focus only on the writers and stories of today is to fall into a crippling trap, is to accept, all-too often, imitation and mayfly mediocrity. Anyone who desires more, who wants to learn, who struggles to develop an individual voice or perspective, will gain more from a study of the past than from the postmodern, postliterate, corporate-academic market place of today's instantly-forgettable exemplars.

In truth, we have many good writers today, often ignored, often buried under piles of garbage. Yet the best way to understand what makes them good is to pay attention to writers of yesterday. Pay attention, celebrate, learn. Become yourself.

The Strangeness of the Symbolists

For years, now, I have to tried to understand the Symbolist movement that appeared in France during the late 19th Century, that went on to influence art, poetry, fiction, and theatre in Europe, in the United Kingdom, and especially in pre-revolutionary Russia. My difficulty was that no one seemed to have any down-to-Earth, non-contradictory definition that could match the work of so many varied poets and writers. Any attempt to define Symbolist intentions felt like pouring raw egg yolks into an open picture frame, and then mounting that frame on a wall: the result, inevitably, was a mess.

Book after book failed to give me any firm concept of what the Symbolists had tried to do, but I gained a sudden insight when I returned to a book I had read earlier in the century, and had, for the most part, forgotten: THE TECHNIQUES OF STRANGENESS IN SYMBOLIST POETRY, by James L. Kugel (Yale University Press, 1971.)

Kugel admits that the term "Symbolist" is vague, contradictory, and perhaps inappropriate. Yet what the Symbolists did have in common was an evocation of Strangeness:

"These... poems have within them the seeds of two central ideas.... The first, briefly stated, is this: that the mysteriousness [of these] poems is a peculiarly Symbolist phenomenon -- that, in fact, after seventy-five years of this kind of verse, what we mean by the term Symbolism is this poetic strangeness.... The second idea is that... Symbolism changed our whole notion of what poetry is, changed the reader's expectations in approaching a poem, and that is where modern poetry begins."

Kugel offers, as "the first poem to achieve this symboliste effect in the French language," a well-known verse from 1853:

EL DESDICHADO
Gérard de Nerval.

Je suis le Ténébreux, -- le Veuf, -- l’Inconsolé,
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie :
Ma seule Étoile est morte, -- et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m’as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon cœur désolé,
Et la treille où le Pampre à la Rose s’allie.

Suis-je Amour ou Phœbus ?... Lusignan ou Biron ?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine ;
J’ai rêvé dans la Grotte où nage la Syrène...

Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron :
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la Fée.

[GÉRARD DE NERVAL ŒUVRES I. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Librairie Gallimard, 1960.]

My roughest of rough translations:

"I am the tenebrous -- the widower -- the inconsolable, the prince of Aquitaine in the destroyed tower: my one Star is dead, and my constellated lute bears the black sun of Melancholy.

"In the night of the Tomb, you, who comforted me, give me back Posillipo and the sea of Italy, the flower that pleased so much my desolate heart, and the trellis where the Vine and the Rose unite.

"Am I Love or Phoebus? Lusignan or Biron? My forehead remains red from the kiss of the Queen; I have dreamt in the grotto where the Siren swims...

"And twice, as conqueror, I have crossed Acheron: modulating, in turn, on the lyre of Orpheus, the sighs of the Saint and the cries of the Fay."

Kugel explains that the poem is full of "allusions to nowhere." Before the Symbolists arrived, poems often alluded to historical, mythical, religious places, events, or figures that readers would have recognized. As an example, he quotes from Shakespeare's THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. Literate readers would understand this passage as a reference to THE AENEID:

"In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage."

What Gérard de Nerval has done, instead, is to mention people and events for which readers have no reference. He offers no clues to context or meaning, no way to make sense of his clearly-stated yet mysterious allusions. This makes the reader feel like an "eavesdropper" who has "caught snatches of a conversation" that will never become clear.

Kugel adds:

"This is the genius of Nerval's poem, and the fundamental discovery of the Symbolist poets. They were the first to seek out systematically this effect of witheld information, recognizing in mystery a source of beauty and depth not known in poetry before....

"The point of the poem is that we read it again and again, that we read it until the simple message -- veuf, inconsolé, Mélancolie -- is enough for us to glide on, until we can get so much into the poem that we can accept all its words and love their mystery."

Reading de Nerval's poem again made me think of a later poem, equally famous, equally filled with "allusions to nowhere":

THE LISTENERS
by Walter de La Mare.

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head: --
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

[THE LISTENERS AND OTHER POEMS. Constable and Company Ltd, London, 1912.]

Like "El Desdichado," "The Listeners" explains none of its mysteries. Who is the Traveller? What was his promise? He seems aware of the ghosts, but what connection do these ghosts have to the people he had hoped to find? Where and when does any of this take place?

Walter de la Mare provides no answers, but his poem, like the poems of the Symbolists, remains lodged in the mind primarily through its denial of answers.

As I read Kugel again, I realized that I understood what the Symbolists had intended, because I had heard the echoes of their Movement all throughout my reading life. I had only needed one clear guide to show me what I already knew.

Too Stupid to Understand Symbolism

Because I lack the intellect to be intellectual, I read essays and manifestoes on some aesthetic movement (in this case, 19th Century Symbolism), only to find vague terms, contradictions, definitions that go 'round and 'round until they plunge into their own event horizons, and a linguistic fog that gives me a clear impression of misty conditions, but of not much else.

"What do you see out there?"
"Nothing."
"That's the weather."

As a result, I find more value in looking at methods. Methods, at least, are clear on the page; methods, at least, can be studied and applied. What sort of words does a writer use? How are they used? Are the words abstractions, or specific nouns? Are they specialized, common, technical, archaic? Is the prose or verse primarily visual, primarily sonorous, or a mixture? Highly metaphorical, or plain?

These approaches can be taken apart, examined, learned, even by someone with my own limited intellect. So please forgive me if I set aside scholarly books of academic intent, and read what the writers and poets have to say in their own stories and poems.

Thomas M. Disch, THE GENOCIDES

Richard Powers, 1965. Click for a better jpeg.

In 1984, science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch surprised many readers when he published a full-blown novel of the supernatural, THE BUSINESSMAN: A TALE OF TERROR. Yet right from the start of his writing career, he had used horrific imagery and nightmarish concepts in many stories: in "Descending" (1964), in "The Roaches" (1965), and especially in his first novel, THE GENOCIDES (1965).

This American book followed the example of many British "catastrophe stories" of the kind written by H. G. Wells, John Wyndham, and J. G. Ballard. Like Ballard, Disch took this form into new, personal directions; also like Ballard, he wrote without compromising the logic of his concept. Ballard's catastrophes offered his protagonists a psychological fulfillment, a liberation of the mind and emotions. Catastrophe in THE GENOCIDES offers escalating horrors and a cruel, inescapable extinction for humanity.

That a book so disturbing, so bleak, should be so light on its feet and effortlessly readable is a testament to the writer's artistry. The prose maintains a tonal consistency from beginning to end; it is clean, clear, understated, even when it deals with topics like mass murder and cannibalism:

"The fish were all eaten, and Blossom began gathering the bones. The moment everyone had been waiting for -- the dreadful moment of the main course -- could be put off no longer. While Blossom brought round the bowl of steaming polenta into which were stirred a few shreds of chicken and garden vegetables, Lady herself distributed the sausages. A hush fell over the table.

"Each of them had a single sausage. Each sausage was about nine inches long and three-quarter inch in diameter. They had been crisped over the fire and came to the table still sizzling.

"There is some pork in them, Alice reassured herself. I probably won't be able to tell the difference.

"Everyone's attention turned to the head of the table. Anderson lifted his knife and fork. Then, fully aware of the solemnity of the moment, he sliced off a piece of hot sausage, put it in his mouth, and began to chew. After what seemed a full minute, he swallowed it.

"There, but for the grace of God . . . Alice thought.

"Blossom had turned quite pale, and under the table Alice reached for her hand to lend her strength, though Alice didn't feel an excess of it just then.

"'What's everyone waiting for?' Anderson demanded. 'There's food on the table.'

"Alice's attention drifted toward Orville, who was sitting there with knife and fork in hand, and that strange smile of his. He caught Alice's look -- and winked at her. Of all things! Or was it at her?

"Orville cut off a piece of the sausage and chewed it consideringly. He smiled beamishly, like a man in a toothpaste ad. 'Mrs. Anderson,' he announced, 'you are a marvelous cook. How do you do it? I haven't had a Thanksgiving dinner like this since God knows when.'

"Alice felt Blossom's fingers relax and pull out of hers. She's feeling better, now that the worst is over, Alice thought.

"But she was wrong. There was a heavy noise, as when a bag of meal is dropped to the ground, and Mae Stromberg screamed. Blossom had fainted."

By focusing on what interests him, and by leaving out the rest, Disch keeps the book in swift motion. (In his SF IMPULSE review from January 1967, Brian Aldiss called this method of telling a story in "rapid bursts," a "staccato" style; Disch makes the method work well.) The result is a short book that covers a lot of ground rapidly. Boring, bloated writers of today could learn from this.

The book gained positive reviews by Aldiss, Judith Merril, and E. C. Tubb. Its best-known detractor was Algis Budrys, who, in his review column in GALAXY, December 1966, complained about the influence of J. G. Ballard (despite Ballard's very different methods, intentions, and style). He accused Disch of being an "apt pupil" of Ballard, and supposed that THE GENOCIDES "reflects a deep and dedicated study of the trappings of a book everybody says is good." (As if Disch had no imagination and purpose of his own.)

This non-review, an insult to Disch, an insult to Ballard, should have been a terminal embarrassment to Budrys. It brought up the notion that science fiction "takes hope in science and in Man," and proclaimed that optimism should win out over pessimism. (As if science fiction had any reality beyond the writings of disparate individuals with their own perspectives on life and art.)

For me, this matter of "pessimism versus optimism" is not only a waste a time, it avoids a more searching question: "How much of the real world do we expect in a science fiction story?"

For Disch, as for so many writers associated with the magazine NEW WORLDS during the 1960s, science fiction was a forceful way to confront reality. Like Aldiss, Ballard, Michael Moorcock, John Sladek, and Norman Spinrad, Disch was compelled to face the realities of contemporary politics, economics, media, imperialism, warfare, art; these provided the energy, the drive, to write science fiction that engaged in speculation without ignoring the crises and possibilities of the day. Disch, like the others, took on this challenge in his own fashion, and worked in his own ways -- ways that often echoed or contrasted with methods used in the past.

For example: when H. G. Wells wrote THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (serialized in 1897, published as a book in 1898), he made explicit connections between his invading Martians and the imperialism of his own times; he also had his Martians killed by an earthly ecosystem for which they, given their evolution on a distant planet, were unprepared.

Disch implies more than he spells out, but those who read THE GENOCIDES might be reminded of American imperialism, of American military force being used to impose the will of American corporations (like United Fruit) over the economic and agricultural needs of third world countries. At one point in the book, Disch includes a bureaucratic memo written by the unseen aliens that reads exactly like a corporate request for "excessive force" to be used against the natives.

Unlike the Martians of Wells, the aliens of Disch target not only human beings, but the entire ecosystem of planet Earth. Their monoculture crop out-competes and smothers local plants, and leads to the extinction of animals and birds. Again, readers of the book might be reminded of corporate assaults on natural environments here and now.

There is more to the book, and more that makes it hauntingly relevant to the American "polycrisis" of today. Disch offers no heroes, no experts with sudden solutions at the height of disaster; instead, he pits ordinary people of the cities against ordinary people of the countryside, authoritarian religious communities against atheists and outsiders. He shows the danger of stupid people who take on "leadership," and the frustration of basically-decent people whose efforts to help each other are thwarted by aggressive morons. America, in this book, is divided, conflicted in ways familiar to us now, and like today's America, as it faces collapse, it lashes out against its own people and against the world, with isolating policies, pointless retreats into solipsistic fantasy, and of course, genocide.

Above all, genocide.

Ripeness is All

EDGAR:
Away, old man; give me thy hand; away!
King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta'en:
Give me thy hand; come on.

GLOUCESTER:
No farther, sir; a man may rot even here.

EDGAR:
What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all: come on.

GLOUCESTER:
And that's true too.

Exeunt

Robert Silverberg, DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH

Frank Frazetta, 1970. Click for a better jpeg.

Having waded for too many years through too many stories by Robert Silverberg, I was done with suffering. Yet in 1979, I had set one of his books above the rest: a book with a consistency of tone, a concern for visual detail, and an unsuspected emotional engagement that cracked his robotic facade.

The book was DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH, from 1969. Reading it now, I find it better than much of the supposedly ambitious work he had written up to his retreat to the safe zone in the 1980s, and vastly better than his bland, smoothly competent yet risk-free, emotionally-detached, endlessly-repetitive stories from that decade onward.

DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH is more than competent. I could recommend it as one model for anyone who wants to craft a visually-detailed story with understated, economical, straight-forward and transparent prose.

A typical passage:

"Generally now the mist was light at ground level, and often there was none at all for an hour or more. But it congealed far overhead as an unbroken veil, hiding the sky. Gundersen became accustomed to the barren soil, the angular branches of so many bare trees, the chilly penetrating dampness that was so different from the jungle’s humidity. He came to find beauty in the starkness. When fleecy coils of mist drifted like ghosts across a wide gray stream, when furry beasts sprinted over glazed fields of ice, when some hoarse ragged cry broke the incredible stillness, when the marchers turned an angle in the path and came upon a white tableau of harsh wintry emptiness, Gundersen responded with a strange kind of delight. In the mist country, he thought, the hour is always the hour just after dawn, when everything is clean and new."

Another:

"The mist came in close, bringing jewels of frost that hung from every tree, every hut; and by the brink of the leaden lake Gundersen cremated Cullen’s wasted body with one long fiery burst of the fusion torch, while sulidoror looked on, silent, solemn. The soil sizzled a while when he was done, and the mist whirled wildly as cold air rushed in to fill the zone of warmth his torch had made. Within the hut were a few unimportant possessions. Gundersen searched through them, hoping to find a journal, a memoir, anything with the imprint of Cedric Cullen’s soul and personality. But he found only some rusted tools, and a box of dried insects and lizards, and faded clothing. He left these things where he found them."

Hardly brilliant, but never bad: clear, functional prose.

Yet even as I read this book with respect (and relief -- I had not wanted to squirm and yawn through another typically-repetitive Silverberg typing session), I still felt the nagging tug of other writers with styles more lively, more engaging, more compelling.

For all of its undeniably good qualities, the prose of DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH is impersonal. It has a job to do, and it gets the job done, but with little hint of any human face at work behind the pages.

What do I mean by hint?

Quite often, you can sense the personality of a writer through the play of metaphor. Consider this:

"Evening shadows came across the spaceport in long strides. It was the one time of day when you could almost feel the world rotating. In the rays of the sinking sun, dusty palms round the spaceport looked like so many varnished cardboard props. By day, these palms seemed metal; by evening, so much papier mache. In the tropics, nothing was itself, merely fabric stretched over heat, poses over pulses."

That was the opening of VANGUARD FROM ALPHA (in the UK, EQUATOR), which is nowhere near the best work by Brian W. Aldiss, but which does come to life with sparks of metaphor in a recognizably Aldiss way. Yet the visual detail in DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH is not presented metaphorically, but through direct comparisons with creatures, plants, and landscapes that we know.

Nor does Robert Silverberg (in this book at least) allow himself to write omniscient comments, like those of Brian Aldiss; instead, he remains within the focus and thoughts of his protagonist. This is good traditional story-telling, but it also means that he cannot offer passages like this one, from Elizabeth Bowen's "The Disinherited."

"Autumn had set in early. While the days were still glowing, the woods took on from a distance a yellow, unreal sheen, like a reflection from metal; their fretted outlines hardened against the blond open hills that the vibrations of summer no longer disturbed. In the early mornings, dew spread a bright white bloom between long indigo shadows; the afternoon air quickened, but after sunset mists diluted the moon. The first phase of autumn was lovely; decay first made itself felt as an extreme sweetness: with just such a touch of delicious morbidity a lover might contemplate the idea of death."

These are not the observations of the story's protagonist, but the comments of Elizabeth Bowen "the implied narrator." Silverberg's approach in DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH avoids any such glimpse behind the mask, which is good for the story, but which also limits what he can write. In this case, I agree with Silverberg, but I also find Bowen more fun to read.

Writers can also reveal their personalities by their choice of rhetorical methods. Here is Avram Davidson, being himself in THE PHOENIX AND THE MIRROR:

"Cyprus was another world.

"The city of Paphos might have been designed and built by a Grecian architect dreamy with the drugs called talaquin or mandragora: in marble yellow as unmixed cream, marble pink as sweetmeats, marble the green of pistuquim nuts, veined marble and grained marble, honey-colored and rose-red, the buildings climbed along the hills and frothed among the hollows. Tier after tier of overtall pillars, capitals of a profusion of carvings to make Corinthian seem ascetic, pediments lush with bas-reliefs, four-fold arches at every corner and crossing, statues so huge that they loomed over the housetops, statues so small that whole troops of them flocked and frolicked under every building’s eaves, groves and gardens everywhere, fountains playing, water spouting....

"Paphos."

Note the disciplined use of alliteration (dreamy with the drugs), parallel clauses (marble yellow, marble pink, marble green), assonance (veined marble and grained marble), the nouns and verbs that make the passage vivid (statues that loom, statues that flock and frolic).

You could argue that rhetorical exuberance would have no place in a sober, sombre story like DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH, and I would probably agree. One of the stylistic strengths of that book is consistency of tone, which in itself is a fine achievement. (How many writers fail to maintain consistency, even within paragraphs? I could name a few....)

As I have said many times, the ways to write badly are limited and easy to label, but the ways to write well might almost be infinite. Objectively, I would say that Robert Silverberg wrote DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH quite well, but subjectively, I still find more to savour, more to love, in the styles of other writers.

Energy and passion in prose are qualities hard to measure, harder to describe, but for all of their will-o'-the-wisp nature, I know them, I feel them when I see them. I can also feel their absence, which is one of the many reasons why Silverberg, even at what is clearly his best, has never been someone I could read with passion.

The Western Crisis of Literacy

Having read too many essays and articles on the Western crisis of literacy, I believe that most of them miss the point. They focus on teaching and learning methods, but neglect the broader crisis of life beyond the classroom. If people in the Western world no longer read for intellectual engagement, instruction, or pleasure, how is anything a student learns at school to be applied outside of school?

Even before I began to read as a child, I noticed that everyone around me lived with books. My parents, who had no money during the early years of their marriage, took me on weekly trips to the local public library, and even though both worked at the time, they read to me, or asked babysitters to read. Either way, I grew up with piles of books at hand, and I was encouraged to love them.

My point, here, is not that my parents were good people. (They were.) My point is that we lived within a culture of books, which made the skills of literacy easy to learn, and easy to apply.

This Western culture of books and applied literacy is dying. If we took note of the loss, and chose to save this culture, we could do it, but the task would be the work of generations, and we would really have to give a damn. So far, we seem willing to let the culture of reading fade into dead history. We have chosen to be ignorant, inarticulate fools; we did this by, and to, ourselves. And now, here we are: nowhere.

Strength versus Power

While strength of character, strength of will, strength of body help us to reach our personal goals, power compels other people to do our self-directed work for us. In this way, power spoils character, corrupts will, enfeebles the body. One glance at our mindless, bloated "leaders" will prove this.

Click for a better jpeg, if not for better people.

When the Weak Support the Powerful

No matter how poor, marginalized, or frustrated they might be, a shocking number of people side consistently with power against their own self-interest. The sources of power, the motives of power, stretch beyond their understanding, yet they support the punitive actions of power against any group they resent.