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.

Jim Rockhill's New Book on Sheridan Le Fanu

Click for a better jpeg.

A MIND TURNED IN UPON ITSELF: WRITINGS ON J. S. LE FANU, by Jim Rockhill. Swan River Press, Dublin, 2025.

Between 2002 and 2005, Ash-Tree Press released a three-volume set of stories by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, with introductory essays by Jim Rockhill. These can be ranked with the most important contributions to Le Fanu scholarship in our field since the Dover collections edited by the great E. F. Bleiler (BEST GHOST STORIES OF J. S. LEFANU, 1964; GHOST STORIES AND MYSTERIES, 1975), and the long essays on Le Fanu written by Jack Sullivan (ELEGANT NIGHTMARES, Ohio University Press, 1978 -- one of the best studies of horror fiction I've read).

Swan River Press has now collected revised and expanded versions of these Ash-Tree Press essays, along with supplementary articles, in a book essential for those with an interest in Le Fanu, in his place within the history of British ghost fiction, and in the aesthetics and techniques that he brought to the writing of horror stories.

Le Fanu remains a top figure in horror fiction, not only as a key influence on M. R. James and other British writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but as a living example of innovation within our field. Like Ambrose Bierce in the United States, Le Fanu was a pioneer of modern horror fiction. He brought a new control of tone and pacing, a new brevity and sensory specificity to the craftsmanship of horror fiction that took it beyond the influence of Gothic romance. In this way, he resembled the writers who succeeded him far more than he resembled those writers, like Poe, who came before. He emphasized atmosphere and psychology above mere sensationalism, and introduced a new type of ghost that was neither an external intrusion nor a clear manifestation of internal states; instead, the ghosts of Le Fanu were inextricably entwined invaders from within and without. Were the ghosts real? Were they hallucinations? None of this mattered. What was important, instead, was how the ghost was perceived, and how this perception destroyed the minds of witnesses.

This modern approach, with its claustrophobically-subjective emphasis on personal perception and secret anxieties, would go on to be developed by M. R. James, Walter de la Mare, and others who preferred the strangeness of the unknown to the clearly-motivated and often moralistic ghosts of the past. Le Fanu showed the way. And yet, as Jim Rockhill writes:

"For all the honour bestowed upon him over the decades by such percipient scholar-creators of supernatural fiction as E. F. Benson, Elizabeth Bowen, Glen Cavaliero, Gary William Crawford, Dorothy L. Sayers, August Derleth, Henry James, M. R. James, Rosemary Pardoe, V. S. Pritchett, Montague Summers, and others, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is still given insufficient credit as a craftsman and often very little credit at all as a visionary in the field of spectral horror."

Part of the reason for this neglect in the early 20th Century was the unavailability of his books, especially in the United States. Le Fanu was ignored or dismissed by important surveyors of the field (like H. P. Lovecraft), because they could not find much of his work to read.

Recent decades have corrected this. Yet facts about the man's life have long remained elusive:

"Rumours concerning the man's life and death still run rampant. Many scholarly editions of his work still cannot even be bothered to provide the correct day of his death."

Jim Rockhill sets out to repair this:

"It has been the goal of this volume to provide a biographical context in which to help dispel any myths still distorting perceptions of the man, and offer commentary that might help liberate the works from those purely psychological interpretations and other limited critical pigeonholes into which they have been forced over the years. If any of this has caused the reader to linger and perhaps shudder a little longer over the terrors in Le Fanu's pages, we can count this project a success."

Jim Rockhill's book is indeed a success.

He begins with the unsettled political climate of Le Fanu's Ireland:

"Although [Le Fanu] has left no direct record of these events, it is difficult not to recognise it as one more factor contributing to the sense of instability, the visions of ancestral mansions tottering on their foundations, and the continual presence of something lying in wait just out of sight which haunt not only his ghost stories, but much of his other fiction as well."

A troubled life of political upheavals and family tragedies took its toll on Le Fanu:

"Grief-stricken and guilt-ridden, disaffected politically, saddled with debts and responsibilities related to his ventures in journalism, and attempting to raise four children on his own, Le Fanu retired to his home at 18 Merrion Square for the remaining sixteen years of his life. His thus virtually shutting himself off from society led Dublin to dub Le Fanu the 'Invisible Prince', an apt appellation considering the results of this isolation: a string of long, complex novels and a body of supernatural fiction remarkable in its atmosphere, intensity, and dark implication....

"By all accounts he was a fascinating if cryptic individual, but if the details of his external life are scarce during these years, the products of his imagination are prodigal."

Jim Rockhill goes on to consider these works in detail, with accounts of their often complicated publishing histories, and their often complex narratives.

"The characters in his folkloric tales tread along the convergence of three lines linking this world with the world of fairy tale and the world of nightmare. In the other tales, his characters are tied to reality by the same dull occupations and concerns that dog us to this day. These characters are soon made to feel the presence of another world, impinging upon and inexorably intruding into their own, a world capable of affecting not only the individual, but even the world around him."

Like the narrators of several Walter de la Mare stories, Le Fanu's victims often seem haunted not merely by ghosts, but by crowded alternate realities: nightmarish, destructive, and without consolation. If Le Fanu believed in heaven, he offered no hints of it, but he clearly believed in the "machineries of hell."

Jim Rockhill takes a close look at the influence of Swedenborg on Le Fanu's work, at conflicting accounts of his legendary death-by-nightmare, at stories once attributed to Le Fanu without strong evidence, and at stories that appeared in multiple versions as Le Fanu developed and expanded their ideas. In effect, A MIND TURNED IN UPON ITSELF is a work of scholarship for scholars, a work of bibliography for bibliographers, a work of exploration for those who travel in the worlds of horror fiction, and, above all, a fine tribute to one of our field's greatest writers.