Marjorie Bowen, "The Sign-Painter And The Crystal Fishes"

Cover by Helmut Wenske. Avon, 1975. Click for a better jpeg.

Along with crime fiction, historical fiction, and historical crime fiction, Marjorie Bowen wrote ghost and horror stories. Of the ones I've tried, my favourite has been "The Sign-Painter And The Crystal Fishes," which I first read in Kirby McCauley's NIGHT CHILLS anthology from 1975.

Bowen has an intensely visual style, but her descriptions are often static, like illustrations:

"The house was built beside a river. In the evening the sun would lie reflected in the dark water, a stain of red in between the thick shadows cast by the buildings. It was twilight now, and there was the long ripple of dull crimson, shifting as the water rippled sullenly between the high houses.

"Beneath this house was an old stake, hung at the bottom with stagnant green, white and dry at the top. A rotting boat that fluttered the tattered remains of faded crimson cushions was affixed to the stake by a fraying rope. Sometimes the boat was thrown against the post by the strong evil ripples, and there was a dismal creaking noise."

While undeniably vivid, these images, at first, might seem better suited to the script of a stage play than to a short story.

When the characters appear, they, too, are described as if on a stage:

"There was no glass in the window, and the shutters swung loose on broken hinges. Now and again they creaked against the flat brick front of the house, and then Lucius Cranfield winced.

"He held a round, clear mirror in his hand, and sometimes he looked away from the solitary tree to glance into it. When he did so he beheld a pallid face surrounded with straight brown hair, lips that had once been beautiful, and blurred eyes veined with red like some curious stone.

"As the red sunlight began to grow fainter in the water a step sounded on the rotting stairway, the useless splitting door was pushed open, and Lord James Fontaine entered.

"Slowly, and with a mincing step, he came across the dusty floor. He wore a dress of bright violet watered silk, his hair was rolled fantastically, and powdered such a pure white that his face looked sallow by contrast. To remedy this he had painted his cheeks and his lips, and powdered his forehead and chin. But the impression made was not of a pink and fresh complexion, but of a yellow countenance rouged. There were long pearls in his ears and under his left eye an enormous patch. His eyes slanted towards his nose, his nostrils curved upwards, and his thin lips were smiling."

Bowen has a good eye, but not always a good ear. She often falls back on adverbs to compensate for weak verbs:

"'You have a very splendid painting swinging outside your own door,' said Lord James suavely. 'Never did I see fairer drawing nor brighter hues. It is your work?' he questioned.

"'Mine, yes,' assented the sign-painter drearily."

As the story develops, her few lapses in style fade into the background, while her visual sense remains up front:

"The bright dark eyes of the visitor flickered from right to left. He moved a little nearer the window, where, despite the thickening twilight, his violet silk coat gleamed like the light on a sheet of water....

"She cast off her long earrings, her bracelets, her rings, the necklace Lord James had given her. This slipped, like a glitter of purple water, through her fingers, and shone in a little heap of stars on the gleaming waxed floor."

Bowen maintains a tone of detached omniscience from beginning to end, which makes it hard to participate emotionally in the narrative, to feel as her characters feel, but her visual details compensate for a spectator.

In the end, I think she was right to keep readers at a distance, because the twists of her plot rely on detached observation. Allowing readers into the heads of her characters would have undermined her best moments.

To say anything else would ruin the impact of a story that not only surprises, but develops a mood of quiet eeriness that creeped under my skin years ago when I first read it, and one that comes back to me with each new reading.

Art Is Not Merely Representation, It Is Experience

More and more, I've begun to think that art, that all of the arts, are not necessarily mimesis, a representation of life, but extensions of life itself; not records of experience, but actual experience. Humans create art for the same reason that insects create hives, or birds create nests: it is a fundamental aspect of our nature, it is what we do.

People often dissect art in search of meaning, in search of instruction; when they find (or believe they find) this meaning, they use it to squeeze the dissected art into categories (horror, drama, romance, science fiction) in the same way that people stuff old shirts and jeans into boxes, and then press down on the lids of these bulging boxes to tape them shut. Yet by doing this, they shift their attention away from art itself to their ideas about art. For the sake of distraction, they ignore what really matters: the experience of art, in all of its troubling complexity, ambiguity, and living refusal to be paraphrased, explained, labelled, and forgotten.

(Many of these ideas came to me as I struggled with the stories and poems of Walter de la Mare, a writer who refuses categorization, who slips away from explanation.)

Walter de la Mare. Click for a better jpeg.

HELL! SAID THE DUCHESS, by Michael Arlen, 1934.

In 1983, Karl Edward Wagner listed Michael Arlen's HELL! SAID THE DUCHESS as one of the thirteen best supernatural horror novels ever written... but why?

For most of its length, the book is hardly the best of anything. More novella than novel, it reads for the most part like a mildly amusing story by Ronald Firbank, but without Firbank's melancholy; like one of Waugh's satires without the sting; like a Wodehouse farce without the clever pratfalls. I found parts of it funny, but with a humour as light and fluffy as meringue:

"Mrs. Nautigale had a pronounced gift for collecting the most intimate friendships possible with men and women who could never overcome their surprise at having been collected. They then found themselves subjected to the alarming process of being pinned down, exhibited and fed in groups of not fewer than twenty, at which it was taken for granted that a good time was being had by all, though no one knew exactly why.

"She was the soul of kindness, gave money freely to the rich, and had built her success as a hostess on having cleverly observed that there is no one like the distinguished Anglo-Saxon for enjoying a series of free meals provided that nothing, and particularly no conversation, is asked of him or her in return."

And so on, for page after page, like Saki without venom. Not even a series of sex-murders committed, it seems, by the chaste and proper Duchess of Dove can darken the mood, and the police investigation is played for laughs:

"My valet and I have been taking it in turns to follow her day and night for several days, and we have also searched her rooms in Camberwell."

"An illegal act," said Icelin. "We also found nothing."

As Arlen's cardboard detectives wander through their investigations, his crisp, imageless prose is consistently arch and amusing, but to little point. The book offers no emotional resonance, no atmosphere, no sense of place, no people to care about, and no sense of horror whatsoever.

But then, in the last twenty pages, Arlen suddenly veers into Arthur Machen territory.

[MILD SPOILER]

His buffoons encounter an Ancient Evil hot for sex and bloodshed:

"He could see nothing at all but her eyes, nothing in the whole world but two eyes. And then he could see two black bright points. He wanted to shut his eyes tight against them, but he was without any will at all. And he felt the coils of a snake around him. He saw the two black bright points of a snake’s eyes reared above his head. He felt his hands caressing the rough sensuous coils. Then he found himself lying on his back on the sofa with her body pressed down on him and her pointed tongue darting in and out of his mouth."

With its predatory sex and supernatural horror, this ending took me by surprise. Its intensity bursts out of nowhere, and undeniably works. Even Arlen's refusal to describe images adds to the sense of danger, as the cardboard characters flinch away from any glimpse of the thing that wants them.

Certain elements in the story, like the hints of a fascist coup and class riots in Great Britain, never add up to anything, which gives the novel a hasty, improvised feel. This impression is reinforced by the climactic shift in tone, by the sudden leap from light amusement to sex-and-death evil. That ending could almost be a separate story grafted onto a failing book.

For this reason, I could never call HELL! SAID THE DUCHESS a good horror novel, but I would still urge readers of horror to skip ahead to those startling final pages.

Yet I still wonder why the hell Karl Edward Wagner called the book great.

Clark Ashton Smith: "The Beast Of Averoigne"

Cover by Bruce Pennington, 1974. Click for a better jpeg.

Good writers are their own best editors. When "The Beast Of Averoigne" was rejected by WEIRD TALES, Clark Ashton Smith revised the story by cutting out entire sections to make it leaner and more focused; he also added significant details to make the story more fantastic. The result, for me, is a great fantasy tale that can easily rival the best work of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Lord Dunsany, or Bruno Schulz. It astonished me when I first read it at the age of ten, and now, five decades later, it remains one of my favourite stories.

The revised version was published in the May, 1933 issue of WEIRD TALES, and begins rapidly with a short prologue:

"Old age, like a moth in some fading arras, will gnaw my memories oversoon, as it gnaws the memories of all men. Therefore I write this record of the true origin and slaying of that creature known as the Beast of Averoigne. And when I have ended the writing, the record shall be sealed in a brazen box, and that box be set in a secret chamber of my house at Ximes, so that no man shall learn the dreadful verity of this matter till many years and decades have gone by. Indeed, it were not well for such evil prodigies to be divulged while any who took part in the happening are still on the earthward side of Purgatory. And at present the truth is known only to me and to certain others who are sworn to maintain secrecy."

This revised version can be found here.

Those who need nothing more than a happy recommendation might want to stop reading this and move on to the story itself, but those interested in the methods used by Smith to make the story great are welcome to continue.

After the prologue, the story runs at a steady pace. The descriptions are brief and conveyed through motion:

"As all men know, the advent of the Beast was coeval with the coming of that red comet which rose behind the Dragon in the early summer of 1369. Like Satan's rutilant hair, trailing on the wind of Gehenna as he hastens worldward, the comet streamed nightly above Averoigne, bringing the fear of bale and pestilence in its train. And soon the rumor of a strange evil, a foulness unheard of in any legend, passed among the people.

"To Brother Gerome of the Benedictine Abbey of Perigon it was given to behold this evil ere the horror thereof became manifest to others. Returning late to the monastery from an errand in Ste. Zenobie, Gerome was overtaken by darkness. No moon arose to lantern his way through the forest; but, between the gnarled boughs of antic oaks, he saw the vengefully streaming fire of the comet, which seemed to pursue him as he went. And Gerome felt an eery fear of the pit-deep shadows, and he made haste toward the abbey postern.

"Passing among the ancient trees that towered thickly behind Perigon, he thought that he discerned a light from the windows, and was much cheered thereby. But, going on, he saw that the light was near at hand, beneath a lowering bough. It moved as with the flitting of a fen-fire, and was of changeable color, being pale as a corposant, or ruddy as new-spilled blood, or green as the poisonous distillation that surrounds the moon.

"Then, with terror ineffable, Gerome beheld the thing to which the light clung like a hellish nimbus, moving as it moved, and revealing dimly the black abomination of head and limbs that were not those of any creature wrought by God. The horror stood erect, rising to more than the height of a tall man; and it swayed like a great serpent, and its members undulated, bending like heated wax. The flat black head was thrust forward on a snakish neck. The eyes, small and lidless, glowing like coals from a wizard's brazier, were set low and near together in a noseless face above the serrate gleaming of such teeth as might belong to a giant bat.

"This much, and no more, Gerome saw, ere the thing went past him with its nimbus flaring from venomous green to a wrathful red. Of its actual shape, and the number of its limbs, he could form no just notion. Running and slithering rapidly, it disappeared among the antique oaks, and he saw the hellish light no more."

The story's vocabulary, physical details, images, metaphors and similes function not only to support the story, but to reinforce the setting and moods of medieval France. They fit the locale and create it simultaneously, all through the magic of carefully-selected words.

Too many stories are written as if the primary unit of information were the paragraph, but as a poet who worked in traditional forms, Clark Ashton Smith understood the need for a tighter focus, not only on the sentence, not only on the clause, but on the word. To this end, he let bare statements do all the work of implication he needed.

"So, on the forenoon of that same day, Theophile, together with Gerome and six others chosen for their hardihood, sallied forth and made search of the forest for miles around. They entered with torches and lifted crosses the deep caves to which they came, but found no fiercer thing than wolf or badger. Also, they searched the crumbling vaults of the deserted castle of Faussesflammes, which was said to be haunted by vampires. But nowhere could they trace the monster or find any sign of its lairing."

This technique let him put the reader into a scene without needless elaboration.

"On the night following the desecration of the graves, two charcoal-burners who plied their trade in the forest not far from Perigon, were slain in their hut. Other charcoal-burners, dwelling near by, heard the shrill screams that fell to sudden silence; and peering fearfully through the chinks of their bolted doors, they saw anon in the starlight the departure of a black, obscenely glowing shape that issued from the hut."

"Peering fearfully through the chinks of their bolted doors" is just enough physical detail to give the scene a sense of place. Smith provided the detail, and then moved on.

His trust in the magic of words made him state briefly what others might feel compelled to spell out in detail.

"Vainly I consulted the stars and made use of geomancy and necromancy; and the familiars whom I interrogated professed themselves ignorant, saying that the Beast was altogether alien and beyond the ken of sublunar spirits."

To bring his medieval setting to life, and to convey the sense of a world beyond this world, Smith relied on down-to-Earth, everyday nouns.

"Once, by full moonlight, a brother peering from his window descried it in the abbey garden, as it glided between the rows of peas and turnips....

"From a rarely opened casket, I brought out the ring of Eibon and made such preparations as were needful for the questioning of the demon. And when the purple stone was held inverted above a small brazier filled with hotly burning amber, the demon made answer, speaking in a voice that was like the shrill singing of fire."

Smith matched his everyday details with touches of pure fantasy. To this end, he solved the problem of his beast with a magical solution that is both carefully-established and justified: not a rabbit from a hat, not a god from the machine, but a Chekhov's gun that, in the context of the story, remains believable as it shoots.

Anyone who needs to write good fantasy, anyone who needs to write good short fiction in general, will gain something from "The Beast Of Averoigne." Many stories that I read when I was ten years old have not survived the passage of time, but this one lives on. It thrives.

The Worst And Best Of H. R. Wakefield

H. R. Wakefield has never been a favourite of mine. For me, he lacks the descriptive clarity of M. R. James or L. P. Hartley, the imaginative power of Sheridan Le Fanu, the dreamlike atmosphere of Walter de la Mare. If I had to use one sentence to describe his work, I would say, "It lacks conviction." If I had to use one word: "Hasty."

For years, I wondered if I was being unfair in my assessment, and so I went back to give several stories another try. The result? I still don't think much of H. R. Wakefield, with the exception of one story that has always impressed me.

The stories that seemed pale and thin years ago seem even duller today. For example, "The Cairn" fails because of needless shifts in point of view, because of the needless introduction of characters who offer little and then vanish, because of a needless insistence on keeping its monster out of sight and out of mind.

"Welland watched the little dark speck climbing steadily towards the cairn till it was but a hundred yards or so from it and then once again put the telescope to his eye. A few minutes later he saw Seebright reach the cairn, slap it with his hand and then turn and face towards the inn and wave his right arm above his head. And then he began rapidly to descend. Welland had started instinctively to wave back and then had smiled at his stupidity. He was just about to put the glass down again when he suddenly became tense and intent. He put the telescope down sharply and rubbed both lenses with his handkerchief, and then he put it to his eye again. For a moment he remained taut and rigid, and then he began to tremble, and then he dropped the telescope to the floor, and then he rushed from the room, out through the front door and down the village street. As it happened there was only one person who saw him pass, old Mrs Elm, who was beating a rug outside her cottage door. When she saw a hatless figure dash hobbling past, and that queer look on his face too, her mouth fell open and the rug dropped from her hands. A moment later she saw this figure turn up the lane and disappear, and then for several minutes she remained staring open-mouthed.

"Now Mrs Elm's brain never exceeded largo in its tempo, and seldom reached it. At the same time she had a sense for the unusual. She went back to her kitchen and wrestled with the problem of what to do. So presently she put her shawl around her head and trotted up to the Hare and Form, where she found Mr Reddle squeezing the digestive apparatus from a chicken.

"'Mr Reddle,' she began, and fiddled with her shawl.

"'Yes, what is it?' asked the landlord, pausing in the midst of his culinary business.

"'Well,' said Mrs Elm. 'I sees one of those young chaps who's putting up here, and I sees him running by in his slippers and without his hat and he turned up Dim Lane. I thought I ought to tell you.'"

But what does Wakefield tell us? Nothing.

As a contrast, consider E. F. Benson's "The Horror Horn": garish, perhaps, but a better development of a similar idea -- better, because it relies on images, a vivid setting, and action:

"Sliding and slipping, with the toes of my skis tripping in the obstacles below the snow, I plunged forward down the hill between the pine-trunks. The low sun already sinking behind some rampart of mountain in the west reddened the snow and the pines with its ultimate rays. My knapsack with the skates in it swung to and fro on my back, one ski-stick had already been twitched out of my hand by a fallen branch of pine, but not a second’s pause could I allow myself to recover it. I gave no glance behind, and I knew not at what pace my pursuer was on my track, or indeed whether any pursued at all, for my whole mind and energy, now working at full power again under the stress of my panic, was devoted to getting away down the hill and out of the wood as swiftly as my limbs could bear me. For a little while I heard nothing but the hissing snow of my headlong passage, and the rustle of the covered undergrowth beneath my feet, and then, from close at hand behind me, once more the wolf-howl sounded and I heard the plunging of footsteps other than my own."

Here, Benson is writing; Wakefield merely puts down words on paper. In story after story, in craftsmanship, in vision, Wakefield falls apart for me.

Another story I tried again was "Lucky's Grove," but after a few pages, I gave up: the prose limped and fumbled, brought nothing to eyes, ears, or skin, and shifted viewpoints from one suddenly-introduced character to another, which kept the story at arm's length and out of focus.

Hours later, I went back to the story, but found no change in its weaknesses. End-rhymes littered the paragraphs. One vague person after another took centre-stage, and then vanished into gloom. Above all, Wakefield strove to give nothing firm, nothing physical, nothing tangible for my imagination to seize.

"Their dreams were harsh and unhallowed, yet oddly related, being concerned with dim, uncertain, and yet somehow urgent happenings in and around the house, as though some thing or things were stirring while they slept and communicated their motions to their dreaming consciousness. They awoke tired with a sense of unaccountable malaise."

Unaccountable. Sounds right to me.

As in too many of his other stories, Wakefield, here, seemed unable to describe events on the page. Instead, he withdrew into his turtle-shell of abstraction.

"If on the preceding night the rest of the sleepers had been broken by influences which had insinuated themselves into their dreams, that which caused the night of that Christmas Eve to be unforgettable was the demoniacal violence of the elements. The north-easter had been waxing steadily all the evening and by midnight reached hurricane force, driving before it an almost impenetrable wall of snow. Not only so, but continually all through the night the wall was enflamed, and the roar of the hurricane silenced, by fearful flashes of lightning and rattles of thunder. The combination was almost intolerably menacing."

Almost? Almost.

"As the great house shook from the gale and trembled at the blasts and the windows blazed with strange polychromatic balls of flame, all were tense and troubled. The children fought or succumbed to their terror according to their natures; their parents soothed and reassured them."

What I miss, here, is any sense of living inside the story as a participant, as a dreamer. Wakefield offered nothing for my imagination; he offered lectures. Instead of making me feel events, he told me how I should feel about them.

Even during the few passages where he did offer something vaguely tangible, he hurried past the moment as if any hint of sensory detail embarrassed him.

"He went to the windows and flung another open, and as he did so he glanced out. His room looked over the rock garden and down the path to the maze. Something moving just outside it caught his eye. He thought he knew what it was, that big Alsatian which had been sheep-worrying in the neighbourhood. What an enormous brute. Or was it just because it was outlined against the snow? It vanished suddenly, apparently into the maze."

======

"The last scene was meant as an appropriate prelude to the climax of the festivities. It showed Curtis and his crew digging up the tree from Lucky's Grove. Out they came from the holm-oaks straining under their load, but close observers noticed there was one who remained behind, standing menacing and motionless, a very tall, dark, brooding figure."

This is dull, dead prose, and the result, for me, is yet another dull, dead story. When someone writes as if he had no interest in writing, how can I take interest in reading him?

Still, few writers can be lousy every time, and even H. R. Wakefield actually wrote something worth revisiting: "Look Up There!"

Like "The Cairn," like too many of his other stories, "Look Up There!" refuses to confront its nightmares. Yet here, to my surprise, the effect works. "Look Up There!" takes the old concept of indescribable horror, and makes it lively on the page.

"I do not remember whether I spoke a word throughout that meal, but I do know that I was under such a strain that I had to grip my chair to stop myself running from the room. The women were on the verge of hysteria, the men drank feverishly and, as time went on, a dreadful vague, inane babble came from all of them. The woman on my right -- she had a high, thin voice -- suddenly gulped down a full glass of champagne, some of which swilled over her chin and neck, and shouted, 'Well, when does it begin?' and then went off into peals of hysterical laughter. We did not move from the table, and from half-past ten onwards, Relf kept getting up to ring the bell, but no servant appeared. 'Where are those bloody slaves?' he cried each time, and staggered back to the table and filled his glass again. From half-past eleven I was no longer master of myself. The room was thick with smoke which wreathed itself into fantastic patterns. The pressure grew unendurable, and suddenly my resistance broke, and I ran from the Great Hall up to my room and lay cowering on my bed. I could still hear the crazy, chaotic babble from those I had left, and then a great bell crashed out. One-two-three -- and each mighty stroke followed so hard on its predecessor that the vile jangle almost seemed an undivided sound. It was as if a murderer was hammering in my brain. Suddenly it ceased, and I heard no sound from below, and then came one high, piercing scream from a woman: 'Look up there!', and then every light in the house went out."

"Look Up There!" is that rarest of things, a story by H. R. Wakefield that unsettled me. If you find his work unimpressive, unconvincing, or just plain dull, I recommend this one for its unexpectedly powerful use of evasion.