Not So Much Lousy As Limiting

I often read that we should not compare and contrast ourselves with other people. This advice turns out to be not so much lousy as limiting, because comparisons and contrasts give us perspective on our abilities.

To that end, I think it makes good sense to contrast our methods and techniques with approaches used by skilled people. In 1907, Vaughan Williams asked if his instrumental textures were as clear as Ravel's; he knew the answer was, "Of course not," and so he became a student of the French composer. I ask myself if my similes and metaphors are as down-to-earth as John Webster's, realize the answer is No, and for that reason study his work.

The more specific these comparisons and contrasts, the better stand the odds for improvement. Even if we cannot salvage what we are, we might enhance what we do.

The Death of All Things Human

If Bergman began the 1960s with hints of private hells and the disintegration of one isolated family in THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, he soon made it clear that he was haunted by collapse in the world beyond individual skulls. In WINTER LIGHT, he showed the collapse of religion as it failed to confront modern dreads like nuclear war; in THE SILENCE, a collapse of communication as families and countries fell into pre-war chaos; in PERSONA, a similar collapse of language and identity in a world of Warsaw Ghetto genocides and burning Vietnamese monks.

By SHAME, Bergman was ready to confront the ultimate collapse of human solidarity and human meaning in the fire and ashes of modern warfare, and the result was a film bleak even by the standards of the 1960s, with a final sequence as ferociously grim as anything conjured up by SECONDS, THE BIRDS, THESE ARE THE DAMNED, or GOKE.

David Conenberg has referred to his own films as a way of rehearsing his own death. In the 1960s, Bergman seemed to rehearse the death of all things human. I respect the courage of his films, even as I fight the urge to hide from them.

A Shift in Expectation and Perspective

That was my reaction, too.

Thanks to the excellent blu ray from Kino Lorber, I've now seen another film by Douglas Sirk: THE TARNISHED ANGELS, from 1957.

Three years earlier, Sirk had filmed MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, not his first American film, but the one that made him a box-office king of melodramatic "women's pictures." I would call OBSESSION lousy: contrived in its plot, ridiculous in its characters, with a few small hints of directorial intelligence but with nothing else to redeem it.

Had this been my introduction to Sirk, it would have been enough to keep me away from his films for the rest of my life, but I was lucky to begin with ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS from 1955. It would have been easy enough to make a film better than MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, but Sirk went further: HEAVEN is just as much a "women's picture" in the storyline, but more honest in its emotions and more convincing in its plot (despite a last-minute injury that turns the heroine into a household nurse). The film also takes a steady aim at American conformity, and has a lot to say about the slow death of pursuing social status instead of personal feelings. Best of all, the film reveals a director with a striking cinematic ability. Sirk develops a stylization of colour and composition that reminds me of later films by David Lynch.

Lynch also came to mind when I saw WRITTEN ON THE WIND, from 1956. This film returns to melodrama, but retains the skill and purpose that had energized ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. Viewers who find Lynch over the top and over-stylized would have the same reaction to WIND, but I found its visual intensity compelling. Sirk was clearly a director of intelligence and power, even if that power served the needs of a story that some would call far-fetched.

These viewers might prefer THE TARNISHED ANGELS. With a storyline that tones down the melodrama, that offers a more subdued look at some down-to-earth characters, ANGELS feels more like a straightforward drama, but heightened, once again, by Sirk's visual intensity. The grim plot is punctuated by flying sequences that caught me off guard; one stunt effect, in particular, made my jaw drop. Sirk would have a been a superb director of action films; what he achieves here is undeniably impressive. All of this builds to an ending that could have been obvious, but works because it does not quite follow the paths I had predicted. This might not be an all-time classic of the cinema, but it is a good film that I can recommend.

Sirk I can also recommend. I understand the reasons for his cult reputation, and I could easily join that cult; I might even be halfway through the door. I can also understand why his films might not appeal to everyone, in the same ways that David Lynch films might not appeal: they are less reflections of reality than creations of an alternate, artistic reality, one that plays by different rules and lives by heightened standards of emotion, colour, texture, shadow. To step into the world of Sirk, viewers need a shift in expectation and perspective; if they can make that shift, they will find much to praise.

THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA, revisited

On a second viewing, this film becomes less elegiac and more sinister. The social norms that few of its people question begin to seem less like adaptations to a harsh reality, than like sadistic celebrations of cruelty sprung from resentment. This mood is reinforced by a small sub-plot, in which a thief and his entire family are condemned in the worst possible way; the mood of community vengeance feels almost like a carnival.

As the film becomes disturbing, it also remains overwhelmingly sad. The central characters are good people caught up in a horrible society, and they have no options for escape or personal revolt. Even worse, the protagonist accepts the standards of her culture as good, and sees her looming fate as a pious act of sacrifice for family and community. The final speech in the film reinforces the continuity of custom: for these people, no matter how painful it might be, their way of life is the only way.

All in all: a film that offers piercing sadness and gorgeous colours, a terrible subtext and a beautiful surface. We need films like this one, but they can be hard to watch even as they dazzle the eye.

Please... Let me hide in the room in the mirror

Click for a better jpeg.

When I first watched DEAD OF NIGHT in 1977, I considered it the best horror film I had ever seen. Watching it this year on the Kino blu ray, with a print unrestored and hardly pristine but still better-looking than I had hoped, I retained my respect for its acting, photography, script, direction, and music, but asked myself if it still frightened me.

The answer is no -- and yes.

As a traditional ghost story, its only filmic rival, in my opinion, would be Thorold Dickinson's THE QUEEN OF SPADES, but today I find its approach to the supernatural more interesting than frightening: certainly well-handled, but not something to make me nervous after midnight. Yet the brilliance of the film is that it sets up expectations for a standard ending, but then kicks away any sense of cosy familiarity by shifting from ghosts to the quicksand of mental illness.* Even the comic golf story -- brightly directed and genuinely funny, but rejected by many viewers for its lessening of tension -- now seems the perfect way to set up an audience for the disturbing final segment. "Isn't this fun?" the film seems to ask, before it punches you in the gut.

After the final segment, the conclusion remains, for me, the one example of its decade that crosses the line into genuine fear. The film that comes closest, Robert Wise and Val Lewton's THE BODY SNATCHER, has an unexpectedly ferocious final sequence, but still ends with a restoration, no matter how sombre, of normalcy. DEAD OF NIGHT offers no such return to the normal, but implies, instead, a night without end.

Click for a better jpeg.

* One aspect of the film that fascinated me on this viewing was the way it seems to reflect a development in the range of ghost stories, from simple tales of premonition and of the restless dead, to highly subjective, personal accounts of the mental trauma that a suspected ghost might cause (as in Le Fanu, Wharton, Henry James, and so on), to a disbelief in ghosts that makes them suitable for humour, and then to a kind of restoration of the ghost story, in which people can be haunted not by ghosts but by the malfunctioning of their own brains, to the point where not only a human mind but reality itself can begin to fall apart.

Sugar on the Bitter Pill

After 97 years, HÄXAN remains a discomforting, even angering film, because it refuses to find any consolation or smugness in its distinction between medieval sadism and the modern treatment of mental illness. Of course a psychiatric hospital is vastly more humane than a trial by the Inquisition, but as the film points out, conditions at a clinic often depend on how much money the patient has; the rich have better options than the poor. The film also makes clear that our supposedly enlightened modernity goes along with a persistence of magical thinking: people today are no less likely than those of the past to believe in supernatural powers for good or evil.

This "doubled" perspective gives the film an unsettling mood. For all of the astonishing imagery in the fantasy segments, HÄXAN takes a clear, sobering look at the everyday techniques and implements of a totalitarian society that murdered human beings for the sin of being human. Sequences of devils cavorting in midnight forests are balanced by close examinations of what a torture device can do to bones and flesh. Impressive shots of witches flying over medieval rooftops are matched by a detailed look at how the Inquisition functioned, and even worse, perpetuated itself, through lies and tricks, good cop and bad cop routines, forced confessions, and an absolute refusal to question its own brutality.

Even if we disregarded the implications of the film, we could appreciate HÄXAN merely for its technical achievement. From double exposures and what might be rear-projected backgrounds, to stop-motion animation, reverse photography, elaborate make-up and costumes for monsters and devils, the film seems to use every visual effect available in its day, all in the service of bringing to life the subjective world of medieval witchcraft. For many viewers, the imagination and detail of these fantasy sequences will become sugar on the bitter pill of HÄXAN's point.

Sing Hear on the Dotted Line

In Gatineau, flu vaccinations are free to anyone with a chronic illness, and as the king of chronic illness, I accept this tribute to my glory. So last night in the rain, I walked to a local clinic for my annual shot.

At the front table, a nice Québécoise lady offered me a medical form. When I told her that I have trouble reading print, she said, in English, "I'll help you! You can sit right here."

I sat beside her and stared hard at the form. She pointed to one section, and said, "Just write your mother's middle name."

Parental names are standard on Québec's hospital cards, but only first and last names.

"You want my mother's middle name?"

"Yes, her middle name, on this line."

In big, block letters, I wrote, YVONNE, but I still felt that something was odd about this request. And so I stared and stared at the form until I realized that what it needed was my mother's maiden name.

The Implications of Implications

"If you could understand crazy, it wouldn't be crazy."

This comment by the protagonist of Vincenzo Natali's film SPLICE refers to her mother, and to painful events in her chilhood that she never brings to mind. One implication of the film is that people who do not want children often have good reasons to be childless; another is that adults who refuse to learn from their family history will repeat the mistakes of their parents all over again.

These implications at the heart of SPLICE remain implied, nothing more. While someone like David Cronenberg digs out the implications of his implications, Natali keeps the subtext of his film in the basement while focusing on a surface of uncluttered narrative. This is not a bad way to make a film, but it does limit the scope of the film's meaning. While Cronenberg will add layers to a film like THE FLY, to explore ideas about the effects of aging or disease on a male ego, on the way a man facing death can often perceive romantic partnerships as a means of personal extension beyond his own failing body into recombinations of personality and genes in the forms of relationships and children, SPLICE never becomes more than a monster film.

As monster films go, I would call SPLICE a good one. The story moves efficiently, the transformations of both plot and creature are carefully foreshadowed, the performances and dialogue are convincing, the music by Cyrille Aufort is understated, eerie, and poignant. The film disturbs, and it lingers in the mind. If you can accept its limited scope, you might find it well worth seeing.

Are you -- Nobody -- Too?

Daguerreotype at Mount Holyoke, 1846-1847.

I have no idea of how to say this without sounding small-minded, which means I have to force myself.

Last night, while watching on Youtube a documentary about Emily Dickinson, I realized that I have no interest in her private life; instead, I want to read her images, metaphors, and phrases:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you -- Nobody -- Too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise -- you know!

How dreary -- to be -- Somebody!
How public -- like a Frog --
To tell one's name -- the livelong June --
To an admiring Bog!

Dickinson is only one among several. I have biographies of Bacon, Keats, Bierce, de la Mare, of so many others, but I never seem drawn to these books as I am drawn to their books; and while someone like Thomas Browne must have lived in a fascinating world, I would rather focus on his perceptions of that world.

People say, "How terrible that we know so little about Shakespeare, about Webster," but the truth is, we know exactly what we need to know, because we have their plays.

I would never deny that the circumstances of a writer's life can illuminate the work, but they can also distract. By the time the sun goes down and the snow hits, what matters are not the small details of a writer's day to day, but the larger patterns of a writer's words.

No Guts

Any film that stars Jenny Agutter might hold at least a visceral interest for me, but somehow I have never liked AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. Watching the film again on Blu Ray, I can see no improvements, but I can see with digital sharpness the details that undermine the story.

The film tears itself apart. It wants to be a horror film, but instead of atmosphere, it offers flat lighting more suited to a television show, and pop songs instead of a haunting score. (Elmer Bernstein could have easily provided effective music if the director and producers had given him priority.)

Worst of all, the film develops hints of tragedy that remain unfulfilled, because it cuts away quickly from its final sequence of death and loss, only to punctuate its lack of spine with another pop song.

Even the funniest films can deal with sadness and with high stakes. Keaton began OUR HOSPITALITY with a murder, to show the real threat against his protagonist, and he set THE GENERAL at the heart of the American civil war. Lubitsch refused to be a diplomat when he showed the Nazi invasion of Poland in TO BE OR NOT TO BE, and the death of someone loved is the backbone that makes HEAVEN CAN WAIT meaningful.

If, at the end, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON had not shied away from the death of its protagonist, had not wiped away its mood with a sudden pop song, but had relied, instead, on music of honest emotion, and had lingered on a final reaction shot of its excellent actress, the film could have survived anything, even its flat lighting and TV show monotony. Courage makes all the difference.

Poe Never Said It!

Portrait of Bacon by Paul van Somer, 1617. Source: Wikipedia.

I see this falsely-attributed quotation all the time on the Web, and it makes me want to bash my brains out with a didgeridoo.

"There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion."

-- Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe never said this. Instead, one of Poe's characters misquoted Francis Bacon:

"There is one dear topic, however, on which my memory fails me not. It is the person of Ligeia. In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and, in her latter days, even emaciated. I would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease, of her demeanor, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came and departed as a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study save by the dear music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her marble hand upon my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It was the radiance of an opium dream -- an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen. 'There is no exquisite beauty,” says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, 'without some strangeness in the proportion.'"

-- From "Ligeia."

It hardly seems to matter to people on the Web that Poe's character attributes his misquotation to the actual source, right there in the same sentence. Right there in plain sight!

Here is what Francis, Lord Verulam, actually wrote:

"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. A man cannot tell whether Apelles, or Albert Durer, were the more trifler; whereof the one would make a personage by geometrical proportions; the other, by taking the best parts out of divers faces, to make one excellent. Such personages, I think, would please nobody but the painter that made them. Not but I think a painter may make a better face than ever was; but he must do it by a kind of felicity (as a musician that maketh an excellent air in music), and not by rule. A man shall see faces, that if you examine them part by part, you shall find never a good; and yet altogether do well."

-- From "Of Beauty," in ESSAYS OR COUNSELS, CIVIL AND MORAL [1625].

We live in a time of instantaneous access to information, yet people seem unable to learn from this information....

I'm Sick of Excuses

"It's only a film for kids."

That's right, just like PINOCCHIO, Lev Atamanov's THE SNOW QUEEN, LE ROI ET L'OISEAU, THE IRON GIANT, ZOOTOPIA.

"It's only a love story."

LE QUAI DES BRUMES, BRIEF ENCOUNTER, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, THE CRANES ARE FLYING.

"It's only a crime story."

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, GUN CRAZY, POINT BLANK, BADLANDS, BLUE VELVET, WINTER'S BONE, NIGHTCRAWLER.

"It's only a horror film."

DEAD OF NIGHT, THE QUEEN OF SPADES, NIGHT OF THE DEMON, PSYCHO, LES YEUX SANS VISAGE, RITUALS, THE BROOD, THE THING, MULHOLLAND DRIVE.

"It's only a western."

THE BRAVADOS, the original 3:10 TO YUMA, STAGECOACH, SILVER LODE, THE WILD BUNCH, THE GUNFIGHTER.

"It's only an action thriller."

LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR, SEVEN SAMURAI, THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, FURY ROAD.

"It's only a comedy."

THE GENERAL, OUR HOSPITALITY, SAFETY LAST, THE KID BROTHER, TO BE OR NOT TO BE, HEAVEN CAN WAIT, THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT, PLAYTIME, THIS IS SPINAL TAP.

With any type of story, with any kind of film, there is no excuse for not pursuing excellence. People who make excuses waste my time, and yours.

Internet Inevitabilities

1) A stranger will compare the work of someone you praise to the work of someone you despise.

2) A reviewer will compare your work to the work of someone you would not ever want to resemble.

Every Day is Hallowe'en

Today was marred by pouring rain, but I don't mind, because --

Every day is Hallowe'en,
Hallowe'en, Hallowe'en.
Easter Sunday? Hallowe'en!
So's my birthday.

Monsters, ghosts, and vampiresses,
Werewolves with blonde, flowing tresses,
Octo-ladies, pterodactyls,
Christmas bulbs and fire cractyls,

All of them on Hallowe'en,
Hallowe'en, Hallowe'en.
Every day is Hallowe'en,
Just like New Year's.

Easter bunnies tossing knives,
Carollers that prey on lives,
Choirs howling at the moon,
Creatures from the Black Lagoon,

All of them on Hallowe'en,
Hallowe'en, Hallowe'en.
Boxing days are Hallowe'en,
And bar mitzvahs.

Could You Do Any Better?

In Youtube comments, I see more and more often that failed response to criticism, "Could you do any better?" -- as if only Vaughan Williams were allowed to complain about the lack of counterpoint in current film scores, as if only Kurosawa could point out the incoherence of current action sequences.

Yet I never see the obvious flip-side to this argument: "Could you do as well?" Unless you, too, are a film director, actor, writer, or composer, then you have no right to praise films, performances, screenplays, or music. So shut up!

Her Haunting Beauty

In a dream tonight, I found myself in a long, narrow kitchen with olive-coloured walls and a polished wooden counter like a bar. Against the counter stood an equally-extended table, covered with food like a buffet, where people sat and watched a film from the 1970s on a widescreen HD monitor that was hung above the counter. As I walked beside the table, my attention was drawn from the food to the film. The sound was muted, and I had no idea what the film was; I wanted to ask the people there, but they were too engrossed in conversation for me to dare interrupt them.


The film took place in a futuristic, art nouveau train car, elaborately decorated with gleaming wood, brass, and chrome. Every now and then, the scene would shift to camera shots of the passing sunset landscape: a taiga forest where the trees glowed with dazzling neon greens and deep blue shadows. The rocky ground was thick with emerald green moss, and bogs went by with flashes of orange or neon pink. For all of their psychedelic brilliance, the colours never seemed like a photographic trick; instead, they seemed the actual colours of an impossible forest.

The lead actress in the film, dressed like a 1960s hippie in elaborate shawls, wore a black beret and round, wire-rimmed glasses. She had gentle eyes, a gentle face, and every closeup revealed a haunting beauty that seized and held my attention.

Only after I woke up did I realize: the actress had been my last girlfriend.

The Climate Strike

The climate strike has brought out the worst in many old men. If anything, the pettiness and cowardice of current ruling-class and pundit discourse has grown even more toxic, and all because many young people have decided to fight back instead of to sit back and swallow corporate garbage.

For my part, I believe these young people are too late, but I refuse to mock them; I refuse to block their way, because I would rather see us die standing for a human cause, than die staring at the mindless robot flickers of a cell phone.

I Know

Yes, I know: posting as I do on this website is playing the lyre as Rome burns. I feel the tension of this awareness every moment of the day. It forces me to question why I bother to write, why I bother to get up in the morning, why I bother to do anything.

I have no excuse for acting as if our modern age were somehow normal, but I do have one explanation. In a few years, I'll be dead. When I was younger, I did as much as I could (within legal means) to prevent the sort of world in which we now find ourselves. I protested, I participated in committees, I mailed off books and pamphlets, I was arrested. But I'm not young any more, and nothing that I did back then has made a speck of difference.

Any hope for a different world, any hope for human survival, will have to come from young people with better ideas for protest and activism than I was able to put forward. I failed; they will have to succeed, or die. The task is theirs.

And so, if I talk about symphonies, or films, or poems, or short stories, please understand that these posts are indications of my failure. If I had better things to offer the world, I would share them.

The Worst of the Dream Tests

Just before I woke up this morning, I dreamt that I would have to face a test. I had no idea what the test would involve, or when it would begin; I only knew that it would present more of a challenge than any test I had ever taken.

As I waited for the test to be announced, I found myself working at the Coles Bookstore (which no longer exists) on Sparks Street. Even though I went through the motions of work, I was afraid of the test. I tried to convince myself that I had nothing to fear; after all, I had taken many tests in university and high school. How tough could a new test possibly be?

Still overcome with dread, I found myself joined at work by my last girlfriend, who had left me seven years ago, and who now (in reality) lives on the other side of the continent. I will never see her again, but in the dream, there she was, right beside me.

She was emotionally distant, at first, but the job pushed us together, and soon we began to talk. It became clear that she still had feelings for me, and as the dream went on, my anxiety over the test was replaced by a rush of excitement over the possibility that she and I would start all over again. For the first time in years, I felt hope; for the first time in a long time, I felt happiness, a sense of inner comfort, a sense of being whole. There was a genuine possibility that she and I would soon be together again, and I felt so good, so alive, so unbroken!

Only when I woke up did I understand how thoroughly I had failed the test.

The Dead Valley

Photo by Marceau, 1911.

"The Dead Valley," by Ralph Adams Cram, in BLACK SPIRITS & WHITE. Stone & Kimball, Chicago, 1895.

One of my favourite horror stories, and, in my view, easily the best of Cram's fiction, "The Dead Valley" is unremarkable in its technique. Simply and rapidly, it tells a tale without excursions into side matters, but it also props up its narrative with good physical details and well-visualized scenes. Unlike too many stories that try to convey a mood of strangeness with assertions, Cram shows the reader the sounds, actions, and images that make his tale bizarre.

I put one foot into the ghostly fog. A chill as of death struck through me, stopping my heart, and I threw myself backward on the slope. At that instant came again the shriek, close, close, right in our ears, in ourselves, and far out across that damnable sea I saw the cold fog lift like a water-spout and toss itself high in writhing convolutions towards the sky. The stars began to grow dim as thick vapor swept across them, and in the growing dark I saw a great, watery moon lift itself slowly above the palpitating sea, vast and vague in the gathering mist.

Cram also skirts the trap of explanation, which adds to the force and mystery of his events. There is no reason for any of these things to happen, but they do, and the simple vividness of their presentation is enough to make the story seem real.

To these good qualities, Cram brings a further touch. At the end, he pulls back to show that the terrible night of his narrative is merely one speck on a vast continuum. This unexplained haunting has occurred over and over in the past, and will go on, perhaps forever. Because Cram has given this deadliness no reason to begin, it has no reason to stop; and this, too, adds to the story's power.

A Skeletal Impression of "Fengriffen."

Valancourt Books

Back in the 1980s, I considered "Fengriffen" a good story buried in pastiche. Reading it again today, I feel the same response.

I also have to wonder how many people stared at the first line, winced, and then tossed the book aside:

My first impression of Fengriffen House was skeletal.

Not content to give such a skeletal impression of his writing skill, David Case goes on to mangle another modifier:

I saw it from the carriage, rising against a stormy sundown like the blackened bones of some monstrous beast....

A first paragraph is the gateway into reading; this one is rusted and barely squeaks open, but after a few more the writing improves:

I looked at the moors and I smoked. When my pipe burned out I filled a second, lighted it, tamped it down carefully, and fired it again until it was burning evenly and the smoke was cool. Tobacco is an ally of contentment, and I told myself I must be content with the cheerful blaze still in the grate and the wind howling ineffectively outside, shaking the trees in a fury but unable to get to me -- indeed, defeating its purpose as in rage it sucked the draught up the chimney and caused my fire to burn more freely. I was able to judge the force of that wind by regarding the shadows beneath the trees. The filigreed moonlight shifted and blurred, laying silver tapestries beneath the limbs. It was hypnotic. I lost awareness of time as I studied the moving shadows. My second pipe went out. I pulled thoughtlessly at the mouthpiece. My eyes grew heavy. Then, gradually, I found myself looking at a different shadow. I must have observed it for some time before I realized it was more than the wind snatching the trees. For this shape had advanced beyond the trees, bringing a shadow of its own; it moved near to the house and then paused. I snapped to alertness. I stared at this dark form and had the grotesque impression that, whatever it was, it was staring back at me. A finger of ice tapped up the articulation of my backbone, leaving me rigid in its wake.

Too many present participles, but otherwise, not bad at all.

The story moves quickly, piles on details and complications with skill, holds the attention at all times. As a narrative, "Fengriffen" brings more than enough to make reading worthwhile, if you can accept the anonymity of pastiche. For me, it represents a dead end. I see no value in mimicking the writers of yesterday; I prefer those writers who have learned from the past, who have digested its methods to bring us ideas and obsessions of their own. The past is a guide, but should not be a limiting template.

As templated stories go, "Fengriffen" is one of the best. I can only wish that Case had used the tale to share private fears and personal images, to make the story his own.

William Sansom And One Of His Best

William Sansom, "A Wedding." From THE PASSIONATE NORTH, The Hogarth Press, London, 1950.

This is not only one of my favourite stories; it also reveals how a frame can be used to broaden our perspective on what might seem, at first glance, a small, isolated event, or to show its implications over a time-span greater than the story's. For me, "A Wedding" offers one of the best examples of its kind.

Click to enlarge.

Because a few people have not read this one, I will not spoil the ending. Leave it to say that William Sansom has put all of the weight of his frame on the final sentence, and that this does not represent a twist ending, but a continuation of the plot with additional detail. 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 like a gimmick than a thoughtful resolution. Sansom has taken the wise approach, and allowed the story to lope ahead without hindrance.

One detail that I can mention without spoiling the plot is the emphasis on setting. I love detailed landscapes in fiction, and here, Sansom has focused on strong visual impressions to make his writing live. Given the story's brevity, there is no room for any detailed exploration of character (and none is needed, in this context), but the place is rendered vividly and with economy of means.

Click to enlarge.

Still and silent, the landscape is the perfect setting for a terrible event. William Sansom is a master of terrible events; in a "Wedding," he also becomes a master of the crowning detail.

Give Up, Give In, Or Get The Hell Away If You Can

Sometimes I wonder if the most divisive and jagged trench in the horror field might be Edgar Allan Poe.

How do writers respond to Poe? M. P. Shiel cries out in glee, and works hard to Poe-verize himself until he limps from the burden. Walter de la Mare grows beyond Poe quickly, to develop his own obsessions and his own voice. Clark Ashton Smith combines Poe with other people (William Beckford, George Sterling, Charles Baudelaire) to reduce Poe's toxicity. Ambrose Bierce and M. R. James follow their own pathways as if Poe had never existed, and all the better for themselves. Baudelaire... well, it's complicated.

But it seems clear to me that certain writers grab other writers by the throat, and shake them until the others give up, give in, or get the hell away if they can. Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Sheridan Le Fanu seem to have been the most ferocious of the shakers in the field, but others have always lurked in the shadows. (John Webster?)

Poe seems to have been the deadliest of all of the shakers. If you managed to get away from him, count yourself lucky.

Really, Who Gives A Damn?

If the years have taught me anything at all, it's that genre is not only useless, but often pernicious: genre can distort perception, and give us false impressions of writers and their work.

Consider this false impression: I used to believe that I loved science fiction, horror, ghost stories, and certain types of fantasy. The truth is, I have never loved these things; instead, I have always loved the work of certain writers categorized, comfortably or kicking, into these illusory straitjackets.

One side-effect of my false belief was the nagging compulsion to "keep up" with various fields. This became a chore, then a burden, then a series of shooting pains, until I realized that only certain writers were able to speak to me; only certain writers were able to strike nerves that I had not known existed.

In contrast, one side-effect of losing this false belief was the liberating discovery that certain writers unconnected with genres were able to give me the same pleasures, the same frissons and shocks, that I had hoped to find within the genres. Labels were no longer useful to me, and the absence of labels was no longer a hindrance.

The result? If people were to ask me, now (and no one ever will, thank goodness, because really, who gives a damn about what I read?) "Do you like science fiction? Horror? Fantasy?" I would have to be honest, and say, No, I often hate them.

But if anyone were foolish enough to ask me about certain writers, I could talk for days on end, without end. No one would be fool enough to try, and my silence in the world beyond the Blind Side Web will remain untroubled.

Details Accumulate

Ash-Tree Press, 2013.

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

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

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

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

'Certainly,' I told him.

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

I told him briefly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Fast!' breathed Thwaite from below.

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

'Can you see any lights?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Glitter of Purple Water

Every time I read Marjorie Bowen's "The Sign-Painter And The Crystal Fishes," I begin with doubts, but end with praise.

The doubts are justified. Bowen writes with an intensely visual style, but her descriptions are often static:

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 are better suited to the script of a stage play than to a narrative meant to involve the reader.

When the characters appear, they, too, are described as if they were actors 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, the few lapses in her style fade into the background, while the 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.

From beginning to end, Bowen maintains a tone of detached omniscience. This makes it impossible to read the story as a particpant, only as a spectator, but the compensations of visual detail make the spectacle worth seeing.

I also think she was right to keep readers off the stage. Allowing us to see into the minds of her characters would have undermined the twistings of the plot.

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.

Dans la confusion de cet étrange bouleversement....

As I have pointed out, C. L. Moore wrote in a pulp style that offered the vividness of primary colours, but without nuance and often without grace. In contrast, Clark Ashton Smith wrote in a style so closely related to writers of French decadence and French Romantic fantasy, that it could be compared without exaggeration to the work of Jean Lorrain, Charles Nodier, or, at its most severe, Marcel Schwob.

Here is a passage from Nodier's "Smarra ou les Démons de la nuit":

...Le monstre jaillit de sa main brûlante comme le palet arrondi du discobole, il tourne dans l'air avec la rapidité de ces feux artificiels qu'on lance sur les navires, étend des ailes bizarrement festonnées, monte, descend, grandit, se rapetisse, et, nain difforme et joyeux dont les mains sont armées d'ongles d'un métal plus fin que l’acier, qui pénètrent la chair sans la déchirer, et boivent le sang à la manière de la pompe insidieuse des sangsues, il s'attache sur mon cœur, se développe, soulève sa tête énorme et rit. En vain mon œil, fixe d'effroi, cherche dans l'espace qu'il peut embrasser un objet qui le rassure; les mille démons de la nuit escortent l'affreux démon de la turquoise: des femmes rabougries au regard ivre; des serpents rouges et violets dont la bouche jette du feu; des lézards qui élèvent au-dessus d'un lac de boue et de sang un visage pareil à celui de l'homme; des têtes nouvellement détachées du tronc par la hache du soldat, mais qui me regardent avec des yeux vivants, et s'enfuient en sautillant sur des pieds de reptiles.

From Jean Lorrain's "L'un d'eux":

Son costume, que j'examinais, révélait maintenant des préciosités voulues: une énorme grenouille de soie verte s'étalait brodée à la place du coeur et, autour de son capuchon de velours glauque, une couronne, que je n'avais pas d'abord remarquée, se tressait, composée de grenouilles et de lézards. Le burnous arabe l'enveloppait comme un suaire, et sa cagoule de drap d'argent évoquait des idées de lèpre et de peste, de maladies maudites comme en connut le Moyen Age. Un damné devait grimacer sous ce masque; il était à la fois oriental, monastique et démoniaque; il sentait le lazaret, le marécage et le cimetière; il était aphrodisiaque aussi dans sa souple et ferme nudité soulignée par le maillot noir. Homme ou femme, moine ou sorcière?

From Marcel Schwob's "La Cité dormante":

Et la somnolence de cette cité dormante mit dans nos membres une profonde lassitude. L'horreur du silence nous enveloppa. Nous qui cherchions dans la vie active l'oubli de nos crimes, nous qui buvions l'eau du Léthé, teinte par les poisons narcotiques et le sang, nous qui poussions de vague en vague sur la mer déferlante une existence toujours nouvelle, nous fûmes assujettis en quelques instants par des liens invincibles.

Or, le silence qui s'emparait de nous rendit les Compagnons de la Mer délirants. Et parmi les peuples aux quatre couleurs qui nous regardaient fixement, immobiles, ils choisirent dans leur fuite effrayée chacun le souvenir de sa patrie lointaine; ceux d'Asie étreignirent les hommes jaunes, et eurent leur couleur safranée de cire impure; et ceux d'Afrique saisirent les hommes noirs, et devinrent sombres comme l'ébène; et ceux du pays situé par delà l'Atlantide embrassèrent les hommes rouges et furent des statues d'acajou; et ceux de la terre d'Europe jetèrent leurs bras autour des hommes blancs et leur visage devint couleur de cire vierge.

And finally, a passage from a story that I read again last night, "The Ice Demon." Notice how Smith falls back on the use of the French term, bouleversement. He had good reason to use it.

Quanga felt that creation itself had gone mad, and had left him at the mercy of demoniacal forces from the godless outer gulfs. Keeping a perilous foothold, weaving and staggering laboriously upward, as on some acclivitous treadmill of glabrous glass, he feared momently that he would slip and fall and slide back forever into Arctic depths unfathomable. And yet, when he dared to pause at last, and turned shudderingly to peer down at the supposed descent, he saw behind him an acclivity similar in all respects to the one he was climbing: a mad, oblique wall of ice, that rose interminably to a second remote sun.

In the confusion of that strange bouleversement, he seemed to lose the last remnant of equilibrium; and the glacier reeled and pitched about him like an overturning world as he strove to recover the sense of direction that had never before deserted him. Everywhere, it appeared, there were small and wan parhelia that mocked him above unending glacial scarps. He resumed his hopeless climb through a topsy-turvy world of illusion: whether north, south, east or west, he could not tell.

The Right Word For The Right Mandible

What can we learn from a genius, if we ourselves are not geniuses?

George Sterling had a gift for adjectives that, in my opinion, matched the brilliance of Shakespeare and Keats, and has made me scornfully aware that too many writers give little thought to precision or to fire.

A writer who saw Sterling's brilliance was Ambrose Bierce. *

One of a poet's most authenticating credentials may be found in his epithets. In them is the supreme ordeal to which he must come and from which is no appeal. The epithets of the versifier, the mere metrician, are either contained in their substantives or add nothing that is worth while to the meaning; those of the true poet are instinct with novel and felicitous significances. They personify, ennoble, exalt, spiritualize, endow with thought and feeling, touch to action like the spear of Ithuriel. The prosaic mind can no more evolve such than ditch-water in a champagne-glass can sparkle and effervesce, or cold iron give off coruscations when hammered. Have the patience to consider a few of Mr. Sterling's epithets, besides those in the lines already quoted:

'Purpled' realm; 'striving' billows; 'wattled' monsters; 'timid' sapphires of the snow; 'lit' wastes; a 'stainèd' twilight of the South; 'tiny' twilight in the jacinth, and 'wintry' orb of the moonstone; 'winy' agate and 'banded' onyx; 'lustrous' rivers; 'glowering' pyres of the burning-ghaut, and so forth.

Up to this point, I agree with Bierce, but then he adds:

Do such words come by taking thought? Do they come ever to the made poet? -- to the 'poet of the day' -- poet by resolution of a 'committee on literary exercises'? Fancy the poor pretender, conscious of his pretense and sternly determined to conceal it, laboring with a brave confusion of legs and a copious excretion of honest sweat to evolve felicities like these!

If Bierce is right, if such an ability depends on genius, and cannot be learned through study or applied through hard work, then what remains for the rest of us to do?

Everything.

Writers need not be geniuses to write, at the very least, well, or, again at the very least, interestingly. We might not show the flair of Sterling (or of Keats, or of Shakespeare), but we can still reject the first word that comes to the keyboard; we can think about what we need to convey; we can hold an image in our minds, turn it around to see all of its curves and planes as if it were a skull, and struggle to find the right word for the right mandible.

None of this effort would turn us into poets, but it would help to turn us into writers worth reading.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

* Ambrose Bierce, 'A Poet And His Poem.' From THE COLLECTED WORKS OF AMBROSE BIERCE, VOLUME 10. The Neale Publishing Company, 1911.

The Death of Halpin Frayser

One dark night in midsummer a man waking from a dreamless sleep in a forest lifted his head from the earth, and staring a few moments into the blackness, said: 'Catharine Larue.' He said nothing more; no reason was known to him why he should have said so much.

Over the decades, I have read "The Death of Halpin Frayser" many times, always with interest, always with nagging doubts. Having read the story again today, I feel that it never quite works.

Believe me, I wish I could say otherwise. I agree with H. E. Bates, who, in THE MODERN SHORT STORY: A CRITICAL SURVEY (1941), praised Ambrose Bierce as one of the founders of modernism in short fiction. As Bates wrote, "Bierce began to shorten the short story; he began to bring to it a sharper, more compressed method: the touch of impressionism."

This radical compression often led to stories with complicated plots being crammed into a few pages. For me, one of the best examples would be "The Moonlit Road," which works because it relies on a series of narratives told in the first person by people who cannot perceive the full scope of what has happened. The story offers bits and pieces of testimony, yet leaves one of the central enigmas unexplained. (Who ran out of the house, that night?) In other hands, this type of story might frustrate, but in the hands of Bierce, it frightens.

In "The Death of Halpin Frayser," the story is told in the third person by an implied author who knows what the characters are thinking and knows what has happened. This makes the delayed resolution of the mystery seem contrived. In "The Moonlit Road," nobody understood what was going on, and this gave the story its power; in contrast, "Halpin Frayser" seems like a failed experiment in withheld information.

Another factor that cripples the story is a narrative method that tells us what to think, instead of prompting us with details that would allow us to form our own opinions. This limitation might be caused by the story's extreme compression, but something more fundamental is at work, here.

In his essay, "Visions of the Night," Bierce recounts a dream that is apparently the basis for "The Death of Halpin Frayser." As in the story, the essay describes a forest that drips with blood, a forest that conceals a terrible secret. In the story, this terrible secret is conveyed only by assurances that it does, in fact, exist:

All this he observed with a terror which seemed not incompatible with the fulfilment of a natural expectation. It seemed to him that it was all in expiation of some crime which, though conscious of his guilt, he could not rightly remember. To the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings the consciousness was an added horror. Vainly he sought, by tracing life backward in memory, to reproduce the moment of his sin; scenes and incidents came crowding tumultuously into his mind, one picture effacing another, or commingling with it in confusion and obscurity, but nowhere could he catch a glimpse of what he sought. The failure augmented his terror; he felt as one who has murdered in the dark, not knowing whom nor why. So frightful was the situation -- the mysterious light burned with so silent and awful a menace; the noxious plants, the trees that by common consent are invested with a melancholy or baleful character, so openly in his sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all about came so audible and startling whispers and the sighs of creatures so obviously not of earth -- that he could endure it no longer, and with a great effort to break some malign spell that bound his faculties to silence and inaction, he shouted with the full strength of his lungs! His voice, broken, it seemed, into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, went babbling and stammering away into the distant reaches of the forest, died into silence, and all was as before.

A pile of adjectives offers nothing tangible that might create a mood, but consider, instead, this image from the original dream:

Mechanically and without hope, I moved under the arms of the giant trees along a narrow trail penetrating the haunted solitudes of the forest. I came at length to a brook that flowed darkly and sluggishly across my path, and saw that it was blood. Turning to the right, I followed it up a considerable distance, and soon came to a small circular opening in the forest, filled with a dim, unreal light, by which I saw in the center of the opening a deep tank of white marble. It was filled with blood, and the stream that I had followed up was its outlet. All around the tank, between it and the enclosing forest -- a space of perhaps ten feet in breadth, paved with immense slabs of marble -- were dead bodies of men -- a score; though I did not count them I knew that the number had some significant and portentous relation to my crime. Possibly they marked the time, in centuries, since I had committed it. I only recognized the fitness of the number, and knew it without counting. The bodies were naked and arranged symmetrically around the central tank, radiating from it like spokes of a wheel. The feet were outward, the heads hanging over the edge of the tank. Each lay upon its back, its throat cut, blood slowly dripping from the wound. I looked on all this unmoved. It was a natural and necessary result of my offense, and did not affect me....

To repeat myself: I would like to call "The Death of Halpin Frayser" a great story in the same rank as "The Moonlit Road," but the limitations of its narrative techniques, and its failure to match a powerful mood that Bierce crafted with similar elements in "Visions of the Night," make it for me a fascinating yet failed experiement.

A Reminder To See And To Hear

There comes a point when the analysis of poetry falls apart. Certain details and techniques can be studied, but further mysteries are beyond solution. Why do poems haunt us? For many reasons, but only a few of the reasons can be taken apart and discussed.

With all of this in mind, some people have argued that the sounds and methods of poetry should never be analyzed, but I disagree. I say, Study whatever you can, as far as you can, but know that study is nothing more than a reminder to see and to hear as you read, a reminder to pay attention with everything you are.

Attention is the first and final thing we can give to certain poems that move beyond analysis, beyond the possibility of paraphrase. Consider this example: I believe I know -- up to a point -- what is going on, here (and the title certainly helps), but beyond that point I can only stare and listen.

THE SONG OF THE MAD PRINCE
by Walter de la Mare.

Who said, 'Peacock Pie'?
The old King to the sparrow:
Who said, 'Crops are ripe'?
Rust to the harrow:
Who said, 'Where sleeps she now?
Where rests she now her head,
Bathed in eve's loveliness'? --
That's what I said.

Who said, 'Ay, mum's the word';
Sexton to willow:
Who said, 'Green dusk for dreams,
Moss for a pillow'?
Who said, 'All Time's delight
Hath she for narrow bed;
Life's troubled bubble broken'? --
That's what I said.


[From PEACOCK PIE, by Walter de la Mare. Constable and Company Ltd. London, 1920 -- Sixth Impression; originally published in 1913.]

And consider these: utterly simple, utterly clear, yet somehow, they move beyond clarity into something more.

IN THE LION'S YELLOW EYES
by Mervyn Peake.

In the lion's yellow eyes
Floats the grief of dynasties
Floats the pain of Emperors
Dying under tragic stars.
In the lion's eyes I see
The yellow lake of prophecy;
While the fickle gods of war
Tell me what I'm needed for,
In the lion's eyes I read
Of what it is I am and need.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

AND I THOUGHT YOU BESIDE ME

 by Mervyn Peake.

And I thought you beside me
How rare and how desperate
And your eyes were wet
And your face as still
As the body of a leveret
On a tranced hill
But my thought belied me
And you were not there
But only the trees that shook,
Only a storm that broke
Through the dark air.


[From COLLECTED POEMS, by Mervyn Peake. FyfieldBooks Carcanet, Great Britain, 2008, ebook 2012.]

I Don't Need Anyone Now, I've Got Teeth

Click for a larger jpeg.

Tove Jansson, MOOMINVALLEY IN NOVEMBER.

If Ingmar Bergman had written a story for children, it would feel very much like this.

In the last of the Moomin books, the Moomins never show up. Instead, six people burdened (yes, burdened) by happy memories of time spent with the Moomins arrive in Moominvalley to find the family absent without explanation, without any hint of where the family might have gone.

Each of the six people carries the weight of a psychological problem to work out in secret; a few of them come to terms with who they are, the rest might -- might -- be on the way to some sort of private redemption. They hate each other; they need each other; over time they begin to understand each other and (perhaps, maybe) to understand themselves.

Then they leave, one by one; the light fades, the valley sinks into the dusk of winter. For the smallest and strangest of the characters, the story ends with a glimpse of hope. Or does it...?

Click for a larger jpeg.

I should write about Toft, the most disturbed and disturbing character I've encountered in fiction for some time, but to do so, I will need to describe the ending of this book. Before I reach that point, I will post a warning about spoilers. Please, if you have not read MOOMINVALLEY IN NOVEMBER, do not continue beyond that warning.

Toft seems to be (seems to be) a child, by implication orphaned, and also by implication, severely mentally ill.

He lives inside his own head:

In the evening, when everyone had gone home and the bay was silent, Toft would tell himself a story of his own. It was all about the Happy Family. He told it until he went to sleep, and the following evening he would go on from where he had left off, or start it all over again from the beginning.

Toft generally began by describing the happy Moominvalley....

By describing this (apparent?) memory in detail, Toft is able to re-experience a (genuine?) memory of happier days that he spent with the Moomin family. Soon the memory fades; the details become unclear.

When he woke up in the dark he knew what he would do. He would... make his way to Moominvalley and walk on to the veranda, open the door and tell them who he was.

When Toft had made up his mind, he went to sleep again and slept all night without dreaming.

Toft arrives in Moominvalley to find the family gone without a trace. When other lost people arrive, driven by similar memories of happy days in the Moomin house, Toft again retreats within himself. He stares into the ornamental glass ball in the garden, which, he believes, has the power to magically reveal the true location of the Moomins:

He looked right into it, it was as deep as the sea and was flooded with a tremendous swell. Toft looked deeper and deeper and waited patiently. At last, deep down inside the ball, he could see a faint point of light. It shone and then disappeared, shone and disappeared at regular intervals, like a lighthouse.

What a long way away they are, Toft thought. He felt the cold creeping up his legs but he stayed where he was staring at the light which came and went, so faint that one could only just see it. He felt as though they had deceived him somehow.

At night, he spends most of his time reading a biology textbook that he mistakes for a storybook. He feels pity for what he assumes is the protagonist:

Toft had never known before that deep down at the bottom of the sea lived Radiolaria and the very last Nummulites. One of the Nummulites wasn't like his relatives... and little by little he was like nothing except himself. He was evidently very tiny and became even tinier when he was frightened.

When he imagines himself as a defender of the last Nummulite, the creature begins to grow within his mind. In the story that he tells himself, the Nummulite develops teeth:

One evening in the yellow light of sunset the Creature leant over the water and saw its own white teeth for the first time. It opened its mouth and yawned, then snapped its mouth shut and gnashed its teeth a bit, and thought: I don't need anyone now, I've got teeth.

It also develops "aggressivity." One of the other characters explains to him what this means:

'It's what one shows when one is angry.'

Like his fictional creature, Toft also becomes angry:

Toft suddenly exclaimed: 'That's what you think! What do you know about what Moominpappa likes?'

They all stopped eating and stared at him....

'Well, what do you know!' said Mymble in astonishment. 'Toft's baring his teeth!'

Toft has no idea what this anger means:

He wanted to be alone to try and work out why he had been so terribly angry at that Sunday dinner. It frightened him to realize that there was a completely different Toft in him, a Toft he didn't know and who might come back and disgrace him in front of all the others.

People disturb him:

'I don't want friends who are kind without really liking me and I don't want anybody who is kind just so as not to be unpleasant. And I don't want anybody who is scared. I want somebody who is never scared and who really likes me. I want a mamma!'

Alienated from his own emotions, Toft projects all of his anger and frustration onto the Nummulite creature. In his mind, it grows:

While the guests were honouring the Moomin family in silence, a faint thumping sound could be heard outside somewhere near the kitchen steps. It sounded as though something was groping its way up the wall... Toft raised his head, the Creature was outside now, a great heavy body rubbing along the wall by the kitchen door.

It has become too big, Toft thought. It's so big that it can't move properly.

In the garden, he confronts the Nummulite (within his imagination?), and tries to reason with it:

'It's no good... We can't hit back. Neither of us will ever learn to hit back. You must believe me.... Make yourself tiny and hide yourself! You'll never get through this!'

For Toft, the only solution to his problems must come from the Moomins. Without them, he is helpless:

Suddenly the crystal ball became overshadowed. A dizzy vortex opened in the heavy blue swell and then closed itself again, the Creature of the Protozoa group had made itself tiny and returned to its proper element. Moominpappa's crystal ball, which gathered everything and took care of everything, had opened up for the bewildered Nummulite.

Snufkin, a songwriter, senses intuitively the story-telling forces at work within the boy's mind, and tries to offer advice:

'You want to be careful not to let things get too big.'

This advice is lost on Toft because, for him, the stories that he tells himself are not imaginary reflections of his own psychological despair, but actual events that take place in the outside world.

SPOILER WARNING

SPOILER WARNING

SPOILER WARNING

His failure to distinguish between events within his mind and events in the real world give the final pages of the book a troubling ambiguity, even, perhaps, a cruelty.

At the end of the book, Toft is (quite horribly) left on his own when the other characters, one by one, leave the Moomin house:

That night the sky was completely clear. The thin ice crunched beneath Toft's paws as he walked through the garden. The valley was full of the silence of the cold and the snow shone on the hill slopes. The crystal ball was empty. It was nothing more than a pretty crystal ball. But the black sky was full of stars, millions of sparkling glittering diamonds, winter stars shimmering with the cold.

But then he catches another glimpse from the garden ornament:

That evening a tiny but steady light was shining in the crystal ball. The family had hung the storm-lantern at the top of the mast and they were on their way home to hibernate for the winter.

Things fall apart for him:

His dream about meeting the family again had become so enormous that it made him feel tired. Every time he thought about Moominmamma he got a headache. She had grown so perfect and gentle and consoling that it was unbearable, she was a big, round smooth balloon without a face. The whole of Moominvalley had somehow become unreal, the house, the garden and the river were nothing but a play of shadows on the screen and Toft no longer knew what was real and what was only his imagination.

He feels compelled to wander towards the sea:

Toft walked on through the forest, stooping under the branches, creeping and crawling, thinking of nothing at all and became as empty as the crystal ball....

Toft looked behind him and the valley was just an insignificant shadow below him. Then he looked at the sea.

The whole sea lay spread out in front of him, grey and streaked with even white waves right out to the horizon. Toft turned his face into the wind and sat down to wait.

Now, at last, he could wait.

The family had the wind with them and they were making straight for the shore. They were coming from some island where Toft had never been and which he couldn't see. Perhaps they felt like staying there, he thought. Perhaps they will make up a story about that island and tell it to themselves before they go to sleep.

Toft sat high up on the mountain for several hours looking at the sea.

Just before the sun went down it threw a shaft of light through the clouds, cold and wintry-yellow, making the whole world look very desolate.

And then Toft saw the storm-lantern Moominpappa had hung up at the top of the mast. It threw a gentle, warm light and burnt steadily. The boat was a very long way away. Toft had plenty of time to go down through the forest and along the beach to the jetty, and be just in time to catch the line and tie up the boat.

This might seem, at first glance, a happy ending, but the question remains: is all of this real? Or is it only taking place in the crystal ball of his imagination?

At the start of the book, Toft was abandoned, isolated, and living only in his mind. At the end of the book, there seems to be a hint that nothing has changed for Toft, that nothing will ever change for Toft.

M. P. Shiel versus L. P. Hartley

A writer can assert with an adjective, or describe with nouns, images, and sensations. One method lectures at the readers; the other invites the readers to participate: to feel, for themselves, the strangeness of a moment.

Here is the first method, in all of its weakness, from "Huegenin's Wife," by M. P. Shiel:

And now, from out the vault, there burst -- above the roaring of the fire, and the whistle of the tempest, and the thousandfold rattle of the earthquake -- a shrill and raucous shriek, which turned my blood to ice; and I saw proceeding from the darkness a creature whose native loathsomeness human language has no vocabulary to describe. For if I say that it was a cheetah -- of very large size -- its eyes a yellow liquid conflagration -- its fat and boneless body swathed in a thick panoply of dark grey feathers, vermilion-tipped -- with a similitude of miniature wings on its back -- with a wide, vast, downward-sweeping tail like the tail of a bird of paradise, -- how by such words can I image forth all the retching nausea, all the bottomless hate and fear, with which I looked?

While a fat and boneless body might seem troubling, what is terrible about feathers? What is loathsome about miniature wings, or the tail of a bird of paradise? No, they don't belong on a cheetah, but neither does a ruby collar, neither does a trilby. Shiel grabs our hands, asserts that these details will provoke retching nausea, but we have only his word for this. I myself have not yet vomited, not even a spoonful.

In contrast, here is a passage from L. P. Hartley's "A Visitor From Down Under." The bizarre details of the bus passenger are not asserted, but dramatized. Things happen on the page, and they happen to us.

Breasting the ascent, he saw a passenger sitting on the right-hand front seat; and the passenger, in spite of his hat turned down, his collar turned up, and the creased white muffler that showed between the two, must have heard him coming; for though the man was looking straight ahead, in his outstretched left hand, wedged between the first and second fingers, he held a coin.

‘Jolly evening, don’t you think?’ asked the conductor, who wanted to say something. The passenger made no reply, but the penny, for such it was, slipped the fraction of an inch lower in the groove between the pale freckled fingers.

‘I said it was a damn wet night,’ the conductor persisted irritably, annoyed by the man’s reserve.

Still no reply.

‘Where you for?’ asked the conductor, in a tone suggesting that wherever it was, it must be a discreditable destination.

‘Carrick Street.’

‘Where?’ the conductor demanded. He had heard all right, but a slight peculiarity in the passenger’s pronunciation made it appear reasonable to him, and possibly humiliating to the passenger, that he should not have heard.

‘Carrick Street.’

‘Then why don’t you say Carrick Street?’ the conductor grumbled as he punched the ticket.

There was a moment’s pause, then:

‘Carrick Street,’ the passenger repeated.

‘Yes, I know, I know, you needn’t go on telling me,’ fumed the conductor, fumbling with the passenger’s penny. He couldn’t get hold of it from above; it had slipped too far, so he passed his hand underneath the other’s and drew the coin from between his fingers.

It was cold, even where it had been held. ‘Know?’ said the stranger suddenly. ‘What do you know?’

The conductor was trying to draw his fare’s attention to the ticket, but could not make him look round.

‘I suppose I know you are a clever chap,’ he remarked. ‘Look here, now. Where do you want this ticket? In your button-hole?’

‘Put it here,’ said the passenger.

‘Where?’ asked the conductor. ‘You aren’t a blooming letter-rack.’

‘Where the penny was,’ replied the passenger. ‘Between my fingers.’

The conductor felt reluctant, he did not know why, to oblige the passenger in this. The rigidity of the hand disconcerted him: it was stiff, he supposed, or perhaps paralysed. And since he had been standing on the top his own hands were none too warm. The ticket doubled up and grew limp under his repeated efforts to push it in. He bent lower, for he was a good-hearted fellow, and using both hands, one above and one below, he slid the ticket into its bony slot.

‘Right you are, Kaiser Bill.’

Perhaps the passenger resented this jocular allusion to his physical infirmity; perhaps he merely wanted to be quiet. All he said was:

‘Don’t speak to me again.’

‘Speak to you!’ shouted the conductor, losing all self-control. ‘Catch me speaking to a stuffed dummy!’

Muttering to himself he withdrew into the bowels of the bus.

A:B:O

"A:B:O," by Walter de la Mare.

It would be hard to find two writers more dissimilar than M. P. Shiel and Walter de la Mare -- Shiel, who in the 1890s wrote some of the most deranged and wild-eyed horror stories of all time, and de la Mare, one of the most subtle and elusive people to make an impact on our field. But that was when de la Mare was older. "A:B:O" is the work of a younger man, and very much a product of the flaming fin-de-siecle mood that set fire to Shiel.

If you know "Xelucha," or "Vaila," or "Tulsah" by Shiel, and consider them crazy tales, you might find yourself at home with "A:B:O," not only for the overheated emotions, the melodramatics, the staccato dialogue that hints vaguely at private histories between the characters, but also for the topic. "A:B:O" is that one-of-a-kind achievement, a Walter de la Mare monster story.

'Dear Friend Pell. I am writing, in a fever. Come at once -- Antiquities! -- the lumber -- a mere scrawl -- Come at once, or I begin without you.'

And so Pelluther comes at once to help his antiquarian pal dig up something nasty in the garden.

When he again set to work upon the chest he prised open the lid at the first effort. The scrap of broken steel rang upon the metal of the chest. A faint and unpleasant odour became perceptible. Dugdale remained in the position the sudden lift of the lid had given his body, his head bent slightly forward, over the open chest. I put one hand upon the side of the chest. My fingers touched a little cake of hard stuff. I looked into the chest. I took a step forward and looked in. Yellow cotton wool lined the leaden sides and was thrust into the interstices of the limbs of the creature which sat within. I will speak without emotion.

He then becomes emotional, indeed. And the monster goes to work.

As vivid as the story can be (and it really does come to life on the page), it's also just a bit ridiculous. With a monster lurking in the house, the narrator goes off on a desperate quest for company, for anyone to share his fear:

'You silly fellow! May a sick man not pace his mansion. I will give you a five pound note to come and sit with me,' said I. 'Be neighbourly, my good fellow. I fear that a fit will overtake me. I am weak -- the heat -- epileptical too. Rats in the walls, I often hear their tumult. Come, sup with me.'

The cad shook his villainous head sagely.

'A five pound note -- two,' said I.

But even a mute beggar on the street can see that something is not quite right with our narrator:

'Come in, come in,' I screamed. 'You shall eat a meal, poor man. How dire is civilization in rags -- Evil fortune! Socialism! Millionaires! I'll be bound. Come in, come in.'

I was weeping with delight.

And so I have to wonder: was Walter de la Mare kidding? Was he writing a parody? (And to be fair, I often wonder the same thing about Shiel.)

Whether you take "A:B:O" as a joke, or as an undeniably vivid monster story, I doubt that you'll regret the time you spend with it, but you might find yourself scratching your head.