Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Disciplined Decadence

What fascinates me in the prose of Robert Murray Gilchrist is a quality that I can also find in Clark Ashton Smith and in Ronald Firbank, but rarely elsewhere: disciplined decadence.

The writing has none of the crazed fireworks and cake frosting that we find in M. P. Shiel, none of the languor that weighs down Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde (but only sometimes in the case of Wilde, who could write with a lean style when he chose to).

It has a lightness, a bounce:

"The striking of a tall clock near the hearth awakened me: I had slept till midnight. The candles had been removed from the table to the piano; those in the girandole had guttered out or been extinguished. A young man sat at the piano on the embroidered stool. His back was towards me; I saw nothing but high, narrow shoulders and a dome-shaped head of dishevelled black-hair plentifully besprinkled with grey. From the road outside came a noise of horses whinnying and plunging. I looked out, and there was a lumbering coach drawn by four stallions which, black in daylight, shone now like burnished steel.

"The would-be musician turned and showed me a long painful face with glistening eyes and a brow ridged upward like a ruined stair. It was a face of intense eagerness: the eagerness of a man experimenting and praying for a result whereon his life depends. Without any prelude he played a dance of ghosts in an old ball-room: ghosts of men and women that moved in lavoltas and sarabands; ghosts that laughed at Susanna in the tapestry; ghosts that loved and hated. When the last chord had sent them crowding to their graves he turned and listened for a footstep. None came. He lifted a leather case from the side of the stool and, unfastening its clasps, took out a necklace which glistened in the candlelight like a fairy shower of rain and snow. 'Twas of table diamonds and margarites, the gems as big as filberts. He spread it across the wires, and after an instant’s reflection began to play. The carcanet rattled and jangled as he went: it was as an advancing host of cymbal-women. When he listened again, great tears oozed from his eyes. He took up the jewel and played a melody vapid at first, but so subtle in its repetitions that none might doubt its meaning: thus and not otherwise would sound a lyke-wake sung in a worn voice after a night of singing. And whilst he played, the door opened silently, and I saw Dinah, there in her nightgown, holding the posts with her hands. She took one swift glance, then disappeared again in the darkness, and came back carrying in her arms a bundle swathed in pure linen and strongly redolent of aromatic herbs. Holding this to her breast, she approached the man. Her shadow fell across the keys, and he lifted his head. From both came a long murmur: his of love and joy and protection, hers of agony. He rose and would have clasped her, but she drew back and placed her burden in his outstretched hands."

-- "Dame Inowslad."

Like Clark Ashton Smith, Gilchrist relies on visual details and descriptions that move:

"By now, at the end of a sloping alley, we had reached the shores of a vast marsh. Some unknown quality in the sparkling water had stained its whole bed a bright yellow. Green leaves, of such a sour brightness as almost poisoned to behold, floated on the surface of the rush-girdled pools. Weeds like tempting veils of mossy velvet grew beneath in vivid contrast with the soil. Alders and willows hung over the margin. From where we stood a half-submerged path of rough stones, threaded by deep swift channels, crossed to the very centre. Marina put her foot upon the first step. ‘I must go first,’ she said. ‘Only once before have I gone this way, yet I know its pitfalls better than any living creature.’

"Before I could hinder her she was leaping from stone to stone like a hunted animal. I followed hastily, seeking, but vainly, to lessen the space between us. She was gasping for breath, and her heart-beats sounded like the ticking of a clock. When we reached a great pool, itself almost a lake, that was covered with lavender scum, the path turned abruptly to the right, where stood an isolated grove of wasted elms. As Marina beheld this, her pace slackened, and she paused in momentary indecision; but, at my first word of pleading that she should go no further, she went on, dragging her silken mud-bespattered skirts. We climbed the slippery shores of the island (for island it was, being raised much above the level of the marsh), and Marina led the way over lush grass to an open glade. A great marble tank lay there, supported on two thick pillars. Decayed boughs rested on the crust of stagnancy within, and divers frogs, bloated and almost blue, rolled off at our approach. To the left stood the columns of a temple, a round, domed building, with a closed door of bronze. Wild vines had grown athwart the portal; rank, clinging herbs had sprung from the overteeming soil; astrological figures were enchiselled on the broad stairs.

"Here Marina stopped."

-- "The Basilisk."

As you can see, there is a terseness here that allows Gilchrist to keep his work in motion. This economy gives his terminal paragraphs a punch: without warning, like doors in a windstorm, they slam shut and leave us out in the cold.

Monday, October 23, 2017

My Favourite Horror Stories -- A Few, At Any Rate

I always hesitate to post a list of my favourite horror stories because I tend to overlook too many. At three o'clock in the morning, I will most likely slap myself on the forehead and think, "How the hell could I have missed that one?" Yet all the same, here it is.

Please note that "favourite" does not necessarily imply "best." "Seaton's Aunt" is a much more important story than "The Three Friends"; "The Spook House" and "A Vine on a House" are minor when compared to "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge," but I have reasons of my own for loving these lesser stories. In a similar way, Robert Aickman's work is vastly more important to the field than anything by Charles G. D. Roberts, and yet something about "The Barn in the Marsh" appeals to me. Quite often, too, I can learn more about technique from a certain kind of story than from ones that other people might consider important.

For the sake of simplicity, I've left out novellas, along with stories about fantasy worlds -- otherwise, I'd end up with a sky-high list of titles by Clark Ashton Smith and C. L. Moore. I've also left out stories that might be considered purely fantasy (like E. T. A. Hoffmann's wonderful "Der goldne Topf", or Ludwig Tieck's disturbing "Der blonde Eckbert"), and stories more dreamlike than eerie, like those by Bruno Schulz, or Marcel Brion's "Les Escales de la haute nuit." As much as I love them, I have to draw the line somewhere.

I've also limited myself to stories in languages that I can read (or could read; I haven't studied German in decades). As much as I love stories by Bruno Schulz, I'm painfully aware that I'm not reading Schulz, but a translation.

The Blind Owl

(The Blind Owl is a difficult book to describe after only one reading, and Sadegh Hedayat's reputation would make such an idea seem foolish, but I've never been noted for wisdom.)

I had long considered J. G. Ballard's Crash the most obsessive book I've read, but The Blind Owl sinks even further down its own spiral. Like a gallery of mirrors in an echo chamber, the story presents the same phrases and fears and tableaux in a loop, yet offers each repetition as if it were an unexpected, unprecedented encounter. By referring back endlessly to the same places, actions, and hand gestures, it conveys the sense of one person stuck in his own head without escape. And this person is very much alone: everyone else in the story could almost be, and might very well be, a reflection or projection of his own diseased mind.

Unlike Crash, a relentlessly physical book, The Blind Owl prefers the metaphysical, with long passages of introspection detached from the wind or the rain or the sunlight:

"Idle thoughts! Perhaps. Yet they torment me more savagely than any reality could do. Do not the rest of mankind who look like me, who appear to have the same needs and the same passions as I, exist only in order to cheat me? Are they not a mere handful of shadows which have come into existence only that they may mock and cheat me? Is not everything that I feel, see and think something entirely imaginary, something utterly different from reality?"

Every now and then, the book rises from the fog of generalities to point at specific details, and I latched onto these moments with gratitude:

"Lying in this damp, sweaty bed, as my eyelids grew heavy and I longed to surrender myself to nonbeing and everlasting night, I felt that my lost memories and forgotten fears were all coming to life again: fear lest the feathers in my pillow should turn into dagger blades or the buttons on my coat expand to the size of millstones; fear lest the bread-crumbs that fell to the floor should shatter into fragments like pieces of glass; apprehension lest the oil in the lamp should spill during my sleep and set fire to the whole city; anxiety lest the paws of the dog outside the butcher’s shop should ring like horses’ hoofs as they struck the ground; dread lest the old odds-and-ends man sitting behind his wares should burst into laughter and be unable to stop; fear lest the worms in the footbath by the tank in our courtyard should turn into Indian serpents; fear lest my bedclothes should turn into a hinged gravestone above me and the marble teeth should lock, preventing me from ever escaping; panic fear lest I should suddenly lose the faculty of speech and, however much I might try to call out, nobody should ever come to my aid...."

But then the book retreats again to its metaphysical corner:

"What life I had I have allowed to slip away -- I permitted it, I even wanted it, to go -- and after I have gone what do I care what happens? It is all the same to me whether anyone reads the scraps of paper I leave behind or whether they remain unread forever and a day. The only thing that makes me write is the need, the overmastering need, at this moment more urgent than ever it was in the past, to create a channel between my thoughts and my unsubstantial self, my shadow, that sinister shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the light of the oil lamp in the attitude of one studying attentively and devouring each word I write. This shadow surely understands better than I do. It is only to him that I can talk properly. It is he who compels me to talk. Only he is capable of knowing me. He surely understands.... It is my wish, when I have poured the juice -- rather, the bitter wine -- of my life down the parched throat of my shadow, to say to him, 'This is my life'."

For me, a story like this one thrives or dies on the quality of its prose. In its original Persian, The Blind Owl might be a masterpiece, but in D. P. Costello's translation, reading the book feels like tracing a finger through dust. Drifting and twisting in sunbeams, dust can fascinate, but here, the dust lies as heavy as the earth on a coffin.

For those who ponder dusty coffins, this book might gleam like a cemetery star. For me, it reveals the power and the weakness of repetition. For you, who knows? You have only one way to find out.


-- Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl, translated by D. P. Costello.
John Calder, London, 1957.

Monday, October 16, 2017

Podolo....



"Transparent darkness covered the lagoon save for one shadow that stained the horizon black. Podolo...."

In 1981, thanks to a Charles M. Collins anthology, Harvest of Fear, "Podolo" was my introduction to L. P. Hartley.

This introduction had no impact, at first. I read the story in late autumn, wondered if I had missed the point, shrugged, and then moved on. Yet for some reason, "Podolo" nagged at me.

Just after sunset a few days later, as I stepped around the frozen puddles beside a long-abandoned, blackened farm house, and stared at the Gatineau Hills that loomed above me like black thunderheads, I thought about "Podolo" once again, and suddenly, for the first time, I felt the chill of that story. I suddenly realized just how frightening it was.

Reading it again tonight, thanks to the Valancourt ebook of The Travelling Grave, I was fascinated by how much foreshadowing appears in the first four paragraphs. Hartley gives away more than most writers would dare to -- certainly more than I would -- but this only testifies to his confidence. He knows that he has a great story, here, one that will nag at readers for decades to come, and catch them off guard when they poke through their own forsaken landscapes.

[Cover art by Helmut Wenske, 1975.]

Sunday, October 15, 2017

The Past Is A Foreign Country

Many writers understand that horror is not a genre, but a mood, a perspective, a state of mind. L. P. Hartley is one example, and his novel, The Go-Between, shows what this understanding can achieve.

What begins as an understated, everyday story of one man's attempt to recapture his memories becomes, almost imperceptibly, a sinister tale of people with concealed motives, of implications half-glimpsed and completely underestimated. As the plot develops, Hartley brings to this matter-of-fact account those elements that give his Travelling Grave stories their mood of unease: conversations that seem innocent or beside the point at first hearing, ordinary settings that begin to glow with dreamlike textures and shadows, a swelling intensity of awareness about some event looming just out of sight. The result is a story that twists and coils around itself until it reveals unexpected claws.

Like the Count in Walter de la Mare's "The Almond Tree," Leo Colston of The Go-Between immerses himself in childhood memories to the point where he perceives them as a child might, without understanding the adult context behind them, but unlike de la Mare, who uses that perspective to keep his readers in the dark, Hartley relies on the discrepancy between what Leo fails to understand, and what the readers understand all too well, for both dramatic irony and for sudden shocks of revelation. These build up to a climax that remains, for me, one of the more nightmarish I've read in a "down to earth" story, followed by an epilogue that combines bitter irony and moving sorrow in one beautifully dissonant final chord.

A mood, a perspective, a state of mind: Hartley knows the region, he knows where the swamps and pitfalls lie, he knows how to lead us quietly to the edge -- and how to push us over.

Sunday, October 8, 2017

Packing Kernels

I've never been paid enough to do his editing for him....

In his books that I've read, he buried every passage that seemed evocative or funny within a crate of styrofoam packing kernels, and had I been given post office wages to sort through all of that squeaking and sliding, I might have considered the chore worthwhile. Selection is half the task of writing, and I leave that job to the writers.

-- My comments, elsewhere, on William S. Burroughs.

J. G. Ballard praised his work, and I respect Ballard's opinion. But as much as I love to read Ballard, I've never been able to work up anything more than a partial interest in Burroughs.

Friday, October 6, 2017

Ordet



Ordet. What to make of this film?

Despite what I had read before I saw it, I never found Ordet slow -- certainly not when compared with late Tarkovsky, or even with Dreyer's earlier film, Day of Wrath.

Nor did I find the film especially "strange" in its technique. Theatrical, yes; much of it seemed like a filmed stage play, but not to the detriment of the story.

Instead, I found the film easily watchable, compelling, often funny. As the story went on, I began to care about the people, and by the midpoint, I found myself concerned for them.

But that ending, as beautifully directed as it was, felt unreal to me. While I had been moved earlier in the film, I suddenly found myself detached. While I had been drawn in before, I suddenly felt myself pushed away.

By any standards I can apply, from the experience of my own life to the methods used by other dramas, the final moments of Ordet are a lie, a deliberate lie, and a lie with cruel implications.

I can accept a film in which a sympathetic person dooms herself with a confession of witchcraft, because people in totalitarian societies often have internalized the accusations made against them. I can also accept a film that wants me to believe, while the story moves along, in vampires, because I have neither hope nor emotional investment in the reality of vampires.

But having watched my father die, having lost people I love, having known exactly how it feels to confront the reality and finality of death despite all of my hopes, I have to reject the final sequence of Ordet.

Or should I say, perhaps, that it rejected me?

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Alchemy In Reverse



Garry Kilworth loves nouns and names. He can show you fifteen terms for wind, various words for ships and boats, the songlike titles for the peals of church-bells, and yet, like the Spanish in his poem, "Cerro Gordo," he remains at heart a plain speaker:

"They call it like it is.
Not for them those fancy names:
Home-of-the-Gods or
Mountain-of-Greatness.
A fat hill is called Fat Hill."


He also loves the world. Animals and peoples, deserts and seas, the bustling smells of towns, the sweetness and acidities of foods, the cometary gleams of the Oort Cloud: these are all, for him, variations of home, and he writes as if he belonged in all such places and with all such people.

His memories call for attention, as in "Aden, 1953":

"Steamer Point with its liners
like sleek racehorses, waiting for the off,
and Khormaksar's black volcanic sands
with its dromedaries, simply waiting."

Or in "Singapore," during its days of rainforests and kampongs on stilts:

"I passed girls with oranges on their breath.
Girls in cheongsams with twilight eyes.
Girls with midnight hair and morning smiles.
Girls who looked back
at a young man."

Yet he also knows that places and people change with time, often in ways that defy understanding. He accepts all of this with clear eyes and wry humour, as in "Bathsheba":

"If you were caught bathing,
seen from a rooftop
in this century, in this decade,
soaping your breasts
in the moonlight
(though innocent of eyes)
there would be dozens, nay
thousands of Davids --
and Johns and Toms and Seans --
you'd be on YouTube
before the morning sun
dried your dripping towel...."

Objects and materials fascinate him, and so do living forms. He can show you the difference between a bolt-action 0.303 Lee-Enfield No. 4 Mk 2 rifle, and an AK47. He sees the "feral" beauty in Suffolk flint, the "willow-sprung" energy of hares, the "bladed shape" of a windhover that "shaves the sky." He can stand in the middle of the Southwold Sailor's Reading Room, "scarred and shabby... one part stillness, two parts time," and not only pick up the details around him, but perceive beyond them to a way of life:

"Days of fire and freezing rain,
nights when winds drove sharp and deep.
They brawled with squalls and screaming gales,
battled with unyielding seas,
drowned."

What he offers, then, is a quiet, accepting book from a man at war neither with himself nor with life; a gentle book of observations and memories from someone lost in the world yet happy to be lost:

"Do not look for me:
I do not want to be found."