Intermission

White Threshold is taking a break. I hope to be back with more news shortly. My other literary blog, Starling City, is still up and running, or at least ambling.

Jan Potocki:The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

When the chest was opened, a skeleton appeared, who came towards me in a menacing way. I drew my sword. The skeleton ripped off its left arm, and, using it as a weapon, launched a furious attack on me. I put up a good fight, but a second skeleton emerged from the chest, tore a rib off the the first skeleton and hit me over the head with it. I grabbed it by the throat but it clasped me in its fleshless arms and tried to throw me to the ground. I managed to get clear of it, but a third skeleton emerged from the trunk to join the other two. Then the other three appeared. Seeing no chance of coming away alive from so unequal a combat, I fell to my knees and begged the princess to spare me.
   The princess ordered the skeletons to return to the chest, then said, 'Romati, never forget as long as you live what you have seen here.'
   As she said this she grasped my arm. I felt it burn to the bone and I fainted.

This story is told by Giulio Romati to the gypsy chief Avadoro in a Spanish inn. Or rather it is being retold by Avadoro in the gypsy camp. to Alphonse van Worden, a young Belgian on his way to take up a commission in the Spanish army. Alphonse's story is part of a manuscript found by a French army officer after the siege of Saragossa in 1809, and supposedly written some decades earlier. The whole nest of stories constitutes the novel called the Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki. As a matter of fact, as Alphonse points out to Avadoro, the story of Giulio Romati, the ghostly princess and her retinue of skeletons comes from a collection of stories by a writer called Happel or Happelius. Saragossa is nothing if not intertextual, an anthology of weird, comic and sensational tales from across Europe. Like its modern British descendant, Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nightmare, it delights in the multiplicity of narrative, the way stories can hide inside other stories. And for Potocki as for Irwin dreams are stories too, the two used almost interchangeably to challenge our sense of reality.

Alphonse's journey to his regiment takes him across dangerous country. A bandit chief called Zoro has been terrorizing the area and is still at large, though his two brothers have been hanged and are now dangling grotesquely from a gibbet in a remote valley in the mountains. Alphonse's servants disappear, and he is forced to put up for the night at an abandoned inn. Lying in the dark he hears a clock strike midnight, the prelude to the first of his adventures. He is taken by a black maid to meet two beautiful Moorish women who are apparently staying at the inn in a luxurious room. They entertain him lavishly and tell him (of course) their story. They are Emina and Zubeida, daughters of the Great Sheikh of the Gomelez, who ruled this area in the days of the Moorish hegemony in Spain. Furthermore, there are related to Alphonse himself, cousins on his mother's side. Leaving aside the ties of kinship, he is infatuated with them, and promises on his honour as an officer never to reveal the details of their encounter. They part, he falls asleep - and wakes underneath the gibbet with the two brothers of Zoro dangling above him.

Are Emina and Zubeida what they seem, or are they demons, or the ghosts of the two hanged bandits? Alphonse meets a possessed man who has had a similar encounter; the mysterious women turn up again, and their flirtation becomes more serious. Encounters dissolve into dreams, and dreams keep leading him to the gibbet with its two corpses. Alphonse meets the gypsies, only to find that Avadoro's daughters bear an uncanny resemblance to Emina and Zubeida. Everyone has a story to tell and every story seems to have another one inside it.

Saragossa may sound like a work of postmodern metafiction, but it was written in the early nineteenth century. Potocki was a wealthy Polish aristocrat, a pioneer of Egyptology and ethnology, who established an independent press and reading room as well as flying over Warsaw in a hot-air balloon, and is said to have committed suicide with a silver bullet he forged himself out of his sugar bowl. The book is a compendium of Gothic themes, a guided tour of the state of supernatural fiction in the Romantic Age (gaining much of its effectiveness from the dry, understated style in which it relates extraordinary events), but it's also a document of the European Enlightenment, shrewdly interrogating the dreamy values of an old superstitious Europe to see what they amount to in the morning light. It's no coincidence that the basic story is set in Spain, with its ancient ideals of chivalry and honour. Spain is on the edge of Europe, and, as the story of the Great Sheikh of the Gomelez reminds us, has a complex religious and cultural heritage. The encounters and stories constantly pit Christian Europe against its Others, gypsies, Muslims and Jews (Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, is an important character). Bizarre as the stories are, they often begin unsensationally with an account of the narrator's upbringing; Potocki, in a thoroughly Enlightened way, is exploring the influence of education on an individual's life and character. At the centre of this exploration is Alphonse himself, whose father, an obsessive duellist, has brought him up to believe that honour and courage are the most important manly values. Saragossa is Alphonse's bildungsroman, his madly elaborate coming-of-age story, at the end of which he will realize that honour is not an infallible guide to behaviour and that, in a world where nothing is what it seems, reason is of more use.

I have now covered ten titles in White Threshold, starting with the historical epic The Man on a Donkey, and concluding with another equally grand epic, the first pre-twentieth-century, non-English-language title I have covered. I'm taking a break now, after which I hope to have some news about the future of the blog.

Muriel Spark: Robinson

In my posting on Riddley Walker, I mentioned my love of the kind of books that have maps at the front. Take a look at this one - not just a map but an allegorical map. It's obvious that the island represents a man, and both, like the novel, are called Robinson, a literary allusion that couldn't be more obvious. In 1958, it was unusual to flout the conventions of realism like this - Thomas Pynchon and John Barth were being greatly daring when they did something similar some years later, in V (1963) and Giles Goat-Boy (1966). Muriel Spark, a poet turned novelist, was in the process of working out for herself the genre we sometimes call, in a term invented by the critic Robert Scholes, fabulation. As practised by her, we might define this as about two parts allegory to three parts comedy, the comedy somehow both exuberant and deadpan. The map says it all, with its Treasure-Island fantasy ('Secret Tunnels'), precisely worked-out geography described in slightly poetic language ('Blue & Green Lake', 'Paths to Snow-White Beach'), and hilarious allegorical features ('The West Leg', 'The North Knee').

Three passengers survive from the plane that crashed on Robinson's eponymous island: January Marlow, a youngish widow and the novel's narrator, Tom Wells, an unpleasant salesman and charlatan specializing in lucky charms, and Jimmie Waterford, a Dutchman despite his name, who turns out to be a relative of Robinson's. There is one other character, the boy Miguel who is the son of one of the pomegranate planters who worked on the island before Robinson purchased it, and now cared for by Robinson. At first life is idyllic. There is ample food and nothing much to do until the pomegranate boat arrives on its scheduled visit in August, apart from milking the goat, listening to Robinson's Rossini records, and discussing relationships and theology. Robinson and January are both Catholics, the former more or less lapsed, the latter, like Spark herself, a recent convert. Robinson has retreated to the island because of his disillusionment with aspects of his religion, and the moral implications of retreat from what one finds unacceptable form the novel's theme. 'No man is an island,' Jimmie reminds him, but Robinson is doing his best to become one. Like January, whose name he initially mistakes for the month and place of her birth, he is a category error in human form.

Two-thirds of the way through this short book, Robinson disappears, and the plot shifts abruptly into a not very mysterious adventure mystery. It is always more of a romp, if any novel so intellectually sophisticated and elegantly written (Spark, at her best, is one of the great prose stylists) can be described in such terms. As well as the secret passages, there is blood, a volcano, and a lot of tension and intrigue between the one woman and two men, each of whom might be responsible for Robinson's death. To complicate matters, January is attracted to the morally ambiguous Jimmie - whose broken English also contributes to the comic tone:

   I dressed quickly and went in search of Jimmie. He was drinking brandy in Robinson's study. When he saw me he said:
   'Alas, I am abased to the servile floor.'
   I shivered, for in my haste I had not dried myself properly. I said, 'I'd like a drink.'
   He poured some brandy for me. 'I lose my nerves.'

Robinson was published four years later than that other desert-island allegory Lord of the Flies. One could read something into that, perhaps: an island suddenly shorn of its global empire returning to and revising the island fantasies that had sustained the spirit of imperial adventure from the start (The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island). Another island novel, Joseph Conrad's Victory (1915), in which Axel Heyst's attempt to shut himself off from the wickedness of the world is rudely interrupted by the arrival of three strangers, must surely have been an influence.

Muriel Spark is the most established writer I have covered in White Threshold. By the end of her career she was Dame Muriel, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which became an Oscar-winning film, rich and internationally famous. When she wrote Robinson, her second novel, she was none of these things. And I believe it's valid to stake a claim for cult status that applies to only part of a writer's work. Spark's five early novels, from The Comforters (1957) to The Bachelors (1960), together with the stories collected in The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories (1958) began an extraordinary outpouring of dark, funny, risk-taking fiction. Once this surge had reached its climax with the success of Brodie (1961) and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), she never again returned to the same level of sustained creativity, though there are isolated successes like A Far Cry from Kensington (1988). The pre-Brodie novels have received comparatively little attention, and Robinson may well be the least known of them all. Hardly surprising in some ways: its nuanced metaphysical debate, adventure-story trappings, and high comedy played with a straight face are, even by Spark's standards, distinctly unusual.

Nine titles done now, and for the tenth I have reserved something special. My first pre-twentieth-century text is also the first not to have been written in English: a pan-European metafictional epic.

Jonathan Carroll: Bones of the Moon

Like most writers, I've woken up many times in the grip of a dream that seems like perfect material for a novel or a poem. Maybe you get as far as jotting it down before going back to sleep. When you wake up again, there's nothing there that makes sense. Dreams are fascinating to live through, but nonsense in daylight. Or, worse, they make too much sense - it's embarrassingly obvious what waking thoughts and experiences got translated into them. Either way they don't generally make good literature. And yet the urge to use them remains. Dreams are narratives, after all, and their very strangeness gives them the element of surprise we value in fiction. For writers who are fascinated by their own art (and what writer isn't?) they make a great metaphor for writing itself. They are used as a conventional framing device in,for example, Piers Plowman, The Divine Comedy, Alice. When we read them in this form, we're well aware of the conventions; the dream is not a real dream, and only retains those dreamlike characteristics that fit the writer's purpose.

In The Arabian Nightmare, Robert Irwin concentrates on two characteristics of dreams, the difficulty the sleeper sometimes has in telling sleep from waking, and the nesting of dreams within dreams. There is also a dreamlike strangeness due to the magical element that appears from time to time - but because of the blurring of sleep and waking, we never know if it's real or dream magic. Irwin's dreams are conventional - we are well aware that they are just another mode of storytelling. But there is one novel I know where the dreams are both an effective part of the narrative, and genuinely dreamlike.

Cullen James is a happily married woman living in New York with her husband and baby daughter. But there are a few shadows in her life. In the apartment downstairs, as we learn in the opening sentence of Bones of the Moon, a boy has gone crazy and killed his mother and sister with an axe. Before her marriage, Cullen herself had a series of unhappy relationships, culminating in an abortion about which she still has feelings of guilt. A charismatic but frightening film director is making insistent passes at her. And Cullen is suffering from her own version of the Arabian Nightmare, a series of intensely vivid dreams which connect together to form a continuous narrative:

How strange it was to eat glass and light. All of the food on the table was laid out beautifully and precisely. The spread would have looked delicious if everything wasn't transparent; splashing the light from the icy chandelier hung high and huge over the crystalline dining-table.
     Pepsi picked up his clear hot-dog wrapped in its clear bun and took a big bite. His walking stick leaned against the chair and was the only patch of colour around. Exposed to the sun for days on our walk here, the sticks had burned or ripened... changed from their original grey-brown to a deep, vivid purple.
     Sizzling Thumb had mine over his lap and kept petting it like a cat. 'Your tapes arrived without chicken.'

The dreams take the form of a quest through a magical land called Rondua. Cullen's companions are a number of talking animals, notably a hat-wearing dog called Mr Tracy, and a small boy, Pepsi, who is her son in the dreamworld (and, as we soon realize, a projection of her guilt about the abortion). They are searching for five magic tokens called the Bones of the Moon. And for all their surreal quality the dreams have a consistent structure: as they travel through the different regions of Rondua and collect the bones, the dream story moves towards its climax, a confrontation with the villainous Jack Chili. Meanwhile, Cullen's waking life is becoming more disturbed. The 'axe-boy', now in prison, has begun a worryingly obsessive correspondence with her. She seems to be developing supernatural powers; and the film director, Weber Gregston, starts having the same dreams.

Bones of the Moon is a brilliantly constructed fantasy thriller, though it teeters on the edge of sentimentality at times. But what really sets it apart is the portrayal of the dreams. Stephen King, an admirer of the book, has written: 'When has any novelist last caught so perfectly the weird but matter-of-fact experience of dreaming?' Never,as far as I know. These are the most dreamlike dreams I have ever seen in fiction, as absurd as they are compelling.

It's a nice piece of synchronicity that the author shares his surname with the author of the Alice books (though Lewis Carroll,of course,is a pen-name, while Jonathan is a Carroll by birth). He has written some fifteen novels, and all of those I've read show the same dazzling originality and imagination that characterize Bones of the Moon. Neil Gaiman, as well as King, is a fan. Carroll's first two novels, by the way, are published in the Fantasy Masterworks series, which I've mentioned before: I intend to blog about one of them at a later date.

Next time I'll be writing about an early, lesser-known novel by a major British post-war novelist.

Patrick Hamilton: Hangover Square

Depersonalization is a psychological symptom in which the sufferer's sense of self is affected. The world suddenly feels remote and unreal. According to Wikipedia, it is the third most common psychological symptom, after anxiety and feelings of depression; it can be an indication of many underlying conditions, or induced by drugs, sleeplessness, shock, or even voluntarily, for example by meditation. If involuntary, it can be an unpleasant, alarming experience: I have suffered from it myself. So, undoubtedly, had Patrick Hamilton, who in his novel Hangover Square, gives a series of brilliant descriptions of it:

Like a camera. but instead of an exposure having been made the opposite had happened - an inclosure - a shutting down, a locking in. A moment before his head, his brain, were out in the world, seeing, hearing, sensing objects directly; now they were enclosed behind glass (like Crown jewels, like Victorian wax fruit), behind a film - the film of the camera, perhaps, to continue the photographic analogy - a film behind which all things and people moved eerily, without colour, vivacity or meaning, grimly, puppet-like, without motive or conscious volition of their own...

George Harvey Bone is a big, clumsy, unprepossessing man, living on a small inheritance in Earl's Court. His life revolves around two obsessions, the unpleasant Netta, whom he loves and despises at the same time, and the drink which is his only consolation for her rejection of him, as well as the main interest the two have in common. Netta is at the centre of a small group of hard-drinking, idle friends who exploit Bone for his comparative prosperity while mocking him to his face. It is just after the Munich agreement; Netta and the friends are supporters of Chamberlain, admirers of Hitler and Mussolini, another reason Bone has for hating them. But they continue their round of the London pubs, with a couple of trips to Brighton thrown in, endlessly engaged in the kind of mean-minded drunken smalltalk which is Hamilton's great contribution to fictional dialogue. From time to time Netta has a fling with someone, never with Bone. And from time to time also, he has what he calls one of his dead moods, his attacks of depersonalization. At such moments, he feels an overwhelming compulsion to kill Netta, a certainty that he will in fact eventually kill her. Then the mood passes and he cannot remember anything about it.

Hangover Square is the darkest of Hamilton's novels. Unlike his other masterpieces Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and The Slaves of Solitude, both of which I hope to blog about in the future, it has very little humour. But, for me, it's his greatest achievement, an unblinking examination of the alcoholic bohemian lifestyle he knew so well, and which eventually killed him. One reason for that is the use of depersonalization: has any other writer described this symptom so well? And yet I strongly suspect it's a common experience of writers, of creative people generally. To write really effectively, you have to be able to drain the emotion from a scene, to look at it as if you weren't really feeling it. That way it becomes strange and new. The term used in literary criticism is defamiliarization - but that's only the literary manifestation of depersonalization. Hamilton gives us a defamiliarized Earl's Court through the eyes of a depersonalized George Harvey Bone. He takes the emotion out so that it will be all the more effective when it rushes back in again:

It almost knocked him down. It made him reel. It was as though he had been hit by something. And yet he knew what it was. It was only his head, cracking back. And with the crack everything came flooding, rushing, roaring back - noise, colour, light, the fury of the real, everyday world.

Hamilton was a successful writer in his lifetime; his plays Gaslight and Rope were both made into films, and made him a wealthy man. But after his death, in 1962 at the age of 58, his reputation went into eclipse. Since then there have been sporadic attempts to revive it, and the current one seems, finally, to have taken off. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky was dramatized on BBC Television a few years ago, and his major works are all in print, including the Gorse trilogy, which I haven't read, and which is less highly regarded than the other novels I've mentioned. I hope he is now back for good where he belongs, among the major British novelists of his era.

Next time, a surreal story about dreaming by a unique US fantasy novelist.

Jerome Charyn: War Cries Over Avenue C

Sometimes I think I started this blog for Jerome Charyn. Or at any rate that he is the author who most perfectly sums up what the blog is about. I still remember the first book of his I came across - it was in one of those bargain second-hand boxes, three for 50p. I had found two I wanted and was looking for a third, and there was Marilyn the Wild. I picked it because it was short, in good condition, and was published by Bloomsbury, who had just published my novel WHOM. I loved it. My editor at Bloomsbury was a fan, too - every time he moved to a new publisher, he signed Charyn up; but, he added, he just doesn't sell.

Marilyn the Wild is part of a series Charyn has written about a New York Jewish cop called Isaac Sidel. I'll write about these in a later posting, but for now I'm going to consider one of his stand-alone novels. War Cries Over Avenue C is set in New York's Alphabet City, an area which is introduced to us in a spoof prologue supposedly written by 'Doris Quinn, Your Manhattan Spy':

Cars move slower on Avenue A. You could die whistling and might not meet a Checker cab. You've entered Indian country without even knowing it.

The combination of urban realism and disconcerting playfulness is characteristic. He knows the world he's writing about so well that it's hard tell when he's exaggerating, or just plain making things up. Sarah Fishman, Saigon Sarah from her time as a nurse in Vietnam, when she wore two .45s to defend her Viet Cong patients from their interrogators, now lives in a fortified Talmud school on Avenue C with her childhood sweetheart, Howie Biedersbill, a Henry-James-loving assassin who still has bits of shrapnel in his scalp from his own Vietnam years. They manage to survive in a world of CIA agents, Bolivian drug-runners and KGB men who use Mont Blanc fountain pens as a weapon. Howie's arch-enemy Capablanca holds him upside down out of a window to force him to admit that Gabriel Garcia Marquez (El Nobel) is a greater writer than Henry James. The Vietnam that provides the backstory to this saga of a crazed New York is just as surreal: Howie has lived among the Montagnards of the Central Highlands in a tribe of sorcerers and magicians:

They took their hammocks, their chicken claws, their poison tubs, tobacco, salt pots, arrows, antidotes, jewels and silver pipes, opium balls they'd fashioned from their last Cambodian brick and ate like cotton candy, a mound of plastique that Judith kept in a rag, jungle knives, French cigarettes that the matriarchs liked to smoke when their mouths grew sore from silver pipes, cutlery to prepare food for the devils, children's toys, French panties from Saigon for the teenage girls, a medicine chest of roots, barks and herbs, white cotton leggings that the women sometimes wore, a clutch of high-heeled shoes, the spirit table and the spirit chair.

[Judith, by the way, is a man who uses a woman's name for magical reasons.]

A touch of El Nobel in that passage, perhaps? Such a long sentence is rare in Charyn's work - he usually writes in the tersest of hard-boiled prose. But even in the most thriller-like passages of War Cries, there is still the sense, as there is in the work of that other New York Jew William Tenn, of the magic that automatically occurs when tribes who are totally alien to each other are suddenly thrust into proximity. Tenn's Venusians are no stranger than Charyn's Montagnards.

Charyn spent many years teaching in Paris, and still has a home there. Honoured with the rank of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, he is not the first American writer to be more appreciated in France than his native land. (There is another example on my list of subjects for future blog entries.) The author of thirty novels, he is still writing at 74, and his most recent publication, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, sounds like one of his most daring projects. Other books chronicle his interests in film, table tennis, baseball, the Wild West, and, of course, the history of New York. And, as with William Tenn, Robert Irwin, H.F.M Prescott and so many other authors I intend to cover on White Threshold, hardly anyone I know seems to have heard of him.

Next time, a major British mid-20th-century novelist who seems at long last to be on the verge of achieving the reputation he deserves.

Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no,said Merricat, you'll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

In Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban makes powerful use of children's rhymes to create atmosphere. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, there's only one rhyme, but it re-echoes throughout, epitomizing the novel's darkly naive tone. Merricat is Mary Katherine Blackwood, the eighteen-year-old narrator, and Connie is her beloved elder sister Constance. The Castle is the grand house they live in with their disabled Uncle Julian; because we see them through Merricat's eyes, and she is clearly quite disturbed, we never really see the Castle and its adjacent village as part of modern America - they are always on the verge of becoming a fantasy realm. Six years ago the rest of the Blackwood family were murdered. Constance was accused of the crime but acquitted for lack of evidence. The villagers, whose children taunt Merricat with the rhyme above, still hate and fear both of them. This is the situation when a cousin, Charles, comes to visit, upsetting the balance of this strange household.

The Gothic has been an important strain in American literature since well before its two great nineteenth-century exponents Poe and Hawthorne. But those two writers stand for the two main currents in American Gothic, the Southern and New England varieties. After all, the Gothic depends on a strong sense of the past, and the South and New England are the oldest parts of the United States, the areas where the image of a castle or a grand old house haunted by ancestral ghosts seems least incongruous. Also both have strong religious traditions and the sense of evil that goes with them. And Gothic without a sense of evil is just a kind of literary fancy dress.

Shirley Jackson was born in California, but lived in Vermont. In her six novels you can see her working her way into the New England Gothic tradition, creating more and more convincingly a world that is both magical and contemporary. And she has the sharpest eye for evil of any writer I can think of. For Jackson, it doesn't come as buckets of blood and torture porn and it never comes unmixed; there are no monsters in her work. There is evil in the Castle, but there is also charm, humour and a particularly touching portrayal of sisterly love. And there is evil outside the Castle, too, in the villagers' hatred - understandable in its origin but always ready to go out of control.

Much of the fascination of the book is in Merricat's voice, childlike in spite of her age. Jackson is superb on children, and wrote a couple of books about her own experiences as a mother: one of them is called life Among the Savages, and as this title implies, her theme, for all the love and humour with which she writes, is that they are as prone to evil as the rest of us - indeed, it's more obvious in children because they haven't learned to hide it. The children persecute Merricat with their rhymes and her own vindictiveness towards Charles is inseparable from her childish preoccupation with the comfortable rituals of her life.

Castle is a short novel, almost a novella, and utterly gripping. The major twist in the plot is one that almost every reader will have seen coming long before, but there is another, almost incidental, surprise which is quite devastating. It's the work of a brilliant writer at the height of her powers: sadly,she died soon after completing it, at the age of 49, worn out by psychological problems and abuse of prescription drugs. Her vision cannot have been a comfortable one to live with, and it says a lot for her both as a person and an artist that her work, though always disturbing, is never depressing. (Much of it is extremely funny.) She is better known in the US than the UK - I'd never heard of her till a reader recommended her on one of the Guardian Books blogs. Even there, her reputation seems to rest mostly on one short story, 'The Lottery', and on her novel The Haunting of Hill House, which was made into a successful film. There have been rumours of a forthcoming film of Castle for a long time now, but I haven't heard of a release date yet. I'll return to Jackson in the future, as I will to several of the other authors I cover in this blog.

Next time, a quirky thriller by an imaginative and immensely prolific US novelist who excels across several genres.