David Lindsay, page 9 of 11

I like the way there’s always one fact you know about an author, even if you know nothing else about them. If you know only one thing about Jane Austen, for instance, it’s that she, the great writer on marriage & marriageability, was herself unmarried. If you know only one thing about Charles Dickens, the great writer on (and righter of) social wrongs, it’s that his father was imprisoned for debt and young Charles had to work in a blacking factory, an experience he loathed & feared for the rest of his life. If you know only one thing about H P Lovecraft, it’s that he was a racist. The main difference with the Lovecraft fact is that, while you can read the entire works of Dickens or Austen and never guess their particular fact, if you read enough Lovecraft, you’re sure to stub your toe against his enough times to grow more than wary. And if you do enjoy his fiction for its unique take on the weird, it always does feel like stubbing your toe — both painful & angry-making.

For anyone who likes to read old fantasy, horror, and weird fiction, it’s a constant hazard. Sometimes it seems that no sooner do you find an author you like, you discover some objectionable opinion they held. (Why is this such a hazard for fantasy, horror & weird fiction enthusiasts? Perhaps because we’re more likely to read the not-so-great writers in our genre’s past.) I remember the sinking feeling I experienced when I first read David Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor (1932) and encountered its passages — from an author who had previously written that “nationalities, and the patriotism that attends nationalities, are inconsistent with true mental freedom and progress” — having one of his characters explain how “Christ was blue-eyed, belonging by descent to the North”. (I also remember the sense of relief I felt when I read Tolkien’s letter to his would-be publishers in pre-WWII Germany who had asked if he had any Jewish blood; he replied that he was sorry he hadn’t, but would be proud to admit it if he had.) There’s a watershed at World War II, before which racism, and (in Britain) Imperialism and classism, were strewn quite freely through the works of so many writers. (Casual racism, of the “it’s the word we always used, we never meant anything by it” type was still the norm amongst my grandparents’ generation.)

But should we bowdlerize Lovecraft? No. Lovecraft’s racism is part of the man we encounter whenever we read his fiction, and as it’s often the most noticeable of his objectionable characteristics, perhaps that’s one reason for keeping it — it alerts us to the fact that these stories are not the products of an entirely healthy mind. The very thing that draws me to reading Lovecraft — his portrayal of a very bleak and inhuman, even anti-human, universe — is centred on his own intently-held fears and beliefs. Lovecraft had a deep terror of life (which I’m not saying was groundless), and particularly of the body, and in a sense it was only because his racism was, at the time, the most socially acceptable part of his profound world-rejection, life-rejection, and body-rejection, that it comes out so explicitly in his fiction.

Lovecraft’s horror of otherness — most crassly expressed in his fear of the foreign faces and cultures he found himself surrounded by in New York — is ultimately the horror of his own body, and the shadow part of his mind. There is in his fiction a mixed loathing for and longing for union with that “other” — as there always must be, the psyche seeking to heal its self-division — and so we get that moment at the end of “The Outsider” where the protagonist sees his own horrific form in a mirror (which is not simply the end of a cheap twist tale, but a depiction of how far a man can go to deny what he knows is most horrific about himself), but also all those fantasies of having one’s mind transplanted into other, alien bodies, which Lovecraft strained to imbue with horror whilst quite plainly longing to experience.

Should we not read Lovecraft, then? My interest in Lovecraft’s fiction is as much with the man who wrote it as the stories he produces, but I don’t at all mean that I admire him through and through. Lovecraft is the picture of a man struggling at the edge of life, caught between the desire to live and the impulse to reject it all. An intelligent, sensitive, self-limited man, he strove all his life to try and solve the very alien equation at the core of his own psychology. He certainly didn’t achieve perfection at any point, but I believe it’s possible to find in his fiction evidence for the very difficult self-healing, or self-unifying (“I am it and it is I”), process we all undergo, and which is all the more explicit in the works of artists and writers who address the darker realms of the mind. Which is also the reason we go to those works, to try and illuminate our own self-healing, self-unification, and the struggle that goes with it. All authors are fallible human beings, and it’s in none of our interests to pretend they aren’t, to make a cult of them, to revere them unreservedly. Far better that they teach us to be always wary of what we read, and work out our own values for ourselves.

As for whether we should admire such authors, quite often it’s not a question of admiration — it’s fascination, that combination of repugnance and attraction, as much as anything, that brings us back to the work of the most powerful artists. It’s seeing ourselves, in however warped, exaggerated, and difficult-to-take a form, that brings us to their work — just like Lovecraft’s ghoul seeing itself in a mirror. Certainly, that’s what brings me back to Lovecraft.

Strange Evil was written in 1955, by the fourteen year old Jane Gaskell, and published in 1957. It belongs to that small class of genuinely unique sports of imaginative fiction from the time before fantasy was a commercial genre. In a sense, it was published in another age. As the publisher’s preface states (after basically apologising for the fact that the book was written by a “prodigy”), the manuscript was submitted in “eight little blue exercise books”, something which wouldn’t even get a cursory glance nowadays. But they published it “not because it is remarkable to have written a novel at all at fourteen, but because we think Strange Evil is, in itself, a strange, arresting and beautiful book.”

The question is, is it still worth reading today? In the preface, the publishers go on to say: “That it has faults and immaturities we know; revision has deliberately been kept to a minimum and has been carried out by the author herself, for we felt that the youthful sparkle of her writing should at all costs be preserved.” One of the things that makes the book still worth reading is its style. And the point about Strange Evil‘s style isn’t its maturity, or lack of it (though I don’t see much of the lack of it myself), but its originality.

As an example:

“Flowers thanked the blue sky with perfume. Perfume was wafted down to her — not only from the great beds on the sunlit terraces, but from those bright assemblages of flowers far away on the mountainside. At the top of the slope trees were massed in shades of jewel-green. White blossoms peered and peeped among them, blurry pearls in the midst of the hard vividity of the rest of the colours of the day. A blue sky rose above them and arched its back as though it, too, were alive and vital. It was certainly sun-soaked. It was blue as though it depended on its living for it.”

“It was certainly sun-soaked” might be immature, but you’d have to have no poetry in your soul not to immediately forgive it for the sentence that follows it, which is just one of the many little sparks of surprise dotted throughout the book. Here’s another:

“A red butterfly perched on her shoulder, and, frightened by the texture of her blouse, darted off again. She followed it until she lost it in its gay philanderage among the flowers.”

Has a butterfly’s flight ever been better described than as a “gay philanderage”? (Taking both words in the 1950s sense, of course!) But the poetry of Gaskell’s style isn’t only reserved for the beauties of her world — though it is far more colourful than most writers’ worlds — as this example from a long and bloody battle at the end shows:

“Once, as she fled and slipped again, it was upon five separate fingers in the pool — they were like five little sticks which clutched at her feet.”

The thing about these examples is they’re so vivid and unique. I’ve read enough fantasy novels by full-fledged adults to know that you don’t find images as arresting as those “five separate fingers” often, however violent things get. One thing you can say about Gaskell’s writing that sets it apart from the “immature” is that it is unclichéd. Most fourteen-year-old writers would simply be rehashing what they’d read before, and in a similar style. It takes a certain maturity to break free of other writers, and Gaskell certainly has that.

The basic plot of the book isn’t so original, as fantasies go, but is so full of weird invention that you either won’t notice it, or won’t care. Judith, our heroine, receives a last minute note telling her that a cousin she has never met is coming to stay. It turns out this cousin, Dorinda, and her fiancé Zameis, aren’t human, but are what could best be called fairies, as Judith realises when their golden antenna become visible in a particularly sunny London restaurant. For some reason, knowing their true nature means Judith can’t be left in our world, but must go with them to theirs, though this is something she seems happy enough to do. They travel to Paris, to jump off the roof of Notre Dames, which happens to be one of the places where our world touches theirs. Judith and her two companions find themselves on a moving silver road, which takes them across the many disparate regions of fairyland.

They are making for a mountain, which Dorinda, Zameis, and other “Internals” live inside. But before they can reach it, they’re kidnapped by “Externals” — a mix of exiled Internals and conscripted satyrs, who grow food for the Internals in exchange for brief returns to the inside of the mountain (which the Externals need to do regularly in order to survive). But it turns out that the Internals have finally denied the Externals any entry to the life-giving interior of the mountain, and the Externals, driven to desperation, are ready for war.

Judith, neither an Internal nor an External, at first finds herself free to move about, but soon comes to the attention of one of the Internal nobles, who thinks she is an agent of Death come to kill him. War breaks out. Judith, finding the decadence and pleasure-loving perversity of the Internals not to her taste, sides with the Externals, and finally confronts the Baby — a monstrous giant god in the shape of a vastly overgrown human baby who represents the selfish, sybaritic nature of the Internals’ religion, “just sheer, puffed-up, spoilt, colossal selfishness”. (This, I suppose, is what China Mieville was referring to when he said Strange Evil had “the most extraordinary baddy in fiction”.)

The book is sprinkled with weird moments that go way beyond the imaginations of most generic fantasists. At one point, heading for the final battle, Judith witnesses the passing of a “colossal black woman”, so big that:

“She stepped over the mountain as though it were flat grass on a plain, and Judith knew her to be one who cared nothing for the little ways of men. Truly there were dreadful things in this world.”

It’s a brief pause that adds nothing to the plot, but does everything to open up the sense of being in another, totally alien world, where potentially vast forces might at any moment come into play. (It may have been inspired by Goya’s “The Colossus“. The back flap of Strange Evil says Gaskell “derives the inspiration for some of her descriptive passages from studying paintings”.)

So, I think Strange Evil is still worth reading, not for the fact it was written by a fourteen-year-old, but because it is the product of a unique imagination. I’d even say there’s an air of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus in the home-grown, one-offness of its fantastic invention, and the authenticity of its intent. This is something that’s still rare today, when it’s so easy to fall into the wheel ruts of genre fiction and follow them through the usual standard plots, standard styles, and standard fantastic images, for the standard reasons.

Jane Gaskell went on to write the Atlan fantasy series, which I haven’t read, but I will certainly be on the look out for.

They’re not typos, they’s scanspellos — errors that come not from someone mistyping something and failing to check it, but from someone scanning something in, running a quick OCR and spellcheck, then thinking that’s enough work on that one and publishing the damn thing. And I’m not talking about people putting stuff up on the web, I’m talking about supposedly professionally produced books available through Amazon. And this plague of scanspellos is set to get a lot worse as ebooks gain in popularity.

It’s not an issue limited to ebooks. The old Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperbacks had their fair share of typos, for instance — enough to make me want to replace them with a higher quality edition if I ever wanted to re-read them, but never so many that it made me give up reading them to start with. I first read A Voyage to Arcturus in its Ballantine edition, and although the typos were mildly annoying, they never got in the way of my understanding — and in fact being bowled over by — the book. It was always obvious they were typos. The trouble with scanspellos (a horrible word for a horrible phenomenon) is, because they involve a careless run through a spellchecker, they’re that much less obvious. The first book that really got my readerly goat as far as scanspellos are concerned was, in fact, another edition of A Voyage to Arcturus, in this case one produced by a university press — Bison Press, who are associated with the University of Nebraska. In a supposedly “commemmorative” edition (that’s one “m” too many, they even managed to introduce an error on the cover), the text was so garbled I actually fired an email off to the publisher (and never got a reply of course). Although it was full of silly little obvious errors, including number 1’s for letter l’s (hardly an important error, but irritating enough to act as a constant distraction from pure reading), some of the words, and therefore the meaning, had actually been changed. At one point, for instance, the text said, “The short stranger turned and comforted the party”. Any reader new to Arcturus would read that and take it at face value, but I, having read the novel a fair few times and knowing that the very essence of the “short stranger”, Krag, is discomfort — he is a supernatural being who has another name in our world, and it is Pain — checked that sentence in another edition and found it was supposed to read “The short stranger turned and confronted the party” — an entirely different meaning.

I’ve recently been reading Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural, a bumper volume of Algernon Blackwood stories. This is from House of Stratus, a publisher who has issued a lot of Blackwood in affordable paperback form. A while ago I bought their edition of his novel, The Human Chord, and it was a well-produced paperback. I thought Tales would be up to the same standard. In fact it was scanspelloed to the hilt. “Her” constantly replaced “for”, “ox” replaced “or”, “axe” replaced “are”, “lie” replaced “he”, among many, many others. Worst of all was its constant replacement of long dashes with hyphens. This might sound like a minor annoyance on a par with number 1’s for letter l’s, but it was actually the thing that most interrupted my reading. There’s a constantly disruptive effect in reading a sentence like:

“The Club-it crossed his tortured mind for a second-was impossible.”

The worst thing was, once I’d been reading the book for a while, I found myself looking at hyphenated words I came across elsewhere, wondering if they were supposed to have a dash or a hyphen between them, and tentatively re-reading them each way before continuing.

Neither of these examples are of ebooks. I recently read Treasure Island on my Kindle, in the free edition offered by Amazon. That actually had very few scanspellos, but had plenty of examples of the other fault that irritates me about ebooks — poor design. I hate books that use html-style paragraphing (a double line-space between paragraphs rather than a single line break and an indent). The free edition of Treasure Island didn’t do that, fortunately, but quite frequently had line breaks within paragraphs, though aside from that — and the poor formatting of chapter headings — it was generally readable. But bad enough to persuade me to pay for a book I want to read in future.

None of this is because of the rise of ebooks, or of print-on-demand technology (the House of Stratus book was POD, the Bison Press wasn’t), but it is an effect of the ease with which old, often out-of-print, books can be brought into production nowadays. On the one hand, I applaud publishers for bringing hard-to-find works back into print once more — particularly the Algernon Blackwood novels and stories. But the very thing that makes it viable for them to do so is that they can put so little effort into it — just scan them, OCR & spellcheck them, and release them to the public without a proper (human) proofread. And the trouble is that once these cheap editions are out there, it makes it so much less likely that a proper publisher — one who will actually check what they publish — will bring out a better edition to replace it, one which will necessarily be more expensive, and so sell less.

In the meantime, I’ve discovered a better way of reading out-of-print books. I download them as PDFs from archive.org. Kindles are generally pretty bad for reading PDFs because they either shrink them too small to read in order to fit on the screen, or you have to constantly pan right and left to read them; but books of a certain age are just the right size to fit on a Kindle screen and remain readable. And they’ve got a good selection of Algernon Blackwoods at archive.org.