Leaves on the Life-Tree

The Seduction of Solitude, Kim Dallesandro (Incunabula Media 2022)

I bought this book because I liked the title, the cover and the author’s name. But would I like the stories inside? I’m glad to say that I did. I liked them a lot. They were like leaves on the life-tree, fluttering and flickering, elegantly shaped and intricately veined. D.M. Mitchell says this on the back cover:

One of the things that I find astonishing about Kim Dallesandro’s writing is its razor-sharp economy. Her short stories have the biblical weight of the classic blues songs put out by Sun Records back in the 50s; little pocket psychodramas that capture not only whole lives but a whole era in microcosm. Comparisons are odious but inevitable, so if I throw a few names onto the table here – Cormac McCarthy, Robert Carver, Shirley Jackson – Kim Dallesandro doesn’t suffer by the comparison.

That’s good apart from the comparison to Cormac McCarthy. I don’t agree with it. McCarthy is a clumsy, pretentious and humorless writer. Dallesandro is precise and elegant and humor flashes through her work like flakes of mica in polished stone. No, she’s more like Charles Bukowski. Except that his prose is boring and flavorless. Dallesandro’s prose has the elegance and subtle flavors of poetry. And sometimes the concision of poetry, the concentration of emotion and experience into small spaces on the page that open big spaces in the reader’s head or heart. Like this line: “Life is a lonely game we try to play with others.”

All of the stories are about people trying to play the lonely game of life. Dallesandro can evoke childhood or old age, write with the voice of teenagers or tots:

I was eleven nine years ago, tall for my age and “quiet in a loud way” as mama put it. Daddy had left about three months before my birthday, so I didn’t get much of anything that year except a long sad story every single night before I was allowed to go to sleep. And we sat here where we find ourselves tonight, in mama’s room playing with makeup and hairspray. She’d rat and tease up my hair into shapes I’d never seen on a head before then spray it with a stream of hairspray that lingered in the room for what seemed like hours. – “Snowballs”

She liked to trace the varicose veins on her legs while she stared out the window in the late afternoon. They were like mazes, or intricate spider webs; she tried to find a beginning point and an end making it a game but never succeeding in finding a clear path to the end and it always surprised her that one more had appeared overnight while she slept – same as those deep lines near her mouth that they call “laugh lines” though she didn’t do much of that anymore. – “The Chair”

Most of the stories are written through the eyes and emotions of women and girls, but she can capture the lives of men and boys too:

Charlie rode the train all night, the wind blowing through the open window, a childhood habit he never let go off, opening the window and letting that wind caress his face as he slept dreaming of fast cars and places far away from here. – “When the Rains Come”

She can also capture the lives of stupid or uneducated people, male and female, young and old. Some of the stories are about those who have long been dismissed as “rednecks” or “white trash”. They drink, they take drugs, they fuck and fight and sometimes commit suicide. But there’s no prurience or superiority in Dallesandro’s descriptions: she has sympathy and sadness for all her characters. They all acquire “the usual scars”, the ones you carry after “life has sliced away at you”, as she puts it in the story “2am”. That story wanders and whispers and builds towards something I always find it very hard to reach in my own stories: a perfect last line. So it’s one of the stories that reminded me of lifting the lid of a music-box and watching and listening as a glittering ballerina pirouettes and a little tune tinkles and twists and ends.

Except that music-boxes can seem twee and that’s something Dallesandro never is. She didn’t remind me of Cormac McCarthy, but she did remind me of Robert Aickman. Their style and themes are completely different, but their stories have depth and mystery. And intelligence. I could feel a powerful mind beneath the words as I began reading The Seduction of Solitude. The stories don’t try to show off, but the elegance and economy of the prose are like the brushstrokes of an expert painter: outward signs of great inner power.

Fernand Khnopff, I lock my door upon myself (1891)

And it’s a painter that the stories also reminded me of, via a happy typo on the front cover. The title there reads The Seduction of Soitude. Which is a happy typo – or maybe not a typo at all – because it brings to mind the French soi, “self”. Soitude could be translated “selfhood”. And the Francophone Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) had a motto: On n’a que soi – “One has only oneself.” His paintings are like Kim Dallesandro’s stories: they’re elegant and precise and convey endless depth and mystery on two-dimensional canvas. Dallesandro’s prose does the same on the two-dimensional page. Or really the one-dimensional page, because language is a line of symbols in the eye or ear.

Or under the fingertips, if you think of Braille. I once learned a little of that, wanting to know how it felt to read with my fingers, not my eyes. It felt strange and intimate, which is why it would feel both right and wrong to read The Seduction of Solitude in Braille. It’s a strange and intimate book, which is why it would feel right to read it in Braille. But it’s about loneliness and our unending desire, and unending failure, to truly connect with others. And reading by eye echoes that: we see the surface and never get beneath. The only depths are in our own minds, as we play the lonely game of life and learn again and again that On n’a que soi – “One has only oneself.”

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Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• The Seduction of Solitude at Lulu

• Incunabula Fiction — more of Kim Dallesandro’s books

• Fernand Khnopff at Wikipedia

• Psyches and Psychoses — the short stories of Guy de Maupassant

• King Cormac — incendarily interrogating the cruddiness of Cormac McCarthy

• The Cruddiness of Cormac (continued)

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Once More (With Gweeling)

D.M. Mitchell of Incunabula Media has very kindly re-published my short-story collection Gweel and Other Alterities. The book always had a good title; now it has an even better cover. But do the stories inside live up to the promise of the title and cover? I hope so and I think so. Why do I think so? Because my dreams are more intelligent and imaginative than I am. After all, they’re woven by my subconscious, which is wiser and wilder and weirder than my waking self.

Some of my stories are also more intelligent and imaginative than I am. They’re the ones woven by my subconscious in a dream-like way. Gweel has some of those dream-stories. I don’t think that many people will understand everything that’s going on “Tutu-3”, for example, but I hope that it still strikes them as a powerful story. I don’t understand everything that’s going on in some of the stories. And nobody at all will understand what lies at the center of nearly every story: language.

We all understand a language or languages. But we don’t understand language. Gweel is obsessed with language and words. But it’s also suspicious of them. That’s part of what’s going on in the title story, for example. And coming to the collection anew, I liked this invented poem that provides the epigraph for “H.M.P. Yivgavurnë”:

For water is the primal drug,
The strongest ’neath the sky.
Then second comes the wasp of speech
That stings both tongue and eye.

A.E. Housman, “Final Fragments” (1941)

What is the verse saying? It’s saying that water created life, then language took one branch of life onto a new plane (and new plain). So did mathematics, which is another obsession in some of the stories. One of the stories, “Ms. Found in a Steel Bottle”, is very traditional and dates back over thirty years. The newest stories – the most dream-like ones – are stranger and, I hope, stronger. I think there’s something for everyone here, but the book as a whole isn’t for anyone. Including me.

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• Incunabula Media — wildness and weirdness in words and more
• Gweel & Other Alterities – Incunabula’s new edition of Gweel

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(click for larger image)

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Sneaky McCready

The Deceiver, Frederick Forsyth (1991)

I assume that Forsyth based the protagonist of this book on John Le Carré’s cunning spy-chief Smiley. But I can’t be sure, because John Le Carré is such a bad and pretentious writer that I’ve never managed to read any of his books. Forsyth is a bad writer too, but he writes what George Orwell called good-bad books – books that you can enjoy despite their flaws and infelicities.

And I did enjoy The Deceiver. But not enough to want to ever re-read it. That’s the true test of a good book for me. Will I want to re-read it in a year or two or three? For The Deceiver, the answer is a definite no. Forsyth is recycling his own plots and ideas, for a start. Not as badly as he did in Avenger (2003), which is a caricature or even a parody of The Day of the Jackal (1971), but not very well either. He still can’t bring characters to life and he’s still revealing more about his psychosexual proclivities than perhaps he realizes. Like Ian Fleming, he enjoys violence and torture; unlike Ian Fleming, he doesn’t write elegantly and doesn’t have much interest in nature.

No, Forsyth is interested in machines and mechanisms. All kinds of mechanisms, including those of power and conspiracy. The four long stories in this book describe how the cunning British spy-chief Sam McCready takes on and outwits the KGB, the IRA, the Libyans and the Cubans. There are twists in the tales, as in Forsyth’s short-story collection No Comebacks (1982), and you learn a lot about spy-craft and the history of the Cold War. You also meet a lot of characters, but they’re puppets for the plots, not people who live and breathe on the page. If you’ve never read Forsyth before, don’t start with this book: go to one (or all) of the three classic and clever thrillers that deservedly made him famous: The Day of the Jackal (1971), The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974).

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Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Twists in the Tale – review of Forsyth’s short-story collection No Comebacks (1982)

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Nasty Lastly

Nasty Endings 1, compiled by Dennis Pepper (Oxford University Press 2001)

I picked up this book for ten pence at a car-boot sale. If it turned out to be no good, well, I hadn’t broken the bank. And I didn’t expect much, because I thought at first that it was a collection of original stings-in-the-tale by Dennis Pepper, a writer I’d never heard of before. He’s probably a bad writer, I thought, but it’s often interesting and instructive to see where writers go wrong.

In fact, Pepper is the compiler, not the composer, as I saw when I looked at the contents page and saw names like Edith Nesbit, T.H. White and Ambrose Bierce. My expectations of the book immediately went up. And yes, there were some good stings-in-the-tale here. Ramsey Campbell provides one of them in the opening story, “Call First”. Or kinda provides one of them, because Campbell’s stories are a bit like blurred photographs. You can see that they could have been good, but they aren’t actually good because he doesn’t write very well. If he did write well, he’d be up there with M.R. James as a giant of the horror genre. James is his most obvious influence, but he’s slyer and suburbaner and less scholarly than James. And I did like “Call First”, the story of a nosy porter at a library who gets more than he bargained for when he spies on an old man.

And I’m sure I’d’ve liked the story even more if I’d been one of the early readers at whom this book was obviously aimed. Back in 2001 it was trying to compete with computer-games, TV and music, to show kids that reading can be exciting too. And I hope it succeeded and maybe even convinced kids that printed words could be more powerful than images and sounds. I also hope that a lot of kids hunted down more by the author who provides the best story in this collection. The author is Saki and the story is “Interlopers”. I can still remember my own first reading. It leads you on very subtly and seductively, then catches you with a horrific final word of dialog. The last story in the collection, Robert Scott’s “The Helpful Undertaker”, also hinges on the final word of dialog. But it’s not subtly gruesome like Saki’s story: it’s gross-out.

But gross-out is good, when it’s done well. Funnily enough, the stories by the names that raised my expectations – Edith Nesbit, T.H. White and Ambrose Bierce – weren’t very good. “The Loony” by Alison Prince and “Cop for a Day” by Henry Slesar, authors I’d never heard of before, were both much better. This isn’t a world-shaking collection, but I’ve bought much more expensive books that I’ve enjoyed much less.

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Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• “The Interlopers” by Saki

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Psyches and Psychoses

One good route to lasting popular success is to say profound things in a simple way. That is what the Bible has always done: even today the Latin Bible is not difficult to read and nor is the Greek New Testament. Until you get to St Paul, that is. He may or may not be saying profound things, but he’s certainly not saying them in a simple way.

That doubt doesn’t apply to the French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850-93): he combined great simplicity with great profundity in a way that’s reminiscent of Mozart. But music doesn’t convey meaning so clearly, and Mozart doesn’t generally have Mauppassant’s melancholy. Both seemed to have a kind of mystic’s acceptance of the world, however: it is what it is, in all its beauty and horror. People do some very unpleasant things in Maupassant’s stories, but he has compassion and understanding for both victims and perpetrators.

The victims don’t have to be human, either: he can write with equal power and compassion about the suffering of horses, dogs and birds. He understands that people do what they do because they are what they are: imperfect beings in particular situations with particular histories and natures. He doesn’t have the shallow and evasive message that society is the real sinner, but sin does take place within a society and is shaped and sometimes caused by that fact. The plump, good-natured prostitute of “Boule de Suif” (“The Dumpling”) (1880), which brought him his first real fame, befriends the bourgeoisie who share her coach as they flee their common enemy during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and is repaid with manipulation, callousness and cruelty.

Those themes occur again and again in Maupassant’s stories, as does the Franco-Prussian war, which shamed, horrified and fascinated him. But he has a gift for humor and absurdity too and a deep insight into both male and female psychology. Canine psychology too: the disturbing “Une vendetta” is about the way a bereaved mother conditions her dead son’s dog to kill his murderer. But canine psychology is in part human psychology, because dogs and men have lived together so long and have a common ancestor. Maupassant is pre-scientific and even pre-Darwinian in his world-view, but his intuition and intelligence revealed these unities and he was a greater psychologist than many who have claimed the title for real.

The simplicity of his prose means that he survives translation well too, but should also be an incentive for you to attempt him in the original French. And if you want more, try Maugham: an Anglophone disciple of Maupassant who may sometimes have matched him in composition and clarity, if not in originality, and whose own prose seems universal, perhaps because English wasn’t really his mother tongue. Maugham is post-Christian like Maupassant but doesn’t write about the supernatural as often, perhaps because, unlike Maupassant, he didn’t start to go mad from syphilis and end his life in a lunatic asylum.

The supernatural stories Maupassant wrote as his madness developed and deepened are among the most disturbing and powerful I’ve ever read, but some of the loneliest too. Madness began to wall him off from the world whose richness and complexity he had portrayed so well, and the stories he wrote under its influence are about individuals struggling against mysterious unhuman forces rather than individuals in interaction. From general psychology his interest shifted to particular psychoses. That’s because he was himself becoming psychotic. Which was his loss and literature’s gain: his final stories add to the already great range and power of his œuvre. Nineteenth-century French literature contains some very great names but Maupassant’s is secure among them.

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Twists in the Tale

No Comebacks: Collected Short Stories, Frederick Forsyth (1972)

My ideal thriller-writer would write like Ian Fleming and plot like Frederick Forsyth. Fleming’s prose is excellent and his plots are good. Forsyth’s plots are excellent and his prose is not-so-good. In fact, I agree with Stephen King, who once said that English didn’t appear to be Forsyth’s mother-tongue.

You can see Forsyth’s big strength and big weakness in this collection of short stories. The plots are clever and the prose is weak. Although he’s not at his best in a short story – he’s a long-distance runner, not a sprinter – there are some good twists-in-the-tale and some good insights into the-way-the-world-works. Particularly the criminal parts of the world.

For example, how do you go about hijacking a truck with 9,000 bottles of brandy on board? Forsyth tells you in interesting and entertaining detail in a story called “There Are Some Days…”. And to do that he also has to tell you about what driving a truck like that involves. In this case, the truck is travelling from Le Havre to Dublin, so you get a glimpse into the life of an Irish driver called Liam Clarke. And then some glimpses into the complicated history and politics of Ireland, north and south. Because the hijacking in Dublin is for the benefit of some racketeers in the north.

At least, it’s supposed to be for their benefit, but things don’t go as planned. That’s not a spoiler, because you’ll know as soon as you see the title of the story. It’s not a very good title, presumably because Forsyth chose it himself. Words aren’t his strength. Nor is characterization. But I enjoyed this collection and I think it will sharpen my appreciation of his novels when I re-read them. Some of the stories are set in Ireland, some in France and England, one on the island of Mauritius. Most of them work well as entertainment, if not as high literature. The most memorable is definitely the title story, “No Comebacks”, which has a particularly kinky twist-in-the-tale. But I think I enjoyed “There Are Some Days…” best. I learned from it and I laughed with it.

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A Goggle at Gogol

Collected Tales, Nikolai Gogol, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Penguin 1999)

Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (1842) is one of the most influential short-stories ever written. But I’d never read it until earlier this year, when I came across it in the collection Chilling Ghost Stories (Flame Tree 2015). I was so impressed with its strangeness, humour and concern-for-the-underdog that I wanted to read more of Gogol’s stories.

And now I have. Or at least, I’ve tried to. This Collected Tales was a disappointment and I didn’t manage to finish all of the stories in it. There were flashes of strangeness and humor in “St John’s Eve” and “Viy”. And it was interesting to read about Gogol’s Ukrainian birth and background in the introduction. But only two other stories came close to matching “The Overcoat”. They complete the list of Gogol’s most famous stories: “The Nose” and “The Diary of a Madman”. I’d heard of them before I ever read a word of Gogol (but I don’t remember hearing about “The Overcoat”). Unlike “The Overcoat”, which starts realistic and turns strange, “The Nose” starts strange and turns stranger. The barber Ivan Yakovlevich, who “like every decent Russian artisan was a terrible drunkard”, finds something unexpected in the loaf he’s cutting for breakfast:

“Where did you cut that nose off, you beast?” she shouted wrathfully. “Crook! Drunkard! I’ll denounce you to police myself! What a bandit! I’ve heard from three men already that you pull noses so hard that they barely stay attached.”

But Ivan Yakovlevich was more dead than alive. He recognized the nose as belonging to none other than the collegiate assessor Kovalev, whom he shaved every Wednesday and Saturday.

Elsewhere in Petersburg, Kovalev himself wakes to find that “instead of a nose he had a perfectly smooth place.” He goes hunting for his missing nose, which Yakovlevich has guiltily thrown into the River Neva. But it doesn’t stay there:

Suddenly [Kovalev] stopped as if rooted outside the doors of one house; before his eyes an extraordinary phenomenon occurred: a carriage stopped at the entrance; the door opened; a gentleman in a uniform jumped out, hunching over, and ran up the stairs. What was Kovalev’s horror as well as amazement when he recognized him as his own nose! […] Two minutes later the nose indeed came out. He was in a gold-embroidered uniform with a big standing collar; he had kidskin trousers on; at his side hung a sword. […] He looked both ways, shouted “Here!” to the driver, got in, and drove off.

Poor Kovalev nearly lost his mind. He did not know what to think of a such a strange incident. How was it possible, indeed, that the nose which just yesterday was on his face, unable to drive or walk – should be in a uniform!

Gogol was surrealist long before surrealism, but there’s social satire and existential angst beneath his dream-like imagery in a way there wasn’t in much of surrealism. And although “The Overcoat” in particular reminded me of Maupassant, whom I assume Gogol strongly influenced, that was only true until the tragicomic death of the protagonist, the down-trodden clerk Akaky Akakievich. He spends his life mocked by his fellow clerks as he copies documents in a dusty office in Petersburg:

It would hardly be possible to find a man who lived so much in his work. It is not enough to say that he served zealously – no, he served with love. There, in that copying, he saw some varied and pleasant world of his own. Delight showed in his face; certain letters were his favourites, and when he came to one of them, he was beside himself: he chuckled and winked and and helped out with his lips, so that it seemed one could read on his face every letter that his pen traced.

Maupassant could have brought Akaky Akakievich to life like that and conveyed the pathos of his life, but he would probably have ended the story with Akaky’s death. Gogol doesn’t and Akaky returns from beyond the grave to right the great wrong he suffered in life.

At least, it was a great wrong for him: the loss of his hard-earned new overcoat, with a “chintz” lining and a collar made from cat-fur, “the best” he and a tailor friend “could find in the shop,” which “from afar could always be mistaken for marten.” Gogol is good at little details like that, even in the stories that I disliked. I’m not alone in disliking them, I was relieved to learn: Vladimir Nabokov said of Gogol that “whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of talent. When, as in the immortal ‘The Overcoat’, he really let himself go and pottered on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.”

Well, I was impressed by “The Overcoat” when I first read it, but is it really that good? I don’t know, because I can’t read it in the original Russian. I assume that even the boring stories here would have read better if Nabokov had translated them, but although I was disappointed by much of this collection, I’m not sorry to have tried it. Only the mediocre are always at their best and Gogol wasn’t a mediocre writer.

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Wannabe Wonder-Weaver

The Best of Robert Westall Volume One, Robert Westall (1993)

Robert Westall wrote one of the best children’s books I’ve ever read: The Machine-Gunners (1975), a vivid and compelling story of children in north-east England during the Second World War. At least, I always thought the book was good when I first read it and every time I re-read it, but I lost my copy more than a decade ago and I haven’t re-read it since.

And maybe it wasn’t as good as I thought back then, because I was disappointed by this collection of his for teenagers. I pounced on it eagerly when I saw it in a secondhand shop, but as I read it I decided that Westall was like Tolkien. His literary ambition outran his literary ability. That’s true of many writers, but it’s more noticeable in some than others. Westall was trying to write strange and soaring stories of the supernatural to tingle the spine and dazzle the inner eye. But he didn’t manage to do it. The opening story, “Rachel and the Angel”, is would-be magical realism about a schoolgirl and the metal sculpture of an angel that comes to life in an old church. The story doesn’t achieve what Westall obviously wanted it to, but there’s some powerful writing in it all the same:

Beyond the vicarage trees the cornfields started, a heartless sea of gold, rising and falling, without hedges or shade, without cottages or gardens, people or animals or even birds. The road crept through it, fenceless, like an unwanted dog, all four miles to Stensfield.

“Heartless sea of gold” is good and that passage proves that, unlike Swinburne, Westall had both an eye for nature and an ability to conjure it. Or in this case, to conjure its absence. I think maybe if I’d read these stories at the same time as I first read The Machine-Gunners, I would have found them as good as Westall wanted them to be.

Still, literary failure can be more instructive sometimes than literary success. It’s easier to understand failure, for one thing. And I’m not sure that any writer can truly succeed with tales of the supernatural, because the supernatural is such an arbitrary thing. If it can intrude into our world at all, why can’t it go further? And faster? Well, because too much supernatural too soon would spoil the story. It has to be kept on a tight authorial leash and only let off at the end. The malicious ghost in the final story here, “The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux”, is obviously inspired by M.R. James. And like the ghosts of M.R. James it has to lurk in shadows and corners before it works its full wickedness.

That’s why I find the stories of Sheridan Le Fanu more powerful nowadays than those of M.R. James. Are Le Fanu’s characters afflicted by real spirits or by real mental illness? Are they being haunted or are they going mad? That ambiguity is more unsettling and more disturbing than the ghosts and monsters of M.R. James, Stephen King and Robert Westall. But I’m glad to have read this collection by Westall and learned more about how difficult it is to write ghost-stories that truly work.

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Gained in Translation

Cuentos de Averoigne: Todos los Cuentos de Averoigne de Clark Ashton Smith, traducción de Enric Navarro (Pickman’s Press 2019)

Evelyn Waugh and Clark Ashton Smith wrote some of the best English prose of the twentieth century. But could either of these writers actually be better in translation than in English? Theoretically, yes, of course they could be. Somewhere in Borges’ Library of Babel there are translations of Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall (1928) that are subtler and funnier than the original, and translations of Smith’s story “The Dark Eidolon” that are stranger and more lapidary than the original.

There are two main ways for such Babelean translations to be better than the original. It could be because they’re better as literature or because the new language is better suited than English for conveying Wauvian satire or Smithean strangeness. But that second way – a better language – is less likely in Waugh’s case, because Waugh set his work almost exclusively among speakers of contemporary English in the real world. His novella Helena (1950), set in the fourth-century Roman empire, is the big exception and also the big failure (though not in Waugh’s own eyes: he regarded it as his best book). Modern English is exactly right for Waugh’s world because Waugh’s world was the modern English-speaking world.

Clark Ashton Smith, on the other hand, set his work almost as exclusively outside the real world, in fantastic worlds of the far future and distant past where English was replaced by exotic languages speaking of exotic things. And so, as I describe in my essay “Wizard with Words”, Smith’s English had to depart from the everyday, using borrowings from Latin, Greek and French to conjure the medieval ambience of magic, mystery and supernatural intervention that is so important in fantasy. And it seems obvious that Smith’s tales of Averoigne, set in the past centuries of an invented French province, might read even better in French if the translator has sufficient literary skill.

And perhaps they do read better in French. My French isn’t good enough to tell. Nor is my Spanish when it comes to Cuentos de Averoigne, the translation under review here. But my Spanish was good enough for me to enjoy the stories thoroughly, to recognize the skill of the translator, and to wonder whether, in fact, perfectly bilingual readers would tend to find the stories better in Spanish. For one thing, Spanish has retained more of the right cultural flavour than English has. One big example: Spanish still naturally makes the distinction between the formal and intimate second persons that English once made with “you” and “thou”. And so you could say that something is gained in translation when Smith’s English is turned into Spanish. For example, this is how Moriamis the Enchantress addresses Brother Ambrose in English when she first meets him in “The Holiness of Azéderac”:

The woman stared at Ambrose, with open amazement and pity. Her brownish-yellow eyes were bright and clear as a mellowed wine.

“Poor little one,” she said. “I fear that your dreadful experiences have served to unsettle you. It was fortunate that I came along when I did, and decided to intervene. I seldom interfere with the Druids and their sacrifices; but I saw you sitting on their altar a little while agone, and was struck by your youth and comeliness.”

And this is how she addresses him at the end of the story, after they have fallen in love:

Ambrose told her of the singular mishap that had attended his journey in time.

Moriamis nodded gravely. “The green philtre was more potent than I had supposed,” she remarked. “It is fortunate, though, that the red philtre was equivalently strong, and could bring you back to me through all those added years. You will have to remain with me now, for I possessed only the two vials. I hope you are not sorry.”

Ambrose proceeded to prove, in a somewhat unmonastic manner, that her hope was fully justified.

It’s “you” all through in English. But not in Spanish. Here’s their first meeting:

La mujer contempló al clérigo sin ocultar su sorpresa y compasión. Los ojos le brillaban como un vino suave y resplandeciente.

–Pobrecito mío –dijo–. Me temo que vuestras recientes y horribles peripecias os han trastornado un poco. Por fortuna me hallaba cerca y fue acertada mi decisión de intervenir. No suelo inmiscuirme en los asuntos de los druidas y sus sacrificios; ahora bien, cuando os vi sentado sobre su altar, me sorprendieron vuestra juventud y candidez. (La Santidad de Azéderac)

Moriamis uses the formal vuestras, os, vuestra. Now here’s their re-union at the end of the story:

Ambrose le narró el singular episodio de su viaje por el tiempo.

Moriamis asintió gravemente.

–La poción verde era más potente de lo que había calculado –comentó–. Por fortuna, el líquido rojo tenía la misma concentración, pero a la inversa, y has podido regresar junto a mí desde esos años de más. Tu única opción es quedarte conmigo, sólo tenía esos dos frascos. Espero que no te importe.

Ambrose le demostró, de modo más bien poco monacal, que no se equivocaba.

As you can see, the formal has become the intimate. For example, the formal vuestra juventud y candidez – “your youth and comeliness” – of their first meeting is replaced by the intimate tu única opción – “thy only choice” – at the later re-union. In French, Moriamis and Ambrose take the same lexical step from formality to intimacy. And so Spanish carries the reader closer to what French-speaking Averoigne would really have been like. Or perhaps you could say that French and Spanish supply something that modern English lacks and that all speakers of modern English are deprived of.

And so Smith’s Tales of Averoigne gain something in translation when they become Contes d’Averoigne, in French, or Cuentos de Averoigne, in Spanish. But sometimes they may gain more in Spanish than in French, because Spanish has retained more of something than French: the ability to compress several ideas into a single word. These are the closing lines of “The End of the Story” in English:

Soon I shall return, to visit again the ruins of the Château des Faussesflammes, and redescend into the vaults below the triangular flagstone. But, in spite of the nearness of Perigon to Faussesflammes, in spite of my esteem for the abbot, my gratitude for his hospitality and my admiration for his incomparable library, I shall not care to revisit my friend Hilaire.

English expresses the first person future with three words: “I shall return” and so on. Spanish expresses the first person future in a single word:

No tardaré en visitar de nuevo las ruinas del castillo de Faussesflammes; volveré a bajar a las criptas bajo la losa triangular. Pero, pese a la proximidad de Perigon, pese a mi estima por el abad Hilaire, mi gratitud por dejarme consultar su inigualable biblioteca, no pensaré en volver a visitarlo.

No tardaré means “I shall not delay”; volveré means “I shall turn”; no pensaré means “I shall not think”. There is no first-person pronoun, because none is needed: the first person is explicitly marked in the verb. From an English- or French-speaker’s point of view, there’s something strange about the conciseness and precision of Spanish, which better suit the strangeness of Smith’s imagination and his desire to lift us out of the everyday and transport us elsewhere – or elsewhither. And there’s a stronger strangeness in Spanish because of its many borrowings from Arabic. Spanish is a language forged on a frontier between east and west, where culture and conflict have shifted and swirled.

All these things – and more – make Spanish a good language to read Clark Ashton Smith in. But perhaps Spanish would be even better suited to Smith’s Tales of Zothique, set in the final days of Earth under a swollen and scorching sun. You understand Zothique better when you’ve experienced for yourself the heat and light of California, where Smith was born and spent the whole of his life. And California – the “hot furnace” – was founded by Spaniards. But if Spanish might be best for the Tales of Zothique, that doesn’t make it any less good for these Tales of Averoigne. I enjoyed Cuentos de Averoigne a lot, and perhaps more so because I don’t read Spanish fluently. I stumble and crawl by comparison with my reading in English.

When you have to concentrate on what you’re reading, the ideas and images bloom in your head with brighter colours and sweeter perfumes – or stronger stenches, as the case may be. You can find both perfumes and stenches in the stories of Clark Ashton Smith, a wizard with words who deserves to be far better known but perhaps is too skilful and subtle a writer to become so. This book proves that his skill and subtlety can survive in translation, and also proves that translation can even overturn the central theme of one of Smith’s greatest stories, “The Last Incantation”. In that story, not set in Averoigne or Zothique, the ancient and mighty wizard Malygris discovers that he can’t re-conjure a lost love and see the world again through the eyes of youth.

But the word-magic of this translation allowed me to read Clark Ashton Smith again with the eyes of youth. When I first read “The Colossus of Ylourgne” in English back in the 1980s, I marvelled at the grandeur and grotesqueness of his imagination:

Gaspard had seen certain of the experiments and evocations of Nathaire, and was all too familiar with the appurtenances of the dark arts. Within certain limits, he was not squeamish; nor was it likely that he would have been terrified overmuch by the shadowy, uncouth shapes of demons who toiled in the pit below him side by side with the blackclad pupils of the sorcerer. But a cold horror clutched his heart when he saw the incredible, enormous thing that occupied the central floor: the colossal human skeleton a hundred feet in length, stretching for more than the extent of the old castle hall; the skeleton whose bony right foot the group of men and devils, to all appearance, were busily clothing with human flesh!

But how could I read that story for the first time again? I couldn’t. At least, I couldn’t in English. But I could in Spanish, and I could marvel again at Smith’s grandeur and grotesqueness:

Como discípulo de Nathaire, Gaspard había visto numerosos rituales y sortilegios, además de estar familiarizado con la nigromancia. Hasta cierto límite, no era escrupuloso ni se echaba a correr porque hubiese visto sombras, figuras de demonios y otras criaturas deambulando por el suelo o surcando el aire de la estancia. Pero un gélido horror le paralizó el corazón cuando reparó en aquella cosa increíble, descomunal, que ocupaba el centro de la planta: un colosal esqueleto humano de más de treinta metros cuyo tamaño superaba el de la planta del viejo vestíbulo. Y hombres y demonios, arremolinados en torno al pie derecho, ¡sin lugar a dudas, lo estaban revistiendo con carne humana!

Clark Ashton Smith is a hidden treasure, an epicure’s delight, and it’s good that Spanish-speaking epicures can now discover more of his greatness in the pages of this book. The translator Enric Navarro and the publisher Pickman’s Press are to be congratulated on this act of homage to a giant – or should that be colossus? – of fantastic literature.

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Conteur Compatissant

Short Stories, Guy de Maupassant, translated by Marjorie Laurie (Everyman’s Library 1934)

Sympathy is an interesting word. It literally means “with-feeling”, that is, sharing someone else’s feelings, while the Latin compassio means “with-suffering”. But both of these words have weaker and wetter meanings in modern English. When I say that Maupassant was a compassionate writer who had sympathy for his characters, you need to read it in the older, stronger senses. He could feel with other human beings, victims and villains, the ordinary and the eccentric, and bring them to life on paper.

But he could do more than that: he had sympathy for, sympathy with, animals too and some of his most moving stories are about dogs, horses and donkeys. One, “Love”, is about a pair of wild birds and the hunters who shoot them. It’s included in this collection, which begins with “Boule de Suif” and ends with “The Horla”. “Boule de Suif”, or “Ball of Lard”, was Maupassant’s early great success. It combines three of his obsessions: prostitution, cruelty, and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. The title is actually the nickname of a plump, amiable prostitute who befriends but is then betrayed by the respectable folk who share a coach with her on a journey through occupied France. A Prussian officer wants to sleep with her, but she refuses. He won’t let the coach go on until she gives in. Her fellow travellers force her to do so, then salve their own consciences by treating her like “a thing useless and unclean” when their journey resumes.

It’s one of the longest stories here and also one of the most powerful, finely observed, closely and compassionately written. And it’s echoed by another story, “Mademoiselle Fifi”, which is also about prostitutes and the German occupation. But this time the title is the nickname of a Prussian officer, a sadistic dandy who treats the French with contempt but gets more than he bargains for when he mistreats a young prostitute called Rachel. That name is Hebrew for “Ewe” and Rachel is in fact Jewish, so the revenge in the story has even more resonance now. She stabs Mademoiselle Fifi to death and then successfully escapes. But the story is less successful than “Boule de Suif”. It’s too obviously a wish-fulfilment fantasy and the victim turns the table too neatly on the villain. And if Rachel’s name is intended to be ironic, it’s a literary touch that undermines Maupassant’s realism.

I think I’d read the story before in French, but it didn’t stay with me strongly. Other stories I’d read in French did stay with me strongly, like “Miss Harriet”, about a repressed English virgin who commits suicide far from home, and “The Devil”, about a peasant woman who’s given a fixed price to oversee the final hours of a dying woman. “Miss Harriet” is tragic, “The Devil” tragi-comic, and both are good examples of Maupassant’s sympathy for women and his ability to write about them convincingly. But “The Devil” is also a good example of his sympathy for peasants. As the Roman writer Terence said: Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. – “I am human and I regard nothing human as alien to me.”

But many people can say that: Maupassant was one of the rare few who could translate his sympathy into powerful art, whether he was writing about an Italian widow avenging her only son in “Vendetta” or a French diplomat learning about the cruel fate of “the only woman I ever loved” in “Shali”. That story is actually expurgated: the French original, in 1884, went further than the English translation did in 1934. And Maupassant should be read in the original. As Gerald Gould says in the introduction: “It has been said by one rather acid French critic that one reason English people think so highly of Maupassant as a writer is because his French is so easy.”

That’s right: he writes with the utmost clarity and simplicity, but when I read him in French I have to concentrate, so the meaning blossoms more slowly and powerfully in my mind. That’s why I find myself unable to re-read some of his stories. They’re not extravagantly violent or cruel, but I find them too powerful and too unpleasant. “The Horla” isn’t one of those stories and although it is one of Maupassant’s best, some of its power comes from what you know about its background. Maupassant was beginning to go mad from syphilis when he wrote it. In “The Horla”, the human being he’s sympathizing with is himself. Not long afterwards, he was confined to an asylum. Then he was dead at the age of forty-two. No other writer has written so much so well in such a short life. Some of his best stories are here, but anyone who can should read him in French. He was a genius who combined simplicity with sympathy in a way that no other writer I’ve ever read has matched.

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