Kitabı oku: «Collected Essays», sayfa 12

ONE HUMP OR TWO
Lecture given at the IAFA Conference of the Fantastic

I have come to few conclusions regarding national differences in British and American fantasy. The longer you look at the two animals the vaguer seem the distinctions. If you observe the dromedary or Arabian camel and the Bactrian camel—the only two sorts of camel on the planet—you immediately see the distinction we all know from childhood: the former has one hump, the latter two. But if you look at all other animals in the zoo, you don’t find anything else resembling a camel. Not even their relations, the llamas. The similarities are overwhelmingly greater than the differences.

Here we have these two camels, the US and the UK variety of fantasy. Here you have this panel reduced to counting humps.

Perhaps because of my early reading—my very early reading, when books still contained pictures—I regard fantasy, as distinct from SF, as having a spiritual, or perhaps I mean a religious, or perhaps I mean a metaphysical side. This regard comes from the area whence all memories spring, the personal deeps, compounded of old forgotten stories told and read, alchemic woodcuts, and perhaps a surly reproduction of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s doppelganger drawing, How They Met Themselves, with lovers deep in the forest, transfixed. Perhaps too the interchange of light and shade above one’s cot—who knows?

If forced to it for the purposes of this forum, I’d say that this spiritual aspect is largely absent in American fantasy and at least flickeringly present in the English stuff. Why should this be? Possibly for a simple reason: the English stuff is so much older, has a much more ancient lineage (though I don’t forget that lineage also became, because of our shared language, a shared American lineage two centuries ago; were it otherwise—were you all Greek speakers, say—I’d not be here arguing the toss). Did the 1980s yield in the US anything so powerful—so full of ancient power—as Robert Holdstock’s wonderful Mythago Wood? The past activates fantasy, as the future SF.

I’ve never seen a reference, even in Trillion Year Spree, to the fourteenth-century poem, written in Middle English, entitled ‘St Erkenwald’. The poem is probably by the unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In the seventh century, the saint Erkenwald, as the poem tells, rebuilt St Paul’s cathedral in London on what had been a pagan site. Digging in the foundations, the workers come across an impressive sarcophagus on which are carved arcane sentences.

Wise men with wide foreheads, wondering in that pit Struggled without success to string them into words.

They lever up the lid of the coffin and find there a body nobly clad. The body is as fresh as if it were alive, with red lips and so on. After a prayer, St Erkenwald speaks to the corpse and rouses it, raises it from the dead, or at least from limbo. Unlike Lazarus, who keeps quiet about what happened to him, this revenant is talkative. He was a judge who has remained in limbo for almost eight hundred years. Having been born before Christ, he cannot enter Heaven, for all his good works. He’s a heathen. A point of Christian doctrine is being raised.

As Erkenwald blesses the judge in the name of the Father, his tears fall on the sufferer, who is thereby baptized. With joy, the heathen relates how his soul is released, to fly to Heaven.

With that he stopped speaking and said no more. But suddenly his sweet face sank in and vanished, And all the beauty of his body blackened like mould, As foetid as fungus that flies up in powder!^[1]

We seem to perceive here the precursor of a number of themes, from the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, mentioned in Gibbon,^[2] through to those two nineteenth-century monoliths of corrupt resurrection, Frankenstein and Dracula, passing on the way all the eerie vaults which lie in wait for the heroines of such Gothic works as Mrs Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries Of Udolpho.

One might also mention here ghost stories, a very English genre. Ghosts always appeared dressed—wearing something, armour, archaic costume, a winding sheet. In the poem, Erkenwald’s heathen similarly has the power to preserve his clothes intact. A peculiar power.

All this could hardly be called a tradition, but it does represent a line of thought. Perhaps it’s part and parcel of a consciousness of the buried past which is peculiarly British. In the USA, there was no buried past until yesterday; T. H. O’Sullivan was there to photograph the Battle of Gettysberg. You don’t share Europe’s secrecy. That’s why Hollywood’s in California, USA, not say, Paris, France. We have Stonehenge; you have Scientology. When you began to turn to scientific disciplines to uncover the forgotten story of the nomads who entered by way of the Bering Straits bridge, to fill this continent and its southern counterpart thousands of years ago, you created a new past—a future, as it were, with a sell-by date long expired.

Yet your past lacks a domestic touch, that intimacy with the past as dwelling in the next room behind the wardrobe, which is one essential of many British fantasies. Alan Garner’s work, for example, in Red Shift or The Owl Service, where ancient Celtic remains lie within sight of Jodrell Bank.

There isn’t and can’t be the equivalent of this kind of fantasy in the USA. The house is, of course, a dominant symbol in fiction from last century on, a common symbol all over the Western world. But houses evidently signify different things in the US and the UK.

Consider, for instance, the comparative scarcity of houses in the US, where 64% of the population own their own houses. The figure in England is about the same. With a population only four times larger than the UK and a land area about 3,000 times greater, the US plainly has comparatively fewer houses. Scarcity breeds suspicion. When our houses—our homes (that very English English word)—are haunted, we continue to live in them, quite often cherishing our ghost, giving it pet names. In the US, if we are to believe the evidence of the movies, from the celebrated Usher abode onwards, houses burst apart with evil. They provide no sanctuary. There’s little amity in Amityville, is there? Fantasy after fantasy shows houses going up in flames. Even in realist fantasies such as the movie Fatal Attraction, the home provides no secure place: the enemy worms her way in, supernaturally able to glide through phone, apartment and country house, into that sanctum sanctorum, the bathroom …

Having said all this, I have almost persuaded myself that there is a difference between the fantasy of the two countries. I’ve been talking only of subject matter and approach. Had we discussed style, we would have found more differences. But really it’s a matter of camels and humps again.

And, of course, the two animals have mated. The moment of coupling occurred in the 1960s, with the publication of Tolkien in the States. In England Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings caused little stir. We’re long on genius, short on enthusiasm. It was here in the States that he was taken up on the most extraordinary scale. From then on, there was no respite. From then on, fantasy was to gain over SF. From then on, it was but a giant step forward for womankind to the Age of Le Guin and Earthsea and Anne McCaffrey and her dragons.

Now, fantasy and the elder gods rule supreme, like groundelder over-running a neglected estate.

Tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely.

There’s so much imitation, so much derivation, so much commercialism, who can be bothered to judge? Discernment is lost. At last, all fantasy is the same. The successors of Thomas Covenant roam through lands resembling the lands of the Belgariad.

Et voilà—at last, what we’ve all been longing for! The result of this industrious miscegenation? A monstrosity with three humps! Yours, mine, ours.

1. Trans. Brian Stone, The Owl and the Nightingale, Penguin Books, 1971.

2. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1773, Chapter XXXIII.

KAFKA’S SISTER

‘How cold it is in the exploding world’ Julia and the Bazooka

When Franz Kafka wrote his famous letter to his father, one of his accusations was that his father did not keep the commandments he imposed on his son. Hence, said Kafka, his world had become divided into three parts.

In the first world, he felt himself a slave. The second world was a world of power, remote from him. The third was where everyone else lived happily and free from orders. Kafka’s lifelong guilt feelings arose from his oppressive sense of these divisions, brought about by his father’s transgressions. Kafka, in the words of one of his editors, Erich Heller, had ‘an irresistible tendency to fall apart’, contained only by his writing. Writing was his way of survival.

The parallels with the writer calling herself Anna Kavan are strong. Her quarrel was with a mother who would not keep her own commandments. Like Kafka, Kavan seems as a child always to have felt herself in the wrong; and this feeling, as she reached adult years, also matured, into the prevailing sense that somehow her existence was unjustified, insubstantial. Like Kafka, she suffered in her struggle to come to terms with other people, and with herself.

‘It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone’, complains Kafka in his diary for 1910.

‘What exactly is it that’s wrong with me? What is the thing about me that people can never take?’, asks the narrator in Kavan’s wartime story, ‘Glorious Boys’.

‘And where am I to find a little warmth in this?’, asks the narrator in ‘My Madness’, as she becomes her own tribunal.

Implicitly, these and similar questions are asked in story after story. The ‘I’ character, a mirror image of Kavan, always expresses the same gamut of anxiety. The search is on, for something lost in childhood to be found in adult life. Insidious as a serpent comes the fear of others, the fear of relationships, but, most destructively, the fear of the self with its inadequacies, the first of Kafka’s three dreaded divisions.

‘Once and for all, I’ve declared myself against life and people, on the side of otherness and indifference, isolation, the mineral beauty of the nonhuman world’—so says a character in ‘High in the Mountains’, speaking in the voice of alienation.

‘All we see of the mentally ill’, says Carl Jung, ‘regarding them from the outside, is their tragic destruction, rarely the life of that side of the psyche which is turned away from us.’ Kavan shows us the hidden side, and it has its beauty, as it struggles to make sense of an illogical world. Extracts similar to the ones quoted above can be taken almost at random from Kavan’s writings, showing her alienation, her madness.

Yet, as her friend Raymond Marriott warns us, she was in many ways an ordinary and pleasant creative person, chic, generally fun to be with. The fiction remains at least at arm’s length from the facts of her life. Writers have many reasons for using a persona not entirely congruent with their own natures, for fact is more complex than fiction. What rises from the printed page is part of an elaborate game of hide-and-seek which a writer plays, perhaps unconsciously, not necessarily with the reader but with herself or himself. Kavan is dextrous in the use of symbols, and symbols are easily mistaken for the real thing.

Although she often looked outwards with a shrewd and witty eye—’the church clock is calling the hour again in its dull voice’, as she says in ‘My Madness’, and we have all heard that particular chime—all roads lead back, like the strands of a web, to the spider of her self-obsession.

Yet hers is not a fiction of claustrophobia. The prose is too fine-spun for that. Her longing for abstraction takes refuge in its symbols: Madness, Ice, China—as one should say Trial, Castle, America. Her narcissism flew to another universe, ethereal and ‘on the side of otherness’. Hence Kavan’s great attraction, that she sees beyond the personal to an impersonal infinity. She is not a victim but a creator, not a mad thing but a winged thing.

Her literary evolution is of remarkable interest. Born somewhere at the turn of the century (the imprecision is necessary, for she would never reveal her age), she was then plain Helen Edmonds. That did not satisfy her. A divine discontent was on the move in her.

The chilly sexuality in the novel Let Me Alone, in its very title, perhaps conveys something of what was happening to Helen Edmonds. In that novel, Anna is the protagonist, taken to the East against her wish. Findlay, Anna’s lover, finally holds her in his arms. The night of the country now called Sri Lanka is about them. ‘For the moment, she was open to him.’ Yet they do nothing; not so much as a kiss is exchanged. The isolation is unbridgeable. ‘They were in different worlds.’

That seems to have been a lifelong problem, not merely for the fictional Anna but also for the real one.

After the ineffectual encounter with Findlay, Anna is raped by her husband, Matthew. She suffers atrociously, yet her spirit remains cold; ‘nor did he ever become real to her’.

The sense of unreality, perhaps the heart of symbolism, was a lifelong problem. And here indeed the fictional character—as a vampire is supposed to take over the living—becomes imposed upon the form of the author.

A contemporary reader of Let Me Alone feels a shock when the irreconcilable Matthew and Anna are introduced at an up-country club in Burma as ‘Mr and Mrs Kavan’. The very words seem ill-assorted. But Let Me Alone was first published in 1930, and the author’s name on the title page given as Helen Ferguson.

Helen Ferguson evidently felt that she had defined herself in the character of Anna, who so courts yet fears isolation. Shortly thereafter, her own marriage failing, she encountered the writings of Franz Kafka, and changed her name by deed poll to that of the character she had invented, Anna Kavan. Art inundated nature.

This change of name, so full of masochism and pride, followed a period in a mental hospital, the period brilliantly defined in ‘My Madness’. It represented a transformation, the crossing of a frontier away from the real. Anna Kavan had converted herself, as writers sometimes do, but rarely so deliberately. From now on, the realm of fantasy commanded her, and she it.

The discontinuity of personality is reflected in the discontinuities of Kavan’s prose. The prose is always lucid, without latinate constructions, without long words or literary allusions; the complexity lies in what is omitted. Often the discontinuities are nothing short of terrifying, as for instance in some of the stories in the collection Julia and the Bazooka, made soon after Kavan’s death. That is to say, they may terrify the reader, although to the ‘I’ character they are merely the stuff of life. Living somewhere on an unnamed continent, you may find friends turn into tigers.

Much of the strength of the laconically entitled story, ‘A Visit’, in that same collection, derives from the proffered discontinuity of its opening sentence: ‘One hot night a leopard came into my room and lay down on the bed beside me’. We are at once in the unknown territory of the Douanier Rousseau, where communication between human and animal happens as punctually as the full moon.

‘A Visit’ dispels the notion that Anna Kavan’s writings are merely depressing. Such is not the case; and the luminosity of even the dark pieces gives light enough. In her sudden transitions of mood and feeling we see the kinship with Kafka, and perhaps even something of that concealed humour which was Charles Dickens’s gift to Kafka.

Many people are surprised to learn that when Kafka first read extracts from The Trial to Max Brod and their circle of friends, he could sometimes hardly continue for laughter. Similarly, Chekhov was first played outside his own country for tragedy, not comedy. Kavan’s reputation is at present for gloom, madness and paranoia. Not undeservedly. Yet the whisper of mocking laughter is often to be heard, even in the sybilline ‘Sleep Has His House’.

Kavan in person, too, did not always project her shadowed side. In conversation with her English publisher, Peter Owen—it’s to be doubted if there would be an Anna Kavan without a Peter Owen—I said something of this kind, having enjoyed her friendly company. Owen agreed. It took a while to see through the camouflage of normality; or perhaps, human nature being so diverse, one should rather say that the camouflage of tortured romanticism concealed much that was no more or less than normal. In either event, Anna was of smart, cheerful appearance. She enjoyed male company.

Neither in her appearance nor her behaviour did she reveal her incurable heroin addiction. As Peter Owen admits, it was a while before the fact of that addiction dawned on him.

When I met her, towards the end of her life, I too knew nothing of the heroin. By then, she had been on the habit for some thirty years. Heroin was her accomplice, her truce with reality. I saw only another dedication: to literature, and to that I responded.

Raymond Marriott, another long-term friend of Anna’s, emphasizes her worldly, everyday side, reminding us that she was a good gardener, an excellent painter, and a skilled designer of small houses.

* * *

Anna was friendly and welcoming, in the small house of her own design in Hillgate Street, in the Kensington district of London. I had selected Ice as the best science fiction novel of 1967, less from any firm conviction that it was science fiction, or from a desire to dismay rivals, than to draw attention to a splendid piece of writing which might have been overlooked in the face of more noisy claimants for public attention. We talked in the ordinary way of two strangers wanting to get to know each other, and I gave her a novel of mine which, I felt, also operated in the same regions of otherness as Ice.

Anna had some complaint about Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon, for whom she had worked in the war years. He could have been more supportive of her with regard to her own writing, she felt. It was the sort of remark anyone might make. She longed to have a reputation, and thought that perhaps my attention marked a new start; she liked the idea of being regarded as a science fiction writer. It sounded modern. One sees in her work the sort of modernism—love of cars and speed and so on, not to mention the ‘fast set’—which surfaces in Aldous Huxley’s novels.