Читать книгу Seven Gothic Tales - Dorothy Canfield Fisher - Страница 3

Table of Contents

The person who has set his teeth into a kind of fruit new to him, is usually as eager as he is unable to tell you how it tastes. It is not enough for him to be munching away on it with relish. No, he must twist his tongue trying to get its strange new flavor into words, which never yet had any power to capture colors or tastes. "It's not like a peach," you hear him say, biting out another mouthful from the oddly colored and oddly shaped thing, and chewing thoughtfully, "nor yet like a pear. Perhaps like a dead-ripe pineapple. Yet only if it had always been watered with fine old wine. Grown out of doors in Siberia, too, for all it has that southern tang. Nothing hothouse about it."

With some such nonsensical combination of impossibles do we all try to describe something--book or food--that has given us a new sensation. As if it were possible to suggest in words any sensation except those already known to everybody! Of course the only sensible thing is to say, "Take a taste, yourself. You'll eat it to the core, if you do."

To fit the occasion, an introduction to the seven stories--are they stories?--in this book, should, therefore, contain nothing but the exhortation, "Here, read one for yourself. You'll need no introduction to make you read the volume." But having just finished a second reading of the volume, myself, I am so much under its spell (it feels exactly like a spell) that I must seize this opportunity for babbling about it. Yet I can't even tell you the first fact about it which everybody wants to know about a book--who is the author. In this case, all that we are told is that the author is a Continental European, writing in English although that is not native to his pen, who wishes his-or-her identity not to be known, although between us be it said, it is safe from the setting of the tales to guess that he is not a Sicilian. Really all there is to tell you beforehand is what you will see for yourself as soon as you begin to read, that the people in this book are a race apart.

Although solidly set in an admirably described factual background somewhere on the same globe we inhabit, in a past mostly no longer ago than sometime in the nineteenth century, although they are human beings, young men, maidens, old men, old women, they are unlike us and the people we know in books and in real life, because the attitude towards life which they have is different from ours, or from any attitude we have met in life or in books. All those who are given leading rôles in these stories have in their youth expected more out of life than it had to give--wait a moment!--you are jumping to the conclusion that the book is just some more Romantic School stuff. You are mistaken. Romantic School characters, after encountering this disappointment, spend the rest of their lives spooning up out of their disillusion the softest and most delicately flavored custard of self-pity. If the characters in these stories ever feel pity for anything, it is a cold, disdainful pity for life itself in being so meanly smaller and poorer and safer than they would have made it, had they been God. Stop!--you are thinking of Byron. You are wrong. Byron was a poet of genius. At least that is what is said about him by people who ought to know. And I daresay these stories, for all their bizarre power, can scarcely expect to have the thumping signboard of genius hung up above the stand in the literary market where they are for sale. But Byron's moral atmosphere is that of a naïve, kindly, immature youth compared to the tense, fierce, hard, controlled, over-civilized, savage something-or-other, for which I find no name, created in this book by its anonymous author.

Perhaps the best description of the spirit one divines back of these stories, is found in the author's own description of one of the characters. She is walking here and there in a public park, taking small well-bred steps in prettily furred boots, and living through a moment of wild emotion (about to keep a rendezvous with a long-dead brother, if you'd like to know). The author says of her, that "in her heart a great mad wing-clipped bird was fluttering in the winter sunset." If you will meditate a moment on that description, you will have quite a clear notion of what you will find in the book--a great mad, wing-clipped bird, fluttering in a winter sunset. Let me add to that self-descriptive phrase, a bit of dialogue which also evokes the dominant mood of the book. It is in "The Deluge at Norderney," to my notion (although you will of course have your own favorite) one of the finest of the tales. The Cardinal says to the old maid of the noble family of Nat-og-Dag, (the world we step into through the covers of this book has many aristocrats in it, cardinals, ambassadors, Chanoinesses, exquisite and perverted young noblemen--and old ones too), "Madame," he says admiringly, "you have a great power of imagination and a fine courage."

"Oh, I am a Nat-og-Dag," said Miss Malin modestly.

"But are you not," asked the Cardinal, "a little...?"

"Mad?" asked the old lady. "I thought you were aware of that, my lord." Now if you don't know what the general spirit animating the book is, I can't tell you.

But there is a great deal more to an author than the spirit that animates him, let that be as curious and rare as it will. There is his style. And I don't know how to tell you what the style of the book is, any more definitely than what the spirit of it is, because the style too is very new to me, and will be to you, I think.

You will probably read it as I did, laying it down from time to time, to look up at the ceiling, pondering, "Is it of Cervantes' leisurely, by-path-following style that it reminds me? Or perhaps just R. L. Stevenson's more mannered--no, no, it is more like a Romantic School German narrator's way of telling a story. Or is that only because the grotesque and occasionally gruesome touches remind one of Hoffman? Perhaps it is because a foreigner, writing English, often falls as it were by accident on inimitably fresh ways of using our battered old words. Perhaps, quite simply, the style seems so original and strange because the personality using it is original and strange." And having come to no conclusion at all, you will turn back to read until you are again stopped by some passage for which you can't find a comparison in the writing you know. Like this one, in "The Supper at Elsinore" at the end of the party. The two middle-aged but still brilliant sisters "were happy to get rid of their guests; but a little silent bitter minute accompanied the pleasure. For they could still make people fall in love with them; they had the radiance in them which could refract little rainbow effects on the atmosphere of Copenhagen existence. But who could make them feel in love? At this moment, the tristesse of the eternal hostess stiffened them a little."

Or this beginning of "Roads Around Pisa." "Count Augustus von Schimmelmann, a young Danish nobleman of a melancholy disposition, who would have been very good-looking if he had not been a little too fat, was writing a letter on a table made out of a millstone, in the garden of an osteria near Pisa, on a fine May evening of 1823."

Or this, a phrase in a description of a small fashionable watering place on the North Sea, "The very air had here in its embrace a scornful vigor which incited and renewed the heart. There was also a small Casino where the coquetry with the dangerous powers of existence could be carried on in a different manner."

And this description of an aging mother who died after hearing of her only son's execution. "She was a stringed instrument from which her children had many of their high and clear notes. If it were never again to be used, if no waltz, serenade, or martial march were ever to be played upon it again, it might as well be put away. Death was no more unnatural to her than silence."

"...that rare, wild, broken and arrogant smile of the dying poet..." sounds again like a description of the spirit of the book. And this from "The Monkey" (a story guaranteed to addle your brains in the most powerful manner), when young Boris kisses the hand of his old aunt, the Chanoinesse, "...and all at once got such a terrible impression of strength and cunning that it was as if he had touched an electric eel. Women, he thought, when they are old enough to have done with the business of being women and can let loose their strength, must be the most powerful creatures in the whole world." And on the next page, when as he leaves he encounters a corpulent old countess, "...a gentle melancholy veiled her always and her lady companion said of her, 'The Countess Anastasia has a heavy cross. The love of eating is a heavy cross.'" And as he drives on to find Athena, "Now in the afternoon sun the trunks of the fir trees were burning red, and the landscape far away seemed cool, all blue and pale gold. Boris was able to believe what the old gardener at the convent had told him when he was a child; that he had once seen about this time of the year and the day, a herd of unicorns come out of the woods to graze upon the sunny slopes, the white and dappled mares rosy in the sun, treading daintily and looking around for their young, the old stallion, darker roan, sniffing and pawing the ground. The air here smelled of pine needles and toadstools and was so fresh that it made him yawn. And yet, he thought, it was different from the freshness of spring; the courage and gayety of it were tinged with despair. It was the finale of the symphony."

Where, you will ask yourself, puzzled, have I ever encountered such strange slanting beauty of phrase, clothing such arresting but controlled fantasy? As for me, I don't know where.

****

Have I given you an idea that the book is filled with a many-colored literary fog in which you can make out no recognizable human shapes? If so I have been exceptionally inept. The light in it is strange, not at all the good straight downward noon-day stare of the every day sun. But it is clear light, and in it we see a series of vigorously presented, outrageously unexpected, sometimes horrifying, but perfectly real human beings. They seem endowed with a sort of legendary intensity of living, almost beyond the possible, but that may be a result of the eerie light in which they are shown; as ordinary people sometimes for a moment or two, although perfectly visible to us as themselves, look legendary and epic in the darkening moment before the bursting of a storm, or in the first glimmer of dawn--in that moment or two during which the sunrise is seen as the miracle it is.

Perhaps you will allow me, as a Vermonter, to fall back on the New England language of understatement as my final report on these stories, and assure you that in my opinion, it will be worth your while to read them.

DOROTHY CANFIELD.

Arlington, Vermont, 1934.