When I read these stories by thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
(My previous reviews of older or classic fiction: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/)
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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
WITH AND WITHOUT BUTTONS
“He hesitated. There was something very direct and somehow comforting in the way he was taking it, piece by piece as it happened, not as what he would think it ought to mean.”
This is quite a find for me! Prose-textured and haunted with more than a hint of Aickman’s disarming strangeness and of Elizabeth Bowen’s psychological garments in earlier 20th century English abodes and, dare I say, of the ‘Only Connect’ ethos in my collaborative story collection with my father Gordon Lewis that was published last century — and this first Butts story to be read in relatively random order by me tells of two sisters living in one of the two houses butting on to each other that were once a single house, with almost a shared loft/attic give or take a door in the wall now built up there between. And the sisters try to tease or hoax the man next door called Trenchard to ridicule more than just his superstition, by randomly planting kid gloves with and without buttons, and by concocting seemingly random on the hoof fibs, but somehow with a preternatural truth (as does gestalt real-time reviewing itself) of a haunted woman from the past, a tease that gets out of hand when kid gloves start planting themselves etc, complete with pungent smells! This story is so much better than I have just tried, over-personally, to do justice to in this short review. No ifs or buttons, it has excited me to read more Butts in the future.
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MAPPA MUNDI
Too much wondrous prose to quote from, so I will quote very little if anything! This is like its own reference to a “choked tank”, a set piece of clogged leitmotifs, intensely felt and conveying much to us by word-osmosis of the Goddess Isis (with her Bird-Priestess) who underpins Paris, she whom Notre Dame was meant to bury? PAR-IS itself literally IS-IS in the language in which this story is written? Until, as Butts was not to know but perhaps prophesied or warned, ISIS attacked back in our own more recent times? All told through the medium of a narrator whose perceived gender is not made clear till the end, who meets a young American man, and they explore together the dreamstuff, the demon lover as a ‘Montagu James’ gargoyle, and a were-wolf, the differences between what is seen via night and day, dream and sleep, until they are both followed by a terribly haunting Elizabeth-Bowenesque ‘shadowy third’….and the narrator continues to search for the American in the getting-lostability of Paris, and, meantime, I break my own vow above by quoting this story’s Zenoism, viz. “Hanging half in, half out when my back was turned, as though keeping an eye on me to see if I knew enough to be drawn in or to interfere.” — which amazingly resonates with an Elizabeth Taylor story entitled ‘For Thine is the Power’ that I reviewed by chance about an hour ago HERE!
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A MAGICAL EXPERIMENT
“There was a place east of the sun, west of the moon. If they spent their lives taking knots out of a piece of string, they would meet there.”
Possibly one of the most nightmarishly oblique fictions, or simply nightmarish, that I have ever read about the condition of life (life between a man and a woman, I guess), but this work will stay with me as somehow something someone somewhere once chose to write! I can see my own screaming face in the square window of the departing taxi!
From Botticelli’s “Madonna of the Magnificat”
MADONNA OF THE MAGNIFICAT
“A female demon, I don’t doubt. The angels of the Lord are male.”
This, for me, is another ‘magical experiment’ to match the story above, one where I wade through readerly conclusions and still have come to none. Ostensibly, it is an experiment of ventriloquism that appears real, where we hear speak many of the participants (or made-up dummies?) of the Annunciation and its aftermath, including Mary and Joseph, and various mentors in the area, to the backdrop of the sexual or gender nature of angels and of the lily that the angel without a beard gives Mary as a symbol of her purity. (Joseph wears a beard Mary made for him from cedar-shavings.) The lily here later falls to dust to the sound of air rushing out of seven old lungs. A second miracle expunging the first? A miracle we now reap? Subtle innuendos, then, subtle even when Butts wrote them down, but blatant now?
“God is subtle.”
Cross-referenced above here:
BRIGHTNESS FALLS
“It was like a place, slightly to the right or left of where you are going, that marches with you; that is occasionally lit up from inside.”
This wholly magical occult companion story shadowing other stories, is its own mentioned ‘word play’ with words as people or places or things in assonance or rhyme or exactly the same as a male shadowy-third called Corandel who takes them all, except the unknown freehold narrator, to the place whence unreliability stems from this freehold male narrator, himself once a suitor of the woman called Parmys before she married Max, a woman who also made mischievous friends (“out of their clothes and into them again”) with tall oblique Cynthia, and Max himself as a leasehold narrator who tells the main narrator what to say by saying it within the latter’s narrative. This work in fact is full of themes-and-variations on Bowenesque companion shadowy-thirds, some dark and ominous, others that are people or places or simply words in themselves, yet others bright, despite being shadows! Max even describes himself as one of these shadowy-thirds. The whole of Lincoln’s Inn around Chancery Lane is transformed into a maximum Machen-like fragment of life, too. “—whispers in the air.”
LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL
A story of “dawms”, a husband and wife in a lonely house by sea-moaning fogs of lighthouse and siren as they await the yearned-for return of a man who is their own paradoxically bright shadowy-third, part of their trinity, him with him, her with him, both together with him, and real enough to them as having been there before, a man in a bark hat or paradise hat coming home on a big lit ship to Southampton passing by their home and they ridiculously think of waving lights at it in the dark. But he returns sooner than they predicted. Or does he? So intensely, poetically felt, it transcends such predictability. Leaving a ‘skin of mist’ on readerly antennae and any homing angels, any falling brightness.
A VISION
“Dickory, dickory, dock.”
Not ‘Hickory, dickory, dock’, I note. A mouse climbing to the zenith or disguised as a macaw or a vast star or breasts like surf on “vertical lunar cliffs.” Cosmos as well as minutiae of a freewheeling vision as vignette.
Was there a macaw
In moon-cratered Kôr?
Hey, Didddle, Diddle? My cow, not ma-caw?
IN BAYSWATER
“There was clear yellow paint inside and a round window over the porch, set in deep wood. He put his elbows in it…”
Instead of that cottage behind Westbourne Grove with the envied round window, Alec ended up with sticky windows, “in a city of charwomen.” And we end up in a novella that has sticky sentences, convoluted references, seeming closed windows of meaninglessness, as Alec can only afford staying in a dysfunctional house with a dysfunctional family, and acting as a catalyst, introducing characters like Billy and Festus, to make them even more dysfunctional, part of my own old story about ‘Alec’ in this claustrophobia and what turns out to be a lethal-chamber of events. “Brightness falls from the air.” I will not attempt to foreshadow its plot, of the landlady and her apostolic signing, ghost-exorcising husband, their son Charles, and their daughter (I forget her name) and, charitably, I felt creative osmosis at work somewhere in these human-eaten farrows, the ‘exaltation’ and ‘exulting’ and now fully fallen brightness, the hinted incest and male love, ‘rewards and fairies’, the sense of magic about. But despite being a prophecy of working-class soap operas, Charles has books of literature in his room, one (the Decameron) being burnt by his mother, I think, because she saw it as obscene. The word ‘betrays’ can be found ‘In Bayswater’, I note.
“You can mean everything. But then you have to know what everything is,…”
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THE HOUSE PARTY
To Jean Cocteau
“He raised himself on his elbows and began an apostrophe on aeroplanes, men, birds, bird-priestesses and the hawk of Horus.”
This is a mix of catalyst guests invited, auditioned in situ, just like earlier today in a story by Maggie Ross reviewed HERE, with Mozart instead of Vivaldi, this being a house party of her Enfants Terribles, now in an evoked Mediterranean coastal resort, being the story of naive Paul who consorts with devils like the Pimp and obscene books from ‘In Bayswater’ and he suggest to his sponsor Vincent that he shows him Pan. Paul is an experimental invitee of Vincent often frowned upon by his other friends…. “Bores are unhelpable,” they say! A mélange of flowing words, often disarmingly meaningless and with some missing upper case letters. Amid an atmosphere of fishermen and women mending nets. I found it off-putting, if unavoidably destined to be read.
“What reason is there to turn him into a bad copy of us?”
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ANGÈLE AU COUVENT
“They were girls grown as boys and turned, occasionally, into animals who had lost their sex.”
This is the most powerful work so far, this being the one about Crazy Terry or Clumsy Terry as the other girls call her in this atmospherically wild Scottish convent. We share her sexual, spiritual, ceremonial agonising, her prayers for a certain girl to be her best friend and not someone else’s best friend. And much else that resonates with a stream of oblique but accessible, meaningful words. Told that her work is disgraceful and that her favourite literature and her own love of words needed to be removed to help with other subjects. Sent on an errand for a mistress’s purse that had ben forgotten in the mistress’s room, and I wish I was her young Hermes not, as I am, her ‘old man on a horse’! (For his ‘horse’ read my platform of losing plots!)
“…what an odd way it was for people of opposite sexes to spend the evening when, after all, there was nothing ahead that any of us could be sure of but infirmity, illness and death. It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely.” — Robert Aickman (The Unsettled Dust)
THE GOLDEN BOUGH by Mary Butts
About partygoers as ‘young nuts’ like God was when he had himself killed. From the point of view of Anne who has come to such a party land – interspersed with Frazier or Walter de la Mare type woodland – Anne having arrived from a seaside with a pier sticking out. Her lunatic asylum of life she is let in and out of by her family, and now she is with Steevens, Leo and Lois. And she writes a novel or screenplay about Leo fir which she gets money, she says. No more ifs or buts other than we reach the day I read it, as if it was meant to be read today…
“…I think it has got to a time when a little death would do our set good. No, I don’t mean another war, rather a ceremonial blood-letting. A ritual death. Not another suicide. Besides, an old order’s changing, we must inaugurate.”