Battlefield.

Dr. Farzin Harim had been up since six ministering to his students, until his research assistant Mahsa had finally warned that somebody would murder him unless he left immediately. It was too late now – no further improvements could be feasibly made at this point – and all of his fussing seemed increasingly like the irritating distraction of an attack from a frantic little moth. Would it not be altogether better if Dr. Farzin was at the President’s side during the ceremony, to represent the University and address any of the statesman’s questions? If anything went wrong, Dr. Farzin would also be needed to defend the University from the pointed observations which would invariably come from the direction of the clerics…

And so Dr Farzin had been stuffed into a taxi and driven off to the Presidential palace. Today marked the first full century since the founding of the Republic, but it was not until the prayers at noon were over that the celebrations could begin freely. At two o’ clock, Dr. Farzin was invited to join the President as he rode in state to the Ghazi stadium to survey the University’s re-enactment of the great battle which a hundred years ago had secured the nation’s independence.

“Splendid day for a bloodbath!” the President remarked cheerfully.

Dr. Farzin smiled. But he was not going to be disarmed by the President’s affability.

The President thought that he might as well have a go at behaving himself, if only to appease this grumpy little academic. “So I trust that this display will not be too educational – an afternoon of screaming and disembowelments, eh?”

“Well…” Dr. Farzin frowned. “It was actually not so much a battle as a massacre…”

“A massacre?” The Presidential entourage were now taking their seats in the stadium’s executive box. The President was momentarily absorbed in the colourful battalions of students which were arranging themselves on the field beneath him. And then Dr. Farzin was at his ear again.

“Yes, it’s left a terrible logistical headache for my students. I mean, in most re-enacted battles both armies gather on either side of the field and then meet in the middle for the fight…”

“Right.”

“But in this battle, the Taliban chased the American and British soldiers over quite a lengthy stretch of terrain. The coalition soldiers who could run very quickly reached the helicopters, of course, but the slower ones… well, you will see…”

The President turned to the doctor. “It won’t be very horrible will it? Unpleasant things like this tend to upset me…”

“It will be less horrible than the reality.”

After a while, the President wanted to criticise the unfolding proceedings without appearing ungracious. At a loss, he finally abandoned all diplomacy. “The coalition troops look a sorry lot, don’t they…?”

To his surprise, Dr. Farzin agreed. “Yes, at first many of the students wanted to be coalition soldiers because they thought that they would be wearing unusual costumes and brandishing strange weapons. But I had to insist upon authenticity. If you could have seen them, you would have thought little of the coalition forces… particularly the British…”

“They look like a pack of beggars,” the President laughed. “I can see the British troops now – there’s scarcely one gun between three of them!”

“Of course, we could not be completely true-to-life,” Dr. Farzin continued. “For example, the coalition forces had a significant number of female soldiers…”

The President shook his head. “Oh these people were barbaric… savages!”

“They were not women in any real sense. They had few feminine attainments. Indeed, most of them were almost men.”

Below them, the “battle” was beginning. The stadium was full and the crowd cheered as the coalition forces ran desperately across the field with the Taliban at their heels. There were rattles of synthetic machine-guns and choreographed detonations of improvised explosive devices. The yells of the crowd soared whenever an American or British soldier was hit. The wounded soldiers would fall to writhe and expire extravagently in pools of fake blood.

“Thank Allah we live in more Enlightened times!” said the President. “Those poor young soldiers didn’t suffer too much, did they?”

“Many were killed,” Dr. Farzin informed him airily. “Some of the things which happened to them are unimaginable.”

“How awful!” The President had lost interest in the feats of his forefathers and he was now scrutinising something on his mobile phone.

“Well…” Dr. Farzin muttered to himself, “I suppose you shouldn’t fuck about in somebody else’s country…”

[There is insightful writing on the present Afghan conflict here and here. Tychy has hitherto referred to the war here. Ed.]

Bump in the Night.

I went to my brother’s apartment for dinner last night, and could not help observing that whilst he leaned back on his chair and regaled me with the latest news of his stock market portfolio, a rather grand-looking gentleman who I had never seen before was marching about the apartment with plates of food arranged up his arms in steps.

It soon became time to interrupt my brother. “Is that man… a butler?”

My brother blinked. “Fotheringay? I suppose he is…”

I snorted with exasperation. “But we ordered a pizza. You order a pizza most nights when you’re at home. All you have to do is pay the delivery man and take it out the box… There’s no washing up…”

“I guess so…” My brother frowned. “But when we took over that golf club, I ended up with this guy… He’s on contract until October.”

The butler advanced towards us with a bottle of coke, like a gardener brandishing a watering can. “Would sir care for a top-up?” he said brightly. He looked very amused by the idea of the coke, as if drinking it was a quaint savage custom.

We finally decided to abandon the dinner and my brother suggested that we go and look for a rave which was being held up in the Pentland hills. The prospect of such a party will always make one feel like a man who has suddenly realised that he is wearing four or five too many layers of clothing. If only adulthood and all its achievements could be taken off like coats and left safely in a pile somewhere, leaving only the youthful pleasure and simplicity of cool bare limbs.

My brother and I drove around the Pentlands for a bit, whilst my brother repeatedly phoned his friends to try and establish where the rave was being held. We were eventually directed down a dirt track, through the backyard of a farm, and over several sodden fields to where pulsing lights crouched and huddled nosily behind a barn, like a badly-concealed spaceship. When we arrived, some people were dancing and a lot more were standing about watching. I became grimly aware that I was totally sober and I suddenly felt like an old solider who has turned up to a parade in civilian dress. I drank three bottles of beer on the spot to try and arrive at the party in a more complete sense.

I was dancing with a group of kids who wore dreadlocks and scummy combat pants. They smelt of weed and musty old sofas, but they whooped at each other with the sort of  voices that I imagine you would hear in the bar after skiing, or on a Boxing day hunt. In front of me, the least attractive woman in the party was already climbing out of her clothes, her huge, hypnotic breasts seemed to be looking around the barn of their own accord for men to attack and gobble up. A family joined our dancing – I mean,  a real family – a plump father and a mother, and two snotty-looking children. I was outraged.

I confronted the mother. “Do you know what this is? You can’t bring children here!”

The mother laughed as if I was not quite present, like a transvestite on the other side of the street. “What characters they have at these things!” she trilled to her husband. “You should take some more photographs Gerald!” Her children were dancing with expressions of furious concentration on their little faces.

Suddenly a light came on from somewhere. A man was walking into the rave, waving at everybody to attract their attention.

“Hullo!” he called. He looked around with amused astonishment. “Goodness me! There seems to have been some terrible mistake. You see, you’re all on my farm!”

Perhaps he imagined that everybody would burst into gales of laughter at this mix-up. Yet the music was wrenched to a halt, leaving a chorus of boos and coughing and restless groans. The farmer smiled in encouragement at all his unexpected visitors. “Would anybody like my wife to make them a cup of tea,” he offered finally.

“The poor old man,” I complained to my brother. “I feel terribly for him. You know, I think that I’m going to phone the police on his behalf…”

My brother looked at me in horror, not sure if I was joking.

A girl in a leather suit, who looked more masculine than half the British army, began to scream at the farmer. “Just you fuck off! This is our party! Fuck you!”

I intervened to reprimand this rude girl. “There is no need for any unpleasantness. Now listen…” I put my arm around the old man’s shoulders, “I expect that this party woke you from your sleep, didn’t it?”

The farmer nodded, bewildered. “Yes, I was sound asleep and then my wife woke me up and told me that she could hear noises from the barn…”

I smiled. “This is what I want you to do. You and your wife will go straight back to bed and have a good night’s sleep…”

“Go back to sleep?”

“Yes, and when you awake in the morning, you will find that this party – and these people – and even myself – were all just a rather odd dream.”

The farmer began to recognise the logic of what I was saying. “This is a dream?,” he wondered reluctantly.

“Indeed so. Just look around you. This is madness. It’s completely irrational. You must obviously be dreaming.”

Just to make certain that the farmer did not think about this any further, my brother and I walked him back to his farmhouse and put him to bed. When we returned to the barn, most of the ravers had departed in a fleet of cars for a party in Blackford Quarry. I will never understand these unlicensed raves – no barman, no proper toilets, and there is no hope of finding a taxi out here. About a hundred legless partygoers now faced a two-hour walk back to the city. My brother’s car remained where we had left it, but the windscreen was smashed in and there were two men masturbating together in the back seat, so we also had to walk home.

[Tychy previously described a party in the Pentlands here. Ed.]

Gong Hei Fat Choi.

From a Windowsill in Beijing.

I have been left on my own for the morning. The breezy arrangement of my hotel room is by now sealed tight like a tin can, offering nothing. Perhaps this is how those big droopy cats feel, in their glass tanks in Beijing Zoo; that languid panther, long melted into a still pool of indifference, regarding his visitors with eyes of sad, fathomless blankness. The civilization which has defeated him, he knows, cannot be perfect – eventually it will make a small mistake, leave a door unlocked or a keeper exposed, and then his heart can begin to beat again. It is just a question of waiting. I traipse around my own enclosure. I can stand the television for about five minutes at a time. The “news” is remorselessly cheerful. The government makes sensible policy suggestions and everybody agrees with them. The economy advances further and everybody agrees that this is very fine.

It seems that everybody in China is sickeningly dutiful and well behaved, as if the country was a gigantic Sunday school. Is it China or only my ken of it which is incomplete? Everywhere banality seems triumphant. The film Avatar has just been released in Beijing and the television is now reporting that a leading Chinese filmmaker has come out and announced that Avatar makes him ashamed of the entire Chinese film industry. China, he despairs, has never produced anything as profound or as beautiful as Avatar. The poor devils.

The maids are coming to clean my room. This is very embarrassing, because I never know quite what to do whilst they are cleaning. I instinctively stop what I am doing and stand to attention, but after a while, as I do not know how to talk to them, I end up staring helplessly, as if they were bailiffs carrying off all my possessions. The maids arrive in pairs, like T.V. detectives, and, sometimes, when they are subjecting me to their mysterious questions – possibly about the weak cistern on the toilet – and I am nodding and saying xie-xie – it may be that I am really being interrogated about a strangling in the vicarage. Today I sit down and pretend to read a book, but this is not very convincing. When the maids look off-guard, I imagine the panther soaring to freedom with his claws outstretched. I tell myself that I should have gone for a walk before the maids arrived, and stayed out of their way until they were finished.

Away the maids go, to hose out another enclosure. I fetch the ashtray and my cigarettes. I pop my head out of the window – the room no longer exists – and there is only a panorama of skyscrapers. The sky is a stunning blue. There is not a cloud in the heavens and, indeed, there has not been a drop of rain during all my time in Beijing. The city has a desert climate during the winter, the surrounding countryside is reduced to the colour and consistency of ash, one is bombarded everywhere with the dazzling hues of a British July, but one needs several layers to keep out the season’s icicle fangs.

My head floats above the city. In Beijing, a cheap packet of cigarettes costs about forty pence and the hotel will only request that one does not smoke in bed. It seems so easy, so innocent. China or Britain: is it better to have a government which goes about shooting people but leaves rights like smoking untouched; or a government which cannot run the country but eternally interferes with our tobacco consumption? It would be an irony if the revolution which remains outstanding in China arrived only after they had kicked all the smokers out of their bars.

The city smiles invitingly and I reflect upon what I can do on my own. I can drift around the big Wu-Mart supermarket on the corner, idly filling a basket, and if I am lucky I can pay for the items without a breakdown. This eventuality will occur if I am asked a question which I cannot answer – any question, pretty much – whereupon I will pack in like a fish pulled out of the lake. As I gasp helplessly, the cashier will beam expectantly at me, or squint, or shrug with despair at her friend. The world has stopped – will it ever begin again? This is why I cannot use the buses. They are loaded and unloaded in seconds, with military efficiency, whilst a sort of sergeant-major in a blue and yellow uniform sits in a raised chair and barks commands at everybody. If I blundered or went too slowly, I could be taken aside and disciplined.

I can walk aimlessly around the streets, detached from everything. I can go to KFC and negotiate the purchase of a coffee (in challenging the supremacy of tea, KFC is an organisation of radical dissent in Beijing). I cannot go to a pub or a bar because these are largely as rare as Scientologist churches. Perhaps the British embassy could double up as a pub, with the ambassador pulling pints of ale under a ceiling of oaken beams. Even if I could get there on a bus, I could not walk around one of Beijing’s monumental shopping malls, which are today the greatest achievement of Chinese civilisation, as grand and populous as sovereign states, and where everybody attains the mind and morality of a teenaged girl. The heat would exhaust me, the stallholders would eat me up, the endless pageantry of merchandise would go to my head and, my mind swimming with a Beijing fever of zany tee-shirts and novelty cigarette lighters, I would lose my reason and empty my wallet on these beautiful spangled treasures.

I pop my head in again. I want to open a beer but it is scarcely eleven o’clock. There is only the company of the television and, yes, the economy is still advancing, the leadership is still making sensible suggestions, and banality, at least seemingly, remains the dragon rampant.

Tychy Time-Out.

[The Tychy media outlet will not be posting anything for a month or so, not least because I'm on holiday in Beijing for three weeks (weather permitting). Tychy will return in February with more illustrations and fiction, literary criticism on Herman Melville and Algernon Blackwood, and coverage of that election. If you keep finding yourself here, however, there's always Tychy's monumental archives...  Take it easy. Ed.]

Remarks upon Herman Melville’s The Encantadas.

The Galapagos archipelago was the cradle of evolutionary theory, but Herman Melville locates its islands altogether beyond modernity and meaning. Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos islands in 1835 and his theory of natural selection would be informed by his observations of their outlandish fauna. Melville arrived on a whaler, The Acushnet, in November 1841 and January 1842, as an ordinary seaman rather than as a professional scientist, and whilst Darwin spent over a month systematically exploring the islands, Melville’s ship drifted listlessly about the archipelago, at most spending six days in anchor off Chatham island.

One should remember that in the antebellum literary marketplace, travel writing was far more of a going concern than it may be today. Whether for entertainment or investment, readers were purchasing information about unknown or scarcely known regions of the planet. The world was yet to be fully conquered, or processed, by its literature, but the perversity of The Encantadas (1854) is that it confounds this imperialistic advance. The collection was initially marketed as a return to form for Melville, or rather, as a return to the sort of travel writing which had made his name (it was widely assumed to be written by him, although it was published pseudonymously). The Encantadas was one of Melville’s few commercial successes following Moby Dick, but there is a ringing irony – almost approaching sarcasm – to publishing a flowery travel narrative about a godforsaken hell-hole:

It is to be doubted whether any spot on earth can, in desolateness, furnish a parallel to this group… in these isles, rain never falls… Another feature in these isles is their emphatic uninhabitableness…

We are presented with what is literally a desert island, but as if the narrator had fundamentally misunderstood the science of marketing, to his mind the glamour and enchantment of his product lies in its desolation. The isles are inevitably mis-sold to us – we are promised that only “reptile life” is to be found on the Encantadas, and that “no voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a hiss.” It will eventually transpire, however, that there are plenty of men and beasts upon the isles, leaving us to wonder at this Aesopian fable against commodity fetishism, in which a talented salesman has been enchanted to promote death and despair as attractive products. With the quick wit and beady eye of a smooth-talking travel agent, the narrator regales us with some of his islands’ enchantments:

What outlandish beings are these?… Their bodies are grotesquely misshapen; their bills short; their feet seemingly legless; while the members at their sides are neither fin, wing, nor arm. And truly neither fish, flesh, nor fowl is the penguin… without exception the most ambiguous and least lovely creature yet discovered by man.

Although the narrator had previously boasted that “the Encantadas refuse to harbor even the outcasts of the beasts,” he now reveals that, “as if ashamed of her failure, Nature keeps this ungainly child hidden away at the ends of the earth.” This may be clear evidence of contradictory and unreliable narration, but in any event, the pitch for the penguin does not amount to dependable information for the consumer, but rather conveys the whiff of a medieval bestiary without any of its magical splendours, the wilfully archaic language of Spenser but none of his romance. The narrator has gone to the “ends of the Earth,” unveiled the secrets of Nature, and the result is an unsightly, useless lump: “On land it stumps; afloat it sculls; in the air it flops.”

Rock Rondondo is almost presented as a shop-window display, with the narrator’s eye running over the shelves. The fish teeming below the Rock may strike us as a desirable prospect: “All were strange, many exceedingly beautiful; and would have well graced the costliest glass globes in which gold-fish are kept for a show.” But although amongst these fishes “hues were seen as yet unpainted, and figures which are unengraved,” unlike the “hidden” penguin, they throng around the narrator’s boat, and “a hundred infatuates contended for the honor of capture.” The narrator spies “larger and less unwary wights” swimming within the depths, but he soon surrenders any hope of discrimination, or of describing them in the same detail with which he pitched the unlovely penguin. The fishes provide one of the few examples of Nature’s beauty on the Encantadas – and they are more than willing to be exploited – but under the narrator’s perverse marketing, they remain in obscurity, unpainted and unengraved.

Romantic literature boasts a fantastic menagerie of haunting and iconic creatures: Burns’ Mouse, Keats’ Nightingale,  Blake’s Tyger, Poe’s Raven, and, of course, Moby Dick. But the tortoise? It provides a powerful image, but not a particularly happy one. The narrator defines their “crowning curse” as “their drudging impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world,” and these creatures are possibly the reductio ad absurdum of such heroes of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short fiction as Parson Hooper, Wakefield, and Goodman Brown, who are dementedly set on hopeless courses:

That these tortoises are the victims of a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical enchanter, seems in nothing more likely than in that strange infatuation of hopeless toil which so often possesses them. I have known them in their journeyings ram themselves heroically against rocks, and long abide there, nudging, wriggling, wedging, in order to displace them, and so hold on their inflexible path.

The literary critic William B. Dillingham has shown that as The Encantadas progresses, we encounter more recognisably human tortoises: Hunilla’s endurance and Oberlus’ “mindless bestiality” suggest, for Dillingham, “the most basic and mechanical form of energy, life without life.” Melville had subjected Hawthorne to offers of literary fellowship, which the grumpy author for his part seems to have politely discouraged, but Melville must have marvelled at how Hawthorne could have made a name for himself as a popular novelist (The Scarlet Letter had been published four years before The Encantadas) when he sold tales of a despair and woe unique within Western literature. Perhaps the picture of a salesman enthusiastically promoting a set of blighted islands – whose cursed citizens, ferocious slaveholders, and “permanent Riotocracy” present a travesty of American society – serves to indict, or at least to question, Hawthorne’s entire literary career.

Dillingham has explored the relationship between Melville’s essay Hawthorne and his Mosses (1850) and The Encantadas (both of which are distinguished within Melville’s writing by their use of pseudonymity) which respectively cite greenery and cinders, and the “ sacred white doe” of truth and the unfathomable tortoise. It is an odd irony that The Encantadas was itself almost a “twice-told” tale: the rights to a manuscript about “tortoise hunting” were sold to Harper’s Magazine but then the completed Encantadas was finally sold to Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, who duly published it, presumably leaving Harper’s grimly aware that their forthcoming travel-narrative would be divested of all its lucrative novelty and authenticity. It is amusing to imagine two commercial publishers vying for an account of Melville’s wretched cinders.

The tortoise is offered to Putnam’s readers as adventuring courtiers had once presented exotic delights to their stay-at-home monarchs, but to the narrator’s astonishment, a tortoise will magically materialise in the traditional venue of storytelling – “scenes of social merriment, and especially at revels held by candle-light in old-fashioned mansions” – and “with “Momento *****” burning in live letters upon his back.” It has fallen to the scholar Mary-Madeleine Gina Riddle to reason that these words are “Momento Vitae” rather than “Mori.” Perhaps the central subject of this travel narrative is telling his readers to forget their books and remember life.

The narrator, however, seems to be increasingly possessed by his intended possession, growing morbidly fixated with the tortoises whilst remaining unable to indicate quite what they signify. Riddle notes that the tortoises “are wavering symbols of refuge one moment and even of worldly ethics another,” and the narrator can only deduce from his anatomical observations that the tortoise “is both black and bright.” He dreams of being a Brahmin mounted on a cosmic tortoise, but the next day he has tortoise steak for dinner, leading Dillingham to tut that “he has committed sacrilege and will be eternally cursed.” The literary consumer can learn nothing from the tortoises because they are rightly exiled from the modern American world, being impractical and hopeless, and our budding salesman has no means of pitching them. Or perhaps he triumphs over the tortoises by reducing them to a commonplace commodity: just as Poe’s Raven will end up as an article of furniture, seated evermore upon a bust of Pallas above the narrator’s chamber door, the tortoises become “three fanciful soup-tureens,” whilst their calipees furnish “three gorgeous salvers.”

We may be pleased to identify The Encantadas as a satire upon commercial travel writing, but the genre exacted its own revenge. Such was the course of travel writing that its narratives quickly lost their novelty, being supplanted by more up-to-date and informative accounts of our emerging and progressively-narrated planet. The Encantadas would sink into oblivion with the rest of Melville’s writings until the “Melville revival” of the 1920s, when readers would learn to value their literary rather than their journalistic qualities.

[Tychy has previously feted Melville’s Babo as the greatest black leader in Western fiction, explored the allegorical possibilities of Typee, critiqued Israel Potter, and reviewed KCS' Billy Budd at the Edinburgh fringe. Ed.]

Interview Room.

Sedan Chair.

Book review: Wolf Hall.

I would hesitate to judge whether Hilary Mantel’s heavyweight historical novel Wolf Hall was deserving of the 2009 Man Booker prize, not least because I have not knowingly read any of the other nominees, whatever they may be. In any event, it is surely Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell who has won the Booker prize – little else in this “novel” can be really classified as fictional. Mantel has described Cromwell as “a nightmare to a biographer and a gift to a novelist,” because whilst “his public life is exceptionally well documented, his private life [is] hardly known at all.” Wolf Hall is founded on the assumption that a novelist can intervene at those points where historians and biographers were unable to establish truth, and instead indicate what probably happened. Mantel makes the off-the-record details of Cromwell’s life harmlessly complement the recorded history of Henry VIII’s court, so that the reader forsakes little if agreeing to the plausibility of Mantel’s Cromwell. For Mantel, Wolf Hall is “true in the way a painting is true,” and she thereby envisages a historical novelist who does not merely appropriate history to colour their novel, but who aims to illuminate history itself. This recalls Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ambitions for historical fiction:

Few of the personages of past times (except such as have gained renown in fireside legends as well as in written history) are anything more than mere names to their successors. They seldom stand up in our imaginations like men. The knowledge communicated by the historian and biographer is analogous to that which we acquire of a country by the map, – minute, perhaps, and accurate, and available for all necessary purposes, but cold and naked, and wholly destitute of the mimic charm produced by landscape-painting… A license must be assumed in brightening the materials which time has rusted…

Yet one will look in vain amongst Hawthorne’s fictions for bright, clear pictures of history, and whilst the play and trickery of his narratives would avoid surrendering easy certainties, Mantel gatecrashes the deliberations of historians with the ambition of completing their work. Wolf Hall, to bend Hawthorne’s metaphor, both draws the map and colours it in, although the emphasis of Mantel’s Cromwell when contemplating Christendom is upon accurate mapping:

There are maps, of a kind; castles stud their fields, their battlements prettily inked, their chases and parks marked by lines of bushy trees, with drawings of harts and bristling boar… these maps are deficient in all practical respects; they do not, for example, tell you which way is north…

Mantel has an expert command of the history and a flair for elegant prose, so we may expect a pretty, colourful map which is sufficient in all practical respects. But is this a viable model of historical fiction?

To truly read Wolf Hall one needs to be already familiar with the relevant historical personages and their standing within history. It helps to know that the book is in effect a revisionist polemic, which challenges the established hostility towards Cromwell within works such as Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (Wolsey’s joke that Cromwell “goes about the countryside committing outrages” anticipates this reputation). Anybody who reads Wolf Hall as a straightforward historical romance will probably complain that it is rendered almost incoherent by an overindulgence in unnecessary detail. The knowing reader who anticipates Cromwell’s downfall will be disappointed – as the book only gets as far as Thomas More’s execution – but one ignorant of the course of history could share in Cromwell’s happy ending. Yet worse awaits one who has at least a passing knowledge of Henry VIII’s court. Did More really accuse Cardinal Wolsey of seeking to poison the king with sweating sickness (incredibly, More did)? Did contemporaries really gossip that More was having an incestuous relationship with his daughter (apparently so)? Had Cromwell really read Machiavelli’s The Prince (some say not until 1537)? The narrative of Wolf Hall retains no means of declaring where the facts end and the fiction begins, and so one interested in the history of the piece has to read the book with Google at their elbow, to verify any eyebrow-raising detail. This novel should be really subtitled “Bring your own footnotes.”

Although Mantel is already writing a sequel to Wolf Hall, one wonders whether she will ever find the heart to preside over Cromwell‘s death. Whereas Bolt had bluntly summed up Cromwell as “an intellectual bully,” Mantel may not necessarily disagree with this description, but her Cromwell is otherwise a superman. Self-made, cosmopolitan, and open-minded, his self-assurance is only matched by his resourcefulness; and he is, in effect, a prototype for the modern bourgeois citizen. It may be just coincidence that all of his personal relationships are also investments – and, to be fair, nobody in that period could afford to bring up a child for the sake of it – but this Cromwell’s outlook is utterly utilitarian, and there is apparently not a moment of carelessness or whimsicality in his entire life.

Despite being simultaneously kindly and ruthless, this Cromwell is a surprisingly uncomplicated character, and, oddly enough, his iron will, unfaltering progress, and discerning appetites cannot fail to remind one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Fleming’s own description of Bond as “a neutral figure – an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a government department” would almost fit Cromwell, were “government department” exchanged for “king.” Both characters are informed by a degree of fantasy and hero-worship which makes one vaguely suspicious of their creators. Yet this Cromwell also noticeably resembles Robert Bolt’s “Common Man”:

COMMON MAN: It is perverse! To start a play made up of Kings and Cardinals in speaking costumes and intellectuals with embroidered mouths, with me.

Mantel’s Cromwell is virtually “tinker, tailor, soldier, spy,” and he “is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard.” Wolves roam the hall – More, Boleyn, Seymour, and Cranmer are all enterprising upstarts – and at Henry’s court, aristocratic right is viewed as a worthy but rather provincial ideal. The Common Man’s “philosophy” is “impregnable” – upon regarding More, he concludes that “the likes of me can hardly be expected to follow the processes of a man like that” – whilst Mantel’s Cromwell is “unknowable” and “probably indefeasible.” This Cromwell is almost entirely un-ideological – apparently signifying Renaissance and Protestant ideals in an animal state – and he dismisses The Prince as “a few aphorisms, a few truisms, nothing we didn’t know before.” He wonders of More, “Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before?,” but perhaps this merely conveys impatience at More’s aimless, impractical intellectualism, which contrasted so absurdly with his bigotry once in government.

One cannot quite define Cromwell and More as, respectively, pragmatism and inflexibility personified – even if More will end up pig-headedly bent on his own martyrdom – because Cromwell’s fidelity to Renaissance and Reformation may be just as fierce and principled as More’s own faith, but he is not (so far) required to betray these ideals. Just as it is difficult to distinguish Cromwell’s pragmatism and tolerance from his ideology, it is equally hard to tell whether More’s lack of “pity” emerges naturally from his political assumptions.

Over the last decade, literature, cinema, and television have gone to quite incredible lengths to explore and advance what should be an obviously inadequate genre: faction, that botched synthesis which is really a negation, and leaves none of the certainties of journalism nor the freedoms of fiction. Wolf Hall is the latest, and possibly the very best, contribution to this field. Whatever is signified by the final exchanges between More and Cromwell is the fantasy of a confrontation between two ideologies rather than reliable historical insight. Wolf Hall may be a fabulous novel and great history, but it is in the final analysis not very sound cartography. Such is history, as Cromwell despairs:

But the trouble is, maps are always last year’s. England is always remaking herself… They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move and even the histories that trail us…

One can only read the map which leads to Wolf Hall after consulting a lot of other maps beforehand, and this novel ultimately amounts to a mass of possibilities about an unknown terrain, which is too wrinkled with detail to be lovely in itself. Perhaps great literature can emerge from this, but only if you bring your own footnotes.

Unmann’d by Folly.

With a price tag of over two hundred and fifty pounds, those Nicole Farhi leather brogues would have urged lesser women to admit defeat, but there was a certain severity to Ellen Stewart’s way of thinking, and by her reckoning, if one indulged oneself and was then knifed dead by a teenager, the disappointment would be significantly less than if one denied oneself and lived on in cheaper shoes. Those brogues consequently stood as splendid as a golden eagle on Ellen’s kitchen table, but when her cronies arrived for morning coffee, she was forced to concede that her logic was amiss, because the shoes were actually unworthy of a stabbing.

“They make little farting noises,” she complained.

“Are you sure?” Arlene Pepperpot asked, “because sometimes only you can hear the noises – they are a sort of hallucination.”

“The noises are definitely real. I was walking around Marks and Spencers yesterday with my husband, and he was growing quite merry over them.”

But just as farting shoes will transform grown men into sniggering adolescents, they may conversely render a housewife as resourceful as a Polish hunk with a toolbox. Beatrix Barton had always been very practical, and she reasoned that the farting noises could be rectified by boiling the shoes. Smiling with amusement, Ellen extracted her biggest pot from under the kitchen sink, and they had soon consigned the brogues to its bubbling waters. Beatrix recommended boiling the shoes for about a quarter of an hour.

They returned to the living room and when they had finished their coffees, Mrs Pepperpot said to the empty cups, “I have always been fond of you, cups, and we’ve told all the neighbours that there are not cups like you anywhere. I am sure that if you really wanted to, you could trot straight over to the kitchen sink and wash yourselves up.”

And the cups ran to the sink and jumped in.

The shoes were dry by mid-afternoon and Ellen decided to take them for a spin. She lived in a cottage in the Pentland hills, and her favourite walk took her several miles over the heather to where the landscape opened like a magnificent blighted flower, and the hills soared bare and plain around a lake which gleamed like a nasty little piece of glass stuck in the dirt. And walking today in her new shoes, listening suspiciously for the resumption of the farting noises, and careful to step around the gashes of mud in the path, Ellen arrived before the lake and unexpectedly experienced a vision.

In the huge cloudy sky over the hills, her husband was making love to the au pair. Ellen took a step back. Her husband’s thrusting buttocks were suspended in the sky as big as a city. His droning cries and the au pair’s breathless squeaks filled the valley, and scraps of the sounds detonated from hilltop to hilltop. Ellen stood transfixed until the vision had flickered from the sky and the landscape was plunged once more into silence.

Ellen knew that her love for her husband had an established territory or a sort of jurisdiction, and that there were dark, uncolonised regions of his life from which she remained excluded. In the past, she had reasoned with herself that these areas were not worth the conquest – that the few secrets which her husband had left were small and unremarkable. Yet on the morning after her vision, Ellen summoned her cronies to coffee and dutifully reported his betrayal.

A great fury rolled up into the heart of the room. Mrs Pepperpot barked at the coffee cups and they dispersed in panic, leaving the table bare. All three women rested a forefinger on the coffee table, which commenced to rock and lurch violently. Soon the table was on the move. It galloped out of the cottage and the women ran with it, each ducking to keep their finger in place. The table’s adventures in their early days had been rather inconsequential. It had rattled aimlessly around a supermarket and it had tried to attack the dogs tied up to the railing outside the library. But now the table was aware of its priorities, and in a trice, it had arrived at an unsettled spot under the brow of the hills, where the mistress of their charms strolled out from amongst the ash trees to greet them…

At breakfast, Ellen had suddenly announced that she wanted to be rid of the au pair. It seemed that the girl ate an abnormal amount of food. A whole tub of ice cream and a packet of cookies had disappeared in a single afternoon. If a hippo had the run of the house, it would eat less.

“She’s cheap!” Rufus snarled. “And you were always complaining about not having a reliable girl.”

Ellen’s eyes gleamed. Despite herself, she felt a vague sense of solidarity with this au pair. Women were all the same to Rufus, as long as he had one to hand when he was bored. To Ellen’s mind, the au pair was harmless – merely a senseless implement which he was beating her over the head with – and she just wanted to annoy him by throwing his tool out of the window. “I’m going to phone and tell her not to come tomorrow.”

“Fine!” Rufus hissed, puffing out his cheeks with exasperation. “I dare say we can manage without an au pair.”

“Rufus!” Ellen was outraged. “How can you say such a thing? Joshua can hardly be left by himself – he requires constant attention.”

Joshua seemed to be aware that they were talking about him. He looked up blankly.

Rufus left for the university. He was lecturing at ten, and he was then at lunch for the rest of the afternoon

At the urinal during lunch, the world screeched to an abrupt halt. Looking down, Rufus was not pleased by what he saw. Indeed, he was a little alarmed. He scrutinised his penis and gave it a couple of shakes as if to revive it. Every wrinkle’s an inch, he tried to reassure himself.

The incident passed out of his mind until the next time he was at a urinal – in the changing-rooms after squash – when he grimly observed that his penis was, beyond the shadow of a doubt, quite definitely smaller.

It was as if it had withdrawn into his body by about half an inch.

Like an old friend who has suffered a mental breakdown, his penis was now something of a stranger to him. It remained the same width, but… there was simply less of it. Rufus was not very satisfied with what was left, but he was grimly aware that this was not something he could place before a doctor. He would be told that, yes it was all very curious, but he should really consult an aromatherapist to have it treated properly.

Rufus worried for the rest of the day, occasionally retreating into the privacy of a bathroom where he would gaze helplessly at his retracting member. He was reminded of the feeling when, as a boy, he had built a snowman and watched it gradually shrink away over the following days.

At home, there was a note stuck to the fridge which said that his wife and Joshua were shopping in Livingstone. On such occasions, they typically spent the night with Beatrix Barton rather than return to the cottage. And as he did when his wife was away, Rufus established himself on the living-room sofa, like King Henry on his royal barge, and, surrounded by his retinue of crisp packets and beer cans, he fell into a deep sleep.

That night he had a horrible dream. An old crone had spied the stalks of a carrot amongst her vegetable patch and, licking her lips greedily, she began to tug away. Yet this was evidently quite a big vegetable, for she could not dislodge it from the soil. She called over Rufus’ wife – who was preparing a cocktail on the patio – and Ellen and the crone pulled away, but to no avail. Beatrix Barton and Arlene Pepperpot were also called over to lend a hand, and gradually the four women and all their might managed to wrench the carrot free. But as the thing slid from its earthy slumbers, Rufus observed to his horror that it was not a carrot but his own penis, and awaking in a panic, his hands fell to his genitals and groped with desperation, until they found a tiny little stump which was smaller than the butt of a cigarette.

Feverish with terror, Rufus jumped into his car and screeched off to the hospital.

He was sent away from the Accident and Emergency unit several times before the duty receptionist was persuaded that the only way of calming him down would be to allow him a few minutes with a doctor. A doctor was found and he examined the penis without interest.

“It’s very small,” he ventured finally. “That’s probably the smallest penis I’ve seen during my career.”

“But it’s shrinking,” Rufus sobbed. “It’s getting smaller.”

The doctor blinked.

“Watch it!” Rufus implored.

The doctor sat and looked at Rufus’ penis for as long as he considered polite. “I can’t see anything,” he concluded. “Perhaps I should get a microscope?”

“What should I do?” Rufus screamed.

The doctor became practical. “Are you going to use your penis over the next few days?”

Rufus looked as if he could cut that doctor’s throat.

“It requires some form of corrective surgery, which is probably best done by a cosmetic practitioner – the sort of people who send out those odd emails, you know? There’s nothing that we can do here. If you only use your penis occasionally, I would recommend a little patience until the problem is sorted out.” The doctor looked thoughtful. “You know, I have heard of historical cases in which a structurally insecure penis has inverted naturally – so that, in effect, it becomes of its own accord a virgina…”

The car rolled through blank spectral streets. Rufus was already resigned to becoming a eunuch – an abomination whose shrill squawks would cause all normal men to give thanks for their health and masculinity. Rufus suddenly needed his wife’s strength and practicality. Yet scrambling into the cottage, he found Ellen and her cronies  awaiting him in a row of armchairs – each lady immaculate at morning coffee – and when his wife looked up at him, it was with that pointed formality and coldness which were once the stormy weather of their courting days.

He was suddenly certain that Ellen was behind this mutilation.  Without thinking, Rufus crashed to his knees, and fell at his wife’s feet like a barbarian king conquered by Rome.

“Hello Mr Stewart” cooed Mrs Pepperpot. “Would you care for a mini bagel?”

“Don’t!” Ellen warned. “They are fattening and he has to remember his cholesterol.”

The ladies murmured at the thought of this peril. “The cholesterol!”

“Do you wish to learn something which may not have occurred to you?” Ellen asked her husband.

“No,” Rufus cried.

Ellen raised an eyebrow. “No?”

Rufus moaned with resistance like an infant at the school gates. “Because it will be horrible…”

“Tough cookie,” Ellen chided. “But not so horrible. Although your willy was getting smaller and smaller, it was all the time perfectly safe. I was keeping it in a very special place.”

“Where?” Beatrix Barton gasped.

“I’ll tell you. On the forehead of that poor au pair girl.”

“On her forehead? Oh the poor child!”

“Yes, whilst it was disappearing from him, it was reappearing… well… sprouting between her eyes. She had such a pretty face and it was quite spoiled by your great willy flopping about in the middle of it.”

Rufus was wracked with sobs. “Please make it stop!”

“That poor girl is almost completely out of her mind by now and I cannot see her living until the end of the afternoon. I don’t know how she will kill herself, but it will be something which obliterates the face and spares her family the mortifying embarrassment…”

“Oh imagine!” Mrs Pepperpot screeched. “Her unfortunate mother turning up to identify the body… and saying “I never noticed a willy there before!””

The ladies cackled.

“But the point is…” remembered Ellen, “that once this bit of fluff has destroyed herself, your willy will be back as good as new.”

“You’re demons!” Rufus exploded. “Fucking bastards!”

“Darling!” there was no longer that playfulness in Ellen’s voice. “I think there is a little something which will bring this unhappy episode to a conclusion.”

“You fucking burn in hell!”

“A little thing, but still incredibly important…”

Rufus wiped the spittle from his chin. The ladies were looking at him expectantly.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

Touchy.

A Portrait of Algernon Blackwood (2/6): Nature and Responsibility.

Mike Ashley’s Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood (2001) offers a treasury of anecdotes about the author and broadcaster, one of which concerns his appearance at the age of 79 on the BBC radio programme Speak for Yourselves, where guests were put before a panel of young people. In Blackwood’s case, the panel turned out to be particularly tenacious, and at one point in their inquisition they bluntly demanded to know what he had “put into life,” a question which apparently left Blackwood lost for words. Perhaps the elderly author was labouring under the misapprehension that he had died on the way to the studio and was now facing an angelic jury, but Ashley relates that “the lack of an answer caused the children to think that Blackwood had been selfish and had wasted his life” (which must have been particularly hurtful for an author who so valued the opinions of children). Blackwood tried to explain how he had used his life to appreciate Nature, and the children may not have been impressed by such an answer: was this all that Blackwood could come up with when finally confronted with a lifetime of irresponsibility?

Yet Blackwood’s conception of “Nature” entailed unmistakable responsibilities. In his autobiographical Episodes Before Thirty (1923), he had written about Nature in terms which modern readers – in an age when the natural world and its precious ice caps are regarded as almost part of the infrastructure – may find somewhat mindboggling:

Forests, mountains, desolate places, especially perhaps open spaces like the prairies or the desert, but even, too, the simple fields, the lanes, and little hills, offered an actual sense of companionship no human intercourse could possibly provide…. In those moments of deepest feeling when individuals must necessarily be alone, yet stand at the same time in most urgent need of understanding companionship, it was Nature and Nature only that could comfort me. When the cable came, suddenly announcing my father’s death, I ran straight into the woods. . . .

Although Blackwood’s love for Nature may flatter modern sensibilities, it was fundamentally at odds with other ecological approaches such as aristocratic paternalism or “green” environmentalism – which appoint man as the custodian of the natural world – because Blackwood had such an absolute faith in Nature that it seemed never to have occurred to him that it could be destroyed or even particularly damaged by man. For him, the idea of a custodian of Nature would have been an amusing impertinence. Yet Blackwood assumed that the natural world was itself almost symbolic of greater powers, and that behind all of its wobbling scenery – the “scaffolding” of nightfall and the stock-cupboards of starlight which he describes in A Prisoner in Fairyland (1913) – Nature remained nothing if not human, and ultimately more human than the feverish, unearthly metropolises which, for Blackwood, denoted civilisation.

Blackwood’s noble ancestry and upper middle-class upbringing exerted an undeniable influence over his mysticism, the ideological confederates of which may be found amongst the coffee taverns and séance parlours of his day, rather than out in more conventional wildernesses. His father, Sir Stevenson Arthur Blackwood, was a hellfire evangelist who spooked his son with wild forecasts of damnation, although the father’s preaching and the son’s subsequent “rebellion” both conveyed more bark than bite. Ashley contends that the Blackwoods were “bonded” by “their common delight in the natural world,” and the son’s Episodes predominantly portrays the pair travelling and appreciating nature together rather than intimately sharing a faith (although it may be redressing previous literary portraits of his father). The elder Blackwood emerges from Episodes as a caring and largely tolerant parent, if one somewhat distracted by his morbid anxieties. “We were ostracised… I was afraid they were true, not glad,” Algernon remarks wistfully of his parents’ fanaticism.

The elder Blackwood apparently broke down when he learned that his son was running a Canadian saloon, lamenting that, “He is lost; his soul is lost. Algie has gone to – Hell!” This despair is compassionate, but otherwise silly or even senile: Blackwood’s readers could not fail to conclude that the author would been thoroughly miserable behind a bar – as by all accounts he was – and yet his own father pictured him as a hell-bound saloon hand. For his part, Algernon was disinclined to cherish any resentment against his father’s failings, and he remembered his father with pride, fascination, and understanding:

His religion was genuine, unfaltering, consistent and sincere… He knew a vivid joy, a wondrous peace, his pain being for others only, for those who were not ” saved”… He became a genuine saint. Also, to the very end, he remained that other delightful thing, possible only to simple hearts, a boy.

Although the last line seems like a magical Oedipal spell, uttered to infantilise authority, it would furnish an equally good description of Blackwood himself. Blackwood would concede that, “without wholeheartedly sharing my father’s faith… his religious and emotional temperament, with its imperious need of believing something, he certainly bequeathed to me…”  Perhaps seeking to protect his father from suspicions of bigotry, Blackwood emphasised the inadequacy of his evangelism in providing moral clarity and discipline. When in the Episodes, for example, Blackwood is accused of stealing a poetry book by his schoolmaster, his father’s response is one of scepticism and disinterest:

He looked troubled, yet somehow not as grave as he ought to have looked. Perhaps he had his doubts.. . . What that fiendish headmaster… had said behind my back, I did not know, for my father never referred to the matter afterwards, and both I and my brother were removed from the school at the end of the term. But I was severely punished – sent to Coventry for three days – for doing something I had both done and had not done…

An apparently commonplace misunderstanding is thus transformed into a shimmering monument of uncertainty. Both father and son sink into awkward silence; the latter flames with indignant innocence but also feels “strangely guilty.” Blackwood was “haunted… for years” by this rather unremarkable experience, initially fearing that he would be sent to prison. Yet another stolen book lay at the heart of Blackwood’s “conversion” to mysticism. The young Algernon swiped a book of Yoga aphorisms which belonged to a visiting friend of his father’s, who was determined “to warn England that Satan was bringing dangerous Eastern teachings to the West, and this book was a first proof of the Fiend’s diabolical purpose.” Unlike the school poetry textbook which Blackwood had merely wandered off with, he consciously took the aphorisms, in full defiance of parental authority and evangelist teaching, and felt no guilt in doing so. In contrast to the morally uplifting sentiments of the school poetry, the defining virtue of the aphorisms seemed to be amorality and even meaninglessness:

I took it to bed with me and read it through from cover to cover. I read it twice, three times ; bits of it I copied out ; I did not understand a word of it, but a shutter rushed up in my mind, interest and joy were in me, a big troubling emotion, a conviction that I had found something I had been seeking hungrily for a long time, something I needed, something that, in an odd way, almost seemed familiar. I repeat – I did not understand a word of it…

After various unsatisfactory experiences at private schools, Blackwood was sent to a Moravian academy at Konigsfeld in the Black Forest, which encouraged more than a mere familiarisation with religious orthodoxies.  Set “among ancient haunted forests,” the school stirred “a sense of wonder” in the young Blackwood, and whilst its rituals possessed “a collective reality… that touched its sincerity with beauty,” the forests provided “an impression of grandeur, of loftiness, and of real religion . . .” Where once the little Algernon had stomped about informing the family servants that they were destined for hell, he now increasingly sensed that “only the very topmost of my personality was affected” by his youthful fervour.

Yet the school ultimately showed Blackwood “another aspect of the same general line of belief,” and whatever dogma his mind eventually put together (the “weird” aficionado S. T. Joshi has described it as “really a religion of Blackwood’s own making”) was similar in structure to his father’s evangelism. Blackwood professed to dislike his father’s faith because it “sharply divided” the world into “souls that were saved and those that were not,” whereas his Yoga aphorisms provided “a singular conviction of the unity of life everywhere and in everything…” Yet all ideologies have a unifying thread, and in the Episodes Blackwood would end up comparing “Old Souls” and “Young Souls”; a sort of cosmic snobbery in which “the bigwigs I interviewed for newspapers are forgotten, but the faces of Otto and the Italian shine in memory still.” And just as the evangelists assumed that however awful an individual, they retained some capacity for salvation, Blackwood regarded the majority of humanity as alienated from the greater “unity,” but not hopelessly so.

One should note that whilst Blackwood’s father ministered to all social classes, he made his name as a preacher at the more exclusive gatherings in Willis’ rooms in St James Street, where once admittance was only granted if one carried a voucher signed by a leading “lady of society.” In 1906 the New York Times remembered him presiding over “many prayer meetings for the benefit of men in society,” and when the Reverend A. Henderson told the elder Blackwood that, “You and Mr. North and others reach a class, and speak with a peculiar advantage which we ministers cannot do…,” he was most likely referring to the aristocracy. Blackwood’s tracts were “most useful for circulation, especially among the upper classes,” and he himself would scheme at “getting at the upper classes.”

Algernon would himself join with an aristocracy or elect of souls upon the Enlightenment’s own equivalent of the Counter-Reformation, a cultural mission which disliked the growing power of the middle classes and defied their rationalistic materialism. With Victorian assumptions being variously challenged by scientists and spiritualists, the philosopher William James’ call to imagine alternative forms of consciousness was a rallying cry to many of Blackwood’s generation. When studying at the University of Edinburgh, Blackwood would encounter theosophists and hypnotists, whilst in London he would join the Society for Psychical Research and investigate haunted houses. He would later become a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn -  although he regarded it more as a gentleman’s club than an apocalyptic movement – and he would seriously believe that he had been a Native American warrior in a former life. Blackwood experimented with spiritualism, morphine, and meditation, and found the last most to his taste.

These were exotic variations upon his father’s evangelism – all of them properties, or even playthings, of a progressive and liberal upper class – fictions of an elite knowledge which was beyond the regulation of society and the state ( “a desirable, genuine, and valuable expansion of consciousness which furnishes knowledge normally ahead of the race,” as Blackwood put it) but which were ultimately characterised by moral carelessness, and a boredom and disappointment at the established order of things.

Wishing to further the boundaries of consciousness, Blackwood would end up on the real frontiers of the New World, where he joined a listless and dissatisfied social class, or an aristocracy in exile:

Men from Oxford and Cambridge, with first rate classical training, were slinging drinks behind bars, or running about the country persuading the farmers to insure their stacks and outhouses; others with knowledge of language and pronounced literary talent were adding figures in subordinate positions in bookers’ offices. But by far the greater number were working as common labourers for small farmers all over the country.

One cannot help imagining Marie Antoinette dressed as a shepherdess. Blackwood would meet his nemesis George Arthur Bigge at a cricket match, which seems as alien to one’s conception of New York as Blackwood himself. In the Episodes, the jolly comradeship between Blackwood and his New York friends seems rather like that between the boys in Greyfriars school. Blackwood would experience genuine danger and poverty in the New World, but Ashley has noted that he “always had that lifeline back to comfort, good living and money.” At some level, Blackwood must have felt as if enchanted – protected from the terrors which threatened most working men – not least because his father was, from the offset, paying him an allowance which would have today amounted to several thousand pounds a year. Whilst many Americans embarked upon gold rushes in desperate attempts to make a fortune, Blackwood claims that he went to enjoy the scenery and open air. He was ultimately a hopeless greenhorn, and he lost a veritable fortune in a succession of business disasters in both Canada and America. Like Fanny Trollope, Blackwood would become a failed American, and the antics of this dreamy aristocrat on the frontier present a travesty of the American dream. And as with D. H. Lawrence, the only comforts which Blackwood found in the New World were those of the natural wilderness. Perhaps that panel of children had more than sufficient evidence to indict Blackwood of irresponsibility.

Whilst Blackwood’s father had ministered to the ungodly after returning from the Crimean war, the homecoming Algernon would resort to popular fiction as an impromptu means of advancing his spiritual ideals, addressing the reading public through improving and uplifting literature. The finest of his early books was A Prisoner in Fairyland, which Ashley claims that Blackwood had written during the happiest years of his life. This unique and incredible novel imagines three communities: the sleepy French village of Bourcelles which is lead by the deacons and elders of Blackwood’s presbytery – the “princess” Mademoiselle Lemaire, Henry Rogers, Jimbo, Monkey, and Jean Anne; a reading public who are eventually lead by the example of this village as it is translated into Daddy’s fiction; and the actual readership of the novel, whom Blackwood attempts to inspire with wonder. Daddy finds that “One must reach people’s hearts if one wants big sales. So few have brains.” Rogers contemplates Daddy’s forthcoming book in such terms which makes one only wish that Blackwood had himself attempted literary criticism:

A real book, then, meant putting one’s heart into sentences, telling one’s inmost secrets, confessing one’s own ideals with fire and lust and passion. That was the difference perhaps between literature and mere facile invention… now he had discovered a big idea, true as the sun, and able, like the sun, to warm thousands of readers, all ready for it without knowing it…

Roger’s secretary, Minks, concludes that the public “is looking for something of that kind, expecting it even, though it hardly knows what it really wants.” The required book would be written with a pen dipped in starlight, which Daddy readily acknowledges to be a “symbol” for “the sympathy of sweet endeavour, love, gentleness and sacrifice for others.” One may be uncertain whether this unifying sympathy is exclusively human or a part of Nature – the distinction is perhaps negated or transcended – for although such a reality is found amongst forests and “star caverns,” it encompasses the very thoughts of men:

“The stars flash your thoughts over the whole universe. None are ever lost. Sooner or later they appear in visible shape. Some one, for instance, must have thought this flower long ago” – he stooped and picked a blue hepatica at their feet – “or it couldn’t be growing here now.”

We are told, however, that the imagination “does not create so much as remember.” A Prisoner is a variation upon the antique folk tale of the child who falls in with the fairies and remains forever lost to mankind. Yet Blackwood flips this premise inside-out, so it is humanity who has irresponsibly wandered away from Nature and those who join the fairies are reclaimed rather than lost. It is the responsibility of the leader to help erring souls regain a more “natural” consciousness, and, in this respect, they are ultimately a servant of Nature. Rogers appreciates that, “…there must be a Leader… Without the Guide, Interpreter, Pioneer, how shall the world listen or understand…?”

[Instalment #1 is here. Instalment #3 will appear in March, and it will consider Bigge/Boyde and “The Empty House.” Ed.]

The Road Gritter.

Hard luck to everybody who has slipped over on the ice this Christmas. If only there was a system of local taxation – some sort of council tax – which could fund the gritting of roads and pavements. Cheers to Sammi for scanning this.

Re-possession: Remarks on Paranormal Activity.

The home has always occupied a critical but distinctly secondary place within the American dream: after the daring of the frontier comes the Edenic tranquillity of the established suburban residence. Whilst Washington Irving’s Sunnyside was the epitome of all homely comforts, the reader of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) may be struck by the degree to which Hawthorne himself must have consciously observed the day-to-day life of a nineteenth-century American house. As an author, Hawthorne had, of course, predominantly worked at home, but there is nevertheless something eccentric about his dispatches from the domestic frontier. For Southern slaveholders, the home was a personal tyranny; the transcendentalists lived and worked together in utopian communities; whilst both tyranny and idealism are conflated – along with home and workplace – on the cosmic voyage of Captain Ahab’s Pequod. From Lloyd Wright’s heavenly Fallingwater to Stuart Hamblem’s “ole house” – in which home and homeowner together perish – the American suburban home has always conveyed an iconic lustre and potency which are not found in, say, British fiction, where homes are either too big and tiresome or too cramped and grotty.

By the end of the twentieth century, the home regularly provided both Americans and beholders of America with a ready symbol of the nation’s power and wealth. American horror films and high school comedies were characteristically set in grand suburban piles. The film American Beauty unfolded within a domestic palace, which could not fail to remind one of the White House, just as the lady of the house bore an uncanny resemblance to Hilary Clinton. The Fresh Prince of Bel Air imagined a black family in the White House; whilst the phenomenally popular sitcoms, Fraiser and Friends, were set in lavish showroom apartments which seemed a lot more appealing than their bland inhabitants (in the latter case, it was forever unclear how the scatty, waitressing and temping “friends” managed either to pay their rents, or to have afforded such monstrosities in the first place.) In the era of the easygoing superpower, such images of domestic grandeur flowed around the world, a powerful current of propaganda which reached an ultimate perfection in the Wisteria Lane of Desperate Housewives.

Cut to the Credit Crunch – when Pitchfork’s track of 2009, Animal Collective’s My Girls, is an anthem to homeownership (“But with a little girl, and by my spouse/I only want a proper house”) – and we have Oren Peli’s edgy low-budget horror flick Paranormal Activity which features a particularly horrible house. Aficionados of the ghostly fictions of Sheridan Le Fanu and M.R. James will heartily welcome Paranormal Activity to the canon, as for all of the uniqueness and innovation of its screenplay, it actually amounts to that most traditional of things: a well put together Victorian ghost story. Haunted houses are as old as this tradition, of course, but Paranormal Activity is not so much concerned with the goblin himself – whose reign of terror is for most of the film confined to slamming doors – but with the suffocating claustrophobia and folie a deux of the young couple – an atmosphere which seems a natural and inseparable part of their San Diego tract house.

By the end of the film, we may be thoroughly sick of Micah and Katie’s pasty faces, but even more so of their home – Micah’s camera seems to have probed into its every corner, and run over its every detail, over and over again. Whenever Micah tries to film the demon (which is invisible), his camera ends up recording the blank walls and still interiors. One may divine just as much about the demon from the haunting image of Micah and Katie sleeping slightly too far apart, as from the Big Bird footprints which it leaves beside their bed; but the meat of the story – the couple’s feelings of fear, confusion, and resentment – cannot, of course, be filmed, and in the absence of such insight, we are left with substitute images of what looks like their disturbed and badly-behaved house: a door opening and closing, thumps, crashes and draughts, a television unexpectedly turning on, and an inconsequential little fire.

By the end of the film, we may feel that we know the couple’s house almost as well as our own – that we would have little trouble navigating around the kitchen, or trotting up and down that glossy centrepiece staircase, or watering all of their pot plants. Aside from the opening shot of Katie pulling up outside in her car, and a sleepwalking scene where she gets as far as the garden, the entire film is imprisoned inside the house and the camera floats repeatedly and aimlessly around the interior, like a fish in a tank. The couple try to dismiss the house as an irrelevance – as if it was merely something so commonplace as a setting – by insisting that the demon will follow Katie wherever she goes, although it is hard to imagine it accompanying them to Burger King. The demon is part of them and their home (although it is suggested that in a previous manifestation he terrorised Katie and her sister, presumably after they developed a similar intimacy to that which she would attain with Micah).

The true perversity of Paranormal Activity is that it obsessively observes an example of the sort of home which many Americans are presently having repossessed: tract homes or “starter homes,” which are the first foot upon the property ladder for the typical young couple. “You are powerless!” Katie will rage at Micah as they are faced with the prospect of losing their home. Paranormal Activity thus matches America with its own timely ghost, or, to recall the distinction made by the film’s psychic, maybe the ghost of the lost house is a demon: the foolish property purchases which damned the American economy. It is somewhat appropriate that Micah is a day-trader, as his inconsiderate and hapless attempts to exploit his lover’s misfortune could easily cast him as the personification of all modern finance. Yet Paranormal Activity is now reputedly the most profitable film in the history of cinema – taking in $100 million on a reported budget of $15,000 – and perhaps such wondrous enterprise exorcises its own spirit of repossession.

[Tychy has previously taken the piss out of Most Haunted and ventured his own account of a seance. Ed.]

A. J. Alan meets Father Christmas.

…we suddenly came to a nice little cottage in the wood. A charming little cottage, it was. Thatched roof, light coming out of the windows (it was nearly dark). Albert said: “Here we are.” There was a sign hanging over the door. I could just read it. It said: “F. Christmas. Chimneys swept by appointment.”

There was a black sweep’s brush sticking up over the sign. Albert knocked on the door, and after a minute or two it was opened by a very nice old man with a long white beard, and he asked us to go in.

So we all went in, including the owl – I forgot to tell you that the owl was sitting on my shoulder. After all, he was a friend of mine.

When we got inside I looked round the room. It was beautifully clean and very tidy – not a bit like you’d expect a sweep’s room to be like.

There was a red dressing-gown hanging up on the door with a pair of top-boots just underneath. Then I looked at the old man. He was a sprightly old gentleman. He had bright red cheeks just like apples, and the most wonderfully white beard you ever saw. I said: “Do tell me, how do you manage to keep your beard so beautifully white while you sweep chimneys? I always thought sweeps were black – all over.”

He said: “Good gracious no, we aren’t. Don’t you know that our wives always take in washing, and that we always fetch it on Mondays, and take it back on Saturdays or some day like that?”

I said: “I grant you all that, but what about your beard? That must be a dreadful business.”

He said: “Well it is rather a trouble, but I’ve got a little bag I put it in when I sweep chimneys, and that keeps it quite clean.”

I know it was true because he showed me the bag, and then we discussed laundry for a bit, but all the time I couldn’t help feeling that I’d seen him before. His face seemed so familiar somehow, and yet I couldn’t quite place him, as the saying is. That may happen to some of you when you get older. When it does, do as I did. I said: “My dear old sir, I know you perfectly well. Please forgive me for not remembering your name.”

He said: “That’s all right, of course I’ll forgive you. The last time I saw you, you were a little boy of five, in bed fast asleep, and I brought you a rabbit.”

I said: “Bless my soul, of course, you’re Father Christmas.”

I ought to have thought of it before with F. Christmas on the sign outside, but I wasn’t expecting it somehow. And he said he was Father Christmas, but, naturally, he couldn’t be Father Christmas except at Christmas because – well he couldn’t, could he?

I said: “Yes, but do you mean to tell me you are a chimney-sweep all the rest of the year?”

And he said: “Of course I am, I must do something. What do you think my nice red cloak and white fur would look like after coming down millions of chimneys if they hadn’t been swept first?”

I hadn’t ever thought of that.

A. J. Alan, “The Sweep: (A Story for Children)” A. J. Alan’s Second Book. London: Hutchinson & Co Ltd, 1933.

[Although Alan is a great British author - and a unique and innovative contributor to the short story genre - no edition of his writing is in print today, aside from a few good stories up on Gutenberg ( the best are here and here). Ed.]