The Collector

As I mentioned in my post on the essay collection Wormholes, The Collector, also by John Fowles, was next on my reading list. I marked several passages that I'll return to over and over again, as I love Fowles's work, but the following excerpt illustrates the author's opinion on the destructive nature of the amateur collector.

I showed her a drawer of Chalkhill and Adonis Blues, I have a beautiful var. ceroneus Adonis and some var. tithonus Chalkhills, and I pointed them out. The var. ceroneus is better than any they got in the N.H. Museum. I was proud to be able to tell her something. She had never heard of aberrations.

"They're beautiful. But sad."

Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.

"But it's you who make it so!" She was staring at me across the drawer. "How many butterflies have you killed?"

You can see.

"No, I can't. I'm thinking of all the butterflies that would have come from these if you'd let them live. I'm thinking of all the living beauty you've ended."

You can't tell.

"You don't even share it. Who sees these? You're like a miser, you hoard up all the beauty in these drawers."

I was really very disappointed, I thought all her talk was very silly. What difference would a dozen specimens make to a species?

"I hate scientists," she said. "I hate people who collect things, and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more."

Fowles performs an interesting magic trick in The Collector, managing to act as a collector himself--by dwelling so obsessively on the subject of human evil--and also as a saboteur of collecting--by revealing its corrupt motives. Clegg, the book's antihero, is the ultimate unreliable narrator, forever justifying his inhuman actions (and his murderous inactions) in a prudish, wounded voice that's terrifyingly believable. Clegg is such a perfect specimen of his working class genus that his very specific evil is diffused into an authorial excoriation of the general population. In studying a single social aberration, Fowles has killed, inspected, and classified an entire slice of vulgar, conservative, middle class England.

Wormholes

In Jan Relf's introduction to Wormholes by John Fowles, she quotes Gunter Grass on the subject of exile and loss: "Language didn't compensate me for my loss, but by stringing words together I was able to make something in which my loss could be declared.... Loss has given me a voice. Only what is entirely lost demands to be endlessly named: there is mania to call the lost thing until it returns. Without loss there would be no literature."

Fowles names a great many things in his collection of essays and occasional writings. He writes about Greece, about being English but not British, about William Golding, Thomas Hardy, and Alain Fournier. He gives personal insight into the writing of The Magus and the filming of The French Lieutenant's Woman. In the essay, "The Blinded Eye," he explains his antipathy toward amateur collectors, how their rampant cataloging and categorizing prevents the collector from understanding and appreciating that which they are collecting in any meaningful way. Identifying and naming a thing, he says, no doubt important in the advance of science, can also limit one's appreciation of it as a complex, natural entity. Fowles argues that scientific classification is not the only serious relationship we can have with nature, but the mania to classify makes it seem so.

Next on my reading list is The Collector, a novel by Fowles that addresses this very subject, and no doubt once I've read it, I'll be able to make some sort of cogent statement about Fowles walking the tightrope between these two ideas, endlessly naming a thing in order to argue against endless naming of a thing. Right now, I'm afraid if I keep going over this in my head, I'll bust a gasket.

Anthology Builder

Writer and editor Nancy Fulda is developing an exciting new fiction market: Anthology Builder. The idea: You the reader get to put on your editor's hat and build an anthology with previously published stories you select yourself. If that's not exciting enough, you also get to choose cover art from exciting artists like Hugo-award-winning fan artist Frank Wu. More and more authors and artists are making their work available every day, so check back frequently for new stories and artwork. I'm currently offering three short stories through Anthology Builder:

"Sleep Sweetly, Junie Carter" from Writers of the Future XX
"Femina Obscura" from Polyphony 5
"The Sympathy of Five" from The Elastic Book of Numbers

Some of my favorite stories also offered:

"Sunday" by Alethea Kontis
"The God Engine" by Ted Kosmatka
"Horizontal Rain" by Mary Robinette Kowal
"Ghost Chimes" by Nancy Fulda
"Foam on the Water" by Cat Rambo
"Looking through Lace" by Ruth Nestvold

Go forth, and build.

Tortilla Flat

I chose this book because of its mythopoeic qualities; I'd heard it had something to do with Arthurian legend, but set in roughly the same time and place as Cannery Row. I don't have enough knowledge of Arthuriana to draw insightful parallels to Tortilla Flat, but some of the themes did seep through, once I knew what I was looking for. In any event--for me, the fun wasn't so much in comparing Danny and his friends to Arthur and his knights. While reading, I was more interested in the deft way Steinbeck replaced my moral code, at least temporarily, with that of his heroes. Through vivid characterization and a brilliant voice, the author convinced me to see his merry band of shiftless, drunken brutes as they saw themselves, as heroes, brothers, diamonds of the first water.

Here is a passage on Danny's closest friend, Pilon:

It is astonishing to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leprous. Honor and peace to Pilon, for he had discovered how to uncover and to disclose to the world the good that lay in every evil thing. Nor was he blind, as so many saints are, to the evil of good things. It must be admitted with sadness that Pilon had neither the stupidity, the self-righteousness, nor the greediness for reward ever to become a saint. Enough for Pilon to do good and to be rewarded by the flow of human brotherhood accomplished.

Pilon goes on to manipulate and con a naive homeless man they call the Pirate out of his hard-earned hoard of "two bitses," supposedly for his own good. In Tortilla Flat, selfishness can be philanthropy, greed can be concern for brotherly welfare, violence can be an expression of affection, and crime can be a demonstration of courage and joie de vive. Steinbeck made me root for the criminals, and I got warmly sentimental when Danny and the paisanos helped the Pirate save up enough quarters to buy a golden candlestick for Saint Francis--in thanks for the miraculous healing of one of the Pirate's dogs. The Pirate's sermon to his dogs was both hilarious and touching.

As Jesus Maria says before recounting the story of Tall Bob, the passionate old viejo who accidentally hung himself to death trying to win the heart of a beautiful girl, Tortilla Flat will make you laugh. "But when you open your mouth to laugh, something like a hand squeezes your heart."

Mrs. Dalloway

Last year, I wrote a few short pieces about Joseph Cornell, claiming him as a kindred spirit because of his anxious, obsessive nature. Cornell seems to have seen the world at a peculiar granularity, and yet with a curious tunnel vision as well--his energies focused on birds, ballerinas, and bubbles. Chronically anxious and even morbid, his writings are deeply nostalgic as he meditates on the transcendent beauties in the world. I was reminded of Cornell's hallucinatory visions in one of Septimus Smith's reveries in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

He had only to open his eyes; but a weight was on them; a fear. He strained; he pushed; he looked; he saw Regent's Park before him. Long streamers of sunlight fawned at his feet. The trees waved, brandished. We welcome, the world seemed to say; we accept; we create. Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now and again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks--all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.

Septimus has been broken by the war, and against the beauty of the day, sitting muttering nonsense to himself in Regent's Park, he serves as one of Virginia Woolf's many counterpoints to the bright frivolity of Clarissa Dalloway's London. After this bit of joy, Septimus has a vision of one of his fallen comrades, and he can no longer focus on the beauties of the world, or on the needs of his distraught wife. Just when we're about to be sucked down into horror with Septimus Smith, the narrative is whisked away by Peter Walsh, who is passing by on a stroll, in raptures over the beauties of London.

I find reading Mrs. Dalloway as exhausting as reading Joseph Cornell's journals and biographies. Its bipolar ups and downs are tiring, but the narrative flow is also exhilarating. Life is an emotional stew. You can't feel this emotion without that one, Woolf and Cornell both seem to say-- Woolf in her novels, short stories, essays; Cornell in his journals, paintings, and multi-media sculpture--as if creative mania can't manifest but as a precursor of, or temporary reprieve from, anxieties and paranoia. Of course I understand that their work can and should be read in external context as well, but I'm most interested in an artist's internal state, and both Woolf and Cornell seem to show the often bizarre focus and hypersensitivity to detail of the truly obsessive.

Mrs. Dalloway was written as a deliberate test of the heroic mode, using the classical method of digression-and-return to paint a portrait of her own society, which in many ways, the author found frightening. It foreshadows, whether purposely or not, Virginia Woolf's own suicide. Mrs. Dalloway isn't meant to be comforting, yet I'm comforted by it. The novel's anxieties, its moody flip-flopping and fragmented observations, make sense to me emotionally--even when I'm often left scratching my head, at a loss to follow its transitional point of view. I'm comforted because the novel's very nature assures me that I'm not alone in how I perceive the world (in flashes, fragments, disparate, overwhelming details, joys and sorrows knocking together like marbles). In its carefully structured chaos, Mrs. Dalloway extends a hand to help me emerge, blinking, from my own solipsism.