Leigh Brackett...the queen of romantic interplannetry adventure!

Sea-Kings of Mars & Otherworldly Stories

Since I've already referred to this book a couple of times on this blog, I thought it only fair that I should devote a post to it now that I've finally finished it. I took my time with it because I struggle to read more than 600 pages of such writing. It's a little raw, unpolished, at times more concerned with simply getting from a to b as so much adventure writing is, with an obvious focus on action. it's writing for adolescents, which I don't mean as a criticism. I dearly wish I could have discovered this writer when I was on the verge of adolescence, around the same sort of time I was introduced to the work of her friend Michael Moorcock. And The Empire Strikes Back doesn't count, as it turns out that she didn't write the final script which was used for the film. Her posthumous credit was a sign of affection. She was though involved in the scripts for several Howard Hawks movies, including both The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo, two of my favourite films of Hollywood's golden age.

No matter, whatever her actual contributions to George Lucas' trilogy, a character like Han Solo is clearly a Leigh Brackett protagonist with the serial numbers filed off. She clearly loved that hard bitten, cynical man of action. Elements of the personas of both Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, appropriately enough. Interesting that from her descriptions, her most famous character, Eric John Stark, hero of three tales in this collection, appears to be black. Not that that's reflected in any cover art I've been able to find online. And Stark's Tarzan-like origin on Mercury as 'N'Chaka' suggests a white skin, growing up amongst savage tribespeople. Still, we're told so often about his dark skin that it doesn't seem wholly inconsistent with what's written. And it's refreshing to think that one of the major heroes of this era of pulp science fiction might have been black.

But yes, as the reference to Tarzan surely suggests, she romanticises primitivism, but so what? It's her romanticism about her fantastical vision of Mars which is surely the main attraction of her fiction. The plots are fairly simple, often reliant on tropes such as telepathy and lost races. What's really powerful is the atmosphere, redolent of fantasies of North Africa and heavy with a sense of ill defined loss, and her powerful descriptions of Mars' landscape. A late story like 'The Last Days of Shandakor', unusually for her told in the first person, is largely plotless, and all the better for it. With many of her stories, I found my attention tended to drift a little as we reached the usually action packed climax of the story. What I most wanted was simply to inhabit this magical, barely habitable Mars for as long as possible. And whilst she may be guilty of romanticising primitivism, a prominent themes is the clash between Mars' aborigines and Earth's destructive bureaucracy. Politically she is on the right side, as far as I'm concerned. Tyrany and authoritarianism, whatever forms they take, is always resisted by her otherwise cynical heroes. Brackett's use of telepathy is interesting in this light. It nearly always takes the form of bodily possession, literally conquering another person's self in taking away their body.

But at times, Leigh Brackett can feel like a bizarrely post-colonial writer! The use of North Africa in the creation of her fictional Mars is obvious - there's even a city called Barrakesh, so it's not like it isn't in plain site - do seem to invite an Orientalist reading. It's difficult to know quite what to make of all this. Her writing displays an obvious love with her invented alien world and cultures, and undoubtedly part of waht's so attractive is a romanticisation of North Africa, which reminds me of something I read online a while ago, that exoticism isn't always a bad thing, because it also expresses a liking for what's being exoticised. It can be the beginning of an engagement with a real place. Something of this development can be traced in this collection, where the final story, the last one Leigh Brackett wrote about Mars, before her romantic vision was lost to our advances in knowledge about the real Mars, is the most explicit confrontation with issues of colonialism of any of them. Here the villains aren't some mysterious lost race as in so many of her stories, but liberal do-gooders who really want to help the natives. The means by which they are ultimately persuaded to stop their interverence might feel implausible, but then this is an adventure story. Some of the endings to other stories are rather more bittersweet, even downbeat. It's actually quite rare that Brackett leaves you with a simple feeling of victory. So her romaticism isn't so far away from the real world after all.

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

'We are not concerned,' he said, 'with long-winded creations, with long-term beings. Our creatures will not be the heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise; their characters - without a background. Sometimes, for one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort to bring them to life. We openly admit: we shall not insist either on durability or solidity of workmanship; our creations will be temporary, to serve for a single occasion....'

Bruno Schulz, 'Talior's Dummies'

I always knew I'd love the work of Bruno Schulz. Obviously, since I loved Kafka. And the Quay brothers' film of The Street of Crocodiles. He didn't publish much, and I must have passed over a copy of his collected fiction in more than one second hand bookshop, which is where I turned up this edition of his first book. Originally titled Cinnamon Shops in it's original Polish publication in 1934. I don't know why they used a title of another of the stories for the English edition, except perhaps that it sounds more evocative, more indicative of the way his stories and language infuse objects with life, a quality which is magically captured by the Quays' stop motion animation. It's such good writing that the temptation is just to go on quoting him, instead of going to the bother trying to define what it is one likes about it.

Emerging from a similar middle European background as Kafka, both from former outposts of the Austro Hungarian empire, you can see why they might get bracketed together, although in fact the translator's introduction suggests Schulz didn't read The Trial until after his first book was published. And whilst there is perhaps something of a kinship between the two, a similarly subterranean imagination, there are surely just as many differences. Whereas the Father in Kafka is a menacing incarnation of the Law, Schulz's Father is eccentric, something of a clown and buffoon. A figure of authority certainly, but a much more equivocal one. Where Kafka's stories come in shades of grey, Schulz writing delights in colour. In place of Kafka's impenetrable bureaucracies, Schulz celebrates his memories of a provincial petit-bourgeoisie life.

'Memory' is the right word here. So many of his stories begin by placing their events in a particular time within their first line, but this particularity is unsettled by the way in which it's only 'that' July, or August, or Winter. These months and seasons have no relation to each other, no stable chronology so that we're stranded in the eternal flow of memory. For it is always inevitably past. The translator describes it perceptibly as a 'sunken world, lost forever under the lava of history', which gets to the heart of it really well. It's not 'nostalgia', a word I sometimes worry that I overuse on this blog, and in any case there are plenty of works about the remembering the past which don't fit comfortably within the term. It's not the pain of remembering, or the slightly fuzzy cossiness into which much our contemporary culture has transformed the term. Reading these stories I was thinking that I could think of nothing else like them in English, except perhaps the work of Terrence Davies, but that may only be because I received a DVD set of his films at Christmas and recently saw Distant Voices, Still Lives for the first time. There's the same disorientation of memory, the lack of sentimentality, and a very complicated longing, because what's being remembered is as much a source of trauma as it is something the author would wish to regain. We maybe need another term to describe this sensibility. 'Remembrancer' is the slightly clunky term John Fowles coined to describe Flora Thompson's work, and may serve for lack of anything else.

Perhaps that wound would be harder to heal too, if only the present were more welcoming. To belabour the comparison with Kafka, another difference is that Schulz seems more self conscious about his fiction, if this doesn't contradict what I've written above, placing his fantastical transformations within an historical context. Where Kafka transcribes his dreams of his present, the fiction all encompassing, for Schulz this all took place in the past. The present, as encountered in the story 'The Street of Crocodiles', is shoddy and badly made, flimsy and grey. A common trope of modernity perhaps, which here also includes such horrors as miscegenation and effeminacy. This upsets me rather, as it always does when you discover that someone you like might hold opinions which you find offensive. To quote from the translator's introduction one final time, the world his fiction remembers is a patriarchal one. It's inevitable perhaps that such a world would find those aspects of modernity particularly troubling. And in any case, at the story's end Schulz undercuts his tirade when he observes that this area of the city wasn't as bad as he makes out in the story, merely an impoverished provincial reflection of metropolitan reality. It's always remembered aslant, as it were. And it's also the consciousness of being provincial. There's always an elsewhere to which you are looking.

Adela, leaning against the balcony rails, bent over the distant, stormy roar of the city, caught from it all the louder accents and, with a smile, put together the lost syllables of a song, trying to join them, to read some sense into the rising and falling grey monotony of the day.

Bruno Schulz, 'The Comet'

The Sea! The Sea!

"Compass - Life Jacket - Windgauge - What strange, awe-inspiring words!"

Tove Jansson, 'Moomin and the Sea', The Collected Moomin Comic Strips, Volume 3 

One reason to love India...

Yes, that is an advert for Top Gear...

India...Edith Wharton

“‘But you must have three weeks to do India properly,’ her husband conceded, anxious to have it understood that he was no frivolous globe-trotter.”

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore

“They walked together down the King’s Road, went into Woolworths, and were dazzled.”

“Richard was the kind of man who has two clean handkerchiefs on him at half past three in three morning.”

“Heinrich was exceptionally elegant. An upbringing designed to carry him through changes of regime and frontier, possible loss of every worldly possession, and, in the event of crisis, protracted stays with distant relatives ensconced wherever the aristocracy was tolerated, from the Polish border to Hyde Park Gate, in short, a good European background, had made him totally self-contained and able with sunny smile and the formal handshake of the gymnase to set almost anybody at their ease…”

“Partisan Street…was, as has been said, considered a rough place – a row of decrepit two-up, two-down brick houses, the refuge of crippled and deformed humanity. Whether they were poor because they were lame, or lame because they were poor, was perhaps a matter for sociologists, and a few years later, when their dwellings were swept away and replaced by council flats with rents much higher than they could afford, it must be assumed that they disappeared from the face of the earth.”

“In this, its heyday, the King’s Road fluttered, like a gypsy encampment, with hastily-dyed finery, while stage folk emerged from their beds at a given hour, to patrol the long pavements between Sloane Square and the Town Hall. …A paradise for children, a riot of misrule, the queer looking shops reversed every fixed idea in the venerable history of commerce. Sellers, dressed in brilliant colours, outshone the purchasers, and, instead of welcoming them, either ignored them or were so rude that they could only have hoped to drive them away. The customers in return sneered at the clothing offered to them, and flung it on the ground. There were no prices, no sizes, no way to tell which stock was which, so that racks and rails of dresses were transferred as though by a magic hand from one shop to another. The doors stood open, breathing out incense and heavy soul, and the spirit was that of the market scene in the pantomime when the cast, encouraged by the audience, has let the business get out of hand.”

“The barge anchors were unrecognisable as such, more like crustaceans, specimens of some giant type long since discarded by Nature, but still clinging to their old habitat, sunk in the deep pits they had made in the foreshore."

Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore

 

Birthday Post

Currently Reading: Almost finished Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald’s third novel. Winner of the Booker in the year I was born, although of course I wasn’t aware of that at the time. At Christmas of the same year, a copy of Jacques Henri Lartigue’s Diary of a Century was given as a gift. I know this because the copy I came across and acquired from a charity shop yesterday contained an inscription to that effect. As ever when you find something like this, you’re left wondering who these people were and what the book that’s now yours might have meant to them.

It took me a few weeks to get around to writing my previous post on The Bookshop. I’m really struggling to make this blog the kind of reading diary I want it to be. My post on Geoff Dyer’s Working the Room has become rather longer than expected. And I still haven’t gone back to the piece on China, which I read as long ago as last September. We’re leaving for India tomorrow, so I expect all of this is going to have to wait a few weeks until we get back. Assuming it doesn’t get swamped with work.

So, what else have I read for pleasure recently? Nicola Barker’s earliest short stories, collected as Love Your Enemies. I was following her work for a while, but then stopped after Behindlings. I do agree with her that the British public’s treatment of David Blaine’s stunt was appalling, but I don’t need an entire novel to tell me that. And I was put off Darkmans by a review which compared it (unfavourably) to Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. Her fiction does seem to have ballooned somewhat since her earliest novels and stories, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Behindlings might have been a long novel, but was also a fantastic piece of literary fiction, evoking the circumscribed lives of the inhabitants of the kind of England which I rarely encounter in our literary fiction with a beautiful skewed poetry.

What else? Poetry by Phillip Larkin and Coleridge. Larkin might be the minor poet that some of his detractors take him to be, but he still wrote a handful of beautiful poems. He loses me a bit in those poems where he attacks matrimony. Not just because I’m happily married (although I am), but because that’s where he comes closest to misanthropy and misogyny, which is otherwise contained in his more successful (and memorable) poems. Coleridge, I should have read when I was 15. That yearning after the absolute.

And Margery Allingham’s Tiger in the Smoke. My first Albert Campion, for all that the supposed hero at the centre of the series is rather absent from this one. A commentator on another blog I follow recently made the point about the genre conventions of crime fiction, that they aren’t really as restrictive as some people think, because you can just pay lip service to the conventions and then go off on whatever tangent you like. I wonder though if they aren’t more restrictive for those writers who are attempting to write a more realistic fiction. This might possibly help to explain my growing boredom with Ian Rankin’s work for instance.

Margery Allingham, I think I always pigeonholed with Agatha Christie and the like. The sort of crime fiction I think of as getting adapted into films for Sunday evening viewing. And in fact, I’m sure I can remember watching one with my Mum. Tiger in the Smoke is far stranger than I expected, somehow straddling the lines between realism and outright fantasy. An utterly bonkers plot is placed with a foggy post war London evoked with considerable fidelity to time and place. The plot, such as it is, is just an excuse to relax and enjoy the scenes, the characters, the dialogue. It’s a confident performance, a phrase I’ve chosen deliberately. She seems to share with Dickens that sense of a theatrical London. As well as a taste for rather flamboyant names for her characters. I mean, a villain called Jack Havoc? I ask you! As her narrative voice acknowledges in a brief aside, ‘…technicolor was inadequate for that fantasy.’ Quite.