The Ballet of Dr Caligari and Madder Mysteries

 

The Ballet of Dr Caligari and Madder Mysteries by Reggie Oliver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With few exceptions, I have come to love the work of Reggie Oliver. While I was lukewarm about Flowers of the Sea , I was head-over-heels about The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler and Other Stories and Mrs. Midnight and Other Stories . I had heard mixed reviews from readers I respect and admire, so I was curious where this volume would fall.

I began with misgivings. While the opening story, "A Donkey at the Mysteries," had some great moments, the ending fell a bit flat for me. I loved the subtext of unknowingly participating in rites one does not understand, but I was hoping for a moment of anagnorises that never materialized. The story had momentum, a series of setups, then . . . nothing. If this was authorial intent, the potential was under-utilized. Perhaps this is because I had read and quite enjoyed Brian C. Murarescu's investigation into ancient Greek and Roman cults of psychedelia(?), The Immortality Key . I had been (pardon the pun - but I am a dad) keyed up for the read, but was disappointed. Not upset. Just disappointed. Have I mentioned I'm a dad?

The second story was a touch better. "The Head" is a double entendre laced with Oliver's bleak humor. It's a strange admixture of sitcom and dread horror that devolves into an absurdist experimentalism. I really do like the two main characters (as much as one can like a madman and a disembodied head), and, as with other works by Oliver, his characters really shine. A worthy story, not his best, but a good read nonetheless.

When I started to figure out the subject matter of the third tale, I was prepared to be really, really disappointed. As a rule, I hate werewolf stories. But I might have to make an exception for "Tawny". I didn't love it, but this English social comedy with a lycanthropic twist was an amusing read.

Then, suddenly, the collection hit its stride. "The Devils Funeral" is peak Oliver. Clergy, madness, corruption, decay, and the near simultaneous death of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Charles Darwin as a sideshow that leaves lingering questions. The question that keeps being posed is "who is the enemy"? It's a seemingly simple question with a dastardly labyrinth of possible answers and meanings, most of it unanswerable and meaningless. Existentialism reigns above. And, as above, so below.

A sinister comedy, or a comedic tale of horror? "Baskerville's Midgets" displays Oliver's insider's insight into the actor's life beyond the stage. This (and other stories about the intersection of horror and theater) is a story that only Oliver could have written. His background as an actor, playwright, and fiction author find a fitting culmination in this story, which will have you checking under your bed for (?).

Oliver next completes an M.R. James fragment "The Game of Bear". The transition, though carefully documented, would be fairly seamless without the indicator, which only serves to sever the tale in two. Oliver does an admirable job of mimicking James' voice, particularly in the climax of the story. Of course, James did put a strong personal stamp on the structure and tone of the English ghost story, so no surprises here.

"The Final Stage" is an existential tale that only one who has acted onstage can fully appreciate; not only because of the settings and situations, but because of the attitude that one must take to truly become immersed in their characters, not just the willful suspension of disbelieve, but the willful deceit which one must not merely engage in, but wallow in, if one is to be "a brilliant actor". There is a price to pay. But how are the funds exchanged? Does the character take from the actor, or the actor from the character? The economies of "real" life and faux-life are powerfully in play here.

With the introduction of a certain trope about mid-way through the story, I was ready to write off "The Endless Corridor" as just another vampire story. It is not just another vampire story. It is, in fact, much more nuanced and much more sinister than that trope led me to believe. Oliver, with considerable panache, twists the old trope into something entirely new and more horrifying. My trepidation was allayed, but my frisson was piqued.

Oliver continues to unveil the "back" of the theater in his mystery "The Vampyre Trap," an excellent, if old-fashioned tale of jealousy and ambition behind the curtain. One wonders who the actors are and who the characters are, as these roles become muddled. What better place for a murder or three in a place whose sole purpose is deceit and drama? There are strong resonances between this story and "The Final Stage" earlier in the volume, not because of direct subject matter, but because both hint at a certain sinister something taking place behind the masks of the masks of the masks.

The title story is the most brilliant story in the volume, but only those who have watched Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari will fully appreciate its impact. If I were to teach a class on the "O'Henry ending" I would show the movie, then have students read this. Textbook. And fantastically well-crafted. This is a Reggie Oliver masterpiece; one of his best stories ever.

How can I resist a story about one of my favorite eras of painting, that of the Pre-Raphaelites? I can't. Nor can the protagonist and victim(s) of "Love and Death" resist the alluring illusion of beauty, over-shrouded by the absolute victory of decay and death. Everyone in this tale is caught in this trap. Perhaps only the reader can escape. Perhaps not. But the allure remains.

"Porson's Piece" is as solid of an English ghost story as I've ever read. The village in which most of the action takes place shares half a name with <a href="https://forrestaguirre.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-day-hike-in-cotswolds.html>a village in the Cotswolds that my wife and I hiked through in 2019</a>, and I think I might know some of the "fictional" spots described. One path in particular (a photo of which is at my blog) was described in such a way that I cannot shake the feeling that this very path was the one Oliver here described. This added to the verisimilitude for me, but maybe I am just hallucinating, like the main character. Or maybe not.

Oliver begins "Lady With A Rose" with an ekphrasis of a Titian painting. The story is erudite and the characters colorful (pun intended), but not as startling as many of his other works. The final "twist" was to be expected and sort of just . . . ends there.

This collection has some real gems in it, but the opening and closing stories were unspectacular. An odd way to construct a collection.

The great in this collection carries the less-spectacular tales. Perhaps I've read too much of Oliver and am a bit jaded? I don't think so. He still astounds me, at times. I would hate to discourage anyone from reading "Porson's Piece," "The Ballet of Dr. Caligari," "Baskerville's Midgets," or "The Devil's Funeral," all of which were outstanding stories. But I can't give it a perfect five. Nor can I drop it to an "average" rating of three stars. I'm firmly in the four camp with this one.

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Carl Otto Czeschka Illustrations 1895-1900

 

Carl Otto Czeschka Illustrations 1895-1900 by Thomas Negovan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Perhaps it has something to do with having spent half my childhood in Europe (Germany, Italy, England), or maybe it's just a matter of taste; regardless of the impetus, I am a hardened europhile (if there isn't such a word, I just made it. You're welcome, Shakespeare lovers). And while Americans are exposed to European art, cinema, literature, etc. now more than ever, I tend to dive into some of the more obscure, recondite works that my co-patriots (can I use that term in this context? Again, you're welcome) might miss either because of lack of interest or lack of exposure. This is particularly true in my taste in books and literature. For example, I've met few Americans who know the works of Géza Csáth, Marcel Schwob, Paul Willems, or Hanns Heinz Ewers. More are aware of the works of Kafka, obviously, or even Gustav Meyrink, but there is a treasure trove of great literature that is only recently being brought to the attention of American audiences.

In terms of visual arts, however, we Americans are more well-versed in the breadth and depth of the European tradition due, I think, largely, to the timing of the Renaissance, when the United States simply did not exist as a nation. Most of our modern western art springs from techniques developed in the Renaissance. Sure, there are many, many exceptions (Fauvism, Japonisme, etc), but by and large western art is rooted in European precedent.

Still, we Americans have much to learn. On the whole, I am amazed at the cultural illiteracy of the masses here. Yes, I'm an over-educated snob, yes, I'm a cultural elitist. So shoot me (that most American thing to do, N'est-ce pas?). I was born in Europe. Half of my childhood was spent there. I am a Europhile and I am frankly appalled at how Americo-centric my "home" nation is.

Now that my ranting is over, let's proceed on learning a tiny bit more about European art. For this purpose, I am giving my strongest recommendation to "read" ("see?", "meditate upon?") Century Guild's absolutely fantastic presentation of Carl Otto Czescha Illustrations 1895-1900.

Normally, I would take a moment here to introduce the person whose artwork is under consideration, Carl Otto Czescha. But I don't want to spoil that aspect of the book for you. Thomas Negovan has collected and collated a great deal of information that is otherwise scattered across physical and virtual archives so thinly as to be ghostlike. Czeschka's life alone makes for an interesting biography. It's an inspiring story, to say the least.

Not only is the research well done it is well-presented. The narrative of Czescha's life and career is written in a font somewhere between gothic and art nouveau. I have no idea what the font is, but it is beautiful and appropriate to the atmosphere and work. I have the hardcover copy of the book (limited to 650 copies - get yours), rather than the deluxe slipcase edition (limited to 150 copies - #lust), which has a different front cover. But I presume the inside pages are identical because, let's face it, who wants to lay out the same book twice?

The artwork is, as one might expect, absolutely stunning. Should you require visuals, I'll point you to the Century Guild Salon episode where Negovan and Kat Handler explore the book in depth, answering listener questions (yes, a few by me - I can't help myself) along the way. Note that these are Czeschka's early works, in a different "voice" than his later, more geometrical works, but obviously drawn by the same deft hand. Many of the works are collected from the Allegorien published by the Wiener Werkstatte around the turn of the 20th century and some are from children's books, if I remember correctly. You'll note several "ex libris" book plates, as well, and I have to say that as a booklover, I am tickled pink (that sounds so painful) by the fact that so many of these are from this artistic sub-sub-sub-genre. I love ephemera, and here you get snapshots of such ephemera in abundance.

The art itself is dreamlike or, in some instances nightmarish. For those of us with both a strong romantic and morbid streak, it's a perfect place to land. Czeschka's sinuous figures ooze into the eyes and brain with such ease! Subject matter includes oh-so-many faeries, mermaids, fruit and flowers in abundance, angels, and even a few appearances by Death. The mythopoeic energy here is strong, echoing loudly even though these illustrations are only a little over a century old.

In publishing Carl Otto Czeschka Illustrations 1895-1900, Century Guild has yet again provided a window into which we can peek to see a seminal artistic vision from an artist whose work resonates both backward in time to the pre-Raphaelites and, hence, to medieval art, and forward in time to the 1960s and '70s, the influence of which continues even today.

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Major Poems and Selected Prose by Algernon Charles Swinburne

 

Major Poems and Selected Prose by Algernon Charles Swinburne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One would think, given the title Major Poems and Selected Prose that the main focus of any good, thorough review would be on the poetry.

This is neither a good nor a thorough review. There's just not enough time, and I don't have the energy to do a meaningful analysis. Swinburne is just too BIG! But there are notable highlights which I must . . . highlight . . . notably . . . nevermind.

We begin with poetry, of course. Swinburne's epic tragic poem "Atalanta in Calydon" is representative of much of his work as it seems to have little to do with Atalanta or Calydon, only as Atalanta is a prompt, of sorts, to Meleager's ultimately fatal actions. Normally, I'm not big on introductions that effectively spoil the entire story before it happens, but in this case, it helped a great deal to be able to understand what was actually happening throughout.

As one might expect, the intertwined themes of Eros and Thanatos predominate throughout. For an example of the admixture of both, I quote, in full, "Anima Anceps":

Till death have broken
Sweet life's love-token,
Till all be spoken
That shall be said.
What dost thou praying,
O soul, and playing
With song and saying,
Things flown and fled?
For this we know not -
That fresh springs flow not
And fresh griefs grow not
When men are dead;
When strange years cover
Lover and lover,
And joys are over
And tears are shed.

If one day's sorrow
Mar the day's morrow -
If man's life borrow
And man's death pay -
If souls once taken,
If lives once shaken,
Arise, awaken,
By night, by day -
Why with strong crying
And years of sighing,
Living and dying,
Fast ye and pray?
For all your weeping,
Waking and sleeping,
Death comes to reaping
And takes away.

Though time rend after
Roof-tree from rafter,
A little laughter
Is much more worth
Than thus to measure
The hour, the treasure,
The pain, the pleasure,
The death, the birth
Grief, when days alter,
Like joy shall falter;
Song-book and psalter,
Mourning and mirth.
Live like the swallow;
Seek not to follow
Where earth is hollow
Under the earth.

Among this and other gems, "Dolores" is one of the more amazing long-ish poems I've read. Again, it's easy to see why Swinburne is so renowned among poets. I don't know that I could write such a beautiful, despairing, mocking, and yearning poem if I took the rest of my life to do it. Brilliant.

And though Swinburne's archaic language and structure can sometimes be off-putting, at other times, he is melodious. "On the Cliffs," for example, is as much a song as a poem. Its sibilance is astounding and fluid. It feels natural, like poetry often doesn't.

Though death and love are frequent foci of attention, the strain of atheism is strong throughout Swinburne's work, an odd thing for a poem written in 1880. Odd as in rare, not as in "bizarre". Swinburne was openly antagonistic to religion in a way that wouldn't be expressed with any regularity until after the Great War.

The masterpiece in this volume is the long epic poem "Tristram of Lyonesse," which requires an attention and stamina like that of reading Ulysses or anything by Beckett. It exacts a toll on the brain! And yet, it is a rewarding, bittersweet opus on love, betrayal, and tragedy.

Confession: I have "wronged" a couple of people in my life. Two, specifically, that I can remember. Many, many years ago. But my actions still sting. When I read Iseult's lament herein, that sting returned, after, what, 35 years now? Such is the power of good poetry. Good poetry digs deep, and sometimes it hurts like hell.

Swinburne might be considered a straight-up Romantic poet, but "A Nympholept," a sort of hymn to the god Pan and, hence, to the winsomeness of Nature, is as thoroughly a Symbolist piece as I've ever read. This would pair well with a good long stare at a Gustave Moreau painting, for sure.

After the poetry is a mixture of criticism, essays, and what must be short pieces of fiction (unless I misread and they are sensationalized early journalism, but I think not). Swinburne's first critical essay here is absolutely scathing and brutal. He tries to pass it off as an unemotional exercise meant to help the poet in question, but the shots he takes are lethal, if on the mark.

Swinburne's review of Les Fleurs du Mal is pretty good.

Mine's better.

While reading his essays, I had a bit of serendipity: last month my wife and I visited the Chicago Institute of Art, which hosts Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Beata Beatrix". And herein is an essay, heretofore unknown to me, by Swinburne about, among other things, that very painting. It's got me thinking about how the internet has made such art widely available, but how tawdry jpegs are in comparison to seeing the artwork in person. Is such ready access to art a good thing if the secondhand reproduction is so poor and if it is impossible to adequately represent the piece on a screen, given the subtleties of the original? Discuss . . .

Finally, one last quote from the book that I found amusing and true, from a piece that is an exceprt from Swinburne's erotic novel Lesbia Brandon:

It's odd that words should change so just by being put into rhyme. They get teeth and bite; they take fire and burn.

Indeed they do.

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The Best of Beardsley

 

The Best of Beardsley by R.A. Walker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Next year, I will have been alive twice as long as the ill-fated Aubrey Beardsley lived. And yet, it was at about the age he died that I became enamored of his work. I has seen his work here and there, but remember that this was before the internet had been populated with every desirable image you'd ever want (and many you wouldn't). My real introduction to his work came as an undergraduate humanities student nestled comfortably away in the Special Collections (read: Rare Books) room, where I discovered a set of books that would fix my love for late Victoriana forevermore: The Yellow Book: An Illustrated Quarterly.

When asked about why I became so enamored of Beardsley's work, I respond: "Why wouldn't I?" I really think it best to just let the work speak for itself. You know, a picture is worth . . .?

The Best of Beardsley a few of his images from Yellow Book Quarterly, but steps far beyond that short-lived (and seemingly doomed, once Oscar Wilde was arrested) relationship between Beardsley and editor John Lane. These were the drawings that really cemented his reputation, but before this there were earlier illustrations for Wilde's play Salome and the romantic poem Mort Darthur (none of which are included in this volume, being considered a sort of juvenalia), among others. And, of course, his art continued for several years after his ignominious departure from Lane's publication. The opprobrium that struck Wilde did little to taint Beardsley's output and, in fact, increased his fame and exposure to adherents of fin-de-siecle decadence. Unfortunately, tuberculosis killed him at the young age of 26 years, just as his art was hitting new heights of style and composition.

The introduction to The Best of Beardsley is one of the better introductions to an art book that I've had the privilege of reading. Of course all the biographical details are there (but let's face it, you can just go to Wikipedia to find this information), but what really stands out is R. A. Walker's analysis of the four phases of Beardsley's work, four phases that I had missed until I read this introductory essay and was able to cross-reference if with the full-page black and white plates that compose the vast majority of the book. But even at about 110 illustrations, we still are only seeing "The Best of". Notably absent are his explicit, one would have to say downright pornographic works, which even the Tate Museum housed in a different, restricted-access room in their 2020 exhibition of his work.

I see you combing the internet for those. Naughty, naughty. Honestly, I prefer to retain a little Victorian prudery in this regard. Besides, as Walker points out several times, Beardsley's sumptuous costumes are oftentimes the center of attention, and rightfully so. Take the Pre-Raphaelites' attention to detail and distil it down to sweeping, textured black-and-white illustrations, add a touch of whimsy, a pinch of, one must admit, Orientalism, and some intentional disproportion and, voila! Beardsley!

This art collection is not nearly enough Beardsley, but it can legitimately argue for being "The Best of," in large part because of the context given the illustrations by Walker's essay. Recommended.

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The Dream Weavers: Tales of Fantasy by the Pre-Raphaelites

The Dream Weavers: Tales of Fantasy by the Pre-Raphaelites by John Howard Weeks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Confession: I never did finish this book when it was assigned reading for my senior seminar on Victorian Arts and Culture. I read enough, at that time, to complete the assigned critique of one story that we enjoyed. Thankfully, this came four stories into the anthology, freeing up study time for other projects in a very busy semester.

To say that Victorian art and literature has had an influence on my own fiction is a gross understatement. I've been accused of, and guilty of, the same flamboyant prose that was popular a couple of centuries ago. I've worked hard lately to be free of those tentacles, or at least to have them resting a little more loosely over my throat.

But a series of nostalgic hankerings has been pulling at me lately, and I thought "it's about time I finish that book". After all, the Pre-Raphaelite artists are not only the subject of one of my novels, they produced some of my favorite visual art of all time.

Unfortunately, what pleases the eye visually does not necessarily make for good prose. Oftentimes, the artists-cum-writers are too free in adding embellishments to their words that ought to have been reserved only for their paintings. Some of them were decent poets, but stretching a poem out into a long narrative, rather than watering the words down, as one would expect, only allows more room for treacle to be poured into the ensuing gaps. Many of the stories in this volume are practically drowning in treacle and baroque language, which makes for a sickly-sweet jolt that should be enjoyed only in small servings.

That's not to say that every story is a failure. Far from it. I found aspects of several of these stories rather refreshing and intriguing.

For example, Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Dead Love," in which the Lady Yolande de Craon falls in love with and, through that love, subsequently revives the body of the knight Jacques d'Aspremont (who had previously killed her husband in battle), shows an interesting ambiguity between what is good and what is evil, what is romantic and what is perverse. This is a much more nuanced take on morality than I would have expected from a story of its age.

In Swinburne's "The Portrait," the painter, Peter, after hatching a plot with a wicked woman (you will find this trope throughout) to kill her husband by means of a painting that would kill a man should he look upon it, is described as "a man that rejoiced in all manner of shameful dealing, and was also unclean of his life, as is the fashion of men that paint and men that make songs and verses; for this Peter also made many amorous poems, and played upon stringed instruments marvellously [sic] well. And the lives of such men as are painters, or such as are poets, are most often evil and foolish; therefore it may be well conceived of this Peter that he was a very lewd man."

I'm not sure if this is an attempt by Swinburne at self-effacing humor or if it was meant as a kind of marketing ploy for the shock value of its self-admitted wickedness. One wonders if he and his contemporaries, Huysmans and Verlaine were not all customers of the same marketing agency.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Orchard Pit" was the story that, as an undergraduate, I chose to examine in detail. I won't bore you with the amateurish rantings and ravings of a college senior who actually thought he knew what he was talking about. Suffice it to say that this remains one of my favorite stories in this volume, a hallucinogenic prose poem that beats a trance-inducing mental cadence in the reader's mind.

Sprinkled throughout these stories are what I will call "Odes to the Cult of Weakness," passages that seek to heroicize the androgynous as being simultaneously better than their peers and, yet, harboring a critical vulnerability that is, in a strange way, lauded. This is evinced in the description of Charo dell' Erma in Rossetti's story "Hand and Soul":

The extreme longing after a visible embodiment of his thoughts strengthened as his years increased, more even than his sinews or the blood of his life; until he would feel faint in sunsets and at the sight of stately persons.

Thankfully, not all of the characters in this volume are infected with that same ultra-sensitivity (it grows tedious very quickly). And, in fact, I wonder if editor John Weeks intentionally followed up Rossetti's shriveling little daisy with Edward Burne-Jones' tale "The Druid and the Maiden". This is a solid story of love, betrayal, patriotism, double crosses, and ghosts in the shadow of the Roman Empire's invasion of Brittany. It is much less florid than the stories that precede it and a welcome, prosaic relief from the extreme poetic acrobatics that permeate the collection.

Burne-Jones continues to display a spark of modernity in his tale "The Cousins". This story is downright Dickinsonian (thank you, Doris, for providing me with the right word!), yet it is punctuated, in the middle, by a long scream straight from Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable that the narrator refers to as "a missing year".

Finally, I quite enjoyed William Falford's "A Night in a Cathedral," not because the hackneyed story about being locked away, alone, for a night in a cathedral had anything to recommend it (it didn't), but because it summoned from the dead caverns of my mind a series of images from childhood: those of Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat being harangued by cartoon, ghosts and skeletons. I needed the laughs, if nothing else, to counter the grave seriousness with which this author, and several others in the volume, took himself.

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