45. L.P. Hartley - 'A Change of Ownership' (1948)

'Laid back, I'll give you laid back'
(Hot Chip, 'Over and Over', The Warning, 2006)

'What fun for him, after these constricted years, to come home to a big house of his own, where he has three or four sitting-rooms to choose from, each of which he may occupy by himself!'

(L.P. Hartley, The Complete Short Stories, Hamish Hamilton, 1973, p.167)

It can never be 'his' front door.

'It was locked all right; but who had locked if?' (p.169)

A real oddity this one, of English gothic vintage. This side of Hartley was discernible in the Belladonna episode of The Go Between, with all its shattering symbolism of innocence and experience, but this is a fully fledged dalliance with the Weird. Making sense of 'A Change of Ownership' is harder than most; it is in many ways a refreshingly recalcitrant read - the sort of short-story where you do have to go back at several points to grasp the underlying narrative of the main character.

Hartley establishes the rather splintered, paranoid personality of 'Mr' Ernest carefully; first, he is seen partly through the eyes of a companion, Hubert - an old friend who gives him a lift back home after they have been to the theatre. Ernest's home is 'semi-rural', a large suburban house overlooking a field on one side. (p.163) His friend's conversation illustrates Ernest's isolation, living alone in this big house (his servants are apparently away), where previously he has lived in shared accommodation: when Ernest says that he is alone 'in a sense', Hubert understandably queries, 'Queer devil you are, Ernest; you must either be alone or not alone. Do I scent a romance?' (p.164)

Hardly so, as once his friend has departed, Ernest slips into thinking about himself in the third-person, a trend that marks the rest of the narrative. He imagines himself in a strange array of guises and roles while attempting to get to grips with being locked out of his house - which has been done by mysterious means. Internal dialogues convey an authentic sense of madness, and Hartley displays an unerring command of using the present-tense to embroil the reader. The status of the narrative voice is deliberately unclear - at times, as in the epigraph above, it seems as if it is mocking Ernest.

His learning to live alone, 'like other people', is shown to involve a splintering of - or at least, an uncertainty within - his personality. Stithies Court, the house, is a forbidding place and becomes literally inaccessible to him, its presumptive owner. The word presumptive being operative there. Stithies - evocatively, choicely, named - is something of an impregnable, infernal fortress: 'it looked like a large black hat-box, crowned at one corner by a smaller hat-box that was, in fact, a tower', the only certainty and constant in this unreliable narrative. (p.164)

LPH delves into the uncanny, and this can be said to fit in very nicely in the English Weird continuum, linking M.R. James and Christopher Priest; I, Haruspex is indeed the short-story covered so far which this most resembles. It is revealed that the figure in the house, keeping down the window with his fingers when Ernest tries to get in that way, initially has a Sapphire and Steel anticipating blankness - its face 'a featureless oval, dimly phosphorescent'. (p.173) This 'simulacrum', it is eventually made clear, is no less than Ernest himself: 'This time the face did not alter. It was Ernest's own face, a hateful face, and the face of a murderer.'

It is, overall, a continually discomfitting, confounding tale, written in an unusual, intriguing style; another fine advertisement for home ownership! Hartley, often facilely bracketed as English Heritage, is indeed, far from that; this is anti-heritage in almost all senses, being concerned with deeper things. As with his great 1953 novel, tradition and hierarchies are destructive; in this case, the old English house itself takes on particular malignance:

'In an old house like this, of course, the floor-boards do contract and expand; they have seen a great deal; they have something to say, and they want to get it off their chests.' (p.168)

8/10

42. Muriel Spark - 'The Leaf-Sweeper' (1952)

'But it was still misty, and really, I can't say whether, when I looked a second time, there were two men or one man sweeping the leaves.'
(Muriel Spark, The Complete Short Stories, Penguin, 2001, p.190)

I had little or no idea what this was going to be about, or like; a good way to finish this extended week of stories from favoured writers. If a week is a long time in politics, I am not sure what Harold Wilson would make of my progress with this. I only got around to completing this story on Thursday 16th of July - as you will see the post has lain dormant for quite some time. ASSAD will reconvene shortly, on a week by week basis, perhaps without a theme to begin with - let's just get things started again!

In truth, I shifted to novel reading: Grant Allen, John Verney, Sjowall and Wahloo, E. Nesbit, Donald Barthelme... and only on Thursday managed to get around to reading this piece. One recent novel read spurred the choice of Spark, a new favourite: her Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), 64 years on, a distinct, droller bedfellow of Allen's The British Barbarians. This is a strain of literature probing the English in particular, their foibles, hypocrisies and absurdities. Dougal Douglas, like Bertram Ingledew, a stranger in a foreign land, is regarded with a mixture of fascination, admiration, horror and incomprehension - and like Ingledew, his role is freelance agent provocateur, sprite-at-large, observing . He is, however, more devious and machiavellian in his means of exposing folly and involving himself in these people's lives. He also takes on paid employment, given the brief of almost a 'blue skies thinker' in the modern parlance; he is given the task of taking the pulse of the workplace and approaches it in an idiosyncratic manner the bosses accept due to their perception of this Scot as an 'Arts Man'.

'The Leaf-Sweeper' is an even earlier work from Spark's career of over fifty years, published originally in The Observer - and will be far from the last I will read (there is an allegory of Watergate in a nunnery, a fictionalised account of Lord Lucan's later life and, of course, a certain novel that was filmed about a schoolmistress with fascist fixations... plz feel free to recommend any more, anyone!). She seems to me to be one of the key post-WW2 writers, along with Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis &c.

The first thing to state about this story is that, like TBOPR, this is bloody funny - Spark has an understated way with insinuation and absurdity. The premise itself rings true in its absurdity - the leaf-sweeper turns out to be an author and fanatic recently released from a mental institution. Johnnie Geddes's fanaticism revolves around his unshakeable opposition to Christmas and all its works. He has some success with pamphlets on the subject and then full-length books (including Abolish Christmas or We Die) outlining his apocalyptic vision, captured amusingly by Spark: 'He cites appalling statistics to show that 1.024 per cent of the time squandered each Christmas in reckless shopping and thoughtless Churchgoing brings the nation closer to its doom by five years.' The effect is all the stronger because he rather has a point!

Spark introduces the concept succinctly and without ceremony - with something of the matter-of-fact quality that I observed in Dahl; after establishing the rather wistful, grounded scene of a man sweeping leaves in the mist for the local council, she throws in this: 'He looks much older than he is, for it is not quite twenty years ago that Johnnie founded the Society for the Abolition of Christmas.' (p.185) It gets one intrigued, right from the off, and Spark goes on to cover a lot of ground in a mere six pages. We get to know very little about the narrator who encounters Johnnie, and it simply does not matter in a vignette such as this is.

Quite how Spark turns it into a ghost-story is ingenious; amusing and melancholy at the same time: 'But perhaps you don't know how repulsive and loathsome is the ghost of a living man. The ghosts of the dead may be all right, but the ghost of mad Johnnie gave me the creeps.' (p.189)

8/10

24. J.G. Ballard - 'Track 12' (1958)

J.G. Ballard (1930-2009)

Hearing of the great writer's death means a change to the schedule, for a day - and Ballard will form the first exception to the 'one story per writer' rule of this site. He will be allocated a second one relatively soon; this I just want to write about briefly, on the spur of the moment as it were.

This story is archetypally Ballard; as Martin Amis said today on Channel 4 News, the style is unmistakable, it could not be anybody else's. Of course, Ballardian has now become an adjective and has had a tremendously productive influence upon music and culture, as detailed at this exceptional site: http://www.ballardian.com/index.php. Crucially, his aim is (the present-tense must be affirmed) to write of the here and now in a way few others have done. He embraces and inhabits the new forms of technology and existence that have marked the post-war world; all the better in order to satirise their effect on humanity in his mischievious yet serene way.

A New Kind of Man, indeed. Here, two contrasting gentlemen are placed in what is obliquely revealed - almost as an afterthought - to be a love triangle; and a bizarre one at that. Their very names sound like East Anglian places - Maxted and Sheringham - and the latter's eccentric obsession is archetypally English but displaced, taken somewhere else entirely. Sheringham is a 'rim, unattractive man, with his pedantry'; he almost appears like a Martin Bryce (of Ever Decreasing Circles) figure, still in Surrey but on different plane - part of a truly modern, radiophonically charged Britain. Skolimowki's The Shout (1978), adapted from Robert Graves's short story, also comes to mind, with its added element of John Hurt as an avant-garde sound engineer, tinkering at the edges - fighting a seemingly losing battle of sounds with sinister force-of-nature, Alan Bates.

Here, Sheringham seems a crank and remains so, but his recordings, truly a labour of love, take on a greater, macabre significance. Suffice it to say that we are talking Delia Derbyshire, Kevin Shields or Basil Kirchin type command of sound - though the use he puts it to is hardly similar. This story, in the way it inhabits technology is light years ahead of the television of its time - Billy Bunter had still got a few years left to run when this was published! Whilst there is a kinship of sorts with Kneale's Quatermass I would imagine that is more in the radiophonic sense rather than any thematic similarity (although it must be said that Kneale's excellent The Stone Tape, BBC2 Christmas Ghost Story, 1972, is a kind of MR James / Ballard meeting). This story was featured in this Resonance FM show, available for MP3 download here and featuring an excellent looking soundtrack: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2008/09/a-bite-of-stars-a-slug-of-time-and-thou-episode-10/

'Track 12', with its title evoking a forlornly unrecognised CD playing in iTunes, is another superbly twisted, confounding tale from a master whose stature can only grow. Along with Poe, Wilde and Angus Wilson, he has inspired my interest in the short story as a form and I will be surprised - and very pleasantly at that - if anyone's shorts are as consistently great as his are. The Ballardian is embedded in our dreams and nightmares - long may it linger and pollinate.

9/10

23. Hector Hugh Munro - 'The Background' (1911)

'She cancelled the sale of the work of art, and a few days later Deplis learned with a sense of consternation that she had presented it to the municipality of Bergamo, which had gratefully accepted it.'

(The Dragon's Head: Classic English Short Stories, Oxford University Press, 1988, p.176)

The second story of week #4 is from the same volume of stories collected in the 1930s. Munro, better known as 'Saki', was Burmese born, but raised and schooled in England - and this is clearly the work of a cosmopolitan Briton, taking up the baton from Wilde and others. There is a dark humour, cruelty and effortless development of a conceit reminiscent of Wilde and possibly looking forward to early Evelyn Waugh.

This is one of the Clovis Chronicles, and yet not about the aforementioned Clovis at all; it is a bizarre tale told to Clovis by a journalist friend - though it all takes off as a result of an offhand, presumably typical expression of Clovis's irritation at a woman's 'art-jargon': 'She's so fond of talking of certain pictures as "growing on one", as though they were a sort of fungus.' (p.175)

Saki's wonderful conceit - of Henri Deplis gaining money and spending it on some 'harmless extravagances', including getting the tattooist Signor Andreas Pincini to cover his back with 'a glowing representation of the Fall of Icarus' - is utilised to the absurdist and satiric hilt. The framing of the story reminds me, in its truncated, deliberate truculence, of the way 'A Sphinx without a Secret' opens - highest praise from me. Deploying the Wildean trope of a human being a work of art, it unfolds with inexorable black humour, without the sense of socialism Wilde imbues in most of his tales, but much glorying and mocking of aestheticism. In some senses, the style might be said to prefigure Kafka or Orton or shame something with G.K. Chesterton. The world-view is notably bleak, back into line with the first few stories assessed as part of ASSAD, and it is unsurprising that this reminds me of Dahl, as I believe that writer used Saki's conceit for an episode of the TV anthology series, Tales of the Unexpected.

Henri Deplis, 'traveller of commerce', is a perpetually unfortunate native of Luxemburg, buffeted around, unable to move freely around regions or nations. Once the 'work' is ruined, he is kicked out of Italy 'as an undesirable alien' and ends the story as an absurd relic in Paris - and I won't quote it anymore to avoid any more spoilers. Read it! Bizarre, amusing stuff; I certainly look forward to more Saki in future.

8/10

12. Christopher Priest - 'I, Haruspex' (1998)

haruspex

[L. (h)aruspex, f. a root appearing in Skr. hirâ entrails + L. -spic- beholding, inspecting.]

One of a class of ancient Roman soothsayers, of Etruscan origin, who performed divination by inspection of the entrails of victims, and in other ways.

1584 R. SCOT Disc. Witchcr. IX. iii. (1886) 138 Another sort of witching priests called Aruspices, prophesied victorie to Alexander, bicause an eagle lighted on his head. c1605 ROWLEY Birth Merl. IV. i. 331 Not an Aruspex with his whistling spells. 1652 GAULE Magastrom. 313 Alexander..called his aruspicks to inspect the entrayls. 1741 MIDDLETON Cicero I. VI. 454 These terrors alarmed the City, and the Senate consulted the Haruspices. 1879 FROUDE Cæsar xxvi. 458 ‘Am I to be frightened’, he said, in answer to some report of the haruspices, ‘because a sheep is without a heart?’

hagioscope

[f. Gr. sacred, holy + -SCOPE.]

A small opening, cut through a chancel arch or wall, to enable worshippers in an aisle or side chapel to obtain a view of the elevation of the host; a squint; also, sometimes applied to a particular kind of window in the chancel of a church.

1839-40 Hints on Eccl. Antiq. (Cambr. Camden Soc.) (ed. 2) 18 Hagioscope. By this term is intended the aperture made through different parts of the interior walls of a church..in order that the worshippers in the aisles might be able to see the Elevation of the Host. The technical term in use is ‘ Squint’..It is hoped..that the new term..may be thought useful. 1844 PALEY Church Restorers 35 A..chandelier hung from the roof..threw its faint light through a hagioscope upon the founder's tomb by the altar side. 1845 PARKER Gloss. Archit. (ed. 4) I. 350 (s.v. Squint) The name of Hagioscope has lately been applied..but it does not seem desirable to give Greek names to the parts of English buildings. 1848 B. WEBB Continental Eccles. 192 A late wayside church..with open grated hagioscopes.
(Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn., 1989)

http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50102884?query_type=word&queryword=haruspex&first=1&max_to_show=10&single=1&sort_type=alpha

'Only I, aberrant haruspex [...] could deal with the threat they presented, but equally it was only my family who had divined their presence.'

(Mike Ashley, ed., The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy, Robinson, 2008)

This week of short-stories, courtesy of Sunderland library's clear-out, is tending towards the recent. One might perceive this, and the general anglophile nature of selections so far, as being somewhat limited in nature; my feeling is that it is quite appropriate for this blog to proceed first from a personal grounding - firstly friends' recommendations and then stories drawn from ex-public library stock at my local library. Ones which have been read by the ordinary reading public of my particular end of Tyne and Wear. There has been a commonwealth, UK and US bias so far, but that is only emblematic of what is what is mostavailable in libraries and most beloved to my fellows. I will in time cover a greater proportion of the world, and indeed delve back beyond the twentieth century, but this will happen when necessary not as forced obligation.

Like entry #8 this comes from an anthology; this time seemingly placing an emphasis on the Weird: on 'Extreme Fantasy'. Christopher Priest is a novelist I have been wanting to read for a little while now; k-Punk posted on A Dream of Wessex (1977), a science-fiction novel concerning a simulacrum version of Hardy's county. His Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972), with its apparent vision of Powell's Blighty, sounds entirely fit for a future essay I may write on GB75 in fiction and cultue that might also encompass Peter Dickinson's The Changes (1968-70, BBC 1975) David Nobbs's Reginald Perrin (1976-8, BBC 1976-9), JG Ballard's 'Theatre of War' (1977) and Amis and Moorcock's alternative histories - The Alteration and Gloriana - which both won the John W. Campbell Award (in 1977 and 1979 respectively).

Of recent writers I have not yet read but read much about, Priest seems to share with M. John Harrison and Michael Moorcock the sense of working within the left-field of the mainstream, within and without of popular genres; developing transgressive and weird fiction, whilst retaining tangible roots in the everyday and in modern Britain per se. CP seems to have had one of the most varied writings careers of the modern era, progressing from politicised science fiction such as the Fugue, a follow-up to HGW's The Time Machine and sexploitation novels (as Petra Christian!) to film novelisations and fantasy novels lauded to some extent to by the literary establishment - he is included in Malcolm Bradbury's survey of the Modern English Novel (1993).

In addition, he was approached to make two submissions for Dr Who stories in its Christopher H. Bidmead period of high seriousness which followed the Douglas Adams and Tom Baker Show of Season 17. It is a matter for some regret for any devotee of that show that there was never a run of stories from Priest, PJ Hammond, Tanith Lee and Stephen Gallagher, perhaps evoking more of the imaginative fantasy style of the Moore / Parkhouse / Dave Gibbons comic strips of the time.* His script for HTV's fairly routine anthology series, Into the Labyrinth, was actually filmed; 'Treason' was broadcast in 1981 and concerns the English Civil War. I say routine purely on the evidence of the first few episodes.

http://bearalley.blogspot.com/2008/11/christopher-priest-cover-gallery.html

Priest is also, judging by this truly weird offering, a master of the short story - though this is admittedly the longest by far that I have written about so far (44 pages). Those pages utilise to the full a decidedly British atmosphere - in the sense of family seats and callings, antiqurianism, cranks being able to do precisely what they want in the English countryside. The atmosphere evoked is perhaps the most hermetic of any so far in ASSAD; the sheer oddity of James Owsley's station in life is gradually revealed to us, after some initial contact with the outside world. He is basically acting as a haruspical agent against perceived underworld forces, encountered when within a hagioscope - a wonderfully unexplained piece of Wellsian ingenuity - and ingesting various entrails. Rightfully, Priest does not judge or necessarily comment as to how grounded the visions are; the story takes on a logic of its own, and yet keeps some crucial feet in reality. Owsley's servant, Miss Wilkins, who prepares the 'dishes' and whom he services sexually provides the only exercise that this bookish, rather M.R. Jamesian type gets.

History and time are factors at play; the story is grounded in 1937, when war seemed unimaginable to many including Owsley - but there is an incursion in the woods within the grounds of his house and, seemingly, his haruspical domain by a German fighter plane from about five years later. This plane is suspended in time, the apparent pilot's face frozen into a scream. I shall not go on to detail the extraordinary turns of the plot, but suffice it to say that this very Sapphire and Steel** tableau and concept of time fracturing is taken somewhere I had simply never contemplated.

'I, Haruspex' is not science fiction in the sense usually accepted today. There are no spaceships, hi-tech hardware or space operas going on. Like the work of Wells, Lovecraft or Hammond, the emphasis is more on the strange and inexplicable, on unusual concepts and time itself. Priest roots things in a recognisably Weird England, of Abbeys and woods - the one here, for example, within the Owsley family's extensive grounds. They are an 'ancient family of mystics, scholars, clairvoyants, contemplatives', and Priest's writing perfectly captures an uncanny archaism in descriptions of the grounds and in the dialogue given to the characters. (p.408) There is also, as my epigraphy shows, a sense of mystical, almost religious fervour in how Owsley proceeds - as a fanatic, struggling with his load. Not necessarily fully in control, possibly akin to Kubrick's Jack Torrance, as is made clear: 'as if I had been merely caretaking the house [...]' (p.421)

Priest's use of language is admirably expansive; 'peristaltic' (evoking, for me, Vivian Stanshall's use of it), 'loathsome', 'monstrous skulkers', 'ineluctable', 'epitheliomata'. The last of these epithets indicates the only usage of science to support Owsley's occult dabblings - he is able to finance a supply from hospitals of the more cancerous entrails. The creatures, the 'Old Ones' that Owsley perceives in the pit have 'mandibles'; a link to the Donald Barthelme short-story? (p.423) The word means a jaw or jawbone, and in rarer, more archaic English it is an adjective: capable of being chewed or eaten. Priest's use of history is deft and amusing; WW2 becomes little more than an iconography to be used as a spanner in the works, misdirecting and confounding the reader: 'It is irrelevant to the greater struggle, the one in which you and I engage, but there is no avoiding it for practical matters.' (p.420)

Overall, it is difficult to encompass how good this story is in mere writing; it is up there with the Lovecraft and Mansfield as my favourite so far. Music to play as a suitably evocative background: Basil Kirchin - Quantum (1973) / Charcoal Sketches (1970) and State of Mind (1968).

* Admittedly, Priest's first Dr Who submission was to be replaced by Stephen Gallagher's sublime Warriors' Gate, one of the Weirest pieces of television ever nominally produced for children (based partially on Frederik Pohl's 1977 novel Gateway - more on him later).

** Highest praise from me; S&S (ATV, 1979-82) is one of the finest of all British television programmes. I have recently starting watching another series from ATV along somewhat similar lines: Timeslip.

10/10