SF Luminaries: Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

As various fans have already pointed out, Stephen King's latest novel Fairy Tale (2022) - despite being overtly dedicated to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and H. P. Lovecraft, also contains a number of covert references to another distinguished predecessor in the horror/fantasy genre: Ray Bradbury.

For one thing, it takes place in a small town called Sentry's Rest, Illinois - which seems like a nod to the mythical Green Town, Illinois, setting for Bradbury's classic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). The alternate universe of Empis which King's protagonist, Charlie Reade [get it? "Read"] explores also contains a magic carousel, one of the central features of the travelling carnival in Bradbury's own book.

Ray Bradbury: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)

Mind you, once you start looking for parallels with other fantasy writers, King's story threatens to fall apart under the sheer weight of allusion. Readers have postulated links with William Goldman's The Princess Bride; Lord Dunsany's realm of Elfland, "beyond the fields we know"; not to mention numerous echoes of King's own Dark Tower saga.

Bradbury is special for him, though. As he himself once put it: "without Ray Bradbury, there is no Stephen King." Or, as he wrote on hearing the news of Bradbury's death in 2012, at the age of 91:

Ray Bradbury wrote three great novels and three hundred great stories. One of the latter was called 'A Sound of Thunder.' The sound I hear today is the thunder of a giant's footsteps fading away. But the novels and stories remain, in all their resonance and strange beauty.

So who exactly was this starry-eyed visonary - this laureate of space and small-town life - and why has he left such a strangely equivocal and contradictory reputation behind him?

Library of America: The Ray Bradbury Collection (2022)

Novels & Story Cycles. Ed. Jonathan R. Eller. The Library of America, 347. [‘The Martian Chronicles’, 1950; ‘Fahrenheit 451’, 1953; ‘Dandelion Wine’, 1957; ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’, 1962]. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2021.

The Illustrated Man, The October Country & Other Stories. Ed. Jonathan R. Eller. The Library of America, 360. 1951, 1955. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2022.

You know that you've really arrived when they not only reprint your collected works in the canonical Library of America series, but even provide a specially designed slipcase to put them in!

Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles (1950)

You'll notice, though, that most of the work included in this set is comparatively early - dating roughly from the 1940s to the early 1960s. And even Stephen King claims only three great Bradbury novels among the dozen or so he actually published.

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

There's little doubt that two of the three must be Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). The third is more debatable: The Martian Chronicles (1950) would be most people's first choice for the honour, but it is technically a 'story-cycle' rather than a novel. That would leave us with Dandelion Wine (1957) - to me almost unbearably saccharine in its evocation of untroubled boyhood, but certainly a book which has its admirers.

Ray Bradbury: Dandelion Wine (1957)

Are there any other serious candidates? Not really. Ray Bradbury was a writer who peaked comparatively early, with a dazzling series of science fiction and horror short stories published throughout the 1940s and 50s, some of the strongest of which were reprinted in the early collection Dark Carnival, by H. P. Lovecraft's disciple and friend, August Derleth, at his legendary imprint Arkham House.

Ray Bradbury: Dark Carnival (1947)

Only 15 of the 27 stories in this unrelentingly dark and pitiless collection were reprinted, several in revised versions, in The October Country (1955). As Wikipedia tells it:

For many years, Bradbury did not permit Dark Carnival to be reprinted ... However, a limited edition ... with five extra stories and a new introduction by Bradbury, was printed by Gauntlet Press in 2001.

A new paperback edition of this seminal collection is promised for early 2024.

The fact is that it was horror stories such as "The Veldt" (in The Illustrated Man), "The Next in Line" (in Dark Carnival & The October Country), and "Mars is Heaven!" (in The Martian Chronicles) which were responsible for much of Bradbury's early vogue. Cannibalism, live burial, and homicidal children are just a few of his early themes.

So before you go writing him off as an old sentimentalist dreaming of some kind of Tom Sawyer-like childhood paradise in rural Illinois, never forget the dark, Lovecraftian roots behind much of his best work.

The Illustrated Man (2012)

A couple of his early Martian stories interested me particularly as I reread all the early collections reprinted in the Library of America boxset.

They're entitled (respectively) "Way in the Middle of the Air" [included in early editons of The Martian Chronicles, 1950] - which concerns a mass exodus of African American people to Mars; and "The Other Foot" [included in The Illustrated Man, 1951] - which tells us what happens when the news of the return to Mars of the last few white people left after their latest suicidal war reaches the now exclusively black population of the red planet.

By today's standards both stories sound rather naive and patronising. There's a lot of Huck Finn-style dialect, use of the "n"-word, and other now unacceptable linguistic usages. Both stories are also intensely well-meaning - it's worth noticing that they long predate such civil rights landmarks as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, let alone the compulsory integration of US schools.

And yet, both now read like museum exhibits: Liberal Northern White Attitudes (c.1950). By contrast, his more complex and haunting stories of the time: "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed" (1949), for instance - about the gradual possession of an all-American family by the haunting (and haunted?) landscapes and mores of Mars - have a mysterious resonance as powerful now as it was then.

John Huston, dir. Moby Dick (1956)

Perhaps the true turning point for Bradbury was the year he spent working on John Huston's adaptation of Moby Dick. It's not a terrible screenplay - there's a bit too much poetic language in the voice-overs, maybe, but the two of them did a competent enough job at transferring an almost unfilmable novel to the screen.

But Huston's habit of belitting and insulting his collaborators - allegedly (he claimed) to get the best out of them, but actually (it would appear) to indulge his own petty sadism - had a particularly bad effect on the ebullient Bradbury. He wrote a fictionalised version of their encounter in the novel Green Shadows, White Whale, which made it clear that he'd been brooding on the matter for quite some time.

John Huston, dir. Green Shadows, White Whale (1992)

It's not that there aren't gems among the later stories - "The Parrot Who Met Papa" (1972), about the search for a legendary parrot alleged to have memorised Hemingway's last novel as a result of his endless rambling monologues in its presence, for instance - but they're pretty few and far between.

Some terrible lapse in self-confidence - or, perhaps, reluctance to indulge the dark side of his nature any further than he'd already done (one of the most prominent themes in Something Wicked This Way Comes) - seems to have kept him largely on the sunny side of the street thereafter. There's a relentless verbosity in his work from the 1970s onwards - occasionally, mercifully, spiked by humour, but mostly a turbid stream of two-bit words and phrases.

He leaves behind, then, a divided legacy: the dark mysteries of his early stories and novels, and the wordy bathos of his later work. As the Library of America has already signalled, there's little doubt which will prevail in the eyes of posterity.

It does leave you wondering, though, just what did Huston (and, for that matter, Herman Melville) do to him in that windy old castle in Ireland? The novel he wrote about it - after, he claimed, having read Katharine Hepburn's account of her own mistreatment at Huston's hands during the making of "The African Queen" (1951): How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind (1987) - is just that: a novel. What really happened to him there we'll never know.

Ray Bradbury Postage Stamp (2012)

•

Charley Gallay: Ray Bradbury (2007)

Ray Douglas Bradbury
(1920-2012)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Novels:


1. The Martian Chronicles [aka The Silver Locusts] (1950)
   • The Silver Locusts. 1950. London: Corgi Books, 1969.
2. Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
   • Fahrenheit 451. 1953. London: Corgi Books, 1963.
3. Dandelion Wine (1957)
   • Dandelion Wine. 1957. London: Corgi Books, 1972.
4. Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)
   • Something Wicked This Way Comes. 1962. London: Corgi Books, 1969.
5. The Halloween Tree (1972)
   • The Halloween Tree. 1972. Illustrated by Joseph Mugnaini. London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1973.
6. The Novels of Ray Bradbury (1984)
   • The Novels of Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes. 1953, 1957, 1962. London: Book Club Associates, by arrangement with Granada Publishing Limited, 1984.
7. Death is a Lonely Business (1985)
8. A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990)
   • A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities. Grafton Books. London: Collins Publishing Group, 1990.
9. Green Shadows, White Whale (1992)
10. From the Dust Returned (2001)
11. Let's All Kill Constance (2002)
12. Farewell Summer (2006)
13. Novels & Story Cycles. Library of America (2021)
    • Novels & Story Cycles. Ed. Jonathan R. Eller. The Library of America, 347. [‘The Martian Chronicles’, 1950; ‘Fahrenheit 451’, 1953; ‘Dandelion Wine’, 1957; ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’, 1962]. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2021.

Collections:


14. Dark Carnival (1947)
    1. The Homecoming
    2. Skeleton
    3. The Jar
    4. The Lake
    5. The Maiden
    6. The Tombstone
    7. The Smiling People
    8. The Emissary
    9. The Traveler
    10. The Small Assassin
    11. The Crowd
    12. Reunion
    13. The Handler
    14. The Coffin
    15. Interim
    16. Jack-in-the-Box
    17. The Scythe
    18. Let's Play 'Poison'
    19. Uncle Einar
    20. The Wind
    21. The Night
    22. There Was An Old Woman
    23. The Dead Man
    24. The Man Upstairs
    25. The Night Sets
    26. Cistern
    27. The Next In Line
15. The Illustrated Man (1951)
    1. The Veldt
    2. Kaleidoscope
    3. The Other Foot
    4. The Highway
    5. The Man
    6. The Long Rain
    7. The Rocket Man
    8. The Fire Balloons
    9. The Last Night of the World
    10. The Exiles
    11. No Particular Night or Morning
    12. The Fox and the Forest
    13. The Visitor
    14. The Concrete Mixer
    15. Marionettes, Inc.
    16. The City
    17. Zero Hour
    18. The Rocket
    • The Illustrated Man. 1951. Corgi SF Collector’s Library. London: Corgi Books, 1972.
16. The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)
    • The Golden Apples of the Sun. 1953. Corgi SF Collector’s Library. London: Corgi Books, 1973.
17. The October Country (1955)
    1. The Dwarf
    2. The Next in Line
    3. The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse
    4. Skeleton
    5. The Jar
    6. The Lake
    7. The Emissary
    8. Touched With Fire
    9. The Small Assassin
    10. The Crowd
    11. Jack-in-the-Box
    12. The Scythe
    13. Uncle Einar
    14. The Wind
    15. The Man Upstairs
    16. There Was an Old Woman
    17. The Cistern
    18. Homecoming
    19. The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone
    • The October Country. 1955. London: New English Library, 1973.
18. A Medicine for Melancholy (1959)
19. The Day It Rained Forever (1959)
    • The Day It Rained Forever. 1959. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
20. The Small Assassin (1962)
    • The Small Assassin. 1962. London: New English Library, 1970.
21. R is for Rocket (1962)
    • R is for Rocket. 1962. London: Pan Books, 1972.
22. The Machineries of Joy (1964)
    • The Machineries of Joy. 1964. London: Panther Books, 1977.
23. The Autumn People (1965)
24. The Vintage Bradbury (1965)
25. Tomorrow Midnight (1966)
26. S is for Space (1966)
    • S is for Space. 1966. New York: Bantam Books, 1978.
27. Twice 22 (1966)
28. I Sing The Body Electric (1969)
    • I Sing The Body Electric! 1969. London: Corgi Books, 1972.
29. Ray Bradbury (1975)
30. Long After Midnight (1976)
    • Long After Midnight. 1976. London: Panther Books, 1978.
31. The Mummies of Guanajuato (1978)
32. The Fog Horn & Other Stories (1979)
33. One Timeless Spring (1980)
34. The Last Circus and the Electrocution (1980)
35. The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980)
    1. The Night (1946)
    2. Homecoming (1946)
    3. Uncle Einar (1947)
    4. The Traveler (1946)
    5. The Lake (1944)
    6. The Coffin (1947)
    7. The Crowd (1943)
    8. The Scythe (1943)
    9. There Was an Old Woman (1944)
    10. There Will Come Soft Rains (1950)
    11. Mars Is Heaven! (1948)
    12. The Silent Towns (1949)
    13. The Earth Men (1948)
    14. The Off Season (1948)
    15. The Million-Year Picnic (1946)
    16. The Fox and the Forest (1950)
    17. Kaleidoscope (1949)
    18. The Rocket Man (1951)
    19. Marionettes, Inc. (1949)
    20. No Particular Night or Morning (1951)
    21. The City (1950)
    22. The Fire Balloons (1951)
    23. The Last Night of the World (1951)
    24. The Veldt (1950)
    25. The Long Rain (1950)
    26. The Great Fire (1949)
    27. The Wilderness (1952)
    28. A Sound of Thunder (1952)
    29. The Murderer (1953)
    30. The April Witch (1952)
    31. Invisible Boy (1945)
    32. The Golden Kite, The Silver Wind (1953)
    33. The Fog Horn (1951)
    34. The Big Black and White Game (1945)
    35. Embroidery (1951)
    36. The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)
    37. Powerhouse (1948)
    38. Hail and Farewell (1948)
    39. The Great Wide World over There (1952)
    40. The Playground (1953)
    41. Skeleton (1943)
    42. The Man Upstairs (1947)
    43. Touched by Fire (1954)
    44. The Emissary (1947)
    45. The Jar (1944)
    46. The Small Assassin (1946)
    47. The Next in Line (1947)
    48. Jack-in-the-Box (1947)
    49. The Leave-Taking (1957)
    50. Exorcism (1957)
    51. The Happiness Machine (1957)
    52. Calling Mexico (1950)
    53. The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1958)
    54. Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed (1949)
    55. The Strawberry Window (1954)
    56. A Scent of Sarsaparilla (1953)
    57. The Picasso Summer (1957)
    58. The Day It Rained Forever (1957)
    59. A Medicine for Melancholy (1959)
    60. The Shoreline at Sunset (1959)
    61. Fever Dream (1959)
    62. The Town Where No One Got Off (1958)
    63. All Summer in a Day (1954)
    64. Frost and Fire (1946)
    65. The Anthem Sprinters (1963)
    66. And So Died Riabouchinska (1953)
    67. Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar! (1962)
    68. The Vacation (1963)
    69. The Illustrated Woman (1961)
    70. Some Live Like Lazarus (1960)
    71. The Best of All Possible Worlds (1960)
    72. The One Who Waits (1949)
    73. Tyrannosaurus Rex (1962)
    74. The Screaming Woman (1951)
    75. The Terrible Conflagration Up at the Place (1969)
    76. Night Call, Collect (1949)
    77. The Tombling Day (1952)
    78. The Haunting of the New (1969)
    79. Tomorrow's Child (1948)
    80. I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
    81. The Women (1948)
    82. The Inspired Chicken Motel (1969)
    83. Yes, We'll Gather at the River (1969)
    84. Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You! (1976)
    85. A Story of Love (1951)
    86. The Parrot Who Met Papa (1972)
    87. The October Game (1948)
    88. Punishment Without Crime (1950)
    89. A Piece of Wood (1952)
    90. The Blue Bottle (1950)
    91. Long After Midnight (1962)
    92. The Utterly Perfect Murder (1971)
    93. The Better Part of Wisdom (1976)
    94. Interval in Sunlight (1954)
    95. The Black Ferris (1948)
    96. Farewell Summer (1980)
    97. McGillahee's Brat (1970)
    98. The Aqueduct (1979)
    99. Gotcha! (1978)
    100. The End of the Beginning (1956)
    • The Stories of Ray Bradbury. London: Granada, 1981.
36. The Fog Horn and Other Stories (1981)
37. Dinosaur Tales (1983)
38. A Memory of Murder (1984)
39. The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone (1985)
40. The Toynbee Convector (1988)
41. Classic Stories 1 (1990)
42. Classic Stories 2 (1990)
43. The Parrot Who Met Papa (1991)
44. Selected from Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed (1991)
45. Quicker Than The Eye (1996)
46. Driving Blind (1997)
47. Ray Bradbury Collected Short Stories (2001)
48. The Playground (2001)
49. Dark Carnival: Limited Edition with Supplemental Materials (2001)
50. One More for the Road (2002)
51. Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003)
    1. The Whole Town's Sleeping
    2. The Rocket
    3. Season of Disbelief
    4. And the Rock Cried Out
    5. The Drummer Boy of Shiloh
    6. The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge
    7. The Flying Machine
    8. Heavy-Set
    9. The First Night of Lent
    10. Lafayette, Farewell
    11. Remember Sascha?
    12. Junior
    13. That Woman on the Lawn
    14. February 1999: Ylla
    15. Banshee
    16. One for His Lordship, and One for the Road!
    17. The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair
    18. Unterderseaboat Doktor
    19. Another Fine Mess
    20. The Dwarf
    21. A Wild Night in Galway
    22. The Wind
    23. No News, or What Killed the Dog?
    24. A Little Journey
    25. Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine
    26. The Garbage Collector
    27. The Visitor
    28. The Man
    29. Henry the Ninth
    30. The Messiah
    31. Bang! You're Dead!
    32. Darling Adolf
    33. The Beautiful Shave
    34. Colonel Stonesteel's Genuine Home-made Truly Egyptian Mummy
    35. I See You Never
    36. The Exiles
    37. At Midnight, in the Month of June
    38. The Witch Door
    39. The Watchers
    40. 2004-05: The Naming of Names
    41. Hopscotch
    42. The Illustrated Man
    43. The Dead Man
    44. June 2001: And the Moon Be Still as Bright
    45. The Burning Man
    46. G.B.S.-Mark V
    47. A Blade of Grass
    48. The Sound of Summer Running
    49. And the Sailor, Home from the Sea
    50. The Lonely Ones
    51. The Finnegan
    52. On the Orient, North
    53. The Smiling People
    54. The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl
    55. Bug
    56. Downwind from Gettysburg
    57. Time in Thy Flight
    58. Changeling
    59. The Dragon
    60. Let's Play 'Poison'
    61. The Cold Wind and the Warm
    62. The Meadow
    63. The Kilimanjaro Device
    64. The Man in the Rorschach Shirt
    65. Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned
    66. The Pedestrian
    67. Trapdoor
    68. The Swan
    69. The Sea Shell
    70. Once More, Legato
    71. June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air
    72. The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone
    73. By the Numbers!
    74. April 2005: Usher II
    75. The Square Pegs
    76. The Trolley
    77. The Smile
    78. The Miracles of Jamie
    79. A Far-away Guitar
    80. The Cistern
    81. The Machineries of Joy
    82. Bright Phoenix
    83. The Wish
    84. The Lifework of Juan Díaz
    85. Time Intervening/Interim
    86. Almost the End of the World
    87. The Great Collision of Monday Last
    88. The Poems
    89. April 2026: The Long Years
    90. Icarus Montgolfier Wright
    91. Death and the Maiden
    92. Zero Hour
    93. The Toynbee Convector
    94. Forever and the Earth
    95. The Handler
    96. Getting Through Sunday Somehow
    97. The Pumpernickel
    98. Last Rites
    99. The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse
    100. All on a Summer's day
52. Is That You, Herb? (2003)
53. The Cat's Pajamas: Stories (2004)
54. A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (2005)
55. The Dragon Who Ate His Tail (2007)
56. Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band Is Playing & Leviathan '99 (2007)
57. Somewhere a Band is Playing: Early Drafts and Final Novella (2007)
58. Summer Morning, Summer Night (2007)
59. Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2 (2009)
60. We'll Always Have Paris: Stories (2009)
61. A Pleasure To Burn (2010)
62. The Lost Bradbury: Forgotten Tales of Ray Bradbury (2010)
63. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition – Volume 1, 1938–1943 (2011)
64. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition – Volume 2, 1943–1944 (2014)
65. Killer, Come Back to Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury (2020)
66. The Illustrated Man, The October Country & Other Stories. Library of America (2022)
    • The Illustrated Man, The October Country & Other Stories. Ed. Jonathan R. Eller. The Library of America, 360. 1951, 1955. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2022.

Edited:


67. Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow (1952)
68. The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories (1956)

Children's Books:


69. Switch on the Night (1955)
70. The Other Foot (1982)
71. The Veldt (1982)
72. The April Witch (1987)
73. The Fog Horn (1987)
74. Fever Dream (1987)
75. The Smile (1991)
76. The Toynbee Convector (1992)
77. With Cat for Comforter (1997)
78. Dogs Think That Every Day Is Christmas (1997)
79. Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines: A Fable (1998)
80. The Homecoming (2006)

Non-fiction:


81. No Man Is an Island (1952)
82. The Essence of Creative Writing: Letters to a Young Aspiring Author (1962)
83. Creative Man Among His Servant Machines (1967)
84. Mars and the Mind of Man (1971)
85. Zen in the Art of Writing (1973)
    • Zen in the Art of Writing. 1973. In The Capra Chapbook Anthology. Ed. Noel Young. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1979.
86. The God in Science Fiction (1978)
87. About Norman Corwin (1979)
88. There is Life on Mars (1981)
89. The Art of Playboy (1985)
90. Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity (1990)
91. Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures (1991)
92. Conversations with Ray Bradbury. Ed. Steven L. Aggelis) (2004)
93. Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars (2005)
94. Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451 (2007)

Poetry:


95. Where Robot Mice & Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns (1977)
96. To Sing Strange Songs (1979)
97. Beyond 1984: Remembrance of Things Future (1979)
98. The Ghosts of Forever (1980)
99. The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury (1982)
100. The Love Affair (1982)
101. I Live By the Invisible: New & Selected Poems (2002)

Screenplays:


102. The Best of The Ray Bradbury Chronicles (2003)
103. It Came from Outer Space: Screenplay (2003)
104. The Halloween Tree: Screenplay (2005)

Miscellaneous:


105. Long After Ecclesiastes: New Biblical Texts (1985)
106. Christus Apollo: Cantata Celebrating the Eighth Day of Creation and the Promise of the Ninth (1998)
107. Witness and Celebrate (2000)
108. A Chapbook for Burnt-Out Priests, Rabbis and Ministers (2001)
109. The Best of Ray Bradbury: The Graphic Novel (2003)
110. Futuria Fantasia: SF Fanzine (2007)

Secondary:


111. Weller, Sam. The Bradbury Chronicles. Harper Perennial. 2005. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.
112. Eller, Jonathan R. Becoming Ray Bradbury. Vol. 1 of 3. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
113. Eller, Jonathan R. Ray Bradbury Unbound. Vol. 2 of 3. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2014.
114. Eller, Jonathan R. Bradbury Beyond Apollo. Vol. 3 of 3. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2020.

•

Jonathan Eller: The Bradbury Trilogy (2011-2020)

Sam Weller: The Bradbury Chronicles (2005)

Edgar Allan Poe and The Pale Blue Eye

Scott Cooper: The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe

Tel qu’en lui-même enfin l’éternité le change,
Le Poëte suscite avec un glaive nu
Son siècle épouvanté de n’avoir pas connu
Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange !

Eux, comme un vil sursaut d’hydre oyant jadis l’ange
Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu
Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu
Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange.

Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief !
Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-relief
Dont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s’orne,

Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur,
Que ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borne
Aux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur.

- Stéphane Mallarmé (1887)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Stéphane Mallarmé (2022)

I thought I'd start off my discussion of the recent Netflix movie The Pale Blue Eye - which I very much enjoyed, in case anyone's wondering - by quoting Mallarmé's immortal poem "The Tomb of Edgar Poe."

I was going to add a literal translation of it, but then I ran across the one below, by American poet Richard Wilbur, which it's hard to imagine improving on:

The Tomb of Edgar Poe

Changed by eternity to Himself at last,
The Poet, with the bare blade of his mind,
Thrusts at a century which had not divined
Death's victory in his voice, and is aghast.

Aroused like some vile hydra of the past
When an angel proffered pure words to mankind,
Men swore that drunken squalor lay behind
His magic potions and the spells he cast.

The wars of earth and heaven - O endless grief!
If we cannot sculpt from them a bas-relief
To ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe,

Calm block here fallen from some far disaster,
Then let this boundary stone at least say no
To the dark flights of Blasphemy hereafter.

Christian Bale as Landor & Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe (2022)

Is it just me, or do you see some resemblance between the whiskery face of France's greatest symbolist poet and that of Christian Bale, above, in his role as "Landor" in the movie?

Mallarmé's implication that it is poets who are meant to give "a purer sense to the words of the tribe" [Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu] lies at the heart of Modernist aesthetics. It ranks with Baudelaire - another Poe fanatic - and his view of the poet as a wave-riding albatross, expounded in his verse of the same name:

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

The Poet is like that wild inheritor of the cloud,
A rider of storms, above the range of arrows and slings;
Exiled on earth, at bay amid the jeering crowd,
He cannot walk for his unmanageable wings.

(The translation, this time, is by George Dillon, Edna St. Vincent Millay's collaborator in their joint 1936 version of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil)

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Edgar Allan Poe ... yes, we know all about him (or think we do): the inventor of the detective story; the misunderstood genius, betrayed by the vindictive jealousy of his literary executor, Rufus Griswold, who almost single-handedly constructed the myth of his drunkenness and infamy; the visionary poet, first recognised by the French before the English-language world reluctantly followed their example; and - somewhat surprisingly - once, briefly, a cadet at West Point, where the film is quite correct in placing him.

What then of the Holmes to Poe's Watson, Augustus Landor? Well, the "Augustus" comes, presumably, from Poe's own prototypical detective Auguste Dupin, the protagonist of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt", and the distinctly Borgesian "Purloined Letter".

The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

As for "Landor", rather than English poet Walter Savage Landor, it seems probable that his surname is meant to refer to the little-known vignette "Landor's Cottage" - the last story Poe ever wrote, in fact - which describes the house he himself was living in at the time. The Landor of the film, too, inhabits a particularly picturesque and bookish cottage.

Louis Bayard: The Pale Blue Eye (2006)

Mind you, most of this inventiveness must be attributed, not so much to the film-makers as to the author of the novel the movie is based on, Louis Bayard. I'm guessing, like many of us, he found frustrating the inconclusiveness of "Landor's cottage": a long descriptive preamble to a promised story to be told in a next instalment which, alas, was never to appear.

Landor meets Poe

All this trivia aside, I have to admit that I was somewhat surprised to find so lukewarm a response to the movie in a number of quarters. Most of them criticised the film's "implausibility" and "inaction", which struck me as a little perverse, given the prevalence of both factors in Poe's own published writings.

As critics then and now have often failed to grasp, with Romantic artists such as Poe, it's all or nothing: you're in or you're out. If you have a problem with orangutans committing murders or with the propensity of Poe's heroines to get themselves buried alive or have their teeth extracted post-mortem, then you'd better stick to realists like Dickens or Trollope.

See How They Run (2022)

Or, in this case, you'd better stick to bad parodies of Agatha Christie, such as the dreadfully tedious and poorly plotted recent whodunit above. I was interested to see that many of those who'd awarded The Pale Blue Eye two or three stars had given See How They Run four or five.

It's not, you understand, that I have a problem with Agatha Christie or the other luminaries of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in their own right - just with the decision to replay them badly as farce. It does make me realise, though, that in detective films as well as in novels, I'm not really looking for the same things as most aficionados of the genre.

The Colloquy of Poe and Lea - by the family mausoleum (2022)

For me, it's all about atmosphere and character. I like the kinds of scenes - so abundant in The Pale Blue Eye - where characters wander around deserted graveyards, or sit in crowded taverns trading witty banter. Best of all are the occasions when large books are taken down from dust-laden shelves and opened to salient passages - translated impromptu, in this case, by Poe himself as Robert Duvall and Christian Bale look on approvingly.

Does any of this advance the plot, or assist us in unmasking the criminal? Not really, no. I don't care. Murders don't really interest me very much - but I do like a picturesque detective, with lots of hidden demons, and a taste for bamboozling even his closest collaborators.

All of this, of course, is anathema to the true devotees of detective fiction. They like an ingenious solution to the mystery, and such curlicues as believable characters or well-painted backdrops are largely irrelevant to them. Hence their preference for the pasteboard mechanics of See How They Run over the ice-bound dramatics of The Pale Blue Eye.

Rian Johnson, dir.: Knives Out (2019)

I suppose, in the end, it's best to have both. I did enjoy the original Knives Out, as well as its sequel Glass Onion, I suppose mainly because Daniel Craig was so obviously having the time of his life playing absurd anti-Bond chicken-fried Southerner Benoit Blanc.

There was, as I recall, some kind of a murder being investigated at the time, but I was more interested in watching the characters score points off one another as each of the superannuated stars tried to steal scenes with ever more outrageous business.

Rian Johnson, dir.: Glass Onion (2022)

Poe, too, could be ridiculous at times (some would say all the time). But he was, in the end, a very serious guy. He felt strongly about the need for rigorous critical judgements in the infancy of American literature, and the hatchet jobs he performed on many of his more celebrated contemporaries were legendary. Funnily enough, many of those authors are now known simply because Poe decided to critique them.

Harry Melling - perhaps better known as Harry Potter's spoilt cousin Dudley Dursley - does an excellent job of animating the touchy, emotional, fiercely intelligent contradiction that was Poe. Some viewers have commented on the incongruity of a Southern accent for someone born in Boston, but Poe did like to portray himself as a Virginian, so this is certainly an arguable quirk to impose on him.

After all, somewhat closer to our own time, Boston Brahmin poet Robert Lowell affected a Southern accent in his own poetry readings - presumably as a salute to his Southern Agrarian mentors John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate - as you can hear in this recording of his 1964 poem "For the Union Dead".

Jane Bown: Robert Lowell

Talking of poetry, there's been a certain amount of discussion of the verses - allegedly dictated to him by his dead mother - Poe quotes halfway through the movie:

Down, down, down
Came the hot threshing flurry
Ill at heart, I beseeched her to hurry
Lenore
She forbore the reply
Endless night
Caught her then in its slurry
Shrouding all, but her pale blue eye
Darkest night, black with hell
Charneled fury
Leaving only
The deathly blue eye

Needless to say, these were not written by Poe - he may have used some dodgy rhymes at times, but I can't see him combining "hurry" with "flurry" and "slurry". Nor is the syntax precise enough for his almost over-controlled style. They do have a pleasing ring in context, though.

His own poem "Lenore", which presumably inspired these lines, is somewhat more conventional in form:

The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride -
For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes -
The life still there, upon her hair - the death upon her eyes.

Presumably the flimmakers also had in mind the narrator's sorrow for "the lost Lenore" in "The Raven":

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore —
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore —
Nameless here for evermore.

The grave of Edgar Allan Poe (1849-1875)

Somewhat bewilderingly, Poe has more than one grave. The simple headstone above - with its appropriately superimposed raven - is in Baltimore, Maryland. His remains were, however, disinterred in 1875 to be shifted under the rather more pompous monument below - presumably the one which inspired Mallarmé's poem.

A somewhat less accomplished verse - by an equally distinguished admirer, Alfred, Lord Tennyson - was composed for the occasion:

Fate that once denied him,
And envy that once decried him,
And malice that belied him,
Now cenotaph his fame.

The tomb of Edgar Allan Poe

What more need one say? If you love the hothouse atmosphere of Gothic extravagance, thrill to the overblown prose of H. P. Lovecraft or Ray Bradbury's early collection Dark Carnival - why not return to their admitted master, the divinely gifted Mister Poe?

As his literary soulmate and principal French translator Charles Baudelaire put it in an 1864 letter to Théophile Thoré - with, perhaps, a mixture of admiration and chagrin:

The first time I opened a book he had written, I saw with equal measures of horror and fascination, not just the things that I had dreamed of, but actual phrases that I had designed and that he had penned twenty years earlier.

One thing's for certain, there will always be a certain region of the imagination identified with Poe's name. If you'd like to explore it further, I strongly recommend a viewing of The Pale Blue Eye.

Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe

Down for the Count

The World of Dracula
[photographs: Bronwyn Lloyd (2022)]

You may (or may not) recall that at the end of last year I posted a piece about completing a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle called The World of Charles Dickens. It was maniacally difficult! So this year we decided to go easy on ourselves by trying to put together, instead, The World of Dracula:

Little did we know that it'd be even worse. Where the Dickens puzzle confounded us with endless little people wandering around mysterious streets with not much to distinguish them from one another, Dracula, by contrast, was all big strokes - lots of versions of the Count, in different poses, in different parts of his castle, surrounded by a seemingly limitless expanse of sky.

If it hadn't been for the bats and the clouds, I doubt if I could ever have pieced that sky together. It was rather canny of Bronwyn to concentrate on the interiors and the action scenes instead.

Adam Simpson: The World of Dracula (2021)

But why Dracula? What is it that attracts me, in particular, to this great repository of folklore and the collective cultural unconscious? It is, of course, by now, far more than a novel: it's been adapted and enacted so many forms in every conceivable medium: comics, film, games, radio, stage, television - you name it, there'll be a version of Dracula there.

Aidan Hickey: Bram Stoker (1847-1912)

I've written quite a bit on the subject already: a piece called "Marginalising Dracula" on the various annotated editions of the book I've collected over the years, as well as the curious scholarly rivalries they enshrine; another piece called "Dracula's Guest" on the prehistory of the novel - not to mention a bibliography of its author, Bram Stoker himself.

Adam Simpson: The World of Dracula (2021)

Perhaps the easiest way to explain its appeal is to go through some of the great showpiece scenes of his masterpiece - as visualised by the designer of this puzzle, Adam Simpson.

•

Here I am at the opening stages of the enterprise (apologies for the less-than-glamorous outfit, but you know how it is with getting to work right away on your things-to-assemble on Christmas morning!)

Arrival: This is a novel that starts strong. Jonathan Harker's picturesque tour of quaint old Transylvania is gradually overshadowed by the mysterious warnings of his fellow-travellers, with their muttered refrain of "the dead travel fast", and finally the spectral coach - driven by Dracula in disguise - that picks him up for the last leg of his journey. You can see it all here: the blue flame that guards the gate, and the need for him to state that he enters freely and of his own will before he is able to set foot in Castle Dracula.

Suspicion: Jonathan Harker's stay in the castle becomes increasingly irksome to him the more he explores its hidden ways. Finally, of course, he discovers the Count himself sleeping in his day-coffin, but by then it's apparent that Jonathan has already prepared his own doom by signing so many legal papers and letters on his arrival.

First blood-letting: This is the wonderful scene where the Count is enflamed by the sight of his guest cutting himself shaving. Dracula manages to restrain himself - just - but even to the matter-of-fact Jonathan it's becoming clear that his host is a little more than just ... odd. Why, for instance, is there no reflection of him in the mirror?

The Three Seductresses: Bram Stoker really lets himself go in this scene where Jonathan is seduced by the Count's three vampire mistresses into accepting their "kisses." Their master is able to save him from them, producing a baby in a bag for them to feast on instead. But from now on he is careful to keep Jonathan weak and on the point of death to prevent any last minute interference with his plans for a new life in London.

The Voyage: Jonathan does, rather implausibly, manage to escape - but the Count has already taken ship across the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to reach final landfall at Whitby in the North of England. By then he's killed most of the crew, with not enough of them left to sail the vessel. It runs aground, and he's forced to take refuge in the town before making his way to London. (You'll note how the multiple co-existing scenes and time-lines of the jigsaw mesh with the novel's collage of letters, journal entries, newspaper items, and even transcripts of gramophone recordings!)

Fighting Back: Here we see Lucy's three suitors proposing to her, one after another. Further down we see the vampire she has become carrying a small child back to her grave to drink its blood. Her death scene is one step down from that, underneath the imprisoned madman Renfield, Dracula's reluctant collaborator.

Van Helsing's Triumph: There's a lot going on in these two scenes. Below we see vampire-hunter extraordinaire Abraham Van Helsing holding aloft the severed heads of the three brides of Dracula, having dared to break into the monster's den. Above we see our heroes - Jonathan, Lucy's remaining suitors, and Van Helsing - putting an end to Dracula himself, just as he's about to be revived by the setting sun.

The Count: And yet - the rumours of his death may, in the end, turn out to be greatly exaggerated. As H. P. Lovecraft once put it:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

Dracula continues to preside over the puzzle as he does over the narrative: what can death be actually said to mean to one who's already dead? He's distinctly livelier than any of the other characters in the novel, and his staying-power remains prodigious.

The merits of each new major incarcation - Max Schreck, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski, Frank Langella, Gary Oldman, and now Claes Bang - may continue to be debated, but the plain fact of the matter is that his cultural cachet can only be matched by that of his one true rival, Sherlock Holmes.

Francis Ford Coppola, dir.: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

You can find a good summary of his pop culture appearances on the Wikipedia page here; a filmography here; and a free download of the original 1897 novel here. Enjoy.

For myself, it's time now to turn my attention to another exciting project: the "Book Nook" model which was my Christmas present from Bronwyn this year. I can already foresee a lot of wrestling with bottles of glue and sandpaper in my immediate future!

Cutebee: Eternal Bookstore Book Nook Kitset

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The World of Dracula
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd (2022)]

A Happy New Year to All in
2023!

My New Bookcase

Bibliography / Psychogeography Bookcase
[photographs by Bronwyn Lloyd (1/6/22)]

Bronwyn and I are inveterate vintage shoppers. The other day we were looking through the Hospice shop at Wairau Park (located just up the street from Hoyts Cinemas, enabling one to combine browsing with moviegoing in a very civilised fashion). In the past she's been a bit scornful of my tendency to return from such expeditions with a pile of scruffy old ex-library books, so I was quite surprised when she pointed out a handsome wooden bookcase in the middle of the shop.

Wairau Park Hospice Shop (2020)

Or, rather, there were two bookcases. One was so large and imposing that it was hard to imagine fitting it into our remaining free wallspace. However the other, smaller one had tall, wide, wooden shelves, and looked tailor-made to hold some exciting new category of books.

The last time an event of this type happened, I used the new space to centralise my previously disparate collection of ghost stories. This time I decided to tackle the tricky topic of psychogeography.

But what exactly is psychogeography? I suppose, in the final analysis, it mainly depends on the list of authors you choose to attach to the concept. I wrote some notes about it for one of our Massey postgraduate creative writing courses a few years ago, which I'll refer you to if you want to explore the theme in more depth. I'll content myself here with a brief précis:

Richard Edkins: The Flâneur, Psychogeography and Drift Photography (2015)

Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance — nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city — as one loses oneself in a forest — that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

- Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle (1932)

In many ways, psychogeography could be seen as a revival of French poet Charles Baudelaire's idea of the flâneur, the perambulating dandy, whose apparently aimless wanderings offer vital clues to the deeper meaning of modern urban environments.

Psychogeography continues to be associated principally with urban explorations - Peter Ackroyd's double-focus historical novel Hawksmoor (1985); Mike Davis's City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990); Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell (1989-99), which postulates a Masonic "secret history" behind the Jack the Ripper murders; and Iain Sinclair's explorations of London's mythic past and present in such works as Lights out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (1997) - even Chris Trotter's chapter about an idealised dream Auckland in his alternative history of New Zealand No Left Turn (2007).

However, in his more recent book the Edge of the Orison (2005), Sinclair has extended his methodology to cover the rural haunts of nineteenth-century English nature poet John Clare, setting out to retrace the poet's famous 'Journey out of Essex' - Clare's own prose account of his 1841 escape from the asylum in which he had been incarcerated to find his lost love, Mary Joyce (unfortunately already three years dead).

Psychogeography, then, deals principally with boundary-crossings: whether those boundaries are those of genre (verse, fiction, non-fictional prose) or discipline (history, geography, travel, memoir and biography).

I suppose, in essence, that it consists of imposing a theory (generally of an occult or abstruse nature) on a landscape, more or less arbitrarily. The landscape is then interrogated to see whether or not it matches up with or confirms the theory, no matter how - intentionally - absurd it may be.

Creative NZ grants (2020)

The list of notable psychogeographers included in Wikipedia's article on the subject includes the following names:

• Peter Ackroyd
• Michèle Bernstein
• Pat Barker
• Paul Conneally
• Guy Debord
• Stewart Home
• Jacqueline de Jong
• Robert Macfarlane
• Geoff Nicholson
• Iain Sinclair
• Laura Oldfield Ford
• Nick Papadimitriou
• Will Self
• Cathy Turner (artist)
• Jean Rolin
• Philippe Vasset

My own set of favourite psychogeographers is far shorter, though it does include a few of the same suspects:

1. Geoffrey Ashe (1923-2022)
2. John Clare (1793-1864)
3. Tim Powers (1952- )
4. W. G. Sebald (1944-2001)
5. Iain Sinclair (1943- )

•

Geoffrey Ashe (2009)

Geoffrey Ashe
& the Arthurian Legend

Geoffrey Ashe actually died just a couple of months ago, on the 30th January 2022, at his home in Glastonbury. On my one and only visit there, in 1981, I was hugely impressed by the intense atmosphere projected by both the town and its environs. I had, admittedly, been reading John Cowper Powys' mammoth novel A Glastonbury Romance, and a combination of that and Geoffrey Ashe's King Arthur's Avalon made it seem like holy ground to me.

I remember dashing up Glastonbury Tor, and feeling as though the ghosts were springing out of the grass all around me. Until my father turned to make some banal remark, that is - God knows how he put up with such a sullen and pretentious teen! All I can say is that my siblings weren't much better. "Thanks for the interruption," as one of my older brothers remarked on a not dissimilar occasion.

The Arthurian legend could certainly be described as England's Dreaming (the title of Jon Savage's classic book about the Sex Pistols). There are rivals, of course: Robin Hood and his Merry Men, Langland's peasant hero Piers Plowman - but only King Arthur's aristocratic mythos combines all the different strands of Celtic, Roman, Saxon, and Norman culture into one bizarre cauldron of stories.

Here's a selection of some of the literature on the topic I've collected over the years. First, from Geoffrey Ashe's own eclectic bibliography (you can find out more about him from my blogpost on the subject):

1. King Arthur’s Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury. 1957. Fontana Books. London: Collins, 1973.
2. From Caesar to Arthur. London: Collins, 1960.
3. Land to the West: St Brendan’s Voyage to America. London: Collins, 1962.
4. All About King Arthur. 1969. London: Carousel Books, 1973.
5. Camelot and the Vision of Albion. 1971. St. Albans, Herts: Panther, 1975.
6. The Finger and the Moon. 1973. St. Albans, Herts: Panther, 1975.
7. The Virgin. 1976. Paladin. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977.
8. The Ancient Wisdom. 1977. Abacus. London: Sphere Books, 1979.
9. Avalonian Quest. 1982. London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984.
10. The Discovery of King Arthur. With Debrett’s Peerage. London: Guild Publishing, 1985.
11. The Landscape of King Arthur. With Photographs by Simon McBride. London: Webb & Bower (Publishers) Limited, in association with Michael Joseph Limited, 1987.
12. Mythology of the British Isles. 1990. London: Methuen London, 1992.

I've added a few other books to the bookcase to contextualise Ashe's curious imaginings. He was a strange combination of scholar and visionary, and - at least until the 'psychogeographer' label came along - it was hard to work out which of these aspects was the most dominant:

1. Alcock, Leslie. Arthur’s Britain: History and Archaeology, AD 367-634. 1971. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
2. Ashe, Geoffrey, ed. The Quest for Arthur’s Britain. With Leslie Alcock, C. A Ralegh Radford, & Philip Rahtz. 1968. London: Paladin, 1973.
3. Barber, Richard. Legends of King Arthur. The Boydell Press. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer Ltd., 2001.
4. Barber, Richard. The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend. 2004. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.
5. Bord, Janet & Colin. Mysterious Britain. 1972. A Paladin Book. Frogmore, St Albans: Granada Publishing Ltd., 1975.
6. Chambers, E. K. Arthur of Britain. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1927.
7. Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. 1966. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
8. Gerald of Wales. The History and Topography of Ireland. Trans. John J. O’Meara. 1951. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
9. Cambrensis, Giraldus. The Itinerary through Wales and The Description of Wales. Trans. Sir Richard Colt Hoare. 1806. Introduction by W. Llewellyn Williams. 1908. Everyman’s Library. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., n.d.
10. Treharne, R. F. The Glastonbury Legends. 1967. Abacus. London: Sphere Books, Ltd., 1975.
11. Watkins, Alfred. The Old Straight Track. 1925. London: Abacus, 1976.
12. Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. 1920. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957.

Joanna Gillan: Glastonbury Tor (2022)

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William Henry Hunt: Unknown Man (perhaps John Clare?) (1820s)

John Clare
& the Power of Pastoral

I've written a couple of posts about John Clare already. The first was an attempt to parallel his poetic practice with that of his near-contemporary Charles Baudelaire. The second was more narrowly focussed on the peculiarities of his bibliography.

He's one of those poets you either get or you don't. His 'madness' (i.e. inability to conform) has made him a troublesome figure for readers and literary scholars alike. In his lifetime his poems were normalised and repunctuated for him by his publisher. After his death the same service has been performed by a series of editors.

But then, the same could be said of almost all the poets of his era. Wordsworth himself punctuated oddly and sporadically, expecting his printers to deal with such accidentals. Even W. B. Yeats was notoriously vague about both spelling and 'stops'.

But Clare is in a class of his own. His output was vast and disorderly - especially the later poems from the asylum years. What makes him an appropriate figure to include here is the immense precision of his observation and knowledge of natural history. His landscapes and creatures are not the symbolic nightingales and skylarks of a Keats or a Shelley, but genuine living beings for whom he had both compassion and empathy.

Clare and Clare-iana have therefore become one of the touchstones of modern pastoral writing. And the story of his posthumous rediscovery and influence is almost as fascinating as the events of his own life:

1. The Works of John Clare. Ed. Arthur Symons. 1908. Introduction by John Goodridge. The Wordsworth Poetry Library. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1995.
2. The Poems of John Clare. Ed. J. W. Tibble. 2 vols. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1935.
3. Poems of John Clare’s Madness. Ed. Geoffrey Grigson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949.
4. The Prose. Ed. J. W. & Anne Tibble. 1951. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
5. The Letters. Ed. J. W. & Anne Tibble. 1951. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
6. The Shepherd’s Calendar. Ed. Eric Robinson & Geoffrey Summerfield. Wood Engravings by David Gentleman. 1964. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.
7. The Later Poems. Ed. Eric Robinson & Geoffrey Summerfield. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964.
8. Selected Poems. Ed. J. W. & Anne Tibble. Everyman’s Library, 563. London: J. M. Dent, 1965.
9. The Wood is Sweet. Ed. David Powell. Introduction by Edmund Blunden. Illustrated by John O'Connor. Poems for Young Readers. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966.
10. Bird Poems. Introduction by Peter Levi. Wood-Engravings by Thomas Bewick. London: The Folio Society, 1980.
11. John Clare’s Birds. Ed. Eric Robinson & Richard Fitter. Illustrated by Robert Gillmor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
12. John Clare: The Oxford Authors. Ed. Eric Robinson & David Powell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
13. The Parish: A Satire. Ed. Eric Robinson. Notes by David Powell. 1985. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
14. Selected Letters. Ed. Mark Storey. Oxford Letters & Memoirs. 1988. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
15. Selected Poems. Ed. Geoffrey Summerfield. 1990. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2000.
16. John Clare By Himself. Ed. Eric Robinson & David Powell. Wood Engravings by Jon Lawrence. 1996. Fyfield Books. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002.

For more on the subject, here are a few selections from the burgeoning library of books about him. I'd recommend, in particular, Jonathan Bate's groundbreaking biography:

1. Tibble, J. W. & Anne. John Clare: A Life. 1932. Rev. Anne Tibble. London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1972.
2. Storey, Edward. A Right to Song: The Life of John Clare. London: Methuen, 1982.
3. Bate, Jonathan. John Clare: A Biography. 2003. Picador. London: Pan Macmillan, 2004.
4. Foulds, Adam. The Quickening Maze. 2009. Vintage Books. London: Random House, 2010.
5. Felstiner, John. Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009.

Rob Chapman: On the Trail of John Clare (2017)

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Tim Powers (2013)

Tim Powers
& the Time to Cast Away Stones

Tim Powers' novels and stories are definitely an enthusiasm of mine. They have their limitations, but their strengths are equally obvious. You'll have to take my word for it that it's not as easy as it might seem to concoct complex and believable secret histories, mixing occult and quotidian phenomena in approximately equal measure. I am, after all, the author of a number of them (my 'REM' trilogy, for instance). Powers is a master of the art.

I've discussed my favourites among his books in my blogpost here, though a few more have appeared since I wrote it: notably the Vickery and Castine trilogy, which does a great job of mythologising the Los Angeles Freeway system, among other strange and arcane matters.

Here's a list of his major works to date (give or take a few limited-edition novellas):

1. Powers of Two: The Skies Discrowned & An Epitaph in Rust. 1976, 1986, 1989. Framingham, MA: The NESFA Press, 2004.
2. The Drawing of the Dark. 1979. London: Granada, 1981.
3. The Anubis Gates. 1983. London: Triad Grafton Books, 1986.
4. Dinner at Deviant's Palace. 1985. London: Grafton Books, 1987.
5. On Stranger Tides. 1987. New York: Ace Books, 1988.
6. The Stress of Her Regard. 1989. London: HarperCollins, 1991.
7. Last Call. Fault Lines, 1. 1993. New York: Avon Books, 1996.
8. Expiration Date. Fault Lines, 2. London: HarperCollins, 1995.
9. Earthquake Weather. Fault Lines, 3. 1997. London: Orbit, 1998.
10. Declare. 2001. New York: HarperTorch, 2002.
11. Strange Itineraries and Other Stories. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2005.
12. Three Days to Never. 2006. William Morrow. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013.
13. The Bible Repairman and Other Stories. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2011.
14. Hide Me Among the Graves. 2012. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2013.
15. Medusa's Web. 2015. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2016.
16. Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers. Preface by David Drake. Introduction by Tony Daniel. 2017. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2019.
17. Alternate Routes. Vickery & Castine, 1. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2018.
18. Forced Perspectives. Vickery & Castine, 2. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2020.
19. Stolen Skies. Vickery & Castine, 3. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2022.

The critical literature on him is limited, consisting mainly of interviews and reviews in various journals. He isn't discussed directly in the K. K. Ruthven book cited below, but many of its contentions bear interestingly on his work:

1. [Katz, Brad. “An Interview with Tim Powers (21/2/96).” Brow Magazine 1996.
   http://www.mcs.net/~brow/powers.html]
2. Ruthven, K. K. Faking Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Karen Robinson: Los Angeles Freeway System Map (2013)

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Basso Cannarsa: W. G. Sebald (2019)

W. G. Sebald
& the Natural History of Destruction

W. G. Sebald is another one of those writers who seems unfairly singled out by fate for a brief flowering and then eternal night ("cum semel occidit brevis lux, / nox est perpetua una dormienda", [when once the brief light has set, / an eternal night must be slept], as Catullus put it in his much-quoted Elegy V). Hence, perhaps, the succession of books which has appeared since his death - perhaps in the hope of continuing his writing career from beyond the grave.

I've written more about this in my blogpost here, along with a few notes in a more recent post on The Imaginary Museum.

Is he a psychogeographer? It seems as good a description as any for his genre-defying works, part fiction, part non-fiction, part travel literature, part history lesson: in particular Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn, but also such eclectic essay collections as the recently translated A Place in the Country.

That's how I choose to regard him, at any rate, though I'm happy to hear all the reasons why I'm wrong from some more earnest commentator.

1. After Nature. 1988. Trans. Michael Hamburger. 2002. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
2. Vertigo. 1990. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Harvill Press, 1999.
3. The Emigrants. 1993. Trans. Michael Hulse. 1996. London: Vintage, 2002.
4. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse. 1998. London: Vintage, 2002.
5. A Place in the Country: On Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser and Others. 1998. Trans. Jo Catling. 2013. London: Penguin, 2014.
6. On the Natural History of Destruction: With Essays on Alfred Andersch, Jean Améry and Peter Weiss. 1999. Trans. Anthea Bell. 2003. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004.
7. Austerlitz. 2001. Trans. Anthea Bell. 2001. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002.
8. Campo Santo. Ed. Sven Meyer. 2003. Trans. Anthea Bell. 2005. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006.
9. [with Jan Peter Tripp]. Unrecounted: 33 Texts and 33 Etchings. 2003. Trans. Michael Hamburger. Hamish Hamilton. London: Penguin, 2004.
10. Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001. 2008. Trans. Iain Galbraith. Hamish Hamilton. London: Penguin, 2011.

Carol Angier's biography speaks to the underlying anxieties of Sebald's life and times, and the curious ways in which this manifested itself in his work. As in her previous book about Primo Levi, she does have certain hobby-horses which appear continually, but no-one could complain of any lack of contextual documentation for her views.

1. Angier, Carol. Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald. London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2021.

Barbara L Hui: Mapping Literature (2014)

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Iain Sinclair (2013)

Iain Sinclair
& the Secret History of London

Iain Sinclair is certainly the most self-consciously psychogeographical of all the authors mentioned here. He began as a poet, then moved to writing novels, and then on to stranger works of cross-genre travel / history / art & film criticism. It's mostly these latter which have won him a cult audience.

He may lack the immediate visibility of a Peter Ackroyd or an Alan Moore, but his oeuvre could be argued to be at least as influential. I haven't yet written about him at length, as there are a number of his books I'd like to read first, but I have compiled an approximate bibliography for him among the others included here

Here's a small selection from the poetry and fiction he's published to date:

1. Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge. 1975 & 1979. Introduction by Michael Moorcock. Vintage. London: Random House, 1995.
2. Flesh Eggs & Scalp Metal: Selected Poems, 1970-1987. A Paladin Paperback Original. London: Grafton Books, 1989.
3. Downriver (Or, The Vessels of Wrath): A Narrative in Twelve Tales. 1991. Vintage. London: Random House, 1995.
4. Radon Daughters. 1994. Vintage. London: Random House, 1995.
5. Dining on Stones (or, The Middle Ground). 2004. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.

The non-fiction works listed below are where his greatest strengths lie, I would argue. Unfortunately I don't own a copy of his ground-breaking London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 (2002) but I have read it with great interest, and indeed used a chapter from it as one of the readings in my Massey Travel Writing course.

1. Lights Out for the Territories: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London. London: Granta Books, 1997.
2. Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's 'Journey Out of Essex'. 2005. London: Penguin, 2006.

Karen Robinson: On the Road (2004)

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Here and there on this blog you can find some of my own attempts at a psychogeography of my own whereabouts, in the form of the two (hopefully ongoing) series "The Intrepid Ghost-Hunters" and "The Mysteries of ...":

1. The Intrepid Ghost-Hunters (1): Waitomo Caves (13/11/2012)
2. The Intrepid Ghost-Hunters (2): Thames & Te Aroha (13/8/2013)
3. The Intrepid Ghost-Hunters (3): Home Turf (5/8/2015)
4. The Mysteries of Ashburton (25/1/2019)
5. The Mysteries of Rotorua (28/4/2019)
6. The Mysteries of Auckland: H. P. Lovecraft (12/4/2021)
7. The Mysteries of Auckland: Jules Verne (4/7/2021)

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In any case, it's nice to see all these books gathered together for the first time. I can feel them already starting to talk among themselves. I doubt very much that this is the last that I'll have to say on the topic, either.

Robert Macfarlane: Psychogeography (2019)