Robert Suggs (July 13, 1999)Hey, has anyone read this story anytime recently? Or any Shiel? What do you think about Shiel anyway? Seems nobody reads him much these days. I realize he writes with an affected prose, and that he's another author who stands accused of racism and anti-semitism. "House of Sounds" is a unique story to be sure, and an upsetting one. Here is a horror tale based on DECIBELS. LOUDNESS. I can't think of another one (OK, Jessica, I'm certain you can). I can't imagine any horror worse than loudness. I have two small children, I know what I'm talking about. And by the way, I do let them around my books. I want them to grow up to love reading and the feel of a book--that's becoming very unique these days. I care for my books, I care for my kids better. Anyway, Shiel has written the House of Usher and taken out the Hush. It's constructed in some kind of weird Scandinavian soundstream (I'm beginning to understand our recent Norwegian spammers a bit better). You can't even hear your host speak, but he can hear YOU with his grotesque little round heredity ears because one develops VERY acute hearing powers in this house. The whole manse is also chained down so it won't spin off into the ether. There are a couple of batty relatives and murderous servants kicking around, too--Emily Bronte would have wuthered away in this place. The story is strange, disjointed, illogical, and propelled by incredible nightmare images that must have come to Shiel in his own sleep (how the visitor DOES sleep in this soundstream, and how his eardrums aren't burst, are among the little questions that crop up on virtually every page). I haven't even mentioned that the house is one gigantic 500-year hourglass, ticking off blood descendants instead of sand. Or the dead-ancestor room, and the little system they've devised for knowing EXACTLY where the rats are in their feasting thereupon. Don't worry, I won't mention it. There's some traditional gothic back-story, the kind of thing Marjorie Bowen would have done much better, but it gets basically forgotten and discarded once the tale gets going. This is a very strange one, friends. Though it's one of the author's best known stories, it's not particularly easy to find. It was anthologized in 1985 in a Lincoln Childs anthology, Dark Banquet, and of course it can be had for $6.50 or so in the Arkham Shiel collection Xelucha, which--again--has not sold out in 25 years. Is Shiel due for a revival? Whaddaya think?
RoboOo
jmaxgilbert (July 13, 1999)
I read the Shiel story, and remember it as the best in that collection (XELUCHA), but I've always found Shiel'd semi-hysteric prose style somewhat off-putting. It is interesting that you mention Poe, because he comes to mind when thinking of horror stories that use sound as a key element (The Tell-Tale Heart, for one). There was also a good Gothic story from Blackwood's (available in an Oxford UP paperback) concerning a guy stuck in a bell tower that does a convincing job of summoning up the horror of loud sound.
MaxoOo
Paul Montelone (July 13, 1999)
"House of Sounds" is indeed one of Shiel's best tales, but I'm one of those who favors the early, fin-de-siecle version "Vaila" (found in the original SHAPES IN THE FIRE [1896] and reprinted in BEST SHORT STORIES OF M.P. SHIEL [1948]). Shiel , in my view, is actually at his best when he is purplest, which is the case here, and also in "Xelucha," which I vastly prefer to any other tale he wrote. But getting back to "Vaila"/"House of Sounds," I guess what struck me about this story is not so much the SOUND of things as their perpetual RESTLESSNESS--the raging of the ocean, the franticness of Harfager, the sudden attack by Aith--the skeletal servant--on the anguished Lady Swertha,, the rats, the wind, the swift and inevitable passage of time, and the final collapse of all. It is virtually impossible to read the story as an allegory and yet one cannot help but to feel that Shiel was making some ultimately unsayable claim about the nature of things--which is why I think Lovecraft somewhere characterized the work as "cosmic."Incidentally, don't forget this site for good Shiel info:
http://www.creative.net/~alang/lit/horror/shiel.sht
Paul M.
oOo
Brian McNaughton (July 14, 1999)
Shiel has the distinction of having been the only writer of weird fiction who was crowned a king. (Nyah, nyah, Lord Dunsany!)His father had established the kingdom of Redonda on some speck in the Lesser Antilles and crowned his son (at the age of about 15) before the Brits brushed the claim to independence aside.
He was born on the West Indian island of Montserrat, and his mother was a mulatto. (The AHD and OED ascribe no pejorative implication to this: it means she had one white and one black parent.) One wonders why he isn't trotted out to be celebrated during Black History Month, as are so many lesser lights.
Perhaps his greatest distinction: ARTHUR MACHEN was best man at his wedding.
He mentions "the poet, Machen," in THE PURPLE CLOUD, which may be his masterpiece. The text of this novel is available online.
--Brian McNaughton
oOo
rbadac (July 15, 1999)
La terra lagrimosa diede vento
che baleno una luce vermiglia
la qual mi vinse ciascun sentimento;
e caddi come l'uom sonno piglia.A wind burst up / from the tear-soaked ground
to erupt red light and batter /
my senses-- *and so I fell, as though seized by sleep.*These are the last lines of Canto III of Dante's Inferno (Robert Pinsky's translation), and the source of the headpiece line of 'Vaila/House Of Sounds.' It describes Dante's swoon before boarding Charon's ferry to enter Hell. Dante awakens on the other side of the river Acheron without benefit of that contrivance, which is reserved for damned souls only; in similar fashion, Shiel's narrator escapes the fate of the Fall of the House of Harfager, though Shiel himself is unquestionably conscious of his mission to recouch Edgar Allan Poe in cosmic terms in this and the other stories which comprise his collection SHAPES IN THE FIRE.
I feel like Dr. Lecter lecturing with his projector (a Shiel-ian sentence !) to the Florentine Studiolo in HANNIBAL. Pass me the extension cord, please. Thank you. Viscera: in or out? Heh heh.
Ahem. This was the first time I had ever read both the earlier and later texts of this story together, and it was quite a shock. Lovecraft and others considered 'Sounds' an improvement; still others prefer 'Vaila.' Armed with the Arkham edition of the former and the Roberts Brothers edition of the latter (got for a jaw-clanging five bucks because some idiot from 1896 I could kiss had bracketed a few passages in the margins in ink with some truly loony observations like 'another expression of the pecuniary disdain of genius'-- you go, nutcase reader 103 years distant, this copy was destined to be mine), I began with 'Vaila,'
An hour later, flames are shooting from my fingers, I'm spinning on my head like a dervish in Antarctica, gibbering Classical references I know nothing about, and just generally having a good time, and I decide to settle down and read the 'Sounds' version; and the whole time I'm going 'Wha--?? This *can't* be the same guy !!'
Quixotically, it is. Now there are two schools here, and I would be lying if I said these reviews you read here bore more than a nodding acquaintance to the algebraic, ink-and-coffee-spattered chicken-scratching and football play diagrams of my first drafts-- to say nothing of the enormous last-minute changes I make when I type them-- and we wouldn't want to put the editors out of work, would we? Conversely, there's the other view, championed by the proponents of oil painting, Chinese calligraphy, and unexploded bomb defusing, that says the first stroke is the only honest one, all others are contrivance (or, in the case of UXB crews, littering). There is no resolution of this. We can only hope for an amicable compromise.
But take a look at these comparative passages.
At the viewing of Harfager's dead mother
('House Of Sounds')
I, too, stood and looked at death so grim and rigorous as I think I never saw. The coffin looked angrily full of tangled grey locks, the lady being of great age, bony and hook-nosed; and her face shook with solemn constancy to the quivering of the building.('Vaila')I, too, looking, stood. Death so rigorous, Gorgon, I had not seen. The coffin seemed full of tangled grey hair. The lady was, it was clear, of great age, osseous, scimitar-nosed. Her head shook with solemn continuity to the vibration of the house.
At the viewing of the hourglass
('Vaila')
Again he made me a busy and confident sign to wait; snatched then the ladder steps toward the pool; handed me the taper. I, mounting, held high the flame, and saw hanging from the misty centre of the dome a form-- a sphere of tarnished old copper, lengthened out into balloon-shape by a down-looking neck, at the end of which I thought I could discern a tiny orifice. Painted across the bulge was barely visible in faded red characters the hieroglyph:('House Of Sounds')
'harfager-hous: 1389-188' Something-- I knew not what-- of *eldritch* in the combined aspect of spotted globe, and gloomy pool, and contrivance of hourly hissing ball, gave expedition to my feet as I slipped down the ladder.Again he made me a busy and confident signal to wait, moved the ladder steps toward the pool, handed me the taper. When I had mounted, holding high the light, I saw hanging out of the fogs in the dome a globe of old copper, lengthened into balloon-shape by a neck, at the end of which I could spy a tiny hole. Painted over the globe was barely visible in red-print letters:
HARFAGER-HOUS: 1389-188 I was down quicker than I went up !
A mixed blessing. Improvements? Undoubtedly, and yet something is getting lost, a certain quality... one more comparison, this time showing the 'Sounds' version first:
('House Of Sounds')
'No, but, God, no, no,' I gasped. 'I will no more go from here: here let me waiting pass in this carnival of the vortices, anarchy of the thunders !'-- and I ran staggering. But memory gropes in a greyer gloaming as to all that followed.('Vaila')'No, but God, no, no,' I cried. 'I will no more wander hence, my God ! I will even perish with Harfager ! Here let me waltzing pass, in this Ball of the Vortices, Anarchie of the Thunders ! Did not the great Corot call it translation in a chariot of flame? But this is gaudier than that ! redder than that ! This is jaunting on the scorial tempests and reeling bullions of hell ! It is baptism in a sun !' Recollection gropes in a dimmer gloaming as to all that followed.
It's a matter of taste, naturally, even more one of mood; if I had read 'Sounds' first, I would have cringed at 'Vaila.' Beyond stylistic differences the island's name Vaila was inexplicably changed in the rewritten version to 'Rayba' (Toast? Sunglasses? Shiel's old nurse? I have no idea why Shiel ditched a perfectly good, even Scandinavian name). Plot points are unaffected-- the setup legend of the brothers Harold and Sweyn fighting over Harold's wife Thronda is a lot easier to read in 'Sounds,' having been divested of its frightful Olde Englyshe Spellynge, and this helps make it clearer that the skeletal servant Aith *is* Harold, one eye, no ears, and all.
Which version is the best one? There's a rub. Siding with most critics, modern literary taste, and of course the older Shiel himself (why *did* he rewrite it? To make it better or to make it more commercial?), you would have to go with 'Sounds.' But admirers of Shiel in his undilute form would pick 'Vaila' in a minute. It was, after all, the first stroke, and there is something about his pyrotechnic period that genuinely sings. What can I say? Lunatics off their medication are always more interesting.
An anniversary is coming up for M.P. Shiel. July 20, 1880 is the day his father crowned him King.
rbadac, Imperial Librarian of Redonda (Special Collections)
oOo
Robert Suggs (July 15, 1999)
rbadac wrote:
( a useful comparison of parallel passages from the two versions of Shiel's story).Well, I read House before these older excerpts, and I did cringe. I'm not against purple prose. It bothers me not at all in Poe. Of course there are no "improved" versions of Poe, but I instinctively know his tales would be ruined by ANY degree of revision. This Shiel is something else again. I read Xelucha in its one version and cringed all the way through. It simply struck me as faux-poe in the service of imitation yellow-90s decadence to little effect; a bitchy Don Rickles-mouthed ghost we can identify from the beginning. But House, in either language form (wonder what the spelling reformers would say about this one?) has a great story, and that's what matters. It's ultimately a matter of whether the language conveys and enhances the telling or gets in the way. I guess I'm with the mob on this one. It's a tale too good to enshround and obscure in lost classical references (much as I mourn the loss of shared classical heritage in this generation).
RoboOo
rbadac (July 17, 1999)
Robert Suggs wrote:(well-informed comment on Shiel, but a potentially contentious opinion of 'Xelucha'...)
Heh heh. We should come back to Shiel sometime later, and look at other stories like 'Huguenin's Wife,' 'Phorfor,' and 'The Bride' etc. But before I leave the topic, Shiel's birthday is July 21st, and here are some links to the truly confusing Kingdom of Redonda:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/5900/
http://www.antiguanice.com/redonda/index.html
http://www.redonda.org/redonda.htmlIf you can tell me who is the current king after going here, you will have told me something.
As for myself, I want one of those cigar boxes.
rbadac
ooOoo