On Two Feathers

To a wonderful critic on what would have been his seventy-first birthday.

A long-standing tenet of the unimaginative has been their aversion to fiction.  Their explanation is rooted in the proclaimed need for truth, for "things that actually happened" as if thoughts and emotions, the flour and yeast of fiction, never "happen" (I think we have all heard such arguments); fiction is regarded as a patchwork of lies, which in one way of course it very much is.  Yet the best fiction on both paper and reel is derived from a sense on the part of the reader or viewer that this event, these words, this gesture actually happened, if in a slightly different context.  Even science fiction, that bastion of the escapist, which often declares itself to be the greatest exponent of the human imagination, scours the most basic plots of melodrama and intrigue for the clotheslines on which to hang its fantastic details.  But let us not begrudge the science-fictionists their pleasures.  What does need elaboration, however, is fiction itself.  To that end, let us use the debate between two observers of fiction, Critic A and Critic B.

Critic A has been trained to study fiction.  What this means, for those of us who have not enjoyed such a privilege, is that he has read the canonical works in his language and translations of foreign classics, and has been given the tools and vocabulary to analyze fiction from a technical perspective.  While his credentials in this regard are impeccable, they are eclipsed by his passion.  He loves his work, he loves reading books and thinking about them during and after his readings, and he loves writing up his thoughts with enough flashy words to assure his audience that he knows of what he speaks.  Among his favorite works are the following: those with a political or social agenda that appeals to his own beliefs, those that exhibit devastating skill, and those that some other critics don't like very much because they seem constructed out of bromides, when in fact, according to Critic A, they are merely subversive.  He falls in particular for those cliché-ridden tales that feature a political or social element that some people – for all intents and purposes, everyone except him – do not fully understand.  These stories are dismissed by the vast majority of other critics and ridiculed years later as examples of the imbecile.  Not all such tales gain admiration on his pages, but enough to lead one to think that he, too, has a particular agenda.

Something else about Critic A: while his reputation is that of a contrarian, he is reviled for another trait – pedantry.  Why is Critic A pedantic?  Because he bandies about trendy terms as if he invented such jargon?  Because when one reads some if not most of his reviews, we learn much more about him than the works in question?  Or maybe because there is a red thread of liberal ranting that infiltrates everything he writes, with the result being that we often get factual mistakes about the works that better fit his paradigms?  In this last way, Critic A is a fiction writer, albeit a poor one.  We can forgive him his credos and slogans as well as the causes he alone appears to support like Atlas.  But what we cannot disregard is his presumably willful distortion of events and characters.  If he really has read the book he describes, why does he get some of the details wrong?  Why does he say "sister-in-law" when the character was really a "mother-in-law," if so young in comparison to her husband as to seem apt for the former title?  Why does he look upon a repulsive protagonist, one who is so unabashedly drawn as evil and self-serving and is digested by all readers in this selfsame fashion, as a "hero" and worthy of the author's admiration, when the author shows clearly from the first page how a horrible man can destroy himself and others?   Does he not get it or do we not get it?  Before we attempt an answer, let us turn to Critic B.

To the best of our knowledge, Critic B has never received any formal education in criticism.  He has become a critic by virtue of his voracious readings and his keen eye for human psychology.  His reviews (with a few notable exceptions) are wry and straightforward but rarely abusive, and while it is uncommon to encounter technical terminology in them, Critic B will use a learned word only if it is more accurate than any alternative.  Critic B has become very popular with his audience because, in his own phrasing, he has liberated criticism from jargon (jargon, after all, is but an unnecessary code for an allegedly exclusive club that no intelligent person would ever want to join).  Unfettered by nonce words and mumbo-jumbo theories, Critic B's reviews shine with the purity of gleaming truth.  Occasionally, one admits, they are a little too indulgent; they will opine that the quality of a work depends not on what it is about, but how it is about it.  Nevertheless the vast majority of Critic B's writings stand the true test of time in that they are read not for trends or his personal and political agenda, but for whether a work has any value as art.  Readers are duly forewarned about the contents of the work (some kind of plot summary or thread is invariably provided) and can always choose not to bother, like the ingredients of a dish often dictate whether or not you would even think of tasting it.  Every so often Critic B will lambaste a social crime or inequality and such howls resonate because we do not have to hear them every week.  To read Critic B's reviews is to enjoy someone who enjoys books and, more importantly, enjoys a life that is devoted to books.  To read Critic B is to read about a life consecrated to an undying love for the endless mysteries of fiction, which is nothing less than the history of the human soul.

We understand in short order that both Critic A and Critic B are moralists, but not of the same type.  Indeed, while Critic A does everything his dictionary allows him to insert bold strokes of his feelings and ideas, Critic B's mores rise slowly to the surface.  It is perhaps true that even when someone just tells you good morning, he is betraying some element of his personality.  With Critic B, however, one needs to read a handful of his reviews, preferably on rather disparate works, to acquire a notion of his world view, which embraces the open sea from the whitest cliffs of Dover.  And what does Critic A look out upon?  He, like Critic B, has a huge number of shelves; but while Critic B gazes upon them with admiration in the hope of matching the emotion and satisfaction in his measly words that he felt upon reading his favorite books, Critic A sees only the bars that the bindings seem to form.  His shelves are eclectic, consciously eclectic in the way that some people have of designing their home first and foremost to impress unexpected guests.  They have always entrapped him because he has clung to the duty of the trained literary critic, that of ancestor worship.  This worship is somewhat akin to assuming pedigree trumps talent, which it never has, even if pedigree and talent tend to be sensational allies.

But we said they were moralists, and they both are.  Critic A knows that things are wrong in society.  They are in fact terribly wrong and he might be the best person to fix them if he were not simply a critic.  In this way he simultaneously revels in and resents his profession, which cannot under any circumstances make for good reading.  Critic B, on the other hand, knows wrong from right in the way that we all know it, I suppose, although many of us try to contemn it with sham superiority.  Critic B knows that a book that doesn't know wrong from right is worthless.  He also knows that a book that glorifies money, relativism, violence, ignorance, or drugs might as well be converted into toilet paper.  He knows that spirituality is sadly perhaps not for everyone, but he does not dislike people who are spiritual; he dislikes people who insist that others adopt their particular spirituality.  Critic B lauds people who speak their conscience, people who work hard and do not blame others, and people who know history and yet strive to think for themselves.  He is always quick to point out moral contradictions and comment as to whether they have been resolved in a fashion consistent with the rest of the work.  He writes with love, tenderness, and very little acrimony, because acrimony should be reserved for those few people who hate you for what you are.  Inevitably some people must hate Critic B, but he does not hint at who they might be.

One of them could be Critic A.  Critic A also knows the things that Critic B knows, but he is very concerned that we might think he doesn't.  That is why, one supposes, we are proffered constant reminders of his learning often phrased in the most tortuous and self-congratulatory shape possible.  Critic A does have a remarkable passel of clever thoughts but he clubs us with them as if expecting them to enter our skin.  He takes stands against dumb and outrageous ideas, especially those that smack of white, middle-class apologetics – in short, bourgeois guilt and insincerity – but then turns around and defends the most unoriginal projects.  Without an ad hominem attack, which he often employs but doesn't himself deserve, one can simply gather his reviews and ask one plain question: are these about joy or about being right?  When you read Critic A, you have the distinct impression that he is disappointed that everyone does not agree with him.  Between his multisyllabics come sighs and groans as if he were an urban stage star in a hopelessly rural production.  He labors as any good critic should; alas, we see not only his review but all the work behind it as if we were looking at a skyscraper with those good, old-fashioned X-ray glasses made famous many decades ago when cinema was starting to catch up to literature.  We do not see much happiness in Critic A even though he is often right and more often observant, never mind his periodic botching of minutia.  As a fiction writer then, he has a lot to say but it all comes off as a diatribe against everything that came before him (there is even a theory about that, which I am sure he would like to forget).  Critic B, on the other hand, critiques fiction the only way it should be critiqued: with joy, wisdom, and a deep understanding of human motivation.  And that cannot be said for all those fact-laden histories.

The Blunderer

Walter had a vision of a little window.  It was a beautiful little square window, just out of his reach, filled with light blue sky with a suggestion of green earth below.

Adulthood, you will surely have heard, may be summarized as a series of one's choices (some apply this label to life as a whole; yet in so many instances of our childhood, choices are snatched from our tender fingers), a lovely mantra for your friendly neighborhood Freewill Society.  We are also told by some of the members of this same organization that religious faith is anathema to volition, because the existence of an omnipotent otherness suggests that our fates are already carved out in some dark and distant cave for us, sooner or maybe much later, to discover.  These same board members, whose staffing is replicated in a club almost invariably named, in cruel irony, "humanist," will then advance their theories as to why science alone promotes freewill.  Science, that same discipline that claims everything can be determined by genetics, fossils, and other unstoppable forces well beyond human direction.  Scientists have made some incredible leaps the last century and a half, but they increasingly jump without a moral compass or parachute, instead electing to manipulate whatever earthbound relics to their own evanescent theories.  The fact of the matter is, one can only exhibit freewill when there is a moral dilemma, because otherwise what we might term "volition" quickly devolves into a synonym for "convenience," or, in dire times, "survival."  Being moral means choosing what is right before the ledgers and balance sheets of ease and self-preservation are perused.  A fine way to examine the protoganist's ordeal in this novel.

That protagonist is New York attorney Walter Stackhouse, and from our first scenes with him we understand he will also become – or perhaps has always been – the title character.  Walter is married to a petite, pretty, and squirrelly real estate agent by the name of Clara, and we would do well at this point to recur to that old adage about judging a man by his wife.  It is unclear to even the casual observer why on earth Walter, physically attractive, well-off, and a respected colleague, would have settled in suburban Connecticut with Clara, who does not seem beautiful enough to justify her behavior.  Neurotic in that way unique to unrepentingly smug and selfish people, Clara is a master hand at that oldest of wifely wiles: driving a wedge between her husband and his male chums ("He had already lost five friends").  Her public and private comportment might even lead one to believe she is trying to induce a divorce (a couple of odd reactions suggest she may be having an affair with one of Walter's friends; a later scene reveals staggering emotional immaturity), which, after a few exhausting years of wedlock, Walter is now ready to give her.  And so, our story would likely have been as tedious and commonplace as a bickering couple were it not for Walter's hobby of chronicling ill-matched pairs:

The essays had been Walter's pastime for the last two years.  There were to be eleven of them, under the general title 'Unworthy Friendships.'  Only one was completed, the one on Chad and Mike, but he had finished the outlines for several others – and they were all based on observations of his own friends and acquaintances.  His thesis was that a majority of people maintained at least one friendship with someone inferior to themselves because of certain needs and deficiencies that were either mirrored or complemented by the inferior friend.  Chad and Mike, for example: both had come from well-to-do families who had spoiled them, but Chad had chosen to work, while Mike was still a playboy who had little to play on since his family had cut off his allowance.  Mike was a drunk and a ne'er-do-well, unscrupulous about taking advantage of all his friends.  By now Chad was almost the only friend left.  Chad apparently thought: 'There but for the grace of God go I,' and doled out money and put Mike up periodically.  Mike wasn't worth much to anybody as a friend.  Walter did not intend to submit his book for publication anywhere.  The essays were purely for his own pleasure, and he didn't care when or if he ever finished them all.       

I give away nothing by mentioning one of The Blunderer's more curious aspects: namely, that as compromising as this diary of sorts could have been, it is summarily discarded early on, never to resurface.  Provided, of course, one didn't understand it as a precursor to a few of Walter's future personal relationships, one of which will be with a dreadful beast, a killer by the name of Melchior Kimmel.

We meet Kimmel in our opening scene, which may remind the attentive reader of this film.  The German immigrant's actions are swift, bloodhot, and premeditated, but they are not foolproof, and anyone who encounters this mammoth bookseller whose "main source of profit" is "pornography" cannot abandon a few initial impressions.  The first is that Kimmel is extremely, almost dangerously intelligent; the second is that he is capable of incredible violence; and the third proffers an explanation for his journey hither:    

Then he stood by his bookcase, playing with his carvings, moving their parts at various angles and observing the composition.  He could see them fuzzily against the light-colored bookcase, and the effect was rather interesting.  They were cigar-shaped pieces fastened invisibly together, end to end, with wire.  Some looked like animals on four legs; others, of ten pieces or more, defied any description.  Kimmel himself had no definite name for them.  To himself, sometimes, he called them his puppies.  Each piece was differently carved with designs of his own invention, designs somewhat Persian in their motifs, their brown-stained surfaces so smoothed with fine sandpaper they felt almost soft to the touch.  Kimmel loved to run his fingertips over them.  He was still fondling them when the doorbell rang. 

It might be relevant to note that Kimmel did not "love to run his fingertips over" his wife, unless you include his wicked actions near that bus rest stop, but there are few greater wastes of time than to ratiocinate with a murderer (anyone who "loved white shirts more than almost any tangible object in the world" likely has a baleful deed or three on his conscience).  In the ensuing two months, Helen Kimmel's slaying remains unsolved but not ignored.  The man officially on the case is police detective Lawrence Corby, who will prove himself in more ways than one to be a worthy opponent.  But a certain Connecticut attorney, unhappily married and a very poor prognosticator of future events, decides to clip an article on Helen Kimmel's demise for his scrapbook.  The same scrapbook that Detective Corby will leaf through once Clara, en route to bury a mother she never loved, does not return to her Pittsburgh-bound bus. 

The Blunderer may not be one of Highsmith's very finest works (nevertheless, a new film version is afoot), but it was also one of her earliest.  Its main flaw, apart from the "Unworthy Friendships" cul-de-sac, is the inclusion at the novel's onset of far too many minor characters, suggesting perhaps that a grander scope was initially intended.  Yet the master's touches can be found on nearly every page: "He felt violently bored and annoyed suddenly, the way he had felt in the Navy a couple of times when he had had to wait too long, naked, for a doctor to come and make a routine examination"; "Not simply hatred, he knew, but a particular tangle of forces of which hatred was only one"; "Even if he fought the whole long way back in words"; "A bitter disappointment in Nathan, like a private inner hell, filled Kimmel's mind, balancing the outer hell of the room"; "His heavy body rolled with his movements, and for a few moments his brain seemed to be concentrated in his fat arms and hands"; and "for Walter simply to be near her for a few moments satisfied a deep craving, like the craving he sometimes felt to lie naked in the sun."  The "her" in this last citation is a young music teacher by the name of Ellie Briess, who may or may not be a figment of his imagination since she is so embarrassingly the opposite of dear old Clara.  Or, for that matter, of dear old Helen Kimmel.   

Akhmatova, "Из памяти твоей я выну этот день"

A work ("From your remembrance this day I derive") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

From your remembrance this day I derive, 
So that your blank and foggy gaze may ask:  
Where once did I see Persian lilacs bask? 
And swallows, and a wooden house alive?  

So oft now comes into your past-flush heart  
A yearning pain, a wish whose name stays hid:  
To seek amidst a thoughtful city's grid  
That street, which figures on no map or chart!   

To see each random letter as a kiss, 
To hear that voice behind a door ajar,
You will think to yourself: "She has come far  
To help my faithlessness turn into bliss."   

Johanna

A work ("Johanna") by this Argentine man of letters.  You can read the original in this collection.

Perhaps it is because I so enjoy reading memoirs that I would like to write one of my own.  Yet when I set to recalling the events of my life, I ask myself: who would be entertained by this?  I was never in a war; I never devoted myself to espionage; I never committed any murders; I never even involved myself in politics.  It seems inevitable that my book would consist of descriptions of various states of mind, like those which callow and pretentious authors tend to bring me.  A colleague once said: "He who tarries overmuch in examining his own projects does not finish them.  There is no better recipe for writing than to write."  I don't know why these words imbued me with confidence.  I will take advantage of this confidence to tell you of an episode that occurred over the course of three nights in 1929.

On the first – a moonlit night – I crossed Montevideo street between Quintana and Uruguay with a group of people who were laughing and singing.  A girl caught my eye – for her beauty, for her sharp features, for the whiteness of her skin.  I must have looked at her with no little haste because she bowed, more light-heartedly than mockingly.  In the days that followed I would return, on a variety of pretexts, to this crossing in Montevideo.

At length I found her.  She was called Johanna Glück, the descendant of a musician.  Born in Austria, she had been educated in Buenos Aires – in Belgrano, to be exact – and was married to a very serious old gentleman, a penitentiary judge, Doctor Ricaldoni.  That night, the second in my series, in a hotel in the Vicente López Partido (the big ramshackle house of an old farm with a vast garden, of which I remember an eucalyptus and its view of the river), I dreamt that I had kidnapped her in a Packard on the night we crossed paths in Montevideo street.  I felt flattered, above all owing to my role in the dream, but also because of the car.  Vanity is a rather crude thing.

We returned by train to Buenos Aires.  I walked her to her house in Tucuman street.  It was almost two o'clock in the morning.

"It's late.  I hope your husband doesn't give you any trouble."

"Don't worry," she replied.  "I'll take care of it."

I wanted to believe her, although my experience as a superstitious lad informed me that an instant of vain self-flattery sufficed for the self-flatterer to receive his comeuppance.

The following day I was awakened by the phone.  I recognized her even though she spoke in a murmur:

"Farewell.  We are off to the farm in Pilar.  I told my husband everything.  Forgive me."

"I warned her," I thought with some irritation.  "The poor thing was so certain.  What can I do?  For now, nothing.  Only wait until an opportunity arises."

Since exams were coming up very soon, I decided to study.  But I could not manage to concentrate.  In reality, I didn't know what to do with myself.  "Why did she ask me to forgive her?  When she said 'farewell,' did she mean 'see you around' or 'goodbye forever'?"  I did not know that I loved her so much.

Doubtless her message had been too fast and too much remained to be clarified.  Since I didn't know what to do, I ran my eyes over a used-car column in the newspaper.  I read: "Packard, 1924, twelve cylinders, unbeatable condition, $600, Landívar residence," and a house number on Florida street.  Then I looked at the cinema listings.  Nothing advertised seemed to appeal to me.  In the Petit Splendid they were showing The Sheik, a film I had seen years ago, and of which I only remembered, or thought I remembered, Rudolph Valentino dressed as an Arab, on horseback, with the heroine on the horse's rump.

The telephone rang.  I attended to it hastily and was disappointed: I did not hear the voice I had been expecting.  Instead it was the voice of a friend offering me a job.  A translation from the French for a law firm of certain documents concerning an uncredited use of the name of a famous eau de cologne.       

"They pay well," said my friend.  "A hundred pesos a page."

They can keep their pesos, I was about to reply.  Then I considered that this work would oblige me, at least for a while, to think about something else, so I said yes.  After telling my mother that I wouldn't be having lunch at home, I made my way to the law firm.

I reviewed the documents and asked:

"When do I have to turn in the translation?"

"Today."

They took me to a small room which had a typewriter and everything I would need, including a French-Spanish dictionary and a French dictionary on law and jurisprudence.  I was busy until the middle of the afternoon, with no interruptions save that of a cup of black coffee.  I translated, corrected, and typed it all up.  I handed in six pages.  With six hundred pesos in my pocket I proceeded as quickly as possible to the Landívar residence.

The Packard was a grey monstrosity with a long convertible hood trimmed with two lines of bolts which gave it a forceful appearance not unlike that of an armored tank.  The hood was in perfect condition with its lateral bars, or shutters, and mica windows.  I took it out for a test drive accompanied by the seller, a Mr. Vilelo, a short, brown, skinny, and bony creole with brilliantine-slicked hair and a double-breasted suit.  When we returned to the agency, he asked me:

"How would you rate it, son?"

"The Packard?  Five stars!  But I need to ask you a stupid question.  It couldn't have some hidden flaw, could it?"

"Look, son, I'm not going to lie to you.  The Packard twelve-cylinder is a great car with a hidden flaw that everyone knows about: it's a guzzler.  Twenty liters every fifty kilometers.  Like you I bought a less powerful Packard.  It will cost you more, yet also less.  I don't know whether I'm explaining myself."

"I won't buy it, then."

"No craving for a twelve-cylinder?"

"It's not that.  I have six hundred pesos and change.  The car and a full tank of gas."

"Cravings are bad advisers, son.  Will you be paying in cash?"

"I will only if I can take the car immediately." 

"For three days with a permit.  Tomorrow or the day after, call me and we'll go for a ride to the Department of Motor Vehicles and put everything in order.  If so, son, don't let the Packard go to your head and explode."

"Do you think I can make it to Pilar?"

"Why not?"

"Because of last night's rain."

"That falls under my competency.  The Packard twelve-cylinder is a tractor in the mud." (The roads were made of mud still, since this story took place before 1930).

If I remember correctly, I left Buenos Aires via San Martín avenue.  I didn't hesitate to get a firm grip on the car: at the beginning, true enough, I was more prudent.  But by San Miguel I noticed not a single car remained unpassed.  I drove into Pilar with some insolence, as if screaming: "Make way, here I come!"

It was also true that I had no one at whom to scream.  Everyone must have been busy at home: it was meal time.  I asked a passer-by where the Ricaldoni farm was.  The explanation was too lengthy for my attention span.  I asked a second passer-by and still spent a while turning here and there before hitting upon the farm.

I was going to say to whoever opened the door: "I would like to speak to the lady of the house."  The door was opened by her husband.  "It's better this way," I thought.  "Less procrastination." 

"I would like to speak with Johanna."

"Please come in," he replied.

He was a tall, pale man, doubtless far younger than I had assumed.  Although this circumstance, this change in the predicted situation, disconcerted me a little, I thought:  "It's better this way.  Fighting with an old man would be unpleasant."

I entered what I considered a well-furnished living room.  A fire burned in the hearth and flowers sprang from every vase.  A staircase led upstairs.

"I've come to get Johanna," I said.

"I'm very happy that you've come.  Sometimes talking helps sort things out."

"I want to talk to her."

"When I heard your voice, I came downstairs to open the door because I knew it was you."

"How did you know?"

"You know how Johanna is.  My wife has the gift of making us see the people she describes."

The conversation was annoying me and I didn't want to hear what Ricaldoni had to say.  I was also annoyed (I don't quite know why) by this room and its armchairs that invited me to stay, this chimney and its flowers, with the pictures of Johanna laughing as she had that first night in Montevideo street, in the  light of the moon.  I tried to explain, but the difficulty of arranging my thoughts discouraged me.  To end our conversation once and for all I said, raising my voice:

"If you don't call her, I'll go find her myself."

"I wouldn't," said Ricaldoni.

"Why not?" I screamed.  "You won't let me?  Just wait and see."

"What's going on here?" asked Johanna from upstairs.

She was leaning on the railing of the stairs.  To me she seemed paler, more serious, and more beautiful than ever.  Her hair fell between her shoulders.  

"I've come for you," I shouted.

"For me?  No one asked me whether I wanted you to do that."

 Silence ensued.  Finally Ricaldoni said:

"I'll talk to the lad."

"I'd really appreciate that, thanks," said Johanna.

And she was gone.  I heard her locking a door.

"I don't understand," I said like a robot.

"Why do you love her?  We also love each other."

I muttered:

"I thought that she ..."

Seeing that I was not going to finish the sentence, he said:

"I know, and I take responsibility for it.  It must be terrible.  Now allow me to explain to you how I see matters.  What the two of you have is an impulse of the moment.  It is nothing.  Nothing has happened.  What the two of us have is life itself."

Could Johanna have lied?  I didn't know what to think, but I understood that on this point I mustn't ask for any clarification.  I decided to make a claim:

"And why couldn't what the two of us have one day become life itself?"

"Yes, why not?  Nevertheless for you this is more likely to be just an episode, to be followed by others.  Life is long and it lies ahead of you.  Johanna and I are going through it together."  

A ditty one is told because one is young, I assured myself.  Yet at the same time I thought that if Johanna really did not love me, then the man was right.  I felt defeated and muttered:

"I'm leaving."

I was so shaken that, as I left the farm, I asked myself whether I needed to turn left or right in order to return to Buenos Aires.  I turned left.  First I thought that it was sad to have ended things this way with Johanna, and soon thereafter I asked myself whether I lacked courage.  Maybe so; but the other option was to fight, in bad faith and like a fool.  For sure, after my arrival in the Packard (I already saw myself as a sheik on horseback, certain of kidnapping the heroine), I retreated, spurned by her and her husband (even worse: spurned paternally by her husband).  A sad ending in terms of vanity, but I did not see a better solution.     

The Glamour of the Snow

But no one sought to stop him.  Hibbert recalls only a single incident until he found himself beyond the houses, searching for her along the fringe of forest where the moonlight met the snow in a bewildering frieze of fantastic shadows.  And the incident was simply this – that he remembered passing the church.  Catching the outline of its tower against the stars, he was aware of a faint sense of hesitation.  A vague uneasiness came and went – jarred unpleasantly across the flow of his excited feelings, chilling exhilaration.  He caught the instant's discord, dismissed it, and – passed on.  The seduction of the snow smothered the hint before he realized that it had brushed the skirts of warning.

There is something eerie about the snow-capped hills that the majority of us worship from afar.  Surely, it must be of staggering sensation to defeat these mountains, as the greatest of all mountains was conquered six decades ago.  Yet by acknowledging these peaks as the nearest earth to heaven, we effectively make them shrines replete with the martyrs cascaded in avalanches and buried beneath icy crags.  I have never been one for heights, much less deadly, freezing heights, yet a year without winter is incomplete and unmysterious.  Winter has concealed many crimes – be they anthropogenic or at nature's whim – but it is its allure, a call to come and melt into its everlasting ice as refuge from the sweltering hum of man, that remains its deadliest trap.  An appropriate segue into the bizarre happenings of this tale.      

Our soul in peril is the pagan soul of an Englishman by the name of Hibbert.  We do not learn much about the "forty odd years of thick experience behind him," except that he has never pursued any affairs of the heart, "with one tumultuous exception that left no fuel for subsequent fires."  At the present he has taken a room in a post office in Valais, "where he could be at peace to write his book."  The subject of this tome may be implied by his subsequent course of action, although perchance Hibbert does indeed have a book in him.  Many different forces, as it were, seem to clash within his mortal frame:

There was the world of tourist English, civilised, quasi-educated, to which he belonged by birth, at any rate; there was the world of peasants to which he felt himself drawn by sympathy – for he loved and admired their toiling, simple life; and there was this other – which he could only call the world of Nature.  To this last, however, in virtue of a vehement poetic imagination, and a tumultuous pagan instinct fed by his very blood, he felt that most of him belonged.  The others borrowed from it ... for visits.  Here, with the soul of Nature, hid his central life .... Now Hibbert was keenly aware of this potential conflict and want of harmony; he felt outside, yet caught by it – torn in the three directions because he was partly of each world, but wholly in only one.  There grew in him a constant, subtle effort – or, at least, desire – to unify them and decide positively to which he should belong and live in.  The attempt, of course, was largely subconscious.  It was the natural instinct of a richly imaginative nature seeking the point of equilibrium, so that the mind could feel at peace and his brain be free to do good work.

A necessary and laudable aim, if one belied by Hibbert's predisposition to winter daydreams and, unfortunately for him, amidst these white waves of death, visions of things that appear to reflect his own soul's struggle.  When the story was published before twentieth-century Europe's first shattering, the glamour of the title had yet to acquire the fashionable definition that is now most prevalent, although its original meaning, a magic spell, nicely predicts its semantic descendant.  Sure enough, Hibbert will be held in fascinated thrall of Valais's exquisite alps, leading some of the locals to impute his odd behavior to his alien mores (one such observer is a certain Henri Défago, perhaps a distant relative of a character in this tale).  An ice carnival complete with Chinese lanterns and extended curfews provides him an excuse to stay out of his wonderfully safe and protective hotel long enough to find a skating rink, and on that rink, something we may loosely term the embodiment of his long-held desires.

No other author provokes such feelings of unease with nature as Blackwood, an all-enveloping and wicked world perhaps forged, as some sects believe, by the Prince of the Air.  Even if the creepiest rendition of such idolatry can be found in this masterpiece, Blackwood's forests and mountains more consistently inspire dread.  For the creed obscured among these trees, disemboguing only into hideous clearings of hideous rituals, is often cited by the ignorant (invariably non-believers) as having bestowed upon Christianity some of its calendar and practices.  While some local adaptation was surely permitted, it would be unfathomable to consider Christianity, as benevolent a manual to life as has ever been encountered, in any debt whatsoever to animal totems, human sacrifices, and demonic spells.  That is because revealed religion, uncovered in the smallest and most abstract amounts, allows the believer, as they say, to connect the dots.  Paganism, the worship of the wild, is exactly the opposite: it overwhelms the senses with its alleged epiphanies that are really merely multifarious cloaks for its evils.  So when Hibbert feels "a longing to be alone with the night, to taste her wonder all by himself there beneath the stars, gliding over the ice," he is not entirely surprised about the form in which night elects to accompany him.  And those "fingers of snow [that] brushed the surface of his heart"?  Let's just say that some people long for temptation, if only to justify their own weak will.  For when one's will and flesh are weak, all hesitation gets conveniently shushed by the wind.  By a very cold wind.