The Bottle, 1930. The bottle drunk by Alice that causes her to shrink. From Lewis Carroll’s (1832-1898) ‘Alice in Wonderland’. After an illustration by John Tenniel (1820-1914) colour printed by Edward Evans (1826-1905). From the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ series of cigarette cards produced by Carreras Limited, 1930.
A number of questions had begun to form in my mind. I am a methodical, plodding soul, with a memory like a sieve. I took out a pencil and a scratch pad and began to write down the questions as they came into my mind.
“Honey, what will you have to drink? Say, have you ever done any hunting?”
“And what do I get for winning?”
“Do you understand why Margaret was killed?”
“The person who was blackmailing me died?”
‘What a bunch of troublemakers,’ they say. And they keep on chatting: would you pass the butter, please? How much have our stocks risen today? What is the price of tomatoes? Have you heard that Princess Di is expecting again?
Of course, he was asking the questions, him and the dicks, but the trick is to answer them in such a way that the next question, or maybe one later on, tells you something you want to know, or at least gives you a hint. That takes practice, but I had had plenty, and it makes it simpler when one guy pecks away at you for an hour or so and then backs off, and another guy starts in and goes all over it again.
Seven passages, mostly questions, from seven page seventeens from seven books, mostly science fiction and crime, found in my bedroom.
Blackmailer by George Axelrod; The Making of the African Queen by Katharine Hepburn; Unicorn Variation by Roger Zelazny from Unicorn Variations; Miss Gentilbelle by Charles Beaumont from The Magic Man; The Long Habit of Winning by Joe Haldeman; Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder; The Sweet Corn Murder by Rex Stout, from The Best of Ellery Queen 2.
To gain some appreciation for Lovecraft’s sudden change in fortune, it is necessary to know that he was the only child in the great house on Angell Street, which, apart from the stabilizing authority of his grandfather and the occasional presence of his great uncle Edward Everett Philips (1864-1918), who got married when Lovecraft was just three years old, was a house of women. In addition to his son, Whipple had sired three daughters who lived to adulthood (a fourth died in childhood), and as yet, only Susie had found–and lost–a husband. The full weight of the smothering maternal attentions of his mother, his grandmother, and his two still-unwed aunts, to say nothing of the maids, descended around young Lovecraft like a storm of scented rose petals.
In the short term, Lovecraft’s upbringing fell to his mother, his aunts Lillian and Annie (now married to the journalist Edward F. Gamwell) and especially to his grandfather Whipple Phillips, a successful businessman who was involved in a number of different enterprises. These ranged from real estate speculation (he virtually established the small town of Greene, in western Rhode Island) to manufacturing to land development in the far west. It was he who had caused the large and lavishly furnished house at 454 Angell Street to be built on 1880-81, with space for five live-in servants. The house and grounds became a spacious area for the expansion of the boy’s imagination and intellect. The house was then at the very edge of the developed part of the city, making Lovecraft feel simultaneously a part of the urban and the rural milieu. Whipple, for his part, showed the boy objects from ancient Rome that he had brought back from his travels abroad, and he also told the boy extemporaneous weird tales, their imagery chiefly derived from the old Gothic novels.
The description Whipple had given of her had been biased. She wasn’t skinny. She was small, a couple of inches shorter than Lily, who came up to my nose, with smooth fair skin, brown hair and eyes, and hardly any lipstick on her wide full mouth. Her handshake was firm and friendly without overdoing it. Lily told me afterward that her brown woollen dress was probably Bergdorf, two hundred bucks. She didn’t want a cocktail.
“I was wondering,” she said, “where a curlew puts his long beak when he goes to sleep.”
He awoke suddenly and completely, wondering why he had let himself drop off when he hadn’t meant to, and quickly looked at the luminous dial of his wrist watch. It gleamed brightly in the otherwise utter darkness and told him that the time was only a few minutes after eleven o’clock. He relaxed; he’d taken only a very brief cat nap. He’d gone to bed here, on this silly sofa, less than half an hour ago. If his wife really was going to come to him, it was too early. She’d have to wait until she was positive that his damned sister was asleep, and sound asleep.
They floated in the darkness for hours, listening to the “frightful sounds” of “ghastly cries, shrieks, yells, and moans,” that “gradually died away to nothing.”
Seven passages from seven page seventeens from seven books lying around in various stages of read and unreadness, three of them featuring men called Whipple.
Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny; The Dream World of H.P. Lovecraft: His Life, His Demons, His Universe by Donald Tyson; H.P. Lovecaft: A Short Biography by S.T. Joshi; A Right to Die by Rex Stout; The Well at World’s End by Neil M. Gunn; Nightmare in White, from Nightmares and Geezenstacks by Fredric Brown; the chapter on Saved from the Titanic from Lost Films: Important Movies That Disappeared by Frank Thompson.
I’m reading the Martin Beck Swedish police procedurals by the husband and wife writing team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Because Beck is such a glum son of a bitch, and the books take their cue from his mordant attitude, I’m alternating them with the jollier (and far less realistic) Nero Wolfe mysteries of Rex Stout (favourite crime writer of both P.G. Wodehouse and his creation Bertie Wooster). So that’s my fiction intake covered for a while. There are forty Wolfes but only ten Becks so I can retire Wolfe and his smug secretary/legman/Boswell Archie Goodwin for a bit once the Becks are exhausted.
I guess the Beck novels are copoganda. The authors were Marxists, but this oddly translates into them being very keen on their detectives, as caring professionals in a flawed society, but quite contemptuous of the ordinary patrolmen, embodied by the comic double act of Kristiansen & Kvant, lazy, bickering bumblers who trash crime scenes and occasionally succeed by pure luck.
The books were intended to form one gigantic ten-volume novel, serving as an examination of Swedish society and its discontents. This is arguably rendered imperfect by the books’ need to invent serious crimes that Sweden was comparatively untroubled by at the time: a serial rapist-turned-sex-killer, a serial child killer, a mass shooter. But it’s easy enough to separate the crime novel conventions from the social commentary.
The books have a slightly contrived prose style, an exaggerated flatness. Martin Beck is always “Martin Beck,” they never abbreviate him. And when the first killer is caught, he’s always “the man who was called ***” with his full name. But it’s clear why this was done: Wahlöö was an established author and Sjöwall a newbie. They each had distinct styles. Preparing the novels in detail, they each wrote alternate chapters, working at night as they had kids and day jobs. The contrived style was created to unite their approach so the reader wouldn’t feel jolting changes.
All ten books have been filmed and there’s currently a long-running TV show, so I’m going to do a partial review of the cinematic/televisual material, comparing it to the books. The books started transferring to the screen quite early on, and one of them was even adapted by Hollywood (THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN). Versions of Martin Beck have been played by Walter Matthau, Derek Jacobi, Russian Romualds Ancans, and various actual Swedes including notably Gösta Ekman. And, of course, the directors, a diverse squad including Bo Widerberg and Stuart Rosenberg, along with their screenwriters took the stories into areas not planned by the original authors.
Oh, and Per Wahlöö, who died almost immediately after he and Sjöwall finished the tenth and final book, also wrote the novel basis for KAMIKAZE 89, the bizarre scifi cop movie starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder, so I should certainly watch that too… It looks amazing.
I don’t think I’m going to explore the Nero Wolfe adaptations, though, even though there are surprisingly few of them. The fact that they got Lionel Stander to play Archie Goodwin, TWICE, tells me that they didn’t really have a handle on the series.
shadowplay 