A Leak In The Safe

Is it just me or do some of these Print On Demand (formerly known as Vanity Press) titles I’ve picked out sound, well, SERIOUSLY WEIRD?

Angelic Cravings by Crymsyn R. Hart (Cacoethes Publishing House)

The Angel of Death has tried to steer Brenna through the nightmare her life has turned into, but she wants nothing to do with him, even though they are soul mates. Before she can tell him that, she discovers a vampire serial killer is murdering witches, and her staff is the next target. 308 pp. (Romance)

by Irving Wesley Hall (Not in Kansas Press)

This political satire is set 13 days before the 2000 election in Florida. Can Albert Einstein’s three brilliant great-great-granddaughters save America from an eight-year-long catastrophe if George Bush steals the presidency? 628 pp. (Fiction)

by W. Royce Adams (Rairarubia Books)

Seeking revenge for the death of her wicked sister Janu, the deceitful Jenuaq Zenu attempts to seize control of the magical realm of Rairarubia by making clones of Queen Romey and her consort, Sam, and trying to substitute her evil creations for the rightful rulers. 148 pp. (Fantasy)

by W. A. Hoffman (Alien Perspective)

Will, a disenchanted English lord, and his beloved matelot/partner, Gaston, an exiled Frenchman, ponder the true definition of sanity and the necessity of compromise in the name of love while contending with the arrival of Gaston’s father, their potential inheritances, and unwanted brides. 568 pp. (Adult Fiction)

Having finished the first book in Knut Hamsun’s Segelfoss series, Children of the Age, I naturally wanted to move on to the second, Segelfoss Town. I was one click away from buying it for a pretty penny on ABE when my book butler Jerome breathlessly interrupted me, running up from the sub-library waving a copy I’d purchased some time ago. He was flogged for his impertinence, of course, but I didn’t allow that to darken my enjoyment of the novel.

In Segelfoss Town another generation has emerged, causing the eclipse of “King” Holmengraa, the bold businessman whose rise was traced in Children of the Age. Hamsun’s pessimism about “progress” and the direction of the modern world in general exhibits itself here, as he suggests that a great man cannot succeed in an environment so committed to mediocrity. His fulminations against a puffed up proletariat that lacks respect, ambition or accountability while being unquestioningly supported by a progressive press are ham handed and lacking in Hamsun’s usual ironic subtlety, and lend a certain unpleasant bitterness to several portions of the book.

In this brave new world, the ascendent character is the shopkeeper, the canny, upwardly striving but slightly ridiculous Theodore of Bua, whose Achilles heel is his carefully concealed love for Holmengraa’s exotic daughter Mariane:

His everyday heart had a little nook where no trade entered, a hidden grove, full of gifts and dreams and devotion.

Unfortunately for him, Mariane is still infatuated with her girlhood crush, the not quite successful composer Willatz Holmsen, namesake and son of Lieutenant Holmsen, the hero of Children of the Age. Theodore himself is the son of Per of Bua, Segelfoss’s first shopkeeper, set up in business by Holmengraa, and notable mostly for his propensity for shortchanging unwary customers. This once robust man has suffered a debilitating stroke, and can only rage at his son and the world from the prison of his bed:

Those long years of idleness had not improved him, but had hardened him a little every day – and now he had gone a long way on the backward path. A little longer, and he would become uncannily malignant and savage; his natural instincts were already having full and fettered play – he was hastening back to his distant past, to the cave, to cunning, to bellowing and sudden onslaught. He was rushing straight ahead with eyes fixed on the unseen – the darkness was calling him.

But to me the real anti-hero of the piece is Baardsen, the telegraphist, whose carelessly noble yet self-destructive habits and hopelessly thwarted artistic and amatory ambitions make him the true heir to early Hamsun protagonists like Nagel of Mysteries and Glahn of Pan. He’s a typically failed romantic and one of the few town residents immune to the modern siren song of materialism and egotism.

Even though Hamsun once again engineers an implausibly happy denouement for a central character, in this case Holmengraa, it’s Baardsen who’s the heart and soul of Segelfoss Town, and indeed the book ends with his tragicomic death and resonates with his dark philosophy:

It is we who are on the right road; we do not sit like great lights in the midst of the riddle of the universe, but like dark objects in the midst of darkness, at one with it, at home and eternally happy.

Honestly, I’m not trying to be willfully obscure or elitist or anything like that when I rave about a writer like Hubert Crackanthorpe (1870-1896), it’s just that I think the guy is really, really good. If remembered at all today, Crackanthorpe is seen as a minor fin de siecle decadent, part of the Yellow Book crowd, most notable for his premature and somewhat pathetic death. Not only is this perception unjust, but it’s a real misunderstanding of both the man and the writer.

English Decadence isn’t the same as French Decadence, and in fact it’s quite difficult to precisely define what either of those terms mean. The only critical work in print about Crackanthorpe is called Hubert Crackanthorpe and English Realism in the 1890s by what I presume is his relative David Crackanthorpe, (I haven’t read it yet, but thanks to ABE a copy is on the way) and realism and decadence are not two things we usually think of as synonymous. In nineteenth century England any French influence was seen as morally suspect, and the writers who most influenced Crackanthorpe, Balzac and De Maupassant, can hardly be called decadent. Rather, they inspired him to consider without censure or sentimentality all strata of English society, even figures that the Victorians found too unseemly to mention like alcoholics, fallen women and card sharks. Similarly he portrayed addiction, sexual obsession, and other extreme mental states that were previously taboo.

Although, in contrast, true decadents like Huysmans and Oscar Wilde portrayed aristocrats who only encountered the lower depths while slumming, Crackanthorpe did share the decadents’ love for polished prose and a jewel-like formal surface beauty regardless of the subject matter, and the incredible quality of his prose is what really wows me about him. Its lyrical, subtly rhythmic, almost incantatory qualities hypnotize me, as does his precise diction and devotion to Flaubert’s le seul mot juste.

Wisely, Crackanthorpe stuck to shorter pieces where his characteristic. languorous tension can be maintained, as can be seen by the titles of the books of his I own — Wreckage: Seven Studies and Sentimental Studies and A Set of Village Tales. I got them both off E-bay, paying about what a new hardback goes for today, and was the only bidder each time, which shows that they are rare but not especially valuable. Kessinger Publishing will provide you with a print on demand copy of any of his works (and I may yet go that way with the posthumous Last Tales) at roughly the same price, but, grateful as I am that there is some way to obtain them, it just seems wrong to have these books in ugly generic packaging rather than the charming bindings they first appeared in.

It’s a little eerie that in Wreckage there are several scenes in which characters consider suicide, and one in which the protagonist (a writer) stands on a bridge, looking down at a river, horribly tempted by the obliterating allure of the dark water. Crackanthorpe himself evidently yielded to that urge, throwing himself into the Seine when it seemed like his prestigious family would learn of the unconventional lifestyle he and his wife had been pursuing. Like Oscar Wilde, another victim of hypocritical Victorian society (not so very unlike our own), it wasn’t the private acts but the threat of public scandal which precipitated tragedy. Nobody really knows how long he was in there but when he was fished out on Christmas eve even his own brother couldn’t recognize him. He was twenty-six years old.

It was an ugly end for a writer who could find beauty in even the most shadowy places. In our era where the quality of the writing is secondary to the purity of the politics, and literary prose is often as dull and depressed as the characters it describes, Crackanthorpe reminds us of how beautiful an true words can be. Here are some of my favorite examples from Wreckage:

“Profiles”

The half-girl, half-child, simple and heedless, with occasional moods of confiding, dreaming gravity, and fits of charming pettishness, the easy dispelling of which he had enjoyed, was gone. The events of the past few days had broken down the barrier behind which the strong passions of her nature had laid dormant, and now, let loose for the first time, they mastered her; she was their slave. She was capricious and irritable, with outbursts of nervous exasperation, followed by hot tears of remorse and a desperate sensuality that disturbed and almost frightened him.

Something about the crispness of her hair; something about the modeling of her chin; something in the questioning look that darted out from the liquidness of her big eyes; something – he knew not what – had haunted him ever since their first meeting.

“Dissolving View”

And before him defiled, in a grotesque procession, all the men who wanted to marry her; each one, as he passed, looking up in jealous admiration.

“A Dead Woman”

And simultaneously there appeared to both of them a vision of the dead woman – to Jonathan clear-cut and living, to Richard half-effaced by time. And each remembered that she had belonged to the other, and, at that moment they felt instinctively drawn together: each was conscious of a craving to talk about her, to hear the other mention her name.

“When Greek Meets Greek”

Her hair was drawn into a single coil on the top of her head, and her black evening dress revealed her warm-tinted throat and breast and her delicately modeled arms: she wore no ornament of any kind, and this enhanced the purity of her charm. Though she stood almost as high as he did, she was little more than a child.

The contrast between the two was a violent one, the man, with infinite possibilities of one kind in the past, the girl with infinite possibilities of another kind in the future.

The scattered remnants of a craving for religion or its equivalent, which years of loose living had not been able to eradicate, had centered themselves in his worship of her, so that there were moments when he could have knelt down before her, and prayed to her as a child prays to God.

O.K., I admit it, I was lazy on my little weekend and didn’t come up with anything for RADIOFREEUBU. I’m working on a couple of critical appreciations but they’re just not camera ready at press time. But rather than slothfully pasting in a link to a clip of some lame old T.V. show on You Tube I’ll use this opportunity to beat the drum for the 6^th annual Kerrytown BookFest which in ON in less than a month, Sunday, September 7 at the Farmers Market. We’ve got well over a hundred vendors, ten book panels including Loren D. Estleman, Rob Kantner, Peter Leonard, Theresa Schwegel, Suzanne Arruda, Megan Abbott and many more. There’s a lot more stuff too which you can check out on the BookFest homepage:

http://www.kerrytownbookfest.org/

You know, as hard as it is to believe, I used to be bitter about the fact that because it’s not hip or connected enough the Fest gets about a third of the publicity of other local events that have half as many vendors and much less attendance. The Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti media/hipocracy always goes for pretension over substance, BUT (and I’m getting to the not bitter part) I really take great consolation from the fact that when I mention the Fest to customers, vendors and authors they all tell me how much they love it and how much fun it is. Though the cool crowd who doesn’t like the smell of old books may sniff derisively at it, it really does have a great buzz on the street where it counts, as well as a growing reputation among publishers and authors, since unlike similar local events it’s actually about selling books rather than feeling superior about literacy.

During the Fest, there’s also these way cool demonstrations at Hollander’s, which is another local institution that gets little press or general recognition. But talk to a book binder or other book arts person and you’ll be surprised at their worshipful attitude. Even though it gets slight honor in its hometown, nationwide it’s regarded as a rare and unique treasure, as well as having an amazing retail store. I could run down a couple of overrated headline hogging businesses around here but that’s not the point. Just dig Hollander’s.

http://www.hollanders.com/

And of all the pictures my blood brother and official BookFest photographer Gregory D. Anthony brilliantly took during last year’s Fest, this is the one I think is best for advertizing it. Mark the date on your calender now!