According to Ovid, the Athenian princess Philomela was brutally raped by her brother-in-law, Tereus, King of Thrace, who was supposed to be escorting her to his kingdom. When she insisted that she would tell the entire world of the crime committed against her, Tereus cut out her tongue and abandoned her in the same woodland cabin where he’d attacked her. Philomela was left to find her own way to
Thrace
; once she arrived, she set to work on a tapestry illustrating her violation by her brother-in-law. As soon as it was completed, she showed it to her sister, Procne, Tereus’s wife and mother of his son, Itys. Procne did not doubt her sister, nor did she waste any time: she murdered Itys, dismembered him, and disguised his body as a dinner she served to Tereus. The king did not discover what his wife had done, or why, until after he’d eaten his son’s flesh. Enraged, he chased the sisters into the forest, where the gods, as overwhelmed by this surfeit of horrors as any mortals, transformed all three into birds. Tereus was made a bird of prey, Procne a swallow, and Philomela a nightingale.

Even for the ancients, this is a grim story. Ovid changes the details, slightly: in earlier versions, Philomela was the one who became the swallow, the silent bird, and Procne the nightingale. The reversal seems to answer some notion of balance, if not justice: the character who had her voice taken from her in one form receives it back—with interest—in her new form. What about her song, though, that nighttime melody? It’s hard not to connect it to the events of Philomela’s story, to want to read it in relation to them. Is it a lament for the violence done to her? Is it a narration of the horrors she has been part of? Is it simpler, purer, grief or pain directly expressed? Is it something entirely different, an expression of triumph over the man who wronged her, or of nostalgia for her lost humanity? Or with her metamorphosis, did Philomela lose the capacity for such abstract thinking? Is her song only a small creature’s welcoming the dark?

Simon Strantzas (I): Ramsey Campbell

Although I must have been aware of Simon Strantzas’s name before this, probably as part of one of Matt Cardin’s group e-mails, the first I can say for sure I had contact with him was when he e-mailed me about an entry on my blog. I had been writing about the 2007 World Fantasy Convention, when Laird Barron, Paul Tremblay, and myself joined S.T. Joshi, Peter Cannon, Wilum Pugmire, Michael Cisco, Michael and Linda Shea, and Ramsey Campbell for dinner at a smallish Indian restaurant. In the opposite corner, what appeared to be an eight or nine foot section of tree trunk had been carved into an ascending spiral of gods and demons. Through ruthless maneuvering, I had placed myself at Ramsey Campbell’s left hand, and as the meal’s courses ebbed and flowed around us, I listened to him talking about Robert Aickman, and L'Année dernière à Marienbad, and a haunted house he and his wife had visited on the Welsh border. This convention was the first I’d met
Campbell
, whose stories and novels I had long respected and admired, and I was more than a little star-struck. Every now and again, I would have what I guess you could call a “pinch-me” moment, which I wrote about in my blog and which was what prompted Simon to write to me.

Also in 2007, Simon had met Ramsey, in his case, at the 2007 World Horror Convention. At one point during that weekend, he went to a dinner with Ramsey, after which, Simon drove him back to his hotel. Navigating the streets of
Toronto
, Simon had had his own “pinch-me” moment as he realized that Ramsey Campbell was sitting beside him in his car, making small talk. It was this common response that Simon was writing to share with me; he was grateful, he said, that he wasn’t the only one to have been star-struck by Ramsey.

In writing, as in every endeavor, there are names that function as a kind of shorthand. Say Stephen King, and you evoke a plot-driven narrative populated by middle-American characters and traditional monsters vividly brought to (un)life. Thomas Ligotti’s name conjures elliptical fictions whose characters are ciphers trying to understand the gnostic codes into which they’ve been written. Mention Ramsey Campbell, and you invoke a prose style that owes a great deal to Nabokov and Graham Greene, that can drop out from underneath you before you know what’s happening. You invoke vividly-delineated characters living in a sharply-observed contemporary world (often somewhere in the neighborhood of
Liverpool
). And you invoke monstrous threats which are rarely seen in full and which, at Ramsey’s best, achieve the sublime effects of such older writers as Blackwood, Lovecraft, and Machen. Indeed, more than any other writer of his generation, Ramsey Campbell has been aware of the literary traditions in which he works, and he has exploited that awareness to the advantage of his fiction. Not to mention, he’s been as productive and, more importantly, as consistent a writer as you could find.

For Simon Strantzas to express his admiration for Ramsey Campbell was, then, a very good sign.

The Nightingale (II): Full-throated Ease

John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” takes up the question of the bird’s song from the beginning. This nightingale sings of summer, and it does so in “full-throated ease.” The bird is a natural, instinctive artist; it requires no effort, no thought, to deliver its song. Indeed, for Keats, the bird is the song. He cannot see it, only hear it, and this gives the bird a particularly intangible quality. Its song becomes a kind of bridge over which Keats imagines he might cross into a realm of pure art, in which there is no gap between the artist and the art. As is so often the case in Keats’s work, though, the problem of consciousness raises itself: the bird is free from the awareness of suffering and sorrow that afflicts the poet, and so, however much he might want to identify with it, there exists a crucial distance between them. In addition, to a certain extent, the bird is also free from the problem of mortality. Because its song has remained the same for countless years, and because it is its song, in the logic of the poem, the nightingale has achieved a kind of immortality. It’s a transcendence Keats imagines he might join were he to die listening to it. But almost as soon as it’s begun, the fantasy is over, undone by the poet’s sense of reality. If he died while the bird were singing, it would continue its song, and he would be so much insensate clay. As the poem draws to a close, the poet bids farewell the sound of the nightingale, which is fading into the distance. Along with it, the sense of a pure, immortal art is going, leaving Keats the silence of his “sole self.” The poem ends with him aware of the quiet around him, but unsure whether he has been asleep or awake.

Keats is unambiguous as to the nightingale’s identity, calling the bird a dryad, or tree spirit. It is nature as artist; although its art, as I’ve suggested, is one from which the human, however appreciative, is fundamentally excluded. We can admire its song, be inspired to our own creative acts by it, but we cannot join it. Keats tell us that the bird sings of summer, which he associates with the south (i.e. the Mediterranean), with warmth, and with wine, and given that the bird’s song never changes, neither does its subject. Inside the bird’s song, it is bright, eternal summer. This contrasts with Keats’s twilit, cool, northern location, as well as with the mutable world he inhabits. For the poet, and for the rest of us, there is no ceaseless summer; thus, though Keats is able to craft a brilliant poem about the nightingale’s song, that song itself represents a type of transcendence from which he and we are forever exiled, a paradise we can never enter. Is it enough to be aware that such a state exists, however closed to us it remains? Or is such knowledge a subtle form of torment?

Simon Strantzas (II): Robert Aickman

I didn’t meet Simon Strantzas until July of 2010, when we both attended Readercon outside
Boston
. He had been there the year before, along with Richard Gavin and Ian Rogers, but I had been in
Scotland
. I was looking forward to meeting Simon, as well as Richard and Ian. I had read work by all three of them, and thought they formed a kind of Canadian counterpart to what I saw as the loose trio of myself, Paul Tremblay, and Laird Barron. There was in their fiction the same range of approaches united by the same integrity of purpose, and I already considered them allies of intent. To be honest, when I finally shook Simon’s hand, the first thing I was struck by was his youth. The photos of Simon I’d seen made him appear my age, maybe older, but despite an admirable beard, and despite two very well-received collections of short fiction, he was my junior.

As is the case at most conventions I’ve attended, the truly interesting conversations at Readercon happen standing around in the lobby, outside at the smokers’ redoubt, over food and/or beverages at the hotel pub or one of the local restaurants. Saturday night of this Readercon, Simon and I were part of a larger group that occupied a long booth on one side of the hotel pub. After a few pleasantries, we fell to discussing our contemporaries, and specifically, their relationship to the writers who came before them. (Laird Barron had frequently expressed his regard for T.E.D. Klein and Michael Shea, Richard Gavin for Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen.) Of course, this was only a way for us to talk about the writers with whom we affiliated ourselves. Simon and I already knew that we held Ramsey Campbell in mutual high regard; the question now was, Who else? I offered my usual pledge of allegiance to Stephen King and Peter Straub, and Simon mentioned Robert Aickman.

Aickman is one of those figures who might be called a writer’s writer. Scratch that: he is a writer’s writer. His style seems at home in the mid-century English literary landscape, not too far-removed from such contemporaries as Elizabeth Bowen or Kingsley Amis. It’s a style that tends to hover close to the story’s protagonist, but that does not dive into the rushing stream of his or her consciousness. The details of an Aickman story, whether of character, place, or action, are always clearly described. Of course, there is a difference between something that is clearly described and something that is clearly understood, and the characters in an Aickman story tend to find themselves in situations grown steadily more bizarre. Nor are their responses to those events necessarily any more decipherable. However, since Aickman’s narratives tend to shadow his protagonists, the full strangeness of their actions is often apparent only upon reflection. Frequently enough, it seems that the weird situation with which the protagonist finds him or herself faced is a manifestation of some part of themselves from which they are radically estranged, but that is by no means a universal rule. Perhaps the finest accomplishment of these stories, to my mind, is that they achieve their not inconsiderable effects in a manner that is deceptively low-key. (It’s worth noting that Ramsey Campbell was a friend of Aickman’s, and while his fiction is its own thing, there are similarities between the two men’s work.)

As he had with his e-mail to me about Ramsey Campbell, Simon once again had associated himself with the literary heights, the places where the air thins out and you must struggle to pull yourself up one handhold at a time. It’s a cliché that all writers, all artists, stand on the shoulders of those who came before. The trick is in finding the right shoulders to support you. With Campbell and now Aickman, Simon had positioned himself on a pair of considerable foundations.

The Nightingale (III):

There is a nightingale in this, Simon Strantzas’s third collection of stories, but it is neither bird nor person. Instead, it is a place, a nightclub at which a striking woman named Elaina Munroe performs. Since she sings inside the Nightingale club, however, her song might be called a nightingale’s song without stretching matters too far. It is a song that makes the narrator of the story in which she appears sick with desire, his every waking thought occupied by her. The narrator compares Elaina Munroe to a siren, and like those mythological creatures, she is, when all is said and done, not human. Indeed, the revelation of her true nature casts a glance backwards to Philomela and Procne, and the elision of the human and the avian. In similar fashion, her song unites the longing for transcendence and the attraction to death that thread through Keats’s ode. The nightingale’s song, this story tells us, is nature overwhelming reason, is our desire for the beauty of our own destruction. It is the liebestod of Tristan und Isolde, that mixing of eros and thanatos, the entangling of the drive to pleasure with the compulsion to self-annhilation.

It would be easy enough to leave the matter there, to conclude that, with this story, Simon forges the latest link in a literary chain that runs through Keats to Ovid. Yet the image of the Nightingale suggests that there is more to the matter. After all, what nightclub features only one performer? Other singers might take its stage, other nightingale songs be sung. In this sense, we might take the Nightingale as a figure for the collection that contains it. I’m fond of this conceit because it hints at the range of stories on display here. Like Aickman and Campbell before him, Simon is not content to write the same story over and over again. Rather, he varies his approach, moves, if you will, from quiet jazz improvisation to thunderous operatic clashing. Underlying and uniting these various performances is a kind of honesty of voice, a fidelity to the different characters from whom we hear each story.

Other books

Velo de traiciones by James Luceno

Holiday in Stone Creek by Linda Lael Miller

Marry Me by John Updike

Pinned by Alfred C. Martino

Seeing the Love by Sofia Grey

God Don't Make No Mistakes by Mary Monroe

The Idea of Him by Holly Peterson

The Cowboy's City Girl by Linda Ford

The Ironsmith by Nicholas Guild

Blue Warrior by Mike Maden