Being a Tastemaker is an awful lot of pressure but I have assumed the judge’s mantle two years running, and if I cast it off now it was all for nothing. If I don’t list out the best books of the year, someone else will, and you might believe them and die believing the wrong books are the best books, and that would be my fault, and it would be me summoned to Hell’s antechamber to answer for why GOLDEN FIDDLE, IVORY BASSOON sold so well in the last month of the year when everyone ought to have closed up their eyes for thirty days to humor the dark earth anyway. I won’t have that on my conscience, not when it’s in my power to say I gave the public sixteen better alternatives. This wasn’t the best of years, but the year-rankings are not my responsibility.
—Here they are, the year’s best books. Call up your book-seller! If you order all 16 titles together and say I sent you, they will slip a dozen quail’s eggs into the parcel gratis. but you must say I sent you, or I can’t answer for what they might substitute.
1. Baron Roarcliffe Commands Your Awful Presence in Hell's Antechamber, Lady
2. A Little Tiny Fellow's Lost His Neckabout
3. Egg in the Breadbox, Whose Is It (Everyone Wants to Know)
4. I Have Four Brothers in the Evening, I Have Three Brothers in the Morning, I have Two Brothers at Tea-Time, I have No Brothers Just Now: Who Am I?
5. When the Ripened Acorn Splits Underground, My Godmother Hears it in Hell
6. Rabbits In the Beehive, Charming, Charming, Ha! Ha! Charming!—Half a Second—Where’s the Queen?—Call The Fire Brigade—Arrest Them All!
7. Nolpe's a Swinful Warbler
8. Alfred I Declare I Hadn't Thought It Of You, I Take My Eye of Pity Away, Now Comes My Eye of Sorrow
9. Bees for the Bank of England
10. In the Garden, Two Small Girls, One at Peace and One at Play, One is Frightened: Which One? Which One?
11. A Man Who Lived in the Darkness, and the Bears Didn't Want Him
12. The Moon Rose in Thirties
13. Vera of Geneva
14. He Promised Me a Hatchet, He Promised Me a Rope of Pearls, He Promised Me the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies: And Now Come to Find He Wasn’t the Pope at All
15. Mister Eyebreaks, My Husband, Took a Fright and Lost His Wits
16. The Grass is My Forest, But I am a Fine Friend of Yours, Sophia Lazarus
How are you this fine morning! “It is not morning” you will say, but that is not what I asked. Me? oh, the new artificial neck, like the new latex mattress it lies upon at night, is still just as springy & spry as the day it fell out of the factory. The pain is Exquisite. Plus I sprained my right wrist on the piano and if you don’t believe me I will strangle you with the hand that still has grip strength in it, just come over here real close so I don’t have to stand up to do it.
Here is a story! but I get repetitious in times of gloom so do be sure to let me know if I have told it before.*
*if you want to hurt my FEELINGS
Back in my wonderful midlife crisis year, right after I got back from bookbinding summer I went to folk music camp. Be slow, please, to judge; this was 2016 or thereabouts and back then mandolins were not yet as widely reviled as they have since become. Or were they? Memory is a great deceiver but I don’t play at the mandolin or even the mandola these days so it does no harm to let a lie be, you are at no risk of encouraging me with your kindness to play you any of the ten thousand melodies from the British Isles that are all in D and all sound exactly the same as each other. be not afraid.
Anyhow I miss my mandolin lessons terribly and I miss my mandola even more. A mandola is to a mandolin what a viola is to a violin: an improvement.
I didn’t yet have my beautiful mandola at the time I am reminiscing about; only a fine Collings mandolin I bought from a famous mandolin emporium on Staten Island which I believe does not exist anymore, its owner having died tragically and his heirs having sold it off. I could look it up to be certain of the second part, but it would only make me sad. I would go back there when my right arm works again if I could, but I can’t and no more can anybody else ever again, as I have said.
and I miss my old mandolin teacher most of all, he was—I dare say still is—a wonderful man full of authentic rustic folk wisdom. I recall one time, during the first airing of Twin Peaks: The Return this would have been, he asked me what this Twin Peaks was all about: and I gave him the vaguest and briefest possible description (an FBI agent comes to a small town to investigate a girl's murder, and then it is twenty-five years later and maybe it is all a dream but maybe it isn't.) He had heard of it previously but had gathered no impressions about it at all, so my news was all surprising to him. I did not go into any more detail than that because I do not like to be a Twin Peaks bore.
but perhaps that little I told him was enough, because then HE says, That sounds a lot like Incident at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce, where the fellow escapes in the middle of being hanged and has many adventures in the course of escaping, and then you find out at the very end that he did not escape after all, those are just the visions he has as he dies.
and I found this to be so terrifically perceptive I did not even take up a resentment at being told who wrote Incident at Owl Creek Bridge, as if I didn’t know.
so that is some legitimate old folk wisdom from an old folk musician.
Back to 2016: whatever you say about old-timey folk music people, you can say it about my fellow camp-goers with accuracy & a clean conscience just as long as you don’t say it about me. Don’t say it about John Reischman, either; he is a Canadian and a gentleman from whom I took a very intimidating week-long tutorial back then & who does a slow solo instrumental arrangement of Little Maggie that haunts you just like a haunted bell, even or especially if you find uptempo bluegrass business to be unendurable, as I certainly do. There are exactly two ways to play the mandolin as a solo instrument that appeal to me: one is to hit a lot of dissonant drones and flail away like a bear bashing a salmon on a rock, and the other is to be so subtle and artistic your terrible audience will want to take off the vaudevillian-style straw boater hats it is probably wearing, out of respect. the first style is the only one I could ever get anywhere with.
[Various people at various times have tried to teach me to play things “in the style of Bill Monroe,” so to say. This is, to some, desirable. In the days of my youthful naivete I was impressed the first time I heard an old man tell a Bill Monroe story, but then it gradually unfolded itself to me how each and every folk musician over 50 has a Bill Monroe story and as time passes they grow less and less likely to be genuine first-hand reports, true in every particular. Still, I will admit they paint a consistent picture.
Now you may say, What is Monroe Style exactly? Well it is a state of mind mainly, let me help you into it.
well now you are a mad old man in a hat. you are ninety-twelve years old. the hat is big, bigger even than your belt buckle. hippies are growing their hairs down over their shirt collars, even the ones who love you and call you Sir, and what can you do about that? what can you and your mandolin and your hat do about that? everyone respects you and your hat but you are mad about it all anyhow.
These terrible youths will hang on every word you speak because it is 1969 or 1975 or 1982 and what else have they got to do with themselves, smoke some drugs or grow some beards or not work in a sawmill probably. that is all degenerate youth do these days is not work in sawmills. "please mr. monroe will you play us a tune please" they say. Well now, how about you go out into the mountains with nothing in your pockets but a washboard, a ham sandwich and a birch bough and make yourself a fine suit of clothes and a sturdy musical instrument out of them, since we are all making requests of one another just like familiar friends.
you have been mad since you were eightyleven and you will not stop simmering as long as you keep your hat on. the hat keeps your mad from coming out the top of your head so if you want to spite these filthy degenerates, about all you can do is fall asleep at them or play the mandolin at them. you can probably do both at once. you are bill Monroe.]
Anyhow, Little Maggie is a song, with words (folk people are as particular about distinguishing songs from tunes as classical people are about distinguishing songs from pieces, and to as much or as little purpose. though I do it too.) Once I had a grand dispute with someone to whom I had said I enjoy certain versions of the song Little Maggie because it is a folk song about a woman in which the woman does not die: but this someone was taken aback and declared that she did, indeed, die, and that this is why you sing Wake up, little Maggie. That is to say (he said), the narrator is one of those folk-song types who is slow to figure whether a lady is dead or just resting. Whereupon I said No, she is sleeping soundly because she drank too much and can't hear the tax collectors coming, just like the song says; dead is dead and asleep is asleep, this is not the new york times crossword puzzle and you are letting your bloodthirst get the better of you in your eagerness to misapply a metaphoric reading.
then he reminded me that Death is the brother of Sleep, unless it was I who reminded him, and I said Yes exactly, and you don’t treat siblings interchangeably, it isn’t decent. How would you like to be Hypnos all through grade school all your teachers reminiscing about how they’d loved Thanatos, & can you do the trick where you kill a guy, Hypnos, just like your brother? and the pain and unfairness of their disappointment when you assert your own identity, which after all is just as good a one, and would make you the popular brother if there was any justice.
you know what is a really super and understanding piece of literature on the way pain focuses the mind is Leonid Andreyev's On the Day of the Crucifixion. That is the one where a guy with just an incredibly bad toothache hears the three condemned men, each their own distinctive “type of guy” as we no doubt would say today,—hears them go by dragging their crosses on the fateful day, being scourged by the Romans and all, attracting a howling crowd of spectators &
"How they are shouting!" he said enviously, picturing to himself their wide-open mouths with strong, healthy teeth, and how he himself would have shouted if he had been well."
this is a good story with good insights into human nature.
and when they take him, our guy of the tooth problem, up the road to be diverted by the spectacle, but he misses that part of the resurrection commonly known as the “good part” due to his eagerness to finish telling his sympathetic friend the story of his very bad toothache, I think: this guy gets it. some readers take a different lesson, but I think they misunderstand.
—to ruin what is a very fine closure to a good couple of paragraphs above, I will be the exegete to my own gnomē: if you read this story as some kind of drippy exposition of the Auden poem on the Brueghel, or the William Carlos Williams poem on the Brueghel—or even of the Brueghel itself, god forbid we should apprehend a work of visual art with our naked eyeballs and interpret it with our naked brains without any textual intercessing intermediary—it all seems sententious, homiletic and dull. The point (stories don’t have “points,” I am just pretending, but pretend along with me if you will) of the Andreyev is not that we miss out on the numinous due to mundane distractions, or fail in our duty to bear witness to the holy due to excessive attachment to the flesh, or that the theological reason for the crucifixion was too many people getting too selfish & egoistic about their own precious toothaches, or that we are all too preoccupied with our own lives to know when something more important is going on, isn’t perspective a funny thing. that is all very silly, none of those are the point of anything. the point of the story is pain hurts. and I submit to you that this is a fine and subtle point, and the more pain has hurt you in your own daily life, the more readily you will apprehend its profundity.
listen! I LIVE
listen, everybody is sick of my dramaticks because nobody but me was ever in any serious doubt that I would live, the only reason they at the hospital kept making me sign papers acknowledging risk of DEATH, DEATH, DEATH was to play at games of cup-and-balls with my head, I know this perfectly well. but I keep amplifying them (the Dramaticks) as loudly as I am able because I am offended to have had everyone take my survival in stride.
If you follow me in other arenas of life you do not need the full context rundown yet again because I have not been able to shut up about my Problems for many years. however, a newsletter is formal serious business and for the sake of clarity and posterity I should say as directly as I can that on July 1 they unbolted my head and cut my throat to uncompress my spinal cord & selected nerves, replacing some, but not all, of my old faulty discs with prosthetic replicas made of polyethylene & titanium. “this’ll stop her complaining for sure,” they said, not knowing me well at all. they are a top-of-the-line model, not everyone’s number one choice but certainly a respectable one, there is hardly any risk of mechanical device failure, usually, and when there is it is at least spectacular and ends up in the medical literature, and that’s something. anyway they got right in there! right up on my spinal cord! blood on my hair, blood at my feet! bruises on my palms! agony abounds!
before long I should be back to my normal irregular schedule of saying things, but as I recover I ask you to either bear with me or at least feel guilty about your inability to bear with me. that, at least, is what I have been preoccupied with all my waking hours since my last address to you all.
surgery was not a decision taken lightly; as it says on all my records, I exhausted all the standard conservative measures long ago. I tried buying a small preserved boxwood topiary, which represents the frozen stoppage of Time & the arrest of attendant physical decay and decrepitude; I tried six different gothic bibliographies, indexed in six times six different ways, to get to know intimately the horror of physical & spiritual existence; I tried misting my hair with thermal-distilled Bulgarian rosa damascena, for a little pick-me up. then, I was out of ideas.
anyway I’m not on a lot of drugs but you better believe I would like to be. I am on just enough drugs to excuse any unpleasant or incomprehensible thing I say for at least two more weeks, and that is a semi-tolerable amount.
say, do you know how in Strictly Ballroom there’s the New Steps! New Steps! scene, and there’s a whirly flash cut from one person to the next, all exclaiming New Steps! and a spinning newspaper with the headline New Steps! and then Bang a cut to Barry Whosis of the dance federation who brings it all down to earth again with a “THERE ARE NO NEW STEPS”? well, it’s just like that for me but with Neck instead of Steps and no Barry to stop me. I have a new neck, and it hurts even more than the old one but in different places, which is a hopeful sign I GUESS. someday I will be cleared to tilt my head backwards again, more powerful even than the famous Pig of Vincent d’Onofrio.
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"Loch Ness swallowed Mrs. Hambro. She was wearing pearls."
A doctor gave me a penetrating gaze through the telephone wires some while ago and asked me Was I sure I had no desire to be a literary critic? I was sure, and said so, but he did not believe me, and he said so. Now, this is more of a pretext than a story, but even so it is hard for me not to want to tell it in a way that makes a field of farmers take up their sickles and charge at him, bellowing, for my honor. But to keep a loose grip on truth, not to say a stranglehold, I must make clear that this was not posed as part of some standard well-woman physical exam (though perhaps it should be; this is a trouble that touches many women: suppressed & seething lit-critical impulses, our generation’s Problem-that-has-no-name.)
No, but it was a natural enough question, in context, to hear from someone who knows me a little and understands me less. The answer is of course No, like I say: because critics are answerable to truth and editors and I am answerable only to Me. I want all the power, none of the responsibility; all the freedom, none of the binding cords, not even for the pleasurable drama of bursting free from my voluntary bonds and breaking the rules I let be set upon myself.
(Do you know, if I were Virginia Woolf, I would amend that sentence because “let” and “set” rhyme, and only the ill-bred ruffians and the jumped-up shopkeepers of the world would leave an assonance alone? but I am not Virginia Woolf. more on that anon.)
He did not believe me, I don't think, because I didn’t bother to do a good sales job on the arrogance and domineering pride of the amateur, which I am one of; on the labored (and necessary) humility of the professional, the burden and the tædium of it all to one not born to tell the truth, as I was not. But I have been thinking ever since, off and on, of what differential diagnosis you might run on a person to wind up with Dissatisfied Critic at the end of it and what alternate maladies were privately ruled out before he put this accusation on me. I will never go to medical school, me. but if you are going there, or have already been, ask somebody for me. won’t you? what if he was wrong and I have a troubled Spleen, or an apoplectic spasm just biding its time? These things are easy to confuse with the literary and the critical impulses.
But this is all just a way of avoiding apologies for having been Away for a time. and do not dare to tell me you haven’t noticed! When not prostrate with complicated neck agonies, I have been spending my time fighting with Virginia Woolf and getting very angry at her cowardice in refusing to fight back, except slyly and behind my back, usually in her diary. Just when I am ready to destroy her, but DESTROY her, she becomes very unhappy and really decent, and pity stays my hand. A co-dependent cycle of some sort is what I think this is.
We are just alike in the inessentials; very often she explains them better than I do, but she careens wildly from being just right about something, hanging an opinion off of herself like a single bell-flower on a hyacinth cluster, pendant and lucid, then wrong and smug and simply unbearable, like some feather-like object (a feather, perhaps? she would know, and feel superior about the knowing) blown indiscriminately by the scheming Winds up to the heavens and into the ditches. Not, of course, that the intellect is blown anywhere, hers or mine: we decide, we are responsible, the Winds we call for do not answer to us. One thing that strangles me into mumbles & groans (not silence; never silence) regarding Virginia Woolf is she summons up in me a dormant, nearly dead, vestigial reflex to sexist rhetoric. She speaks to an allergy, a sensitivity, an inflamed portion of my sensory apparatus I did not know existed or was flawed in this way. The more careful I try to be, the worse it gets. You see there: ‘She summons up in me,’ as if it is her fault! That is the trouble, is it does feel like her fault. But I know better. But so did she! And so on. Usually I am more vigilant than this, but usually I never have to be; I resisted the implantation of this particular rhetorical instinct pretty violently and I can honestly boast that I don’t have much of it to repress. But Virginia—Virginia—VIRGINIA—
and you see again, calling her by her first name. Who am I to do that, except someone just as clever as she was, better qualified than most people to judge her for that reason, but all the same not her friend, not possessed of any special rights of intimacy. How do I dare speak about her this way? How can I stop?
—well, let it be for the moment. We are, as I was saying, alike in the inessentials. What about the essentials? Is genius an essential? She distinguished between minor genius and the other kind, at times, and never cared to force her younger self into consistency with her older one, and neither do I, so I am happy to call Genius an inessential and not quarrel over which of us has more of it, or who has a better kind. Go ahead and think me minor & her major, I am too proud to mind. She was productive and prolific in a way I have never been and never will be. On the other hand, she had to guess from a writer’s hand-cramp at what a “servant’s hand” might (“must”) feel like, when it got tired from working, whereas I have done actual labor all my life though never more of it than I absolutely had to, so I do not have to wonder whether the fatigue from drawling & fussing over assonances is quite as fatiguing as scrubbing floors and sweeping fireplaces all day, since I have done both and recommend none of them, except for the fact of having done it, which is good for both you and the floors.
—But that is not essential either! and anyhow, Woolf had more physical suffering and deprivation at intervals than I have yet had, excepting what my spine does to me, and she did work hard at writing and she was barred from most occupations in her youth, so that is not a competition I ought to enter into if I am wise. Working herself up into a mad froth of delightsome metaphors and sentences both angular and curvilinear at surprising times, shaped to please and to disguise a lack of depth or the feared appearance of a lack of depth, like the thinnest of polished flooring over a missing or rotten substructure, which insecurity in her had to do with old childhood resentments and intellectual deprivations and “Cambridge” the envied and despised, and in me has nothing to do with anything (yet it persists)—there is an essential, and look! we are alike in it! have I been wrong about everything?
no, because Temperament is the Empress of all things and, though the reasons for it are perfectly plain and probably biographically unavoidable, Virginia Woolf had a temperament that led her to make a fetish of Reality, a word whose meaning to her I have not yet discovered, although at times I think she says Reality where I would say Eternity; that led her to place Jane Austen on a strange and separate pedestal in the hall of authors because serene detached divinity seemed good to her as an attitude to take, and furious asymmetrical unresolved passionate anger seemed to her a jagged flaw in the heart of a hard clear gem. She was wrong about what is beautiful and what is ugly, about what is perfect: what is worse to be wrong about, than that? Of course she had good reasons, I know she had good reasons.
(—Would I have said that perfection is better than imperfection, before I started fighting with Virginia Woolf? I absolutely would. What does this mean? Is unprincipled inconsistency the flaw at the heart of MY gem? Do I need a new setting? or only a new metaphor?)
—My personal opinion in my capacity as unlicensed psychoanalyst is that because VW spent so much youthful time disguising and decorating and beautifully controlling her furious hatreds & hateful furies, as she details so blazingly well in parts of Moments of Being, she got out of the habit of thinking analytically about them: and calm recollection, like keen observation, wears the disguise of dispassionate analysis well, but is not that thing.
—Because of this, she seems at times unable to read passion expressed in finished literature,—expressed, not merely represented from a wry distance,—unable to read it as anything but a blot, a lapse, an offensive accident; as if Charlotte Brontë would not have found a rock to bash her heart against no matter what kinder, freer time she was born into. This is not what I believe: I believe she would have. I believe that a Charlotte Brontë free to fling her body over the hills along with her heart & gallop off into the horizon instead of gazing at it, who traveled to lands besides Belgium and did it unchaperoned and in comfortable clothes, who got out from under the heavy hand of her strange & sorrowful father early or never had him, would have been happier: but not happy, not calm, never not setting her beloved Self at war with unbeloved Reality. Would she have written better books? I do not know, not like Virginia Woolf thinks she knows: but she would have finished her last one, her Emma, which might have been the greatest. And as to patriarchy’s effects, which god knows Virginia Woolf knew better and felt more closely than I do—the strangest thing, to me, in Charlotte Brontë, is the absence of self-hatred, the lack of self-disgust. You feel for it with your hands all through Jane Eyre, like a child locked in a closet feeling for the doorknob, but it never comes, is never there, only a smooth surface. Is it possible to build a house so, without any doorknobs? Do the doors open of themselves, then, have you only got to pound on them until they yield? The triumphant masochism of the martyr who knows her cause is just, who will submit up to a point and no further, who will bend almost down to the ground but never ever all the way, who will give up her life before she gives up her grudges—these are barely legible qualities to Virginia Woolf, who gently tolerates the “elementary” characters, the “grim and crude” — and there she is right— “comedy,” to get to what she bafflingly calls the “poetry,” her word for beauty, sublimity; Woolf who praises Wuthering Heights over Jane Eyre because—because!—”there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights.” She sees and names the “overpowering personality” of writers like Charlotte Brontë, the “untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently.” She knows what it is she is looking at. Only, these things are not virtues to her. Imagine that. Imagine it! To see, and believe you see from a great height, and to appraise, and to set a wrong and insulting valuation on it all!
no wonder I am fighting with this terrible woman all of the time. and this after reading no more than five or six percent of her total output, at a generous estimate.
but I admit that To the Lighthouse is a good book.
‘The Paris Exposition story’ used to be a thing you could refer to and everyone would know what you meant, you wouldn’t even have to call it that, or call it anything. Maybe it still is known to some like the backs of their hands, but I am going to tell it to you anyway, just in case you have forgettories as full as my own.
A woman and her mother check into a hotel; the mother lies down in their shared room to rest, and the daughter goes out to see what she might see at the Paris Exposition. Hours later she comes back. The room is empty.
Her mother’s suitcase is gone. Her mother’s things are gone. Her own things are still there, it cannot be the wrong room. Is her mother hiding behind the curtains? Her mother would not hide behind the curtains, not in a foreign country. Her mother could not have run from her own daughter, she never runs anywhere, and skirts are hobbled this year. Who would flee her own child? Does the orange tree flinge from the oranges? Does the oak fear the acorns? Does the wolf attend the Paris Exposition all alone, without her cub to read the placards to her and demand that the people make way, make way for her aged wolf mother, who is hard of hearing in one ear and must be brought a glass of water? Preposterous! All of this is preposterous.
The woman makes with all speed to the reception desk. They will not dare to be preposterous to her at the reception desk, she has brought her Passport. Where is my Mother! The clerk is embarrassed. Am I thy Mother’s keeper? Let me consult the enregistrements; if your mother was here she certainly signed in. Ah—she did not sign in. Your own name is here in your own hand and it is alone. There is no mystery, mademoiselle, you are only mistaken; that is all. Either you do not have a mother, which is a misfortune or an unmentionable, or you mislaid her some years previously and only noticed today, and such is your forgetfulness that I wonder you are not ashamed to mention it. In fact, we have never heard of mothers at this hotel, and I am only pretending to know what this thing is you have lost, to humor you. If you could explain in French, the language of your hosts, I might help you better? Ah—I joke, I expect too much from les touristes. Go and inquire of la pharmacie if they sell the object you seek, you may whisper it in back if you are ashamed, but they are professionals and will not be shocked. Or better yet, go out and skip across the Pont Alexandre III, go and frolic in our Water Castle, enter into the Gallery of Machines and ask our proudest architect to design a Mother for you, if he can spare the time.
That is the Paris Exposition Story, the basis for THE WHEEL SPINS (aka THE LADY VANISHES), for PHANTOM LADY, for BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING. That is the foundation of it, which is: I had a woman, or I saw a woman, and she is gone, and I need her back, and nobody but me will admit she existed; or: Something happened, and I was there, and I saw it, but nobody else saw it, and what is not witnessed by two pairs of eyes has not happened, and two-out-of-three are the chances I am a woman myself telling the tale, and that means Doomed and Disbelieved. But to give in and accept what they tell me is doom as well, and worse, because that would be doom of character as well as circumstance. Doom is anywhere you look, everyone is a conspirator against you, and your choice is to be their victim or save yourself by becoming a co-conspirator against yourself, no salvation without self-betrayal.
(Do you know the bit in THE SILVER CHAIR when the lady in the green kirtle tells our friends that there is no Sun? that their tales of the Sun are amusing, like all children’s stories, but a fantasy is a fantasy and to go on believing in fantasy when storytime is over is a sin, and moreover, in bad taste? This is a deformed Paris Exposition Story, because it is one against many (as is proper) but the Many are on the side of truth, and the One all alone, the woman invaded in her home, is the liar, and liars never prosper when the fight is fixed against them. So it it is all backwards and it cheats, as a Paris Exposition story, although it is not trying very hard to be one.
The other difference between a C.S. Lewis and an Evelyn Piper/Merriam Modell—there are only two differences, as you see—is that the faith-smarm defense is not allowable to the true Paris Exposition victim, since to use it will bring her nowhere she wants to go. What if Blanche Lake does pull a Puddleglum and says to the police Well, I don’t care; you say having a daughter who disappeared and nobody ever heard of her or cared to look for her is a story for babies, that’s all right, it’s a BEAUTIFUL story for babies and I intend to go on believing it, for I would rather live in a world where I had a daughter who is lost and every face is turned against me than live in a world where I took a funny turn and had an episode of imagination and everything is all right except I need a rest cure, and no bad things have happened to anyone.
you see at once how this doesn’t work at all. The woman who is Paris Exposed finds no comfort in being a solitary believer, martyred and tormented by a vicious world. She would rather be wrong, as the visitors to the Sunless Lands would not; she would be perfectly happy visiting the Thermal Hotel Visegrád Superior in Budapest to take the galvanic waters and receive some Interference Therapy to remove the delusion and the trouble, as that would mean that no-one is harmed, no-one is in danger, no-one’s life hangs on her action or inaction.
(Interference Therapy is nothing like so wonderful as it sounds. if it was what it sounds like I would retrain to be an Interference tech, I am great at interfering. no, it is just more pleasant electricity. but in 1900 perhaps electricity, whose Currents you and I may regard with the contempt borne of familiarity, was as much a wonder of the world as interfering, which is eternal.)
I had a Paris Exposition story happen to me in, of all places, Paris, in the year 2001, which is awfully suspicious. I was there on a study abroad program run by a woman hired by my university; there were only five of us so accommodations were individual, unequal, and, to me — who had at that time not dealt with any private landlords at all and was unprepared to have French landlords be my first — terrifying. I moved to a tiny studio midway through the year, when another student left and I was freed at last from my erstwhile roommate, an older grad student who did some angry sautéing but no talking (and me who says it! Nowadays I am silent as the tomb some days but voluble as a squirrel warning another squirrel off its acorn hoard on alternating days, and you cannot know which day you will get me, I take good care of my mysteries so that no-one should know. But back then I was only silent as the tomb all the time, knowing no other way to be.)
Any how, this woman sharing my first apartment barricaded herself in her room at most hours, falling asleep to Françoise Hardy in the small hours, which meant keeping me awake to Françoise Hardy in the small hours. I like Françoise Hardy, now, but it took years to get over this imprinting. So I was thrilled to be going to look at this potential upgrade, and was planning to take it if I could no matter what it looked like, for to live alone in a room the size of my thumb and smoke cigarettes out the window facing the Musee Carnavalet through the rain instead of going to Sorbonne lectures on Le Grand Meaulnes was all my desire and shortly to be all my delight.
and when I came back to take possession, all was as it had been, everything the same, except when I got in the elevator, the floors were different. I had gone to see it on the fourth floor. They told me to get off on the fourth floor; I did; they met me there, they conducted me to the apartment, I looked it over, I sat on the bed, we spoke, we agreed, we planned, I departed.
then I came back, and it was on the third floor.
and for the rest of my time in Paris, it stayed on the third floor, though every day I went out and came back, sometimes at different times, to see if I could catch it making its daily rounds from here to there.
and—yes—this is not completely right for the Story, because the apartment was not lost and gone, and nobody denied that it did exist, which they should have, to make it correct. But it had moved down a floor, and they did deny that. It was the same apartment, it was not some simple thing of having shown me a sample unit and contracted me for another identical one directly below. No! I thought of that! It was not a question of the French numbering their étages differently and me becoming confused. No! I thought of that too! The same studio had been rented to helpless American undergraduates for years and years, and the owners of it owned just that single solitary one in that building, and no other. This happened, it was really real, and while it fails in many ways to be a true Paris Exposition story, yet it has the buried kernel, for nobody will ever believe it.