The Essential Clive Barker

by Clive Barker

  My family waited through the heat of the afternoon for this last part of the show to begin, my father doing his best to interpret the words of the announcer on the airfield loudspeaker. Was that the Frenchman’s plane: that tiny dark dot up there in the wide, empty sky? (This was the fifties; the sky was emptier then.) Yes, that was the plane, because look, there was Leo Valentin tumbling out, an even tinier dot. My uncle helped me follow him, explaining what I was seeing; but it didn’t interest me very much. I was too hot and tired; too distracted by the wasps. And the spectacle, such as it was, seemed so remote, so undramatic. It required an adult’s comprehension of the risks this man was taking to make the diminishing shape of the plane and Valentin’s tumbling form seem significant.

  I think my aunt began to panic first, her voice shrill. My uncle attempted to calm her, but her distress simply grew, as she watched the Bird Man descend.

  Vaguely I began to understand what was happening. Something was wrong with the trick we were here to see. The man up there in the sky wasn’t flying the way he was supposed to: he was falling.

  Was there any concern being expressed by the voice on the airfield loudspeaker? Perhaps; I don’t remember. But I do remember the mounting panic of the adults, a panic not simply fueled by the fact that Valentin was dropping out of the sky, but by their growing comprehension that he was going to hit the ground very close to us.

  I think my mother must have taken me back to the car at this point. Certainly my next memory is of the hot confines of a vehicle, and my mother instructing me not to look. This was a sight I must not see. You can imagine what a goad to my curiosity that was. Something was about to happen so terrible I was forbidden sight of it.

  “Don’t look,” my mother said, over and over. “Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.” My aunt was also in the car (perhaps she’d preceded us there) and my baby cousin was bawling in her arms.

  In the confusion I defied my mother’s repeated edict, and looked out toward the cornfield. My father and my uncle were standing at the edge of the field, their hands cupped over their brows to shield their eves from the blazing sun, watching Leo Valentin plummet to his death.

  (The image of a man falling out of the sky, his body and his ambitions dashed against the earth, is one that trails mythologies, of course. But it would be many years before I learned the story of Icarus, or read Paradise Lost. All I knew at that moment was the panic, and my hunger to see what the men out there were seeing; the thing I was forbidden.)

  I was denied it, however. Probably my mother averted my eyes at the last minute, though it’s unlikely I would have seen much. A blurred form dropping out of the blue, with the silk plume of a parachute following behind. It would have meant nothing.

  My father, on the other hand, saw it all, and was one of the first to reach Valentin’s body. I asked him about it, much, much later. He is a plain-spoken, pragmatic man, not given to waxing poetic, but when he answered my questions his vocabulary grew dreamy and evocative. The Bird Man’s body, he said, had made a shape from the flattened grain, and he lay with his wings spread wide, so that it looked as though an enormous bird had fallen to earth. Of course they knew he was dead, but they turned him over anyway, I suppose to be absolutely sure. His face, my father told me, was not bloody, though a newspaper piece I later found about the accident speaks of “severe head injuries.” His eyes were closed.

  Perhaps, for completeness’ sake, I should tell you how the tragedy came about. That flight, on May 21, 1956, was to have been Leo Valentin’s last; he’d been experimenting with the technology of unaided human flight since 1950, when he’d made his first jump at Villacoublay, and was now, at thirty-seven, ready to pursue a safer avenue of work. He was a superstitious man. He had asked for Room 123 at the hotel where he’d stayed (that was the number he called out before jumping); he would let no hands touch his wings but his own. Nobody is entirely certain what went wrong, but the favored theory is that his wings clipped the plane as he jumped. He started to spin, and the damage to his wings prevented his controlling the descent. He attempted to open his parachute but it caught in the fractured wings, and candled.

  So that was Valentin’s story. Now let me return to the way it affected me. Though I saw nothing, and left the event undiscussed for thirty years or more, what happened that day marked me deeply. The sight of a winged man (sometimes flying, sometimes falling) comes up over and over again in the work I make. In the opening chapters of Weaveworld a character called Cal Mooney “falls” into a world in a carpet: “The tumult of the birds grew louder, crowing their delight at his descent. He, the usurper of their element; he, who had snatched a glimpse of the miracle, would now be dashed to death upon it.”

  In the play Crazyface, the fool-hero Tyl Eulenspiegel escapes at the end, rising from the dirt and grief of his life on the wings of a failed Bird Man. There is a shot in Nightbreed, a movie I directed, in which the hero, Aaron Boone, is gunned down in a field of rushes. The sequence ends with a crane shot, rising from his face, to show him splayed on the ground, his arms spread wide. I had no idea what I was doing when I created that shot. If I had, I would probably not have been moved to do it.

  My paintings and drawings also contain more than their share of winged figures. One of those images, created for a limited edition of Weaveworld, later became the symbol of my film company. Even the Bird Man’s name appears in a story of mine (“The Last Illusion”) and as a character in the film adaptation, Lord of Illusions. None of this, as I say, was conscious. But nor, I believe, was any of it accidental. On that afternoon in 1956 the death of Leo Valentin entered the life of a four-year-old Clive Barker. The fact that I had no way to interpret the event doesn’t mean it went away. Indeed its power to impose itself upon my imagination may have been made all the stronger because I lacked those skills. It became, as it were a private legend, an image drawn on the rock of my skull, from which all manner of other tales and pictures would in time be derived.

  There are no other events in my early life that carry quite the primal power of Leo Valentin’s fall, but every childhood, however unremarkable, has its share of strangenesses and wonders, which the mind files away and puts to later purpose. Though in 1956 I was many years from realizing I wanted to write for a living, I certainly knew from an early age that I was a natural inventor of imagined things. I knew how to tell stories; how to create pictures in other people’s heads. I also knew that there was power in those inventions; that I, as their creator, felt special, even unique.

  Jorge Luis Borges, a writer for whose works and wisdom I have the greatest admiration, says at the end of his poem, The Maker, that: “A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Over the years he fills a given surface with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses, and people. Shortly before he dies, he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.”

  I wonder if the reverse is not also in some way true. That the artist is constantly working on an elaborate and fantasticated self-portrait, but at the end has drawn, unbeknown, a picture of the world.

  Before I move on from the story of Leo Valentin, let me describe the other image that remains with me from that day: the one I did see. I’m looking out of the car window, and there, at the edge of the cornfield, stand my father and uncle, watching the last moments of the Bird Man’s fall. No doubt they were as panicked as everyone else, but that’s not how I remember them. What I picture in my mind’s eye are two stoic witnesses to this terrible scene. This was maleness, this witnessing; or so in that moment I came to believe. And if my early work is marked by a certain hunger to see what should not be seen, to show what should not be shown, the beginning of that appetite may be here, at the edge of the cornfield with the men watching the sky, and me, struggling in my mother’s arms because I was forbidden the sight.

  IV

  The notion of the forbidden—of a subject so unspeakable that it ca
n not be visited without terrible consequences—lies at the root of the subgenre of fantastic art which has drawn most public attention in the last few years: horror fiction. Given that a significant number of the books I’ve written, and most of the film projects I’ve worked on, have been dubbed works of horror, it may be time to talk about it a little.

  In the grand scheme of the fantastique, horror fiction—which I will define as narratives that seek chiefly or solely to scare or horrify—is a relatively small subgenre. It’s also a modern phenomenon. That’s not to say that the horrific has not always been a part of the storyteller’s repertoire; only that the singularity of focus is recent; say, since the middle of the eighteenth century, when Gothic fiction began to depict lives entirely consumed by darkness and terror. Before that, the horrific was always part of a larger story-scheme. In a number of my early short stories I attempted this single-minded approach; making tales that only went after shock and horror. Their titles announce their intent: “The Midnight Meat Train,” “Rawhead Rex,” “Pig Blood Blues.” But after writing a few of them, I quickly tired of the trick, and I started to expand my palette, while attempting to keep an element of hardcore horror in play. It’s harder to do than it looks: distressing images and ideas are so potent that they often outweigh all other elements. It’s difficult for character-based work, or felicities of philosophy, to make any impression on a reader when bodies are being disemboweled and heads are flying. But there were occasions, I think, when I struck a reasonable balance. “In the Hills, the Cities,” for instance, achieves a potent surreality amid the bloodshed. A couple of stories, “Son of Celluloid” and “Dread,” operate as metafictions, debating their use of the grotesque and the horrific even as they dramatize them. With three books of short stories under my belt I turned my hand to a novel: The Damnation Game. It is a Faust story (after Marlowe rather than Goethe), and though it’s much shorter than my later novels it still spins an elaborate narrative, which allowed me to expand the place of metaphysics in my storytelling. This is the first time a religious tone appears in the fiction, I think; and I took courage from the readers’ response to these deeper chords. When I returned to short stories for the next three books the narratives are much more explicitly metaphysical. Again, the titles tell all: “Down Satan!,” “The Madonna,” “The Life of Death.” And again, there are attempts to create metafictions, the most lucid of which, I believe, is “The Forbidden.” The film Candyman was derived from this story, and drew some serious critical attention. For anyone who might have missed the subtext, I drove it home by making the heroine a semiotician: an intellectual in pursuit of what she believes to be a monstrous myth, who finds halfway through the narrative that the myth is alive and well, and that she’s become its quarry.

  In a sense this story dramatizes a vital dynamic in these early books. They gain much of their energy from the tension between my intellectual and stylistic ambitions and the often disgusting ferocity of their images. I had learned some of the key creative lessons from the cinema. From Georges Franju’s poetic and horrible Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face); from Cronenberg’s brutal, eloquent films, and of course from The Exorcist, which still stands as a benchmark of resonant cruelty. My own attempt to create something memorable for the screen, Hellraiser, was made soon after the delivery of these short stories, and in a way completed the first arc of my career. I was effectively finished with writing horror fiction. The next book I wrote was Weaveworld: a new world, a new direction.

  That’s not to say that my reputation as a purveyor of Grand Guignol hasn’t followed me. I have, to be honest, an ambiguous response to that reputation. It has been all too often an easy peg for lazy journalists to hang a headline on; and for a certain order of reviewers, more interested in turning a phrase than exercising their intellects, it has been a stick to beat me with. But then if it hadn’t been that it would have been something else; we all make rods for our own backs. I still enjoy crafting horror movies. It’s a genre, which, for all its inanities, can still stir people up, which is always pleasing. It’s such a primal form—it deals in the meat and bone of our existence—yet the moral issues it raises can be surprisingly complex: that’s an attractive package.

  As to writing horror, I think I’m done, barring a few pieces I still have in the works, designed to finish mythologies that still need closure. Of course I’ll still go after a frisson if I see that the narrative offers me one; I just can’t imagine devoting an entire novel to the business of scaring the reader. Sometimes, in fact, there’s more potency in a darkness that creeps out of nowhere, its presence unsuspected, than in a fiction that announces from the first word that it intends to scare. There are passages in Sacrament, for instance, which are as disturbing as anything in “The Midnight Meat Train,” but they arise organically from a story that has a lot of other things on its mind. In that sense this perhaps more closely approximates the way images of horror occur in real life. More often than not they come out of nowhere. But perhaps that also can be said of other areas of our experience. Out of nowhere, something strange.

  V

  Something strange.

  One of my teachers at university, a notable literary scholar, railed against my appetite for invented worlds. Why, she demanded, did I waste my time reading about Middle-earth and Wonderland, when the real world was so rich and diverse? True artists weren’t interested in inventing places, she said. It was a narcissistic game; writers who played it were arrested in adolescence. The woman intimidated me; I kept my enthusiasms to myself thereafter. Now, of course, I’d remind her that Shakespeare, surely the greatest model for storytellers in the Western tradition, was no stranger to invented worlds. Prospero’s island, the woods of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, even the history plays, with their ghosts and omens, are fearless marriages of the real and the fantastical. What I believe she was objecting to, in hindsight, was a perceived hollowness in the conventions of the fantastic; and had she made that argument I would have been obliged to see its merit. Emptied of meaning or belief, the forms of the fantastic often become mere filigree, no question. Books become catalogues of nonsense names and empty cliché: elaborate conceits, lacking the power to move us. But at its best, I would have countered, the fantastic is as rich and truthful and humane as any piece of realism.

  I’m not sure I would have convinced her. There was something in her nature that made her unsympathetic to imaginative labors. When we were studying Ibsen, I voiced my admiration for Peer Gynt. She was scornful, directing my attention back to Ibsen’s naturalistic plays. They had all kinds of merits, she insisted, that Peer Gynt lacked; it was a thin work by contrast. Her admiration (indeed her understanding) of Ibsen’s work was directly connected with his powers as a social observer. It was as though she could not quantify the excellence of a scene involving the Kingdom of Trolls, for instance, because she had no personal experience by which to measure it. Put plainly like this, the notion sounds absurd, but there’s some truth in it, I think. In short, the very qualities that define the fantastique were at the heart of her problem with it.

  Of course, Peer Gynt isn’t simply fantastical; it’s profligate in its imaginings. And such profligacy is one of those defining qualities. There are exceptions to the rule (Beckett’s plays, for instance) but, broadly speaking, the imagination, once unleashed, is defiantly excessive. The journeys the protagonists of fantastic fiction take are seldom less than staggering, the countries or planets or dimensions they discover either surpassingly beautiful or hellish, the characters and creatures they meet there prodigious in form and feeling. As befits a literature with its roots in myth, the wars and romances which the narratives describe are likely to be vast in their consequences.

  Perhaps it’s not surprising that the critics panic. Schooled to analyze the spartan aesthestics of modernity, the sheer spectacle of the fantastique looks, to their eye, deeply suspect. They’re like architecture critics who’ve spent their formative years in minimalist houses and are suddenly re
moved into a Gothic cathedral. They don’t have the vocabulary to describe or critique the complexity, the confidence, the sheer exuberance of what’s in front of them. It intimidates them. In what is finally a supreme act of self-defense, they put on shrugs and walk away, saying that there’s nothing here that deserves their scrutiny.

  Readers have no such difficulties. They don’t need screeds of criticism to help them understand what the books are attempting to do: they trust their sense of direction in these invented places. Nor do they flinch when the author explores his appetite for transgression. Though readers of contemporary fantasy are often characterized as conservative, even reactionary — half in love with places where life is simpler, and sex is invisible—they are, in my experience, quite the reverse. Over the last fifteen years I’ve played both pornographer and pulpit-pounder in the books I’ve written, without meeting significant objection.

  I’ve created a character (Pie ‘oh’ pah in Imajica) whose gender is dependent on the erotic desires of those it’s coupling with; I’ve made gay heroes and lesbian heroines; I’ve described confrontations with both the God of the Israelites and with pagan Goddesses; I’ve explored Gnosticism, Hermeticism, numerous forms of Sex Magic and Earth Magic; I’ve celebrated the perversities of the Devil and pictured Christ as a sun-addled egotist. I’ve made paintings and photographs depicting every kind of physical and spiritual conjunction and found audiences eager to see what I’ve made.

  One of the things that surprises observers about the crowds who come to my book signings and lectures is how eclectic they are. The appetite for imaginative material is not circumscribed; it reaches out into every part of our society. I can still be astonished myself by the passion which these readers express for some of the darker, more byzantine elements of my work. The book to which many readers feel most fiercely loyal is Imajica. It’s without question the most difficult thing I’ve written, both thematically and structurally. It is also the most ambitious, using the tropes of classical fantasy—the quest, the doppelgangers, the separated lovers, the villain with access to dark forces—as the bones of a far stranger body. Just as the alchemical writers used their pseudoscience as a way to encode a theory of spirit—the burning away of ego in search of a purer being—so in Imajica I attempted to encode a whole belief system into a single ambitious narrative. Have readers broken that code? Yes; in their tens of thousands. The most moving letters that I receive are related to this book, and to the breaking of that code. From a priest in Russia, who had been restored in his faith by reading the book, from a man with AIDS who relates that the book did more good than months of counseling, from a prisoner in England who paralleled the book with another spiritual quest, Pilgrim’s Progress, which is one of the two books Imajica’s protagonist, Gentle, purchases on his journey. (The other is Fanny Hill.)