by Clive Barker
Returning to my forbidding lecturer, with her contempt for Peer Gynt, I wonder why the code of that play was so impenetrable to her. She was a very bright woman, the author of several influential texts; she understood perfectly well the idea of metaphor. She had undoubtedly read books by fellow academics analyzing Ibsen’s intentions in Peer Gynt. But the moment any artist removed his or herself from a context which she identified as real something disconnected in her. The work no longer made sense.
This is, I suspect a peculiarly modern problem. Our century has been a time of investigation: everything has been made visible, made quantifiable. Mystery retreats; or, when it survives, it does so in the most broken-backed fashion: as a preoccupation with aliens or, worse, with the necessity to prove their existence.
The fantastic has nothing to do with proof; nothing to do with what might once have been true, or might yet come to pass. Hence my contempt for Todorov; for that mealymouthed negotiation with what might be possible. Why concern oneself with the plausible? What use is it in the grip of a dream? Would it help us comprehend the wisdom of The Tempest if we could be persuaded that there was once an entity called Ariel? Not at all. Only the frailest of cultures, afraid of its own shadow-self, will judge the excellence of its dreamscapes by a standard of verifiable truth.
VI
A second story, then. My tale of the Magician.
In the autumn of 1960, I was sick, quite seriously so, with the flu. I think we must just have gotten a television; a small black and white set. Enraptured by the thing, and too light-headed to do anything else with myself anyway, I sat and watched it through the gloomy afternoon. At some point an elderly man was interviewed; his words were translated from the French as he spoke. He was a strange character to my unsophisticated eye, but he fascinated me, with his fluttering hands, his old maid’s mouth, the sorrowful wrinkle in his eyes. At the end of the interview came an excerpt from a film that he’d made. It was called, though the title meant nothing to me at the time, The Testament of Orpheus, and in it this same old man appeared, dressed much as he’d been dressed in his interview. He was wandering in a rather fake-looking landscape of ruins, where he encountered a menacing woman dressed in a cloak and elaborate helmet, armed with a spear. Flanking her were men wearing horse-masks. There was some exchange between the two, then the old man turned his back and walked away. Suddenly, the woman threw the spear, and it sank into the man’s back, appearing through the middle of his chest. He fell to the ground, transfixed. One of the man-horses went to him, and pulled the spear out. This I remember very vividly: the spear sliding out of the dead man’s body.
That was it. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. Visits to the cinema were extremely rare events for the family, and when we did see movies they were the usual juvenile fare. This was like a thunderbolt; I couldn’t get it out of my head. I grasped nothing of what was meant by what I’d seen, or so it seemed at the time. But it had transfixed me nevertheless, as the spear had transfixed the old man.
It would be several years before I discovered who the man being interviewed was. It was, of course, Jean Cocteau. The Testament of Orpheus was his last film; he was to die a year later. The film was by no means the best he made; it’s mawkish in places, and Cocteau is not a great screen presence by any means. But it is a testament, and it serves that purpose well. There are references throughout to his work as an artist or, as he would have preferred it, “a poet.” He did not mean to limit himself with this definition. A poet might work in any medium and still express his poetic visions. Cocteau did just that. He made a number of films (two of them, Orphée and La Belle et la Bête, masterpieces of fantastic cinema), he painted frescoes, designed tapestries and ballets, illustrated books (on two occasions with groundbreaking homo-erotic frankness), wrote books, and yes, poetry.
I don’t recall asking my parents any questions about the man I’d seen that afternoon on the little television screen. Perhaps I knew they wouldn’t be familiar with him; or that I wasn’t ready to understand him vet. But the image of the ruins and the horse-headed men, and the terrible tenderness with which the spear was drawn out of the dead man’s body, remained with me. It was only a matter of time before I went back into the world Cocteau had made. When I did so I was probably fifteen. I saw some of his drawings in a book: the grace and beauty of the men he rendered in such confident lines spoke loudly to me. I found a biography: saw La Belle et la Bête at a local film society screening; stumbled through some of his poetry; and, by degrees, began to interpret his very particular code. I don’t have the space here to detail what I learned: but it had in some measure to do with being homosexual, in some measure to do with his faith in mythic models, and a great deal to do with his fearless belief that he was a king in his own country, and could legislate freely there. As it happened, I was learning much the same lesson from another poet, William Blake. “Make your own laws,” Blake says, “or be a slave to another man’s.” (Blake was, of course, a polymath like Cocteau: poet, mystic, painter, engraver.) The lesson seems clear enough: make what your heart instructs, and don’t let anyone persuade you to compromise with your own truth.
In practical terms, of course, this can be difficult. Both of these men were obliged to be workers for hire at periods in their lives; sometimes your stomach instructs more loudly than your heart. But when we look back over their lives (I hesitate to say careers; these men lived their careers), we see that they were wholly committed to being conduits for a vision which was in one sense theirs, of their essence, and in another wholly remote, unconcerned with the particularities of their lives, their unhappiness, their frustration, their addictions (in Cocteau’s case), their grinding poverty (in Blake’s). Though their circumstances were very different—Cocteau worked and played among some of the greatest artists of the century, Blake was barely noticed by the potentates and tastemakers of his age—they had this in common: they saw the world with a gaze that was peculiarly their own; and they scarcely deviated from the business of communicating what they saw to others.
My early encounter with Cocteau changed me. Seeing him living and dying I had, without being able to articulate what had happened, understood something; and all understanding brings change. I understood that the books I’d read and the paintings I’d seen were all pieces of their maker. That was what the image of the old man walking in the ruins showed me: an artist present in his own creation. Blake is even more audacious: he populates the city of London, familiar places like Camden Town and Mary-le-Bone, with the warring tribes of his homemade pantheon. Together these two artists provided me with an almost complete education in the methodologies of the fantastique. One draws the reader/spectator into his own kingdom; the other expels his creations into the known world, transforming it in the process. One centers his world around Christian iconography, though with a very personal slant; the other is inspired by pagan images and ideas. None of these dichotomies is strict, I should add. Cocteau, the classicist, painted frescoes for chapels, and Blake’s Christian convictions contain a healthy portion of pantheism. They both brim over, defying any simple description of their ambitions or achievements. That’s perhaps why, having been familiar with the work of both men for three decades or more, I am nowhere near exhausting them. They continue to teach, and I am still their apprentice.
Cocteau, my first magician, died on October 11, 1963. He had already planned the circumstances of his burial. He lies in a chapel he had decorated, sacred to the order of Saint-Blaise-des-Simples, the members of which had been known for their use of healing herbs. Shaping his world to the end, he inscribed his epitaph with his own hand: “Je reste avec vous” (I remain with you).
There is a herb garden around the chapel. Among the medicinal plants that grows there is the opium poppy.
VII
I originally had more than three stories to tell as part of this piece. Indeed one version was simply a patchwork of stories sewn together. The truth is, any intellectual grasp I have upon my fiction, a
nd the context of my fiction, is framed inside a telling. I have no means at my disposal but to say: this happened, then this, then this.
Let me tell something about telling, then.
People are curious, I think, about how a writer makes a world. The process is assumed to be very different from the writing of a so-called realistic novel. In my experience, that’s true. When I write about places I know—the Hebridean island of Tiree, for instance, in Sacrament, or Liverpool in Weaveworld, or London or New York—I write quickly, reporting to the page scenes which play out in my mind’s eye. I’m almost a journalist. When the narrative is removed to new worlds, however, the rhythm of working changes completely. Very seldom does the scene I’m attempting to create spring immediately into my head. It’s misty at first; I have a feeling about it, little more. The first exploratory paragraphs are likely to be about that feeling; they seldom make it to a final draft.
Before I describe the process any further perhaps I should retreat to an even earlier point: to the urge which makes me want to remove myself to these imagined spaces. This is best described as a phase of yearning: a powerful need to be in some other place. There’s a melancholy aspect to this state; indeed the melancholy may be an essential part of the process. We feel this yearning when we wake from a particularly pleasing dream: a sense of separation from something wonderful. The Freudian will claim that it’s the comfort of our mother’s arms we yearn for, but I believe that’s simplistic. I don’t think it’s Mama we’re thinking of when we stare at the open sea, or at a road cresting a hill, leading away into some undiscovered place. But having stated with such certainty what it’s not, I can’t really supply any alternative explanation. I suppose if I knew the root of the yearning that gets me to work, its power over me would be diminished.
(Perhaps the medium best suited to an expression of this yearning, by the way, is music. I hear that longing in countless pieces: in Barber’s Adagio, in the “In Paradisum” from the Fauré Requiem, in the “Liebestod” from Tristan and Isolde; in Max Steiner’s film scores, in folk songs like “Blow the Wind Southerly” and “Shenandoah.” It expresses both a dissatisfaction with things as they are and a suspicion that there are places, just out of sight, where life is better, richer, more meaningful. Across the Jordan or the wide Missouri some world waits to be restored to us.)
Returning now to the nuts and bolts of the process, I find that the restoration I’m describing occurs for me in increments. Having begun by setting down the feelings this as yet unspecified world arouses, I work, sentence by sentence, to make it come clear to me. Sometimes it simply refuses. Or rather, I’ve misread the signs, and am searching in the wrong place. There are countless abandoned explorations in my bottom drawer: the remains of searches for places that simply weren’t there to be discovered. It’s no use trying to fake it. If I can’t see this place in my head what hope do I have of evoking it for my readers? I suppose you could cobble together a collection of secondhand thoughts, but there’s no joy in that. If the place refuses to become real to you, you give up on the pursuit and look elsewhere. One of the tools I have on hand as I work on specifying the landscape is a lexicon of names and invented words, which I usually assemble when I start work on a book, and supplement as I go on. They may not stay in place as the drafts proceed, but they help to make the characters and places a reality. I always know when I’ve alighted upon the right name: Pie ‘oh’ pah and John Furie Zacharias; the twin cities of Yzorrdorex and Patashoqua; Mamoulian, the Last European and his companion Anthony Breer, the Razor-Eater; the names sound right to me.
As the work progresses all the senses come into play. I come to know the texture of a certain skin, the timbre of a certain voice. I’ve heard writers speak of the magical moment when a character “talks back” to them; when someone they have created attempts to wrest from the creator control of his or her destiny. It’s an illusion, of course: they’re all you, in the end; different parts of your being in conversation with one another. But the illusion can be potent, for all that. My equivalent of this feeling is less about voice than about something I suppose I must call presence. A character becomes so real that I can walk all the way around them, as it were; I can imagine how they’ll respond to any stimulus I might toss at them: waltz music or the prospect of a bagel with lox.
Once the work is up and under way, once the world is breathing, you have to surrender to it: to its rhythms, to its intentions, to its ugliness, sometimes; to its beauty, others. Sometimes this surrender, which is the second state of creation, feels perilous. You float in a murky place for long periods, waiting for the sense of things to show itself. Doubt devours you. This time, you think, there’s nothing there to bear you up. You’re just going to sink, while these illusions you created watch you go down.
And then, miraculously, something begins to happen. The story begins to move before you, like a pageant. Still surrendering, you describe it. If you’re lucky, there are days when this other world is so familiar to you that you can operate in that journalistic fashion I described before and simply report what you see. Some days too when you have to wait, not pushing too hard, not demanding that the sense of all this show itself before it wants to; listening, deeply; watching, deeply.
And when you’re very lucky, a third state comes your way: what I’ll call the ecstatic. It doesn’t happen very often, at least to me, and when it does it never lasts very long, but when it’s gone you know it. What is this state? Damned if I know. I do know that it invariably comes when you least expect it. Suddenly you’re expressing feelings you didn’t know you had, you’re seeing patterns you didn’t know were there to be found, and better still, you find you have the words to express those feelings, those patterns. When it’s over, you come down from the experience feeling tender and vulnerable. But what has happened on the page is somehow new to you, as though another mind has created it. More than once I’ve been tempted to reject or even destroy work I made in this state, motivated by an unhealthy desire to recall the text within the boundaries of what’s recognizably mine.
Somebody asked me at a lecture a few weeks ago whether I took drugs when I wrote. It’s not the first time the question has been asked of me; and it’s not surprising, perhaps, given what is on the page. I told the questioner that while I thoroughly enjoy certain altered states, I’ve never done good work when out of my head. Later, I realized that wasn’t entirely true. I found titles to several of the stories in The Books of Blood one evening, high on hashish-laced brownies, and I’ve jotted down paranoid fantasies on cocaine, which I later used in stories. But that’s about it. The paintings I’ve made high I always destroyed. They seemed thinly felt. And though I’ve made a few grandiose schemes for films and books in such states, they’ve never seemed as interesting—or indeed, as ambitious—as those I made on a Monday morning, clearheaded. That’s not to say the method is unworkable. I’m happy to believe that Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan” while in a laudanum fugue; and that great works of nineteenth-century poetry and painting were made under the influence of absinthe. Keith Haring made wonderful, lucid images while high as a kite; Faulkner wrote beautifully when drunk. There are no rules here, except the rules of the dominant culture, which I—old Romantic that I am—firmly believe artists have no place obeying. It’s just that I’m not wired to work while I’m high. Maybe I fear the consequences. I see quite enough visions as it is. Too many, some days. Some days I feel abused by their brightness, their elaboration. Perhaps I’m afraid that they have more than enough heat to cook me alive as it is; drugs would only stoke the fire.
Even as I write that, I see my own ambiguities clearly. How much, on the one hand, I want to be consumed, I want the fire to burn me up; and how much on the other I retreat from the prospect. And then, perhaps both appetites need to be in play, in balance even, for the work to be made. The surrendering self has to be matched by the aggressor; the man who wants to be lost in his worlds forever, erased by them, has to be met halfway by his other self, th
e one who is making this work out of a neurotic need for self-description.
VIII
I observed at the beginning of this introduction that it would contain its share of contradictory statements; so here’s one. Having stated clearly that the fantastic is not motivated by an appetite to escape, I think that it was some part of what drew me to these forms at the start. I was born in 1952, in Liverpool: an unpromising place for a child. There were great areas of rubble-strewn bombed-out sites, wounds of the Second World War, all about the city; there was a sense (not consciously grasped by a child, but informing my experience in many subtle ways) that the best years were over and a slow decline from greatness begun. I remember in the autumn, thick, choking fogs the color of phlegm still seizing the city, stinking of the coal-fire smoke that created them. And, in the summer, the grass in the parks burned brown.