In the meantime, The Queen of Springtime, viewed as a project in itself, does indeed raise the question of what the hell it is for—and the only answer one can offer is that it exists to fill in that embarrassing gap between emergence and resolution which is created by the publisher’s excessive love for the trilogy. It is padding, and its only saving grace is the fact that because the whole project was planned on a no-previous-experience-necessary basis it doesn’t entirely waste its generous allocation of word-space; it does, at least, put in its ration of spadework in preparation for the revelations to come.
I loved the works which Robert Silverberg produced in the years he was an intense, passionate, uninhibited writer of sophisticated science fiction. I remember the books which he wrote in that phase of his career with great affection and great admiration, but I can understand why he ultimately came to the end of that phase of his career, why he harbored bitter thoughts for a while when he reflected on some of the consequences which stemmed from it, and why he is now following a markedly different career-plan. I hope that he would understand in his turn why I am disappointed by The Queen of Springtime.
* * * *
Note (1995): No third volume has yet appeared to continue or complete the “New Springtime” series. I have no idea why.
RICE’S RELAPSE: Memnoch the Devil
“If God did not exist,” Voltaire once wrote, “it would be necessary to invent Him.” He was, of course, being sarcastic; Voltaire knew perfectly well that God did not exist, and that mankind had invented Him. The real question under consideration is: now that we know that God does not exist, can we do away with Him altogether or are we somehow bound by necessity to keep on reinventing Him?
When she began the Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice seemed to have taken the view that God had become an irrelevance, even to the supposedly-damned. The luckless Louis, suckered into angst-ridden superhumanity in Interview with the Vampire (1976), searched in vain for proof of his own condemnation to Hellfire but only managed to inflict punishments upon himself. The second volume of the series—in which Louis’s own creator, the charismatic Lestat, began to tell his own story—seemed even more insistent upon this point. The superstitious vampires of eighteenth-century Paris would not enter the Cathedral of Notre Dame lest they be struck down by the wrath of God, but when Lestat put their fear to the test nothing happened. That non-event struck him with all the force of revelation, informing him that he was free to be what Nature had made him: free not merely to kill, but to revel in killing. Lapsed Catholics are always prone to reproduce the absolutist zeal of Catholicism in their new-found atheism—a tendency which bodes ill should they ever be tempted to lapse back again.
Lestat’s subsequent researches into his origins and nature, as dutifully recorded by his lapsed Catholic creator, revealed no evidence at all of the existence of God or the Devil. His consequent reappraisal of the inherent amorality of the vampire condition seemed to be utterly secure. This was, one presumes, one of the keys to his extraordinary success in attracting disciples among the reading public, who yearned—as do we all—to be free, at least for for measured intervals in the privacy of the imagination, from the burdens of social and moral conformity. On the other hand, the very fact that the matter kept coming up in the texts was just a trifle suspicious. It was as if the unprovability of the negative conclusion were an itch that—for the author if not the character—simply would not be quieted.
It is, therefore, not entirely surprising that the fifth volume of the Vampire Chronicles marks a sharp change in direction. Here, Lestat finds out that God and the Devil do exist, and that the Devil—who does not like to be called Satan, preferring Memnoch on the grounds that it is his real name—wants to recruit him as a star player for the diabolical team. By way of persuading his chosen appointee to accept his offer, Memnoch takes Lestat to Heaven to meet God and relates his entire life story (with full explanations of his conduct). Memnoch then whips Lestat back in time to witness the crucifixion and takes him to Hell—just for a visit—so that the purpose of that particular project can be made clear. There is a frame narrative of sorts in which this exhaustive account of Creation is embedded, but it exists only to facilitate a further analysis of the nature of the Christian religion, and the significance of the sacred artefacts of Catholicism as a force in human affairs.
What Memnoch the Devil amounts to, in effect, is the most sustained exercise in literary Satanism ever to have been carried out. By “literary Satanism” I mean the tradition which is constituted by literary works which have followed up William Blake’s remark that Milton, in writing Paradise Lost, had been “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Works making up this fascinating tradition have made out a variety of apologetic cases in which the Devil became a heroic rebel rather than an archetype of evil; Anatole France’s The Revolt of the Angels (1914) remains the subgenre’s pinnacle of literary achievement.
This is, of course, unusual territory for bestselling writers; Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895) is the only previous venture of this kind by an author possessed of an audience as broad and as numerous as Anne Rice’s, and Rice grasps the nettle much more firmly than Marie Corelli did. Indeed, it is arguable that Rice grasps the nettle far more firmly than anyone has ever done before, including Anatole France and John Cowper Powys (whose epic poem Lucifer, written in 1905, but not published until 1956, is arguably the most forthright example previously written in English, although William Gerhardi and Brian Lunn’s The Memoirs of Satan, 1932, might qualify were it not a parody). How brave this decision was in terms of commercial fortune and critical appraisal remains to be seen, but one thing beyond doubt is that it will be a devilishly difficult act for Rice to follow. Now that Lestat has met God and learned everything he could ever want to know about Creation, how can he ever interest himself again in anything as trivial as body-swapping or rock superstardom?
Even Voltaire would have to admit that Rice’s reinvention of God is ingenious, and her reinvention of the Devil even more so. She is, of course, standing on the shoulders of giants, but she has taken full advantage of that standpoint. Like Anatole France before her (and riding a wave of current fashionability) she derives her account of the War in Heaven—which here becomes a Philosophical Disagreement in Heaven—from selected passages of the apocryphal Book of Enoch, making the archetypal fallen angel into a Watcher who becomes a little too intimately involved with those he watches. This allows Memnoch to play the Promethean role celebrated by virtually all previous literary Satanists, but Rice adds a cunning twist which allows him to retain both his status as overlord of Hell and the honest respect of his great adversary, God. Rice cleverly interweaves her modified Enochian history into modern conceptions of the history of the earth and the evolution of human societies, and does not shirk the project which most modern writers of religious fantasy have either avoided or rendered silly: the description of Heaven. Even Voltaire would have to admit, in fact, that Memnoch the Devil is a fascinating and engaging book.
Having admitted all this, though, Voltaire would surely have gone on to observe that however brilliantly Memnoch the Devil is put together, there remains something vitally important that has been left out. Rice’s God has indeed been thoroughly reinvented, but His Creation remains as stubbornly geocentric and anthropocentric as anything envisaged in pre-Copernican days. In order to restore the relevance of God, Rice is forced to declare the universe beyond the earth irrelevant (and Memnoch explicitly does so at an early point in his discourse). Not all reinventions of God are forced to this extreme—Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937) is a conspicuous exception—but ones which work within a specifically Christian framework, let alone a specifically Catholic one, are bound to make human beings the linch-pin of their argument. The Christian God, like His immediate antecedents, was invented in order to create humankind, and his adversary the Devil was invented to plague humankind; whatever their argument was initially about, human
kind was and must remain their battleground. While that remains the case, the rich, complex and vast universe of modern science will always constitute glaring evidence to the effect that what we are dealing with when we confront such visions is not merely an invention but an invention whose necessity is way past its sell-by date.
It must not be forgotten, of course, that the account of God, Creation, and the Devil which is contained in Memnoch the Devil is not the only reinvention which requires consideration here. The narrator who is granted this vision is also a reinvention; his attitude is not that of an ordinary man but that of a vampire, and a very specific kind of vampire at that. Lestat’s earlier adventures have also been, in their humble way, exercises in literary Satanism. They too have taken a figure previously used as an archetype of evil and have subjected his attributes to ingenious apologetic reappraisal. By necessity, Lestat views the history of humankind not as a human but as an unrepentant predator upon humanity, who has always previously taken the argumentative line that if he is damned, he will be proudly and defiantly damned.
Actually, and puzzlingly, Lestat tells us in the prologue to his story that “it doesn’t matter here that I’m a vampire. It is not central to the tale.” This is, if taken at face value, an astonishing claim, tantamount to a confession that the author has framed her account of Creation as an episode of the vampire chronicles purely and simply as a means of selling it to a public which has every right to expect something much more akin to The Tale of the Body Thief (1992). It also lends a particular awkwardness to the thorny question of why Memnoch wants so desperately to recruit Lestat—another matter which, in the end, Rice shirks, not by brazenly declaring it irrelevant but by cravenly rendering it deeply and inextricably problematic. Memnoch’s account of Creation and its dynamics does provide an explanation of what vampires are and how they came into being, but it does so as a quirky aside and Lestat hardly reacts at all to the revelation, his mind by then being intent on larger matters.
Whatever Rice intended, however, the reader of the book, in stepping imaginatively into Lestat’s shoes, is able to see the story from the distanced viewpoint of a defiantly unhuman petty Satan—and the fact that the reader can do that (and surely should) makes a difference. The difference it makes is, I think, crucial to the dilemma in which Lestat is placed when he meets God and God expresses the polite hope that Lestat will never be his adversary. The reader-as-Lestat might well react to this incident in a spirit rather less humble than the one in which the author-as-Lestat does, thus being thrown into a rather uncomfortable relationship with the remainder of the text.
Like Marie Corelli before her—but unlike Blake, Shelley, Baudelaire, Anatole France, and the other central figures of the Great Tradition of Literary Satanism—Anne Rice wants to make an apologetic case for the Devil without insulting, or even offending, God. She wants to make all the world’s sufferings morally explicable in a way which will allow God to retain His Divine Right to stand idly by. Because Rice wants to do that—perhaps because of some recent reconciliation with the faith of her childhood—Memnoch wants to do it too, and so, at least for the duration of this particular text, does Lestat. The reader of Lestat’s previous adventures will know, however, that Lestat is acting way out of character here. Any connoisseur of modern vampire fiction will know full well that Lestat the vampire would take the view, even if Memnoch the Devil did not, that God’s argument simply won’t wash.
Lestat the vampire would know, even if his creator has somehow forgotten, that if all the world’s suffering really is the work of a Creator, framed by some sort of moral order, then that Creator has botched the job so horribly as to merit the fiercest condemnation. Anyone who has properly understood the message of modern vampire fiction and the entire tradition of literary Satanism will believe, as I firmly believe, that having heard all that Memnoch has to say to him, the Vampire Lestat would spit in his eye and refuse pointblank to have any truck with his dubiously-sanitized Hell. He would tell Memnoch that the Heaven he has seen—which consists of legions of angels glorifying God with transcendentally lovely music—is a place where no sane human being could possibly desire to end up, and that even a human being who did want to go there would be forced to refuse on moral grounds, given Memnoch’s explanation of the price of admission. Then, if afforded the chance, Lestat would spit in God’s eye too, and tell Him to stuff His reinvented Heaven up His Divine Arse, where it belongs.
What Lestat actually does in the final phase of the story is unworthy of him, and it constitutes a terrible betrayal of the hopeful expectations built up in millions of loyal readers by the previous volumes in the series.
FIELD OF BROKEN DREAMS: Michael Bishop’s Brittle Innings
The essence of creativity, according to Arthur Koestler’s classic analysis of The Act of Creation, is bisociation: the bringing together of disparate notions in such a way that a kind of cross-fertilization occurs and the compound becomes greater than the mere sum of its parts. Some of the partners brought together in this fashion seem to be made for one another from the very beginning, whereas others initially strike the onlooker as so bizarre as to be virtually unthinkable, but even the most unlikely juxtapositions are capable of synergistic association in the right circumstances.
Brittle Innings is a novel about Frankenstein’s monster playing minor league baseball in the American Deep South during World War II. At first sight this may appear to be one of the most ridiculous combinations of motifs ever devised, but Michael Bishop demonstrates that it is not—and, indeed, that there is a unique propriety in it. The fundamental tale which is told in the story is so nearly universal that there are very few lengthy works of fiction which do not contain some form or echo of it, but precisely for this reason it is a tale which cannot be renewed and revivified and given claws to catch the heart without being encoded in some peculiarly striking fashion.
It is possible to discern the meaning and significance of Frankenstein’s monster as an allegory of the human predicament purely in terms of the text which created him and its imagistic legacy, and it is possible to discern the meaning and significance of baseball as a microcosm of human hopes and desires without reference to any texts at all, so it is not immediately apparent why the two would benefit from fusion. We know, though, that everything stands out more clearly against a contrasting background and this particular juxtaposition is a contrast indeed. The point, of course, is not simply to make things stand out clearly, but if possible to make the resultant clarity so sharp and so insistent as to burn its image on the brain behind the beholding eye. This task requires an artist of great ability, and the more startling the contrast the greater that ability must be. Michael Bishop has already shown himself to be a writer of considerable skill and consistent grace—not to mention awesome versatility—but Brittle Innings is the book which reveals exactly how great his ability is.
Brittle Innings contains three narratives nested one within another. The outer frame is narrated by a sports journalist, explaining how and why he had to make a deal with an aging baseball scout, by which the journalist will get to write the book he wants to write—an educative account of the scout’s career—if he first writes a book on his subject’s behalf, telling the story which he yearns to tell. The main part of the text is this story: a first-person account of the long-gone season which first raised and then put paid to the scout’s hope of being a major-league player. Contained within it, however, is yet another first-person narrative: the partial autobiography of the monster Victor Frankenstein made, whose early career was described in a series of letters written by Robert Walton aboard a vessel trapped in the Arctic ice, which eventually came into the hands of Mary Shelley and were published by her as a “novel.”
The protagonist of the main narrative, Danny Boles, is a stammering seventeen-year-old high-school student in Tenkiller, Oklahoma, when he is spotted as a potential professional shortstop by the sister of the owner of a team in the Chattahoochee Valle
y League (whose territory overlaps the border between Georgia and Alabama). It is 1943 and the draft has decimated the pool of available players; part of Danny’s attraction is that he seems unlikely to be judged fit for military service. He gladly signs for the Highbridge Hellbenders and sets off to join them, aware of the irony of the fact that his smidgin of Cherokee blood is travelling the infamous “trail of tears” in reverse. The journey is nightmarish; the GIs with whom the train is crammed look upon him with unanimous naked hatred and he is robbed and raped by a sergeant who claims to know his allegedly-despicable father. This recalls to Danny’s mind the horror of an occasion when his father (whom he has not seen in years) struck him across the throat, with the result that he could not talk at all for two years; he is struck dumb again and arrives at his destination speechless.
Partly by virtue of his dumbness and partly by virtue of his protruding ears, Danny is nicknamed Dumbo by his new team-mates. Although they are rough-mannered and bad-tempered most of them treat him reasonably kindly most of the time, but the incumbent shortstop whose rival he has been appointed to be, Buck Hoey, is implacably hostile and hateful from the outset. Danny’s nightmare is briefly intensified when he is allocated a half-share in a room occupied by the grotesque giant Henry “Jumbo” Clerval, but he comes to realize that this is actually a position of privilege (the giant has never before allowed anyone to share with him). Clerval becomes his protector, and in exchange the infallibly-discreet Danny becomes the giant’s confidant and confessor.
As the season progresses Danny gradually wins a reputation as a good player, but it is his awkward relationship with a girl—the daughter of the team’s lone middle-aged groupie—which eventually allows him to break through his psychological barrier and recover his voice. In the meantime, news of his father’s death is given to him by Franklin D. Roosevelt himself, after a game at which the touring president has made a morale-boosting appearance. The fates of Danny and the monster become increasingly entwined, complicated by deceit and mystery in some matters but secured by honest mutual aid in other and more vital ones; in the end they are a team within a team, one for all and all for one.
Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature Page 7