The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 15: An Orchid Thus Come By

Glancing over the contents page of my copy of John Collier's Fancies and Goodnights is kind of depressing. It's dotted with hashmarks, indicating which stories I've read so far. Not counting what I've read over the last couple of days, there are a total of eighteen hash marks, which is over half the stories. And what do I remember from all that reading? I remember a reasonable amount of "Evening Primrose", and the ending of "Witchs Money", and what kind of story "Back for Christmas" is...and that's about it. Nothing whatsoever remains in my brain of "Squirrels Have Bright Eyes" or "Thus I Refute Beelzy" or "A Touch of Nutmeg Makes It" or "Wet Saturday" or "Another American Tragedy" or "Without Benefit of Galsworthy". I do have a vague sense of two other stories that I'm pretty sure were by Collier, but I don't remember what they were called. I think one might have been "Bottle Party" and the other "Little Memento", but I don't know for sure.
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I read all those stories many years ago, so I suppose it's not so strange that my memory can't hold onto all of them. But it's depressing -- and it's only so depressing, because I can, you know, just read the stories again if I want to, which I do -- because Collier is one of those writers that I'd heard about for years, first from Harlan Ellison, and then as I researched the name and tried to find Collier's books, from a host of other writers who praised the man almost as highly as Ellison himself, if not more. And as big a pain in the ass as Ellison can be, anyone who's read him knows that when he recommends other writers, he recommends the shit out of them, to the point where you almost can't sleep until you've at least gotten a taste (see also: Gerald Kersh). Then, when you finally track down some of the writer's work, it's like you've just won something. You're not only about to read something really good, but considering how hard you've worked to get to this point, you're going to be in on something, as well. Pretty soon, the number of people who've read John Collier and who are still alive will swell by one. It'll be Harlan Ellison, maybe three other guys, and you.

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So, having ascended to that magical sphere as it pertains to John Collier, it's kind of a pisser that I can't remember very much of what I've read. I do know he's good, though. I know this despite the almost inevitable twinge of disappointment that follows the completion of the sort of quest described above, a twinge I do remember feeling when I first started reading Collier. Because of course I expected him to be the most unusual and brilliant writer I'd ever read -- if you don't have unreasonably high expectations for this sort of thing, you'd give up in a week. One of the reasons I think I remember "Evening Primrose" better than many of the other Collier stories I've read is because that was the first one that I finished without any of that twinge remaining ("Witchs Money", too), though it would return in a little while.

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The main reason that I know John Collier is good is because of a book called His Monkey Wife, or Married to a Chimp. This is one of Collier's novels -- his first one, in fact -- and I think that title speaks for itself. That title is what the book is about, as a matter of fact, and it's a stunning piece of work. His Monkey Wife is basically a send-up of English, upper-class, early 20th Century romance novels, where one member of the loving couple is from some class below said upper-class. In the case of Collier's novel, that class is the ape class. Except the novel isn't quite the goof that description implies. It's also weirdly dark, beautifully written, discomfiting, and you almost can't quite believe the damn thing ever got published. My edition of Fancies and Goodnights, by the way, is part of an old Time/Life series, and in the preface, some chowderhead who identifies himself as "The Editors" calls His Monkey Wife "not very remarkable", outside of its basic premise. He can't have actually read the book, or he'd never say that. Then again, Collier himself wrote a review of the book -- privately, for himself only -- in which he said of the author of His Monkey Wife:

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From the classical standpoint, his consciousness is too crammed for harmony, too neurasthenic for proportion, and his humour is too hysterical, too greedy and too crude.

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Oh, what does he know*.

As a writer of short horror fiction, the best, and laziest, way I can think to describe Collier is as a cross between P. G. Wodehouse and Roald Dahl. Dahl's fiction for adults was often incredibly nasty and dark (and, while I'm at it, pretty terrific, too), while Wodehouse's stories were all light and froth, and, most importantly, lifted up by a mastery of the language, an ability to show that the English language was the greatest comedic tool ever devised. Collier possessed Wodehouse's skill with words, and Dahl's sardonic mean streak. At its best, it's an awfully nice marriage..

The first story I read is called "Bird of Prey", and it tells the story of Jack and Edna Spalding, and of their parrot Tom. One day, Tom is attacked by something; he's not killed, but Jack and Edna find him sprawled on their front porch, a clump of feathers ripped away. Edna believes a cat did it, but Jack saw something else:
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He went to the rail and looked out and around, but there was no sign of a cat. Of course, it was not likely there would be. Jack was more interested in the fact that the swaying vines were spread over a length of several feet, which seemed a very great deal of disturbance for a fleeing cat to make. Finally he looked up, and he thought he saw a bird -- a big bird, an enormous bird -- flying away. He just caught a glimpse of it as it crossed the brightness of the moon.

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And that giant bird didn't exactly attack Tom, either. What it did do, and what comes of it, parallels, at least thematically, a particular rift in the Spalding's marriage, a rift that is ultimately exploited in an ending that is both horrible, cruel, detached and bizarre. This story is only ten pages long, and to quote more -- to quote the best of it -- would be to spoil it, but there is a particular description of action, thrown away in the middle of a sentence, in the last paragraph that I've read over several times, because its very vagueness is so awful. I sit there imagining what Collier could mean, while Collier sits back chuckling at what people are willing to do to each other, and themselves.

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As good as "Bird of Prey" is, the other story I read, "Green Thoughts", is something of a small masterpiece, and is closer in style and effect to His Monkey Wife than any other Collier story I've read (at least that I can remember). Our hero is Mr. Mannering, an amateur but enthusiastic botanist, who, at the story's beginning, receives a very special flower in the mail:

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The orchid had been sent among the effects of his friend, who had come by a lonely and mysterious death on the expedition. Or he had brought it among a miscellaneous lot, "unclassified," at the close of the auction. I forget which it was, but it was certainly one or the other of these. Moreover, even in its dry, brown, dormant root state, this orchid had a certain sinister quality. It looked, with its bunched and ragged projections, like a rigid yet a gripping hand, hideously gnarled, or a grotesquely whiskered, threatening face. Would you not have known what sort of an orchid it was?

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Mr. Mannering did not know. He read nothing catalogues and books on fertilizers. He unpacked the new acquisition with a solicitude absurd enough in any case toward any orchid, or primrose either, in the twentieth century, but idiotic, foolhardy, doom-eager, when extended to an orchid thus come by, in appearance thus.

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I've quoted the beginning of "Green Thoughts" so extensively because how often, when reading horror fiction, do you get to revel in the language itself, to be so grabbed by the words, as Collier allows you to be here? I wasn't even sure I was going to read "Green Thoughts" -- technically, I'd read enough other Collier stories to get by tonight -- but when I read about Mannering's particular doom-eagerness when faced with an orchid thus come by, I was set. I thought, "This is my story."

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The orchid first takes out a cat belonging to Mr. Mannering's Cousin Jane, with whom he lives, and then Cousin Jane herself. And then -- I'll just tell you -- Mr. Mannering himself. Each are consumed, though not killed, and while much of their bodies are subsumed into the giant plant, their heads bloom again, fully formed, as flowers. And that's actually the story -- it's not about a monster plant rampaging through Torquay (yep, Torquay), but rather what would it be like to find yourself turned, literally, into a vegetable? Mr. Mannering handles it pretty well, initially, with some exceptions:

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The impossibility of locomotion, for example, did not trouble him in the least, or even the absence of body and limbs, any more than the cessation of that stream of rashers and tea, biscuits and glasses of milk, luncheon cutlets, and so forth, that had flowed in at his mouth for over fifty years, but which had now been reversed to a gentle, continuous, scarcely noticeable feeding from below. But the physical is not all. Although no longer a man, he was still Mr. Mannering. And from this anomaly, as soon as his scientific interest had subsided, issued a host of woes, mainly subjective in origin.

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Eventually, a more objective woe will appear, in the form of Mannering's miserable no-good nephew, who takes legal possession of Mannering's home and all his possessions, including his greenhouse, in which he makes a fairly shocking discovery. And this strange and amusing story about death, rebirth and plants turns very cold-blooded and distanced. As in "Bird of Prey", what the reader becomes witness to is made all the more unhappy and unpleasant because Collier holds us back, with him, watching it from a hill. Even the words don't seem to care that much. They're interested, of course, but that's hardly the same thing.

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Thinking about it now, I'm reminded of another masterpiece of this kind of writing: Richard Hughes's A High Wind Jamaica. That brilliant novel could be reasonably termed a horror story, as well (if we're going to expand the definition to include Lord of the Flies, then throw Hughes's novel in there, too: it's twice as frightening, and ten times better). Both Hughes and Collier are on that hill with us, watching the nightmare unfold, and they show us where to look, and tell us what it all looks like, so that we may see it more clearly. They're smiling, but we're not. Except when we are.

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*Information on Collier's self-review is taken from Paul Theroux's introduction to His Monkey Wife, published by Robin Clark Books.